Columnist Charles Krauthammer on Obama’s constant state of denial: “With alarming regularity, he professes obliviousness to the workings of his own government. … Hence the repeated no-one-is-more-upset-than-me posture upon … any number of scandals from which Obama tries to create safe distance by posing as an observer. He gives the impression of a man on a West Wing tour trying out the desk in the Oval Office, only to be told that he is president of the United States. The paradox of this presidency is that this most passive bystander president is at the same time the most ideologically ambitious in decades. … What bridges that gap is rhetoric. Barack Obama is a master rhetorician.” Historian Victor Davis Hanson adds: “The more he speaks untruthfully, the more he resorts to emphatic intensifiers that instead confirm that he is speaking untruthfully. In turn, Obama’s audiences play an even stranger game: The more they hear their president speak, the more they are impressed that he can sound so sincere in being so nonchalantly insincere and mellifluously misleading.”