Before Barack Obama’s election, his wife promised that Obama would “never let you go back to your lives as usual.” And Alejandro Echevarria, principal of Broadway Elementary, seems hell-bent not only on keeping Michelle Obama’s threat but making it a reality from the tenderest ages on.

In case you were worried that enforced play at recess was free of charge—or as Obama himself is fond of saying, “won’t cost you [the taxpayers] a dime—the cost of the program is $23,500 a year.

And just how much are the little darlings at Broadway enjoying their newfound playground imprisonment? The article answers that question with a frank exchange between 11-year-old Esmeilyn Almendarez and 28-year-old Brandi Parker, the “recess coach with a whistle around her neck, corralling children behind bright orange cones to play organized games.”

Esmeilyn: I don’t like to play.

Brandi: Why do I have to go through this every day with you? There’s no choice.

What is Spanish for dolce far niente?

But surely some of the children like the new regime, right? Well, not Jose Salcedo, a fourth grader, who misses the old recess when “nobody would tell us what to do.” And not Khizeeq Murphy, aged 10, who used to enjoy just running and dribbling a basketball. Or Kazmir Payne, a second grader, who “wishes he could have his free time back.” At least Kazmir’s mother, Kizzy, is on board. She is quoted as saying “I think the more supervision, the better.”

Presumably, in the interests of fairmindedness, the article even goes so far as to cite a study from the journal Pediatrics which found that “children still benefit most from recess when they are let alone to daydream, solve problems, use their imagination to invent their own games and ‘be free to do what they choose to do.’”

Not to worry, though. Brandi Parker knows better. “These are the things that matter in life: who you are as a human being at the core,” the article quotes her as saying. Never too soon to take the weight of adult responsibility on your shoulders. Or put it on the shoulders of children in their formative years.

Raines’s rant against Roger Ailes and FOX, which appears in today’s Washington Post, is certain to come away with honors as the decade’s unintentionally funniest commentary on the state of the modern fifth estate. Just take this quote alone: “Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II.”  Standards of fairness and objectivity? Raines couldn’t be more of a stranger to fairness and objectivity.

Raines’s disquisition on the alleged unfairness of FOX centers on one beef: its biased treatment of the current health care fiasco. In support of his claim, Raines relies on an unattributed quote he ascribes to FOX: “The American people do not want health-care reform.” Crack journalist that he is, Raines probably should name the FOX employee whom he is quoting, but remember—this is the man who gave the world Jayson Blair.

But never mind any of that. Raines, oblivious to blunt self-contradiction, shoots himself in the journalistic foot a paragraph later by noting “It is true that, after 14 months of Fox’s relentless pounding of President Obama’s idea of sweeping reform, the latest Gallup poll shows opinion running 48 to 45 percent against the current legislation.”

You have to hand it to the Washington Post for publishing this bit of self-righteous drivel and, in so doing, demonstrating that they are willing to hire, if only on a freelance basis, the handicapped.

The first came from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who in a typically belligerent, typically high-handed fashion gave utterance to the lie that the American people can’t afford to have Congress start the process over because they’ve reached the last straw.  She went on to recite sob stories of voters who have written to her(!), claiming they are using food money to buy medicine they can’t otherwise afford. What Pelosi conveniently overlooked is that none of the legislation in the package her house passed will go into force before 2013.  By that time, the poor souls she was describing will have started devouring each other.

The next untruth came from Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, who insisted the root of the problem is the “vulturous” insurance companies, who prey on the public. I wonder if Rockefeller was listening when his fellow Senator Lamarr Alexander of Tennessee pointed out that the combined profits of the entire insurance industry would cover exactly two days of health care for the country out of 365. I wonder if any of the Democrats is aware that the health insurance industry’s profit margin is among the lowest of any current active industry.

But far and away the funniest line of the day had to be Obama himself admonishing John McCain that the time for campaigning is past. Lucky Obama didn’t add that the time for exaggeration and egotism are past, which probably would drawn lightning bolts to Blair House.

Obama, who had the floor more than all the representatives of either party combined, concluded the side show by throwing up his hands and saying we can’t afford “baby steps,” adding that in a few weeks the final determination on the bill will be made. His final words were “That’s what elections are for.”

Precisely, Mr. President. You want to start cleaning out your desk now, or do you need the weekend?

So who do you think is responsible for that divide? Yo! That’s right — according to Newsbusters, the subject was the focus of a discussion on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” this morning, and all present were in agreement that politically oriented media websites are the culprit.

Besides Joe Scarborough, the panel included Mika Brzezinski, Pat Buchanan, Time’s Peter Beinart, and NBC’s Savannah Guthrie. A video of the exchange appears below.

Although this seems like an outrageously fatuous claim in light of the show that Reid, Pelosi, and Obama himself have put on this past year, there is a bright side. At least they didn’t blame the mood on George W. Bush.

First, he was prepared to allow his misbegotten health care proposal to die quietly so that he could turn his attention to the real problems besetting the American people. Then ObamaCare was back “on.” Then it was “off” again. Now. . . it’s frankly hard to keep track without a scorecard.

What a ride this presidency has been for dimwits like Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post. These people, who will remain dedicated to the myth of Barack Obama long after the bad taste of his presidency has vanished from the collective American palate, have done their best to run interference for Obama, but his constant “head fakes” have to be giving them a pain in a neck.

Robinson has a column today, the title of which — “On Health Care, Do It” — pretty well sums up the viewpoint of Obama’s loony left loyal base. “Pass the thing, and quickly,” Robinson importunes, “or risk becoming the loyal minority.” Apparently, on Robinson’s planet, the Democrats will remain in the majority if they pass this monstrous bill. Yeah, right.

Robert Reich, who should frankly know better, has a piece in Salon pushing for the use of reconciliation to pass the bill. Using reconciliation on a massive piece of legislation that will effectively hand one-sixth of the economy off to the government will spark a popular revolt in a country that has been sickened by the blatantly partisan deal-making it has witnessed over the last year.

The Democrats seem unwilling to accept that the dream scenario they all bought into a short year ago has crashed and burned. Obama’s approval ratings have been hovering around 47 percent — the point of no return for past presidents. Why any of them believe that forcing an unwanted, bloated, health care package down the throats of the American people is going to change any of that will be one of the mysteries for the ages. Call it ObamaClueless?

What Kilgore invites readers to contemplate is the type of alternate “what if” reality familiar to those who have “been watching the cult TV show ‘Lost.’” I have to confess, I am not one of them, and knowing that the show attracts great thinkers like Ed Kilgore, I have no deep regrets about spending my time otherwise. I am, at the same time, a huge fan of the Frank Capra Christmastime classic It’s a Wonderful Life, which addresses the same question, which reworded to fit the present situation is “How different would the U.S. be today if Barack Obama had not been elected president?”

“On a variety of fronts,” Kilgore writes, “the Obama administration is suffering from an inability to show Americans the parallel universe in which its past policies were not enacted.” I don’t what flavor of Kool-Aid Kilgore (I keep wanting to call him “Trout”) is drinking, but I think we already know what that wasteland would look like. Obama himself painted a vivid portrait of it in January of 2009, when he announced that a failure to pass his mammoth spending package would lead to unemployment levels above 8 percent. And we all know how well things have turned out since that bill was passed.

After some suitable Obama-esque talking points about jobs saved, Trout takes his what-if scenario to the next level, to ObamaCare:

Critics savage Obama for a health care plan that doesn’t do enough to limit costs. Obama responds that health care costs are going up anyway, without a plan. But it’s not easy to convince people that the status quo is riskier than a large and complicated series of changes in how Americans obtain health insurance.

Okay, this one is so simple that even a cave man could figure it out. (My apologies to Trout, who apparently can’t figure it out.) Obama’s plan for health care reform originally had two objectives:

1. To insure the then-47 million Americans without health insurance.
2. To lower (yes, lower; talk of deficit neutrality came later) the overall cost of health insurance.

If that sounds pie-in-the-sky it is because it is. You can’t possibly provide more of a good or service at a lower cost. Unless, of course, the government steps in as the seller of that good or service, in which case. . .

In which case what? Can Ed Kilgore or his ilk point to a single government-run program that has worked better than its equivalent in the private sector? Kilgore echoes the White House’s lament over the “gargantuan premium increases” that one insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, will impose on its California policy holders. But if it’s true that the cost of health care is rising fast, it is equally true that legitimate measures for controlling its cost — specifically tort reform and premium portability — were summarily dismissed by Democrat leaders crazed with their own power.

I could go on — Kilgore does — but this has been rehashed so many times that nothing new can be added to the argument. The nightmare that was ObamaCare is blessedly in the rear view mirror and getting more distant and smaller all the time.

One what-if Kilgore doesn’t bother to explore is how different the reality of Iran’s incipient nuclear capability might be if Obama had admitted some time early in his first year that his comments about sitting down with Iran’s leaders without precondition had been naive. Even without making this confession, if he had begged off the fatuous idea of engagement and pressured his allies to squeeze Iran back then, we might not be talking now about the reality of Iran as a nuclear power.

In the end, maybe Ed Kilgore and his fellow what-iffers should spend less time worrying about what would have been and more contemplating what is likely to be come 2010 and again 2012. They had their chance. Time to turn control of the country back over to the adults.

Maybe that bit of wisdom courtesy of Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr should have provided fair warning to voters who supported the hope-and-change candidate in the 2008 presidential election, but apparently at least some of them have had enough. According to a Gallup poll released last week, Obama is now running just about even with the proverbial generic candidate on the Republican side.

The poll reveals that 44 percent of registered voters claim they would reelect Obama compared with 42 percent who say they would opt for any Republican candidate.

The prognosis for a second term for Obama get even worse when you take into consideration those all-important independent voters, who were a cornerstone of his victory last November. According to the poll, they now favor a Republican candidate to Obama by a 14-point margin: 45 percent to 31 percent.

The larger polling picture from Real Clear Politics paints an even grimmer picture of Obama’s chances for reelection. The aggregate as of noon today had Obama’s approval rating at 47.6, just 6 tenths of a point above the re-electability threshold. (No president has ever won a second term with an approval rating at or below 47 percent.) Some of the polls that make up that aggregate have Obama’s approval rating trailing his disapproval rating. The Marist poll, for example, his Obama with an approval rating of 44 percent and a disapproval rating of 47 percent.

He was on the program to promote the book, whose thesis is disquieting to those, like O’Donnell, who are still trying to square the general public’s revised view of Barack Obama against the idealized version many voted for. O’Donnell became so unhinged during the interview, babbling on about how George W. Bush was responsible for 9/11, that Scarborough was finally forced to go to commercial, first assuring his viewers that he would be conducting the interview with Thiessen alone. The video follows.

Speaking more precisely, it wasn’t the editorial which brought the question to mind but a comment by one of the readers. The comment in question, posed by one “Jake, Manchester,” follows here in its entirety:

Let us also remember that he [Washington] owned many slaves (over 300 by the time he died at Mont [sic] Vernon). If not for those slaves its [sic] very possible he might not have become the man that he was.

Jake, Manchester’s comment makes it crystal clear who he hates for Presidents’ Day, though it doesn’t quite explain why. Let’s assume for the moment that Jake isn’t just engaging in some cheap, rhetorical self-righteousness — that he really believes that it was Washington’s slaves and not the man’s own military prowess that enabled him to defeat the British against great odds in the Revolutionary War. Shouldn’t Jake then — shouldn’t we all — feel gratitude to Washington and his slaves for the role they played in causing the events of history to turn out as they did? Can’t Jake join the rest of us in giving thanks for the ends General Washington achieved if not the means by which he achieved them?

But, as the editorial notes, Washington’s gifts to the nation he helped found didn’t end on the battlefield. They continued once he was elected as its first leader:

On his ride to New York City, then the capital, he was serenaded by citizens singing, ‘Welcome, mighty chief!’ Had he sought them, dictatorial powers were his for the taking. But on his inauguration, he wore a plain brown suit fitting of an average American, the first step in his plan to establish that Presidents were citizen executives, nothing more.

It is not clear from Jake, Manchester’s comment whether he read this portion of the editorial, but to accept the viewpoint that Washington’s democratic ideals somehow derived from the slaves he owned is to make a preposterously large leap.

The fact that Washington personally owned slaves is lamentable. The fact that anyone ever owned slaves is lamentable. Most lamentable of all is that that slavery continues to be practiced as a way of life in some places to this day.

The need to mention any of this in the context of paying homage to our founding fathers for the great gift they bestowed on us on a day set aside for doing precisely that is beneath contempt.

Now that it’s become clear even to sage political analysts like the Times’ Charles Blow that Barack Obama can’t be trusted to tie his own shoes, the question for Obama is who to trust. He’s getting opinions from every quarter imaginable — the extreme left (which Blow represents), the far left, the left, and the lunatic fringe.

Blow’s advice is simple and comes in two parts. The first is get America back to work. The second — and more interesting — part is shake up the staffing of the West Wing. Now this second part would be tantalizing to non-Obama supporters, who would enjoy seeing (for example) Robert Gibbs, a brutish lout, get booted out the door onto Pennsylvania Avenue with a chamois and a can of Kiwi Shoe Polish, so he can begin a career more in line with his skill set. Ditto David Axelrod, a a brutish lout, etc.

But how sound a piece of advice would it be for Obama to jettison the group that got him to 1600 Pennsylvania in the first place? He has made it clear from his appointments so far that he gravitates toward people from the above-mentioned lunatic fringe when selecting individuals to serve him in advisory roles. As his poll numbers inch ever closer to the terminal cut-off of 47 percent — a popularity rating at or below which no president was ever elected to a second term — how wise would it be to trust Obama to assemble a crew as good as the minimally acceptable staff he has now?

Okay, clearly, Obama should tell Blow to blow.

Who is else is the president getting advice from? Well, there’s Joe Klein. Klein used to be a member of the extreme left, but his own craziness has driven him over the edge of the lunatic fringe. Klein thinks Obama should give the country the middle finger — figuratively speaking. He echoes a view that Obama himself occasionally gives utterance to when he is musing aloud. That is to forge ahead with his original plans for health care reform, cap and trade, the whole enchilada, and worry later that he has flouted the wishes of the people who elected him. Once they understand it was all for their own good, all will be forgiven and Obama’s likeness will begin to be hewn from the granite face of Mt. Rushmore.

The main problem with this advice is that Obama no longer has the political capital to make any of these initiatives happen. The votes simply aren’t there any longer.

So who do I think Obama should trust? I think he should trust me. I have a piece of advice for him that I believe he will eventually be receiving from his party’s leadership when it is clear that he is dragging all of their careers and the party’s very foundations down with him. Better he should act now than wait until the damage is so far along that even the most politically correct histories of his administration will paint him as an abject failure.

I think he should announce his intention to resign from the Office of President effective immediately. He should tell the American people he has learned he is sick — I don’t know: let’s say it’s some rare blood disease — and that he has decided to tender his resignation for the good of the country. He’s not actually sick, not so far as I know, but he should say it anyway.

Following that advice won’t do a whole lot to alter his tarnished image; he has already done much to hurt the country, and there’s no walking that back. But at least it will prevent his name from becoming a verb meaning “to fail.” (Tom worked night and day to make the school baseball team but ultimately he obamaed.) His children won’t have to live a life of disgrace knowing that their last name has joined the dubious ranks of Lynch, Burke, and others that aren’t coming to mind right now.