NOW THEY TELL US...:

Obama, All at Sea: It’s the new president’s mythology that urgently needs some stimulus. (Mark Steyn, 2/06/09, National Review)

In the Washington Post, E. J. Dionne tried to break it gently to us: “No occupant of the White House has ever been able to walk on water.”

Yeah, sure, no previous occupant of the White House has been able to walk on water—your Eisenhowers and Roosevelts, your Chester Arthurs and Grover Clevelands and whatnot. But Barack Obama didn’t run as just another of those squaresville losers. He was gonna heal the planet, and lower the oceans. So, even if he couldn’t walk on water, he should at least be able to paddle in it. “He is a community organizer like Jesus was,” said Susan Sarandon, “and now we’re a community and he can organize us.”

So how’s that going? Jesus took a handful of loaves and two fish and fed 5,000 people. Barack wants to take a trillion pieces of pork and feed it to a handful of Democratic-party interest groups. Jesus picked twelve disciples. Barack seems to have gone more for one of those Dirty Dozen, caper-movie line-ups, where the mission is so perilous and so audacious that only the scuzziest lowlifes recruited from every waterfront dive have any chance of pulling it off. The ends justify the mean SOBs: “Indispensable” Tim Geithner, wanted in twelve jurisdictions for claiming his kid’s summer camp as a business expense, is the only guy with the savvy to crack the code of the U.S. economy. Tom “Home, James!” Daschle is the ruthless backseat driver who can figure out how to steer the rusting gurney of U.S. health care through the corridors of power. Charles Bronson is the hardbitten psycho ex-con who can’t go straight but knows how to turn around the Department of the Interior.

And, of course, there’s the lovable dough-faced shnook in the front office, Robert “Fall Guy” Gibbs. He didn’t do nuthin’ wrong, but, when seven nominees die in a grisly shootout with a Taxable Benefit Swat Team in the alley behind the Senate, he makes the mistake of looking sweaty and shifty while answering routine questions.