Love Labors Lost

The Honeymoon is over.

Now it’s time for the in-fighting.

A Separation?

A Divorce?

The Congressional Democrats, and even the Europeans are so over “Mr. Hope & Change” Obama.

Hope has become Nope.

He ran as something he’s not and never has been: A post-partisan centrist transformative healer. That’d be a difficult trick to pull off even for somebody with any prior executive experience, someone who’d run something, like a state, or even a town, or even a commercial fishing operation, like that poor chillbilly boob Sarah Palin.

“In his world,” wrote the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, “everything is political and everything is about appearances.” (IBD)

And those appearances have been deceiving. But when ripped off, the expose an ugly underbelly.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who supported Obama’s $787 billion stimulus a year ago, says the president needs to be much more forceful about how, where and why the money was spent if Democrats are going to get credit for attacking the recession in an era of double-digit unemployment.

“I think the administration needs to be much more aggressive, and hopefully the president will outline some of this in his State of the Union address,” she said. “We very much need leadership from the executive on this. You can’t just put money out there — even if we had it to put it out there — unless it’s going to produce an actual new job.”

The Super ultra-leftist Sen Feinstein complaining about the stimulus and jobs?

Now that’s amazing.

Here, I thought the Stimulus  was a marvelous success and the recession was over, according to Democrats. They “saved or created” over a million jobs, so they said pompously.

That is, prior to the Massachusetts Massacre.

Administration officials say they get it — with Axelrod recently admitting that Obama’s team is recalibrating and refocusing on the economy. Emanuel, for his part, is now pushing for a stripped-down health care bill that could be passed within a few weeks and force Republicans, for a change, to take a few tough votes.

That may mollify some Democratic moderates, but it will further infuriate the liberals, who insist that the lesson of Massachusetts is that Obama has come on too weak, not too strong. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman captured the left’s winter of discontent Thursday with a blog post in which he wrote that he’s “pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in.”(Politico)

At the moment, the whole cacophonous crew seems to be united by the fear that no one is safe if a tea party-backed Republican can win the Senate seat the late Ted Kennedy held for nearly 50 years.

I even read that except for 1 term that seat had been Democratic since 1926.

We all pretty much knew for sure we were going to lose Massachusetts,” one person in attendance told POLITICO on Wednesday. “And yet, last night and this morning, we had absolutely no message guidance from the White House, [the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] or [the Democratic National Committee]. There was no leadership. … So all of the members today are just opining about what they think it means and whether we should move forward on health care.”

The unsinkable Titanic has hit the Massachusetts Iceberg.

But House Democrats, already terrified by the wholesale defection of independents to the GOP in Massachusetts, were infuriated when a New York Times article, apparently citing an administration source, suggested Speaker Nancy Pelosi could pass an unamended version of the Senate’s health reform bill.

“The sense was that the Obama folks were trying to say it was inevitable when it wasn’t,” said New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, a supporter of the public option who has clashed with the White House repeatedly about the issue.

“It wasn’t that they were bullying us, but it reinforced the idea that they were a little tone-deaf to what the reality inside the House and Senate really were,” Weiner added.

And they and The Congress have been tone deaf for over 6 months about the warning of the Iceberg coming.

And some still are:

Howard Fineman, the increasingly loopy editor of the increasingly doomed Newsweek, took it a step further. The truck wasn’t just any old prop, but a very particular kind. “In some places, there are codes, there are images,” he told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. “You know, there are pickup trucks; you could say there was a racial aspect to it one way or another.”(IBD)

So Senator-Elect Brown’s old pickup is a code word for Racism??

Someone want to get Mr. Fineman a white coat with the sleeves on backwards please…

But many Democrats aren’t the only ones who have fallen out of love with The Messiah.

As Paul Krugman, the New York Times’ “Conscience of a Liberal,” put it: “He Wasn’t The One We’ve Been Waiting For.” Not the once-delirious Europeans, either. As the headline in Der Spiegel put it: “The World Bids Farewell To Obama.”

When it comes to great headlines, no publication beats the (UK) Daily Mail. Wednesday morning’s edition featured a classic which dovetailed the first anniversary of Obama’s inauguration with the election of Scott Brown.  It read:  “Happy Birthday, Mr. President — here’s a bloody nose!” 🙂

Financial Times Deutschland: “For everyone else in the world, this means that they will have to bid farewell to a candidate for whom the hopes were so high. They will have to say goodbye to the charisma they fell in love with. Obama will be staying home after all.”

Center-left daily Süddeutsche Zeitung writes on Thursday:

“Obama made a serious misjudgement. Right at the beginning of his first year in office, he saved the banks, rescued the automobile industry from collapse and passed a huge economic stimulus package. He had hoped that these enormous deeds would give him the space to address those issues which are dearest to him: health care reform, climate change and investment in education.”

“Those issues, however, are clearly not priorities for people in the US at the moment. Scott Brown campaigned on two promises, both of which apparently struck a nerve with the electorate. He wants to block health care reform and he wants to find ways to reduce the enormous budget deficit. It is here where the roots of dissatisfaction with Obama are to be found. His reform agenda, in its current form, is highly suspect to Americans. And they have the impression that, if he continues piling up debt, he will be gambling away the country’s future.”

Gerald Scarfe, a major political cartoonist for the Times of London, began — at Obama’s inauguration — depicting the new President as a promising Superman.  By the middle of last year, these images had devolved into a Superman whose biceps and pecks had disintegrated and whose cape hung limply from shriveled shoulders.  In the August addition to his series, Scarfe shows Super Obama having a face first collision into a brick wall labeled “Health Care.”

Darn that Massachusetts Kryptonite!!

Or perhaps Super Obama, rather than being faster than a locomotive, could be drawn being mowed down by a runaway train called The Tea Party Express. 🙂

Sarkozy was the first European leader to turn on President Obama in 2009, describing him in an interview as “naïve.”  He had good reason to feel that way. Early in his Presidency, Obama had sent a letter to the French President going on about how well he envisioned them working together.  Alas, the letter was sent to the former French President, Jacques Chirac — not Sarkozy. The news of Obama’s diplomatic faux pax was widely reported in Europe, but not by the hypnotized American media.  This incident was followed by a bungled dinner invitation in which both Sarkozy and Obama perceived themselves as snubbed by the other.  Needless to say, the French media are no longer dazzled by the American President and they think even less of Michelle Obama’s fashion sense. (Human events)

But here’s the Best One:

But Nile Gardiner of the Telegraph will surely have to gate crash his way into the White House from now on after penning his opus: “10 Reasons why George W. Bush was a smarter world leader than Barack Obama.”  Since David Letterman is unlikely to read this top ten list, we’ve printed them here for your convenience:

(1) Bush never apologized for his country;

(2) Bush identified and confronted evil;

(3) Bush made the advance of freedom a key component of his agenda;

(4)  Bush defended national sovereignty;

(5) Bush believed in the Special Relationship (with Britain);

(6) Bush cultivated key allies;

(7) Bush understood the importance of missile defense;

(8) Bush believed in fighting a global war;

(9)  Bush did not compromise U.S. security: and

(10)  Bush did not send mixed messages in the face of the enemy.

Ouch! And he was so “European”. 🙂

Just shows to go you, a house of cards, built on shifting sand cannot last. A small, northeast, gust of wind has blown it all to smithereens. 🙂