If President Obama drops another point in the Gallup poll tomorrow, then the only Presidents to have fallen faster and worse than he will have been a one-termer and a guy who got impeached. Not only that, but no President ever had a worse Dow Jones Industrial Average drop on Inauguration day than he had, and that was before Death Panels, Health Rationing, flag@whitehouse.gov, rendition, Government Motors, Card Check, Cap and Tax, and the numerous foreign policy gaffes this embattled administration has inflicted upon itself. Add it all up and you get the undeniable fact that Barack Obama is on track to be a Miserable Failure™.

Do you like getting your diaries promoted to the Front Page? If so, consider not writing your post in Microsoft Word. Posts in that have to be cleaned up before being promoted, and given that most of us don’t get paid to do this stuff, diaries that need less time and energy to promote will get the promotion more often.

Open Thread

During his Presidential campaign, Barack Obama famously promised direct diplomacy with Iran, going as far as to say he will meet Iranian leaders without preconditions of any kind. Even as Iranian-funded and -armed forces in Iraq were bombing civilians and shooting at American troops, he promised to meet with their leaders. We’re not at war with Eurasia, and absolutely should not start one.

As he told NPR:

Oh, we have to deal with the role of Iran. The question is whether we deal with Iran through saber-rattling, or whether we deal with Iran by direct diplomatic engagement. The key for us is to engage in the sort of direct talks that we engaged in, by the way, when Iran cooperated with us in dealing with the Taliban in Afghanistan. It’s that sort of direct engagement that this president has been unwilling to do, but under an Obama administration would be, I think a top priority.

It’s all just words, of course, because the statements made by Secretary Clinton make it clear that Obama sees no chance of success for this plan against Iran’s nuclear program.

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Barely two weeks into his first term in office, President Obama is sucking for air and grasping at straws to pull even the semblance of a single victory of any kind out of the rubble that is fast becoming his presidency. His Washington Post op-ed, and the other tactics being employed in the offensive he is waging to get this unstimulative $800,000,000,000.00 pork barrel spending bill passed as quickly as possible (with as few Americans actually reading it or hearing what is included), are clear signs of desperation on the part of a man who has never actually had to negotiate anything before in his life, and who hasn’t a clue how to actually lead anybody anywhere.

President Obama’s handling of this pork bill demonstrates how little reality reflects the transformational themes and sweeping rhetoric that made up the his campaign. Beneath the veneer of “post-partisanship,” of being a uniter and not a divide, and of a “new tone,” was a man who had never once successfully brought people together from opposite sides of the political spectrum in the past, who had never once managed anything so much as a candy store (remember all the late-campaign talk about how campaigning for president was all the experience he needed?), and who had never lead on anything in his life.

A major part of the issue here is that the President and Congressional Democrats — “lead” by Nancy “500 million Americans a month are losing their jobs!” Pelosi and Harry “Why yes, I did come straight from a Normal Rockwell painting” Reid — are all engaged in a game of who can avoid leading (and thereby being responsible) for anything the longest.

The Majority that Would be a Minority

With over 250 votes in the House (nearly 60% of the total), Speaker Pelosi is demanding Republican support for legislation she, had she the slightest bit of competence and political acumen, could ram through without broaching the least bit of dissent (witness the pork barrel bill’s passage despite 11 Democrats and 100% of Republicans opposing it). With nearly 60 D/I votes in the Senate, a handful of liberal Republicans just itching to work with him, and the GOP’s strength being taken down yet another notch with the departure of Jim Jeffords Judd Gregg to fill a ceremonial role at best in President Obama’s cabinet, Harry Reid could push through anything he wanted with little time spared for needless debate or discussion. With the power of the bully pulpit and both houses of Congress on his side of the partisan divide, President Obama could push nearly anything he wanted through the legislature, demanding votes first and questions/discussion/reading later.

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Google is readying for what is possibly their most bandwidth-intensive Internet service yet: The Google Drive is reported to be a planned service to let people store all their data on Google’s servers, but access it all like a disk drive from their own home computers.

Services like Youtube and Picasa already transfer large amounts of data, but the GDrive conceivably would mean the continuous, two-way transfer of gigabytes of data, rivaling Bittorrent in the strain that an ordinary user might routinely put on an Internet connection. Clearly, any plans ISPs have to make their users pay for what bandwidth they use would put a crimp into this plan.

Enter the Google’s ever more cozy relationship with the Obama Administration. After leaving “Miserable Failure” as a search term that leads to President Bush for about four years, Google took less than four weeks to disarm the “Googlebomb” now that it’s aimed at President Obama.

Is there any serious question that this change in speed was motivated by a desire to curry favor with the new President on “Net Neturality,” or specifically plans that Google promotes that would prohibit ISPs from charging customers for what they use? I think not.

Guess what happened when we switched Presidents Tuesday?

Yup, it’s now triggering Obama. At least on Yahoo; Google fixed this problem a while back, although if I understand this fellow correctly Obama’s bio is going to be increasingly linked with “failure” until everything’s resolved. There’s a certain air of “the President’s tech team should have been on top of this:” I dunno if that’s fair. At any rate, Google’s going to go back in and fix this again - probably with the help of the aforementioned tech team.

And that’s pretty much the point of this post: I just felt like pointing out that if you played Googlebombing games with Bush’s name, congratulations: you’ve helped ensure that the Obama administration has more, fairly tedious work to do.

Have a nice day!

Crossposted on Moe Lane.