Of all of the manifestations of the Cult of Obama, this one has to take the cake: not only do you have these brainwashed kids warbling hymns to Dear Leader, but they were invited to do so on the set of CNN (last seen fact-checking a Saturday Night Live comedy skit that cracked wise about this administration’s incompetence).

(Yes, you read that correctly: CNN actually fact-checked a comedy skit.  Because it was critical of Dear Leader.  And now they’re providing a platform for and coverage of brainwashed schoolkids crooning paeans to him.)

Unbelievable.

I’m generally not given to linking pieces without some commentary of my own, but this one at Ace’s place is just too damn good.

Frankly very few of us even realized Chicago was in the running for the 2016 Olympics (long time in the future, eh?) until a week and a half ago.

And yet, suddenly, among liberals, this became a much greater political cause than health care.

Why? Because it was so important that Chicago spend oodles of money for a two-week party?

No. Because they knew Obama needed a win, desperately, and they figured this was an easy one. Rack this easy win up, claim he’s on a roll, try to leverage this easy (and frankly meaningless) win into a win on something more important, like health care.

Which… 80% of them also don’t care about all that much, except to the extent Obama can win there and beat those nasty Bible-thumping moose-murdering Republicans.

So, you know — f’n’ spare me, spare the living shit out of me, over this sanctimony of Republicans rooting against your BMOC wannabe-boyfriend. “You’re just rooting against our collective Dream Date Ken Doll out of partisan spite!,” liberals sputter.

Oh? And why the hell are you rooting for him, I’d like to know. Tell the exact moment when you all collectively became great supporters of publicly-funded stadium construction — and if that point is more than two weeks ago, I’ll eat a beer-truck.

Jay Cost explains the feeling all of us on the right have. While you on the left are still so giddy to be able to root and cheer Obama in all his glorious contests — like baseball, scheduled just about every day, with frequent double-headers — the rest of us are starting to get a little weary of Obama Omnipresent.

For you, it’s delightful. You still get tingles up your leg and you still marvel at his impeccably-creased trousers.

For the rest of us: Go. The Hell. Away.

RTWT.

Two things about Mr. Obama’s speech last night that I want to touch on:

1.  The Heckling

For those unaware, at one point during the speech a Republican congresscritter from South Carolina who nobody had ever heard of before yesterday stood up and shouted, “You lie!” at the president (video and context here).  The media and much of the port side of the political spectrum came down with a collective case of the vapors and dragged itself over to the fainting couch to bemoan the lack of civility and the coursening of the discourse, et cetera et cetera.

Well, screw that.

For one thing (and I say this fully appreciating that it’s a rhetorical two-by-four to the backs of the heads of Mr. Obama’s many, many personality cultists), the United States has a president, not a king.  Calling a politician — any politician — on his weapons-grade BS isn’t “classless”; it’s the absolute birthright of every American.  We owe public servants the raucous skepticism of a free people, not the polite fealty of cowed subjects.

For another, let us note that the folks currently soiling themselves over this supposed breach of Congressional decorum — you know, the same deep thinkers who spent the entire month of August calling opponents of ObamaCare “teabaggers”, “evil-mongers”, an angry mob, and so forth — are, shall we say, poorly positioned to be casting stones.  If you want respect, try giving it occasionally.

For a third, and perhaps most importantly, truth is a higher-order value than civility.  The mendacity of politicians corrupts the public discourse far more gravely than mere incivility ever could.  When a president brazenly lies his ass off, as Mr. Obama did last night vís-a-vís coverage for illegal aliens (among other things), he deserves to be called on it, ideally while dodging the rotten fruit and dead wombats being hurled in his direction by an outraged citizenry.

And that brings me to my second point:

2.  The Lies

Matt Welch at Reason does yoeman’s work cataloguing the president’s fusillade of whoppers.  A taste:

The lies last night began in Obama’s opening paragraph. “When I spoke here last winter,” he began, “credit was frozen. And our financial system was on the verge of collapse.” In fact, Obama spoke on Feb. 24, at least six weeks after credit markets began to thaw, and one week after he proclaimed that the passage of his $787 billion stimulus marked “the beginning of the end, the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans.” Obama’s speech that day wasn’t about staving off a collapse, it was about cleaning up the mess and tackling long-ignored issues. Such as health care.

It’s never encouraging when a politician who desperately needs to convince skeptical Americans of his fiscal sobriety starts off by slurring his words. As you might then infer, Obama was just warming up. “Insurance companies,” the president announced, “will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies,” in part because such prevention “saves money.” Looks like someone forgot to tell the Congressional Budget Office, or other non-White House sources that have analyzed the cost-benefit of prevention.

Welch, hunting in a target-rich environment, manages to miss the illegal alien lie.  But he does capture the latest episode of what Rich Lowry described, a while back, as President Above-It-All.  Lowry (writing about Obama’s vicious murder of straw men in the war on terror/enhanced interrogation debate):

Put Barack Obama in front of a teleprompter and one thing is certain — he’ll make himself appear the most reasonable person in the room.

Rhetorically, he is in the middle of any debate, perpetually surrounded by finger-pointing extremists who can’t get over their reflexive combativeness and ideological fixations to acknowledge his surpassing thoughtfulness and grace…

Obama bracingly politicized these very issues on the stump, staking out unsustainably purist positions because they suited his momentary political interest. Now that’s he’s president, he wants the debate to end. He’s above the grubbily disputatious culture of partisans and journalists. And he’s above contradiction because, as ever, he occupies the middle ground, one “obscured by two opposite and absolutist” sides: those who recognize no terrorist threat and those who recognize no limits to executive power.

And there Obama stands, bravely holding his flanks against straw men on all sides.

Welch:

Again last night, Obama invoked the boogeyman of “special interests” who “lie” in order “to keep things exactly the way they are,” despite the fact that the special interests in this case are lining up to support the president, and that the critics of his plan tend to bemoan, not defend, the status quo. Opponents of his plan, he said, were “ideological”; Ted Kennedy’s support for health care reform, meanwhile, “was born not of some rigid ideology, but of his own experience.” Obama said his door was “always open” to those bringing “a serious set of proposals,” and he slammed that door shut on any attempts to break the almost universally unloved link between employment and insurance. He yearned to “replace acrimony with civility,” then got Democrats stomping on their feet with attacks against the Iraq War and “tax breaks for the wealthy.” The center of the debate, as always, was wherever he chose to stand.

By far the most offensive bit is that which I’ve bolded — as if the Democratic healthcare reform proposals are not themselves ideological in nature, insofar as they evidence an unshakeable faith in the munificence and competence of government, “the leavening hand of wise policy” without which we’d be in as much peril as if government were too big.

What a load of unmitigated crap.  Anybody who looks upon the federal Leviathan and comes away thinking that we’re confronted by a crisis of too little government is hopelessly blinkered by ideology.  Anybody who looks at the American healthcare system and comes away thinking that the principal problem is the sliver of market freedom remaining rather than the hash that previous government interventions have made of things is similarly not dealing with reality.

I’m not sure why this should surprise anybody.  Backscratching cronyism has been commonplace in politics for as long as there’s been politics.

Granted, there’s the hypocrisy angle — the guy who promised Hope and Change and transparency and good government turns out to be a typical pol who regards rewarding buddies and fundraisers with cushy government jobs as one of the perks of public office — but anybody paying attention, who declined to get swept up in Mr. Obama’s personality cult or otherwise drink the Kool-Aid, could’ve predicted as much.  For one thing, Mr. Obama is a product of Chicago’s notoriously corrupt political culture.  For another, the campaign and eventual governorship of Deval Patrick, a friend of Mr. Obama’s and another Plouffe/Axelrod hopenchange production, provides a ready example of how these supposedly transformational political figures actually operate once in office.

I’m all for beating both the rubes who bought the hopenchange lie, as well as the activists who peddled it knowing full well that it was a stinking pantload, over the head with reality.  But as revelations, go, this one does not rate particularly high on the Clutch The Pearls And Gasp-O-Meter.