Romancing the Stone

[Geee]

American Spectator:

Oh, for the good old days -- when Barack Obama was forced to defend his policies; when he couldn't stop himself from lashing out at his political opponents. Today he is happy to float above the fray -- ignoring any and all criticism and, indeed, openly borrowing from the vocabulary of his critics as he espouses a new-found love of liberty, free enterprise, and Western civilization.

If there is one thing our president cannot abide, it is being lectured to by someone else. What sweet release, then, to jet over to Europe, escaping the need for being on the receiving end of a second lecture from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who addressed the U.S. Congress on Tuesday. Just a few days before that, Netanyahu had publicly taken Obama to task in the Oval Office, telling the president that his plan for a return to Israel's 1967 borders was a "non-starter." This was said with his eyes fixed on the president and the cameras rolling.

Netanyahu's address to the joint session of Congress was a rousing success -- with no fewer than 56 standing ovations. By contrast, Obama's address to the British Houses of Parliament a day later was a pallid affair, with only a smattering of polite applause for what the Telegraph described as "a series of orotund banalities."

But no matter from the president's perspective. His important task now is to try to persuade a majority of the independent voters in the U.S. who supported him in 2008 that he is, after all, the "post-partisan politician" that he promised to be when he was running in the Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton.

That is something, apparently, that many Americans still want to believe.