Leave it to Mark Steyn to finger the essence of Obama's re-election themes.

In the end, free societies get the governments they deserve. So, if the American people wish to choose their chief executive on the basis of the "war on women," the Republican theocrats' confiscation of your contraceptives or whatever other mangy and emaciated rabbit the Great Magician produces from his threadbare topper, they are free to do so, and they will live with the consequences.

But it is the so-called "Buffet rule" that reveals the true nature of Obama's class warfare campaign:

A-hem. According to the Congressional Budget Office (the same nonpartisan bean-counters who project that on Obama's current spending proposals the entire U.S. economy will cease to exist in 2027) Obama's Buffett Rule will raise - stand well back - $3.2 billion per year. Or what the United States government currently borrows every 17 hours.

So in 514 years it will have raised enough additional revenue to pay off the 2011 federal budget deficit. If you want to mark it on your calendar, 514 years is the year 2526. There's a sporting chance Joe Biden will have retired from public life by then, but other than that I'm not making any bets.

Let's go back to that presidential sound bite: "It will help us close our deficit."

I'm beginning to suspect that the Oval Office teleprompter may be malfunctioning, or that perhaps that NBC News producer who "accidentally" edited George Zimmerman into sounding like a racist has now edited the smartest president of all time into sounding like an idiot. Either way, it appears the last seven words fell off the end of the sentence.

What the president meant to say was: "It will help us close our deficit ... for 2011 ... within a mere half-millennium!" (Pause for deafening cheers and standing ovation.)

Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. A nation that takes Barack Obama's current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path.

Finally this week, some news outlets began to push back against this idiotic notion that the Buffet rule is a deficit fighting measure. Some pundits began to refer to the rule as a "gimmick." But that hasn't stopped the president from pushing the rule as a way to make America more "fair" and reduce his gargantuan deficit.

Steyn concludes:

The Buffett rule itself may die, but the name will live on as a metaphor for pointless public policy.

Read the whole thing for some excellent insight into Obama's class warfare campaign.