Who’s Watching The Shop While Obama Endlessly Campaigns??? New Major Scandals Erupting DAILY As Obama Attends More Fundraisers Than Last FIVE Presidents COMBINED

The Solyndra President.  Well, make that the Solyndra-EverGreen–SpectraWatt–First Solar–Solar Trust–Abound Solar–BrightSource–LSP Energy–Ener1–SunPower–Beacon Power–ECOtality–A123–Uni Solar–Azure Dynamics President.  Not to mention all the other now-bankrupt green energy crony-capitalist businesses that have stolen more than $2 billion dollars of the American people’s money.

And few Americans have any idea whatsoever how transparently corrupt Barack Obama is.

Eighty percent of all green energy loans provided by the American people’s stimulus money were given to crony capitalist-fascist Obama donors.  Obama is using the American people’s money as a political slush fund to reward his friends:

A new book by Hoover Institution fellow Peter Schweizer details the startling extent of the cronyism that has pervaded President Obama’s “green jobs” push. According to Schweizer, 4 out of every 5 renewable energy companies backed by the Energy Department was “run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers.”

Those companies’ “political largesse is probably the best investment they ever made in alternative energy,” Schweizer explains. “It brought them returns many times over.”

Such is the inevitable consequence of large government interventions in private markets. Leaving aside the losses associated with transfers of funds from self-sustaining industries to ones that rely on government support, such interventions also encourage unproductive business activities by making “subsidy suckling” far more profitable than run-of-the-mill business expansions or product improvements.

Doug Ross spotted the relevant excerpt of Schweizer’s book (h/t Ben Domenech’s Transom):

When President-elect Obama came to Washington in late 2008, he was outspoken about the need for an economic stimulus to revive a struggling economy… After he was sworn in as president, he proclaimed that taxpayer money would assuredly not be doled out to political friends…

…But an examination of grants and guaranteed loans offered by just one stimulus program run by the Department of Energy, for alternative-energy projects, is stunning. The so-called 1705 Loan Guarantee Program and the 1603 Grant Program channeled billions of dollars to all sorts of energy companies…

…In the 1705 government-backed-loan program [alone], for example, $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted as of Sept. 15 went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers—individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party. The grant and guaranteed-loan recipients were early backers of Obama before he ran for president, people who continued to give to his campaigns and exclusively to the Democratic Party in the years leading up to 2008. Their political largesse is probably the best investment they ever made in alternative energy. It brought them returns many times over.

…The Government Accountability Office has been highly critical of the way guaranteed loans and grants were doled out by the Department of Energy, complaining that the process appears “arbitrary” and lacks transparency. In March 2011, for example, the GAO examined the first 18 loans that were approved and found that none were properly documented. It also noted that officials “did not always record the results of analysis” of these applications. A loan program for electric cars, for example, “lacks performance measures.” No notes were kept during the review process, so it is difficult to determine how loan decisions were made. The GAO further declared that the Department of Energy “had treated applicants inconsistently in the application review process, favoring some applicants and disadvantaging others.” The Department of Energy’s inspector general, Gregory Friedman, … has testified that contracts have been steered to “friends and family.”

…These programs might be the greatest—and most expensive—example of crony capitalism in American history. Tens of billions of dollars went to firms controlled or owned by fundraisers, bundlers, and political allies, many of whom—surprise!—are now raising money for Obama again.

So it really doesn’t matter to Obama whether these crony capitalist boondoggles go bankrupt or not; what matters is that he gets a percentage of the billions of dollars of the American people’s money in the form of campaign contributions.

And that’s THE ONLY thing that matters: Obama providing all kinds of self-righteous rhetoric while he racks up more special interest campaign monies than ANY cynical and corrupt politician in the history of the entire human race.

This is a slick weasel who has now held more fundraisers THAN THE PREVIOUS FIVE PRESIDENTS COMBINED.

Barack Obama is without any doubt whatsoever the most evil and wicked man who has ever polluted the White House.

When Obama is not punishing his enemies and rewarding his friends, he is campaigning, campaigning, campaigning.

The Demoniac-in-Chief has not bothered to govern in years.  It has now been ELEVEN HUNDRED days since Obama’s Senate – controlled by his fellow Democrats – have bothered to pass ANY BUDGET AT ALL.  Where the hell is Obama while the party that he leads engages day after day after day after day in such abandonment of any kind of responsibility whatsoever???

What about Obama’s own budgets?  His 2012 budget was voted down – voted down BY EVERY SINGLE DEMOCRAT – to the tune of 97-0.  His 2013 budget was voted down – again by every single DEMOCRAT – to the tune of 414-0.  Just where the hell is Obama while he phones in one demon-possessed budget after another that even his own party unanimously vomits over???

He’s campaigning.  Endlessly campaigning.  Never governing, never leading, never bothering to do anything other than demonize and demagogue and lie and slander.

As of March 27, Obama had attended 191 fundraisers – FAR EXCEEDING ANY PRESIDENT EVER RECORDED IN HISTORY.

God damn America doesn’t need a budget.  Because this nation under Obama is going to hell and you don’t need a budget to burn.

We are watching America – and even the most formerly honorable and important positions in America – begin to drift into what can only be described as psychotic behavior.

The Secret Service scandal in which over twenty top Secret Service agents and Marine security personnel engaged in wildly inappropriate conduct involving some twenty prostitutes in Colombia is no aberration.  Nobody’s minding the shop; and the same attitude that holds that George Bush is responsible for the economy forever no matter how many years Barack Obama has been in control of it has permeated every single layer of government: nobody is responsible for anything in this “God damned” administration.

So, yes, the Secret Service scandal – which exposes behavior and abuses unlike anything this formerly honored branch of service has ever seen in its history – reveals a blatant failure of leadership on the part of Barack Obama.

That scandal almost immediately followed another scandal that is just beyond maddening: as GSA employees had an out-of-control “gone wild” convention that cost taxpayers nearly a million dollars:

WASHINGTON — Potentially problematic and certainly embarrassing video of the General Services Administration’s infamous $820,000 Las Vegas conference has been obtained by The Huffington Post, showing well-dressed employees singing Frank Sinatra, downing margaritas and making light of lavish spending.

Video of the 2010 party, provided by an administration official on Friday, shows GSA employees in colorful tuxedos, putting on magic shows and enjoying mock Vegas-style entertainment — all in the name of team-building.

The footage follows the release of a video clip featuring a GSA employee named Hank Terlaje at the same convention strumming a ukulele and belting out an ode to high-spending office culture. That video, like the new batch, was part of an awards ceremony meant to be light-hearted and satirical, but clearly at odds with the President Barack Obama administration’s message of fiscal belt-tightening. Several GSA officials have already lost their jobs because of the convention.

“These videos reinforce once again the complete lack of judgment exhibited during the 2010 Western Regions Conference,” Greg Mecher, a GSA spokesman, said in a statement to The Huffington Post. “Our agency continues to be appalled by this indefensible behavior, and we are taking every step possible to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.” […]

Among the report’s findings, GSA spent $95 per person for a dinner reception at the M Resort Spa and Casino in Henderson, Nev.; $75,000 on a bike-building training exercise (the bikes were later donated to the Boys’ and Girls’ Club); $19 per person for an “American artisanal cheese display;” $7,000 in sushi; $3,200 for mind reader; $3,700 for T-shirts; and more than $2,500 on water bottles. The new videos obtained by HuffPost on Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend provide the first long visual evidence of the excess.

One clip features a red carpet entrance into a conference room gathering, during which GSA officials discuss what designer clothes they are wearing. Acting GSA Administrator Jeff Neely, who reportedly encouraged event organizers to make the conference “over the top,” tells the camera he’s donning all Armani, before urging people to “dispense with the notion that what’s done in Vegas stays in Vegas.” Later, a female employee with a self-described “talent for drinking margaritas” is handed a massive goblet filled with the beverage. Terlaje himself makes a cameo without his ukulele, during which he jokes that the board of directors should get a raise.

Another clip features GSA officials destroying office property in a scene inspired by the movie “Office Space.” The song “Push It To The Limit,” from the movie “Scarface,” blares in the background.

In another video, an “angry clown” — either a GSA employee or a professional hired by the organizers — talks about making work more challenging for other people. “Meetings are good to have in between breaks,” the clown declares. “Government — if you think the problems we create are bad, just wait until you see our solutions.”

Among the other clips, there is a performance by the Green Man group — a variation of the Blue Man troupe — that uses recyclable material for beat-making. Additionally, GSA officials, donning black tuxedos with colored vests, perform their own rendition of “Luck be a Lady.”

There are silly magic tricks and an on-stage contest to see which attendee can blow the most bubbles through hula hoops.

Employees were encouraged to submit videos for a talent show contest, which Terlaje won. Among other entrants was one featuring Gumby on a motorcycle, as employees flashed dollar bills and rapped about the world travel and government pay raises they were getting.

“Not trying to get all touchy-feely, but I have to give props to my man [Acting Regional GSA Administrator] Jeff Neely,” they sing.

“I’m thrilled to be doing this,” Neely says in a separate clip, calling the conference the “culmination of a huge and impressive talent contest.”

The new videos seem likely to further inflame the back-and-forth between the administration and House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) over the GSA’s spending. The California Republican has suggested that the White House tried to hide evidence of lavish spending by sitting on the inspector general’s report for 11 months.

The GSA inspector general “briefed the Obama administration 11 months ago on its factual findings of waste and wrongdoing at a lavish Las Vegas convention,” Issa spokesman Frederick Hill, told POLITICO. “Rather than taking immediate action to suspend or dismiss those identified by the IG at this briefing as responsible, the administration instead let them have bonuses. Despite their efforts to manage the story, the administration only took real personnel actions when there were no more options for delay.”

Administration officials have scoffed at Issa’s charge, noting that proper protocols were followed to investigate the conference spending and that, once it came to light, officials who were responsible resigned or were fired.

With Reporting By Amanda Terkel and Brad Shannon

The full-length video obtained by The Huffington Post.

What did the Obama administration immediately try to do?  Blame Bush.  For an event that took place two full years AFTER BUSH LEFT OFFICE AND WAS GONE.

Nobody in the Obama administration – from the top down – has ever been responsible for ANYTHING.

Former Bush-era GSA administrator sets the record straight to correct the smokescreen of lies from an administration that is beyond pathological in its refusal to accept personal responsibility.  She pointed out:

Doan said the president and his aides aren’t taking ownership of their jobs. “This is very typical of the Obama administration,” she said. “There’s a lot of misdirection and cherry-picking of information that they release to the public. I think you also see the Obama administration circling their wagons because they know this is very damaging. You simply cannot justify the kind of wasteful spending.”

Barack Obama is running for president 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and he can’t be bothered with actually governing or running anything.  You don’t take responsibility when you’re running for president – EVEN IF YOU’VE ACTUALLY BEEN THE DAMN PRESIDENT FOR FOUR FREAKING YEARS.

The Fast and Furious scandal – and this is giving Obama and Holder the benefit of the doubt and not believing the very real possibility that the two men deliberately set out to undermine 2nd Amendment gun rights by literally selling Mexican drug gangs guns so they could demonize American gun sellers and thus demonize the 2nd Amendment – has racked up so many corpses it is positively UNREAL.  Let me simply sum it up: Obama’s people actually put guns into the hands of criminal drug cartels who then used those guns to murder American Border Patrol agents and HUNDREDS of Mexican soldiers, federal agents, police and family members of officials.

As Chuck Norris put it, Obama is smuggling guns to the Mexican drug gangs without any way to track them while demanding that YOUR guns be regulated or just plain taken away.

And if that isn’t sick enough, Barack Obama’s and Eric Holder’s ATF actually PROMOTED the supervisors who were most responsible for the fiasco.  Most likely to keep them quiet.

Congress is on the verge of issuing contempt of Congress proceedings against Obama’s Attorney General, stating:

“For over a year, the Department has issued false denials, given answers intended to misdirect investigators, sought to intimidate witnesses, unlawfully withheld subpoenaed documents, and waited to be confronted with indisputable evidence before acknowledging uncomfortable facts,” it reads. “’Operation Fast and Furious’ outrageous tactics, the Justice Department’s refusal to fully cooperate with the investigation, and efforts to smear and retaliate against whistleblowers have tainted the institutional integrity of the Justice Department.”

They issued a memorandum detailing the charges available here.

And where the hell is Obama?  He’s at one after another after another campaign event.

As we speak, Obama’s State Department has terribly and despicably failed to protect human rights or America’s reputation as a nation that defends those rights in it’s godawful handling of China’s abuse of human rights activist Chen Guangchen.  A BBC headline reads: “Barack Obama SILENT…”

We’re finding out the State Department applied pressure on Chen to leave the US embassy; then they abandoned him when he was in the hospital.  From being safe on sovereign US territory, the human rights activist is now in Chinese custody, future very much uncertain.  And his wife’s and children’s future equally uncertain.

If Obama had actually bothered to do his damn job, it might have prevented him from attending another campaign event and raising more campaign money. And that is the ONLY “crime against humanity” that Obama gives a damn about.

There are so many scandals going on under Obama’s “permanent campaign” that many of them – even really vile ones – just get ignored.  Such as the one with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with the out-of-control agency inflicting huge fines on fishermen for small infractions and putting the collected monies in a slush fund used for lavish trips and booze-cruise luxury boats.

That is hardly the end of Obama’s constant scandals.  It’s hardly the end of his complete failure to lead.  There are so many examples this would be a 25,000 word article for me to write up half of them.

Obama has taken America to “Greece” territory with our debt exceeding our entire gross national product for the first time.  Obama is foolishly spending $2.52 in debt for every dollar of “growth” to get himself re-elected.

Obama has promised Russia that he’ll abandon American national security interests if they don’t raise any stinks and thus help his re-election campaign.  Meanwhile, his supporters are boasting that Obama will be able to usurp the wealth and freedoms of productive Americans and redistribute them to his supporters without fear in a second term.  But apparently Russia doesn’t trust Obama any more than the American people Obama is willing to betray ought to trust him: yesterday Russia warned that it would preemptively strike American facilities – literally threatening war on America – if the US continued to build a missile shield to protect the US from the Iranian nuclear threat Russia is responsible for.

Meanwhile Israel is on the verge of attacking Iran to prevent the nihilistic jihadist regime from developing nuclear weapons.  Which Iran is on the verge of getting, mind you, because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party has steadfastly refused to do one damn thing to prevent Iran from getting for the last decade.

And where the hell is Obama?  He’s campaigning, campaigning, campaigning.  The man who has attended more fundraisers than the last five presidents combined is trying to attend more fundraisers than the last TEN presidents combined instead.  So don’t expect anything other than a weak response from the likes of him on pretty much anything.

Liberal Supreme Court Justices Support Material Support To Foreign Terrorist Organizations

Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Obama-installed Sonia Sotomayor gazed into the Constitution like gypsies gazing into the murky depths of a crystal ball, and somehow discovered the penumbras and emanations justifying allowing material support to foreign terrorist organizations.

Supreme Court Affirms Ban on Aiding Groups Tied to Terror
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 21, 2010

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has upheld a federal law that bars ”material support” to foreign terrorist organizations, rejecting a free speech challenge from humanitarian aid groups.

The court ruled 6-3 Monday that the government may prohibit all forms of aid to designated terrorist groups, even if the support consists of training and advice about entirely peaceful and legal activities.

Material support intended even for benign purposes can help a terrorist group in other ways, Chief Justice John Roberts said in his majority opinion.

”Such support frees up other resources within the organization that may be put to violent ends,” Roberts said.

Justice Stephen Breyer took the unusual step of reading his dissent aloud in the courtroom. Breyer said he rejects the majority’s conclusion ”that the Constitution permits the government to prosecute the plaintiffs criminally” for providing instruction and advice about the terror groups’ lawful political objectives. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor joined the dissent.

The law allows medicine and religious materials to go to groups on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations.

The Obama administration said the ”material support” law is one of its most important terror-fighting tools. It has been used about 150 times since Sept. 11, resulting in 75 convictions. Most of those cases involved money and other substantial support for terror groups.

One of the funny things is that the “humanitarian aid group” that is behind this case is ITSELF tied to terrorism.  But American liberals are determined to serve as the useful idiots for Islamic jihadists.

Better that every single American die a horrible death of radiation poisoning from the next major terror attack than that a single terrorist be deprived of a single “right” as championed by morally idiotic liberal justices on the US Supreme Court.

Even Barack Obama and his insanely leftist administration realizes the sheer craziness of these three morally idiotic whackjob justices.  Which begs the question why Obama would have appointed one of said morally idiotic whackkob justices.

Obama is saying he opposes Sonia Sotomayor’s stupid ruling.  But the dumbass disgrace supported it and hundreds of idiotic rulings just like it when he appointed this racist and sexist “wise Latina” to the bench in the first place.  It’s like shooting yourself in the foot, and then opposing the gunshot wound in your foot.

Leftist ideas cannot possibly work in the real world.  Governing by leftist ideology is akin to playing Russian Roulette with all six cylinders loaded.

Obama is about to appoint yet another moral idiot whackjob to the Supreme Court, who will curse this country with her despicable lunacy for decades to come.

You can’t really blame Obama, or his Supreme Court appointees, though.  They are merely working to enact the vision of “God damn America!” that Obama’s reverend for 23 years planted in the mind of the Manchurian President.

Here’s why we have such contemptible justices who are trying to destroy America one asinine and self-destructive decision at a time:

“The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president.”

“The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America . Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince.

The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president.”

Obama campaigned on a platform of complete moral idiocy.  At some remote level, he is beginning to realize that his ideology is utterly useless and inherently self-destructive as a basis from which to actually govern.  But moral idiocy is all he has to offer.  So he’s paralyzed, stuck somewhere between being utterly useless and being inherently self-destructive.

All he’s got is the perennial campaign; the ability to actually govern or lead has been purged from the White House until this president is himself purged from the office.

Obama supports the lunatic environmental movement, and then flounders in the Gulf as every solution to contain the damage of the oil leak is opposed by the very environmentalists he appeals to.  Obama supports the pro-illegal immigration movement even as he falsely promises to somehow reduce illegal immigration.   Obama supports the lunatic liberal judicial approach, and then flounders in the war on terror (renamed the “overseas contingency operation” to satiate the left) as the very liberal judicial approach he so favors gets in the way of actually winning or even just not losing.

The sad thing is that you can count on Obama to keep appointing fools – and then being forced to resist the very rulings that his fools dictate.

That’s just what fools do.

What’s Happened To Obama’s Chicago-Way Thug-Style ‘Hope And Change’?

One of the things that was truly amazing during the 2008 campaign is that the mainstream media were hyper-eager to gather in droves over Sarah Palin’s and then Joe the Plumber’s trash cans for any dirt they could find, but utterly refused to examine Barack Obama’s record in the most politically corrupt city in America.

This is why Obama was able to say, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”  He could be whatever he wanted to depict himself, because the mainstream media wasn’t going to challenge anything he said.

Americans are finally beginning to understand who Mr. “blank screen” really is – and they are rejecting him in droves.  The pity is that they should have had an opportunity to learn who he was before they elected him.  But the dishonest ideologically-biased mainstream propagandists were not about to tell us anything they thought we might not want to hear.

The mainstream media have long held a “gatekeeper” mentality to the news, which is to say that they only told you what they wanted you to know, while holding back what they didn’t want you to know.

And they didn’t want you to know how Obama’s Chicago past would influence or even dictate his presidency: what happens in Chicago stays in Chicago.

But, inevitably, the American people were going to see the “Chicago side” of Barry Hussein.

From the Los Angeles Times blog:

President Obama Day 386: What’s happened to him?
February 9, 2010A favorite story about Chicago politics involves Roman Pucinski, who served six long terms of political apprenticeship in the Washington minor leagues of the U.S. House of Representatives before the Windy City’s vaunted Democratic political machine allowed him to step up and serve on the City Council.

The late Pucinski then served for 18 years as a loyal operative assigned to the 41st Ward (of 50).

It’s always useful for Chicago pols to have White House connections if, say, they’d like to dispatch someone famous to fly off to Copenhagen to lobby the International Olympic Committee for their city’s 2016 summer games bid.

But the Chicago Daley machine, which is actually a ruthless coalition of urban Democratic factions united by the steel reinforcing rods of self-interest, didn’t much care about this Barack Obama fellow before, as long as he was quiet, obedient and headed on a track out of town. How he acquired a reform label coming out of that one-party place is anyone’s guess.

But now that the sun has risen on the 386th day of the Obama White House, many political observers are coming to see that the ex-state senator from the South Side is running his federal administration in Washington much the way they run things back home: with a small….

…claque of clout-laden people from the same school who learned their political trade back in the nation’s No. 3 city, named for an Indian word for a smelly wild onion.

That style is tough, focused, immune to any distractions but cosmetic niceties. And did we mention tough. A portly, veteran Chicago alderman once confided only about 40% jokingly, that he had taken up jogging to lose weight but quickly gave it up as boring because “you can’t knock anyone down.” That’s politics the Chicago way.

For instance, remember how much we heard all last year about the need for healthcare legislation before early August, before October, before Thanksgiving, before Christmas, before the State of the Union? And how spanked the White House was by the Massachusetts Senate upset that Obama said his laser-vision for 2010 was on jobs and the economy?

So, what did he announce during a Super Bowl interview? More healthcare meetings, designed to politically box Republicans into the No-Nothing corner.

In the last few days at least three major outlets have published well-informed evaluations of Obama’s first year in office.  All are well worth reading.  The dominant themes: disappointment and disillusionment with the Chicago way.

In one respect it’s not surprising that a capitol city with its own style of take-no-prisoners politics should find a professed outsider’s style of smoother-spoken take-no-prisoners discomforting.

But now, no less than the Huffington Post headlined its Obama evaluation by Steve Clemons: “Core Chicago Team Sinking Obama presidency.”

The devastating Financial Times report by Edward Luce: “A fearsome foursome.”

And the Washington Post story by Ann Gerhart: “A year later, where did the hopes for Obama go?“

The Post story focuses on a handful of Obama supporters, so fiercely motivated and hopeful in 2008 and through the inauguration, now largely drifting back to normal lives lacking fulfillment of so many promises.

The other two fascinating accounts examine Obama’s close-knit team of Chicagoans: confidante Valerie Jarrett, who’s so intelligent she once hired Michelle Obama; Rahm Emanuel, the diminutive, acid-tongued chief of staff with overwhelmAxelrod and Obamaing energy and ambition; David Axelrod, the ex-Chicago Tribune politics reporter-turned-consultant who’s been coaching Obama forever; and Robert Gibbs, who isn’t from Chicago but that’s OK because he’s only the mouthpiece and the others keep a close eye on him.

Clemons focuses on how dead-on the Luce piece is and how the FT Washington bureau chief had to assiduously hide his sources as everyone was properly so fearful of retribution from the quartet around the mayor, er, president.

And Clemons attributes the lack of online link love to the Luce item Monday to the same fears among D.C. journalists dodging disfavor from the same four.

Quoting “administration insiders,” Luce says “the famously irascible Mr Emanuel treats cabinet principals like minions. ‘I am not sure the president realises how much he is humiliating some of the big figures he spent so much trouble recruiting into his cabinet,’ says the head of a presidential advisory board who visits the Oval Office frequently.”

And both articles note, accurately, how savvy cabinet secretaries like Kathleen Sebelius at Health and Human Services and Ken Salazar at Interior have been marginalized because putting a media face on the Obama Oval Office can only be entrusted to the likes of Gibbs and Axelrod.

Another Luce source talks about the difference between campaigning, which is easier, and governing, which is the ultimate goal but takes a more refined skill-set:

‘There is this sense after you have won such an amazing victory, when you have proved conventional wisdom wrong again and again, that you can simply do the same thing in government,’ says one. ‘Of course, they are different skills. To be successful, presidents need to separate the stream of advice they get on policy from the stream of advice they get on politics. That still isn’t happening.’

Also noted, how most everything coming out of the executive office is filtered through a political prism above all. i.e. the Afghanistan troop surge speech that touched all the political bases in 4,582 words without once saying “victory.”

Warning that Obama needs to take action quickly, Clemons adds that needed advice from a broader range of advisers “is getting twisted either in the rough-and-tumble of a a team of rivals operation that is not working, or is being distorted by the Chicago political gang’s tactical advice that is seducing Obama towards a course that has not only violated deals he made with those who voted him into office but which is failing to hit any of the major strategic targets by which the administration will be historically measured.”

David Gergen, who helped guide Bill Clinton out of not dissimilar troubled waters, tells Luce: “There is an old joke. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one. But the lightbulb must want to change. I don’t think President Obama wants to make any changes.”

— Andrew Malcolm

Mark Steyn reminded viewers of Obama’s horribly botched pronunciation of the Navy Corpsmen who save the lives of wounded Marines, and then referred to “the four corpse men of the Obamaclypse.”  That’s quite accurate, as it turns out.  and these four corpse men are riding America into apocalypse right along with Barack Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s political future.

It’s scary to think that we have a preening peacock campaigning and campaigning with absolutely no idea how to actually govern.

Since the FT article is hard to obtain, and since I am all about preserving a record of the facts, here is the Luce article:

A Fearsome Foursome
By Edward Luce

At a crucial stage in the Democratic primaries in late 2007, Barack Obama rejuvenated his campaign with a barnstorming speech, in which he ended on a promise of what his victory would produce: “A nation healed. A world repaired. An America that believes again.”

Just over a year into his tenure, America’s 44th president governs a bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington’s ways. What went wrong?

Pundits, Democratic lawmakers and opinion pollsters offer a smorgasbord of reasons – from Mr Obama’s decision to devote his first year in office to healthcare reform, to the president’s inability to convince voters he can “feel their [economic] pain”, to the apparent ungovernability of today’s Washington. All may indeed have contributed to the quandary in which Mr Obama finds himself. But those around him have a more specific diagnosis – and one that is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing, they say.

In dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington – most of them given unattributably in order to protect their access to the Oval Office – each observes that the president draws on the advice of a very tight circle. The inner core consists of just four people – Rahm Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, his communications chief.

Two, Mr Emanuel and Mr Axelrod, have box-like offices within spitting distance of the Oval Office. The president, who is the first to keep a BlackBerry, rarely holds a meeting, including on national security, without some or all of them present.

With the exception of Mr Emanuel, who was a senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, all were an integral part of Mr Obama’s brilliantly managed campaign. Apart from Mr Gibbs, who is from Alabama, all are Chicagoans – like the president. And barring Richard Nixon’s White House, few can think of an administration that has been so dominated by such a small inner circle.

“It is a very tightly knit group,” says a prominent Obama backer who has visited the White House more than 40 times in the past year. “This is a kind of ‘we few’ group … that achieved the improbable in the most unlikely election victory anyone can remember and, unsurprisingly, their bond is very deep.”

John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and founder of the Center for American Progress, the most influential think-tank in Mr Obama’s Washington, says that while he believes Mr Obama does hear a range of views, including dissenting advice, problems can arise from the narrow composition of the group itself.

Among the broader circle that Mr Obama also consults are the self-effacing Peter Rouse, who was chief of staff to Tom Daschle in his time as Senate majority leader; Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff; the economics team led by Lawrence Summers and including Peter Orszag, budget director; Joe Biden, the vice-president; and Denis McDonough, deputy national security adviser. But none is part of the inner circle.

“Clearly this kind of core management approach worked for the election campaign and President Obama has extended it to the White House,” says Mr Podesta, who managed Mr Obama’s widely praised post-election transition. “It is a very tight inner circle and that has its advantages. But I would like to see the president make more use of other people in his administration, particularly his cabinet.”

This White House-centric structure has generated one overriding – and unexpected – failure. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Mr Emanuel managed the legislative aspect of the healthcare bill quite skilfully, say observers. The weak link was the failure to carry public opinion – not Capitol Hill. But for the setback in Massachusetts, which deprived the Democrats of their 60-seat supermajority in the Senate, Mr Obama would by now almost certainly have signed healthcare into law – and with it would have become a historic president.

But the normally liberal voters of Massachusetts wished otherwise. The Democrats lost the seat to a candidate, Scott Brown, who promised voters he would be the “41st [Republican] vote” in the Senate – the one that would tip the balance against healthcare. Subsequent polling bears out the view that a decisive number of Democrats switched their votes with precisely that motivation in mind.

“Historians will puzzle over the fact that Barack Obama, the best communicator of his generation, totally lost control of the narrative in his first year in office and allowed people to view something they had voted for as something they suddenly didn’t want,” says Jim Morone, America’s leading political scientist on healthcare reform. “Communication was the one thing everyone thought Obama would be able to master.”

Whatever issue arises, whether it is a failed terrorist plot in Detroit, the healthcare bill, economic doldrums or the 30,000-troop surge to Afghanistan, the White House instinctively fields Mr Axelrod or Mr Gibbs on television to explain the administration’s position. “Every event is treated like a twist in an election campaign and no one except the inner circle can be trusted to defend the president,” says an exasperated outside adviser.

Perhaps the biggest losers are the cabinet members. Kathleen Sebelius, Mr Obama’s health secretary and formerly governor of Kansas, almost never appears on television and has been largely excluded both from devising and selling the healthcare bill. Others such as Ken Salazar, the interior secretary who is a former senator for Colorado, and Janet Napolitano, head of the Department for Homeland Security and former governor of Arizona, have virtually disappeared from view.

Administration insiders say the famously irascible Mr Emanuel treats cabinet principals like minions. “I am not sure the president realises how much he is humiliating some of the big figures he spent so much trouble recruiting into his cabinet,” says the head of a presidential advisory board who visits the Oval Office frequently. “If you want people to trust you, you must first place trust in them.”

In addition to hurling frequent profanities at people within the administration, Mr Emanuel has alienated many of Mr Obama’s closest outside supporters. At a meeting of Democratic groups last August, Mr Emanuel described liberals as “f***ing retards” after one suggested they mobilise resources on healthcare reform.

“We are treated as though we are children,” says the head of a large organisation that raised millions of dollars for Mr Obama’s campaign. “Our advice is never sought. We are only told: ‘This is the message, please get it out.’ I am not sure whether the president fully realises that when the chief of staff speaks, people assume he is speaking for the president.”

The same can be observed in foreign policy. On Mr Obama’s November trip to China, members of the cabinet such as the Nobel prizewinning Stephen Chu, energy secretary, were left cooling their heels while Mr Gibbs, Mr Axelrod and Ms Jarrett were constantly at the president’s side.

The White House complained bitterly about what it saw as unfairly negative media coverage of a trip dubbed Mr Obama’s “G2” visit to China. But, as journalists were keenly aware, none of Mr Obama’s inner circle had any background in China. “We were about 40 vans down in the motorcade and got barely any time with the president,” says a senior official with extensive knowledge of the region. “It was like the Obama campaign was visiting China.”

Then there are the president’s big strategic decisions. Of these, devoting the first year to healthcare is well known and remains a source of heated contention. Less understood is the collateral damage it caused to unrelated initiatives. “The whole Rahm Emanuel approach is that victory begets victory – the success of healthcare would create the momentum for cap-and-trade [on carbon emissions] and then financial sector reform,” says one close ally of Mr Obama. “But what happens if the first in the sequence is defeat?”

Insiders attribute Mr Obama’s waning enthusiasm for the Arab-Israeli peace initiative to a desire to avoid antagonising sceptical lawmakers whose support was needed on healthcare. The steam went out of his Arab-Israeli push in mid-summer, just when the healthcare bill was running into serious difficulties.

The same applies to reforming the legal apparatus in the “war on terror” – not least his pledge to close the Guantánamo Bay detention centre within a year of taking office. That promise has been abandoned.

“Rahm said: ‘We’ve got these two Boeing 747s circling that we are trying to bring down to the tarmac [healthcare and the decision on the Afghanistan troop surge] and we can’t risk a flock of f***ing Canadian geese causing them to crash,’ ” says an official who attended an Oval Office strategy meeting. The geese stood for the closure of Guantánamo.

An outside adviser adds: “I don’t understand how the president could launch healthcare reform and an Arab-Israeli peace process – two goals that have eluded US presidents for generations – without having done better scenario planning. Either would be historic. But to launch them at the same time?”

Again, close allies of the president attribute the problem to the campaign-like nucleus around Mr Obama in which all things are possible. “There is this sense after you have won such an amazing victory, when you have proved conventional wisdom wrong again and again, that you can simply do the same thing in government,” says one. “Of course, they are different skills. To be successful, presidents need to separate the stream of advice they get on policy from the stream of advice they get on politics. That still isn’t happening.”

The White House declined to answer questions on whether Mr Obama needed to broaden his circle of advisers. But some supporters say he should find a new chief of staff. Mr Emanuel has hinted that he might not stay in the job very long and is thought to have an eye on running for mayor of Chicago. Others say Mr Obama should bring in fresh blood. They point to Mr Clinton’s decision to recruit David Gergen, a veteran of previous White Houses, when the last Democratic president ran into trouble in 1993. That is credited with helping to steady the Clinton ship, after he too began with an inner circle largely carried over from his campaign.

But Mr Gergen himself disagrees. Now teaching at Harvard and commenting for CNN, Mr Gergen says members of the inner circle meet two key tests. First, they are all talented. Second, Mr Obama trusts them. “These are important attributes,” Mr Gergen says. His biggest doubt is whether Mr Obama sees any problem with the existing set-up.

So you learn that Obama is all fluff and no substance (i.e., all campaign mode and no actual governing mode), and that Obama has to rely on his “Chicago fearsome foursome” the way he relies on his teleprompter: ubiquitously (as in even in sixth grade classrooms!!!).

And you should think long and hard about the profound comparison of Nixon’s tight (and tightly wound) inner circle and Obama’s same same.  A tight, insular circle that answers to no one and keeps its counsel secret is a frightening thing in any republic.

Here’s another comparison between Obama and his alter ego.  And realize that for a CHICAGO POLITICIAN to say, “I am not a crook,” is pretty much like a Chicago politician saying, “I am not a Chicago politician.”

Everything is politics for Obama.  Political posturing, political preening, political hatchet jobs.  Nothing else matters.

It is frankly amazing to me that such a hypocritical and cynical man as Barack Obama was ever elected president.  He constantly lectures Republicans (and even Democrats when it suits him) to “rise above petty politics” when the very construction of his administration is completely about politics.

I have on several occasions compared Barack Obama to Neville Chamberlain.  Both men were utterly ruthless (there’s your ‘Chicago Way’) in pounding head after head to achieve their signature domestic issues, and both men became utter failures as they attempted to have their personal domestic agenda at the expense of everything else.

People are starting to learn that the “blank slate” may well be blank because the man behind the grand facade has no soul.