I admit to often taking George W. Bush to a rhetorical woodshed. “He has the Reverse Midas Touch,” I once wrote. “Everything Bush touches, he destroys.” If you find a harsher non-left critic, this conservative will chant misunderestimate.

Alas, the average Leftist is not as objective about W.’s successor: an intellectually dishonest base denying the Incredibly Dissembling Obama. Recently, the President visited the Grand Canyon: a metaphor for the gulf between how he governs and campaigned.

“A growing core of Americans is turning against the president,” The Wall Street Journal wrote recently. In a WSJ/NBC News poll, only 46 percent say Obama “has the right set of goals and policies”: 53 disagree. The percentage feeling “very negative” about him has quadrupled, warbling The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again.

One cause is liberalism: If Bush was The Decider, Obama is The Divider. Another: mistrust of the person, not just his policies. Winston Churchill dubbed deceit a “terminological inexactitude.” Below, Dr. Would-Be Health Care’s inexactness in performing malpractice on the truth:

Obama vowed fiscal sanity, then tied a $410 billion bailout, $787 billion pork-barrel stimulus, and $1.8 trillion deficit. As Peggy Noonan says, America increasingly deems him “slippery.”

Obama vowed “total transparency” — before his web site asked Americans to report e-mail and other health care data “that seems fishy”: citizens informing on one another.

Most recently, Obama denied saying, “I was a single-payer supporter,” having said exactly that in 2003. His Administration would build a government-run $1 trillion health care Potemkin Village peopled by real-life Chicago thugs.

Obama says he opposes “some government takeover” — but backs “a panel of experts, health experts, doctors, who can provide guidelines” on who gets service, what kind, and when. He states that health care won’t fuel abortion — except he proposes a provision that would keep bureaucrats from funding abortion-on-demand.

Obama says more coverage would cut cost — except that the Congressional Budget Office says it would swell the deficit. He insists you can still keep your doctor — except that his Council of Economic Advisors wants to erase “low-cost, low-value treatment.” This means senior “rationing of health care,” says Martin Feldstein, 1982-84 Council head. It is safe to say America did not vote for this last fall.

Support tanking, the White House and media (pardon the redundancy) have chosen to demonize the country (a novel, if self-defeating, plan) calling town-hall protestors “Nazis” and “extremists” and “violent mobs” who “carry swastikas.” In fact, the sole violence has been pro-Obama labor goons, beating up a black handing out U.S. flags. You might know this were it not for, as Dorothy Rabinowitz writes, the press’s “undisguised, worshipful [Obama] reporting.”

One prostitute, MSNBC, calls opponents “domestic terrorists”; another, Harry Reid, “evil-mongers.” Nancy Pelosi dubs the up-in-arms middle class — my mom, your dad — “un-American” for — what? — defending quality health care. Owning the Presidency, press, and Congress, Obama inanely blames Republicans for the backlash: like drunken drivers, crashing, blaming a stroller down the street.

Telling is Obama “being surprised” by the firestorm. “He knows Harvard. He knows Chicago politics,” I wrote in 2008. “Does he know America?” The question is now rhetorical, Obama a stranger to Peoria: worse, to his once-nuanced mind. Recently, he used U.S. Post Office failure to defend Federalizing health care’s 1/6th of our economy. By such logic, Mr. President, Bernie Madoff would head your Treasury.

Candidate Obama vowed accountability. His final “inexactitude” shirks it. In 1969, Richard Nixon inherited a much worse horror house — 548,000 troops in Viet Nam; 200 cities rioting a year earlier; moorings ripped away — yet never blamed predecessor Lyndon Johnson. By contrast, our Juvenile-In-Chief blames W. ad nauseam for the deficit, the Red Sox bullpen, the economy, the rain in Spain.

Mr. President, we long ago grasped the self-evident: Bush was a cosmic bust. Now a greater worry looms, like a hangover or the gout: Could you be as bad as W.?

I once said Bush “fits the definition of a fool: He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.” Today liberalism defines a hypocrite, hailing a double standard. Many believed the candidate who vowed a post-identity-group Presidency. A future column will suggest how Obama instead often governs by sex and race.

 

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