What is emerging out of the black comedy of Barack Obama's weakness and vacillation in response to the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria is the revitalization of what President George W. Bush termed the "axis of evil."

By allowing himself to become what Ann Coulter charitably describes as "President Putin's bitch," Obama has not only taken yet another step in his purposeful overseeing of the decline of the U.S. as a world power, he has brought about a power vacuum that has seen Kim Jong-un restart his nuclear reactors and Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad grab the initiative as they dictate the terms of the ongoing war for the Middle East.

In reducing Obama to lackey status in world affairs and in order to further chastise his bitch for her reference to American exceptionalism, the atheist communist Putin played the God card, referencing the U.S. Declaration of Independence in the process, no less:

I would rather disagree with a case he [Obama] made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States' policy is "what makes America different. It's what makes us exceptional." It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord's blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

It's ironic enough that Putin was able to use the New York Times, a key media outlet in what has become Obama's state-run communications conglomerate, to make a fool out of the president. What's even uglier, though, is Obama's mealy-mouthed response to Putin: "I don't think that Mr. Putin has the same values that we do."

In fact, Obama is wrong again. Since he took office and has done everything in his power to radically change the United States into a second-rate socialist state, the U.S. is exhibiting almost exactly the same values as those that characterize Putin's Russia.

Since Obama assumed power in 2009, we've no longer been a democratic republic. Important decisions are now made unilaterally by executive order and through regulations imposed by cabinet secretaries. From suspending the deportation of illegal alien criminals to arming Mexican drug cartels to refusing to uphold our Constitution, both the president and his complicit attorney general, Eric Holder, bend the law to their liking, making decisions as to which are followed and which ignored based on their political ideology and their obeisance to their political benefactors.

Obama's foreign policy, like Russia's, has consistently favored the very Islamist radicals that our country has been at war with for nearly two decades. Most recently this includes the president's suggesting that he sees a potential role for Iran in helping to stabilize Syria, though this ignores the fact that Iran has been providing fighters to support the Assad regime for years.

But beyond that, any foreign policy which doesn't recognize that most Middle Eastern countries are not ready for democracy is naïve at best. Nations whose borders were arbitrarily drawn by western powers during World War I but whose fundamental political and geographic divisions remain based solely on tribal and religious sectarianism are incapable of hosting anything but dictatorial national leaders. Our own national interests are advanced or weakened only by our choice of which dictator we align ourselves with.

The fact that Obama has supported (or at least not challenged) Middle Eastern despots like Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei, whose hatred of the west knows no bounds, but spoke out against longtime American and Israeli ally Hosni Mubarak on the absurd grounds that somehow a democratic government would magically appear in Egypt after Mubarak was overthrown, demonstrates our president's allegiance to Islamist fundamentalist governments, arguably coupled with the naïvete of a high school junior.

Even the idea that Obama didn't realize that the overthrow of another despotic American ally, Moammar Ghadafi, would result in Libya's descending into tribal chaos boggles the mind. Apparently, our president is not only an incompetent, he's an incompetent who sympathizes with our sworn Islamist mortal enemies.

Vladimir Putin couldn't have scripted the outcomes Obama is managing to enable to play out in the Middle East any better if he'd tried.

But the comparison of Putin's and Obama's values goes beyond domestic and foreign policy issues. Obama's economic policies are gradually turning the U.S. into an imitation of Soviet Russia, with de facto food rationing now imposed on nearly 50 million Americans who rely on SNAP benefits for their daily bread.

Those same Soviet-worthy economic policies have starved American businesses and small investors out of the market as big bankers use the tens of billions of fiat dollars printed each month by the Fed and shunted their way, not to loan to small businesses and homeowners, but to manipulate the prices of currencies, precious metals, and stocks in order to line their own pockets.

Thanks to Obama, Putin is dead right about our not being "exceptional." Indeed, Obama -- in his uncanny mirroring of Russian communist values and practices -- has turned the U.S. into a fledgling socialist dictatorship even as he has managed to transform George W. Bush's Axis of Evil into the Axis of Obama.