For the first time in 78 days, Joe Biden faced the media...sort of.  For the most part, the conference was a miscellany of nonsense, weirdness, and lies.  However, even the most determined, compulsive liars occasionally leak out the truth, and that's what Biden gave himself the highest marks for: his job performance.  If you understand what that performance actually was, rather than what he thinks it was, he did, sadly, exceed all expectations.

Biden's scariest answers concerned Russia and Ukraine.  We've currently reached a situation that has no good outcomes: Putin has massed troops on the border and can't pull out unless he gets concessions.  The real concession he wants is a promise that Ukraine won't join NATO.  As Tucker Carlson said, for Putin, having NATO on his doorstep would be as if Mexico fell under China's military control.  Ironically, NATO doesn't want Ukraine because Ukraine is famously corrupt.  That means that the push for NATO is about national one-upmanship and ego.

Biden, after conceding that Russia probably would invade Ukraine and doing a bit of his "weak man talking tough" shtick, eventually offered his Solomonic, split-the-baby decision that the U.S. probably will not enter into full war with Russia (a nuclear power) if Russia just does a "minor incursion" into Ukraine:

Biden on Russia invading Ukraine:

"It's one thing if it's a minor incursion..." pic.twitter.com/BFp5jnJYPI

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 19, 2022

The Ukrainians, who are ostensibly our allies (and were once Hunter Biden's paymasters), were horrified.  The fact that Biden was recognizing how these things often work out (Putin puts his toe over the border, there's a diplomatic storm, and various egos are somehow assuaged) doesn't mean it wasn't a massive foreign policy gaffe of the type that shakes nations — and in a parliamentary world would bring down a Biden government.

Please note that the reason we're on the precipice of a ground war with Russia, something we avoided throughout the Cold War, is because Biden is weak.  I'm absolutely certain we never would have gotten to this point had Trump been in the White House.  Medieval France and England, which both suffered the Hundred Years' War because of a series of senile old kings and infant kings, would have understood the peril America faces with a man who's not all there and, worse, what little is left is dangerous.

Biden also said that unless his voting rights bill, which federalizes elections and builds fraud into each election, passes, he cannot say that the upcoming midterm will be legitimate:

REPORTER: "Do you still believe the upcoming election will be fairly conducted and the results will be legitimate?"

BIDEN: "It all depends depends on whether or not we're able to make the case to the American people that some of this is being set up to alter the outcome..." pic.twitter.com/COdhiTEYhh

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) January 19, 2022

When Trump did it, it was a threat to democracy.  Somehow that doesn't apply to Biden (of course).

Laughably, Biden also blamed the Republicans for his inability to get the voting fraud and Build Back Communist bills passed.  He seems to have forgotten that Democrats have a majority in the House and Kamala as the tie-breaker in the Senate.

Image: Biden at his press conference (edited in befunky).  YouTube screen grab.

But as I said, Biden did manage to tell the truth in that swirl of angry, dishonest, scarily inept, and weird stuff.  The AP's Zeke Miller reminded Biden about the problems currently facing him (the economy, COVID, failed bills, nation's divisions), and asked if he over-promised what he would achieve and if he plans to course correct.  Biden, speaking the absolute truth, stated, "I have probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen."

BIDEN: "I have probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen." pic.twitter.com/WcrnAEdTnA

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) January 19, 2022

This is true.  Every sentient who hadn't drunk too deeply of the leftist Kool-Aid knew that Biden's gift is making mistakes.  Even Obama said, "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to f--- things up."  Even those of us who were most distressed by Biden's election didn't imagine how absolutely awful his first year would be, a combination of his puppet masters' hard-left politics and his own ineptitude.

Who predicted that in a single year, Biden would destroy America's energy independence, send inflation skyrocketing, come very close to breaking the American economy entirely, destroy America's southern border, come within minutes of a land war with Russia, preside over the deaths of more American civilians than any president in history, castigate an entire political party as the living embodiment of Jim Crow and the KKK, utterly destroy America's and the military's prestige in Afghanistan, drastically increase America's racial tension, politicize federal law, and turn the military into an increasingly dysfunctional woke institution?

Yes, Joe, you did outperform what anybody thought would happen, but it's nothing to boast about.  If you had any decency, you'd admit that you didn't really win the election, hand the White House keys to Trump, and slink away ignominiously and forever.