You kids stop making all that noise and do your homework!

This was the essence of yet another pointless Obama speech today. Here is the president, demonstrating his firm grasp of the obvious:

There are plenty of ways out of this mess but we are almost out of time.

And why are we out of time, Barry? Could it be that you have shown absolutely no leadership? Sure, you proposed a budget back in February – and it was perceived by everyone as such a joke that it got voted down in the senate 97-0. And yes, there are “plenty of ways out of this mess”; for one thing, you might take five minutes out of your unending demagogic mega-rant to actually try a little compromise.

And as for your Democratic Party colleagues…well, where’s their plan? The Democrats held the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives for two years before the watershed congressional Republican victory last November. Maybe if they hadn’t all been so busy industriously undermining our health care system, they might have found some time to pass a sensible budget (but then, being Democrats, that’s probably physically impossible).

However the debt-ceiling negotiations turn out – whether we manage to put off calamity for another six months or a year, or whether we wind up running for the root cellar – the media will try to spin the whole business as a Republican failure. Maybe they’ll succeed, maybe they won’t. One thing’s for sure, though: I don’t see any way that Obama comes through this looking like anything but a corporate climber who, having finally obtained the coveted key to the executive washroom, decides that sitting on the can and reading the newspaper is all he ever wanted to do in the first place.

Oh, and sorry, Barry, but when you’ve lost Harry Belafonte…