Obamedy Central

I'm having a difficult time thinking of a center-right equivalent to Barack Obama sitting for a televised interview with snarky comedic journalist poseur.  First, because I don't think there ever was an equivalent prior to Jon Stewart.  The closest thing I can remember is the old Weekend Update bit on Saturday Night Live, and that was a straight comedy sketch.  Second, because aside from Bill Clinton I can't imagine a past sitting president of the United States debasing the dignity of the office by granting an "interview" with somebody who began each broadcast by saying, "Good evening, I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not!"

Oh, I know WHY The One went on The Daily Show - to try desperately to rouse the youth vote out of its usual midterm torpor and out to the polls Tuesday, despite the fact that (1) he's not on the ballot and (2) his popularity has plummeted with youts like it has with every other age demographic (just not as much).  And, yeah, to help promote Stewart's attempt to one-up Glenn Beck on Saturday, I guess.  Rotsa ruck with that one, Jonny.

Being in that [ahem] unchallenging environment - and without TOTUS - Red Barry offered up a fresh platter of gaffes, mendacities, and psychological revelations.

***You won't believe how little TARP cost.  Seriously, dudes and dudettes, it's unbelievable:

If you had told me two years ago that we're going to be able to stabilize the system, stabilize the stock market, stabilize the economy, and, by the way at the end of this thing, it'll cost less than 1% of GDP where the S&L crisis two-and-a-half percent of our entire economy -- a much smaller crisis -- I'd say, we'll take that. Because we saved the taxpayers a whole lot of money.

Really?  Honest and for true?  Let's see; annual GDP is approximately fourteen trillion dollars ($14,000,000,000,000); one percent of that is .01 x $14,000,000,000,000 = $140,000,000,000 or one hundred forty billion dollars.  Now I know I'm not getting any younger, but I think my memory is good enough to recall that via TARP the feds printed at least FIVE TIMES that much boodle and pumped it into the Wall Street bailouts, which would equal FIVE PERCENT of GDP, and SIX TIMES the cost to taxpayers (in nominal dollars - approximately three times as much adjusted for inflation) of the S&L bailouts twenty years ago.  B.O.'s math, in other words, isn't just "fuzzy," it's frakked.  And that isn't counting the seizures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the "bargain".  Yves Smith refreshes the gory details.

But even if you accept the loopy premise of his policy boast, the truth is that those weren't HIS policies, but those of his despised, endlessly-maligned-by-him predecessor.  He inherited them, IOW, but since he's screwing with this particular inheritence in order to take non-existent credit for it, he just glommed it instead.  But as we all know, for anything for which he wants to deflect blame, he's obscenely eager to employ the "I" word:

If I had the capacity to have prevented the unemployment that happened basically before we put our economic plan into place, obviously we would have done that. But the problem was we lost four million jobs before I was sworn in...most of the jobs that were lost, were lost before the economic policies that we put in place had any effect.

Unemployment rate on Election Day 2008: 6.1%.  Unemployment rate on Inauguration Day 2009: 7.6%.  Unemployment a month later when Hogzilla was rammed down our throats: 7.8%.  Within two months of that, unemployment soared past the 8.0% Hogzilla was supposed to keep it under, and has been hovering in and around 10.0% ever since.  "Effect" of Hogzilla: a trillion dollars of debt, thousands of state-level unionized public sector jobs that shouldn't exist in the first place "saved," zero REAL (i.e. private sector) jobs created.

The irony of Lucifer's sad, tiresome rap is that the rapturous audience he once had for it has long since scattered to the four winds.  Hell, I doubt that Stewart was even buying it, but his role was facilitator, not interviewer.  Only the True Believers remain, and most of them are pissed at him that the domestic communization agenda "glass" he promised them is still a third empty.

The L'il President had other hypocrisies, like his mercurial feelings on the Senate filibuster:

Would it be impolite to point out that President Bush was more successful winning enactment of his big-ticket agenda items - tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, in addition to the legislation pertaining to the War with Islamic Fundamentalism - with far smaller congressional majorities than Barack Obama has enjoyed?  Gosh, I hope so.  Especially since he's about to lose them lock, stock, and Lollipop.

And then there was the peek into his radical, big-picture scheming - nothing new to you, dear readers, but intriging in that Comrade Hussein feels comfortable publicly admitting it:

In short, ObamaCare was, more than anything else, the Trojan Horse we, its bitter opponents, said it was all along.  It's why Barry O outsourced it to Crazy Nancy and Dirty Harry in the first place and never sweated the details; public option, no public option, that didn't matter; what mattered was moving the metaphorical ball down the strategic policy field as far as politically possible and beyond.  It's why they were willing to sacrifice their congressional ascendancy in the bargain; after all, you only need forty-some senators to throttle any attempt at repeal, and in the 112th Congress they'll be backed up by his veto.  And by the time a filibuster-proof GOP Senate majority and GOP president can arrive in January 2013, O-Care's implementation will have reached the point of no-return, and the private health insurance sector will be history.

At least, that's his big picture conclusion.  Whether the disproportionately large contingent of Senate Dems up for re-election in 2012, many of them just barely elected in the first place six years earlier, and struggling grimly against the polling undertow of a president whose own numbers are as low as 37% right now (and gives no sign of moving right to try and rebuild them after this Tuesday's debacle), will be willing to commit political suicide as so many of their House counterparts did this time 'round is another question entirely.

Exit question: Does this mean that Jon Stewart is going to be Barack Obama's version of David Frost?