Summoning his remaining strength after months in his burrow, 77-year-old presumptive president-elect (oh, please no!) Joe Biden (D) declared that "America is back" as he introduced his latest presumptive (oh, please, no!) administration appointees.

This begets the question, "Well, where has America been?"  Climbing from the depths of President Barack Hussein Obama (D)'s administration, America has been in success.  For instance, unemployment, which peaked at 10% in the early Obama years, later dropping to 5%, accelerated its downward trend during the Trump era to well under 4%.  This dynamism particularly benefited blacks and Hispanics, whose unemployment numbers also correspondingly dropped.  Incomes rose.

Discarding the same old, same old failed ideas, Trump brought fresh ideas and insights into some foreign relations problems such as telling the Europeans to start paying more of their agreed upon share for their own defense in NATO while reducing America's burden, pulling America out of the suicidal Iran nuclear deal, and introducing the beginnings of peace among seemingly intractable enemies such as Serbia-Kosovo and then the Abraham Accords between Jewish Israel and several Sunni Muslim countries.

Ah, but all this success is apparently too difficult for the presumptive (Oh.  Please.  No.) incoming president, who seems intent on shoving America back to the failed past.

Biden introduced his national security team on Tuesday, his first substantive offering of how he'll shift from Trump-era "America First" policies by relying on experts from the Democratic establishment to be some of his most important advisers.

"Together, these public servants will restore America globally, its global leadership and its moral leadership," Biden said from a theater in his longtime home of Wilmington, Delaware.  "It's a team that reflects the fact that America is back, ready to lead the world, not retreat from it."

The nominees are all Washington veterans with ties to former President Barack Obama's administration[.]

In other words, America is back to...failure.  Unlike Trump and many of his appointees, who had real-life experience in business around the country, Biden's superficially diverse — i.e., color, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation — but basically similar "Washington veterans" who are "experts from the Democratic establishment" bounce around in an enclosed bubble among government jobs, a few "think-tanks" and even fewer and more limited academia ivory towers where reality does not intrude.  America Last is their unofficial motto.

Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and potential 2024 presidential candidate, argued that Biden is surrounding himself with people who will go soft on China. 

Sen. Marco Rubio, another potential White House hopeful, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that will consider Blinken's nomination, broadly wrote off the early selections.

"Biden's cabinet picks went to Ivy League schools, have strong resumes, attend all the right conferences & will be polite & orderly caretakers of America's decline," Rubio tweeted.

Nothing demonstrates this America is back...to the past failure as much as learning that "former Secretary of State John Kerry will make a curtain call as a special envoy on climate change."  Oh, so Kerry will travel to outer, outer space to confer with Sun God Helios about those recent solar flares, asking him/her/them to tone them down because of climate change before heading off in the other direction to deal with Satan him/her/themself, in you know where, about the forthcoming La Niña and more climate change, according to the information Satan leaked to the government's National Weather Service.  Based on these government reports, Southern Colorado's NBC weather person reported:

As of September 10, 2020 La Nina has formed, with a 75% chance it will last into winter.

The El Nino - Southern Oscillation, AKA ENSO, measures the cycle of tropical Pacific Ocean temperatures. (snip) Colder than average indicate La Nina.

Kerry has oh, so much work to do as climate change envoy.

America will be back, back to the build back better negativity of the Obama era.

No!  NO!  Please, no!  I don't want to go back; I want to go forward.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.