You are there—sipping green tea with President Obama in this imaginary one-on-one . . . Sir, in your Cairo address to Islam you were the first Western potentate since Napoleon to embrace the Islamist narrative dividing humanity into warring religious camps: Christian, Muslim, Hindu, etc. That implicitly supports re-establishment of the caliphate—

Further quotations on the economy . . . Amity Shlaes, senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations, in her new book, The Forgotten Man: a New History of the Great Depression: “From 1929 to 1940, from Hoover to Roosevelt, government intervention helped to make the Depression Great . . . . It was a period of a power struggle between two sectors of the economy, both containing a mix of evil and virtue. The public sector and the private sector competed relentlessly for advantage. At the beginning, in the 1920s, the private sector ruled. By the end, when World War II began, it was the public sector that was dominant. The contrast was a brutal one, fought across the land.“

President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court and promptly left town. The preceding week hardly could go down as a high point for him or his administration—but maybe, in certain ways, as a period of personal growth. Time for a break. Think about it. The week had featured these items on an incomplete list, most related one way or another to national security:

Our fabulous president said the other day, “I will not rest until the dream of health care reform is achieved in the United States of America.“ What do you think about that? As we all know he’s a dreamer, and on this one he’s dreaming bigtime—or smoking something. His is a protracted exercise in wishful thinking. You don’t believe in reform? You don’t believe our health care system needs reforming?

Additional stops on a random walk through a garden of issues currently in the news . . .

• A study of student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test (NAEP) since the early 1970s reaches dismal conclusions. On a scale of 500, test scores by today’s high schoolers average a pitiful one point higher in reading and just two points higher in math.

A grab-bag of quotations on subjects currently in the news . . . President Obama, with reporters during his first flight aboard Air Force One—dressed in a flight jacket bearing his name and the presidential seal: “I’ve got my spiffy jacket, so I thought I’d come and show it off. What do you think about this spiffy ride?“

The story goes that in the 1950s, because it couldn’t determine what Dwight Eisenhower was saying in his tangled thicket of words during press conferences, The New York Times started printing transcripts and letting its readers figure out his meanings. Suppose, just to be supposin’, you were part of the White House press corps and were approved to ask the first question at the president’s next press conference. Here’s an imaginary transcript . . .

David Letterman updated the old game of “Can You Top This?“ with his reverse lists of the 10 best or worst or most bizarre—whatevers. Here’s a listing of 16 outrages from Barack Obama and his two-month-old administration, each new outrage seemingly topping—outdoing in idiocy and insult—the one that went before . . . (16) Naming as treasury secretary, with oversight of the Internal Revenue Service, a man who had failed to pay his income taxes. Were Timothy Geithner a mere IRS hireling, his tax issues would have landed him in the unemployment queues at light-speed.

Herewith some questions about contrasts and double standards—and how the leftists comprising the nameless “they” who rule the world would react to what Barack Obama is doing if Obama were George Bush. For instance . . . If Obama were Bush, what would their reaction be to the president’s failure—even now—to submit a plan to salvage the nation’s banks?

With the world’s wealth halved and Barack Obama the first president to try his hand at stock-brokering (“Buying stocks is a potentially good deal”), herewith some back channel chatter amid the static and the buzz . . .

Type_webhead_here On precisely the day Barack Obama signed into law the most gargantuan economic measure in the nation’s peacetime history (White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel termed it “the most major, sweeping, comprehensive legislation as it relates to economic activity ever”)—at almost precisely the moment of his penstrokes—the stock market’s hope balloon went “bang!“

It’s an hour of hope. Yet you don’t seem especially hopeful about the grim gray economic scene or the ability of the new administration—and the stimulus package—to give it color. Good observation. Though hope never dies, a large hunk of hope went out with the lights. But there’s a rarefied ethical atmosphere in Washington now, and surely the trillion-dollar package Congress is bestowing will make everything economically right. A new day is coming. I can see it now . . .

Before they recede too far into the rear-view mirror, quotations sublime and ridiculous from the political game . . . President Barack Obama, immediately following his election to the Senate in 2004: “I can unequivo cally say I will not be running for national office in four years . . . .I am a believer in knowing what you’re doing when you apply for a job, and I think that if I were to seriously consider running on a national ticket, I would essentially have to start now, before having served a day in the Senate. There may be some who are comfortable with doing that, but I’m not one of those people.“

In the contemporary environment of all Obama all the time, who does not know that come Tuesday the nation will have a new president? Barack Obama arrives at the presidency bearing the goodwill of many (including your correspondent) and the messianic hopes of many more. The latter group has elevated him above criticism. Jesse Jackson sees in him “theological qualities.“ Congressman Bobby Rush, who once opposed him, regards his election as part of God’s plan. A press that Obama does not particularly like accords him a reverence comparable only to media adulation of JFK.

The left and the media and the ever-expanding blogosphere, and of course the Democrats, never permitted George Bush to recover from the circumstances of his 2000 election. They deemed him unacceptable, accidental, illegitimate, likely a conniver in the national outcome—and so took to lobbing their hateful commentaries one after another without end.