We are, thankfully, departing an odd-numbered year. With few exceptions, such as my birth year, odd-numbered years are not good ones. See 1941, 2001, 2021, and 2023.
But even-numbered years like, say, 2024 are always full of promise and hope. I say that free of any contradiction fears because it’s only beginning. But just in case, please, Lord, make it so.
The year that’s ending was a disturbing and messy one, in case you didn’t notice. Disturbing because it was so messy or messy because it was so disturbing. Either way, most Americans felt the unease in their bones.
During car rides down hills with my young boys, I used to anxiously stomp my left foot on the car floor, mumbling something about brakes. It worked every time, producing screams of “Dad! Stop that!”
Even when they knew the prank, they couldn’t see my feet. The uncertainty prompted their panic and fed it. I found that hilarious.
That’s what this year was like for our country. Uncertain. Fearful. And it wasn't funny. There's this sense that we're heading down a dangerous hill with no brakes, waiting for some big, bad thing to happen with this feeble commander in chief "in charge."
We currently have a president no one would trust in a go-kart, let alone the Situation Room. Among other fables, he blathers about the profound benefits of Bidenomics, which remain undetected by those of us who live without 24-hour servants.
The RealClearPolitics average of Right Track-Wrong Track polls finds two out of three Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. Some polls find it’s nearly three out of four.
I’m surprised the Wrong Track is not higher. Some folks apparently aren’t paying attention. Joe Biden says he wants to stay in office until he’s 86. His family of grifters is good with that.
It’s not so much the number of years of life Biden has accrued doing little of substance. It’s the toll that time has taken on the mind and body of the man who sets a new record for oldest president in office every single day.
Today is Joe Biden’s 29,626th day of life and the 1,075th day as president. That’s the same as 1.55 million minutes or 92,880,000 seconds, which feels more accurate.
This week, I was going to write about Joe Biden’s Top 10 Gaffes of 2023. However, going through the files, it would have to be more like Joe Biden’s Top 1000 Gaffes of 2023.
A sad sampling from the year:
This man who is president has often referred to Kamala Harris as the president.
The president declared cancer was cured. The White House transcript was doctored to cover his error.
The president told one crowd about his White House Oval Office being in the Capitol.
The president announced a major news conference that no one else knew about because it didn’t exist.
The president often blindly reads out loud teleprompter instructions intended only for his eyes. Again, the White House edits the official transcript to cover his mindless tongue-flapping.
The president continues to tell debunked stories, such as the fire that nearly consumed his house, when it was a minor kitchen flareup.
During one ramble, the president said: "We announced the first ever offshore wind sale in the Gulf of Mexico. We're going to the Gulf! You think I'm kidding? Heh. You ain't seen nothing yet." The audience was politely puzzled.
The day after he met with U.S. service members in North Carolina, the president told a gay pride event: “I see more courage on this lawn than any time I’ve seen in the recent past.”
The military base Biden visited was Fort Liberty. You never heard of it. For 105 years, it has been called Fort Bragg for Gen. Braxton Bragg. But that name had to go under this Woke administration — because Confederacy, which ended 158 years ago, even before Biden's birth.
Following the deadly Nashville shooting that killed three children and three adults, President Biden opened the sad speaking event by telling everyone about his favorite ice cream flavor and how much of it he had upstairs. (Chocolate chip).
Biden startled one audience by saying, “I like babies better than people." He called wife Jill “the first full-time lady.” And he blithely shared with the cringing crowd a note she stuck on his bathroom mirror: “Stop trying to make me love you.”
Just the other day, we learned that on a recent phone call, the 81-year-old leader of the free world grew quite exasperated when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel would not obey his advice. So, Biden hung up on the Israeli leader.
Biden and his family entourage are on another undeserved vacation this week at the borrowed mansion of a supportive billionaire in the Virgin Islands. I wonder if Biden reports this lavish generosity as a taxable gift?
Biden has spent 40 percent of his 1,075 presidential days on vacation.
He seems oblivious to the image of him wiggling his toes in warm sand while Hamas holds American hostages, China plays him like a Mahjong master, and thousands of illegal aliens, including unscreened Europeans and Chinese, stream across the southern border daily.
Coming up on an estimated nine million illegal aliens infiltrating our communities with no real tracking since Biden erased his predecessor’s border controls and put his vice president in charge of doing nothing.
That’s an old Obama trick. He put his vice president in charge of driving the 2009 “shovel-ready” stimulus spending and new gun controls after Sandy Hook. Biden produced no results there either, and a sympathetic D.C. media lets it all slide.
Biden’s border inactions, despite the screams of Democrat officials trying to handle the arriving hordes, has to be intentional. He won’t be around for the decades of costly aftermath. So, why is he doing this so purposefully?
I have so many questions about Joe Biden’s actions and inactions. He’d like us to forget China’s massive spy balloon that he allowed to drift cross-country for seven days over numerous military installations and radio its findings back home via satellite. Biden claimed it was rudimentary intelligence-gathering, and shooting it down would destroy it.
So what? Why would an honest U.S. president be concerned about halting and destroying an aggressive Chinese spying attempt?
The U.S. can’t seem to block Chinese hacking either, which is breaking into and sizing up the vulnerabilities of the nation’s infrastructure, sector by sector. You know, just in case.
And we have no indication or confidence that President Naptime has authorized countermeasures or hacking pushbacks. Biden was slow to crack down on China's “police stations” across this country, tracking activities of Chinese living legally in the U.S.
Among the many, many fictions Biden spins is his boast about the long travels he’s made as Xi Jinping's Tonto. Exactly how would being a dictator's sidekick benefit the United States, while allowing Xi to size up, or size down, the garrulous Biden?
When China’s Xi tells Biden face-to-face that Beijing “will” reclaim Taiwan, there’s no U.S. pushback. China is certainly getting its money's worth.
When Russia downed a U.S. intelligence drone over international waters, Biden said nothing. When Iranian proxies launch missiles at Israel and international shipping, he says nothing.
And he’s slow-walking military aid to Ukraine, trying to appease his left and Putin, who's a little busy trying to hold on to his latest occupied land.
Twenty-eight months ago, Biden badly bolloxed the Afghan exit by rejecting our own military’s advice. Ever since that deadly, global mortification, my concern has been what adventure might the new axis of evil – China, Iran, North Korea — come up with to take advantage while this wet noodle is in office?
Their window of opportunity is closing. The year 2024 — Year of the Dragon on the Chinese calendar – could be dangerous for us in numerous unanticipated ways.
That’s a distressing thought. The world sees the United States occupied now by a divisive national election which, at the moment, features two very old men, political retreads seeking redemptions for their own purposes, not because of any national mission or calling.
But no one wants either man back.
Trump confronts an array of costly, time-consuming legal proceedings politically designed to cripple his reelection campaign. However, Democrats' coordinated "lawfare campaign" has unexpectedly boosted his support, according to current polls, creating the real potential of the United States electing a convicted felon as commander in chief.
If Lady Justice truly was blindfolded, the incumbent president would be confronting an aggressive investigation of Biden’s involvement in his family’s lucrative international influence-peddling schemes.
Joe Biden is currently ignoring a pretend investigation by his own Justice Department.
A slim Republican majority, whose House management this year resembles the pratfalling Keystone Cops of silent-movie days, is investigating that scheme.
To inflict maximum damage on Democrats in 2024, it is intentionally dribbling out startling revelation after startling revelation showing Joe Biden’s continual involvement in that scheme to make money off his family name and elected job.
Anyone hoping for actual results from this investigation might recall the 2014-16 House probes of the Obama administration’s Benghazi scandal.
The idea was to get to the bottom of how, despite advance warnings, four U.S. government employees, including an ambassador, could have been abandoned to the nonexistent mercies of Libyan terrorists in 2012.
The embattled consulate staff had its security removed. The Pentagon had no backup. The desperate rescue calls to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton produced no response. Obama was absent all night with no explanation. Two died from mortar blasts. One was shot, and another died of smoke suffocation when the mob set the consulate on fire.
The House investigations produced numerous photo ops and reports. No one was blamed. No one was fired.
Nothing happened.
Editorial Note: A previous version of this article incorrectly identified 2024 as the Year of the Monkey on the Chinese calendar. It has been updated to note that 2024 is the Year of the Dragon. We apologize for the error.
