Forget the birther theory that Obama was born in Kenya. Chris Hayes wants you to believe the president was born on Krypton.
How else to explain his over-the-top gushing for Dear Leader during an appearance on MSNBC colleague Rachel Maddow's show on Thursday (video after page break) --
There's a tendency in commentary in politics to be what we would call in economics pro-cyclical, which is that when the president is doing poorly everyone rushes to talk about how he's terrible and listless and has no leadership qualities and the Ron Suskind book comes out saying the same and everyone piles on and then you forget, you get this weird induced amnesia, this is an extremely able, deft, confident, exceptional politician. (laughs)
And, and what happens is the cycle sort of gets on this internal logic, his approval ratings are down, the economy is bad. And everyone is like, well what happened to? You know, he's right there. I mean, that is a very good, able, amazingly powerful politician and I think in some ways he has been not using his superpowers (laughs) for lot of his time in office. I think as, I don't know why frankly, I'm not inside the president's head.
Ah, that explains it. The greatest challenge confronting Obama is that his opposition is comprised mainly of mere mortals, and everyone knows what fools these mere mortals be.
Hayes' cheerleading came in response to Obama speaking in the shadow of the Brent Spence Bridge linking Ohio and Kentucky, Boehner symbolically on one end and McConnell on the other, calling on Republicans to end their opposition to his so-called jobs bill -- "Mr. Boehner, Mr. McConnell, help us rebuild this bridge!" -- even though his legislation doesn't provide a dime for any work on the overloaded structure.
Hayes is partially right, though not in the way he intended. Obama isn't using his "superpowers" when he makes bogus claims like that.
