The liberal media, in its obsequious fawning over the God-Emperor and his disciples, no longer offers even the hollowest simulacrum of reality:

Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) — After the first glimpse of Michelle Obama in sunny yellow going to pray at St. John’s Church, after Barack Obama paused on the Capitol steps to gaze on thousands of small flags held aloft by a sea of humanity, after the million- plus crowd had maintained a communal kindness for hours — after all that, people mostly picked up after themselves. The local NBC station reported Tuesday night that the Mall was cleaner than anyone might have expected.

That was the first act in the new era of responsibility that the president called for in a speech that sacrificed the rhetorical heights he usually reaches for cold, stark reality.

Uh huh. “Reality” is whatever you guys say it is, obviously.

Inaugurations often get presidents swinging for history’s fences. They speak to posterity, bypass the living, and are so crammed with generalities that you need carbon dating to know when they took place.

Obama’s was filled with the kind of substance usually reserved for the State of the Union:

“We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together,” he said. We will “wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.”

And by the way, he’s going to end the war in Iraq and bring peace to our enemies who will “unclench” their fists.

Yessireebob, that right there is the kind of “substance” Obama’s personality-cult adolescents can really get excited about. Never mind the smell wafting forth from that steaming pile of “specificity;” Obamadroids like this “journalist” will swear it smells like lilacs and roses anyway.

Grow Up
At its core, the speech was an invitation to grow up, fast. “Set aside childish things,” he lectured, as former President George W. Bush looked on. Obama graciously thanked Bush for his service even as he ushered out the substitute teacher who had let the class run wild.

And then turned right around and graciously put his thumb in Bush’s eye, even as his deranged acolytes showed their very adult beneficence in victory by hooting and jeering like crazed gibbons. Adult gibbons, of course.

The permanent teacher, of stern demeanor and withering gaze, announced that there will be homework, no grading on a curve, and a change of curriculum.

Hey, wait a minute. Here I was trying to seriously fisk this worshipful balderdash, and it turns out she wasn’t serious at all.

She isn’t serious, is she?

And: “permanent teacher?” That’s way beyond ominous.

“We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” he said in a rebuke to former Vice President Dick Cheney, sitting in a wheelchair, looking like Mr. Potter, the greedy banker in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Science will be restored “to its rightful place” and government will resume regulating. Our financial crisis reminds us, he said, that “without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control.”

Not that we needed a reminder. As Obama spoke, the markets plummeted, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling more than 300 points, its worst Inauguration Day performance. Citigroup Inc. is being broken into two pieces with no assurance that either will survive.

To the leader who should have been regulating the reckless, selfish financial buccaneers, Obama scolded, “A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.”

He’s likely to reverse course entirely, step up regulation and spend yet more money than the $700 billion Bush asked for to shore up the financial system.

Okay, that does it. This has to be a poorly-conceived joke of some sort. If it ain’t, it’s beyond parody anyway, so I hereby give up.

Seriously, though, what’s going on here is readily discernible for anyone truly paying attention, and has been for a long time. Liberals at last have their chance to finally and irrevocably put this country on the last leg of the road to socialist ruin, and their media handmaidens are not going to see this chance squandered.

I had previously halfway believed that there were still enough “journalists” left who had the old iconoclastic fire to go after Obama’s admin once the inevitable disasters and scandals start cropping up; like the old story about the scorpion and the frog, I figured there were still a few old-school guys left who would be unable to resist the call of their true nature and get back to at least some semblance of the gadfly, “afflict the comfortable” standard they used to be so proud of upholding.

I no longer believe this. Their true nature has changed, and their eagerly-accepted function is to advance progressivist causes by any means they can conceive of, fair or foul, honest or dishonest, rational or delusional.

They’re pulling out all the stops to see to it that the Obama regency is at least perceived as wildly — nay, miraculously — successful. I don’t expect this to change to any meaningful degree. Only time will tell if the American body politic will rouse themselves from their restless slumber in time to see the last pitiful vestiges of Constitutional government slip down the drain.