An Obama Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand!

Certainly not without the aid of a good teleprompter at least, as “Senator Obama Debates President Obama on Surveillance,” writes Matthew Sheffield of Newsbusters:

Sometimes, video can really clarify things like nothing else. You’ll likely agree after watching the video below featuring presidential candidate and inexperienced Illinois Senator Barack Obama discuss the issue of surveillance as practiced by the George W. Bush Administration compared to what now-president Obama has to say about the same subject matter.

Beyond the legality of the spying that’s been conducted for years on behalf of Obama by the National Security Agency, it is transparently obvious that Barack Obama has violated his campaign promises on this issue. Naturally, we don’t expect this video to get much play from the Obama-adoring media.

But then as now, “Obama Is Just Obama,” Victor Davis Hanson writes this week:

So where’s the beef? Obama, who was given a pass from Rev. Wright to Tony Rezko, is justifiably confused: who now changed the rules? Why should he suddenly be held accountable in a way he never was prior? He signed up to be a transformational president who was above politics, not someone subject to the vagaries of Washington scandals.

The result of the serial dishonesty is that Obama almost immediately reverted to his natural campaign mode, the soaring rhetoric and non-traditional persona that won him everything on the guarantee that there would be no audit, no assessment, no final appraisal. In other words, Obama never really became president of the United States. He simply kept running for the office against “them” even when he is now “them” holding the highest office. So Pavlovian was his campaign mode that he never quite stopped to wonder why he was running against himself — now damning the very abuses of power that he committed, upset only that someone might be disturbed about a record in a manner that they never were at Harvard, in the Senate, or during his first term.

“Jerry, just remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it,” said George Costanza, when his postmodern brain wasn’t crafting the inspiration for our headline above.