HAS THE PRESIDENT LOST HIS ABILITY TO DISCHARGE THE POWERS AND DUTIES OF OFFICE? “Is it now time to invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment?” Those are the questions that Charles Hurt of the Washington Times asks:
Anyone who listened to President Obama speak to reporters in Paris on Tuesday would reasonably conclude it is high time to start drawing up the papers to transmit to Congress for his removal.
If you are one of the millions and millions of literate Americans out there who have simply tuned this president out the past three or four years, that is certainly understandable. But if you tuned in to the long, rambling, empty press conference, you would have been truly alarmed.
Without the use of the teleprompter, his speech can be described only as “halting.” It was impossible to count the number of times he seized up, able to deaden the silence with only a drawn-out “uh,” “um” or “ahhh.”
The White House dutifully scrubbed all the halts and stutters from the official transcript, and it was impossible to count them in real time. But a sample of his incoherent word salad found him stuttering about every 15 words, which comes to more than 330 “uh-um-ahhs” in a single appearance.
This is not the same soaring speaker who inspired so many in 2008. This is a broken-down man who has lost the only gift he ever had.
Seriously though, Hurt’s article’s packs an extra punch, coming on the heels of Obama’s fellow Democrats Stuart Rothenberg comparing Obama to Dubya, another president who had difficulty on the podium, and Richard Cohen similarly realizing the tremendous mistakes he made in 2008 and ’12. But as Iowahawk’s video from late September of 2008 highlights, well, we tried to warn you.