If you’ve resisted the urge to chug a bottle of cheap bourbon due to the collapse of your retirement savings, congratulations are in order: You just survived the nation’s worst first-half stock market performance in more than half a century.

No doubt you already know this, but Joe Biden did that. As Yahoo Finance reports:

The S&P 500 fell by 0.9% on Thursday to reach 3,785.38, ending the first half of 2022 lower by 20.6% for its worst start to a year since 1970. The Dow ended Thursday’s session at 30,775.43, dropping 15.3% for the year-to-date for its worst first half since 1962. And the Nasdaq’s 29.5% drop so far in 2022 marked its worst first half on record.

Indeed, we can still hear Biden crowing about how great the stock market is doing; about how it’s “hitting record after record after record on my watch.” But he’s been strangely silent since the middle of last month, when the market had lost everything it had gained since he was sworn into office on January 20, 2021.

What a difference a year makes, huh?

“Back then,” the Washington Examiner reports, “the administration enthusiastically said that Biden’s policies had drastically reduced Independence Day price tags, repeatedly posting on social media and even putting together videos about how the president had cut the cost of a July 4 cookout by 16 cents compared to 2020.”

Surely you remember those big savings he bragged about, and this idiotic and sophomoric tweet from the previous Independence Day:

Planning a cookout this year? Ketchup on the news. According to the Farm Bureau, the cost of a 4th of July BBQ is down from last year. It’s a fact you must-hear(d). Hot dog, the Biden economic plan is working. And that’s something we can all relish.

This year, that same cookout cost you 17% more. Put another way: Joe Biden put 16 cents into your July 4 piggy bank last year, but he raided it for $10 this year.

This year, Biden and his handlers had nothing to be cute about. At a White House event yesterday, Biden draped himself with military families and spoke in serious, even somber tones: “The Fourth of July comes at a critical moment: Our economy is growing but not without pain, liberty is under assault both here and abroad,” Biden said. “In recent days, there has been reason to believe that this country is moving backward, that freedom is being reduced, that rights we believed were protected are no longer.”

Biden also took the opportunity to attack private industry this weekend, blaming high gas prices not on his ruinous energy policies but on greedy oil companies and individual gas stations. Perhaps we should be grateful that he’s taken a momentary pause from blaming Vladimir Putin. But if these record-high prices were Putin’s fault, is Biden now crediting the Russian dictator for the recent reduction in prices?

“My message to the companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump is simple: this is a time of war and global peril. Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product. And do it now.”

It was a sordid display from a desperate president — one that not even a lefty like Washington Post owner and cheerleader Jeff Bezos could stomach. The guy who also runs Amazon called Biden’s tweet “either straight ahead misdirection or a deep misunderstanding of basic market dynamics.”

To which the Wall Street Journal’s editors rightly replied, “They aren’t mutually exclusive.”

UPDATED to include additional information on soaring and briefly subsiding gas prices.