[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]Observing the Presidency of Barack Obama is like having a one-armed man cursed with Parkinson’s Disease serve you the last of the Mexican jumping beans from a deep, nearly empty bucket.
His philosophical swings are so wide and strong they could knock the Empire State Building from its moorings.
At the start of each day, you never know whether you have drawn a slightly reflective Obama or the juvenile noisemaker.
It is like living with a psycho who tantalizes you each night about whether he actually is going to swallow his meds.
In the morning, will you wake up beside a normal person respectfully under control or an eye-rolling maniac?
Mr. Obama alternates between the two extreme personalities.
Over the past 7 months, it has become the norm for him to radically alter his supposedly thought-through position by 180 degrees, often from morning until afternoon.
Everybody changes his mind — that is a sign of growth, you say. You are correct.
But Mr. Obama leaps back and forth across the river 4 or 5 days of each week.
Some afternoons when he conducts himself as a model administrator, you are positive that even before his first term is out, he will be voted the best President of the last 4 centuries.
Other days, you would swear Lou Costello has resurrected, and you are tempted to reach for a strait-jacket.
He ran for President last year, obsessively, against President Bush and Vice President Cheney to please his left wing.
Does he truly believe they are as evil as he regularly portrays them?
Does he, a peculiarly trained elitist accustomed to winning the automatic deference of all peers, mainly on racial grounds, really swallow the nonsense he has rapped about on Rush Limbaugh?
You hear this kind of talk at the midway of a carnival, but generally not even in Washington where the questionably balanced often seem to be in the ascendancy.
Does He Have Any Firm Beliefs?
Mr. Obama’s wispy, tissue-thick, constantly transforming belief system follows the trajectory of a wind-blown ball during a torrid tennis match.
When you write down a master list of Mr. Obama’s major pronouncements in the 28 weeks since he was impressively elected, you had better use a wide sheet of paper. His pronouncements have darted, zagged and zigged all over the grounds.
At a glance, what I am about to say probably seems absurd — that the eccentric Mr. Obama’s mind bounds around a padded room and off of all 4 walls virtually to the same degree of volatility as the unrespected, bizarre mind of nutty Joe Biden, his Vice President.
Kindly reflect on that assertion before making a final call.
When it comes to churning brains, the two of them are far more alike than the adoring mainstream media is willing to acknowledge. Let us put it this way. If Mr. Obama were white and Mr. Biden were black, the nervous, intimidated white-boy liberals who flood editorial rooms across America would have stamped Jumping Joe as the genius in the crowd.
Someone He Could/Should Learn from
President Clinton, in his time, was regarded as the all-time king of finger-in-the-wind politicians. Adroitly, silkily, he would send up trial balloons, almost without the country noticing, and deftly pull them back if they were going to go harshly against him.
Mr. Obama is the little brother to Mr. Clinton’s big brother, a clumsy, fumbling imitator who cannot quite figure out why his brother is smooth and he is not.
Answer: Because Mr. Clinton surrounded himself with fellow smoothies, Mr. Obama with loud, brassy, awkward hardline wanna-bees.
For the last few days, cable television and the newspapers have been throbbing with the remarkably distressing news that Mr. Obama was going to unleash numerous photographs of misbehaving American troops operating Abu Gharib.
It is called childish revenge against the previous administration.
This thrilled the radicals on left, such as the ACLU and Human Rights Watch. All other sensible Americans worried out loud that Mr. Obama, constantly seeking revenge against Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Limbaugh, was, for his own selfish purposes, endangering hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers.
A Ghoulish Scene
After his initial announcement, Mr. Obama pretty much clammed up. Stood back and waited for reaction, like a goofy father on the sidelines seeing his son the athlete get beaten up.
This afternoon, unaccountably, but as some watchers had predicted, for about the 24th time since January, Mr. Obama reversed himself. Said he would fight the release of dozens of photographs that purport to show our soldiers committing abuse.
Said Mr. Obama this afternoon:
“In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”
This is what many of us said when he burst into the room to say the opposite.
Why is he always the last, the slowest, to figure out the most obvious answers?
Watching Mr. Obama is little different from having “Seinfeld” on television 24 hours a day, except that Mr. Obama can ruin the world and Seinfeld only would spoil your 30 minutes.
