It may be no surprise for a President who believes that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” and whose supporters have bumper stickers like “Barack and Roll” that he would behave like a 20-something year-old pop star rather than the supposed leader of the most important nation in the world at one of its most important times.

A friend e-mailed me, feeling something between embarrassment (for the country) and outrage at our president’s behavior when Obama agreed to become the first president to appear on The Tonight Show, which happened last night.

(for those of you paying attention, this image is actually from a prior appearance on the show, but since I’m writing this some hours before the show airs this image will do.)

I don’t care about the PC-crowd’s stupid reaction to Obama’s comparing his bowling game to the Special Olympics. (Although you can imagine how the mainstream media would have had a completely different reaction if it were a Republican who said it.) What I do wonder about is Obama’s statement that he’s been practicing his bowling. With all that spare time???

But if that’s not enough, we also have this pathetic spectacle:

Yes, this is our president filling out an NCAA basketball tournament “bracket” with ESPN’s senior college basketball writer. It’s one thing trying to appear to be a man of the people. It’s another thing to degrade the office of the presidency by dealing with trivialities while all around you there are serious issues that you are supposed to be showing leadership on. (Now that I think of it, we might all be better off if Obama spends a lot more time thinking about the NCAA rather than continuing to lead us down the Road to Serfdom.)

Even Duke’s basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski, offered a (half-joking) criticism of Obama’s behavior when learning that Obama didn’t pick Duke to go to the Final Four: “…the economy is something that he should focus on, probably more than the brackets…so why would I care about that?”

And when Obama isn’t busy thinking about hoops, apparently he’s thinking about writing a children’s book, as we now learn from the Washington Times that in the days just before taking office Obama secured a $500,000 advance on an abridged version of his best-selling book “Dreams From My Father". After all, if adults weren’t smart enough to learn from the book that at least some of Obama’s most important early influencers were communist haters of America (and I do not intend that as hyperbole) why shouldn’t Obama think he can get away with having that same sort of influence on our impressionable youth today?

A comment to an article of mine on another web site described Obama as “leader who has a Beatlemania effect on crowds (without any of the Beatles’ substance).” I think that’s right on target – and I think the public is beginning to realize it.

I was thinking of Nero fiddling while Rome burned as a comparison to Obama’s behavior now. Clearly I wasn’t the first to think of it:

While Obama’s actions are perfectly consistent with what many of us expected from him, i.e. based on a complete lack of understanding of economics or the fundamental principles of American liberty but enacted with the ego of a man who sees himself as a cross between a political messiah and a rock star.