Arguments continue to be made that Barack Obama is not legally qualified to hold the office of President of the United States, based on questions about the circumstances surrounding his birth.  While the courts continue to refuse to hear cases on this, that the President continues to allow the question to be asked is at direct odds with all his calls for honesty and transparency.  Like the old saying goes, “He who has nothing to hide, hides nothing.”  Surely it would be a simple matter to allow the release of records and thereby properly refute claims by his family of a Kenyan birth to a mother not old enough to confer U.S. citizenship upon him.  His college records remain protected as well, which again gives, at best, yet another appearance of impropriety.  Like the best of cases made up purely of circumstantial evidence, something both his Harvard law degree and his $800,000 worth of lawyers fighting to keep all his records sealed surely must know, many people have a hard time believing the answer would be something as simple as he doesn’t want anyone to know his grades in school were even worse than those of our much-ridiculed former President George W. Bush.

 

That President Obama is inadequate in his role as President has become a matter of daily course.  While both Hugo Chavez and the Ayatollah Khomeini aren’t exactly leading anyone’s list of reputable advisors, that they have both come out in the last week to blatantly blast Obama with both barrels in derision of his policies and his lack of concrete “change” speaks to the low level of regard with which the United States is now held.  And that is a dangerous place for us to be, yet President Obama continues to attempt to soothe the savage beasts with lullabies of cooperation and dialogue while treating our allies with casual disregard and in some instances outright disrespect.  As if it never occurs to him that no matter what America says or what America does, there are some people in this world who wish for nothing less than America to disappear off the face of the Earth.  

  

Further inadequacy is demonstrated in his insistance – despite rumblings from Europe that the dollar should no longer be taken seriously – that taking trillions and trillions from zero will somehow magically transform the raging rivers of federal red ink into a viable and stable national budget.  

  

The qualities required for a President to be effective are not consistent with the actions of Barack Obama.  He shows more concern about winning a game of oneupmanship with people like Rush Limbaugh and doing late-night comedy with Jay Leno (a trip paid for by the taxpayers) than properly addressing, say, the economy.   Effective leaders care enough to know the facts at hand and are able to speak intelligently most of the time without the aid of a teleprompter.  Functioning properly in the role of President is not resorting to “gallows humor” when asked legitimate questions; indeed, these never-ending media appearances only serve to show that President Obama lacks the maturity required to lead the United States.  He shows the world that he is more enamored with the color of authority and privilege he perceives his role confers upon him than he is with the grave responsibilities it brings.  This immature perspective is reinforced by alleging to have been “blindsided” by the AIG bonuses.  I don’t know very many people who find out what it was they did at work by watching the evening news, do you?  Oh, but I forgot.  When he was to have been serving as a Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama was out campaigning instead of working to represent those who had elected him so apparently couldn’t be bothered to know just what he was voting for or what his colleagues were doing.  Along the same lines he couldn’t be bothered to read the stimulus bill.  The applause of the crowds apparently meant more to him – and still does – than actually doing real work.

  

President G.W. Bush may not have been the brightest bulb in the drawer and though his business ventures were all failures, at least he had legitimate experience from which to draw when he was elected.  Including military experience, such as it was.  Barack Obama cannot make the same claim.  Since coming of legal age he has done nothing of real value, he has never gotten his hands dirty doing what anyone might recognize as a regular job.  He is the stuff of debates and models and multi-layered theories, of myths and fantasies that have never known the hard knocks from application in the real world.  Yet he feels entitled to sit in the Oval Office and to make a mockery of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and with the stroke of several pens – because of course it’s all about creating historic souvenirs – destroy the free market.

  

It is no longer a case where the silly Emperor has no clothes on.  It is that the Emperor is, whether naked or clothed, dangerously incompetent.