Obama As Farce

Great article by American Thinker

Karl Marx said history repeats itself, "first as tragedy, then as farce."  Barack Obama has reversed that.  His first term was certainly farce; his second will be tragedy.

Obama has Forrest Gumped his way through his presidency, except without the success, charm, and endearing sweetness of the original.  He has given America three and a half years of farce, even if no one is laughing. 

He is an adumbrated president, desperate about his re-election prospects.  Sold as a bipartisan moderate, a post-racial healer, a transformative leader -- we were told he would not just solve our problems, but heal the earth and save humanity. 

The president has governed as a hyper-partisan, race-baiting, barely present tyrant with absolutely no leadership skills and little regard for the constitution.  His daily ululations paint anyone who dares to disagree as evil and un-American.  People are either pro-Barack or an enemy of the nation -- there is no in-between. 

It is the intangible aspects of the presidency where Barack Obama is most adept: entertaining, vacationing, and golf.  The parties are legendary and extravagant.  Bringing the NBA to the White House, or the NFL or Motown or Broadway -- when he feels like it, the party comes to him.  The vacations are even more extravagant, and the golf...everyone knows about the golf.  He may not be good, but at least he puts in the time. 

America has to pay for it all, but this is an opportunity to see the true Barack Obama, surrounded by minions and sycophants constantly telling him how great he is.  Is it any surprise he wants four more years of this? 

Obama hagiographer Davis Guggenheim has said, "I mean, the negative for me was there were too many accomplishments."  Barack wholeheartedly agrees; after all didn't he recently say, "My entire career has been a testimony to American exceptionalism"?

Popeil's Pocket President, brought to you by Ronco, or Rahm Emanuel -- one of those.  At least the Pocket Fisherman worked.  Barack doesn't work; it's all parties, vacations, and golf -- in between, he practices verbal assassination of anyone who disagrees.  Chin up, he turns away and looks off in the distance, à la Mussolini, as the applause and adulation reverberate from the rafters. 

"No, please," he pleads, "I do this for you."     

In less than four years, he has reduced America to the laughingstock of the world.  We are threatened by Iran with nuclear Armageddon, while he lines up a putt and tells us what his imaginary son would look like. 

He talks of "flexibility," while he plots both unilateral disarmament and the scrapping of missile defense.  With no deterrent and no defensive capability, the nation will be defenseless and impotent.

Unemployment has ravaged America; economic stagnation has destroyed families and futures.  Good people have been demonized simply for being successful; business has been terrified by threats of confiscatory taxation and the relentless assault of regulatory fiat.  Obama's trillion-dollar stimulus stimulated nothing, except the wallets of political backers and crony capitalist pals.  It actually made the economy worse by diverting money from productive business investment into the Obama for President slush fund, which is really all the stimulus ever was. 

ObamaCare, so named because he does care, is more unpopular with every passing day, while the Supreme Court seems likely to overturn the entire abominable mess.  Using procedural trickery, our transformational tyrant and his minions, Nancy and Harry, rammed it down America's throat, eking out a victory without a single Republican vote.  It's farcical that he would claim that it passed with a "strong majority of a democratically elected Congress." 

As part of this comedy of errors, standing with the president of Mexico and the Canadian PM last week, Barack Obama couldn't help but channel his inner Chevy Chase in The Three Amigos.  Our president, once a professor of constitutional law, made statements showing how ignorant he is about the Constitution, judicial review, checks and balances, and the separation of powers.  He's tried to walk those comments back, but it's hard to walk back idiocy.   

People have died from his policies, although hundreds of white Hispanics in Mexico who perished as a result of his administration's Fast and Furious program apparently don't count.  Ever faster and much more furiously, the administration is done talking about gun-walking.

Our president, who believes himself the living embodiment of American exceptionalism, veers wildly between bragging about how successful he is and puling loudly about how unfairly he is being treated.  Every jeremiad from the man is laced with an unsaid but implied "you people don't appreciate me, even after all I've done for you."  Although at times, he skips the unsaid and the implied. 

He boasts of his accomplishments, which amount to nothing more than brazenly redefining abject failure as success, or taking credit for things he had nothing to do with.  Is there anything funnier than hearing the most anti-oil president in the history of the nation take credit for oil production?  He stands in front of some pipes and makes a speech, and suddenly, he is the "Energy President."  Could he look more desperate?

To hear Barack tell it, no other president has done more for the fossil fuel industry, cut taxes for the middle class, been more supportive of business, cut regulation, or done more to increase employment and help the economy recover.  Did you hear that Osama bin Laden is still dead? 

Most laughable is his assertion that no president has ever done more to control spending, despite the $5 trillion in debt he has added in less than four years.  With a second term, he is on track to add more debt in eight years than all the presidents who came before him combined.  His budgets are a joke, with last year's failing in the Senate 97-0, and this year's losing in the House 414-0.  Even Democrats won't vote for them.

It is Obama's version of the "big lie," a lie told so often that it is accepted as truth.  The Obama variation entails many lies, big and small, told over and over again in mellifluous tone, with aggressive confidence and a joking manner that implies that anyone who doesn't believe all he says is an idiot. 

To him, Americans are morons, so intimidated by his brilliance that they will buy into his bull, become backers of Barack, and re-up on hope and change this November.  The secret to his success is that he is able to convince people that if they believe him and not what they see with their own eyes, they are geniuses, just like him.

As a rule -- with everything Barack tells us about what he has done and what he will do -- the truth is always the exact opposite.  On Seinfeld, it was called "bizarro world."  We live in Barack's backwards bizarro world. 

Unemployment, at over 8%, is at the highest protracted level since the Great Depression.  The economy is moribund, with the worst recovery from a recession, also since the Depression.  Government spending, as a percentage of GDP, is the highest since WWII.  The percentage of people employed is at its lowest level in 30 years; gasoline prices are the highest ever.  America, internationally, is at its greatest risk since the fall of the USSR.  Yet Barack constantly talks about how wonderful things are and how great he has been.  Sadly, many people believe him, and these people will vote to give him an opportunity to try again.  Scary, isn't it? 

America is circling the drain, and despite the farce that has been Obama's first term, he has his hand on the handle...and with re-election, he is going to flush.

Mark Twain said that truth is always stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense.  Watching Barack Obama campaign for re-election should be funny, but it's hard to laugh when realizing how tragic four more years of this president will be for America

Original article

Obama’s Made-Up Jobless Numbers. Its' Nice To Be Dictator

 

When it comes to the unemployment rate, it’s nice to be president.

Sure, it wasn’t so nice for President Obama in October 2009, when the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics declared the rate was 10 percent. But exactly a year from Election Day 2012, the rate began a precipitous plunge, first to 8.9 percent, then the next month, to 8.7, then to 8.5. And just last week, the BLS said the rate had fallen all the way down to 8.3 percent.

If the spectacular “recovery” keeps up at the same pace, the rate will be 6.3 percent by Nov. 6. It hasn’t been that low since — well, all but four of the 96 months George W. Bush was in office. But you get the point. America is back!! 

Woo-hoooo!!

So, spectacular news for the president, yes? And fantastic news for America, right? Uh, yes. And absolutely no.

See, the BLS boys, no doubt at the president’s direction, are busy rewriting the rules, and they’re in uncharted, and unchecked, territory. The federal government Friday declared that the U.S. had created — not “saved,” mind you, “created” — 243,000 jobs. Amazing, right?

But wait, what’s that little asterisk here? A record 1.2 million Americans left the labor force? 1.2 million?! Well, where’d they go? Oh, just left? Well, OK. But no, wait. What does that even mean?

Zerohedge.com’s Tyler Durden precisely spelled out the government version of “Project Mayhem”:

“A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55 percent. Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: It appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million. No, that’s not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month! So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non-institutional population increased to 242.3 million, meaning those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30-year low of 63.7 percent as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation.”

The labor force rate — all workers more than 16 years old — climbed above 66 percent in October 1988. It stayed there throughout the term of President George H.W. Bush, and topped 67 percent for 40 consecutive months during President Clinton’s two terms. The rate stayed above 66 percent for almost all of President George W. Bush’s two terms.

But the month Mr. Obama was elected, the rate dropped to 65.8 percent. By the end of his first year in office, the BLS said the labor participation rate was just 64.6 percent. And last month, for the first time in nearly 30 years, the rate dropped all the way down to 63.7 percent.

Still, month after month, the mainstream media laps up reports of a falling unemployment rate. “U.S. Jobless Rate Falls to 8.3 Percent, a 3-Year Low,” blared the New York Times. “The nation’s unemployment rate dropped for the fifth straight month, to 8.3 percent, its lowest level in three years, the Labor Department reported Friday, with widespread hiring across the economy,” declared the Washington Post.

Clearly, they hadn’t read the major financial papers the month before. When the unemployment rate dropped to 8.5 percent in December, the Financial Times wasn’t convinced. “According to government statistics, if the same number of people were seeking work today as in 2007, the jobless rate would be 11 percent.”

And they must have ignored the Gallup write-up the month before: “The sharp drop in the government-reported unemployment rate for November and the sharp drop in jobless claims during the most recent reporting week have combined to create the perception that the job market may be improving … . In contrast, Gallup’s data suggest little improvement in the jobs situation.” The organization concluded: “It may be wise to exercise caution in interpreting the drop in the government’s most recent jobless claims numbers.”

No one in the mainstream media, busy rewriting the government’s press release on Friday, will bother to question the newest number, or explore what trimtabs.com CEO Charles Biderman said that very day: “Actual jobs outstanding, not seasonally adjusted, are down 2.9 million over the past two months. It is only after seasonal adjustments — made at the sole discretion of the Bureau of Labor Statistics economists — that 2.9 million less jobs gets translated into 446,000 new seasonally adjusted jobs for January and December.

“No one I know has any idea as to how the BLS does this seasonal adjustment,” he said.

When Project Mayhem has run its course, Tyler Durden looking out across the city, where banks and financial institutions are about to implode, says: “Out these windows, we will view the economic collapse. One step closer to global equilibrium.”

Indeed.

Article by Joseph Curl, Washington Times

Where's That Green Jobs Revolution Obama Promised?

When Obama first came into office in 2009, he did so on the back of a promise to usher in a green jobs revolution of sorts -- with an intent to employ 5 million people in sectors like clean energy and efficiency improvement retrofitting. And while he did manage to secure the largest sum of funding for clean energy research and green initiatives in the stimulus bill that year, needless to say, no such 'revolution' has happened. Strides have been made, but 10% of the nation is still unemployed, and clean energy -- though growing faster than most other industries -- remains relatively small-scale. So what happened?

Politico offers an unsatisfying take:
 

President Barack Obama heads to an energy plant in North Carolina today to talk once again about the job-creating power of a green economy. The catch? Nearly three years into Obama's presidency, the White House can't point to much solid evidence that significant numbers of Americans are scoring the green jobs the president has been touting.

 Monthly Labor Department employment reports say nothing about the new clean energy workforce, while an effort to document how many Americans actually make a living in the "green collar" field may not be done by November 2012. Obama's Council of Economic Advisers suggests 225,000 clean energy jobs were either created or preserved through the third quarter of 2010 thanks to more than $80 billion in the economic stimulus package. But those are estimates at best.

Politico's article is rather silly, because the 'lack of evidence' it refers to isn't due to a lack of actual green job creation, but lack of good statistics. By the CEA's count, the stimulus created or saved around one million jobs in its first year. And there's no doubt that tax relief for green projects is helping spur the boom in cleantech -- and making it one of the nation's fastest-growing industries.

But there is a reason that we haven't seen the kind of 'Green New Deal' that many were hoping for to help get the nation's unemployed back to work and nascent clean energy industry kicked into high gear -- a lack of adequate, sustained funding. Top economists (even some of Obama's advisers) routinely called for a larger stimulus package back in 2009, and Obama didn't heed them -- largely due to immense pushback from the GOP, which was overwhelmingly opposed to the idea. Like the rest of the stimulus, the green jobs initiatives included in it were simply too small to make any transition towards a cleaner economy seem palpable.

So despite consistent gains and progress in the sector, those gains never felt front and center to the American public. And they simply weren't big enough drastically alter the nation's employment picture. If we want green jobs to take root, we're going to have to either a) direct a major, sustained boost of stimulus investment in cleantech, building efficiency, and renewable energy sectors or b) price carbon. Stripping subsidies from fossil fuel companies would help. Barring that, we won't be seeing that green jobs revolution anytime soon. 

Article by Brian Merchant, TreeHugger

Obama’s Socialist Takeover Must Be Stopped

First major US newspaper calls for Obama's Impeachment! Washington Post columnist explains in detail why Hussein must be forcibly removed from office before he destroys our country. We hope more journalists step up and tell the nation how it really is. The time to act has arrived.

Wake Up America! 

President Obama has engaged in numerous high crimes and misdemeanors. The Democratic majority in Congress is in peril as Americans reject his agenda. Yet more must be done: Mr. Obama should be impeached.

He is slowly - piece by painful piece - erecting a socialist dictatorship. We are not there - yet. But he is putting America on that dangerous path. He is undermining our constitutional system of checks and balances; subverting democratic procedures and the rule of law; presiding over a corrupt, gangster regime; and assaulting the very pillars of traditional capitalism. Like Venezuela’s leftist strongman, Hugo Chavez, Mr. Obama is bent on imposing a revolution from above - one that is polarizing America along racial, political and ideological lines. Mr. Obama is the most divisive president since Richard Nixon. His policies are Balkanizing the country. It’s time for him to go.

He has abused his office and violated his oath to uphold the Constitution. His health care overhaul was rammed through Congress. It was - and remains - opposed by a majority of the people. It could only be passed through bribery and political intimidation. The Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, the $5 billion Medicaid set-aside for Florida Sen. Bill Nelson - taxpayer money was used as a virtual slush fund to buy swing votes. Moreover, the law is blatantly unconstitutional: The federal government does not have the right to coerce every citizen to purchase a good or service. This is not in the Constitution, and it represents an unprecedented expansion of power.

Yet Obamacare’s most pernicious aspect is its federal funding of abortion. Pro-lifers are now compelled to have their tax dollars used to subsidize insurance plans that allow for the murder of unborn children. This is more than state-sanctioned infanticide. It violates the conscience rights of religious citizens. Traditionalists - evangelicals, Catholics, Baptists, Muslims, Orthodox Jews - have been made complicit in an abomination that goes against their deepest religious values. As the law is implemented (as in Pennsylvania) the consequences of the abortion provisions will become increasingly apparent. The result will be a cultural civil war. Pro-lifers will become deeply alienated from society; among many, a secession of the heart is taking place.

Mr. Obama is waging a frontal assault on property rights. The BP oil spill is a case in point. BP clearly is responsible for the spill and its massive economic and environmental damage to the Gulf. There is a legal process for claims to be adjudicated, but Mr. Obama has behaved more like Mr. Chavez or Russia’s Vladimir Putin: He has bullied BP into setting up a $20 billion compensation fund administered by an Obama appointee. In other words, the assets of a private company are to be raided to serve a political agenda. Billions will be dispensed arbitrarily in compensation to oil-spill victims - much of it to Democratic constituents. This is cronyism and creeping authoritarianism.

Mr. Obama’s multicultural socialism seeks to eradicate traditional America. He has created a command-and-control health care system. He has essentially nationalized the big banks, the financial sector, the automakers and the student loan industry. He next wants to pass “cap-and-trade,” which would bring industry and manufacturing under the heel of big government. The state is intervening in every aspect of American life - beyond its constitutionally delegated bounds. Under Mr. Obama, the Constitution has become a meaningless scrap of paper.

To provide the shock troops for his socialist takeover, Mr. Obama calls for “comprehensive immigration reform” - granting amnesty to 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens. This would forge a permanent Democratic electoral majority. It would sound the death knell for our national sovereignty. Amnesty rewards lawlessness and criminal behavior; it signifies the surrender of our porous southern border to a massive illegal invasion. It means the death of American nationhood. We will no longer be a country, but the colony of a global socialist empire.

Rather than defending our homeland, Mr. Obama’s Justice Department has sued Arizona for its immigration law. He is siding with criminals against his fellow Americans. His actions desecrate his constitutional oath to protect U.S. citizens from enemies foreign and domestic. He is thus encouraging more illegal immigration as Washington refuses to protect our borders. Mr. Obama’s decision on this case is treasonous.

As president, he is supposed to respect the rule of law. Instead, his administration has dropped charges of voter intimidation against members of the New Black Panther Party. This was done even though their menacing behavior was caught on tape: men in military garb brandishing clubs and threatening whites at a polling site. A Justice Department lawyer intimately involved in the case, J. Christian Adams, resigned in protest. Mr. Adams says that under Mr. Obama, there is a new policy: Cases involving black defendants and white victims - no matter how much they cry for justice - are not to be prosecuted. This is more than institutionalized racism. It is an abrogation of civil rights laws. The Justice Department’s behavior is illegal. It poses a direct threat to the integrity of our democracy and the sanctity of our electoral process.

Corruption in the administration is rampant. Washington no longer has a government; rather, it has a gangster regime. The Chicago way has become the Washington way. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is a political hit man. He is an amoral, ruthless operator. It was Mr. Emanuel who reached out to Rep. Joe Sestak, Pennsylvania Democrat, offering a high-ranking job in the hopes of persuading Mr. Sestak to pull out of the primary against Sen. Arlen Specter. It was Mr. Emanuel who offered another government position to Andrew Romanoff to do the same in the Colorado Democratic Senate primary. And it was Mr. Emanuel - as the trial of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has revealed - who acted as the go-between to try to have Valerie Jarrett parachuted into Mr. Obama’s former Senate seat. The only question was: What did Mr. Blagojevich want in exchange?

This is not simply sleazy Chicago machine politics. It is the systematic breaking of the law - bribery, attempt to interfere (and manipulate) elections using taxpayer-funded jobs, influence peddling and abuse of power.

The common misperception on the right is that Mr. Obama is another Jimmy Carter: an incompetent liberal whose presidency is being reduced to rubble under the onslaught of repeated failures. The very opposite, however, is true. He is the most consequential president in our lifetime, transforming America into something our Founding Fathers would find not only unrecognizable, but repugnant. Like all radical revolutionaries, he is consumed by the pursuit of power - attaining it, wielding it and maximizing it. Mr. Obama’s fledgling thug state must be stopped.

If Republicans win back Congress in November, they should - and likely will - launch formal investigations into this criminal, scandal-ridden administration. Rep. Darrell Issa, California Republican and ranking member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has promised as much. Mr. Obama has betrayed the American people. Impeachment is the only answer. This usurper must fall.

Article by Jeffrey Kuhner, Courtesy of Washington Post

Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute, a Washington think tank. He is the host of “The Kuhner Show” on WTNT 570-AM

Time Magazine Editor Mark Halperin Calls Obama a "Dick" On The Air (Video)

The Editor Time Magazine Called Barry O. a "Dick" on MSNBC Morning Joe Show. 
Since there was no delay.. it aired on national TV

Now That Is What We Refer To As "Showing Some Balls"

Tell It Like It Is, Mark!!

Anatomy Of a Failing Presidency

This article was by written Geoffrey Hunt for the American Thinker in late 2009. The message is more ominous now than it was then. 

Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed presidency since Woodrow Wilson. In the modern era, we've seen several failed presidencies--led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ. Failed presidents have one strong common trait-- they are repudiated, in the vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding a shove into oncoming traffic by his own party. Richard Nixon indeed resigned in disgrace, yet his reputation as a statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant overture to China 20.

But, Barack Obama is failing. Failing big. Failing fast. And failing everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in forging connections with the American people. The incomparable Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal put her finger on it: He is failing because he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed loathe them. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says he is failing because he has lost control of his message, and is overexposed. Clarice Feldman of American Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.

But, there is something more seriously wrong: How could a new president riding in on a wave of unprecedented promise and goodwill have forfeited his tenure and become a lame duck in six months? His poll ratings are in free fall. In generic balloting, the Republicans have now seized a five point advantage. This truly is unbelievable. What's going on?

No narrative. Obama doesn't have a narrative. No, not a narrative about himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn't connect with us. He doesn't have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us. All successful presidents have a narrative about the American character that intersects with their own where they display a command of history and reveal an authenticity at the core of their personality that resonates in a positive endearing way with the majority of Americans. We admire those presidents whose narratives not only touch our own, but who seem stronger, wiser, and smarter than we are. 

Presidents we admire are aspirational peers, even those whose politics don't align exactly with our own: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, and Reagan.

But not this president. It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, and is historically illiterate and woefully small minded for the size of the task--all contributory of course. It's that he's not one of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn't command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don't add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don't make sense and don't correspond with our experience.

In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he's dissed just about every one of us--financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job. Expect Obama to lament at his last press conference in 2012: "For those of you I offended, I apologize. For those of you who were not offended, you just didn't give me enough time; if only I'd had a second term, I could have offended you too."

Mercifully, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 devised a useful remedy for such a desperate state--staggered terms for both houses of the legislature and the executive. An equally abominable Congress can get voted out next year. With a new Congress, there's always hope of legislative gridlock until we vote for president again two short years after that.

Yes, small presidents do fail, Barack Obama among them. The coyotes howl but the wagon train keeps rolling along.

Margaret Thatcher: "The trouble with Socialism is, sooner or later you run out of other people's money."

"When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both." - James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union

"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus

"A Liberal is a person who will give away everything he doesn't own." - Unknown

Dr. Geoffrey P. Hunt is a social and cultural anthropologist.  He has had nearly 30 years experience in planning, conducting, and managing research in the field of youth studies, and drug and alcohol research.  Currently Dr. Hunt is a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Scientific Analysis and the Principal Investigator on three National Institutes of Health projects.  He is also a writer for American Thinker.

Anatomy of a Failing Presidency

An article from American Thinker by Geoffrey P. Hunt

Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed presidency since Woodrow Wilson.  In the modern era, we've seen several failed presidencies--led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ.  Failed presidents have one strong common trait-- they are repudiated, in the
vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding a shove into oncoming traffic by his own party.  Richard Nixon indeed resigned in disgrace, yet his reputation as a statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant overture to China.

But, Barack Obama is failing.  Failing big.  Failing fast. And failing everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in forging connections with the American people. The incomparable Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal put her finger on it: He is failing because he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed loathe them. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says he is failing because he has lost control of his message, and is overexposed.  Clarice Feldman of American Thinker produced a dis-positive commentary showing that Obama is failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.

But, there is something more seriously wrong: How could a new president riding in on a wave of unprecedented promise and goodwill have forfeited his tenure and become a lame duck in six months?  His poll ratings are in free fall.  In generic balloting, the Republicans have now seized a five point advantage.  This truly is unbelievable. What's going on?

No narrative. Obama doesn't have a narrative.  No, not a narrative about himself.  He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else.  But this
self-narrative is isolated and doesn't connect with us.  He doesn't have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us.  All successful presidents have a narrative about the American character that intersects with their own where they display a command of history and reveal an authenticity at the core of their personality that resonates in a positive endearing way with the majority of Americans. We admire those presidents whose narratives not only touch our own,
but who seem stronger, wiser, and smarter than we are. Presidents we admire are aspirational peers, even those whose politics don't align exactly with our own: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, and Reagan.

But not this president. It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, and is historically illiterate and woefully small minded for the size of the task--all contributory of course.
It's that he's not one of us.  And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper.  Moreover, he doesn't command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don't add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don't make sense and don't correspond with our experience.

In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he's dissed just about every one of us -- financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job.

Expect Obama to lament at his last press conference in 2012: "For those of you I offended, I apologize.  For those of you who were not offended, you just didn't give me enough time; if only I'd had a second term, I could have offended you too."

Mercifully, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 devised a useful remedy for such a desperate state--staggered terms for both houses of the legislature and the executive.  An equally abominable Congress can get voted out next year.  With a new Congress, there's always hope of legislative gridlock until we vote for president again two short years after that.

Yes, small presidents do fail, Barack Obama among them.  The coyotes howl but the wagon train keeps rolling along.

Margaret Thatcher: "The trouble with Socialism is, sooner or later you run out of other people's money."

"When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both." - James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers  Union

"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus

"A Liberal is a person who will give away everything he doesn't own." -
Unknown