Obama Is Already a Lameduck President

Is Barack Obama already a lameduck President? Consider the four items below before you answer. ~~~~~ (1). John Brennan won Senate confirmation Thursday as CIA chief after a late struggle that had more to do with presidential power to order drone strikes than with the nominee. The confirmation came after a 12-hour Senate filibuster by Kentucky GOP Senator Rand Paul, who was helped to carry on by several Republican and one Democrat Senator. Paul stopped his block of the Brennan vote after declaring he was satisfied with the administration's statement that the President does not have the authority to use a drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil. Some analysts said Paul's receiving the White House declaration was in reality a caputulation of President Obama to the Kentucky Senator and his Republican fellow Senators. (2). According to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, most Americans support the idea of cutting federal spending across the board, but insist defense programs be kept off limits when cutting the government budget. The survey of 1,017 conducted nationally February 27 to March 3 found that 61% of respondents support a 5%, across-the-board spending reduction in domestic programs, but 60% oppose an 8% reduction in military spending. The poll results follow closely the GOP House-defended automatic spending cuts that began Saturday in domestic and defense programs brought on by the sequester, which was originally suggested by President Obama, who recently repudiated the sequester as being catastrophic. The support for the across-the-board cuts crossed party lines, with a majority of both Democrats and Republicans favoring them. (3). In a related area, even Democrats are saying that Obama ‘overstated’ the effects of the sequester and offered a confusing message about it. The White House early on in the battle with the GOP made statements full of doom and gloom, warning of interminable lines at airports, widespread firings of teachers, and quick, huge job losses in the private sector as government contracts were canceled. That was going overboard, says former Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Ed Rendell. “They probably went over the top in terms of saying that the consequences were going to be horrible, especially because it’s happened and the lines in the airports aren’t long, the world hasn’t changed overnight.” A top Democrat congressional aide scolded Obama for strategic incompetence. “Don’t accentuate a fight you don’t intend to wage [and] can’t win,” the aide said. “They spent two weeks building up sequester as a horror show and then got fact-checked a dozen times and were forced to back off their own claims of it being a disaster once they were forced to acquiesce to the cuts happening.” Even Michigan House member Sander Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, who basically agrees with Obama on the sequester, told MSNBC, “Maybe at times there’s been an overstatement.” Obama and his aides have pulled back from their fire and brimstone act over the last few days. That represents a “recalibration,” an Obama insider euphemistically put it in an interview. The day before the cuts began, Obama started to soften his words. “This is not going to be an apocalypse, I think, as some people have said,” Obama told reporters. (4). Finally, after the shocking statements of Washington Post legendary journalist and editor Bob Woodward, who said that he had been threatened by the White House after he published comments saying that Obama had lied, Fox News chief Roger Ailes is quoted as saying in a new biography of him that President Barack Obama is “lazy’’ and claims the commander-in-chief “never worked a day in his life.’ In his upcoming biography, “Roger Ailes: Off Camera,’’ author Zev Chafets writes that Ailes reacted to a crack by Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen that Ann Romney, wife of last year’s Republican presidential candidate, “never worked a day in her life,” with his own blunt opinion of the president. “Obama’s the one who never worked a day in his life. He never earned a penny that wasn’t public money,’’ Ailes said, according to Chafets. “How many fundraisers does he attend every week? How often does he play basketball and golf? I wish I had that kind of time. … He’s lazy, but the media won’t report that.” Ailes says, however, that he didn’t come up with Obama’s “lazy’’ tag. Ailes says the president said it himself during a 2011 interview with Barbara Walters, in which he described his most deplorable trait as “deep down, underneath all the work I do, I think there’s a laziness in me.’’ ~~~~~ Dear readers, it is crystal clear that the Obama charisma and its capacity to muster both his Democrat Party and the media and public in support of almost any silliness he comes up with are over. He had been knocked off his pedestal for good. That is the definition of a lameduck President.