Charles Krauthammer observes that the liberal press is not alone in its limitless admiration for Barack Obama. The candidate only too obviously feels just the same himself.

Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast — a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins — would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign policy credentials.

What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn. President Ronald Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final “tear down this wall” liquidation. When President John F. Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.

Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop? What was his role in the fight against communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the creation of what George Bush the elder — who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall but modestly declined to go there for a victory lap — called “a Europe whole and free”?

Does Obama not see the incongruity? It’s as if a German pol took a campaign trip to America and demanded the Statue of Liberty as a venue for a campaign speech. (The Germans have now gently nudged Obama into looking at other venues.)

Americans are beginning to notice Obama’s elevated opinion of himself. There’s nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

Read the whole thing.

Conservative commentators are widely predicting that television network coverage of Barack Obama’s trip abroad is going to look an awful lot like a series of campaign commercials.

Investors Business Daily :

Barack Obama is headed overseas, with the three network anchors trailing behind him like groupies ga-ga over a rock star. And they say that media bias is just a myth.

Obama will begin his travels Friday with a visit to Europe and continue on to the Middle East. These are not normal campaign stops for a man running for president. But Obama is no common man — at least as the media see him.

They have uncritically anointed him a savior and are eager to be in his presence as he makes his “historic” trip. NBC News anchor Brian Williams, ABC anchor Charles Gibson and CBS anchor Katie Couric will be on hand, and they’ll scratch and claw each other to get that exclusive interview.

Obama’s arrogance — playing president and planning to speak in front of Berlin’s symbolic Brandenburg Gate — is unseemly enough. But the media fawning is a disgrace. Other than those reporters assigned to John McCain, do they even know that Obama’s opponent in the fall has made not one, but three trips overseas since March?

Not only did the anchors pass on those tours, their respective networks “provided little if any coverage of any of them,” according to an analysis by the Media Research Center. When McCain was in Europe and the Middle East for a week in March, the networks that will immortalize Obama’s triumphant tour carried only four full stories on the trip.

“CBS did not even send a correspondent along” and offered “only one report consisting of only 31 words” over 10 seconds for “the entire week Sen. McCain was abroad,” the MRC reports.

Read the whole thing.

Barack Obama is accepted by the MSM definers of reality as the winner and annointed nominee of the democrat party, but… it is true that Hillary won a majority of the popular vote, Florida and Michigan were denied participation, a sizable irredentist block of Clinton supporters is still active, and if some sharp political operators got hold of control of the credentials committee next month in Denver, it is not impossible that a contested vote for the nomination could yet occur.

CQPolitics:

The senator from New York is said to be negotiating a respectful presence followed by a graceful exit from next month’s Democratic convention, and last week the party announced that Barack Obama would formally accept the party’s nomination in the stadium built for the Denver Broncos. But there are Clinton supporters clinging to the hope that if her name is placed in nomination and the roll call of the states is conducted, she might — might — still win.

Heidi Li Feldman, a Georgetown University law professor, insists there’s still “no way of predicting” the outcome should there be a fair vote. That’s because Obama has not secured enough pledged delegates to ensure the magic number of 2,118 needed to claim victory; the Illinois senator has gone past that benchmark only with the pledges of about 390 superdelegates — and they can change their minds at any time up to the moment they cast their ballots.

Bob Parks was also following the left’s explosive reaction to Barry Blitt’s satirical New Yorker cover, and he thinks that Eustace Tilley inadvertently provoked a great deal of commentary that reveals only too much about the attitudes and perspective of the liberal elite.

To hell with all the thoughtful analysis; I got more out of reading the snobby, smarmy comments from the HuffPo intelligentsia who genuinely believe this is how right wingers (who always “hate” Obama) and hayseed hicks view our Number One Power Couple.

“Folks in Dumbville, USA with no help from the braindead MSM will believe this…”

“This will reinforce the images many Americans have in their reptilian and mammalian brains, the part that is NOT thinking but imaginal and symbolic, with no sense of time. The part of the brain oriented toward survival at all costs. This image is going to help mylenize the brain cells and synaptic connections to facilitate that association of Barack Hussein Obama and Michelle with terrorist/Muslim/socialist/black rage/ etc., etc. This operates OUTSIDE of conscious awareness and is very, very powerful.”

“Actually it is a slap in the face to all the stupid poeple who believe anything in the cover visual is true. That there are people in the U.S. that belive this stuff is true, is a sad commentary on the inteligence of some of the Amercian public.”

“I mean come on people, they had to know that the cover was going to get this kind of reaction. It is doing what it was intended to do…plant that seed. Do you really think that this is going to be taken as “satire” by the intolerant citizens of Kentucky and W. VA? Heck no they will see this on the news and confirm that they were right.”

“Satire presumes sophistication, reflection and humor on the part of the reader…perhaps that is the typical reader of The New Yorker, but this picture shall be circulated to and used to inflame those who do not read, are not sophisticated and lack the haute humor of The New Yorker.”

via The Onion:

1:50 video

Yes, lefties, he’s laughing at you.

John Kass observes that the left is starting to discover that it’s been had.

The cries of pain came… from the American political left, from scribes and liberal editorial writers and broadcast analysts and eager bloggers. The true believers who evangelized that Obama would transcend politics as we knew it are suffering a Barackian hangover.

Greedily, they drained the kegs once full of sweet Obama Kool-Aid, drained them to the dregs and mopped up the remains with stale crusts. The inevitable happened—the pain that comes as everything finally becomes clear, in the rosy-fingered light of a terrible dawn.

Obama used them to crush the Clintons, but now the left is finally realizing it’s been betrayed, on issue after issue, with Obama changing his positions in order to defeat a tired and disillusioned Republican Party in November.

They’re at the dance now and he’s the one with the keys and he’s the only ride they’ve got. And they don’t like it.

He has flip-flopped again and again, on campaign finance, on government eavesdropping of overseas phone calls, on gun control and even Iraq. Future President Obama now says he’ll listen to his generals about when to withdraw. He didn’t say he’d listen to the commissars of the blogosphere.

And his cheerleaders are beginning to realize that Obama may not be the Arthurian knight in shining armor, that he may not be Mr. Tumnus, the gentle forest faun of our presidential politics. Months after his inauguration, after he makes Billy Daley the secretary of the treasury and Michael Daley the secretary of zoning and promotes Patrick Fitzgerald to become the attorney general of Mars, the political left may figure out that Obama is a Chicago politician.

Read the whole thing.

The July 21, 2008 issue of the New Yorker features a cover cartoon of B. Hussein Obama and his wife Michelle in the Oval Office looking more or less the way some of us are prone to imagine they might some day.

The New Yorker’s intention was to satirize right wing images of the Obamas, but some people in politics have no sense of humor, and both campaigns were quick to get all pious and sanctimonious about it.

Chicago Tribune Swamp:

The Obama campaign, as well as the campaign of Republican rival John McCain, slammed the cover as offensive:

“The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement, reported by Politico. “But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.”

“We completely agree with the Obama campaign, it’s tasteless and offensive,” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said in a statement.

Transgressing the boundaries of convention is precisely what makes a lot of the best kind of humor funny. Besides, cartoonist Barry Blitt isn’t really endorsing the viewpoint of the Obamas depicted in the cartoon. He’s mocking it, and poking fun at people like me who think that image isn’t so very far off the mark.

Conservatives do have a sense of humor, though, so I am able to find it funny, even if I am one of the targets of the satire. Kudos, Barry Blitt.

Those looking for more laughs this morning need only to scan the Comments section of this posting over at HuffPo. A lot of the lefties are, as the saying goes, having a cow.

Jonah Goldberg finds Barack Obama kind of swell-headed, even for a politician.

In his pre-campaign book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Barack Obama proclaims, “I find comfort in the fact that the longer I’m in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience.”

Some might think this odd testimony from a young and inexperienced freshman senator on the cusp of seeking the highest rank, and the most famous position, in the world. It’s a bit like a parish priest saying he’s happy with his modest lot in life and then declaring he’s throwing his hat in the ring to become pope.

But a closer reading reveals a possible explanation. Perhaps he’s an adulation junkie. Maybe the diminishing “nourishment” Sen. Obama receives from “popularity” is actually causing him to ratchet up his pursuit of more and more praise just to get the minimal fix he needs.

That would account for why a man who thinks striving for popularity is a character flaw has nonetheless decided to give his nomination acceptance speech in a 76,000-seat football stadium.

Or it might tell us why a candidate who hasn’t even been nominated yet wants to re-enact some of the most famous scenes from both Reagan and JFK’s highlight reels by holding a rally at Germany’s Brandenburg Gate, even though he’s not a head of state yet. (German authorities, aware of Obama’s rock-star status with the German public, diplomatically suggested that it was up to Obama to decide what is in “good taste.”)

Perhaps Dominic Lawson, writing in the British newspaper The Independent had it right when he recently wrote that Obama is “a man of stunning articulacy, but also stunning self-regard.” …

there’s little evidence that he’s interested in dispelling or rebutting the cult of personality he’s developed. Obama himself talks of reversing the ocean’s tides.

The overarching theme to his entire campaign – “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” and all that – is that voting for Obama is proof of the cosmic superiority of . . . Obama voters.

In a speech in Madison, Wis., Obama told his supporters that rallying to his cause was today’s equivalent of the “greatest generation” rallying to defeat Hitler and Tojo. Oprah merely calls him, “The One,” saying he will help us “evolve to a higher plane.”

Someone get that man one of those “I’m Kind of a Big Deal” T-shirts.

Read the whole thing.

Newsweek can’t figure out how Obama lost his mojo, and how the gap has narrowed so quickly.

The perceptible tone of disappointment and chagrin peeking through the facade of objective journalism is delightful. How can this possibly be happening?

A month after emerging victorious from the bruising Democratic nominating contest, some of Barack Obama’s glow may be fading. In the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, the Illinois senator leads Republican nominee John McCain by just 3 percentage points, 44 percent to 41 percent. The statistical dead heat is a marked change from last month’s NEWSWEEK Poll, where Obama led McCain by 15 points, 51 percent to 36 percent.

Obama’s overall decline from the last NEWSWEEK Poll, published June 20, is hard to explain. …

At the time of the last poll, pundits also noted that a large lead in the polls doesn’t always guarantee a general-election victory. Many warned that Democrat Michael Dukakis led George H.W. Bush by as much as 16 points in some 1988 polls and then went on to lose that year’s presidential contest.

But perhaps most puzzling is how McCain could have gained traction in the past month. …

Despite Obama’s precipitous decline, the poll suggests underlying strengths for the Dem.

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Meanwhile visiting Dublin to receive an honorary degree from Trinity College, aging cinema idol Robert Redford told the Irish Times that in his opinion the downfall of one more ultra-liberal presidential candidate could prove fatal to the democrat party.

I think Obama is not tall on experience . . . but I believe he’s a really good person. He’s smart. And he does represent what the country needs most now, which is change.

“I hope he’ll win. I think he will. If he doesn’t, you can kiss the Democratic Party goodbye. I think we need new voices, new blood. We need to get a whole group out, get a new group in.”

Isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results?

Jesse Jackson’s whispered desired to “cut off (Barack Obama’s) n*ts” for “talking down to black people” about (something) “faith-based,” recorded and broadcast by Fox News,

0:22 video

would seem to be a response to Obama’s July 1st Zanesville, Ohio speech, in which he proposed creating a “Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.” But how is that “talking down to black people?”

The Reverend Jackson’s anger seems more likely to have been in response to Obama’s June 15th Father’s Day speech, in which he referred to half of all black children living in single parent homes, and urged black fathers to set an example of excellence and not “just sit in the house and watch SportsCenter.”

Obama proposed more ambitious educational goals.

You know, sometimes I’ll go to an eighth-grade graduation and there’s all that pomp and circumstance and gowns and flowers. And I think to myself, it’s just eighth grade. To really compete, they need to graduate high school, and then they need to graduate college, and they probably need a graduate degree too. An eighth-grade education doesn’t cut it today. Let’s give them a handshake and tell them to get their butts back in the library!

Obama also advocated placing greater emphasis on empathy and kindness and less upon machismo.

The second thing we need to do as fathers is pass along the value of empathy to our children. Not sympathy, but empathy – the ability to stand in somebody else’s shoes; to look at the world through their eyes. Sometimes it’s so easy to get caught up in “us,” that we forget about our obligations to one another. There’s a culture in our society that says remembering these obligations is somehow soft – that we can’t show weakness, and so therefore we can’t show kindness.

But our young boys and girls see that. They see when you are ignoring or mistreating your wife. They see when you are inconsiderate at home; or when you are distant; or when you are thinking only of yourself. And so it’s no surprise when we see that behavior in our schools or on our streets. That’s why we pass on the values of empathy and kindness to our children by living them. We need to show our kids that you’re not strong by putting other people down – you’re strong by lifting them up. That’s our responsibility as fathers.

Jesse Jackson would be living in a state of spectacular denial if he thinks the problems Obama is referring to don’t exist, and his response seems to manifest a hypersensitive racial chauvinism surprising even for him… unless this whole affair was merely a calculated ploy intended to give Barack Obama a “Sister Soldjah moment.”

Headline:Enlightened New Multi-racial Leader Offering Change Denounced by Bitter Old-School Race-Baiter.

Matt Drudge quotes Bill O’Reilly boasting that he held back even more rich material.

We held back some of this conversation… we didn’t feel it had any relevance to the conversation this evening. We are not out to get Jesse Jackson. We are not out to embarrass him and we are not out to make him look bad. If we were, we would have used what we had, which is more damaging than what you have heard…

Oh yes, that Bill O’Reilly is a principled idealist. He’d never do anything unethical, like surreptitiously tape and then broadcast Fox News guests’ private statements. Except, whoops! he just did.

O’Reilly’s not an Obama supporter, so he wouldn’t be intentionally collaborating in “staging Sister Soldjah,” but he is dumber than a bootjack, and even Jesse Jackson is sufficiently smarter to be able to dupe him.

Perhaps Jesse Jackson’s stage whisper was intentional, and the clueless Mr. O’Reilly unfortunately got cold feet about exposing the best parts, featuring even more colorful terms and touching upon sensitive racial animosities, and all we got was an abridged, tepid, and bowdlerized version of what could have been a fine and memorable dramatic performance.

That political genius Barack Obama tells a Georgia crowd that they should be teaching their kids to speak Spanish, instead of worrying about immigrants learning English. And he then explains how embarrassing it is to people like himself to live among all those dumbass Americans who don’t speak lots of languages like the sophisticated Europeans do.

B. Hussein says:

Understand this: instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English –they’ll learn English!– you need to make sure that your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about how can your child become bilingual. We should have every child speaking more than one language. Yo! It’s embarrassing… it’s embarrassing when… when… uh, Europeans come over here. they all speak English. They speak French. They speak German. And then we go over to Europe, and… and all we’s can say is “Merci beaucoup.”

1:46 video

Oh yes, this one will win lots of support from those bitter gun-owners and church-goers in the Heartland, alright.

I bet they’re pulling out their hair at Obama campaign headquarters.

Unless he’s completely rested and prepared and working off a script on a teleprompter, Barack Obama is every bit as much of a disaster as Michelle.

Yes, learning languages is a good thing, but we have plenty of language education available in America right now. People like B Hussein Obama, who attended exclusive preparatory schools and Harvard, and who jet off regularly to Barcelona, Paris, and Gstaad, do almost invariably speak some other languages.

Ordinary, working class Americans (surprise, surprise!) actually commonly cannot afford European vacations, and have a whole lot less use than Europeans, who live next door to countries speaking them, do for foreign languages. If France was right across the Missouri River from Iowa, I expect most people in Sioux City would know how to read a menu in French. Spanish biligualism is actually pretty common right now in the US of A around the Mexican border.

The issue that bugs people is the way the system bends over backwards to accomodate foreign languages like Spanish, discouraging assimilation and inconveniencing ordinary Americans. When I use the ATM machine at the local supermarket, I have to choose a language before I can transact my business. The burden ought to go the other way. The immigrant ought to have to figure out how to deal with English language ATM machines. The inconvenience is minor, it’s true, but the symbolism is annoying. One feels that the normal American’s English language has been demoted from its formerly established position to the status of just another of the tongues of Babel.

Obama has yet again given a very effective demonstration of his elite perspective and his contempt for, and inability to understand or sympathize with, the lives of ordinary Americans.

Rich Lowry identifies the fraud which is Barack Obama.

In the past few weeks, Obama has broken two pledges (to take public financing in the general election and to filibuster legal immunity for telecoms that cooperated with the government in terrorist surveillance); has belittled his own rhetoric during the primary campaign (saying it could get “overheated and amplified” on the issue of trade); redefined his promise to meet without preconditions with the leaders of hostile states until it’s basically meaningless; endorsed a Supreme Court decision striking down a Washington, D.C., gun ban his campaign had previously said he supported; and made muddy, centrist-sounding statements about his positions on Iraq and abortion that he had to go back and try to clarify.

Has there ever in recent political memory been so much calculation and bad faith by a politician who has made so much of eschewing both? We now know that Barack Obama is not naive, but his ardent supporters are. Obama exhorted them to “believe” — one of his favorite words — in him and his virtue above all, and as soon as they gave him the nomination he wanted, he showed how foolishly credulous they had been. When it comes to triangulating, he’s Hillary Clinton without the baggage.

Forget the debate about whether Obama is “American enough.” He’s that great American archetype, the audacious salesman with an eye on the main chance. Nothing in his utterly orthodox left-wing record ever suggested he was a transformationally unifying figure, but he sold himself as that to the audience he needed in the Democratic primaries. Nothing in his record suggests he’s a sensible centrist, but he’s going to sell himself as one to the audience he needs in the general election, whatever contortions it takes. In his current TV ad, he touts his support for welfare reform when he actually opposed it.

Obama is calculating shrewdly now — just as shrewdly as back when he was attacking calculation. His left-wing base won’t abandon him, and all the dewy-eyed new voters attracted by him will stay that way, so long as he continues to look and sound good. His task is to win over general-election voters in a center-right country who value hardheadedness and practicality in their presidents.

Barack Obama doesn’t need to be a messiah figure. He needn’t even be particularly admirable. In a poisonous year for Republicans, he just needs to be a minimally acceptable Democrat, and so minimally acceptable he aims to be.

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Hat tip to the News Junkie (who likes a lot of the same stories I do this morning, I see).

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And Rich Lowry is not the only one who notices.

Tony Blankley sees a gifted demagogue at work fleecing the bumpkins.

Way back in June, Sen. Barack “middle name not permitted to be mentioned” Obama campaigned on the theme of “Change We Can Believe In.” Now, several days later, his theme should be “Change We Can’t Keep Up With.” Apparently, the change he was calling for was not for Washington politics, but for his primary campaign positions. …

Which brings us, as it always does in such circumstances, to America’s greatest fraud sniffer, H.L. Mencken. He defined a demagogue as “one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.” It is not surprising that the youth is particularly enchanted by the senator from Illinois. Being young, they are inexperienced in the ways of the world.

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Iowahawk paraphrases the great man.

Let me be crystal clear: if elected president, my first act will be to call for the immediate withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq. I have always been consistent and forthright in this position, and I want to reassure my supporters that my recent statement backtracking from it was just some bullshit my staff came up with to tack to the center for the general election. To win this election, it will be critical to appeal to the dwindling but stubborn group of idiots who cling to fantasies of American “victory” in this tragic disaster. It’s an unfortunate part of the complicated game of presidential politics, but let’s face it: I can’t stop this war if I’m not in the White House. However, you should know by now that whatever I may say from now until November, once elected I will immediately pull the rug from these gullible pro-war rubes.

Or will I? As is obvious to all but the most deluded HuffPo retard, the surge in Iraq has produced dramatic improvements in security throughout Iraq, and the roots of a stable pro-American democracy. We have the terrorists on the run, and it would obviously be crazy for us to pull our troops from the region just as we are on the verge of victory. And it is equally obvious that everything I said in the previous paragraph was designed to placate the naive hipster moonbats I brilliantly exploited to destroy the Clintons. (You’re welcome.) Now that the nomination is in the bag, I am finally free to stake out my genuine pro-victory Iraq position, and have a good laugh while the dKos morons screech like a bunch of apoplectic howler monkeys. Let’s face it: at the rate I’m heading right on national security, I’ll be raining nukes on Tehran by February. …

Just look at all of the comsymps and pinkos I’ve thrown under the bus in the last 6 weeks – Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, Samantha Power, Jim Johnson, the list goes on. And you know what? I enjoyed it. Ask yourself this: when was the last time John McCain stabbed a lefty asshole in the back? Then ask yourself: who’s the real conservative in this race?

In conclusion, this should make it clear to the broad moderate middle mainstream of independent American voters that I am willing to reach out to both sides of the contentious war debate, and forge a new national consensus based on unity. Together, we can build a new era of hope, and bring an end to politics of cynicism.