RUTHFULLY YOURS

ESPN’s Monday Night Football pre-game show is watched chiefly for its “C’mon man!” segment. The phrase, which derives from common speech and was big in the Sixties, has now become iconic, a mainstay of the sports lexicon, and may be cogently applied to the political world as well. Implying as it does an attitude of stunned disbelief or eyebrow-raising amazement at any statement or event so palpably absurd as to beggar credibility, it fits the political domain like a catcher’s mitt burying a perfect strike. It is especially apt when brought to bear on the utterances of Barack Obama. As for example, to cite at random:

“Hope and change”—C’mon man!

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”—C’mon man!

“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal”—C’mon man!

“The state of our union is strong”—C’mon man!

“I don’t know what the term is in Austrian”—C’mon man!

“Navy corpse-man”—C’mon man!

“Our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes, and I see many of them in the audience here today”—C’mon man!

“I’ve now been in 57 states—I think one left to go”—C’mon man!

Re. questions about his birth certificate: “We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers”—C’mon man!

“We’re the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad”—C’mon man!

“Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance”—C’mon man!

“We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition”—C’mon man!

“The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco”—C’mon man!

“Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America and that Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country”—C’mon man!

Re. Fast & Furious: “I heard it on the news about this story”—C’mon man!

Re. the IRS scandal: “I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this”—C’mon man!

“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam”—C’mon man!

The Falkland Islands (aka Las Malvinas) are “the Maldives”—C’mon man!

Re. the Benghazi betrayal: “There’s no there there”—C’mon man!

The list of such stupefying, ludicrous, deceptive and/or misguided statements can be indefinitely extended, betokening a president who makes Chris Berman seem like a soft-spoken, erudite and limpid thinker and a master of lapidary rhetoric. Indeed, the bordereau of gaffes delivered by Obama over the course of his meteoric career has spawned a considerable number of Internet sites whose sole purpose is to track the gibberish of probably the most arrogant, mendacious and ignorant president ever to disgrace the Oval Office. Anyone who actually believes, or believes in, this president, whether a single mother living in the barrio or a sophisticated intellectual prancing in the halls of academia or pontificating in the media, is in serious need of rehab and ideological detoxification. For such people are impervious to reality and prefer living in a fantasy to confronting undeniable, real-world evidence. The unstanchable torrent of nonsense that surges from the vast reservoir of presidential malapropisms is indicative of both Obama’s self-regarding ineptitude and his supporters’ unflinching gullibility.

The segue to such a derisory concatenation of presidential remarks practically announces itself:

This is the huckster the American electorate put in the White House?—C’mon man!

This is the student of Frank Marshall Davis and Saul Alinsky the American people trusted to secure their economic interests?—C’mon man!

This is the ostensible benefactor who will hand out free phones, pay off mortgages, stimulate industry, green the environment and repair the medical system?—C’mon man!

This is the magus who will solve the world’s problems?—C’mon man!

This is the budding climatologist who thinks global warming, which does not exist, is a top priority?—C’mon man!

This is the narcissist whose problematic antecedents, disreputable cronies, broken promises, embarrassing bloopers and authoritarian methods of governance the liberal press has protected and cossetted?—C’mon man!

The two conjoined words, “President” and “Obama,” are connotatively among the great oxymorons of the current age. In conclusion, another phrase which has entered the idiom would seem particularly appropriate with regard to Barack Obama:

He should be voted off the island.

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