Elect a Chicago community organizer (twice) as your president and you should not be surprised to find that all he is capable of is spewing propaganda and dividing us by personalizing attacks on those who oppose his grandiose, wildly impractical efforts at reshaping our lives to suit his sophomoric view of the good life.

As the obvious failure of ObamaCare has become evident to all but his most blinkered cultists, Obama fell back this week on upping the propagandizing and deflecting attention from his failures with even more lies.

His organizing arm OFA (Organizing for America) urged supporters to use this year's Thanksgiving dinner to persuade less-blinkered family members to sign up right away for ObamaCare, extolling its (apparently hidden) virtues. They handed out a tip sheet to help out with this hard sales pitch.

Michele Obama joined in the rallying effort, urging her fans to work with OFA to gather and share their happy ObamaCare experiences.

Word went out to the Obama megaphonic press, some of which went so far as to offer debate tips regarding the increasingly unpopular program.

Anticipating perhaps that this effort might be insufficient to stem the tide, the administration funneled $1.1 million through the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation to the non-profit, "non-partisan" Families USA to pad the propaganda by producing a database of ObamaCare "success stories."

Iowahawk cast his gimlet eye on this effort and tweeted: "Say what you will about Scientologists but they don't show up at your house on Thanksgiving with Xenu talking points."

In characteristic Obama FUBAR style, in any event, the propaganda wing and the administration side clashed. For just in case any relatives might have been persuaded to push back from the turkey feast and rush to their computers to sign up for ObamaCare, they'd have been unsuccessful. Someone gave all the call center operators off on Thanksgiving, and the site was even deader than usual. The White House then issued a last-minute call: hold up on the signup. (In Xenu I think that reads Ixnay on the OFA.)

OFA didn't enlist me, so I spent Thanksgiving with my family like many lucky American Thinker readers. We admired my granddaughter's artistic paper turkey with feathers inscribed with things for which she is grateful. "I give thanks that I have a house a.k.a. shelter." "I am thankful for all my family and friends who made me what I am." I watched her laugh as over and again she slid down the 10-foot-high berms on Venice beach in her pink sno-board disc. We made a great apple and cranberry pie decorated with six-sided crust stars because it is Chanukah, too. We laughed when my Japanese-American daughter-in-law arranged to pick up the Chanukah jelly doughnuts from a popular bakery, explaining her order was under the name of "the Judy who has the non-Jewish surname."

On the day of the feast we admired my niece and nephews' new home; swapped funny family stories; chased the dog who'd filched a turkey wing around their dining room, admired the moist turkey and all the trimmings, and generally gave thanks for the health and happiness of all the guests.

For a short time we could ignore Obama's domestic and international catastrophes and put out of mind the administration's effort to deflect attention from them with the announcement of a new agreement with Iran, an agreement as flimsy and false as his claim that ObamaCare would allow us to lower health care costs without losing our insurance plans or our doctors.

Yesterday, Iran accused the US of lying about the terms of the deal on nuclear proliferation announced over the weekend, which produced this lament by John Hinderaker at Power Line: "One yearns for the good old days when, if there was a conflict between the U.S. government and Iran's mullahs, you could assume it was the American government that was telling the truth." Now it appears that the White House and State Department may have not been entirely honest about whether we actually have an agreement or not. The Times of Israel reports that the back and forth between Iran and the US forced the State Department to acknowledge that "technical details" have not been concluded -- and that the agreement hasn't gone into force yet:

Iran is currently enjoying a "window" of time before the six-month deal signed in Geneva early Sunday goes into effect, during which it is not bound to take any credible steps toward disabling its ability to produce a nuclear weapon, the State Department acknowledged Tuesday.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that the six-month interim period, during which Iran would take steps to rein in its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief, has not yet begun. Furthermore, there are still a number of details to be worked out, she said, without specifying what points had yet to be finalized.

[snip]

So when does the clock start on the non-deal deal? Psaki says no one knows:

Psaki said that she did not "have a specific timeline" for how long the window would be in place before the six-month period began, nor did there seem to be any mechanism in place to prevent Iran from stepping up nuclear production before the scale-down went into effect.

A disagreement on the Arak plant is hardly a "technical detail." It was the most significant part of the issues that supposedly got addressed -- a sticking point that led France to balk at an earlier push by the Obama administration to settle the dispute in the P5+1 talks. If Iran plunges forward on its plans to build a heavy-water facility, then one has to wonder what exactly the West got out of the negotiations except a piece of paper. Also, since the argument for the deal from John Kerry and Barack Obama is that the pact forces Iran to slow down its pursuit of nuclear weapons before it achieves that capability, one has to wonder why the clock hasn't already started -- and why the White House didn't wait until it had before announcing the agreement.

Like Icarus, Obama, as Professor Charles Lipson reminds us, "was cursed by vaunting ambition, hubris, and a poor understanding of technology." Pestering relatives with even more of his lies at one of the most nationally recognized and loved days of the year with more taxpayer funded propaganda and issuing press releases about what is an apparently nonexistent treaty doesn't seem enough to undo the fall from grace.

For that I am also grateful.