This is CNN

Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

After CNN’s talking heads did everything they could to clear the way for Barack Obama in 2008, including praising Rev. Wright and then tossing him down the Orwellian Wright-Free Zone one week later very likely based on orders from the Obama campaign itself, an astonishing article appeared on their Website on November 27th of that year. CNN backbencher  Jonathan Mann wrote a column with a remarkable ending:

Obama hasn’t taken office as president, only glimpsed the Oval Office as a visitor and won’t take over until January 20.

But already, he’s being compared to the most remarkable leaders the United States has ever had.

The way some Americans talk, [such as your colleagues elsewhere at Time-Warner-CNN-HBO — Ed] they’re getting five presidents in one.

After comparing Obama to first JFK, FDR, Lincoln and Bill Clinton, Mann concluded, “The Americans who are comparing him to those remarkable predecessors are putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know.”

No kidding, champ. And now, let’s flash-forward to today. As Daniel Halper writes at the Weekly Standard, “CNN’s John King reports that Democrats are privately calling President Obama ‘detached,’ ‘flat footed,’ and ‘incompetent:'”

“Forget for a moment that Republican outrage,” said King on his CNN show this morning. “More and more Democrats in key 2014 races are calling for the president to get a spine, they say, and fire his Veterans Affairs secretary. And what more and more Democrats are saying privately is scathing, calling the president and his team detached, flat footed, even incompetent.

Why, it’s almost as if taking someone with no previous executive experience, and no real world experience outside of the academic-political-community organizing bubble and handing him the keys to one of the most demanding jobs on the planet after serving less than a full term in the Senate based solely on his ability to deliver nuanced teleprompter readings into a Shure SM-58 microphone might have been a mistake. Who knew?

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Update: By the end of 2008, novelty action figures could be purchased, depicting Obama as a sort of badass James Bond superhero (never mind, as Mark Steyn pointed out at the time, that John McCain actually did all sorts of James Bond stuff in real-life). Today, Andrew Malcolm spots a far more accurate polypropylene representation of Barack Obama.