One of my favorite moments in television was when Geraldo Rivera did a show called
The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault.  Everyone was so excited that he managed to syndicate a special.  On live television they did the excavation, which took several hours, as his team penetrated the vault.  There was even a medical examiner on scene in case they found some bodies.  Finally the great moment arrived and they opened the vault to find nothing other than some broken bottles.  It was hysterically bad.

Recently, we saw the Presidential version of the empty vault.  For years we have been hearing about the brilliant Barack Obama, the former President of the Harvard Law Review and constitutional scholar.  There has actually been zero evidence supporting this myth, but Obama is a far left liberal, and the main stream media just assumed brilliance.  After all, he agrees with them on just about every issue.  But now Obama gave a very public statement about the Supreme Court’s review of Obamacare and personally destroyed the myth of his brilliant legal mind.  No second-year law student would say something as stupid as claiming the Supreme Court overturning a law passed by congress would be unprecedented.  That has only been happening for about 200 years.  That is the whole point of the Supreme Court!  This is so pathetic that even the fawning main stream media pounced on it.  They absolutely hammered his Press Secretary and Obama himself has resorted to stammering incoherent attempts to try and spin this away.  The following article, from Reuters of all places, is typical:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/04/usa-court-obama-idUSL2E8F4B8N20120404

The real problem is that Obama’s blunder absolutely shatters the myth of Obama the brilliant legal scholar.  The only other possible explanation is that Obama doesn’t care about the traditional rule of the judiciary in the U.S. legal system.  That may be true, but stupidity would be a better defense than that!  The courts were not amused.  A three-judge panel from the Fifth District court ordered the Justice Department to explain, by Thursday, whether the administration believes judges have the power to strike down a federal law.  It was a slap in the face and a shot across the bow.  No one, and I mean no one, is taking Obama’s side on this.  The DOJ attorney on the case, Dana Lydia Kaersvang quickly wilted under a blistering verbal assault from Federal Judge Jerry Smith.  Even Attorney General Holder genuflected and said the DOJ would respond to the demand.  This is the same Holder who earned his name by holding on to documents in spite of repeated subpoenas from congress.  He folded on this one like a cheap umbrella.

No one, even in the Obama administration, is even pretending that Obama got this right.  They are just trying to defend his blunder by claiming he was speaking only of a law passed by congress on an economic issue, such as health care.  That didn’t even pass the giggle factor with the folks from MSNBC.  They aren’t reporting on this, mind you, they are just ignoring it.  But even MSNBC isn’t trying to defend Obama’s position.  The other networks, including CNN, are reporting it and no one is agreeing with Obama.

This is a worse mistake than the brain freeze on national television by Rick Perry during a Presidential debate.  Perry never recovered from that.  Obama has been permanently damaged because the illusion of the brilliant legal scholar has been shattered.  The genie is out of the bottle and no one is going to be able to put it back.  They finally opened the secret vault containing the brilliant Obama and found nothing. 

TDM