"WORST. PRESIDENT. EVER."

That's what the irreplaceable Gateway Pundit had to say last week, and I can't argue -- and neither can the week's polls which give the Messiah-Prez and his hapless Veep a 110-day "F" grade, coming in at lower popularity than their predecessors at the 100-day milestone mark. The disasters have been coming on faster and more furious than that old Journey to the Center of the Earth movie (1959 starring Pat Boone and a giant Geiko gekko).

Over at my alter-ego, the Probing Plumber [Summa Contra Improbos et Plumbeos], we celebrate the 100-day anniversary from our perch in the emergency ward: I weigh in on Swine Flu and Cancer (metaphor for Islamofascism) and the Kindly Doctor Plumb covers Cancer as metaphor for Liberalism.

This just in: the New York Times calls Pennsylvania Pork-Pusher Congressman John Murtha ("D" for Disgrace to the Marine Corps) a "heavyweight" -- only partly due to his decades-long accumulation of power through fund-funneling. Heh. And -- believe it or don't -- ABC News does a profile/hit-piece on Murtha's eponymous Potemkin Village vanity airport, as reported by Instapundit. Couldn't happen to a nicer lying S.O.B.




Vis-a-vis the diurnal "century" mark, I was thinking something along the lines of

MOST CATASTROPHICALLY DESTRUCTIVE HUNDRED DAYS OF ANY PRESIDENCY IN THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC

-- not to put too fine a point on it. Certainly the most catastrophic FIRST hundred days, but I might even argue for any 100-day period ever. I mean, of course, self-generated, deliberate catastrophe, destructive of the nearly every institution by which America has defined itself for 233 years: free enterprise, free market, free speech, free exercise of religion, freedom from foreign interference/domination, free and fair elections, and a strong military to defend those freedoms. Did I miss anything? It's all under assault to one degree or another, by the deliberate implementation of a radical socialist agenda by a cold-blooded ideologue.

That cold-blooded part has really come home to me during the recent apology tour. Only a man of ice-blue personal narcissism but national self-loathing could have conducted this global penitential exercise in the name of a country and a people who, he must know, have not all, not even a slim majority, signed on to his all-out campaign to cut American arrogance down to size. The American voter has never been privy to Mr. Obama's academic record at any level of his long and generously subsidized education -- but I suspect what he is spewing forth these days is the kind of regurgitated agitprop that would have gained him an A+ in his poly-sci classes. Perhaps there are faculty heroes and mentors from his past that he is still trying to please. I wish he would polish his apples on somebody else's time.

"Treason" is a white-hot term to throw around, and has come too easily to the lips of political activists in the past decade. I've used it myself, but not without serious deliberation, in the direction of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, John Kerry, and a few of their colleagues, for specific acts and pronouncements done in the course of their congressional duties -- and I stand by the words. "Treason" was cried against certain organs of journalism, most notably the New York Times, for specific acts of leaking classified information which threatened national security -- and the shoe still fits, perfectly.

I am now prepared to use that word to describe the President's publication of intelligence memos which reveal, in detail, the methods and limits of interrogation techniques to be used on imprisoned terrorists -- a publication, let it be noted, that was done AGAINST THE ADVICE OF FOUR FORMER NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISORS, AND OBAMA'S OWN SITTING DIRECTOR OF INTELLIGENCE, the certifiably liberal partisan Leon Panetta.

This has been Mr. Obama's COLDEST ideological act in a long line of cold acts, in a very short frame of time. And to what end? Nothing more, I contend, than for him to solidify for the history books his own sense of rigid, almost Puritanical moral superiority. And who's he superior to? All the rest of us, friends -- so much so that our ally across the pond, Gerald Warner at England's Daily Telegraph ponders the musical question, "Why does President Pantywaist hate America so badly?" Good question dude. And Prez P/W is NOT alone. Money quotes:

If al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest of the Looney Tunes brigade want to kick America to death, they had better move in quickly and grab a piece of the action before Barack Obama finishes the job himself. Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people - not even Jimmy Carter.

So, next time a senior al-Qaeda hood is captured, all the CIA can do is ask him nicely if he would care to reveal when a major population centre is due to be hit by a terror spectacular, or which American city is about to be irradiated by a dirty bomb. Your view of this situation will be dictated by one simple criterion: whether or not you watched the people jumping from the twin towers.

I would have thought you'd have to go a long, long way, and have occupied the seat of power for some considerable time, before you could come near to eclipsing Jimmy Carter as the worst president of the past hundred years. Mr. Obama has bull-dozed his way into the record books poised to do exactly that, and to do it in less than a hundred days. This is a dangerous man -- dangerously ignorant, arrogant, tunnel-visioned, self-absorbed, and cold, cold, COLD man.

There is only one way to head off the disaster that four years of Obama represents, and that is to vote for any Republican with a pulse in 2010. The American nation is on the brink of losing itself, and only the free exercise of the ballot box can save it.

Most shocking VICTIMS OF OBAMA'S 100 DAYS of God-damn Amerikka:

the poor minority children from Washington D.C., who might have slipped through a cracked (and crack-infested) window, out of the cycle of unchanging hopelessness and into educational discipline and self-propelled ambition. Instead, their voucher/scholarship program has been canned by the compassionate, minority-loving Democrats, as part of their non-stop pandering to the NEA -- that's the teachers, folks, those job-secured, well-pensioned people at the National Education Association (No Equal-opportunity African-Americans, thank you!!!).
Hello change, good-bye hope.

One among that rare species, the Rational Liberal, Juan Williams reads the riot act to his President about this gross injustice to innocent children who have had their futures compromised in the name of naked political self-interest, Obama's Outrageous Sin Against Our Kids.


[hat-tip/ Flypaper]


LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL?

CHENEY REDUX?

Daughter Liz Cheney, who quietly held some position in the Bush administration, of which I was unaware, obviously did her homework and honed her skills. She turns in a killer interview performance with some pushy dame at CNN (not as bad as the Roesgen chick, but obnoxious and partisan enough for the I-AM-the-news Reporter Club.) PowerLine picks up the theme: Cheney in 2012?

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

[updated**]
PICTURE YOU UPON MY KNEE --
JUST TEA FOR TWO, AND TWO FOR

TEA

Tomorrow is Tax Day, and as someone who made less than a thousand bucks last year, let me be the first to say that I'm going to be filing late because i decided to do it myself and it's damned complicated.

But don't let that stop anybody from hitting the bricks and rallying for the preservation of the American identity at one of the hundreds of Tax Day Tea Parties happening later today (since it's after midnight) -- because nothing less than the American identity is what's at stake in these troubling days. Like the man said:

But do it with a light heart and a confident air, of course! 'Cause that's what right-winged crazy eagle-birds do. Leave anger, defeatism, and the politics of personal destruction to those who do it best: the Kos Kids and willing accomplices in the adult Democrat community. Teach the tantrum-throwing anarchists what real Community Organizing -- the kind with results -- actually looks like. Good luck to ya, Tea-baggers.** Wish I could be there. Have a cuppa Liberty Leaves for me.

And sing along [a-one, and a-two]:

** It's always nice to know, after all the years of my ever-diminishing life, that I can still be shocked or at least ignorant of what others find shocking. I am given to understand that to use the term "tea-bag" in its verb form is to indulge in a sexual vulgarity of a grotesque and rather deviant, albeit SO-O-O adolescent, sort. The Kos Kidz and the MSNBC crowd are enjoying themselves no end, having been handed such an easy opportunity by the right-wing family values crowd to make naughty word-plays. Oh, oh, oh -- pee, po, belly, bum, drawers.

Begging the readership's pardon for the unwitting faux pas.

TRIDUUM




Tonight begins the High Holidays of Christianity, known as the Triduum, or Three Day sequence (Thursday night to Friday night -- Friday night to Saturday night -- Saturday night to Sunday dawn) of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Holy Thursday = Last Supper, Betrayal & Arrest in Gethsemane, Denial & Trial

Good Friday = Trial, Torture, Mocking, Execution, Death, Burial

Holy Saturday = Hiding and Fear on earth, Harrowing and Liberation in Limbo

Easter Sunday = Resurrection, Revelation to Mary Magdalene, Reunion

Tonight at Holy Thursday Mass the Catholic Church celebrates the institution of two sacraments: the Eucharist (the transubstantiated meal of the Body and Blood) and Holy Orders (the ordained priesthood).

Tonight I will be celebrating in my own way at a church where, in the Catholic understanding, neither of these sacraments is present.

I believe I mentioned, lo, these two years or so ago, what I called The Great Choir Massacre of '07, with the promise that I would tell the story. I have never been able to make myself do that, because it remained (and remains) too painful, or at least too exhausting.

Fear not -- by "massacre" I do not mean that anyone died. Just that there was a violent rupture in my religious practice, and in my relationship of trust and friendship with a community of priests, via the dissolution of a choir and its replacement by an unwelcome, unexplained, and so far unsuccessful new musical regime. Something died, but it was not coporeal.

Recovery from this rupture was slow, and so far incomplete. If recovery means forgiveness that may be achieved -- if it means forgetting, well, it is hard to "unknow" unpleasant and unlooked-for truths and disillusionments about people.

The dissolved choir went in various directions, and after the reverberations of shock had subsided, re-formed itself for seasonal gigs in other places, much appreciated by nursing home residents and others.

For myself, as long as the actual music, collected in six different binders and comprising a repertoire of some 500 works, was stuffed away where I couldn't see it, I began to manage my emotions (with a little pharmaceutical help!) and get back to an even keel on this tender subject. But the minute the music comes out, in preparation for one of our independent gigs, I am overcome, sick with sadness and longing for that deepest of spiritual engagements I was fortunate (and always grateful) to have experienced for seven years.

Last Easter we (the spousal unit and I, he not being a choir member but a fan of the former regime) bolted to Texas to experience an entirely new and different Triduum, out of the environment where we would feel the vacuum so acutely. This Easter, for tonight at least, we go our separate ways -- he to some Catholic Mass or other not at our parish (if "our" parish it still is -- it often doesn't feel that way), and I deprive myself of the Catholic observance altogether by singing for the Anglicans.

Well, I suppose it isn't an "altogether" insofar as the music we will sing -- treasures of the Counter-Reformation and Flemish Renaissance, amongst others -- are entirely Catholic in origin but under-appreciated in too many Catholic churches of the modern age. For me, tonight, there will be no genuine priests presiding, nor genuine Eucharist to partake in, but a schismatic parody thereof, however sincere may be the Christian philosophy of the congregation. So this will be Holy Thursday intra cor meum -- in my heart -- lifted by the music I have ached to sing, and which had come nearly to define the Triduum for me -- certainly to have enriched it more intensely than I had ever known before.

There are times when I can hardly believe I was so privileged as to spend my Easter singing these works. Perhaps the day will come again, in my own church, surrounded by my friends again. Cum dolore langueo.

Just before going into Holy Week Mode:
my final spew-forth on that perennial subject,

IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD
AS WE KNOW IT

More reviews on "LARA ANTIPOVA
and People's Commander STRELNIKOV
doing the GRAND TOUR -- Part Deux"

[1] WHY I LOVE THE KRAUTHAMMER

Dr. K. assesses the Amerikka Suxx tour with his customary aplomb and deftly planted poignards. My favourite bit:

Obama says, "In America there is a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world."

...It's hard to appreciate an entity's leading role in the world when it's been sucking on your tit for 60 years, as Europe has...

[h/t Gateway Pundit]


[2] JAMES LEWIS AT AMERICAN THINKER
has been doing some THINKIN' about it.

We know that Obama has a very conventional mind. I have not heard a single novel or even interesting idea from the man over all the months that I've listened to him. He clearly has no understanding of classical economics. He doesn't understand, as Bill Clinton did, the real harm and suffering that welfare dependency has inflicted on black people after LBJ's War on Poverty. He does not understand the elementary difference between productive and non-productive investment of scarce resources. He has no conception of the damage inflicted by inflation on the poor, more than even on the rest of the country. He has no real understanding of the dizzying complexities of foreign policy -- nor does his Secretary of State, who was hardly picked for her competence in foreign affairs.

These are not just rank amateurs, they are willfully ignorant amateurs, who also happen to be grandiose narcissists, and who now have free reign over the levers of power in the United States. We are all watching the Titanic steaming full speed ahead right before that diamond-hard iceberg tears off all the steel rivets from her skin. If you're not aghast, you're just not paying attention.

[h/t Hugh Hewitt]


[3] OVER AT URGENT AGENDA, WILLIAM KATZ
weighs in with these observations about the foreign follies of our "apprentice president":

I'm reminded of something that George Shultz, President Reagan's secretary of state, once said: "Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table." The president should mount that quote on his desk. Throughout the trip he has appeared more the neophyte than the leader, more the apprentice than the president.

His trip came at a moment when the Pentagon is preparing widely publicized budget cuts. It came at a moment when the phrase, "the war on terror," has been dropped from administration vocabulary. It came at a moment when the administration flashes "weakness" rather than strength. And, of course, the president spent an embarrassing amount of time this last week apologizing for America's sins, real or imagined, mostly imagined. There was no shadow of power. There was only the shadow of a kid playing in the sandbox.

[4] ULTIMATE POLITICAL ANIMAL, DICK MORRIS
does some niggling over small matters of American Law and Constitutional Tradition, as recently blown to smithereens by the itinerant president: "Obama Just Repealed the Declaration of Independence" (picky picky picky, Dick!)




[5] JOHN HINDERAKER AT POWERLINE
asks the obvious question:
"The Apology Tour: Will it Ever END?"


[6] CRAZY-AS-A-LOON NORTH KOREAN COMMIE DICTATOR launches big-ass missile --
Leader of the Free World bends over and assumes the position:

"Change: $8B for ACORN, while missile defense slashed $1.4B"


And a whole round-up of disturbing slaps upside the head from Gateway Pundit.

I'M NO GOOD AT MULTI-TASKING --
THERE'S TOO MUCH GOING ON,
IT'S COMING ON TOO FAST,
HOW DOES ONE ADDRESS THE AVALANCHE
OF HORRORS?...

Well, we could start with Michelle's sweaters.

She began promisingly enough, leaving Washington in what may be her best fashion experiment yet, the striking black and white suit with the graceful long coat.


But it all kind of went to pieces when she emerged at the other end with her knees poking out from under another one of these peculiar shades of mustard, covered by a faux medieval surcoat. Bleah.


Then the parade of the sweaters began.

First was the demure little black on white number, which was lovely in its way, but more like an elementary school-marm's daily outfit than anybody's idea of the proper dress for meeting the Queen -- or, in Michelle's case, groping the Queen.

Yes, the palace issued calming re-assurances that no protocols were demolished by Mrs. Obama's unprecedented effrontery and violation of the most basic norms of British royalty etiquette. In fact, it was pointed out that the Queen returned the favour. Yeah.

Memo to Michelle's Social Secretary: the Queen has good manners, and 80 years of experience encountering the public. Her token half-lift of a closed-fisted arm was her way of covering for her crass guest, having more respect for the visitors than they had for her.

Reminded me of the wondrous Calpurnia [the Queen, not Michelle], housekeeper to Atticus Finch and the young'ns, who took Scout to task when she drew attention to Walter Cunningham's over-use of syrup on his dinner. Hissed Calpurnia, "That boy's yo' comp'ny and if he wants to eat up the table cloth you let him, you hear!" The Queen and Calpurnia knew how to treat people, even when they "commit solecisms that society would never pardon."

You don't touch the Queen. Them's the rules. Even if you tower over her and she looks so cute and helpless down there. She's not any such thing. And she'll still be on her throne when Mr. and Mrs. Chicago Way have been shown the exit door from D.C.

Other sweaters followed, the cute, the weird and ugly, all just peculiarly inappropriate to the image of the First Lady. Jackie Kennedy wouldn't have gone out to walk the dog in any of them.














Why am I fixating on this? Because it's easier than coming to grips with the sheer madness and horror being perpetrated on Mr. Obama's seduced, mocked, and abandoned mistress, the United States of America.

BARACK AND MICHELLE'S MOST EXCELLENT EXECRABLE ADVENTURE

--or--

LARA ANTIPOVA AND PEOPLE'S COMMANDER STRELNIKOV DO THE GRAND TOUR

What can one say about the first president in American history to go abroad to a major international gathering and (you should pardon the expression) sell the country down the river?

Oh yes, he gave lip service to tsk-tsking Europe for failing to live up to any decent standard of participation (gratitude?) expected of their privileged comfort-status (gift of the U.S.A.?) within the world community to beat back the scourge of Islamofascism. But what most of his slavering anti-American audience came away with was the admission the the big bad U.S. is a big bad bully that went haywire in Iraq and tortured tens of thousands of people in Guantanamo.

Speaking of "lip service", the Great One's teleprompter appears to have been suffering from jet-lag, and failed him noticeably at one of his Big Speeches. Gateway Pundit [more and more my daily go-to guy] has the clip of one pregnant pause, but it's nothing compared to the painful silence after he uttered "liberté" because he couldn't come up with "egalité, fraternité" on his own, in his repugnant comparison of our respective national mantras -- despite Jefferson's spasm of theoretical fondness for the bloodshed of revolutions, I doubt he would have tolerated it if "life, lberty, and the pursuit of happiness" had been born in the shadow of Madame La Guillotine. (Slide forward to minute 6:40 -- the pause that refreshes...)



John Crace at the decidedly left-leaning U.K. Guardian seems to have noticed the Emperor's awkward nudity, and fisked his halting performance mercilessly. Enjoy.

I checked with TOTUS (Obama's Teleprompter's blog site) and it's not admitting anything about its obvious lapses (how arrogant!), but one of its commenters, called TruthWillWin, coined a wonderful moniker for the Big Guy: "Reader of the Free World." Heh.

What we saw there was the foreign policy equivalent of the coach of a far-and-away best hockey team [for instance, the 24-time Stanley Cup winning Montreal Canadiens] going to a league meeting and volunteering to only suit up a 14-year-old goalie with no helmet and bed-pillows for pads, just to make it "fair" for everybody else. Yeah, that will win friends and respect for your team. Not to mention inviting the Philadelphia Flyers to move in and break the kid's neck. Now THAT'S strategery.

President Obambi announced to his Strasbourg town hall audience that among his aims was to repair the supposedly "drifting" relationship between America and its NATO allies, and getting Europe to step up to the plate in the fight against terrorism. He announced that the G20 meeting was a success. That was a lie. Sweetness and Light sums up the scope of his abject failure to win over his European hosts.

Most egregious of all was his throw-away characterization of six years in which, through wrenching trial and considerable error, Iraq has been transformed into a functioning, genuinely multicultural if infant democracy through blood, toil, tears, and sweat of the American military and their families, as a misadventure upon which we got "SIDETRACKED."

How comforting, how encouraging for my son -- on the job seven days a week, housed in temporary shelters, flying through sand-storms, fixing to broil in the approaching summer, separated from his wife and child for months -- and he not having the worst of the experience by any means -- how wonderful to know that his Commander-in-Chief thinks all of this sacrifice has been for some giant oopsie on which the nation got "sidetracked." Shucks, shrugs Obama -- our bad.

Barack Obama's presidency has broken over the fruited plains like a giant shamal, bringing dirt, darkness, and disorientation, faster than anyone could ever have predicted. Those of us who opposed his election and saw through him from the start likely thought that we might reach this level of impatience, even disgust and outrage, with him in one or two years. That we are there after only two months is absolutely terrifying.

Here's another prediction: by the time the 2010 elections get into gear, if not before, appearances by the President or members of his party will periodically be met with mass demonstrations and calls of "traitor." Please, Mr. President, surprise me. Make it not so. [I LOVE this picture -- hat-tip Michelle Malkin]

In the last video that confirmed beyond doubt Osama Bin Laden's earthly existence [produced in November 2001, remember!] he uttered his famous horse metaphor: "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse." Fresh from his triumph on September 11, he was convinced (not without good reason) that America had shrunk into the weak horse.

However, he was in a cave in the mountains of Afghanistan at the time, and George Bush was in the process of replying with a horse metaphor of his own -- to quote Nicely Nicely Johnson, "I got the horse right here, his name is Paul Revere, and there's a guy that says if the weather's clear,
CAN DO!!!!"



We could, and we did, though it's true enough to say that we could have finished it up better. [Apparently there was too much argument in the war room about whether to put the bet on Epitaph or Valentine....] However, may I point out, what we did in Afghanistan in 2001 -- blow in, overthrow bad guys, put local government in place, set up election, blow out -- is EXACTLY what the Monday-morning quarterbacks in Washington and the newsrooms were saying we should have done in Iraq. I'm just sayin'....

In my quest for the "strong horse/weak" horse quote, I ran across a prescient speech made by columnist-to-the-world and boy genius Mark Steyn in Berkeley a couple of years ago, on the occasion of the 23rd annual Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz Memorial Lectureship in National Security Affairs. If you think the title's long, the lecture was 50 minutes, and the questions another 40 -- but it's worth every minute of your time to watch and listen. I provide it here as a public service. As they say in Mr. Steyn's home state of New Hampshire, Live Free or Die.
slams the door on a courageous and loyal Iraqi interpreter's bid to seek asylum (read: survival) in the United States. Nice.

Oh, and Wall Street teeters in continuing insecurity, taking only a mild breather while Barack the Obarometer of Doom is out of town, and Joe ("I wish I were as intelligent as the similarly-named plumber") the Creepy Veep is being kept marginalized and relatively quiet. Oh, and did I mention that President Obumsfeld is trying to fight another war on the cheap? So says the man who knows, Michael Yon.

Finally, America begins to see what it means to live under Mob Rule, as carefully illustrated by classical historian, California farmer, and increasingly pissed-off dude, Victor Davis Hanson.

If you're not scared of these folks, friends, and what the future under their domination holds for us all, you ought to be. It has indeed happened too fast -- I had thought that it would take at least six months or more to answer my fundamental question, has Obama been the user or the used?

Did he sit through the Rev. Wright's sermons, and write (if he did) the essentially racist roll-out of his early life in biography #1 because he really believed that stuff, or because he knew that pretending to do so would position him for the fast-track to political power? Is he the starry-eyed golden boy of master manipulators like Bill Ayers and the Chicago-way activists, who took one look at him and made him their child-star goose that would lead them to the golden egg of ultimate power? Or is he the master manipulator himself, who made a bee-line for the Windy City and its ruthless machine, and sought out the power brokers who could shoulder him along on the sedan-chair of dirty tricks to the mountain-top from whence he could roll out the Revolution?

I'm going for the latter -- it's only two months, and that's my final answer. On the one hand, he's NOT brilliant (no matter what Bill O'Reilly says) because unfortunately you don't have to be to hoodwink half the American electorate. And no one who is brilliant would have made such a headlong amateurish hash of his first 30 days, nor would he believe the utter crap philosophy to which the man adheres. And he is both an ignoramous about world history, and nothing short of a fool on foreign policy.

But he does have cunning, and he is a hardcore leftist ideologue who will stop at nothing to achieve his transformation of Amerikka. And he is, by the way, a garden-variety Chicago-way political thug.

"I won."

"Don't think we're not keeping score, brother."

"My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."

He won the votes (though he bought some of them with illegal money) and he certainly won the war for media attention and advocacy -- nobody held a gun to the mainstream media's heads and forced them into their slobbering obsession with him. I had no desire to hate him, and to tumble into a dose of Obama Derangement Syndrome. When he began rebuilding the Clinton administration I thought he was at least wise enough to know that he was in over his head. Silly me. I underestimated his raw arrogance. He is a dangerous man, and there will be hell to pay in some form or other. Right now, I can only think of one thing to advise him -- to beg him, even.

[Salty language alert -- ladies, avert your eyes.]

Or if you can't quite handle that, there's always this:

Semper Fi, but nearly FUBAR.