The audacity of a president hell-bent on destroying our great nation has truly been a stunning spectacle to observe.  No lie is too ridiculous to tell about anyone who opposes him.  With a compliant media behind him, the smears this demagogue-in-chief promises to unleash on his opponent this fall could divide the county so badly that it becomes ungovernable.

The societal tensions Obama promised to ease have worsened by his politics of envy.  The racial healing he promised has fallen flat, leaving only a worse divide.  Despite overwhelming opposition, he forced a health plan on the people that few want.  He has trampled on the Constitution and infringed on powers granted to Congress.  He has bailed out auto companies, investment bankers, and insurance companies.  He has given constitutional rights to terrorists.

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One one hand, we have nearly a fourth of working-age Americans without jobs, the worst proportion since the early 1980s. On the other, we have $2 trillion of cash sitting idle on corporate balance sheets, as President Obama complained in a February 2011 speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. We have investors languishing for lack of returns, and unemployed people languishing for lack of work.

Standing in between prospective workers and prospective investors, preventing capital from employing labor, is Barack Obama. Someone really ought to to draw the cartoon: a $2 trillion cash pile gathering cobwebs on one side, an endless line of unemployment on the other, and Barack Obama in the middle, keeping them apart.

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“This housing crisis struck right at the heart of what it means to be middle class in America: our homes,” Mr. Obama said at a community center in Falls Church, where he unveiled the plan. “We need to do everything in our power to repair the damage and make responsible families whole again.”

The president’s latest plan, which he outlined in his State of the Union address last week, would allow underwater homeowners – those who owe more than their homes are worth – to refinance their mortgages into loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Borrowers could not have more than one late payment in the past six months, and banks would be required to reduce mortgage balances for homeowners who owe more than 140 percent of their home’s value.

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Unfortunately, because so many other nations have followed approaches similar to the failed policies Obama has stubbornly refused to abandon in the U.S. (most notably, 31 of the 43 European nations), America was far from the only country in which economic freedom declined in the 2012 index.

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There are strange characters seeking the Republican nomination. Ron Paul has to be the oddest man to contend for the greatest office in the world, and the fact that he consistently polls so well must be one of the few matters to give a pulse of hope to the embattled leader of the Democrats, Barack Obama. Then there is Herman Cain, the pizza magnate, whose campaign was flying very high before it, and he, were smothered in a near blizzard of accusations of various forms of sexual mischief and outright harassment. I have nothing against pizza — and am in fact very fond of it and those who make it — but I still struggle to see how the skill in the marketing of pepperoni and anchovies adds up to the resume of a future president.

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If you can recall, back in February his State of the Union address was a bore-a-thon stocked with spending ideas (on everything from light rail to salmon), with only glancing reference to the debt. His grand proposal: Freeze discretionary spending at the astronomically high level he had presided over in his first two years.

The next few months were spent bashing the only man to author a serious budget plan and put real Medicare reform on the table. He not only rebuffed Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposals but invited him to a speech, put him in the first row and then delivered a hyper-partisan attack, accusing the Republicans of taking Pell grants from college kids so fat cats could get a break on corporate jets.

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But in making his case, Obama appears to be perpetuating several myths about the recession he inherited and the slow recovery over which he’s presided. Among them:

1) The recession was unexpectedly severe. “I think we understood that it was bad, but we didn’t know how bad it was,” Obama said recently in an interview with a Seattle radio station.

However, several economists had been warning late in 2008 about the severity of the crisis. A January 2009 National Association of Business Economics survey found the “worst business conditions since the survey began in 1982,” which was during that deep and prolonged recession.

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Rob Quirk, KOAA-TV: “And one year from today we will know if this a one-term or two-term president. So, I asked the president what will it take from now until then to not only win Colorado again, but reelection as well.”

President Obama: “Well, what we’re going to have to do is continue to make progress on the economy over the next several months. And where Congress is not willing to act, we’re going to go ahead and do it ourselves. But it would be nice if we could get a little bit of help from Capitol Hill.”

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Most of the jobs created last month were temporary, low-wage positions in the service industries.  Of the 120,000 new jobs created, 50,000 were in the retail sector.  Most of these are minimum-wage positions, many of them temporary holiday hires.  The “leisure and hospitality” sector, which includes jobs in the food service industry, accounted for 22,000 of the total.

The poor quality of jobs on offer is not good news for the 6 million Americans who’ve lost their jobs since Obama took office.  The jobs on offer were so unattractive, in fact, that over 300,000 workers dropped out of the labor market altogether in November alone.  The labor participation rate, a crucial measure of the strength of the overall economy, has fallen to its lowest level since 1980.

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When three-quarters of Americans think the country is on the “wrong track” and even Bill Clinton calls the economy “lousy,” how then to run for a second term? Traveling Tuesday to Osawatomie, Kan., site of a famous 1910 Teddy Roosevelt speech, Obama laid out the case.

It seems that he and his policies have nothing to do with the current state of things. Sure, presidents are ordinarily held accountable for economic growth, unemployment, national indebtedness (see Obama, above). But not this time. Responsibility, you see, lies with the rich.

Or, as the philosophers of Zuccotti Park call them, the one percent. For Obama, these rich are the ones holding back the 99 percent. The “breathtaking greed of a few” is crushing the middle class. If only the rich paid their “fair share,” the middle class would have a chance. Otherwise, government won’t have enough funds to “invest” in education and innovation, the golden path to the sunny uplands of economic growth and opportunity.

Where to begin?

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Barack Obama keeps looking for a presidential identity not his own. In 2008, he wished to be JFK — whom he often referenced as a youthful and charismatic figure supposedly similar to himself. So we heard references to Obama’s father’s arrival to the U.S. during the golden Kennedy Camelot years. Caroline Kennedy herself came out of seclusion to assure us that Obama had the same Kennedy zest, and she flirted with a Senate run to help restore the lost age of grandeur. And at the Brandenburg Gate, Obama would have liked to electrify Europeans with another Ich Bin Ein Berliner speech. But even the left-leaning Germans sorta balked at that, and relegated the new Galahad to the Victory Column — a nice enough gesture that earned them a snub when a later President Obama chose not to go to Berlin for the commemoration of the twenty year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. (But flying ad hoc to Copenhagen to lobby for the Chicago Olympics is a horse of a different color.)

The New Gipper

Next candidate Obama channeled his inner Ronald Reagan. He reminded us that that he too had a sense of a new “trajectory.” His supporters swore that he had the same sunny disposition and eloquence. Obama liked that new persona. Soon he was talking about being the same “transformative” president, as long as we understood that Obama was going to be Reaganesque solely in the way he campaigned and soared with “hope and change” rhetoric — a sort of ironic payback to the Reagan Revolution as Obama mimicked the Gipper’s personal talents to undue his legacy.

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