Karl Marx said history repeats itself, "first as tragedy, then as farce."  Barack Obama has reversed that.  His first term was certainly farce; his second will be tragedy.

Obama has Forrest Gumped his way through his presidency, except without the success, charm, and endearing sweetness of the original.  He has given America three and a half years of farce, even if no one is laughing. 

He is an adumbrated president, desperate about his re-election prospects.  Sold as a bipartisan moderate, a post-racial healer, a transformative leader -- we were told he would not just solve our problems, but heal the earth and save humanity. 

The president has governed as a hyper-partisan, race-baiting, barely present tyrant with absolutely no leadership skills and little regard for the constitution.  His daily ululations paint anyone who dares to disagree as evil and un-American.  People are either pro-Barack or an enemy of the nation -- there is no in-between. 

It is the intangible aspects of the presidency where Barack Obama is most adept: entertaining, vacationing, and golf.  The parties are legendary and extravagant.  Bringing the NBA to the White House, or the NFL or Motown or Broadway -- when he feels like it, the party comes to him.  The vacations are even more extravagant, and the golf...everyone knows about the golf.  He may not be good, but at least he puts in the time. 

America has to pay for it all, but this is an opportunity to see the true Barack Obama, surrounded by minions and sycophants constantly telling him how great he is.  Is it any surprise he wants four more years of this? 

Obama hagiographer Davis Guggenheim has said, "I mean, the negative for me was there were too many accomplishments."  Barack wholeheartedly agrees; after all didn't he recently say, "My entire career has been a testimony to American exceptionalism"?

Popeil's Pocket President, brought to you by Ronco, or Rahm Emanuel -- one of those.  At least the Pocket Fisherman worked.  Barack doesn't work; it's all parties, vacations, and golf -- in between, he practices verbal assassination of anyone who disagrees.  Chin up, he turns away and looks off in the distance, à la Mussolini, as the applause and adulation reverberate from the rafters. 

"No, please," he pleads, "I do this for you."     

In less than four years, he has reduced America to the laughingstock of the world.  We are threatened by Iran with nuclear Armageddon, while he lines up a putt and tells us what his imaginary son would look like. 

He talks of "flexibility," while he plots both unilateral disarmament and the scrapping of missile defense.  With no deterrent and no defensive capability, the nation will be defenseless and impotent.

Unemployment has ravaged America; economic stagnation has destroyed families and futures.  Good people have been demonized simply for being successful; business has been terrified by threats of confiscatory taxation and the relentless assault of regulatory fiat.  Obama's trillion-dollar stimulus stimulated nothing, except the wallets of political backers and crony capitalist pals.  It actually made the economy worse by diverting money from productive business investment into the Obama for President slush fund, which is really all the stimulus ever was. 

ObamaCare, so named because he does care, is more unpopular with every passing day, while the Supreme Court seems likely to overturn the entire abominable mess.  Using procedural trickery, our transformational tyrant and his minions, Nancy and Harry, rammed it down America's throat, eking out a victory without a single Republican vote.  It's farcical that he would claim that it passed with a "strong majority of a democratically elected Congress." 

As part of this comedy of errors, standing with the president of Mexico and the Canadian PM last week, Barack Obama couldn't help but channel his inner Chevy Chase in The Three Amigos.  Our president, once a professor of constitutional law, made statements showing how ignorant he is about the Constitution, judicial review, checks and balances, and the separation of powers.  He's tried to walk those comments back, but it's hard to walk back idiocy.   

People have died from his policies, although hundreds of white Hispanics in Mexico who perished as a result of his administration's Fast and Furious program apparently don't count.  Ever faster and much more furiously, the administration is done talking about gun-walking.

Our president, who believes himself the living embodiment of American exceptionalism, veers wildly between bragging about how successful he is and puling loudly about how unfairly he is being treated.  Every jeremiad from the man is laced with an unsaid but implied "you people don't appreciate me, even after all I've done for you."  Although at times, he skips the unsaid and the implied. 

He boasts of his accomplishments, which amount to nothing more than brazenly redefining abject failure as success, or taking credit for things he had nothing to do with.  Is there anything funnier than hearing the most anti-oil president in the history of the nation take credit for oil production?  He stands in front of some pipes and makes a speech, and suddenly, he is the "Energy President."  Could he look more desperate?

To hear Barack tell it, no other president has done more for the fossil fuel industry, cut taxes for the middle class, been more supportive of business, cut regulation, or done more to increase employment and help the economy recover.  Did you hear that Osama bin Laden is still dead? 

Most laughable is his assertion that no president has ever done more to control spending, despite the $5 trillion in debt he has added in less than four years.  With a second term, he is on track to add more debt in eight years than all the presidents who came before him combined.  His budgets are a joke, with last year's failing in the Senate 97-0, and this year's losing in the House 414-0.  Even Democrats won't vote for them.

It is Obama's version of the "big lie," a lie told so often that it is accepted as truth.  The Obama variation entails many lies, big and small, told over and over again in mellifluous tone, with aggressive confidence and a joking manner that implies that anyone who doesn't believe all he says is an idiot. 

To him, Americans are morons, so intimidated by his brilliance that they will buy into his bull, become backers of Barack, and re-up on hope and change this November.  The secret to his success is that he is able to convince people that if they believe him and not what they see with their own eyes, they are geniuses, just like him.

As a rule -- with everything Barack tells us about what he has done and what he will do -- the truth is always the exact opposite.  On Seinfeld, it was called "bizarro world."  We live in Barack's backwards bizarro world. 

Unemployment, at over 8%, is at the highest protracted level since the Great Depression.  The economy is moribund, with the worst recovery from a recession, also since the Depression.  Government spending, as a percentage of GDP, is the highest since WWII.  The percentage of people employed is at its lowest level in 30 years; gasoline prices are the highest ever.  America, internationally, is at its greatest risk since the fall of the USSR.  Yet Barack constantly talks about how wonderful things are and how great he has been.  Sadly, many people believe him, and these people will vote to give him an opportunity to try again.  Scary, isn't it? 

America is circling the drain, and despite the farce that has been Obama's first term, he has his hand on the handle...and with re-election, he is going to flush.

Mark Twain said that truth is always stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense.  Watching Barack Obama campaign for re-election should be funny, but it's hard to laugh when realizing how tragic four more years of this president will be for America.