The New Definition Of "Rescue"

Y'know, I don't know when I've seen more Republicans have more fun all at the same time since....well, 2004, at least:

Understand that "Where are the jobs?" - the already-mantra of the 2010 mid-term campaign - as the context and backdrop for Rahm Emanuel's risible exercise in self-humiliation, to which House Minority Leader John Boehner showed a lot more mercy than I would have:

As I say, it's totalitarianism, but it's totalitarianism before they've actually formally thrown out the Constitution and banned and imprisoned all opposition groups.  This is the kind of hysterical delusionism in which you engage when you've got the power to enforce terrorized subserviance from sea to impoverished sea.  As it is it makes Emanuel sound like he's cranked up on PCP, much less "out of touch," if by "out of touch" you mean orbiting Neptune.

And to think that the White House's solution to this existential crisis we know as "popular sovereignty" is to roll out the old Hopeandchange Express and hit the campaign trail for another dose of hectoring "Barackitudes".  It's like the notion of the fallability of the heretofore invincible Jemimah Glory is so inconceivable to the Obamunists that it doesn't even occur to them that their tin god is hemorrhaging credibility and political capital like the Titanic.  Were there a single crack in that impregnable conceit they might have learned from John McCain's mistake of wading frontally into the Wall Street collapse and fallout last fall while The One steered clear and let events burnish his image from afar as the omniscient, "cool" "savior".  And maybe, just maybe, they'd have also taken from that the lesson that once the mess became theirs, it could happen to them, too.

But you know the old saying: "Whom gods destroy, they first make mad."  Like a boxer that punches himself out in the first couple of rounds, they tried to shoot the moon ("stimulus," health care, cap & tax, etc.) not in the first term, not in the first biennium, not even in the first year, but in the first six months.  If they get it, American politics as we know it is over because communism will be institutionalized in the government, never to be expunged.  If they don't, Obamunism, if not necessarily Obama himself, is over.

Whether his presidency "survives" the defrocking of its self-proclaimed "divine" aura at the hands of an economic reality and American political system both of whose demises turn out to have been significantly exaggerated is up to him.  He can live long and prosper for another three and a half (or, God help us, seven and a half) years if he can live with his messiahnism forever unrequited (outside the confines of the Obamedia, at any rate), settling for small issues and nibbling 'round the edges to give the poll beating he's given himself a chance to fade from the public's notoriously short attention span.  Heck, that way he could even succeed in devouring via several small legislative bites what he's choking on now in one too-huge one.  No, it wouldn't be the end of the old America and birth of the utopianist Obamerika of his hallowed ambitions, but life could go on.

Bill Clinton was able to adjust because in the end, his presidency really was all about him even to the exclusion of both his party and his ideology.  Barack Obama is far more like Sick Willie's wife, or maybe a hybrid of Hillary and Jimmy Carter, too religiously committed to his Marxist creed to ever willingly give up it or his starring role at the top of it.

My prediction?  He'll do what all presidents do after their big ticket domestic policy centerpieces go down in flames: focus on foreign policy.

See?  We're not out of the woods yet - not by a long shot.

UPDATE: Dudes and dudettes, if Obamaweek drones are panning their god's performance, you know it sucked ditch water.

But note Howie Fineman's specific words: "[Obama was] tired, offering the same old talking points... he missed an opportunity here."  If you're an orthodox Obamunist, this is, at least potentially, a chillingly ominous statement.  Not to beat to death the Bill Clinton parallels and contrasts, but the 43rd president was the greatest propagandist and sheer performer of the modern political era.  He never ran out of talking points because he was always (seemingly) able to come up with new ones, or new twists on the old ones, or simply make it up as he went along.  BSing came so naturally to him that he never came across as "tired" and "repetitive" and "unoriginal".  At the very least, he was, in his public guise, sufficiently entertaining and likeable that most people were (highly unwisely) willing to give him the benefit of the doubt - after handing the REAL policymaking power to Newt Gingrich and the GOP, at any rate.

I've wondered for some time now how Barack Obama would react if the bloom finally came off his rose, if the unstoppable honeymoon were ever to end, if his PR maidenhead at long last sundered (oh, you get the point).  Could he adapt on the fly like Sick Willie or would he be exposed, as Jimmy Carter was, as a one-trick pony whose "light-bringing" "messianic" discourses would degenerate into indignant and condemnatory nagging harangues replete with whiney fingerpointing at powerless Republicans, ungrateful Americans, and pretty much everybody else except himself and his foolishness in believing his own adulatory press clippings and gambling (whether he realized that's what he was doing or not) his presidency on a single, all-or-nothing legislative blitzkrieg?

Now we know - or have a pretty good idea, at minimum.  And folks, if Lucifer, "The One" upon whom this, um, incarnation of the Donk Politburo depends, is "thrown down to Earth....having great wrath, knowing that he has only a short time," to whom else can the Democrats turn to front their den of thieves?  Crazy Nancy or Dirty Harry, whose "blue" tides are already heading back out to sea and which would never have swept in to such lopsided proportions without Barry O "before the fall"?

Somewhere, Rahm Emanuel is muttering to himself, "I picked the wrong week to stop snorting the Boss's incense spices."