There is an endless supply of white men. There has always been a limited number of human beings. -- Old Lodge Skins

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I don't scorn, deride, or begrudge anyone's determination to resist defeatism, although I probably won't get any points for being objectively pro-defeatist.

But I just gotta say that I find it sad and depressing that we beleaguered and embattled minority of human beings-- if I may so flatter myself-- are so deeply traumatized, exhausted, and parched after seven lean years wandering in the desert created by a predatory criminal Executive Branch and a political elite that has transmogrified into a principle-free, ethics-free, para-corporate class of middle-managers that many of us desperately credit "Nowhere Man" Obama's disingenuous and equivocal position on this abominable legislation.

I've been keenly aware from the beginning that Obama is absolutely a messianic politician, and that support for Obama is contingent on making the requisite leap of faith, hope, and trust in the candidate. It doesn't have to be an enormous flying leap, although Obama certainly has a "hard core" of devoted zealots who indeed see him as quasi-supernatural-- oddly, even SF Chronicle writer Mark Morford seems to be espousing the view that Obama is, or at least shows indications of being, a transcendent, charismatic adept or spiritual master. Just as saints have various manifestations or avatars, some tout Obama as The Second Coming of Abraham Lincoln. I wish!

But the above-cited leap can be less dramatic, even merely a micro-leap. And certainly supporters have many mundane, secular reasons to find Obama a superior and worthy candidate. So I can understand and sympathize with those who are sticking with him despite this little letdown, and are thus seeing the crisis as opportunity-- just like that bogus motivational invention about the Chinese having a single ideogram that means both "crisis" and "opportunity".

But Obama's belated position boils down to "Trust me! I'll fix it!" Why is this sidewinding appeal, straight from the Confidence Man 101 syllabus, any more credible here than it is when uttered by the forked tongues of "lesser" politicians?

I submit that we have become so desperate that we are reduced to "hysterically trusting" Obama, for lack of a better term. I don't give a flying fuck about the high-wire he must tread so delicately; if a fucking supposed professor of Constitutional Law can give lip service to this counter-Constitutional, anti-Constitutional, post-Constitutional abomination, then throw out a couple of bones about fixing the really egregious excesses by and by-- in the fullness of time, as it were-- his messianic cred drops into the negative for Your Humble Narrator.

The jokes that Woody Allen used in "Annie Hall" are truly monumentally and profoundly expressive of the paradoxes of contemporary life. You may recall this one, extemporaneously paraphrased:

A man mentions to his psychiatrist that the man's brother thinks he's a chicken.

The psychiatrist suggests that the man bring his brother in for treatment.

The man replies: "Well, I would... but we need the eggs."

The best I can say about Obama today is: he's a good egg.