O, now he tells us

Now that the big 0 has ramrodded his socialist spending plan through Congress without allowing questions about the pork-bloating attached to it, now he says "the national crisis is not as bad as we think"?!?

Challenged to provide encouragement as the nation's "confidence builder in chief," Obama said Americans shouldn't be whipsawed by bursts of either bad or good news and he was "highly optimistic" about the long term.

The president's proposals for major health care, energy and education changes in the midst of economic hard times faced skepticism from both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, as senators questioned his budget outlook and the deficits it envisions in the middle of the next decade.

The plan must positively reek if even beltway Democrats complain about the pork.

But Obama, speaking to top executives of the Business Roundtable, expressed an optimistic vision and called for patience.

This sounds like a line common to bank heist movies - "This will all be over soon. Everybody stay quiet and nobody will get hurt."

Richard Parsons, chairman of beleaguered Citigroup Inc., asked if Obama could offer some help in a national battle "between confidence and fear."

"A smidgen of good news and suddenly everything is doing great. A little bit of bad news and ooohh , we're down on the dumps," Obama said. "And I am obviously an object of this constantly varying assessment. I am the object in chief of this varying assessment."

No sir, Mr President, you are the SUBJECT. You are the fearmonger, and your policies are exacerbating the problems you claim to be solving. The best thing you could do for our country would be to resign now, and take your crooked cronies somewhere they might be appreciated. I hear Mugabe's hiring...

"I don't think things are ever as good as they say, or ever as bad as they say," Obama added. "Things two years ago were not as good as we thought because there were a lot of underlying weaknesses in the economy. They're not as bad as we think they are now."

Translation: "Give my socialist agenda time to work, and in a couple of years these will seem like the good old days. You haven't seen anything yet."

update: even Das People's Democratic Republic of Europe balks at the big 0's spending ideas!