USS Obama: But since the downgrade, more and more liberal pundits have been deserting what they clearly fear is a sinking ship.

Can you blame ‘em? Anybody still aboard the sinking Obama deserves all the ridicule and derision the rest of us can muster. Headline via this really good article by Norman Podhoretz in the Wall Street Journal:

In short, the spell that Mr. Obama once cast—a spell so powerful that instead of ridiculing him when he boasted that he would cause “the oceans to stop rising and the planet to heal,” all of liberaldom fell into a delirious swoon—has now been broken by its traumatic realization that he is neither the “god” Newsweek in all seriousness declared him to be nor even a messianic deliverer.

Hence the question on every lip is—as the title of a much quoted article in the New York Times by Drew Westen of Emory University puts it— “What Happened to Obama?” Attacking from the left, Mr. Westin charges that President Obama has been conciliatory when he should have been aggressively pounding away at all the evildoers on the right.