Confusion, Confusion, Confusion!

I want you to  think back. I don't care how old you are. I just want you to think back to the time when you first started paying serious attention to the national news. When you reached that point of maturity when you realized, that it is important who it is that is President of the United States. When you understood that we, as citizens, have a lot of ourselves invested in the person that holds that office. When you got it that the President was not just the leader of a political party but the leader of the American people and the leader of the free world.

Presidents, by the nature of their job, create news. When they first take office, they lay the ground work for their administration. Many appointments are must be made to fill the offices that run the country. Some appointments are controversial. That makes news. The President must set down policy. That makes news. Once an administration is up and running, the flow of news usually abates to a reasonable trickle. A President that is highly visible in his first six months in office is seen only on an occasion of importance. If all goes well the administration becomes a smoothly running machine.

This has not been so with the Obama administration. A president, like a beautiful woman, loses much charm if seen to often, to exposed, and in awkward situations. As we are told by his poll numbers, Mr. Obama's charm factor is disappearing faster than cookies at Christmas. When a president feels obliged to give a daily self-serving lecture, people feel less obliged to watch and listen. Too many words, not enough serious meaning.

Every president has a scandal or two during their administration. If they don't put their own foot in it, it is almost guaranteed that the opposition party will drum up something to cause a bit of embarrassment. But the Obama administration has taken this way beyond the pale. 

On almost a weekly basis we are shuttled from scandal to crisis and back to the next scandal. It is an amazing blur of incompetence that the administration denies, ignores, or labels phony. They are real. They are so very real. And they have a price tag. They cost us in real dollars. They cost us in stature. They cost us in power. They cost us in respect.

Old allies blow us off as unreliable. Old enemies poke a virtual finger in our collective eye. Creditor countries think they own us. Today's enemies do not fear us. So we are blessed with a very needy leader whose numbers are somewhere south of his kneecaps. We also are faced with a crisis that he brought us into, in Syria. Suddenly time has become unimportant in this crisis that was so important because "women and children are dying". So now our leader tosses it back to Congress. Whenever they get to it. No rush.

And while all this is going on, our leader is hearing a small voice in his ear coming from Iran. Their new leader, he is not as hard line you know, might be willing to talk. Right. Trust me, the Iranians are not softening one bit.You know that if that voice is heard often enough and loud enough, Mr Obama will buy into the fantasy that the Ayatollahs spin for him and the Iranians will put another notch on their proverbial bedpost.

But please, don't forget all the other unresolved scandals. Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the IRS, spying on reporters, ignoring Constitutional limitations, the NSA spying, the White House Entry Log, and so much more. I sometimes lose track of them all in the confusion, confusion, confusion.