It is increasingly obvious that Obama wants to get out of the White House, not just to take vacations, visit Letterman, and go golfing, but to be free of the  responsibilities of the office of President itself, and those horrid media types are doing everything in their power to make him stay where he is. It's time to free Barack.

This week for the very first time, Obama got free of the phalanx of media guards -- the gang Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal, calls " Pack Journalism" and faced actual questioning on Univision, instead of the yentas on The View, Entertainment Tonight, "Pimp With the Limp" and such, and he made clear what I've suspected for a long time: He wants out of the Presidency. Yes, you heard me -- he wants O.U.T.

"The most important lesson I've learned is that you can't change Washington from the inside."  So said the Man whose 2008 campaign theme was "Hope and Change." "You can only change it from the outside."

There's plenty of evidence that his passive aggression is behind much of his failure in office. How else to explain things like turning over his signature legislation, Obamacare, to Reid and Pelosi, refusing to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu in favor or a joke fest on Letterman where he claims not to even know the extent of the national debt?  Going off to a fundraiser in Vegas as our embassies burn and a dead or dying Ambassador is being hauled through the streets of Benghazi? 

Did he assume he was invulnerable to the wrath of Univision viewers? Did he assume they didn't care that14 high officials were behind the ludicrously planned and operated Fast & Furious which resulted in the murder of hundreds of Mexicans and that undoubtedly Holder and Obama would themselves be implicated had they not withheld evidence from investigators? He is resisting our demands that he adequately perform the job of the Chief Executive, dodging all responsibility, blaming others for his failures. In short, he is intentionally refusing to perform his job.

Personally, I am not sure he ever was even minimally suited for the job. Many, with good reason, argue that he never was. Here's Kevin DuJann of  HillBuzz on that point:

The reality is that 2008 was a massive fluke and was powered largely by raw emotion: Americans thought it was time to "make history" and elect a magical black man to be President because they thought the color of this guy's skin was going to "change the world".  Well, they were right about that...but in a very Twilight Zone kind of way people were not at all careful with what they wished for and the change that resulted over the last four years isn't what they wanted.

Record unemployment, with between 25-30 million Americans either out of work or underemployed. $16 Trillion in national debt (and exploding with more daily). Islamic radicals conquering the Middle East, raping and murdering male ambassadors, and the White House ignoring clear security warnings and even considering releasing the "Blind Sheik" 1993 World Trade Center bomber.  Obama's watching the world burn and is enjoying it.  Meanwhile, Obamacare's terrified small businesses, forced many of them to shutter, and has frozen most hiring.  We're in an economic Depression caused by the wasteful 2009 "stimulus" (that went mostly into union coffers) and the uncertainty and zealous regulations of Obamacare.

People know Obama has failed and made a giant mess in Washington.  Many are still uncomfortable admitting the first black man in the job was not as magical as they thought he'd be. These people not only won't turn out for him in numbers he needs them to in November, but here in Chicago at least they have no interest at all in physically accosting, screaming at, or otherwise trying to bully anyone who doesn't support Obama.

Reports are surfacing suggesting, indeed, there are plans afoot for one of his most generous sponsors, Penny Pritzker, to buy him a mansion in Hawaii to which the family can retire in January,

So, you might ask? Why didn't he just throw in the towel and head off to the links in Oahu before the nomination and campaign? I can't be sure of course, but a key reason it seems to me is that the pack journalists keep smothering his cries for help (mistakes and disengagement) and won't let him out.

Take the Romney tape this week.

Let's start with David Corn, the fellow who reported about it in "Mother Jones."  He is a longtime leftwing propagandist, which should have raised questions in any pundit, reporter or reader's mind when it appeared.

Years ago I reported in the Weekly Standard how David Corn had exaggerated Armitage's leak to Novak into a  story that ensnared Lewis Libby and almost destroyed the Bush Administration.

The Nation's David Corn, a friend of Wilson's, reframed the tale, giving it a more lurid cast and a plotline that would drive media coverage--and in turn Fitzgerald's investigation--for the next three years. Valerie Plame, he reported, was a "covert agent" who had been deliberately "outed" as "thuggish" payback for her husband's brave whistle blowing. Moreover, this outing probably violated the law, placing her, intelligence agents everywhere, and national security at risk. This blonde Emma Peel-tied-to-the-railroad-tracks-by-lying-warmongers version of the story (assisted by a timely leak from the CIA that Director Tenet had referred the case to the Justice Department) led to press and congressional demands for an investigation by an outside prosecutor.

And then he falsely accused Andrew Breitbart of selectively editing the Shirley Sherrod tape.

This time he outdid himself. The tape be provided as the "complete tape" which he said he got through the auspices of Jimmy Carter's unemployed grandson was missing 1-2 minutes in the first part (which dealt with  the political  effect of 47% or Americans  not paying taxes and dependent on the federal government) and he took his time admitting that after Legal Insurrection noticed the obvious cut and called him on it,

Corn reacted vigorously to Romney's suggestion that he only provided "snippets," and then Corn released what purported to be the complete audio/video in two parts.  The "complete" version was consistent with the original edited audio/video.  Again, there was no disclosure by Corn that there might be something missing.  (Corn added an "update" after my original story ran."

To the contrary, Corn went out of his way to assert that there was no "filtering" and that the full audio/video had been released.  As Corn explained to Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast (emphasis mine):

Is the liberal media making too much of the Romney video? "It feeds into a narrative he's been fighting all along, that he's a 1 percenter, not one of us, doesn't really understand it," Corn says. And since these are the candidate's own words, "there's no filter here whatsoever, there's no out-of-context argument to be made."

But there was a filter.  As reported in my prior post, Corn has admitted that 1-2 minutes of audio/video are missing.  That missing audio/video includes part of Romney's controversial answer.

Corn says that his source told him the recorder shut off on its own right in the middle of Romney's answer, and then was not turned on until Romney already was into a different topic.  We have no way of verifying that source's story, but we do know that there were various edited pieces of the tape circulating prior to Corn's involvement, so it is just as possible that Corn's source or someone else handling the video prior to Corn edited out part of the answer.

It is impossible for us to know if Romney said something, which changed or put the remarks in context.  Romney doesn't remember the event except for what exists on audio/video.  Maybe in the fullness of the answer, the answer was less "inelegant" than it appears.  Maybe Romney put some of the context on it that we have heard in his interviews the past two days.

What difference does it make?

Think how the initial 24 hours of controversy might have played out differently had Corn made the disclosure up front.  That part of the answer was missing from the tape would have provided a valuable context both to readers/listeners, and to the Romney campaign.  That never happened because there was no disclosure by Corn that part of the tape was missing.

With regard to this part of the tape, Corn embellished Romney's temperate words, suggesting falsely that he had  called government dependents  "shiftless moochers" and "parasitic free-riders".  Cecil Turner did a far better job describing what Romney did say than did Corn:

The point is the inherent unworkability of a system wherein a majority pay nothing into a fund, and yet control how the monies are spent. Whether we refer to the tragedy of the commons or the (probably misquoted) bit on democracy from Andrew Tytler,

'A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.'

It should be obvious such a system cannot work, and that we're perilously close to the point where most people will have a rational vested interest in voting for fiscal insanity. And that's not good for anybody. Tragic, in fact.

But Corn's mendacity was worse than that, as time and scrutiny showed. The second part of the "complete tape" that Corn provided was deliberately edited to change entirely the nature of Romney's remarks on Israel:

Watch as Fox' Megyn Kelly unveils the  second Corn  tape deception.

This mendacious act made it seem as though Romney was washing his hands of Israel when, in fact, he said that he would not push Israel to continue to make concessions to the Palestinians as his predecessors have done -- that until the Palestinians want peace such actions are futile.

Review the situation: Romney did not have a tape of the discussion, he was blindsided by the edited tapes.  Once again the pack ran with the Corn fabulist storyline and incomplete videos, suggested instead that (again) the Romney campaign was lost, the pack pundits (left and right) jumped onboard. Shame on all of them.  Romney's positions are  perfectly sound.

The tape kerfuffle was just one more example of the media's dishonest role in covering the campaign..

Here's Dorothy Rabinowitz'  view of  Romney's remarks critical of the failure of Obama's foreign policy after the 9/11 attack in Libya and  riot in Cairo-remarks in complete agreement with those expressed on the tape which Corn  repeatedly fluffed up for Obama  -- which also got the media's knickers in a twist:

"The governor's offense, as the world knows, had to do with his blast at the eye-popping apologias that had come from our Cairo embassy while mobs of the faithful were gathering to wreak havoc over a crude YouTube video insulting to Islam -- apologies that Mr. Romney linked to the general inclinations of the Obama administration.

For this he was pilloried as having criticized the president in a time of urgent crisis. Or, as Andrea Mitchell put it Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," Mr. Romney had come out with his statement when the State Department didn't know where Ambassador Chris Stevens was -- "the body was missing."

At the time of Mr. Romney's initial statement, of course, no word had as yet come about Stevens' fate or those of his murdered colleagues. Which didn't prevent members of the press and pundits from proclaiming, all the rest of the week, that Mr. Romney had embarked on a political attack while the world was aflame and the president embroiled in the crisis. The same president who would, in the midst of that crisis, go tootling off to Las Vegas for a campaign fundraiser."

Why don't people like Corn and his colleagues in the press just get out of the way and let Obama tell us in his own words what he told Univision this week: Let me out of the White House. For good.