How on earth is it possible that, after nearly four years of  a manifestly dismal, failed presidency, Barack Obama has any support at all, beyond the ten percent of the population who do not know that America has a president?  How can a single sentient person on the planet  claim that he has been a good leader, a good steward of the economy, a good strategist on foreign policy,  a unifier of the American people, a jobs creator? 

He has in fact been the worst president since Jimmy Carter and has seen to it that we have surpassed Carter's misery index scores.  Obama has further ruined a fragile economy, an economy shaken by a Democrat-engineered housing scandal, a bomb begun under Carter, made catastrophically worse under Clinton,  and detonated under Bush.  He has thoroughly and completely bungled our foreign policy by embracing the so-called Arab Spring, effectively handing over a large swath of the middle east to the Muslim Brotherhood, putting Israel in the gravest danger since 1973. 

By withdrawing prematurely from Iraq, he frittered away victory to the Sunni/Shia civil war of the day and he has so badly mishandled Afghanistan that Afghanis are killing our troops on a daily basis with impunity.

And yet the audiences at the Democratic National Convention, scaled down as it was, clapped like trained seals at every phrase of every speaker, no matter how tired, clichéd or bizarre those phrases were.  They gazed fawningly, sometimes tearfully, at these shrieking, desperate characters, like the contemptible Sandra Fluke,  the crazed Jennifer Granholm and the always pretentious John Kerry, as though they actually had something of value to say.  Half of them booed God and Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, denying the very roots of our Judeo-Christian heritage.  Who are these people?

Most citizen Democrats have to be embarrassed by the messages and behavior at the DNC.   The Democrats in Congress surely are, with a few exceptions:  Pelosi, Reid, Wasserman-Schultz and their ilk.  They just will not admit it. They pretend that he should be reelected.  They go through the motions of actually supporting a man they know is thoroughly incompetent and has done terrible damage to the nation.  He is on record, thanks to that live microphone, planning for even more damage if reelected; becoming Putin's lapdog.

Why do intelligent people, in the face of certain disaster, cling so wretchedly to a failed ideologue and a discredited ideology?   How is it possible that there is a single American Jew who can cast a vote for this anti-Israel president?   Obama has made his antipathy for Israel abundantly clear over and over again.   Having reduced women to nothing beyond reproductive systems, how can any woman in this country cast a vote for Obama?  Because he demands that abortion be free and available up to the moment of natural birth (and after if necessary) and taxpayer-funded contraception for all women, regardless of need?   Because he has imposed a bill, Obamacare,  that will take all choice about our own medical care completely out of our hands?  These women are their own worst enemies.

What has happened to the American spirit of open-mindedness,  to our the ability to think critically about what is best for ourselves and the country?  When did it become impossible to change one's mind upon the realization one has cast a misguided vote?  When did at least half of us become the type who dig in our heels like a stubborn child demanding our way?  Have those tenured radicals who control our universities and our media been so effective that Americans can no longer make informed decisions?    'Tis a mystery.

Or have the American people perhaps realized that, in the words of Clint Eastwood, "President Obama is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."