Speaking Truth to Power

(By Michael Walsh, National Review Online) - If you want to understand why Paul Ryan has suddenly become the de facto leader of the sad, pathetic, shriveled thing known as the Republican party, you need look no farther than his response to the classless sandbagging he got from the Bringer of Kinetic Military Action and Vacationer-in-Chief:

“I thought the president’s invitation…was an olive branch. Instead, what we got was a speech that was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to address our countries fiscal challenges… What we heard today was a political broadside from our campaigner in chief. This is very sad and very unfortunate. Rather than building bridges, he’s poisoning wells.”

As I said on the radio yesterday, if anyone had spoken like this to the princeling earlier in his life, he very likely never would have become president. Instead, Obama has been coddled and cosseted throughout his glide-path trajectory — maverick Democrat Mickey Kaus just called him “the biggest affirmative action baby in history,” and said he was a lousy politician to boot. No one, it seems, has ever sat him down and explained to him how thoroughly mediocre he really is. Call it the audacity of mope.