There’s a distinction between criticizing a president and ridiculing him. I don’t call President Biden ‘Sleepy Joe’. I never claimed he was “hiding in his basement” during the campaign, or that he drinks cocoa out of a sippy cup and goes to bed at 7 PM.

I’ve referred to myself as “defender of presidents” for years now, because I believe they’re easy targets who get a bum rap from jealous haters, of which there are plenty. Such contempt is oblivious to party distinction; I remember it well, from Jimmy Carter to Biden, a span of eight presidents – four Democrats and four Republicans.

Even the celebrated Ronald Reagan, who won an astounding 49 out of 50 states in his 1984 reelection bid, and now places in the all-time top 10 in numerous presidential rankings, was characterized as a buffoonish cowboy with an itchy trigger finger on the nuclear button who’d blow up the entire planet. But things really got bad beginning with George W. Bush, and worse with Barack Obama. Say what you will about Donald Trump inviting criticism with his abrasive, combative persona, Bush and Obama were excoriated, even though they consistently were perfect gentlemen. I defended both against the petty mudslingers.

As for Trump, I wrote an entire book exposing outright lies and out-of-context half-truths spewed about him since the moment he rode with Melania down the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015 to announce his candidacy.

I defended Biden when the rightwing media mocked him for saying “I’m Joe Biden’s husband, Joe Biden,” which he didn’t. Like a lot of people, when Biden says ‘Jill’ (his wife’s actual name) it sounds like ‘Joe.’ I defend him when he’s accused of being hostile to the press. A lot of those snarky pseudojournalists deserve it; in fact, I don’t think he scolds and embarrasses them nearly as often as they deserve.

It’s also ridiculously premature to assess Biden’s entire presidency in the span of seven months. However, to this point, most of Biden’s time in office has been one giant nightmare, and feels more like it’s been seven grueling years. Before Biden, the two worst presidents of my lifetime were Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter. To date, Biden’s both of them rolled into one.

But I don’t blame him. I don’t think Biden’s senile, but he’s aged badly. He’s an old 78; by comparison, Bernie Sanders is a young 79 and Dianne Feinstein’s a super-young 88. Reagan, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s certainly was a mere shadow of his former self by the early 1990s. Sadly, he was incapable of spending his last decade of life as America’s preeminent elder statesman, counseling the rest of us.

But Biden was never great to begin with. It’s like comparing basketball legend Larry Bird to his 1986 Boston Celtics teammate David Thirdkill. Both are in their sixties now and surely can’t compete in the NBA like they did 35 years ago. But Thirdkill, like Biden, never accomplished a whole lot in his career even in his prime.

Biden had no business becoming president. Sure, he’d been hanging around the longest. He paid his dues. He suffered horrific family tragedy. He faithfully served as Obama’s vice president for eight years. But without being Robin to Obama’s Batman, once Biden passed on or retired, he would’ve been forgotten.

But it’s not Biden’s fault that he ran for president. Few are those who’d pass up such an opportunity if they had any sort of realistic possibility to win. It’s one thing for people to say “I wouldn’t want that job” when they have no chance of getting it, and another to actually pass it up when it’s really there for the taking.

But why was it there for the taking? Why did this perennially ordinary, mediocre politician have such weak competition? Why did Bernie go toe-to-toe with him and then suddenly bow out, followed by a cavalcade of exits so by the time we blinked Biden was delivering his Democratic nomination acceptance speech?

I blame the tens of millions of Americans who actually voted for Biden. Only a smidgen are “Joe Biden Democrats.” Some simply voted party line, others were Republican Never Trumpers, and almost all were Anybody But Trumpers. They were so hell-bent to get Trump out of office, they didn’t really care how it happened.

Before Covid, which seems like a million years ago, Trump-bashers like Bill Maher openly hoped for an economic recession that would take the wind out of the record-setting Trump economy’s sails and cause Trump to lose reelection. Well, he got one, replete with masks, universal shutdowns, and widespread panic. A sizable number of Biden voters acknowledged that he probably wouldn’t finish his term in office – he’d either die there or be forced out due to mental incapacitation – but again, they didn’t care. All you had to do was pitch a Trumpless White House to them and they might’ve voted for Kim Jong-un.

Let’s review what exactly made Trump so unbearable: in that aforementioned book of mine, Trumped-Up Charges!, I debunked all of the following myths (and more): Trump called Mexicans “rapists” and “criminals”; said white supremacists are “very fine people”; bragged about committing sexual assault; and mocked a reporter’s physical disability. But, for the moment, let’s pretend he said and did all those things. After all, he really did call Rosie O’Donnell a pig, and did retweet someone else calling Megyn Kelly a bimbo.

Words and arm-flailing. Compare that to the mayhem on our Southern border, as PHIs (Persons Here Illegally) saunter into our country – untested for Covid, by the way – we’re about to spend $5 trillion on “infrastructure” and just print the money to pay for it; small businesses, which comprise 99.7% of all businesses, can’t find employees because with ridiculously bloated unemployment checks, recipients can afford to eat at Tavern on the Green every week, all leading to a word we haven’t heard since the Carter days: stagflation. And that was all before the Afghanistan catastrophe.

But, hey, it’s all worth it, right? No more mean tweets!