There shouldn’t be any particular surprise, in any quarter, that Joe Biden came home from the Middle East empty-handed. He’s come home empty-handed from all of his foreign trips since becoming president. Or at least, the American people have had our hands emptied; perhaps the Joe-Jim-Hunter mini-mafia has filled its sacks with plunder away from the attention of the multitudes as a result of these trips.

But Biden returned home from his meeting in Jeddah with the Saudi royals, having committed a near-endless string of gaffes ranging back to his prattling about the “honor” of the Holocaust and calling the prime minister of Israel (which apparently is now pronounced “Israilty”) “Mr. President” multiple times, and offered us the national humiliation of having the Saudi government expressly denying even so much as his weak claims of progress on energy security and human rights. This had to be the worst of the foreign adventures.

Put a different way, if it gets worse than this, Americans should have a real concern Biden might inadvertently start a war.

His miserable public performances are dangerous enough. The White House hasn’t presented this weak on the world stage since the British burned it down in the War of 1812, and the wolves — Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and who knows what other varieties — are beginning to sniff about. Every time Biden goes abroad and says things like “The Palace the Palestinian people are hurting now you feel uh you can just feel it,” or refers to the Persian Gulf nation as “United Avrab Ememirates,” it’s an invitation, like a fresh bloody cut of meat left on the back porch of the cabin.

But it’s now a real threat; things might spin out of control if someone doesn’t put a stop to the Biden World Malaprop Cavalcade.

The point of the Saudi trip was pointless. Somehow Joe Biden was going to cajole the sheikhs to pump more oil out of the ground after he’d bragged that he’d make them a pariah. The Saudis have all the motivation they need to produce more oil; the price is high, and with American oil production artificially restricted thanks to Biden’s domestic policies it’s going to stay that way. The reason they aren’t producing more is that they don’t have the capacity.

And they’ve said so. They told French Premier Emmanuel Macron that, and Macron relayed it to Biden within earshot of a microphone, meaning the entire world heard it. But Biden went anyway.

Why would the president of the United States go to a country he called a pariah for its state-sanctioned murder of jihadi-friendly journo Jamal Khashoggi a few years ago when there was no clear deliverable he could bring home? The oil America needs isn’t 7,500 miles away from the White House in Saudi Arabia, it’s one thousand miles away in the Gulf of Mexico, or 1,600 miles away in the Permian Basin.

And the Saudis know it. So does everyone else.

Going halfway across the world to be treated by medieval princes in the same incredulous manner Central American kleptocrats treated his vice president last year was a blunder no one plausible as president of the United States would make. This was amateur hour. It was catastrophic. Biden and the Saudis couldn’t even publicly agree on what was agreed on during that trip.

You travel to disagree with peer nations. Saudi Arabia has never been a peer nation with the United States, but they look like one now. A president doesn’t make a trip to a foreign country unless he’s assured of getting something for his people — if he’s giving things away, the recipients come to him. So instead of sending underlings to fail at deliverables, Biden went himself, like a senile supplicant. Call it a three-dimensional bungle.

The Iranians barely waited for Air Force One to depart from the Arabian desert to announce they’re all set to build a nuke. Something Biden and the Saudis apparently didn’t agree on a strategy about, either.

That’s what you get sending a demented old man, whose credibility has been near zero since he got caught pilfering bad speeches from Neil Kinnock, overseas without a clear, attainable set of objectives.

The old trope is that an unpopular president, if he can’t bomb some hapless dictatorship Wag the Dog–style, will go abroad and enjoy the pomp and circumstance of foreign diplomacy. It creates optics, shows who’s in charge.

That can work for a Nixon. It can work for a Clinton or an Obama. It can’t work for a man who says the birth of Christ was “God’s great grift to the world” and “We’re never give up on the work peace.”

This column warned months ago that it was time to shut Biden up and shut him down. Now there is no foundation left to his presidency. It’s in free fall, and the only real question is whether his own party will panic as the partisan legacy corporate media allies have and turn on him.

In the past week, they’ve begun babbling about creating distance between themselves and the doddering dunce in the White House, as though there is any distance to be plausibly had on policy matters. Well, that was before the dangerous debacle in the desert. Now the house is on fire in as strong a figurative sense as it literally was when Admiral Cockburn did his work on that August night in 1814.

So if they really want the distance from Biden they don’t deserve, then it’s time to dust off the 25th Amendment and put it to use. Come on Chuck, come on Nancy. Before the August recess, start that ball rolling. Demand Biden submit to the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, as your Republican colleagues have insisted for more than a year, and, if he won’t do it, then start the proceedings to declare him unfit.

Men fit for duty as commander-in-chief don’t say things like “all 50 straits and the District of Combia.” They don’t give out “postumitous” “Bedals” of Honor. They don’t try to shake hands with thin air or waggle their hands fruitlessly in halting attempts at applause at meetings of world leaders who aren’t clapping.

They don’t repeat stage directions on teleprompters over and over again. And they don’t lecture the people that “[a] patient comes into the emergency room in any state in the Union, she’s expressing experiencing life-threatening miscarriage.”

Or claim that a bullet will knock someone’s lung out of their body.

Joe Biden has always been an embarrassment. The Democrat establishment, a whitened sepulcher of a political cabal whose time is past and whose bench is empty, took extraordinary, illegal steps to foist him on the American public and is now choking on him.

As we all are.

They’re so afraid of Kamala Harris finishing off any claim they might have to national leadership that they won’t do the obvious thing and rid us of Biden. They know that, once Harris takes office, as it’s increasingly clear she’ll have to before this presidential term is up, there will be no more excuses, and the public will understand that Joe Biden isn’t the real disaster — the Democrats are.

And the American people be damned.

Well, if that’s what we’re stuck with, and if our suffering under this putrid excuse for leadership is clad in cement, then can we at least have an end to the foreign gaffe-tastic spectaculars?

Can we at least confine Dirty Joe to the White House and his beachside assisted living facility in Rehoboth?

Or is even that too much to ask of our ruling elites?

Admiral Cockburn is looking less like a foe and more like the hero we need the longer this debauch is allowed to proceed.