USA Today's Chuck Raasch has decided that President Obama is a "transformational American leader abroad" and that his America Stinks tour of Europe is a "confirming stamp of that new reality." This effluvia of over indulgent praise heaped on Obama is ubiquitous in the media, we all know, but what makes Raasch's piece egregious is the assumption of historical "truth" that posits that Obama has already succeeded as president even though he's only been in office a few short months. Raash states as fact that Obama has "transformed" America's image with this one tour and that all sorts of new and better relations have followed.

But, the main problem with Raasch's sycophancy is that "followed" hasn't even arrived yet. In fact, Raasch writes this article before Obama's trip abroad is fairly done. It is idiotic to say what "has" come of it all before the president has even set his feet back on American soil. And this is a key problem with all these fake assessments of the "success" of Obama's presidency. There hasn't BEEN any "success" because history has yet to see the outcome of anything he's done thus far.

But this doesn't stop the slobbering Obama love affair that mediots like Raasch wallow in. It all amounts to little else but propaganda as opposed to serious analysis -- serious prOpaganda, if you will.

The reality is that getting handed the keys to the White House is Obama's only true "success" to date. He hasn't "fixed" the economy, for instance. Sure he's bellowed a lot of hot air about it. He's made pronouncements and seen a few spending bills passed. But nothing has actually succeeded up to this point. Right now we are all still waiting to see if anything he's done or has proposed will work. We won't know this for some time.

The same goes for his tour of Europe. All we know right now is that many of our enemies like what he had to say because he dissed America, bowed to tyrannical "Kings" and told the rest of the world that the USA is sorry for being so bold.

But, so what? What he did so far has actually resulted in nothing simply because not enough time has passed to see what will come of it all. We cannot say, like Raasch did, that he is a "transformational" American leader abroad. There simply is NO proof that this is a trueism. It may end up being true some day, but as of right now it is not very intelligent to state it as fact. Yet Raasch, as his ilk are prone to doing, has already decided that Obama has succeeded as president to transform for the better our image abroad.

Truth is, Obama's naive tour of Europe could be transformational in the worst of ways, empowering our enemies, hurting American interests, and causing allies to waver in their support. Or maybe the opposite will happen? The point is we cannot know right now what will become of Obama's efforts. We only have guesses, fears, hopes, dreams, speculation. But we have no facts, no done deals, no truth to point to so that we can deem his European vacation a success or a failure.

We also have no proof at all that beside getting elected Obama will succeed at anything as president. He may yet end up the best president ever. He may also become the worst laughing stock since Carter. Or even worse than that.

Naturally Raasch bases some of his Obamamania on another one of those "experts" the media so love to quote. This time it's hack "historian" Douglas Brinkley whose pronouncements on Bush, Kerry, and Obama have been made in the midst of current events, a sure sign of a bad historian.

One thing is sure about the history of a U.S. presidency, we can't begin to know how successful it was until at least a decade after it ends. In the years after office we can begin to get an assessment of their actions but during and upon leaving office we simply haven't enough historical record to make such determinations. So, any historian... I repeat ANY historian... that claims he knows what it all means in the midst of a presidency is no historian. Brinkley fits that description handily. He's made a name for himself by making pronouncements on history before history has become history. He's the first faux historian out of the gates to claim he knows what it all means proving he is really only interested in self-promotion and not history. Naturally, he is a media darling because of it.

Whatever the legitimacy of Brinkley, though, the whole point here is that it is foolish to claim that Obama's Euro tour has been a good one for America. We just can't say for sure. Despite the sold-out propaganda by faux historians like Brinkley and the slavish love the press bestows upon their messiah, this trip hasn't been in the past long enough to assess.