Still ridin’ with Biden?

That Donald Trump was unfit for the presidency was obvious well before he assumed it, more obvious as he occupied it, and most obvious by his behavior after losing it.

It should have also become obvious by this point, at least for anyone honest and willing to look, that the man who replaced him is profoundly unfit as well, albeit for different reasons.

Presidents are often unfairly blamed for events that are beyond their control, but Afghanistan is a case where all the blame Joe Biden has received still falls well short of what he deserves. Even worse has been his befuddled, feckless, and incoherent response to what his befuddlement, fecklessness, and incoherence caused.

Apparently massive government spending at a time of massive national debt, runaway inflation, rising violent-crime rates, a border crisis provoked by putting out a come-onecome-all welcome mat, and suppression of domestic energy production while begging OPEC to produce more were simply warm-ups for Kabul.

Trump was a mess in the White House, and Biden is now making a mess of the entire country and beyond. It is difficult to recall any other point in American history where so many needless unforced errors were piled on top of each other in such rapid succession.

The fellow commonly referred to as “Obama’s impeachment insurance” became the Democratic nominee only because he wasn’t Bernie Sanders. He then became president only because he wasn’t Trump.

Enough of the American electorate wanted the craziness and chaos to end via just about any means possible and they were persuaded that a fellow so feeble he was kept in his basement by his staff during the campaign was the only means available.

But one of the most important lessons of politics is that however bad things are, they can always get worse. The hunch is that even some of the folks who voted for Slow Joe are answering the question posed on those Trump posters (“Miss Me Yet?”) with a nod.

It takes a spectacularly bad president to make people look back on someone like Trump so fondly so soon.

We have had presidents who lacked the character and temperament for the office before (although probably and thankfully not to the degree demonstrated by Trump), but we have almost certainly not had the kind who have no idea what is going on around them, say idiotic things at every opportunity because they can’t remember what they were talking about when they started talking, and can’t complete a coherent sentence in response to soft-ball questions slowly enunciated by sympathetic reporters.

Commentary Magazine editor John Podhoretz asked “What’s Wrong with the President” in a recent podcast, but this is disingenuous because we all know what’s wrong with the president, don’t we? And we know what we are all talking about, while pretending to not talk about it.

And we all also now know, even if lots of us didn’t want to before, that the reason Biden was hidden away during the campaign is the same reason he’s had an empty daily presidential schedule, goes AWOL during crises, and apparently can’t be left unattended by his aides for more than a few minutes without further revealing his depleted condition.

What we are now experiencing with Biden is not entirely unprecedented in American political life— Woodrow Wilson spent the last 18 months or so of his second term largely incapacitated after a series of strokes suffered on a whistle-stop tour while promoting his League of Nations—but presidents can no longer hide their infirmities the way they could a century ago; hence a dire circumstance in which we find ourselves led by a doddering curmudgeon who has no capacity to organize Thursday night bingo in a nursing home, let alone lead a nation.

The interesting part of this comes in contemplating what would constitute evidence beyond what has already been provided of our commander-in-chief’s inability to perform the somber duties of his office.

Afghanistan wasn’t just a humiliating failure; it was as decisive a testimony to presidential unfitness as we’ve experienced or could imagine.

We come back, of course, to the damage that Trump did to our body politic. What Charles Krauthammer called the “guardrails” of the American system might have held in an institutional sense, but our political culture didn’t, in the sense of exhausting the nation to the point where so many just wanted him gone and didn’t much care what we replaced him with.

And now we know. And it’s not going to get any better in the next threeplus years, is it? Because that’s not the way such things work.

Far too many Republicans damaged their nation and their own party’s interests by spending four years apologizing for and/or looking away from the sight of a manifestly unfit Republican president.

Now it’s the Democrats’ turn to face the integrity test.

And then maybe we can, as a nation with so many talented and bright people, discuss why we have put such unworthy men in our highest office.

If democratic government is nothing more than a reflection of the virtue (or lack thereof) of the people, what can now be said of us?