Sometimes you just have to unburden yourself of the unpleasant truth. A few years back, I was old enough, but not too old, to have self-restraint. That’s by the boards now. So without further adieu, let me list the Seven Items of Bad News — four for the short run, one for the middle run, and two for the (sort of ) long run.

One. The emperor has no clothes. More often recently, conservatives are titling this as something like, “It’s time to say the quiet part out loud,” but one way or the other it’s the same message: The President of the United States has lost it and is incompetent to govern. Indeed, he’s incompetent to run a hardware store much less the nation. This has been evident for some time, but got put irredeemably on the front burner by the Hur report, which concluded that Joe Biden is such a sad sack of a figure that a jury would overlook clear evidence of his guilt because it would be reluctant to send an enfeebled old man to jail.

Biden routinely makes errors characteristic of encroaching senility, mistaking names and dates all the time. This is on top of his history of telling (usually but not always) harmless whoppers.

I was at one time a White House aide (as Special Counsel for Pres. George H. W. Bush). The Presidency takes an enormous amount of energy, agility, breadth, depth and savvy. And the world is a dangerous place. Joe’s not up to it and we all know it. Is this making you feel safe?

Two. This year’s choice for President is very likely to be between two men each of whom is manifestly unfit for the Office. I’ve already discussed Biden (although on top of everything else, for the most part he lacks the will or intelligence to resist the caustically anti-American extremes currently running his Party and, therefore, the executive branch).

Do I really need to say much about Trump? Yes, he did some good things for the country in his term a few years back, and no, he doesn’t hate the country like much of his opposition does, but, good grief, is that supposed to qualify him to lead the Free World? He’s a narcissistic jackass. There is no degree of self-justification unknown to him. And it’s not just that his knowledge of law is nowhere to be seen; worse, it’s that his interest in knowing anything about the law simply doesn’t exist. This is the fellow whose oath, if he takes it again, requires him to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Yikes.

And this is not to mention his behavior in refusing to accept his loss in 2020. Yes, there was fraud in the election and yes, the other side falsely denied (and denies) it, but next to no sensible conservative thinks he won. Worse, when he challenged the results in numerous court suits (which he was entitled to do), and lost them all, he would not accept the results. Instead, he egged on a mob to disrupt the processes of peacefully transitioning power, a tradition that is the signature tradition of the greatness of American governance.

And he makes goo-goo eyes at Putin. And he ridiculed McCain for being a prisoner of war. And he invites Russia to invade NATO countries behind on their dues.

Enough. He’s unfit for office. And this would be true even if the Republican Party didn’t have a wealth of mainstream candidates who are both qualified and not insufferably stuck on themselves and How I Wuz Robbed.

Three. This year’s campaign, for the first time in American history, will be run with one major candidate hobbled by prosecutorial strong-arming orchestrated by the other.

The Manhattan DA, leftist Democrat Alvin Bragg, has charged Trump with abstruse campaign finance violations in a case so attenuated that even the New York Times sheepishly says that it’s the “least significant” of the four criminal cases against him. Just today, the New York judge set the trial to start next month:

A judge in Manhattan rejected Donald Trump’s bid to throw out criminal charges against him that stem from a hush-money payment to a porn star in 2016, clearing the way for the first prosecution of a former American president in the nation’s history.

The judge, Juan Merchan, scheduled the trial to begin on March 25, ensuring that Trump will face at least one jury before Election Day.

The New York case is generally viewed as the least significant of the four criminal cases against the former president, but it still presents a formidable threat. Trump is facing 34 felony charges and, if convicted, a sentence of up to four years in prison.

There are of course the two federal cases brought Biden’s Justice Department, and the Atlanta case brought by Democratic race-huckster Fani Willis, who was at least able to take time off from funneling money to herself through her boyfriend — oh, excuse me, make that the Assistant DA she hired at a nice salary — to indict Trump.

So the governing Democrats, not content to try to force the main opposition candidate off the ballot altogether with an argument the Justices all but ridiculed last week, aim to kneecap his campaign by using prosecutorial power to keep him tied down in court.

In any other context, the MSM would lambaste this for what it is, namely, the worst machinations of banana republic politics. But because Trump is the target — and so often cooperates by making himself the easiest target this side of Jupiter — it’s now lionized as the “rule of law.”

Rule of law my foot.

Four. The Republicans cave in to fruitcake isolationism by refusing to pass desperately needed aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. There are two components of the Republicans’ stance here, one perverted and the other merely terminally stupid. The perverted part is reluctance to help Israel, the Ukraine and Taiwan because “we need to use the money here at home” or some similar isolationist bromide.

Well, sure, we could use the money at home, but like it or not, we live in a smaller and smaller world, and the enemies of civilized life overseas (like Hamas) are our enemies as well. Malevolent forces beyond our borders proved it at Pearl Harbor and proved it again on 9-11. How many more of our people do we need to get killed to demand more proof? And while the hard-headed safeguarding of strictly American interests should be enough to persuade us to help our friends defeat our enemies, there is something else, too: Some people (I admit to being one of them) think our country has a moral as well as a self-interested obligation to help countries aligned with values of decency resist conquest and murder by forces with the opposite values.

I understand that the Republicans are trying to use the aid bill to try to force Biden into concessions that will strengthen the border and reduce the all-but unmitigated flood of illegal immigration. The goal is laudable but it’s too obvious for argument that this is not going to work.

Here’s the deal: It doesn’t matter what changes in immigration law Biden agrees to because he’s not going to keep any agreement he makes and will not enforce future law he dislikes any more than he’s enforcing present law he dislikes. It mystifies me that the Republicans don’t see this. The only way the border is going to be enforced is to defeat Biden in the election and install a President who takes national sovereignty more seriously.

Five, six and seven. This post has gone on longer than I’d planned, so I’ll just give a brief introduction to the other three things that will ruin your day, together will my promise that I’ll elaborate on them in a future post to ruin yet another day (my father was a member of the Optimist Club, but I never really fit in).

No. 5 is Iran and our failure to confront it as it needs to be confronted in order to prevent it from getting and using the atomic bomb. Half-measures and hope aren’t going to work for a lot longer, as my very smart friend Richard Vigilante spells out here.

No. 6 is our addiction to debt, both public and private. The national debt keeps growing astronomically. Not a single leader in Washington takes this seriously. I guess they think America is going to become the first civilization in history permanently to consume more than it produces. I have my doubts. We need to ask ourselves where and how this is going to end.

No. 7 is America’s disgraceful and failing system of public education. Standards have cratered. We no longer even pay lip service to excellence and now bow down to “equity,” the only poorly disguised term for achieving nothing and learning less. We need to guts and the vision to explore why this has happened and set it right. Right now, I’m not seeing either.