What a fitting end to Joe Biden’s first year as president. The devastating defeat this week of his ruinous Build Back Better bill had the odd effect of turning his biggest lie, his most hilarious howler … into the truth.

It was back on September 25 when his handlers put out the following statement on his POTUS Twitter account: “My Build Back Better Agenda costs zero dollars. Instead of wasting money on tax breaks, loopholes, and tax evasion for big corporations and the wealthy, we can make a once-in-a-generation investment in working America. And it adds zero dollars to the national debt.”

Remember the uproar? Remember how even has pals in the mainstream media were doing spit takes? No one believed that ridiculous claim — not even the left-leaning Congressional Budget Office, which first said his bill would add $367 billion to the deficit and then reassessed it over a decade under real-world conditions and came up with $3 trillion in new debt.

But now, thanks to West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and 50 resolute Republican senators, his massive domestic spending agenda is dead, and Honest Joe Biden’s most outrageous claim is correct after all: His now-defunct bill will indeed add “zero dollars to the national debt.”

For Joe Biden, 2021 was one Democrat disaster after another. There was his son Hunter and the Laptop From Hell, whose incriminating contents would’ve landed any other president’s son in prison by now. There was his disastrous handling of illegal immigration across our southern border — a disaster that continues to remake the demography of our country. There was his catastrophic retreat and surrender in Afghanistan, whose effects are still reverberating around the world. There was his awful stewardship of our nation’s economy and the runaway inflation his fiscal policies have introduced. And there was his failed declaration of independence from the COVID-19 pandemic — a pandemic whose permanence continues to plague and divide the nation. There was — and still is — his party’s obsession with the events of January 6, which Biden called “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” It was an ugly event that he and his Democrat colleagues have kept calling a “deadly insurrection,” even though the only life lost to violence in the Capitol that day was that of 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed 14-year Air Force veteran who was shot by a Capitol policeman named Michael Byrd.

Speaking of worst things “since the Civil War,” there was Biden’s response to the very modest voter reform efforts of certain Republican-controlled state legislatures such as Georgia — efforts he claimed amounted to “the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history.” Regarding those Republican efforts, Biden warned: “We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole — since the Civil War. Confederates back then never breached the Capitol as insurrectionists did on January 6. I’m not saying this to alarm you. I’m saying this because you should be alarmed.”

The president’s pronouncements have indeed been stirring, even Rooseveltian. How else to describe those smooth, steady, mellifluous tones and that command of the spoken word that never failed to leave the sober-minded critics at MSNBC awestruck?

And just as Joe Biden’s oratorical gifts instilled confidence in the American people, so too are we confident that he’s of sound mind and body. We know this because White House physician Dr. Kevin O'Connor said it was so. “[Biden] remains a healthy, vigorous, 78-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency,” said O'Connor last month. Indeed, only the healthiest and most vigorous of American presidents can race so swiftly through a portion of the Declaration of Independence that its very words are left coughing in the dust. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Biden said back in March of 2020. “All men and women are created by the, you know, you know, the thing.”

You know, the thing.

Perhaps it was also altogether fitting, then, that Dr. O'Connor was able to vouch for Biden’s cognitive condition only after having performed a presidential colonoscopy.

One year down, and three more to go.