Bad omens are on the rise for Biden — and rest of us

“April is the cruelest month,” wrote T.S. Eliot in the opening line of what is regarded as his greatest poem, “The Waste Land.”

For President Joe Biden, the cruelest month was surely August of 2021.

When has a president had a worse month?

On the last Sunday in August, Biden watched solemnly, hand over heart, as the coffins of the American dead in the Kabul airport terrorist massacre came home.

The American dead had been carrying out an evacuation of U.S. citizens and Afghan allies from America’s lost war, a defeat dealt to us by the same Taliban we ejected from power in 2001 for providing sanctuary for the al-Qaida terrorists of 9/11.

We have lost our longest war, and the triumphant Taliban are now back in power and presided over our departure from Kabul.

The fate of the hundreds of U.S. citizens and thousands of Afghan allies we leave behind will be decided by the jihadists we have been fighting for two decades.

Throughout the Biden presidency, we will be reading of, hearing of and being witness to the evidence of their fates.

As Biden honored the fallen at Dover, Delaware, Hurricane Ida was coming ashore. Ida’s 150 mph winds were raking the same Louisiana coast that Hurricane Katrina hit 16 years ago.

In this same August, the U.S. moved ever deeper into the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, with new infections, new hospitalizations and new deaths approaching the numbers they had reached at their worst last winter.

August also brought hundreds of thousands more aliens across our southern border in the largest peacetime migrant invasion in memory.

Most of these millions are coming for a better life. Yet among their numbers are the criminals and rapists who have assaulted women and girls in the exodus, and not a few foreign enemies coming with the intent to bring the war on terror home to these United States.

Nor is this all. In this August of 2021, American politics seem at their most poisonous.

Race relations are as raw as they have been since the ’60s. In the wake of George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis cop, an outpouring of hostility against police has brought record retirements and resignations by cops across the country. Result: an unprecedented surge in urban shootings and killings, with children prominent among the victims.

When President John F. Kennedy gave his approval for the invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba that ended in the Bay of Pigs debacle, Americans rallied behind Kennedy because, though he had blundered badly, he was our president, the personification of America’s nationhood. His support soared to 80%.

We were one nation then, and one people. And today? Demands are being heard for the impeachment or resignation of Biden.

This piling on of the president is surely in part payback for what the Democrats did to former President Donald Trump.

“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith’s observation after the British lost the decisive Battle of Saratoga, is often invoked these days.

And justifiably so. For how much ruin can a nation endure and remain a nation?

Our goal, it is said, is to ever move “toward a more perfect union.”

Does it seem like that is the direction where we are heading?

Are the divisions between us becoming too great for us to remain one nation and one people?