When a candidate can't run on his past and has no ideas for the future, he must destroy his opponent in the present -- which can be done by distorting his adversary's history and lying about his plans for the future.

There is a problem with this approach, however.  It works only if people trust the candidate doing the distorting.  Should people actually take a look for themselves and not come up with the same conclusion, the disseminator with the poor past and no plans begins to lose credibility.

No one likes a liar -- unless, of course, he is a good liar.  And Barack Obama is not a good liar.  He is a victim of media complicity in the fallacies and half-truths that constitute the myth of Barack Obama.  But fiction works only if you can get your audience to suspend disbelief, and every day fewer people are buying into the meme.

During the first two debates, America looked at Mitt Romney and realized that Barack Obama has been lying to them.  Mitt is not an evil oligarch raping the nation so he can put another elevator in his beach house and buy his wife another Cadillac.

Once people realize that a candidate is a liar, many are loath to ever believe anything he says again -- or at the very least, they approach all he says with studied suspicion.

The first debate was a game-changer.  Romney not only showed himself to be a viable alternative, but also exposed Barack Obama as a liar on all things of substance, while destroying the myth of Obama the genius.  As far as Barack being the world's greatest orator, that interpretation is just "not optimal."  I'm sorry -- he makes this too easy.

Very simply, the myth of Barack Obama has become Barack Obama the myth.

The second debate was even better, because there were many instances where even the casual political observer, with only the slightest tinge of suspicion lurking in his consciousness, could see that the president was not being entirely truthful on a host of issues.  No matter how the second debate is viewed -- and I happen to think Obama lost -- his untruths resonate.

Remaining members of the hardcore group of Obamaphiles have been crowing about the president's "victory" last Tuesday.  But they are all Barack all the time anyway -- everything he does is a victory.  And after his performance in the first debate, even if he had hit the stage drinking wine from a brown paper bag, unshaven, with a Newport dangling from his lips, they would have declared victory, saying he was so in tune with the electorate that he didn't need to put on any pretenses.

They conflate aggression with confidence and knowledge, refusing to see the lack of substance through the style.  With Barack and his minions, it's all Big Bird and binders.  They think they are winning, but it's in the same way Charlie Sheen was winning.  At least Charlie had no illusions; with the president, it is nothing but illusion.

And this is how you know this election is over and that Obama has lost (by a landslide) -- he has been reduced to preaching to the choir.  The relationship between Obama and his dwindling base has become incestuous -- the rest of us don't matter.  They cheer him on, and he speaks only to them.

Candy Crowley may have thought she was helping when she prevented the 45^th president from rhetorically destroying the 44^th after he lied about calling the assassination of our ambassador in Benghazi a "terrorist attack" during his Rose Garden comments on 9/12.  But tens of millions -- even hundreds of millions -- of Americans heard the president for weeks continue to blame a little-seen and unimportant YouTube video for the debacle in Libya and the deaths of four American citizens.  Since it was an attack on America, for once, most people were actually listening to Obama.

...But even those not paying attention then heard the administration and its surrogates continue denying reality for weeks.  When in front of almost 70 million people the president told the world that he had called it an "act of terror" from the very beginning, the American public let out a collective "huh?"

They saw in the first debate how misleading the months and months of negative ads against Romney from the Obama campaign had been.  Now, when they hear him claim he said something that they know he never said -- they see the lie and the cover-up.

...And therein lies both the beauty and the problem with "trust": once it's broken, it's almost impossible to get back.  When someone is trusted, the little inconveniences of truth can be ignored for shared purpose.  But once trust is lost, reality is all that's left.  And the reality of Barack Obama is frightening.  He has been a starkly bad president, and every time he opens up his mouth, more and more people see it.

In the end, it doesn't matter how well the president performs in the third debate, because he is a candidate with a disastrous past and no plan for the future, opposing a hardworking and decent man with a stellar past and a simple and specific plan "forward" (sorry; I just couldn't resist it).  However he does, the conspiring claque in the press and his sycophantic cabal of minions will claim victory, but it won't make any difference.

The rest of us no longer believe.  And what becomes of a god when people no longer believe?

America now sees him as a sad man enthralled with his own lies, just as they did after the first and second debate.  This is why he continues to slide in the polls, despite all his victories.

People will date liars, sleep with liars, marry liars, and do business with liars, but they are reluctant to vote for liars -- or at the very least, ones they can't pretend are honest and truthful.

Barack Obama has become a joke.  The only problem is that it's not funny.

The laughter will have to wait until November 7.