The utterly nauseating and unnecessary abandonment of Afghanistan to its fate recalls a similar humiliation at the hands of Islamist radicals in the Jimmy Carter administration. President Biden’s profligate spending policies are unleashing inflation that is sparking voter distrust so noticeable that even NPR is sounding the alarm. He is begging OPEC to come up with more oil while interfering with U.S. production. He announced barely a month ago, with great confidence, “The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability.  There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan.  It is not at all comparable.”

Our president comes across as weak, meek, ineffectual, incompetent and confused. (Momentarily confusing South and North Vietnam doesn’t even make the list of the top 100 senior moments we’ve seen this year from this near-octogenarian, despite the fact that his staff is keeping him hidden to a degree with little if any precedent in the past half-century.) Biden is embarrassing the United States in real time, and I await with eagerness the Biden version of the blame-shifting Malaise Speech. Biden’s version, of course, will be the This Is All Trump’s Fault speech.