^{It is highly recommended that you repeatedly play this video to fully appreciate this post.}

While the Useless Media continues to pretend the murders of the American Ambassador and three valiant men in Benghazi was “not optimal” and just one of those “bumps in the road” (as POTUS Obama dubbed it), following today’s news that the Navy had replaced Rear Adm. Charles M. Gaouette, the leader of the Mideast strike group, and Gen. Carter Ham had been replaced as commander of U.S. Africa Command, a comment appeared on Twitter that “Captain Queeg is running the country.”

This is not the first time Barack Obama has been thus characterized.

In a March 2010 post titled “He’s talking a private language, to himself, like crazy people do…..”, I wrote that a long-time RBO reader had commented, “Obama has rounded the bend… I saw shades of Captain Queeg and heard the tapping and squeaking of brass marbles.”

The reference was to POTUS Obama’s White House speech the day prior while a “group of health care professionals” watched him from behind while others sat in the gallery to his front.

USA Today remarked that his audience, however, was not the men and women in little white coats but, rather, members of Congress who were being asked to pass health care legislation that was (and remains), among other things, a suicide mission and financially unsustainable.

POTUS’s arguments are easily summed up in deceptive, often contradictory and somewhat laughable bullet points:

. It’s the right thing to do.
. You’ve already voted once for a health care overhaul — and reconciliation has been used before.
. My bill won’t add to the deficit.
. We’ve tried to get Republican cooperation.
. Don’t listen to the media.
. And, lastly, we need to prove that government can work.

Tony Gallardo observed at American Thinker that perhaps it was time to revisit a question posed in a June 10, 2009, Esquire on-line article by Charles P. Pierce in which he asked: “What if Obama’s out of his mind?”

As Gallardo pointed out, Pierce said:

Listen to him. He’s talking in what seems to be a glossolalic deluge of issues. One plan a week, each thrown out there while we’re still digesting the previous one. He’s moving too fast for us to keep up with him. He’s talking a private language, to himself, like crazy people do…..

Gallardo wrote:

Maybe it is time to ask again.

After pursuing a reckless healthcare reform plan for 14 months now; after having it roundly rejected by the American people; in the aftermath of significant election losses in New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts; after having been shown that it is at minimum a budget busting $1 to $2 trillion monstrosity, he is continuing to insist on getting it passed, one way or another.

On Wednesday, March 3, 2010 he again made it clear that he will do whatever it takes to enact something (anything) into law.

His rationale, if you can call it that, is a variation on the same thing he has been saying for 14 months.

[...]

Listen to Pierce again; “He’s talking a private language, to himself, like crazy people do…..”

There seem to be only two possibilities; either Obama is in fact “crazy”, meaning he is certifiably detached from even a scintilla of reality, or he is cunningly trying to drive the rest of us crazy by standing before us, chin jutted into the air, and seriously proclaiming for the umpteenth time what we all know to be pure claptrap.

I can think of no third possibility.

It was also brought to my attention that, talking about POTUS on air, Michael Medved had been “assigning the label ‘active/negative personality’” to him.

Each time he’s used the term on air, he has laid out more detail. Medved says other examples of active-negative presidents include LBJ, Nixon, and Jimmy Carter to some extent.

Medved commented January 21, 2010, at Townhall.com re the “grim, joyless demeanor” of POTUS:

The one-time apostle of “hope” now gives the impression of self-righteous suffering in office—more and more exemplifying the self-destructive presidential personality defined as “active-negative” by political scientist James David Barber and characterizing stubborn, troubled, arrogant leaders like Wilson, Hoover, Johnson, Nixon and Carter.

Paraphrasing Medved’s comments from his show, we learn this “can be a pretty dangerous trait… essentially, the more embattled and criticized an active-negative feels, the more he/she digs in and the more he/she separates from rational people and data. It is also a characteristic common to someone who has been elevated way beyond his/her depth and skill level.”

On June 14, 2010, John Batchelor wrote about POTUS Queeg on his blog:

Disturbing and mesmerizing whispering that the Oval Office is the scene of stormy and romantic melodrama between POTUS and his most senior and trusted advisers.

Whispering that POTUS is sleeping poorly and is much aggrieved at slights, shortfalls, interruptions. Whispering that POTUS is vulnerable to jet lag. That POTUS has returned to chain-smoking. That POTUS hesitates to heed his advisers, because POTUS frets that he is being sand-bagged by experts, allies, confidantes. Whispering that POTUS’ frailties most in display in West WIng settings. That POTUS evidences a Nixonian persecution mania.

Can any of this be confirmed? Not easily.

Less detailed, POTUS is said to express his opinion to pals in Chicago that he dislikes his job.

Wilder whisperings that some pros are now weighing that POTUS try an LBJ exit after one term – rather than face a Carter collapse.

Update1: Melissa Clouthier picked up on the same whispering. In her post, President Obama’s Pity Party, commenting on The Politico’s Obama: Gulf spill ‘echoes 9/11′, Clouthier wrote at Liberty Pundits (emphasis added):

It’s time to say it: President Obama, man up. Good God, man! Get a freakin’ grip!

America and the world does not have time for your lost, bewildered, sulky navel-gazing. So, look in the mirror, take a deep breath, and man-the-f*ck-up.

And then, start firing the jerks around you who are letting you be this big a cry baby. No, sir, the oil spill is not the same as 9/11, not even a little bit, although it is a disaster of monumental proportions. Your delusion about the scope of difficulty you face is unnerving. [...]

The big story here is that the President seems paralyzed when there is any bad news as if he can make it go away if he closes his eyes, plugs his ears and sings Itsy Bitsy Spider to himself. And then, when people note that he’s being self-indulgently wussy, he gets even more pissy and starts pointing fingers and then decries the pointing of fingers.

All in all, President Obama does not inspire confidence. In fact, everything he touches seems to feel more unstable, more unsure more confused, more bewildering. I suppose that’s what comes with a lack of moral clarity and an abundance of narcissism.

Update2: Jennifer Rubin wrote at Commentary Magazine:

Because Obama is now a weight around the necks of his fellow Democrats, David Axelrod is forced to offer this spin: “I believe that ultimately these [2010] races are going to be decided at the local level at the, at the grass roots. And the candidates who speak to the aspirations and concerns of people in their districts and states are going to win.”

Because there is no state in which Democrats escape Obama’s toxic effect: “Obamaland is crumbling. Democrats have firmly controlled Illinois, the president’s home state, for nearly a decade, turning it into what one Republican called ‘a deep blue state.’ But this has changed almost overnight. In the midterm elections on November 2, Democrats stand to lose the governorship, Obama’s old Senate seat, two to four House seats, and any number of state legislative seats and down-ticket statewide offices.” [...]

Because the mainstream media continually carry water for the Democrats, the obvious always comes as a surprise to their readers and the chattering class: “We’re all familiar with the factional fights among Republicans, the party purges, and rabid RINO (a.k.a. Republican in Name Only) hunting. … The divisions in the Democratic Party are deepening, less than two years after its galvanizing 2008 victory that left liberals crowing about the prospect of a 40-year majority. With Republicans essentially stonewalling any hope of bipartisan support for Obama’s policies, the reason the significant Democrat majorities have not materialized into a steady stream of legislative victories is because of these ideological and political divisions within the Democratic caucus itself, largely between big-city liberals and swing-district centrists.”

Waiting for more brass marbles to fall.