God help me for saying this but I have a soft spot for the president. Perhaps it’s because I inadvertently gave him his winning campaign strategy (OK, I cannot prove that anybody on his team read my article “The case for locking Joe Biden in a cupboard,” but it certainly appeared as if they did). Perhaps it’s because he is old and vulnerable.

But he spoke quite firmly — and sometimes eloquently. “Be not afraid,” he said, quoting the Polish Pope John Paul II, “It is a message that will overcome the brutality of this unjust war.” It is a good one.

Another reason I have some time for President Biden is that he has been resisting calls for military escalation between NATO and Russia. When he was asked, in Brussels, if he had ruled out armed intervention prematurely and emboldened Putin he replied, with fitting crankiness, “no and no.” (Before the invasion, in another valid outburst of Trumpian disdain, he responded to a journalist who had asked him why he was waiting for Putin to “make the first move” by saying, “What a stupid question.”)