The Implosion of a Presidency

We witnessed something this past Tuesday evening. I'm not talking about the Lakers rout of the Celtics in Game 6 of the NBA Finals.

No, what we saw was the implosion of a Presidency. It was like watching a train wreck: you know there will be carnage, but you can't take your eyes off it. Call it a morbid fascination if you will, but President Obama's oil spill speech was what we conservatives have been waiting for ever since he was elected. The nation finally got a good look at our President and what it saw, it didn't like.

Those of us who strive to make informed decisions about politicians prior to entering the voting booth to cast our ballots knew just enough about Barack Obama not to vote for him. Not that his opponent, John McCain was any better, McCain has his own history as a "maverick" inside the GOP. Still, for anyone who was able to find any information at all on Obama, his history in politics gave us pause.

Obama kicked off his political career in the swanky home of one of America's domestic terrorists, Bill Ayers. That one simple fact should have been enough to scuttle his future except for one thing: most Americans didn't know who Bill Ayers was, and this was Chicago. OK, that's two things. Ayers' heyday was in the sixties, an era that the majority of Americans outgrew around 1972. While the rest of us matured, Ayers didn't. His lunatic ravings about wanting a revolution to overthrow the US were so quaint, we patted him on his little head and tossed him to the curb alongside our old copies of Rolling Stone. Ayers, however, never let go of his adolescent rebellion, and in fact, held it even more closely.

That was one strike against Obama.

Then we found out that Obama had spent twenty years in a church headed by one Jeremiah Wright. Wright is every bit the immature radical that Ayers was, except Wright had his hand on a Bible. His sermons were made available on YouTube and caused a minor sensation for about three days until Obama disowned the "pastor" who married him and baptised his two little girls. Another lunatic, Wright used his pulpit to rail against some mythical country whose own CIA would introduce AIDS into the water supply of black neighborhoods, or some such nonsense.

That was two strikes against Obama.

Despite a radical past and present, a nation wracked by manufactured racial guilt decided to give Obama a shot at the highest office in the land and leader of the free world. It rationalized that he wasn't really as radical as all his friends and elected him by a narrow margin. "He'll grow into the office" was the national mood. After all, he was the Anti-Bush. Eight years of constant criticism from the media had turned the country against him: it was ready for a change, any change. It hoped desperately for change.

Obama portrayed himself as the new cool guy, intellectual, knowledgeable in all things, able to undo all of the damage that the cowboy Bush had done to the US around the world. Healer of the planet, receder of seas, lover of European-style soft Socialism. He was to bring a new tone to Washington, we were told. Gone would be the days of partisan bickering, backroom deals and political paybacks.

The nation believed him. Right up until Tuesday nights' speech.

We've been patient enough. We watched the nation's unemployment rate go up to nearly double what it had been for a decade, thinking it was a blip that could be easily cured with the application of a massively expensive Recovery bill. We watched as more and larger bills cascaded from the halls of Congress, each one sold as the cure for the impending doom brought on as a result of the failed Bush administration. We saw the government takeover of not one, but two former powerhouses of American capitalism: General Motors and Chrysler Corporation, reducing then to mere shells of their former selves, now essentially run by the unions that caused their demise. Not content with that, we watched the Cash for Clunkers program squander billions more taxpayer dollars as millions of perfectly good vehicles were destroyed for no good reason, depriving many consumers of reliable, though used, "inefficient" cars.

Fast forward to April 20th. The Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico explodes, killing eleven workers and causing the worst environmental disaster in American history. Weeks go by while British Petroleum tries to fix the leak. Obama fails to fully mobilize a full-frontal assault on what rapidly proves to be a massive oil spill, choosing instead to focus on his golf game. Obama refused, in writing, the assistance of several other countries. He even skipped the memorial for the fallen workers on the rig in favor of a fund-raiser for Barbara Boxer.

Finally, nearly two months after the explosion and spill, Obama deigned to grace America with his words last Tuesday. In his first speech from the Oval Office, sitting behind the desk he normally has his feet on, he addressed the nation in what was a rambling, mostly incoherent speech lambasting our "addiction" to oil and pushing for yet another job-killing, massive tax, after issuing an unnecessary moratorium on drilling that will put many more thousands of Americans out of work.

What made his Tuesday speech remarkable was the reaction from his former supporters in the Ministry of Misinformation, namely Chris "Tingles" Matthews, failed sportscaster and make-believe pundit Keith Olberman, and Howard Fineman. Their post-mortem of Obama's speech was eye-opening, as they finally appeared to shed their blind, deaf, and dumb allegiance to The Anointed One. Since then, his former tongue-bathers have abandoned him nearly in unison, as if they had somehow seen the Bat Signal that it was OK to finally start speaking the truth about this most incompetent of Presidents.

Couple the unexpected reaction from the left with his sinking approval numbers in the polls, and one thing is becoming clear to the nation: Captain Kick-Ass is not here to save us.

Not by a long shot.