Chinese water torture. GWAR jamming with Celine. Autoeroticism employing a cheese grater.

These are just a few the things more harmonious and enjoyable than listening to The Dear Leader (TDL) speak. Tonight, he gives the SOTU address mandated by the Constitution, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to watch more than a few minutes.

Eric called me earlier tonight asking me if I was planning on watching it, and though not my exact words, my belief is that I would rather “be anally raped by the elephantine-hung natives of hence unexplored  areas of lower Madagascar” than listen to TDL orate, to watch his chin glance to the sky, to understand that he is being clear, to know that there are straw men to the left and to the right from which draws to the middle, to finally remember that before he was TDL, there were eight years of bungling that, like Christ himself, he took upon his own shoulders.

It really has come to this.

Readers who’ve been with me for some time know that one of my greatest joys in life back in the go-go 90s was a SOTU by Pres. Clinton. Much shoe-throwing went along with the evening, and then a bit of columnist rage followed in the next day or two. Pres. Clinton was the kind of man who could charm you with lies; TDL, one Barack H. Obama, is the kind of man who looks down at you as stupid for not being smart enough to believe the lies.

There are many adjectives that are unfurled to describe TDL by all sorts of folk: cool, distant, academic, intellectual, reserved, withdrawn. Some of these are more positive than others, but all apply to the type of many who has a taste for blood: it’s not that such a person doesn’t get it, they get it better than most.

This doesn’t apply to TDL. Here’s the best well-known phrase I can think of that describes my view of TDL: if you can keep your head about you when everyone else is losing theirs, you don’t understand the situation.

A larger theme of my criticism of Barack Obama is that he’s not nearly so smart as people want him to be, and his egocentric, narcissistic bearing has been underplayed by the Medea at large. To wit: I’m not the first person to pick up on this aspect of the man, but I called it out rather early, when he would not put down this messianic label his more ardent supporters were giving him.

If you want a recipe for disaster in a representative republic, find someone who is billed as a genius and as above the rest of us when they are in fact of average intellect and super-human vanity. The rest, as we’ve seen in one year, plays itself out.

Two curious photographs (one more well-known than the other) hit the tubes this week. The first is TDL standing in a sixth-grade classroom, teleprompters to his right and left, addressing what was reported to be a group of sixth-graders, then that was debunked. Turns out, he was addressing a group of Medea folk after he’d finished addressing the sixth-graders. A pictures is worth whatever they say it, but what I found surreal about the photo was the extension cord running from the prompter on TDL’s left to the plug in the wall of the sixth-grade classroom. Aside from the tackiness of the optics, a larger question must be asked: why does a man, sold as so intelligent need a teleprompter to address the couple-dozen Medea members able to fill the back half of a sixth-grade classroom?

Building on this question, there was the less-publicized photograph of TDL addressing his own task force on the middle class. Anyone whose sat in a meeting already knows the scene – two dozen people in suits sit around a U-shaped table, only instead of the guy at the front presenting a snnoze-worthy PowerPoint presentation, we have TDL, the leader of the free world, addressing his own task force … with a teleprompter?

Huh?

While others construct their SOTU drinking games and bingo cards, I find this business depressing. From what I’ve read (way, way, way, way too much recently), POTUS TDL will strike a defiant tone in his call for the care that bears his name, he’ll call for an end to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and – I’m sure he’ll be clear – the mistakes of “the eight years before I came into office” won’t be repeated.

I assume “job creation and/or salvation” will be a big theme tonight, and I note that whenever I hear about such salvation, it usually involves “teachers, firefighters and police,” which is interesting since all three are a) employees of the government and b) protected by unions. I’ve nothing against any of the three for the most part, nor do I think it’s the POTUS’s job to create jobs, yet it’s sad to know that TDL and his supporters seem to think that more government workers empowered by contracts collectively bargained, guaranteed golden benefits and pensions made of kryptonite will somehow stimulate this economy or any other, for that matter.

While he manicures the hand that feeds his quasi-criminal operation, he insists on going – again and again and again – after American banks and the people who work in them, even though it was the same bank and gigantic rent-seeking corporations who supplied his early campaign with the bulk of its cash, and now supply his economic team with the bulk of its braintrust. Politely, this is called crony-capitalism, but for a capitalist like me, who believes in the ideal of capitalism without being dumb enough to ignore how quickly it can be corrupted under any party, it is state-sanctioned theft outsourced to people who aren’t elected.

Finally, there is the issue of transparency, which was, is and remains a joke under most Administrations, yet with this one was elevated to a farce even before TDL was anointed. The first real sign of trouble with the concepts of “TDL” and “ethics” was TDL’s pledge of acceptance of Federal campaign dollars, just like every major candidate before him. TDL repeatedly vowed that he would do this, then when he realized he could get a lot more money by not taking it, he decided it was in the public’s best interest to not do what wasn’t in his best-interest. The break of the “C-SPAN” transparency pledge ruffled many feathers, but anyone who’s followed TDL’s rise to power was not surprised.

The problem with promising so much to so many while delivering so little to most is that you lose the grant of good faith. I don’t believe most of what any powerful politician actually says, but I’m willing to give them a certain benefit of the doubt. This POTUS lost his benefit earlier, and now, a year later, even his most ardent, baptized supporters are coming around to see what a mess they’ve enabled.

It will get worse. Much, much worse.