Thursday, March 29, 2012
The past seven brutal days will go down as one of the worst weeks
in history for a sitting president. It certainly has been, without any doubt,
the worst week yet for President Obama.
Somehow, Mr. Obama managed to embarrass himself abroad, humiliate
himself here at home, see his credentials for being elected so severely
undermined that it raises startling questions about whether he should have been
elected in the first place — let alone be re-elected later this year.
Consider:
• Last Friday, Mr. Obama wandered into the killing of Trayvon Martin. Aided by his ignorance of
the situation, knee-jerk prejudices and quick-draw racial profiling, Mr.
Obama played a heavy hand in elevating a tragic situation in which a teenager
was killed into a full-blown hot race fight.
Americans, he admonished, need to do some “soul-searching.” And
then, utterly inexplicably, he veered off into this bizarre tangent about how
he and the poor dead kid look so much alike they could be father and son. It
was election-year race-pandering gone horribly wrong.
• By the start of this week, Mr. Obama had fled town and was
racing to the other side of the planet just as the Supreme Court was taking up the
potentially-embarrassing matter of Obamacare. While in South Korea he was caught on a hidden mic
negotiating with the president of our longest-standing rival on how to sell
America and her allies down the river once he gets past the next election.
• Meanwhile, back at home, the Supreme Court took up the single most
important achievement of Mr. Obama’s presidency and, boy, was it embarrassing.
The great constitutional law professor, it turns out, may not quite be the
wizard he told us he was.
By
most accounts, Mr. Obama and his stuttering lawyers were all but laughed out of
the courthouse. They were even stumbling over
softball questions lobbed by Mr. Obama’s own hand-picked justices.
•
Mr. Obama closed his week pulling off a nearly unimaginable feat: He managed to
totally and completely unify the nastily-fighting Democrats and Republicans in
Congress. Late Wednesday night, they unanimously voted — 414 to zip — to reject
the budget Mr. Obama had presented, leaving him not even a thin lily’s blade to
hide behind.
So,
in one week, Mr. Obama got caught whispering promises to our enemy, incited a
race war, raised serious questions about his understanding of the Constitution,
and then got smacked down over his proposed budget that was so wildly reckless
that even Democrats in Congress could not support it.
It
was as if you lumped Hurricane Katrina and the Abu Ghraib abuses into one week
for George W. Bush. And added on top of that
the time he oddly groped German Chancellor Angela Merkel and got caught cursing
on a hot mic.
Even
then, it wouldn’t be as bad as Mr. Obama’s week. You would probably also have
to toss in the time Mr. Bush’s father threw up into the lap
of Japan’s prime minister. Only then might we be approaching how bad a week it
was for Mr. Obama.
Not
that you will see any trace of embarrassment in the face of Mr. Obama. He has
mastered the high political art of shamelessness, wearing it smugly and
cockily. Kind of like a hoodie.
• Charles
Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com.
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