We have all had the experience, back in the days when check-writing was far more common than it is now, of writing the previous year on the check, at least in the early days of January. 

But Old Joe Biden went one better in his remarks before a COVID-19 meeting on Tuesday: he referred to the new year not as 2022, or as 2021, but as 2020. 

Anyone can make a verbal slip, but they come from Old Joe so often that it’s increasingly harder for his handlers to keep up the pretense that he is fully in charge of his faculties, or of the presidency itself.

From the depths of his fog, Biden kept up his fearmongering and scapegoating of the unvaccinated: “You know, be concerned about Omicron, but don’t be alarmed.  But if you’re unvaccinated, you have some reason to be alarmed.  Many of you will — you know, you’ll experience severe illness, in many cases, if you get COVID-19 if you’re not vaccinated.  Some will die — needlessly die.”

The unvaccinated may be dying needlessly, but they shouldn’t expect any help; they’re just taking up space meant for decent people: “The unvaccinated are taking up hospital beds and crowding emergency rooms and intensive care units.  That’s a place that other people will need access to those hospitals. So, please — please, please get vaccinated now. So, there is no excuse — no excuse for anyone being unvaccinated.  This continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated.  So we got to make more progress.”

Biden continues to repeat this “pandemic of the unvaccinated” business when even his own base has abandoned it. The Atlantic, always reliably Leftist, published an article entitled “The Pandemic of the Vaccinated Is Here,” specifically criticizing Biden’s use of the term: “Back in July, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced that COVID had become ‘a pandemic of the unvaccinated,’ an unfortunate turn of phrase that was soon picked up by the president. Now the flaws in its logic are about to be exposed on what could be a terrifying scale. Unvaccinated Americans will certainly pay the steepest price in the months to come, but the risks appear to have grown for everyone. The pandemic of the vaccinated can no longer be denied.”

Except at the White House, that is, where Biden continued to vilify the unvaccinated: “In the last two weeks, we have developed hundreds of military — we have deployed, I should say, hundreds of military doctors and nurses to staff the hospitals in our states that are overrun and overworked because of unvaccinated COVID-19 patients, primarily….We’ve shipped nearly 2.4 million pieces of protective equipment to hospitals, from gowns to gloves.  And we’re doing whatever we can to protect communities from the surge of hospital cases that we’re likely to see from unvac- — from the unvaccinated population.”