The Patriot Post® · News Briefs, and Not Just Anthony Weiner's

I wonder how Democrats manage to keep track of their talking points when Obama keeps yakking out of both sides of his mouth.

For openers, he’s changed his tune from 2008 about shutting down Gitmo; raising the debt limit; getting us out of Afghanistan faster than you can say Afghanistan; a transparent and post-racial administration; military tribunals; and even the Patriot Act, for heaven’s sake. So, while some people suspect that Obama will dump Joe Biden in favor of Hillary Clinton in 2012, Obama’s people are rumored to have sent out feelers to George W. Bush.

One of the fascinating items in Obama’s speech in May regarding the Middle East and his recommendation that Israel withdraw to its 1967 borders, presumably as a necessary first step to disappearing entirely from the face of the earth, was his use of the word “swaps.” Political strategists and Talmudic scholars both here in America and in Israel have been scratching their heads, trying to figure out what the President thought the Palestinians might be willing to cough up in exchange for Israel’s agreeing to commit suicide. Among the guesses have been a skate key, a Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card, clippings from Yasser Arafat’s beard and Osama bin Laden’s collection of pornographic videos.

As we all know by now, Anthony Weiner wears gray jockey shorts. And while I usually wouldn’t want to be accused of piling on and kicking a guy when he’s down, I find the urge irresistible in the case of this arrogant putz who had assigned himself the role of hit man for Pelosi’s Democratic mob. However, by this time virtually everything rotten that could be said has been said, except for the fact that when I first saw the crotch shot seen around the world, I swear that my honest reaction was that it was much ado about very little. In fact, I was apparently the only person who saw the picture and was unaware that I was looking at a sexually aroused Weiner. When someone finally set me straight, so to speak, I was reminded that at the 1973 Academy Awards, a naked man streaked across the stage. The very droll David Niven, who was hosting the event, mused, “Just think, the only laugh that man will probably ever get is for stripping and showing off his shortcomings.”

But I will say that I was greatly relieved when, after a week and a half of lying, Weiner took total responsibility. After the way he and his left-wing henchmen went after Andrew Breitbart, I thought maybe he’d only take 37% or 22% or maybe even 8.6%.

Speaking, as we were, of appearances, am I the only person who thinks that when you see Barack Obama these days, looking even more dour than usual, with those ears jutting away from his head, his resemblance to an angry bat is downright spooky?

I recall a cover of Time magazine during the 2008 campaign in which Obama was decked out to look like FDR, a homburg on his head, a cigarette holder in his teeth. Being Time, it was naturally intended as a compliment. There are, after all, a lot of meatheads on the Left who still regard Roosevelt as godlike. To the rest of us, FDR was more a case of oh-my-god!

Like Roosevelt, Obama has been the beneficiary of what my friend Bernard Goldberg has aptly called the mass media’s slobbering love affair. The fact is, the courtiers of King Louis XV could take lessons in simpering, curtsying and bussing the royal bum, from the likes of Chris Matthews, Katie Couric, Joy Behar, David Letterman, Rachel Maddow, Maureen Dowd and Oprah Winfrey.

Still, there’s no denying there’s a strong connection between the 32nd president and the 44th. Like FDR, Obama inherited a terrible economy and then did everything humanly possible to make it worse. Also, like his predecessor, there’s nothing Obama loves more than the sound of his own voice. Another thing Obama shares with the man from Hyde Park is that he tends to treat America’s foes better than he treats our friends. In FDR’s case, he preferred Stalin to Churchill. In Obama’s, he prefers everyone to Netanyahu.

Finally, has anybody noticed that the same crowd who kept insisting that President Bush show us the flag-draped coffins of America’s warriors as they were brought home from war zones never demand the same of Obama? And how is it that the same media that never tired of showing jihadists being hazed at Abu Ghraib aren’t storming the White House, insisting that Americans have the right to see the photo of bin Laden’s bullet-riddled corpse?

On the other hand, it’s not fair for people to accuse the mass media of having no standards. On the contrary, they have double ones.