QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 8:43 A.M. ET:  Reader Alan Weick alerts us to an excellent piece by Kyle-Anne Shiver at Pajamas Media, containing this bit of truth:

Barack Obama holds, I think, the distinction of having been the presidential candidate with the highest self-esteem of any in American history. There was that moment in July 2008, when Lara Logan of CBS asked candidate Obama whether he ever had any doubts concerning his utter lack of foreign policy experience. The beyond-audacious candidate gave the one-word answer “Never.” An answer that pretty much says it all about this president’s inability to gauge reality.

Here we are less than two years into a presidency which appears more and more by the day as though it were some cosmic cruel joke. Americans are learning the hard way that political indoctrination parades as education, with grave national peril as its handmaid. An Ivy League degree ain’t what it used to be, in other words. At the very least, one would think that higher education ought to impart some sense of reality, some ability to prioritize problems, some idea how the real world works. If Barack Obama is any example, then one would need to conclude that the Ivies are long overdue for a bubble-burst, too.

Indeed they are, and they are joined in that overdue status by many other "prestige" colleges and universities.  Glenn Reynolds, a professor himself, who runs InstaPundit, predicted last week that the college bubble was about to burst, and I'm inclined to agree.  More and more parents are asking what their kids are getting for $42,000 a year...and that figure is temporary.

Kyle-Anne Shiver goes on:

When I see a president with enough leisure time on his hands to party (not on his own dime, lest we forget) chime in on a baseball umpire’s call, and never miss a beat on the Democrat fundraising circuit or a chance to shave one more point from his golf score while crises explode unfettered from here to kingdom come, I see a president so out of touch with reality that it would take a complete nitwit not to assume the man has simply lost all his bearings. Flipped out. Gone ‘round the bend. Is so out to lunch that he doesn’t even have the good sense to pretend he’s hard at work so as to quell the public’s growing-more-frantic-by-the-day concern.

I get the feeling he just doesn't like the job.  He likes having the job.  Obama reminds me of those many people I met at The New York Times who were bored to tears, yet were determined to die at the paper, their bodies lying in state at their desks for decades...just so they could say they wrote for The New York Times. 

We ought to make a deal with Obama:  Keep the title, leave the office.  Early.

You can even keep the neat jacket with the seal.

June 14, 2010