Bad time for a close-up

The timing of Jill’s Vogue cover spread couldn’t be worse.

Staffers in the East Wing of the White House were probably brimming with excitement last week, knowing that the First Lady’s latest cover spread in Vogue was going to hit the shelves just days after her husband triumphantly secured his second term by obliterating Donald Trump in the upcoming CNN debate.

What better way to celebrate Biden’s certain reelection than for Jill to grace the front cover of the most fashionable glossy in the world to remind Americans that the Bidens were the modern-day Kennedys?

I can imagine East Wing staffers high-fiving each other as they looked at the carefully airbrushed cover photo selected for the big day, knowing that Jill Biden would be so pleased with how well the photo editor managed to soften the 73-year-old bottle blond’s creased and wrinkled features.

Then tragedy struck.

Joe Biden’s triumphant victory in last Thursday’s debate never materialized.

No amount of denial could change the reality of an 81-year-old president in the throes of cognitive decline.

The panicked Biden family hurried to Camp David to stage an intervention to keep their befuddled patriarch from finding out that he crapped the sheets so badly that 67% of debate viewers thought Trump was the winner.

To absolve Joe of blame, his family scrambled to find someone else to blame for the American people discovering what the family tried to keep under wraps for the last four years.

However, there was a slight problem.

Vogue was already set to release the First Lady’s latest fawning profile.

The Vogue cover that only days before was likely viewed by the White House as the perfect follow-up to the president’s anticipated triumphant debate performance was now about as well-timed as a wet fart at a D-Day commemoration ceremony.

I posted my column “From their cold dead hands…” about an hour before Vogue released the overly airbrushed Jill’s latest close-up, and I laughed myself silly over the impeccably bad timing.

I texted Jill’s Vogue cover picture to my brother, who said it made her look even more power-hungry and vainglorious than I described in my column.

Yup. That’s what makes it so funny.

I wrote yesterday:

If you want to know why the Biden family wants its senile patriarch to continue publicly humiliating himself on the world stage, the clue is in the phrase “photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz.”

Do you think Jill Biden wants to give up the wealth, fame, and perks that being married to a Democrat president guarantees?

How else could an unremarkable elementary school teacher like Jill ever have the chance to rub elbows with Hollywood stars or pose for celebrity photographers like Annie Leibovitz?

I tried reading Vogue’s profile of Jill but couldn’t make it past the first paragraph.

When you see the first paragraph, you’ll understand:

If you want to know what power feels like, try to get yourself driven around in a motorcade. Flashing police chaperone lights form a perimeter as you blaze down an empty highway, waiting cars backed up on entry ramps as you pass. It’s as if the world is holding its breath. For you.

Hahahahaha!!! No. A thousand gallons of No.

The optics of this are catastrophic.

There was a growing sense after Thursday’s debate debacle that Jill Biden must be a ruthless, power-hungry fishwife guilty of elder abuse to force her cognitively-impaired husband to run for president.

Following up that debate with a fawning profile featuring a soft-focused airbrushed photo of Jill looking like Eva Peron in a pantsuit was a tremendously bad idea, not to mention all kinds of hilarious.

Am I a bad person for enjoying the hell out of Jill Biden’s humiliation?

Probably, but she deserves it.