Even Stern Mister Obama striding out onto the stage, firm-set and grave, declaring the Persian Perfidy(!) struck a nebbish chord I won't soon forget.
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Believe it or not, I still struggle with twinges of conscience over my initial skepticism towards Obama rising to the level of settled repugnance.

Still, I can't warm to his monotonous, staccato delivery with that rising inflection of emphasis ending every declarative sentence.

Maybe it's him, maybe it's me. But it strikes my ear as someone overly determined to sound Firm and Decisive, and project qualities of Firmness and Decisiveness, regardless of whether or not he really is being Firm and Decisive.

More succinctly: he sounds phony to me.

And when he Talks Tough, he comes off like a tight-lipped* middle-school principal grimly announcing that assemblies will be cancelled for all time if the person or persons who let all the air out of the principal's tires doesn't come forward voluntarily.

So I am grateful for your gratifying corroboration on this point.

* AFAIK, this isn't listed as a racism "tell" on the PC taboo index, but I don't keep up with its constant revisions.

The real shame is the way you come in here and hijack the thread with your paranoid and pernicious theories about legions of zombie "Muslims" descending on your homeland.
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I would've put "homeland" in ironic, aka "scare" quotes, but that's me.

Otherwise-- before the God I still don't believe in sent killfile as a miraculous cure to end excessive cramping and sweating in my scrolling finger, I spotted the newcomer Steve Klein for exactly what he turned out to be.

There's a certain contrived easygoing humility trolls display when first penetrating a comments cell wall:

Howdy, everybody, I'm new here! I'm just an ordinary, unprepossessing fellow who's become intrigued by this-here Glenn fella, and if you don't mind I might stick around and join the conversation.

I'm not as smart as some of the gents 'n ladies here, but the main thing is that I want to learn-- I Want to Learn! Oh, and I guess I do have a couple of ideas of my own that don't exactly jibe with some others here-- but that's what these comments are all about, right?

This contrived disingenuousness also smacks of teevee characters like "Columbo" and "Matlock"-- hi fellas, I'm just a bit of a muddled boob with a couple of stupid questions; do ya have a minute?

Wait, maybe "Clark Kent" is a better analogy-- because, fast-forward about three pages, and Mister (?) Newbie has torn off his specs and overhauls, and leaped out of the box as Captain Ziocon! And like our president, he's all about his agenda.

As if this, of all blogs, needs another Captain Ziocon!

The original sheepish deference is replaced with a boa-constrictor's primal urge to squeeze and squeeze until it has crushed the life out of the discussion and Prevailed to its satisfaction. Despite its pretense to open-mindedness, and feigned delicacy towards sharp and justifiably hostile rebuttals, it cannot be uncoiled by plain fact or logic, much less well-deserved Dope Slaps.

The more its interlocutors struggle, the more tightly it squeezes.

As Derbig has so sagaciously noted, blame it on Ziocaine.

The O'Hanlon book cover puts me in mind of a "Seinfeld" scene.

Jerry, confronting the dilemma of dating a girl who is as sexy as she is stupid-- i.e. very-- fantasizes himself split into two conflicted Jerrys: "Brain" Jerry vs. "Penis" Jerry. They are playing a game of chess to decide whether or not to break up with the girl.

In this scene, "Brain" Jerry is wearing a cap that looks like a brain; "Penis" Jerry is wearing a helmet like the one on the O'Hanlon cover. [link@sig]

Sorry, the combination of the helmet and chess piece brought this to mind.

The only difference is that in the "Seinfeld" episode, the brain won.

A self-styled "pragmatic" president never stands so tall as when he stoops to fellate a fork-tongued weasel like Arlen Specter.

That really tells you everything you need to know about Obama's priorities.

By now, all of the honeymoon hype about Obama adopting the supposedly Lincolnesque approach of surrounding himself with rivals is flatter then yesterday's champagne.

And remember the optimistic projection that Obama's passionate embrace of Wall Street banksters was in fact the shrewd strategy of keeping his enemies close?

No, Obama doesn't welcome criticism and challenge. In the two-dimensional, amoral world of Inside Politics, it's all about the numbers and the benjamins.

And a second term, naturally; that's why he's sacrificing the shorter-term prospect of greater congressional cooperation, I presume. The incumbent "made men" may not take orders from him, or even give him the sycophantic respect he'd prefer-- but they're made men, and you don't want to rock the boat so they'll get as much as splashed, much less toss them overboard.

Ironically, Obama is again revealed to discerning eyes as the very antithesis of the "Change" that his marketing slogan promised!

I presume that he and Rahm have calculated that the "benefit" of hanging on to the Blue Dogs, and affectionately adopt the odd defective weasel, outweighs the "cost" of training puppies-- even if those ol' Dogs keep nipping at him.

Obama will trade values for prospective votes any day.