What an idiot.

This isn't the first time he's made a fool out of himself.

Remember when he signalled the band to play "Hail to the Queen" in the middle of his toast and then kept on speaking through the song?

Awkward.

//President Barack Obama was met with what appeared to be the U.N.'s version of the Oscars' "wrap-it-up" music Monday after he significantly overran his allotted time to speak at a global climate change summit.

Obama was one of 147 world leaders given a three-minute slot at the COP21 conference to outline their vision for the future of the planet.

The president of the free world, however, had other ideas.

More than eight and a half minutes into Obama's address — and with no sign he was stopping soon — three beeps sounded across the auditorium, clearly audible to everyone present and watching on TV.

Organizers did not respond to NBC News' requests for comment on the beeps, but the punctuating sounds appeared to be the conference's not-so-subtle attempt to get Obama to wrap it up.//

When Turkey and Russia are fighting, it is good to know that we have a Nobel Prize winner as our leader!

Obama is not going to be distracted by an international conspiracy to commit mass murder or a NATO ally shooting down planes of a nuclear power....

... he's going to stay focused on the only issue that matters: non-existent, insignificant global warming.

We are so boned.

Undeniable truth number 11 - a person can survive if they are arrogant and they can survive if they are incompetent...

...but they can't survive if they are both incompetent and arrogant.

//We all know people of towering arrogance and we all know people of staggering incompetence, but Barack Obama is quite possibly the perfect package. No one on the scene today combines these two qualities in quite the same way as Mr. Obama.

On the incompetence side, and sticking just with the president’s policies and record in the greater Middle East, there is Mr. Obama’s mishandling of the rise of the Islamic State, which just last year he referred to as the “jayvee team” and just last week declared was “contained.” Recall his threat to Syrian President Assad that if Assad used chemical weapons on his own people it would constitute crossing a “red line” (Assad did and Obama did nothing), and his stop-start-stop support for opposition forces in Syria.

Then there is the president’s decision to pull out all American troops from Iraq, which had disastrous consequences; his failures in Afghanistan (including announcing a withdrawal date even as he was announcing a surge in troops); his bungled relations with Egypt; his failure to support the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009 and his nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, which Charles Krauthammer called “the worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history.” Add to that Mr. Obama declaring his policies in Libya, Yemen and Somalia to be models of success before things collapses in all three countries, his alienation and mistreatment of Israel, and his botched handling of relations with our Arab allies – not to mention policies that have allowed Russia a presence in the Middle East unlike any its had since Anwar Sadat expelled the Soviet Union from Egypt in the early 1970s – and you have a catastrophic foreign policy record. It was only in the summer of last year that the Wall Street Journal reported, “The breadth of global instability now unfolding hasn’t been seen since the late 1970s” – and things are more disordered, chaotic and violent now then it was then. Things are so bad that the president has even lost CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.//

The Empty Suit Presidency.

Ending as it began, by assuming that his narrow set of assumptions, carefully nurtured among the feverswamp left as a community organizer, run the world.

2. Obama used racist attacks against minority Republican presidential candidates to justify an open border policy for Muslim refugees. After praising the religion of peace in a sermon that would make the local mullah blush, Obama directed his scorn at Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Marco Rubio. When asked about the Muslim refugee crisis, Obama exploited the family history of the two Cuban-American candidates, calling the second-generation immigrants un-American. “When some of those [Republicans} themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution -- that’s shameful. That’s not American,” wallowed Obama. Rather than addressing the security concerns of Republicans on the other side of the aisle, the commander-in-chief decided to dismiss and define the experiences of one immigrant population to bolster his reckless policy of accepting Muslim refugees without appropriate screening procedures.

The Empty Suit Presidency

Hours before ISIS attack on Paris Obama declares that ISIS has been contained.

Obama's vacation from history is about to end.

Apparently, simply being given a Noble Peace Prize in the first 4 months of office is not a substitute for actual leadership.

//MSNBC Contributor and Washington Editor-at-Large for the Atlantic, Steve Clemons stated that French officials he had talked with criticized lack of US support against fighting terrorism, with one arguing that, “ISIS has been incubated for two years with an absence of US leadership, and that the United States needs to take the security of its allies more seriously” during MSNBC’s coverage of the terrorist attacks in Paris on Saturday.

In response to a question about his conversations “with some French officials here in the United States expressing frustration about perhaps a lack of support from the US, in terms of France’s ability to fight this jihad.” Clemons said, “Well, the discussion I — was with French officials in Paris who were communicating this, and you know, in doing so, on a background basis, and on a personal basis, saying that one of the things that they’re facing is why did this happen, why did this happen? A lot of it has looked at their relation with the United States. I got an email this morning saying that’s not why, our proximity to Syria and all things Syria is profound and big, but he said the bigger part of this is that, for a variety of reasons, directly and indirectly, ISIS has been incubated for two years with an absence of US leadership, and that the United States needs to take the security of its allies more seriously, and it was a direct implication that we had not done and acted in a way to take action…he recognized in his email that I have a different view of that, that that’s not my view, but that — very clearly I sensed in these emails and the exchanges, frustration, tenseness, but also confidence. He said, we will prevail in this, but there was a real frustration and tenseness over that. And a frustration that — not only about what was happening and unfolding on the streets of Paris, but where it had come from, how it had been able to metastasize and to grow over the last two years.///

To be fair, this is the longest he's ever held a job.

Obama never learned how to negotiate, and now it is too late for him to learn.

//Most notably, of course, he said he would take executive action on immigration by year's end unless Republicans passed a bill.  It’s certainly a bold negotiating tactic: You can do what I want, or I’ll go ahead and do what I want anyway.  This is how you “negotiate” with a seven-year old, not a Senate Majority Leader.

I’m not sure that isn’t what Obama thinks he’s doing, and I’m sure many of my left-leaning readers are chuckling right now at the comparison.  But Mitch McConnell is not a seven year old; he’s an adult, and he just won an election in which voters repudiated Obama and his party. (Temporarily, I am sure, but just the same: As someone once said, “Elections have consequences.")  McConnell is not  the proverbial Tea Party extremist who won’t negotiate; he’s an establishment guy, known as a strategist and a tactician, not an ideologue (which is why the Tea Party isn’t that fond of him).  In short, he’s someone who can make deals.  Responding to McConnell’s rather gracious remarks about finding common goals by announcing that you know what the American public wants, and you’re going to give it to them no matter what their elected representatives say, seems curiously brash.  It might chill the atmosphere today when he sits down with congressional leaders.

 I wonder if Obama even knows how to negotiate with Republicans.  It’s not as if he has a long, distinguished record of passing legislation in a mixed environment.  His later years in the Illinois State Senate enjoyed a solid Democratic majority, and he jumped into the U.S. Senate at a propitious time. Soon after he arrived came the wave of 2006, when Democrats controlled both houses of congress by comfortable margins, and Senator Obama was far too junior to be negotiating with the White House.  Then came the financial crisis, and another wave, and Obama spent the first two years of his presidency in a happy situation where he could get things done without needing the support of the opposition.  He didn’t even negotiate with his own party; the Senate negotiated his health care bill, and Nancy Pelosi whipped it through the House.

 Post 2010, of course, he also hasn’t had much practice negotiating.  I’m not interested in another tedious argument about who did what to whom; whatever the cause and whoever’s fault it may be, the fact remains that the president has spent the last four years in a stalemate: Neither party can leave, and neither party can win.

 It’s a little late in the president’s career to learn the fine art of making deals with people who fundamentally disagree with you, but might be willing to work on whatever small goals you might share.  I suspect it feels more comfortable to go along with the strategy that has worked decently well over the last four years: hold your ground, complain about Republican intransigence, and hope that Republican legislators give you another opportunity to play long-suffering adult in the room.//

Why should we be surprised?....

... "President" is the longest job he's ever had.

//It was only a matter of time.

President Obama, a short-term college professor and failed community organizer who became a mostly absentee state senator and then an all-but-invisible U.S. senator, has Petered out. Per the Peter Principle, he has risen to his level of incompetence — some would argue far beyond it.

The president — and the president alone — let Ebola into America. He could have made one phone call (even on Saturday, when playing his 200th round of golf as president) and said one sentence to protect all Americans from the usually fatal disease: “No one from West Africa gets into the country.”//

OK...we get it.  Racism is bad and we're sorry.

Can we elect someone competent next time?

Apparently, he's not reading the paper or watching TV.

This is from Obama's West Point speech:

//Instead, what we have is, as I say in the speech, this moment in which we are incredibly fortunate to have a strong economy that is getting stronger, no military peer that threatens us, no nation-state that anytime soon intends to go to war with us//

Strong economy?   According to his administration, the economy contracted during the last quarter.

Could you imagine Bush being permitted to say that the economy was strong when it was actually in decline?

Other than that the speech was panned.

The Big Speech Fails...

...but really haven't they all failed.

The one speech that made his career was his 2004 Democrat Convention speech.

1. Washington Post Editorial Board

“President Obama has retrenched U.S. global engagement in a way that has shaken the confidence of many U.S. allies and encouraged some adversaries. That conclusion can be heard not just from Republican hawks but also from senior officials from Singapore to France and, more quietly, from some leading congressional Democrats. As he has so often in his political career, Mr. Obama has elected to respond to the critical consensus not by adjusting policy but rather by delivering a big speech.

In his address Wednesday to the graduating cadets at West Point , Mr. Obama marshaled a virtual corps of straw men, dismissing those who “say that every problem has a military solution,” who “think military intervention is the only way for America to avoid looking weak,” who favor putting “American troops into the middle of [Syria’s] increasingly sectarian civil war,” who propose “invading every country that harbors terrorist networks” and who think that “working through international institutions . . . or respecting international law is a sign of weakness.”///

//4. Daily Mail Online
“Receiving tepid applause and a short standing ovation from less than one-quarter of the audience upon his introduction, Obama argued for a contradictory foreign policy that relies on NATO and the United Nations while insisting that ‘America must always lead on the world stage.’
‘If we don’t, no one else will,’ he insisted.”//

Wasn't this the President who told us that he was going to lower the levels of the oceans just by being elected President...

...but now the press corps is saying that his followers are stupid for believing in his magical powers?????????????

At today’s press conference, President Obama spent a fair amount of time pushing back on what some of us are calling the “Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power.” This theory — which seems to hold broad sway over many in the press — holds that presidents should be able to bend Congress to their will, and any failure to do so proves their weakness and perhaps even their irrelevance.

The Victim Presidency

The final evolution of the "Empty Suit Presidency":

As many have remarked here, Barack Obama has a strange habit of acting like somebody else has been president these past years. It’s really odd.

In his speech on the VA, the president said that he would not stand for things that he clearly and undeniably has stood for some years now, and swore that he would not tolerate that which has has been tolerating since 2009.

He’s been described as acting like a bystander to his own presidency, but it’s more like he’s a victim of it, as though the presidency were this terrible thing that just happened to him one day that he’s now courageously dealing with.

His demeanor is that of a man who has been diagnosed with cancer who puts on a brave face, gets up every morning, and reiterates his determination to “beat this thing.” (Not that I don’t think the presidency is a cancer, but that’s a point for a different post.)

It’s a remarkable talent he has. When he was getting beat up politically for his association with that goofy racist clergyman, he lectured us on the evils of racism, as though we’d been the ones sitting in on those hateful sermons. Every time he has some spectacular screw-up, which seems to be about once a quarter, he pronounces himself outraged, as though he had not failed us but had been failed himself.

So Barack Obama has sworn that he will not tolerate the incompetence of the Obama administration. I’d like to think that that means he is going to resign, but I don’t think that’s what he meant.

The most incompetent leadership in history.

Peggy Noonan writes:

For four years I have been told, by those who’ve worked in the administration and those who’ve visited it as volunteers or contractors, that the Obama White House isn’t organized. It’s just full of chatter. Meetings don’t begin on time, there’s no agenda, the list of those invited seems to expand and contract at somebody’s whim. There is a tendency to speak of how a problem will look and how its appearance should be handled, as opposed to what the problem is and should be done about it. People speak airily, without point. They scroll down, see a call that has to be returned, pop out and then in again.

It does not sound like a professional operation. And this is both typical of White Houses and yet on some level extreme. People have always had meetings to arrange meetings, but the lack of focus, the lack of point, the sense that they are operating within accepted levels of incoherence—this all sounds, actually, peculiar.

And when you apply this to the ObamaCare debacle, suddenly it seems to make sense. The White House is so unformed and chaotic that they probably didn’t ignore the problem, they probably held a million meetings on it. People probably said things like, “We’re experiencing some technological challenges but we’re sure we’ll be up by October,” and other people said, “Yes, it’s important we launch strong,” and others said, “The Republicans will have a field day if we’re not.” And then everyone went to their next meeting. And no one did anything. And the president went off and made speeches.

Because the doing isn’t that important, the talking is.

It's a good thing we have a sophisticated leftist beloved of the world community -

and a Nobel Prize winner! - rather than that cowboy!

U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has achieved the hat trick of alienating all factions in Egypt.

Schadenfreude - it's so invigorating on a Friday.

Best analysis ever of ...

...Why.We.Are.So.Boned.


From Moe Lane:

Let me give all of you the basic background, first: Obama has yet to make a decision on the Keystone Pipeline, and he’s more or less going to seriously anger a key block of supporters either way. If he approves the pipeline, he annoys Hollywood celebrities, radical environmentalists, and other scientific illiterates; and if Obama rejects it, he infuriates Big Labor, or at least those parts of it that still do actual work. The result? Barack Obama is… dithering; which pleases nobody. The union workers aren’t working, and the scientific illiterates are justifiably paranoid that the current no-by-default is unsustainable in the long run. So, of course, both sides are now trying to pressure the White House into resolving the situation.
What both sides don’t quite realize is that the problem that the administration is facing a structural problem, not an ideological one. It’s not that the White House doesn’t want to resolve the issue; it just doesn’t know how. 

This next part is unavoidably geeky, but necessary: because it’s there where you can find the specialized jargon that can describe the Obama administration. To sum it up for the gaming geeks who are reading this: Barack Obama is a munchkin mini-maxer who has put all of his points into “winning elections” because he found an exploit that made him President early. And now he’s trying to solve everything else via The Gun Is My Skill List and/or button-mashing, with predictable results. 

…No, seriously: if you have a very specific background that entire paragraph makes crystalline sense. But I will happily translate. 

To begin with: a munchkin (or power gamer, or mini-maxer, or a bunch of terms that cannot be repeated here) is a type of gamer (roleplaying, computer, roleplaying-computer) who looks for loopholes in the rules – because games have rules, and there isn’t a ruleset in the world that cannot be manipulated by somebody with enough motivation/obsession. And it turns out that the American Democratic primary system was full of such loopholes, which is why Barack Obama won the nomination in 2008 despite losing almost all the big Democratic primary states (and arguably the popular vote, depending on how you score Michigan). And it also turns out that the intersection of our electoral system with our rapidly-expanding online culture can produce what computer gamers call “exploits:” which is to say, a glitch in the system that gives someone an unintended benefit (if it just crashes the system, it’s a bug). Strictly speaking, the system is not designed to elevate a state Senator to the Presidency in five years – for what turned out to be very good reasons – but it can be done. 

The problem, though, is that Barack Obama (and I should note that I am lumping his election team in with him here, as Obama largely does not really have much of an independent personality himself) has what the gaming community calls “mini-maxed” himself. Let me explain that one a bit more: lots of video games allow for the player to control a character that gets better at the game as he or she goes through the various game ‘boards.’ Special abilities, improved combat techniques, cool-looking items: if you’re playing a game that is something else besides a straight combat game, you can usually improve how you interact with computer-generated characters (“NPCs”) in the game, or learn how to make your own cool items, or whatever else the game designers thought that you’d like to do. Since gamers like to have unique characters (this is very much the young adult male equivalent to playing dress-up with dolls) there’s usually a way to customize your character, which is to say: people get to choose how and where the character improves. 

Mini-maxing is when a player designs a character that is fantastically good at one thing, at the expense of everything else. So you could end up with a character who is, say, obscenely good at hitting things with a sword – but can’t convince a bunch of sailors to drink free beer. The mini-maxer doesn’t mind; he’ll just go around the game trying to resolve as many problems as he can by hitting them with a sword (tabletop gamers – err, “D&D players” – often call this The Gun is My Skill List, although obviously substitute a sword for a gun in the name). The problems that the mini-maxer can’t resolve that way he’ll either ignore until later, or else flail about on the screen while hitting the buttons quickly and/or at random (“button-mashing”), in the hopes that eventually the laws of probability will allow him to bull on through anyway.
And that’s where we are now. Barack Obama knows how to do one thing: elect Barack Obama to public office. And that’s not ‘elect Democrats.’ Or ‘elect liberals.’ Or even ‘elect people that Barack Obama likes.’ It’s just him: his team is trying pretty hard right now to figure out how to use their over-specialized skill more generally, but they don’t have much time to figure it out and the system is actually rigged against them in this case. Barack Obama certainly doesn’t know how to govern effectively; take away a Congress that will rubber-stamp the Democratic agenda and he flails about. He’s so bad at this, in fact, that when confronted with a situation where all he had to do was do nothing to fulfill a campaign promise (the tax cuts) we somehow ended up with a situation where Obama gave in on 98% of those tax cuts and voluntarily signed up to take the blame for the AMT fix. In short: Obama was woefully unprepared for the Presidency, and he hasn’t really spent the last four years trying to catch up. Instead, he goes from situation to situation either trying to recast the problem in ways that he does have some skill in (permanent campaigning for office), or else… flail about on the scene while hitting people’s buttons quickly and/or at random, in the hopes that eventually the laws of probability will allow him to bull on through anyway. 

If none of this sounds like any way to run a railroad – or lay a transcontinental energy pipeline – well. It’s not, particularly. Unfortunately, we’re stuck with the guy until January 2017. Sorry about that: I did what I could.

Panetta: Obama Absent Night of Benghazi

According to The Weekly Standard:

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta testified this morning on Capitol Hill that President Barack Obama was absent the night four Americans were murdered in Benghazi on September 11, 2012:

Panetta said that Obama left operational details, including knowledge of what resources were available to help the Americans under seize, "up to us." 

In fact, Panetta says that the night of 9/11, he did not communicate with a single person at the White House. The attack resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.

Panetta said that, save their 5 o'clock prescheduled meeting with the president the day of September 11, Obama did not call or communicate in anyway with the defense secretary that day. There were no calls about the what was going on in Benghazi. He never called to check-in. 

James Taranto on "Our Butch President."

Taranto writes:

Just seven weeks after a massacre at an American elementary school, the White House released a photo of the president firing a gun. Strangely, no one seems to think this is in atrocious taste. We imagine the reaction would be quite different if it were, say, George W. Bush.

Yeah! Can you imagine!

And this:

The photo, purportedly shot last Aug. 4 (which happens to be the president's birthday), shows Obama holding a shotgun. The barrel is smoking, indicating that the gun has just been fired. What's odd about it is that the president is aiming straight ahead, as if he were firing a rifle at a stationary target.

But in skeet shooting, the target, a disk known as a clay pigeon, is moving. It is launched from one of two "houses" and travels in a parabolic trajectory across the field. In order to hit it, one has to move the gun so as to follow the path of the clay. It's not impossible that one would fire at shoulder level, as Obama is doing in the photo, but it's unlikely. We therefore surmise that the picture is the product of a photo shoot, not a skeet shoot.

Expressions of dubiety about the photo have prompted some weirdly intense reactions from Obama partisans. Our old pal John Avlon lashes out at "Republican conspiracy nuts" who are "partakers of the paranoid style in American politics" and have succumbed to "the unhinged, hate-fueled impulse" toward "disrespect and near-dehumanization of this president."

Dehumanization? The suspicion here is that when he claimed to be a skeet shooter, Obama was talking to Buncombe--that is, speaking insincerely for political purposes. Has Avlon had so little contact with Homo sapiens that he fails to recognize that is an all too human thing to do? Is he too naive to know it is a behavior characteristic of politicians?

 

Without a doubt, this is among the most unintelligible, incoherent prose ...

...to ever get gargled forth by a politician:

"Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society's ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise; our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, are constants in our character.

But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. For the American people can no more meet the demands of today's world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we'll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people."

If fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges, does a lack of fidelity require old responses to old challenges?

If preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action, does preserving our collective freedomes ultimately require individual action?  You might think it would since "ultimately" collections of people only work through the actions of individuals.

Who was this person who was advocating that Communism and Fascism be met with militias and muskets?  The pro-Nazi Charles Lindberg perhaps?  Or was it the Crypto-Communist Henry Wallace?

Didn't we already spend something like $6 trillion to build those roads and networks and research labs?  If not, I would like to see an accounting for how that money was spent?  Or is that too much like dissent and not "collective" enough because, you know, rich people! and vaginas! and Elmo! and binders! and Mitt Romney murdered that guy's wife! and a dog on the roof of a car!

It's really simple - Stop Apologizing to Barbarians.

But history's greatest President doesn't think American values are something he needs to defend, so he's funding an "apology ad" to be aired in Pakistan:

Call it a video reprise of the Obama Apology Tour: "The American Embassy in Islamabad, in a bid to tamp down public rage over the anti-Islam film produced in the U.S., is spending $70,000 to air an ad on Pakistani television that features President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton denouncing the video," the Associated Press reports.

The 30-second spot was released yesterday and is running "on seven Pakistani networks." It's also getting some free airtime here in the U.S.; yesterday Fox News Channel's "Hannity" ran it before an interview with Sarah Palin (who was, not unpredictably, critical).

The ad rehearses, with Urdu subtitles, last week's statements from Obama and Mrs. Clinton in which he declares that America "respects all faiths" and she asserts: "Let me state very clearly, and I hope it is obvious, that the United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video. We absolutely reject its content and message."

Basically, Obama's message is the tactic of liberals for the last 40 years, i.e, "Don't blame us, we're good Americans. We hate those bad Americans that you hate."

James Taranto explains the problem - Obama's Anti-Americanism isn't the same as the Islamofascist's Anti-Americanism:

The Reuters report underscores the basic conceptual problems with the Obama-Clinton apology. For one thing, it assumes that militant Islamic anti-Americanism is based on essentially the same critique as the multicultural left's anti-Americanism. But how is the claim that America "respects all faiths" supposed to appease people who burn churches? Nor is the secretary's assurance that the U.S. government "had absolutely nothing to do with this video" responsive to the demand that its maker "be handed over to us so we can cut him up into tiny pieces."

It seems likely that this Mohammed Tariq Khan faults the U.S. government for failing to do so. Now of course Americans understand what Mrs. Clinton means when she says the government has nothing to do with it. The video's makers are alive and free not because the government has permitted it but because the Constitution prohibits the government from doing anything else. Don't blame Obama, don't even blame George W. Bush. Blame James Madison.

Too bad for Obama - the Islamofascists will think he's a "Bad American" so long as he doesn't submit to Islam.

James Geraghty: "You'll Never Guess Who Obama Spoke with Yesterday Afternoon. No, Really."

The President has a lot on his plate, what with an economy taking a nose-dive and the barbarians he caters to attacking Americans, so it just makes sense that he would spend the anniversary of 9/11 on a radio show featuring "the pimp with the limp."

James Geraghty explains:

On Tuesday, President Obama spent the morning marking the 9/11 anniversary at a memorial service in the Pentagon, telling families of the victims, "But no matter how many years pass, no matter how many times we come together on this hallowed ground, know this: That you will never be alone, your loved ones will never be forgotten. They will endure in the hearts of our nation because through their sacrifice they helped us make the America we are today, an America that has emerged even stronger."

And then . . . in the afternoon . . .

President Barack Obama put new meaning to the cliche "wide-ranging interview" while speaking with DJ Laz of Miami Latin station Romance 106.7 FM Tuesday morning.

"DJ Laz!" said Obama.

"O-BAMA" said DJ Laz back, who is also known as the Pimp with the Limp.

When asked how he was, Obama said, "Blessed and highly favored."

When Laz said that it was an honor to have Obama on, Obama replied, "I'm the one who should be humbled. You're big time. You've got Pitbull and Flo Rida and all these guys just beating a path to your door. And so I'm hoping I can get a little of that magic from you in this interview."

. . . Obama gave a long defense on Medicare and attacked the Romney/Ryan ticket for ending "Medicare as we know it."

"My Cuban-American parents would not be happy about that!" replied Laz.

If you wrote a novel depicting an incumbent president doing an interview with a radio talk show host entitled, "The Pimp with the Limp," people would throw it across the room, calling it silly, too farfetched to be an effective parody, too ridiculous to be good satire.