Last week, Dan Lamothe and Alex Horton published an expose in the Washington Post about the Biden administration’s evacuation of Afghanistan late last summer. This was a withdrawal that finally ended a war that never should have been, but the withdrawal was executed so sloppily that many U.S. troops were unnecessarily put in harm’s way, with a number of them killed outright. More importantly, thousands of people — American and Afghan — were left abandoned as the Taliban instantly filled the power vacuum and now rule over Afghanistan in totality. Mass starvation looms, if it hasn’t commenced already.

The Biden administration’s defense of the Afghan pullout boils down to them claiming that it was necessary (this part is correct), but that it couldn’t have been handled better because, well, war is just so darn crazy. Here is White House press secretary Jen Psaki, whose main accomplishment on the job thus far has been showing such a dismissive attitude toward free COVID test distribution that her boss ended up sending out those free tests just so people would stop being pissed off, explaining the fiasco thusly to Lamothe and Horton:

“I would just say if you look back at the specific planning steps we took, we did plan for a range of contingencies. … There wasn’t an anticipation that the Afghan National Security Forces would fall as they did, or as quickly as they did.”

In other words, they were prepared. They just weren’t prepared. And that has been Joe Biden’s presidency in a nutshell.

Joe Biden is out of excuses. He never should have had any. He won the 2020 election decisively. He took over the White House while having both houses of Congress in his pocket. He was a veteran of the Hill who, I foolishly presumed, understood not only how things are done in Washington, but how that process has evolved since he first won elected office in 1973. Best of all, he wasn’t Donald Trump.

Those are all good things, and Biden’s first 100 days showed him cashing in on all of that political capital. He presided over a comprehensive and free vaccine rollout, and he crafted a nearly $2 trillion stimulus fund that included direct payments, paid leave, extended unemployment benefits, small business grants and a trove of other goodies.

He has done precious little ever since. Democrats failed to get a minimum wage increase into that stimulus bill, with eight Democrats even voting against it. That failure would soon repeat itself in every other vital initiative Biden tried to get off the ground. He banked his first term on passing the Build Back Better Act — an ambitious proposal that could have potentially reinforced and redesigned the American social safety net — only to have it killed by a single, awful Democratic Senator. He pivoted to a large-scale plan to protect voting rights only to have that entire project killed by a different awful Democratic Senator. He seized $7 billion in frozen Afghanistan funds and then split the baby between the Taliban and 9/11 victims. One of Biden’s former associates — a crony, really — will oversee the doling out of that money, while skimming a hefty amount of it off the top for his trouble.

In many ways, it feels as if Biden’s presidency is already over. He let the unemployment benefits and tax breaks from his stimulus bill expire. A historic rise in price inflation has wiped out many gains that working class Americans made on his watch. When the omicron variant ravaged an already exhausted nation and the CDC responded with mixed messages on quarantining and mask-wearing, Biden stood idly by, exacerbating a partisan fight over virus prevention that never should have existed to begin with. Politico reported that Biden has been more apt to listen to New York Times columnist David Leonhardt for pandemic guidance than his own experts. He could have taken cues from even worse columnists over there, I suppose.

Speaking of worse, Roe vs. Wade stands to be overturned roughly four months from now, and from what I can tell, Biden’s only move to prevent this calamity has been a sternly worded statement that Brett Kavanaugh will crumple up and toss into a barbecue pit. Saudi Arabia, home to Osama bin Laden and the majority of the 9/11 hijackers, is about to jack up the price of oil across the world, despite Biden’s pleading for them not to. Republicans wanna put a lock on every uterus, shred every mail-in voting ballot and throw every book about slavery into a blast furnace, and they’re succeeding.

Right now. Despite having no executive power of any kind. All of Biden’s adversaries have counted on him proving weak and helpless, and they’ve been right in doing so.

All this begs the question: Does Joe Biden even know he’s president? Does he give a s—t? After voters risked COVID and endless waits at the polls to vote him into office, and after the New Georgia Project and other grassroots organizations helped provide him with the legislative clout he needed to re-engineer this country into something better, it feels as if he has no power of any kind. He’s uninterested in confronting the student debt crisis, even though he has the ability to expunge it with a stroke of his pen. He’s shown no ambition to use the vaccine rollout to create a wider, and permanent, free health care system. Sea levels will rise a foot by 2050, but the next time I hear “Green New Deal” out of Biden’s mouth will be the first. Faced with a Federalist Society wet dream of a Supreme Court hellbent on destroying millions of lives, he formed an exploratory committee to expand the court. That committee refused to decide on court expansion one way or the other.

This is where I get pissed off. All my life, Democrats have been terrified of governing. When Republicans take office, they have very little compunction about using power, and often abusing it. Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination in 2020 thanks to a bloodless Democratic power play that consolidated every other candidate’s following in order to crush Bernie Sanders. These people have it within them to be ruthless, too. So where the f—k are they?

I am sick to death of this. I’m sick of voting out evil politicians only to be saddled with merely ineffective ones. I’m sick of Democrats treating every Republican victory as a winning campaign message for themselves two years down the road. I’m sick of having to actively search around for good things Biden and his party have done, like I’m trying to find a pair of lost sunglasses. Their accomplishments are rarely, if ever, self-evident. I’m sick of Kyrsten Sinema. I’m REALLY sick of Joe Manchin. I’m sick of watching American cynicism get handsomely rewarded by Biden and by his spineless compatriots.

But cynicism is what’s called for at the moment. It’s not merely that Biden has been a lousy president; it’s that I’ve seen nothing to suggest that he’ll STOP being lousy. I have no faith that he’ll get his Supreme Court pick through. I have no faith that he’ll be able to resurrect Build Back Better, whether in its original form or piecemeal. I have no faith he’ll do anything monumental this year, or any other year of his term. Why would I? What has he done to give me a reason to believe in him?

I briefly had high hopes for Joe Biden, and that’s on me. I’m an even bigger sucker than he is. I should have learned my lesson from his old boss, and from every other Democrat who’s had the chance to do great things and then pissed it all away.