Name! That! Pundit!

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, for another round of America’s most exciting and challenging game show. And remember, all answers must be phrased in the form of exasperation.

Are you ready to play? Here we go, and pay special attention to every word and maybe you’ll be the one to Name! That! Pundit! Begin:

The menu of current problems feels far more perilous because these go to issues of core competency to govern:

Eavesdropping on foreign leaders. The choices here are unflattering. Either President Obama did not know what his spy agencies were up to, in which case he is not fully in control of the reins of power after nearly five years in office, or he knew, in which case he did not think through the obviously inadequate cost-benefit ratio and his aides are misleading the public now.

It’s tempting to write this one in all caps, but I’ll confine my alarm to italics: How could he not know? If he did know, how could he think the information gleaned could possibly be worth the risk of having foreign leaders discover the surveillance?

Syria. No, Mr. President, this is not a problem solved, critics-jumped-the-gun situation. Even if the country had been transformed into the Garden of Eden, the herky-jerky nature of the administration’s approach — drawing a red line, failing to enforce it, trumpeting enforcement, then suddenly shifting to Congress — does not portray the president in a flattering light. This is first year of first-term amateurishness, not the workings of an experienced president and well-functioning national security machinery.
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Oh yes, health care. The president’s signal domestic policy achievement. Probably the most important legacy of his administration. Time for italics again: So how could the rollout of the website be so bad?

Emphasis in the original, because our Mystery Pundit said so!

I’ll give you clue to today’s answer: This time we have a feisty female columnist.

Could it be firebrand Ann Coulter saying such nasty things about the President?

Well, it could be — but it isn’t.

How about that catty Mona Charen?

Wrong again!

Would you believe… Washington Post doyenne Ruth Marcus?

Yes, Ruth Marcus.

Thanks for playing, and come back next time for another exciting episode of Name! That! Pundit!