A couple of weeks ago, Joe Biden had a doozy of an hour — an hour that has come to embody his catastrophic presidency of late.

On Friday afternoon, September 17, in the space of just 60 minutes, his Pentagon announced to the world that his hastily conducted drone strike in Afghanistan hadn’t taken out any terrorists but had instead killed 10 innocent civilians, seven of them children. In addition, a panel advising his Food and Drug Administration voted to not recommend COVID-19 booster shots for all Americans over age 16, which derailed a key component of what he’d said to be the central mission of his presidency. And, finally, our oldest ally, France, announced it was recalling its ambassador to the U.S. due to having been aced out of a secret nuclear submarine deal struck between the Biden administration, the UK, and Australia.

Here, we’re reminded of what former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said when a journalist asked him what the greatest challenge to his administration was: “Events, my dear boy, events.”

And so it is with Joe Biden, whose presidency appears to be at the mercy of events that regularly spin out of control and leave him with nothing but excuses. If it isn’t Donald Trump’s fault, then it’s the fault of Republicans, or the white supremacists, or Demo dissident Senator Joe Manchin, or the unvaccinated, or Governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, or the Taliban, or those Afghans who refused to fight, or global warming climate change.

“He that is good for making excuses,” said Ben Franklin, “is seldom good for anything else.”

But back to those events that keep foiling our president. As political analyst Eddy Scarry observes:

The media want Biden to look like a “helpless bystander,” a victim of circumstances out of his control. He’s not. He’s the perpetrator of nearly every disaster anyone with eyes can see, from the obscenity at the southern border, to the loss of 13 service members (not fighting, but leaving a war zone), to the stratospheric inflation of household necessities.

We’re led to believe these are simply “challenges” Biden is facing rather than the results of his own deliberate screw-ups.

Indeed. Take the crisis on our southern border, for example, which continued to worsen even during the height of summer, when illegal border crossings should’ve settled down. Not so under Biden, though, who reflexively blamed the Trump administration by saying he inherited “one god-awful mess at the border.” But when illegal immigrants themselves are asked why they’re coming, they make clear it’s because of the message that was sent by the Biden administration. That message? “What I would do as president … I would in fact make sure that there is, we immediately surge to the border all those people who are seeking asylum. … We’re a nation that says ‘If you want to flee, and you’re fleeing oppression, you should come.’”

Talk about an open invitation to chaos, crisis, and human misery. Who can blame the more than 1.5 million illegals we’ve counted crossing our border in fiscal year 2021, and the countless others who’ve avoided detection? Who can blame the 30,000 Haitians who heard that message? The only question is whether Joe Biden is simply idiotic or is bent on changing the face of America. Or both. Clearly both.

Or take Afghanistan, the 20-year war that seemed to be winding down under Trump, but that went off the rails under Biden’s leadership. As former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put it a month ago, when Team Biden and its surrogates were just beginning to roll out the excuses: “The disaster unfolding in Afghanistan has shown in stark terms the incompetence and weakness of the Biden administration. In a matter of days, the Taliban was allowed to take over the entire country. This feckless, poorly executed withdrawal is already calling into question American leadership from some of our closest allies [and] emboldening our enemies. … Biden’s incompetence has left Americans in harm’s way and is dishonoring those who serve and our country.”

As one exasperated CBS analyst asked, “How did Biden miss the red flags?” To which our Mark Alexander replied, “Joe Biden IS the red flag.”

Under this president, we retreated and surrendered, we lost 13 warriors to a suicide bombing we saw coming, and we left billions worth of military gear to our Taliban enemies.

That trio of events aptly sums up the effectiveness of the Biden administration. And no amount of excuse-making can put the blame elsewhere.

Eight months down, 40 more to go.