Barack X

I wouldn't call myself a huge Bill Maher fan, but in five minutes, he's managed to wittily encapsulate everything reasonable people have been saying for quite some time now: that the Barack Obama the president's critics (on the Right, yes, but on the Left as well) have been talking about obsessively is almost entirely imaginary. The clip in question:



He makes an excellent point in an amusing fashion, although it's a pity that it had to end with — as Hitchens described it, on Maher's show, no less — "the joke that stupid people laugh at." The joke, in other words, that absolutely anyone can make, because Bush was so ridiculously inarticulate as to lend himself to 'megagaffes' of the worst sort, including, I kid you not, "Is our children learning?"

At any rate, the point still stands. Reasonable people may have to cope with the two completely different and, I would say, completely incompatible versions of the same man for a while longer.