To paraphrase the crow in Disney's Dumbo, I've seen a peanut stand, I've heard a rubber band, and often I've seen presidents lie. But now I'm sure I've seen everything, because I saw a president replace himself in the middle of a press conference with someone he must believe to be possessed of greater political skill, charm, and credibility. .,..

At Friday's presser, after playing the concerned president, Obama looked at his watch, announced that he was keeping the First Lady waiting too long, and stalked out of the briefing room, leaving the podium to Bubba who kept it for another thirty minutes. It was more than a little amusing to see a startled presidential press secretary Robert Gibbs leap out of his chair to follow his boss out of the room.

He wanted me to ghost-write President Obama's self-appraisal for the Oprah Winfrey Show. Now it was my turn to be incredulous.

"Let me see if I understand this," I said. "The president thinks that he reports to Oprah Winfrey, and you want me to write a self-appraisal that he turns in on her show? I find that pretty hard to believe. Why don't you just have the president's speechwriters draft his remarks?"

"Well, we've got a little problem there," Gibbs conceded. I waited for him to continue. After a long pause, he did.

"This is one time I really want an outside writer. We -- and I mean all of us who work for him -- have a credibility problem with the president. Perhaps you saw what the president said in the 2008 New Yorker profile by Ryan Lizza. He said, and these are his exact words, 'I think that I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm gonna think I'm a better political director than my political director.' Now that was back when everything was going great. Think of what he's like now -- given the shellacking that we took on Nov. 2. Now he thinks his top advisers and writers are a bunch of absolute idiots."

"I see. What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to get our guy ready for Oprah Winfrey next week. When he went on Oprah at this time last year, he awarded himself a 'good, solid B-plus' for his first year in office. He gave himself credit for getting the economy on track, winding down the Iraq war, making the right call for a temporary surge in Afghanistan, and pushing ahead with Obamacare. Next week, the first thing that Oprah is going to ask is how he scores his performance for the second year of his presidency. You know, a lot has happened in the last year…"

"And none of it has been good from your perspective," I said, sparing him the need to go into all the painful details of the dizzying descent of this presidency into ever-increasing unpopularity and irrelevance, as problems have mounted on every front… and as the president himself has seemed resolutely arrogant -- and totally clueless.

Still, I tried to be helpful.

"May I ask a question?"

"Fire away."

"Is the president prepared to admit that he has made any mistakes, and I mean any mistakes other than spending too much time on policy and substance and not enough time communications and politics?"

"No, we won't want to do that."

"And he won't admit that the clear majority of the American people want nothing to do with Obamacare, cap-and-trade, stimulus and bigger and more intrusive government?"

"Certainly not."

"He still feels he is the Chosen One?"

"Absolutely."

"Then, I'm afraid I can't help you. Nothing I can say will make any difference. This is a president who reports only to himself. He is totally solipsistic. A prisoner of self."

"What's that you're saying?"

"Never mind."

Check your local listings if you want to see an unscripted Barack Obama on Oprah later this week.

A Spine Transplant for the GOP by G. Tracy Mehan, III

Governor Sarah Palin just hit a home run with her cogent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal endorsing Congressman Paul Ryan's (R-WI) Roadmap for America's Future, a tax-cutting, budget-balancing, entitlement-reforming proposal which House Republicans still refrain from embracing wholeheartedly.

In putting her political capital behind the Ryan plan, she may be giving a needed spine transplant to the Republican Party and saving it in spite of itself. ...

At some point, the Republican congressional leadership is going to have to… well… lead. In this case, leadership begins by educating the American people to the dimensions of the crisis they face, something Governor Palin actually gives the President's commission credit for doing; but it cannot stop there. It is well past time for them to embrace a concrete proposal that takes on the tough issues, head-on, and prepare the electorate for the momentous issues that must be faced now and in 2012.

The only game in town is Paul Ryan's Roadmap around which Governor Palin is rallying the troops, be they independents, Tea Partiers or GOP mainstreamers. This may be her greatest contribution to the Republican Party and the nation in its time of need.

Minneapolis got 17 inches of snow in less than 24 hours, but the south suburban area where I live got more than 21 inches of snow altogether. ...

I’m sore as hell today after all of the snowblowing and shoveling necessary to keep up with the storm and don’t anticipate leaving the house for anything, but the roads and businesses are open, even if it is only 3 degrees above zero and -22 degrees with wind chill. It’s just life in Minnesota, and it goes on.

In those now long ago days before Climategate and one too many vein-bulging dressing-downs, Al Gore was apotheosized for convincing the planet both that it was probably doomed and that his own various books, films, and green companies could be part of the solution for the crises that he so brilliantly helped to inflate. Gore had taken a truth (man’s 21st-century lifestyle in theory could alter the atmosphere) and made out of it The Truth that we are doomed in just a few years without radical action of the sort he peddled. He was soon selling eco-penances to fund the stones on his own rising Gorethedral.

In that sense Gore was only following a long tradition of entrepreneurial alarmists who saw problems in the free enterprise culture of the West and turned those solvable challenges into impending Armageddon, in the process winning a lot of attention and money as a sort of hyper-prophet/fixer. We know the script of, say, a Rachel Carson (e.g., overuse of organophosphate pesticides has doomed the planet), Paul Ehrlich (Indian and Chinese poverty is proof that the planet is doomed by a "population bomb") or a Michael Harrington (without a massive government war on poverty America is lost). They were only the snooty versions of the 1990s Tony Robbins videos.

Remember the Michael Moore shtick in the Cindy Sheehan era? He rose to the heights of liberal society (invited to sit next to Jimmy Carter at the 2004 Democratic convention) on the basis of being a useful idiot who could for the more respectable vicariously slander their president. ...

So the "we are doomed without Obama" hysteria has finally gone the way of the torrential seas, the silent spring, the population bomb, the war on poverty, the geodesic dome, TM, the greening of America, and all the other periodic hysterias of the bored affluent liberal class, whose intellectual factories send in the raw product of challenges and problems and vomit out variously packaged "doom" on the other end of the assembly line.

We always get these quite admirable warnings that political discourse has hit a new low, that a new center of civility is needed — after a 1980-like or 2010-like election. We rarely get them in periods like 2004 when "any means necessary" is the creed to stop a Bush-Hitler or hear warnings to George Soros or Jimmy Carter to cool the hate-filled rhetoric.

When David Frum admirably calls for restraint, I am reminded that not long ago in the glory days of the Obama administration, Frum thought it necessary to counter Rush Limbaugh’s influence by invoking his one-time bout of drug dependency and weight (e.g., "his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence"). Juxtapose all that with "No Labels" and there comes disbelief at the present campaign against ad hominem invective that hampers political discourse. (By Frum’s earlier standard, Gov. Chistie’s waistline or President Obama’s confessionals about habitual use of marijuana and occasional "blow" are fair political discourse).