The aft party deck on a mega yacht is the best spot to luxuriate out of the buffeting winds, protected from spray, with lingering sunsets perfecting the ambiance.

Admiring one’s wake from the aft party deck carries a certain nonchalant casual breeziness

The aft party deck occupants have little clue where the boat is headed -- indifferent to destination or hazards to navigation. The aft deck partygoers view life on the bridge and running the ship as inconvenient exertions, cutting into playtime. Better to delegate the dirty work to callused helmsmen, beady-eyed navigators, and greaseball engine room donkeymen.

President Obama has made the aft party deck celebrity culture synonymous with his presidential seal. Even the most fawning poolside historians will be sorely tested in finding any statesmanlike redemption. Hobnobbing with Hollywood moguls, nonstop fundraising while the world burns and scandals erupt all around him, hanging out with NBA basketball stars, hosting White House galas with the likes of serial felon Snoop Dog, fighting boredom by burning nearly $50 million of taxpayer funds for elite class travel, lodging, dining, and entertainment, are all enduring optics of our first and only Dobie Gillis president.

President Obama’s tenure, indeed his entire life, has been scenes from the aft party deck.

It all started with his cannabis reeking mediocrity at Columbia and Harvard. Then as a so-called constitutional law lecturer at Chicago and undistinguished Illinois state senator, not a single scholarly sentence published nor a line of meaningful legislation sponsored, with none of his students nor any of his constituents remembering anything noteworthy.

The perfect apprenticeship to being the fantail deck president, Obama’s defining legacy in governance.

On a U.S. Navy destroyer the fantail deck is where the crew can go topside for a smoke while admiring the ship’s wake.  In WWII days, depth charges were launched from the fantail deck, soon followed by spectacular underwater explosions, safely astern trailing away from the ship’s bottom. Look out below.

Admiring the ship’s wake from the fantail deck usually meant calibrating the pattern of depth charges, while soon enough the telltale oil slick might appear, promising a direct hit, a world apart from life on the aft-party deck.

The fantail deck crew on U.S. Navy vessels are serious able seamen. Our fantail deck president is instead unserious, disordered, disengaged, and an insult to any able seaman. Only too willing to indiscriminately launch explosives in the form of race baiting, handing over terrorists to the enemy, lying to Congress and the American people,  inviting trafficking of children across our border with Mexico for purely political posturing, and hijacking Article I and the First Amendment.

Embracing his fantail deck mode, Obama displays apparent witlessness about any of his administration’s abuse of power and corruption scandals, while exercising militant apathy about any serious national security strategy.  And now, a president who has unapologetically celebrated his own insouciant but deliberate destruction of the nation he loathes, has assigned himself -- the imposter Commander Obama -- to a permanent station on the fantail deck of his own personal destroyer.

Yet if the Commander is self-absorbed on the fantail deck, who is steering the ship of state? Seemingly no one, as the vessel too often lies ahull, beset by outside forces and a stream of unwelcome events, none predicted nor for which any contingencies have been prepared. Of course, there is Obama’s occasional ideological autopilot where its claims of virtuous inertia are undeterred by anyone in his own political party or the mainstream media. The fiction persists that this historic presidency is honorable, despite the catastrophic consequences of willfully abetting those who would imperil our sovereignty while nullifying the rule of law nearly everywhere else.

Ideology on autopilot, while its protagonist commands a chaise longue, enlists and encourages the worst of loyalist brigands. Rogue helmsmen masquerading as the daily officer of the deck, easily deploy override codes while the ship’s nominal captain zips along a jackstay line, escaping accountability once again to an aft-party deck.

Within hours, even minutes, the president can execute a movietone dissolve and fade, effortlessly transition to his aft-party deck mode, reveling in another campaign stop, another photo-op at a burger joint, another round of golf, another helicopter landing at Martha’s Vineyard.

Reality of what a vessel may encounter, only possible from competent vigilance on the bridge, escapes the occupants of the fantail deck. “Whoa… what was that… where did that come from”, are the predictable reactions as nasty debris swiftly tracks alongside, casualties from Obama’s careless invectives, flippantly lobbed like so many of those WWII depth charges.

Using survivors of torpedoed Allied merchantmen as bait and cover, WWII U-boat commanders waited patiently submerged just below the life rafts and flotsam   hoping a U.S. Navy or Royal Navy destroyer or destroyer escort would be the arriving humanitarian, soon dead-in-the-water, with rescue nets over the side, morally paralyzed precluded from attacking the enemy below. And now, Hamas terrorists casually position children and innocent civilians in schools and hospitals to screen rocket batteries, knowing when the Israelis counterattack the civilian casualties will once more elicit moral outrage.

Who but an addicted party-boat leech and morally reprehensible fantail deck Commander would lift tactics from a U-Boat Kapitan and Palestinian bombers to encourage over 50,000 children to flood the southwest borders, carrying a full pallet of infectious diseases from whooping cough, TB, hepatitis, scabies, measles, and more in order to score cheap and despicable political points blaming such a human cataclysm on principled opponents of amnesty for illegal aliens?

Obama’s petulant rants about the only adults in his life -- his political opponents --barely obscure this nakedly brazen and morally bereft calculated invitation for trafficking children from Central America just to scatter chaos in the most cynical political manipulation yet seen in modern U.S. history.

Who but a fantail deck president, disengaged from the bridge, disagreeable and unrepentant, would blithely hand over five terrorists to the enemy while our troops are still in the field? Who but a fantail deck president would ignore his own intelligence community’s warnings about the ISIS/ISIL invasion of Iraq, then seek an alliance with the nihilist terrorist state of Iran to thwart the invaders?

Who but a fantail deck president would embrace jihad sympathizers, celebrate a U.S. Army deserter, then dispatch dutiful envoys and spokesmen to lie about it to Congress and the American people? Who but a fantail deck president would disappear as an American consulate is firebombed with an ambassador and three cohorts murdered?

Who but a fantail deck president would scoff at multiple rebukes from the Supreme Court for repeated executive branch overreaches while taunting the U.S. House, “So sue me!”

Obama’s fantail deck presidency has been aptly captured by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker, where an unnamed White House official used the phrase “leading from behind” in justifying Obama’s disastrous approach to Libya. Of course leading from behind is more than just another harmless circumlocution describing cool and cautious.

How convenient to be leading from behind on the fantail deck, disavowing errant orders from the bridge to the helmsman and the engine room.  And leading from the fantail deck means never having to scan the forward horizon, never posting a lookout on the bow, never reckoning what the eyes can see, nor what intelligence intercepts, radar blips, and sonar pings reveal.

Not soon enough will our fantail deck president dissolve and fade to his permanent aft-party deck containing his post-presidential library.  In the meantime, can we evade the torpedoes, aimed at mangling the prop and jamming the rudder, ultimately severing the stern, sinking the ship? 

Obama, the fantail deck president, will be the last to know, or to care, as he will already have found refuge on an aft-party deck someplace else. And the rest of the nation will struggle for air as wreckage-strewn waves break over our heads.