On February 29, 2009, a carnival parade in Dusseldorf, Germany, boasted the above float. I see that the Germans believe that His O'liness--and I do not in light of the above picture apologize for the sneer in the soubriquet--will lead the world to prosperity, or the Progressive World of Next Tuesday™, whatever, with Europe hanging onto his skirt. Sad to think of the nation that gave us Bach and Gauss and Goethe sinking to this. But then Germans with SatNav systems in their cars tend to turn into buildings when told by the voice, "Turn right."

A friend of mine suggested that Barack Hussein Obama was the stupidest smart man he'd ever seen, and on reflection there is some truth to that. I suppose that you could except the academic left, degreed and pedigreed but diploma-foolish, but recall that Mr. Obama's c.v. is in academia, training ACORN in voter fraud community organizing, or running for office. Let's never forget that Jesse Jackson memorably said, "He ain't run nothing but his mouth." When Jesse Jackson knows that a man is composed of equal parts attitude, mouth and hubris, you have learned something.

Thomas Sowell's article, Ego and Mouth, in NRO contains this nonpareil insight:

Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else.

Considering what I've had to listen to from the left sneering about the infelicitous phrases of George W. Bush, I take particular delight in hearing my assistant refer to him as Uhbama. With reason. If he's in a position requiring a response which was not scripted, he's wrong-footed, as an actor who is sure of his script is wrong-footed when he's not fed the right line. Come to think of it, that's a pretty good analogy because I don't get the sense that Mr. Obama is anything more than the sum of his diction, his dress and his mannerisms. Appliquéd of course on top of that monstrous ego.

This is borne out by him letting the Congress write this stimulus bill--just where is Nancy Pelosi's hand? Are we being led by Pelosi's sock puppet? Obama wants to revamp health care, and said to Congress, "Here. You come up with something," and implicit in this was that he wanted to preen and posture.

He hasn't done enough governing as either a state Senator or a U. S. Senator to know how to govern; he was surprised to find that huge spending bill on his desk, even though he ought to have had a hand in the past at making that sausage. And now he's going to turn crucial decisions over to a rag-tag bunch of Congressmen just so he can put his name on it. Doesn't he know that when it's a disaster that his name will be all over it? Is he so arrogant that he thinks it won't matter? This is not the view of a wise man. It could be the view of a stupid smart man.

This is like a professor telling his graduate students what to research and publishing it under his name, but I'll bet the professor has better editing skills and even the most shiftless graduate student looks like Diogenes compared to some of the Democrats in Congress. And the professor was, at one time, an undergraduate and then a graduate student, and he had done some heavy lifting. He didn't matriculate directly into running for the professoriate, without bothering to turn in term papers.

Obama doesn't want any of the work. I'm not sure that he realizes that work is important. Has he ever really done any work except run a campaign? Obama wants to smile and be on camera, and showboat and listen to the oohs and ahhs of the admiring throng, taking a turn on the presidential catwalk, showing some leg for the heaving breasts and fluttering eyelashes of the press, while letting others do the heavy lifting. And I'm not sure that he even has the ability to understand if the lifting that they do would be good or not, so great is his immersion in the cult of Obama, which believes that his personality is of such force that all He has to do is talk, and things will be resolved. He can sit with terrorists and because of His winning smile they will have a Hallmark moment and decide not to kill us. That because He wants to fix the economy, it will bend to His will--this is called the pathetic fallacy, and it would be pathetic except that we will have to live through it. We are the grist for the mill of his amour propre.

Evidently Mr. Obama's TelePromTer has a blog of its own, and here it is.

Someone unkind called a woman, "A rag, a bone and a hank of hair." Mr. Obama is a voice, a smile, and his ego, all of which amount to being a President only in the eyes of his adoring throngs but which do not, sadly, amount to being presidential in terms that are of use to this nation.

Even now devoted Democrats are wondering at the competence of his team--cannot these people check for dirty laundry for nominees? A series of embarrassments, and they never learn. Propose one person, and there's a tax problem. Another, another tax problem. I find it wryly amusing that some of Bush's nominees had nanny problems while Obama's nominees have blatant tax evasion. But the fact that these people were proposed at all suggests incompetence at the very least of the Obama team, or most probably an incompetence rising from the self-love of a man who has not ever had to do anything except look good. Like a runway model. For really, isn't that what he is? He looks good and is arrayed in the finest leftist opinion, fresh from the House of Harvard and as he struts on the public stage the strobe lights pop and with every star turn politico-fashionistas swoon with delight.

As things stand now, Mr. Obama is not a president, but a president-manqué. For the sake of the country I hope he grows into the job. If his ego will let him admit to being wrong.

I wonder, if at the end of the Obama administration, after all the damage that he with his self-obsession and delegating of hard work to others can do, T. S. Eliot will have the last word on his administration, as in "The Hollow Men":

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us--if at all--not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.