In his interview Tuesday evening with ABC’s Jake Tapper, President Obama was asked to reflect on the economy and his overall performance as president. Asked by Mr. Tapper how he would grade himself thus far, the president declined to give himself a grade, preferring, instead, to redirect viewers to all the work that still needs to be done, presumably by him. That is why Americans should re-elect him in 2012, in order to allow him to complete his work.

In his now classically narcissistic style, Mr. Obama refuses any self-criticism during the interview. He appears to expect that his authoritative statements about the issues that face our nation are sufficient for mere mortal Americans. When Mr. Tapper nudges the president to determine, we can only assume, whether Mr. Obama’s concept of his disastrous poll ratings is based in reality, the president responds, “I believe all the choices we’ve made have been the right ones.”

Many of us would have all to do to keep our mouths from dropping open as we sat, incredulous, at this response, but perhaps Jake Tapper’s professional journalistic training was seeing him through.

We are now at a point, with this president, when every speech, every interview, every press conference, every bus tour, is nothing but a series of distorted statements, meant to pull unthinking Americans into a shared delusion. The president is part illusionist, part hypnotist, hoping to lure the most ignorant Americans among us into his realm of unreality. He feels empowered to do this because, as he so often reminds us, “I’m the president!”

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By now, you’ve all seen it.  Gawker has reported on it, as has Huffington Post and Jake Tapper, among others.

It was tweeted this afternoon from the official Secret Service Twitter account and subsequently deleted by its author.  But Twitter has no mercy…delete can only delete if no eyes ever saw it in the first place.  Unfortunately for one Secret Service employee, eyes saw it.

I called the Secret Service Office of Public Affairs to ask for a comment.  I asked the question and almost immediately after identifying myself, was transferred to the voice mail of spokesman Robert Novy.  Luckily, Jake Tapper had already reached the office and received an official statement:

“An employee with access to the Secret Service’s Twitter account, who mistakenly believed they were on their personal account, posted an unapproved and inappropriate tweet,” Special Agent in Charge Edwin M. Donovan said in a statement to ABC News. “The tweet did not reflect the views of the U.S. Secret Service and it was immediately removed. We apologize for this mistake, and the user no longer has access to our official account. “

My first question was, ‘why is the Secret Service monitoring FOX News in the first place’?  But then I realized that such agencies monitor news outlets all the time – if they didn’t, they wouldn’t know which person in Congress just said something stupid that might prompt a foreign entity, or perhaps terrorists, to get really pissed at us.  And for other generally harmless reasons, too, of course.  It’s their public affairs staff doing the monitoring.  And besides, it’s Twitter.  We all know, Twitter is a public sandbox – you get in and play, and anyone can see you, and play with you.

I will admit however, I was slightly irked when I saw this in Jake Tapper’s report:

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The indispensable Jake Tapper of ABC News took an interview with Vice President Joe “Foot in Mouth” Biden that contains a nugget of information that tends to prove that Barack Obama intends to destroy America’s insurance industry and place it under the full control of the federal government.

Tapper asked VP Biden what he’d been hearing from the members of the Democrat Congress that are vulnerable over this healthcare debate and Biden’s reply let slip the administrations ultimate goal; full government control of the insurance industry. (My bold)

BIDEN: Well, I yes. Some of them I say they say, well, Joe, look, man, I mean, you know, you guys haven’t massaged this very well. And, you know, this thing has gone on so long, I don’t know. And my response is, hey, man, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I’m telling you, you know, pre-existing, they’re going to be covered. You know we’re going to control the insurance companies.

Granted Joe Biden is the court jester of the Obama Administration. He is a fool of the highest order. It would be easy to dismisshis words. However, the idea that Obama wants to take full federal control of the insurance industry fits quite nicely with Obama’s claims as a candidate — that he was for a single payer plan all along.

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In the book Game Change penned by John Heilemann and Mark Halprin, Harry Reid is quoted as saying that people supported Obama because he was “light skinned,” and because he exhibited no “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” This implies that Reid thinks dark skinned Negroes cannot win election. Since then the left has circled the wagons and refused to treat Reid as they’ve treated Republicans in similar instances. It’s an obvious double standard.

Now, we can look to no better authority on purported racism than The Root Magazine, an Internet publication founded in 2008 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (he of Beer Summit fame) which is published by the Washington Post. Gates’ online magazine pretty much proves that this double standard is alive and well by its treatment of two situations of obvious racist sentiment from the left. Gate’s magazine summarily rejects the accusations of racism by these lefties.

First up we look at a post by Root writer Omar Wasow who proclaimed Harry Reid in the rights for his comments as reported by Game Change. Wasow wonders what the big deal is with Reid’s comments? He says it is true that white people will vote for a light skinned black over a dark skinned one and that it was true that Obama only utilized a black vernacular “when he wanted to.” Interestingly, Wasow saw nothing wrong with Obama shifting from proper English to black vernacular at will. Wasow said that just made Obama a good politician. He obviously doesn’t see this as a cynical political ploy at all.

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‘This is about the election,’ where you’d get into violations of the Hatch Act, it’s not illegal. But it doesn’t look good — it looks terrible. It’s inappropriate.”

Jake Tapper of ABC News:

White House officials say they are enacting specific steps to make sure such a call never happens again.

Today White House officials are meeting with the chiefs of staff of the executive branch agencies to discuss rules and best practices in this area, a conversation during which they will be told that that while White House lawyers do not believe that the NEA call violated the law, “the appearance issues troubled some participants,” Burton said. “It is the policy of the administration that grant decisions should be on the merits and that government officials should avoid even creating the incorrect appearance that politics has anything to do with these decisions.”

After listening to the transcript and the audio posted at the conservative website BigHollywood.Breitbart.com — secretly recorded by Los Angeles filmmaker Patrick Couriellech — Melanie Sloan, executive director of the good-government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told ABC News that the call was “disturbing.” (more…)

From FoxNews.com:

This story has everything you could ever want – corruption, sleazy actions at tax-funded organizations, firings, government ties, sex, hookers. It is a network news director’s dream. Imagine the ratings. But almost no one is covering it.

Bruce Springsteen once wrote: “From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come).” I doubt he expected that story of love gone wrong would become ideal political commentary for the group known as ACORN.

The small scandal showing an embarrassing video of Baltimore ACORN staffers looking like they were giving tax advice on how to set up a brothel, is now national news. — This story has everything you could ever want – corruption, sleazy actions at tax-funded organizations, firings, government ties, sex, hookers. It is a network news director’s dream. Imagine the ratings!

Only almost no one is covering it.

This is the news media in the era of Van Jones and President Obama. The major outlets cover what they want and create the themes they want. When they find something inconvenient, they let it pass. They didn’t like the Van Jones story, so they ignored it. The network news media liked the financial entity known as Fannie Mae, so they ignored that scandalous organization for years. ACORN is getting the same treatment. (more…)

From the American Spectator:

Here’s the Saturday morning round-up on the Census Bureau story for the formerly mainstream media, checking out their home Web pages:

Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, CBS News, CNN Sucks — story isn’t there. WashPost did run a piece about the Big Government expose’ in DC.

MSNBC, to its credit, posted a link to an AP version of the story near the top of their homepage. Some of the others above have the AP story too, but they don’t headline it on their homepages. This is significant because all the major news organizations have an auto-feed of wire service stories to their sites — MSNBC just took the trouble to link it from their homepage.

Fox News of course has followed the story all along, and the Washington Times ran the AP version.

And kudos to ABC News (top of their homepage) and reporter Jake Tapper. Unlike the other lazy and indifferent bureaus listed above, Tapper stayed on the story doing original reporting, crediting Fox News and Big Government for their scoops, embedded one of James O’Keefe’s YouTube videos in his story, and got a response that no one else did:

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