Worst Week Ever!

Leave it to my employer to schedule a four day trip to Sin City as the slow-motion implosion of the Obama regime began. (I guess I shouldn't complain too much; at least I got to go to Las Vegas.) The mass murder by PowerPoint that I and my colleagues endured was made all the more heinous by the fact that I had neither the time to compose my thoughts nor access to a laptop in order to give my electronic "nyah-nyah" to all the Obamicans who are left to watch the Chosen One twist silently in the wind.

While the cat was away, the parade of Democrat tax cheats (headlined by Charles Rangel, Al Franken, Caroline Kennedy, Tom Daschle and Timothy Geithner) got two deeper, with the addition of White House Chief Performance Officer nominee Nancy Killefer and the husband of Labor Secretary nominee Hilda Solis. And beyond bagging Daschle's and Killefer's scalps this week, a newly resurgent (or insurgent) Republican Party - along with centrist Democrats - was able to shape the debate on the Stimulus bill winding its way through the Senate, demanding more than $90 billion of cuts in spending programs.

For his part, Obama was alternately wooing and trash-talking Republican Congressional leaders, both to little avail. Obama's week of political bipolar disorder began with his hosting a bipartisan Super Bowl party on Sunday, and ended with a blistering critique of GOP arguments for a greater emphasis on tax cuts during his radio address six days later, with Obama averring, "[w]e can't expect relief from the tired old theories that, in eight short years, doubled the national debt, threw our economy into a tailspin, and led us into this mess in the first place." (This from the man who is all but ready to roll out the White House red carpet to Russia and Iran.)

Last week served as more evidence that the Obama White House is well out of its depth.



(By way of even more evidence, I submit this video.) But what is more interesting than the administration's incompetence is the reaction of its main house organ. The New York Times' op-ed page has swiftly metamorphosed from advocate to apologist, with Gail Collins removing her pom-poms from their mothballs and donning her stretchiest cheerleader outfit to rally the troops from their winter of disillusionment with a hypothetical Q&A.

I dropped out of school for a semester to campaign for Barack Obama. And now I'm asking myself whether I spent four months living with my aunt and going door to door in Dayton, Ohio, just so we could have a stimulus plan written by a bunch of moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats in the Senate.

I don't know how many times we need to go over this, but this is actually a real-life version of what Obama promised during the campaign. Didn't you jump up and cheer when your guy promised that he’d get Republicans and Democrats to work together?

I wanted them to work together on global warming, not on cutting money for Head Start out of the stimulus.

And Obama feels your pain. He always said the bipartisan path was going to be rocky, but this week the going was so rough that the great trailer-tractor of stimulus blew out several tires on the shoals of post-partisanism. It was embarrassing — the President of the United States held White House negotiations with people who had already announced that they had no intention of voting for his bill... But he still wound up cooling his heels, waiting for word from the newly hatched moderate caucus on what would happen next. This is the group that was led by Susan Collins of Maine. In November, we apparently elected Collins and her fellow Maine Republican, Olympia Snowe, to help run the country. And you wasted all that time thinking about Joe Biden.

Maureen Dowd took a slightly different tack, suggesting that Obama "got distracted, seeing Lincoln in the mirror, and instead gave the kiss of life to a bunch of flat-lining Republican tax-cut fetishists." She of Bergdorf's and botox continued on to say that "[t]hose in the president's circle were too caught up in more narrow concerns, like how their relationships with the president and the capital were shaking out; whether they could breathe on this new planet with the rarefied air of cool planes and helicopters."

Whatever these "hopium" peddlers have allowed themselves to get caught up in, they would be well-served to simply get caught up. Or more precisely, to catch up, as they (and the whole of Team Obama) are hopelessly behind the power curve presently. Even the artist now famous for his red, white and blue "Hope" posters of Obama - Shepard Fairey - was arrested on Saturday for spraypainting graffiti on private property.

Another week down. (Only) Four Long Years to go!