Fox News host says consumers bear no blame for supply chain issues because they 'have a belief in American excellence'

• Fox News host Dana Perino said it is "absurd" to blame excess demand for the US's supply chain woes.
• In a Wednesday morning segment, Perino took exception to a WaPo op-ed on the subject.

In an otherwise typical segment on supply chain issues Wednesday morning, Fox News host Dana Perino took umbrage at the notion that American consumers bear some responsibility for the pandemic backlog.

"I thought this was so absurd, that Americans are wrong to have a belief in American excellence," Perino said.

As Insider's Áine Cain and Grace Kay recently wrote in their analysis, the numbers show the supply chain crisis is partially Americans' fault because of a tremendous spike in demand.

Perino was specifically responding to a Washington Post op-ed by columnist Micheline Maynard, who argued that the shipping bottleneck shows how much American consumer expectations have gotten out of hand.

"American consumers, their expectations pampered and catered to for decades, are not accustomed to inconvenience," Maynard writes.

Perino, a former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush, took exception to Maynard's take.

"No, we can do this," Perino continued. "And also, it's not just inconveniences. It's very serious. The school cafeteria food shortage is a really big deal. People not being able to buy car parts ... These are not just inconveniences."

On Fox and other conservative media outlets, the supply chain crisis - which has been ongoing since the onset of the pandemic during the Trump administration - has been presented as a partisan issue in a similar way to the so-called War on Christmas.

When primetime opinion host Tucker Carlson mocked Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg over taking paternity leave as a gay father, he used it as a segue to criticize Buttigieg for making a joke about delays in deliveries for holiday shopping.

"I think there have always been two kinds of Christmas shoppers," Buttigieg told CNN. "There's the ones who have all their list completed by Halloween, and then there's people like me who show up at the mall on Christmas Eve … if you're in that latter bucket, obviously there's going to be more challenges."

"That's not the point, Pete Buttigieg," Carlson responded. "The point is, you're the transportation secretary, and our transportation grid is broken. And people can't get Christmas presents for their kids, or food that they want to eat, or things that they would like to buy."

On the Fox News website on Tuesday, the op-ed was framed as being "crushed" by conservative pundits for being emblematic of "Joe Biden's America."

What started as a general, non-partisan argument from Maynard in her Post column ended up getting caught in the gears of the modern-day media polarization.