In his first few years and beyond, liberal funnymen sometimes complained that Obama was so flawless that he didn't provide them any material. Of course, we knew at the time that this otherworldly caricature of Obama was wholly mythical, but it was nonetheless very real in the eyes of its liberal beholders. They regarded him with a quasi-idolatrous zeal -- almost as though it would be sacrilegious to criticize, much less mock, him.
But on "Saturday Night Live," among other shows, the comics have grown increasingly derisive. In the most recent episode, the Obama character lamented that a New York doctor had been diagnosed with Ebola. He said: "Now, some people want to criticize the way our administration has handled this crisis, and it's true we made a few mistakes early on. But, I assure you, it was nowhere near as bad as how we handled the ISIS situation. I mean, our various Secret Service mishaps or the scandals of the IRS and NSA. And I don't know if you guys remember, but the Obamacare website had some pretty serious problems, too. In fact, if you look at all the stuff that's happened in my second term, this whole Ebola thing is probably one of my greatest accomplishments."
Folks, this would be bad for the least politically correct president ever, but it's devastatingly brutal for the most politically correct president in the history of the universe.
Obama is not just a guy who plays a lot of golf because he has earned his recreation time; he appears to have difficulty working his job duties in between rounds. He's a guy who is largely disengaged, but when he is engaged, he makes an even bigger mess of things.
Many of his shortcomings are no longer just a matter of partisan opinion. They are objectively obvious. On foreign policy, he flounders around indecisively like the Scarecrow in "The Wizard of Oz."
He draws lines in the sand, and then a slight breeze covers them up. He denies that overt acts of jihadi murder are terrorism. He paints the United States into a corner by emphatically pledging there will be no American boots on the ground in the Middle East no matter how great a danger the Islamic State poses to the United States or its allies. He even openly argues with himself, as when he boasted that he would oppose a status of forces agreement with Iraq that would prevent any but an ineffectively small number of troops from remaining there to maintain the stability of our victory and then later complained that it was unfair he was being blamed for the decision. And please don't get me started on the unconscionably fraudulent depiction of the Benghazi, Libya, attacks as being prompted by an Internet video, as opposed to being the planned acts of terrorism that they were.
On the domestic side, his word has proved to be no more reliable. When it was no longer feasible for him to deny that the Internal Revenue Service had specifically targeted conservative groups for discriminatory tax treatment, he feigned outrage just long enough to get through the current news cycle and then later dismissed it, along with other genuine scandals, as something the Republicans had manufactured out of whole cloth.
His administration of the Obamacare rollout would have been even more embarrassing for any other president. The website "glitches" were not glitches at all but a direct consequence of fundamental incompetence and lack of preparation.
Moreover, it was hardly just a computer or processing problem. The entire law has been revealed as an utter failure in every respect, from breaking its promise to reduce premiums for a family of four by an average of $2,500 per year to its pledge that you could keep your doctors and plans to the assurances that our health care quality would increase and the net effect of the overhaul would be revenue-neutral.
If we had time, I'd rehearse for you Obama's stubborn refusal to reform entitlements in time to prevent the bankruptcy of the United States, his war on business and oil, his perennially anemic economy, his shameless diminution of the office of the presidency, and his unparalleled, hyper-partisan divisiveness.
There is plenty enough for me to have written yet a third book chronicling Obama's disastrous presidency, but it is gratifying enough that people have finally awakened to the enormity of this man's destructiveness to the point that he might very well bring his party down with him in the November elections. Even the mega-Democrat Stephanie Cutter advised that if she were a Republican, she'd be making the election about Obama as much as possible.
Everywhere I turn, even normally calm people are asking, "How can we ever get out of this nightmare of a mess Obama has created?"
I tell them, "November will be a good start, God willing."