It’s becoming clear that President Obama really is a Marxist – but of the Groucho, not Karl school.  “Are you going to believe me, or what you see with your own eyes?” is the next logical answer for administration apologists to employ in claiming the fall of Ramadi isn’t an outright catastrophe.   At least one top Democrat, senior House member Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, has had enough.

A senior House of Representatives Democrat said Tuesday that the White House’s description of supposed progress in the war against the Islamic State should ring “alarm bells,” and called the fall of the city of Ramadi to the extremists “a very serious and significant setback.”

“I don’t think we’re losing the war, but I don’t think we’re making tremendous progress either,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters at a breakfast organized by the Christian Science Monitor.

The California Democrat had been asked about White House deputy press secretary Eric Schultz’s recitation last week of the number of U.S. and partner airstrikes to counter a reporter’s question about whether the Islamic State is winning.

Schiff is only a half-step short of Silvio Canto's call for a righteous Democrat to step forward.  Schiff spoke before White House spokesman Josh Earnest played Chico, the straight main, to Obama’s Groucho at the White House press briefing:

'So we have seen a lot of successes' he said, 'but we've also seen significant areas of setback.'

That's all part of 'a long-term proposition like this one,' he said.

Asked if he thought that the president's strategy for defeating and ultimately degrading ISIS, as the White House likes to say, has been a success, Earnest said, 'yeah...overall, yes.'

'That doesn't mean there haven't been areas of setbacks as we saw in Ramadi,' though, he continued. 

“Overall success”?  Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist, quipped yesterday on Fox News’s Special Report that this is either cynical or delusional.

“I would hope cynical, because otherwise we’re in deep trouble,” he remarked. “This is a tremendous defeat. It isn’t only a geographic defeat, the fact that Mosul is gone, Fallujah is gone and now Ramadi is gone. It’s that the Iraqi army once again ran.”