"Mission Accomplished"

Not quite seven years ago Chris Matthews was feeling a thrill up his leg and waxing orgasmically on television over the image of George Bush strutting on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier wearing a flight suit. Monday he is similarly enraptured by the sight of Barack Obama strolling the halls of Washington, in his view, wearing passage of “health care reform” as if it were some kind of Superman suit.

The man is a complete idiot, with his endless enthusiasms for the visions of the moment. Somebody needs to point out to him that “health care reform” or not, Obama still needs to use a bridge to cross the Potomac.

If I don’t see Obama as the Caped Crusader after the passage of a bill by Congress that contains enough about health insurance that it can be labeled “health care reform,” maybe that’s because I did not see him as a feeble Clark Kent prior to that event.

In his campaign, Obama said that a president should be able to “walk and chew gum at the same time.” Unlike the morons on cable news, who measure him by the gum chewing alone, some of us have been measuring him by both the walking and the gum chewing. While the cable news has been breathlessly waiting for him to swallow his gum, us grownups have noticed that he has managed to walk quite a long ways and, unlike Matthews, we did not really expect that he that he would swallow the damned gum and so were not surprised that he has not.

Last week, Matthews was droning at great length about the drubbing that Democrats were going to take in the fall elections, a full seven months away. With passage of one bill by Congress, which polls at only 50% in public opinion, he is now saying that the Democrats will triumph because Obama is such a tower of strength.

I’m beginning to think my “I watch him so that you don’t have to” is losing viability. It may be time to devolve that responsibility back to you.