President Irrelevant

"Expect it pains you," a dear friend wrote after President Obama's war speech at West Point.  She sent me a charming little dog story -- knowing these always warm my crotchety old heart -- to salve my pain.

Another longtime friend posted: "As a one-time Obama supporter, it has been difficult not to notice that we, virtually all us old Obama supporters, have been rooked, or not to notice how consistently and persistently we have been rooked. No more love in exchange for getting rooked, Mr. Obama. No deal. For the first and only time, I watched about half of your campaign's life story replayed on HBO's documentary last night. And as I watched, I kept wondering what you were thinking while you fooled us over and over again. Never again, sir. Never again."

We knew it was coming (see my earlier post on Obama's Sinai).  But seeing the scalpel coming doesn't ease the pain of an unanesthetized incision.

Lies, deceit, flippant disregard for basic human decency -- we expected these from his predecessor, an empty-headed buffoon whose only qualification for any office was a rich and well-connected family.

But this man was intelligent, articulate, seeming to ooze human compassion from every pore.  Yet as we watched his actions, even in the honeymoon interim between election triumph and the harsh realities of the Oval Office, we quickly realized that the new President was not the person we thought we were voting for.

Well, some tell us now, you simply deceived yourselves. You invented a Knight in Shining armor, named him Sir Barack, and voted for him.  Quite a bit of truth to this,  Mea culpa.

Well, some tell us, it's simply brilliant strategy.  He will compromise with the opposition on everything and when the resulting policies clearly fail, Shazam!, Dr. Kidglove will become Captain Marvelous and fix everything. Now that's self-delusion!

In fact, Mr. Obama is what he is: a gifted orator, mundane politician and largely powerless chief executive.

Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, writes:

"In less than one year, President Obama has betrayed all of his supporters and broken all of his promises. He is the total captive of the oligarchy of the ruling interest groups. Unless he is saved by an orchestrated 9/11-type event, Obama is a one-term president. Indeed, the collapsing economy will doom him regardless of a 'terrorist event.'

"Essentially, Obama is irrelevant."

How sad.  A mind is a terrible thing to waste.