A few days ago, Associated Press writer Liz Sidoti issued perhaps the most disturbing bit of “journalism” in recent memory:

It didn’t take long for Barack Obama — for all his youth and inexperience — to get acclimated to his new role as the calming leader of a country in crisis.
“I feel surprisingly comfortable in the job,” the nation’s 44th president said a mere two weeks after taking the helm.

A milder complaint was often made of President Clinton, but frankly, a president who claims comfort amidst the current circumstances — from the economy to continuing battles with Islamic radicalism and the various conniving regimes across the globe — is either lying or dangerously overconfident. This isn’t to say that our national head ought to appear panicked, but “comfort” wouldn’t be a word in the vocabulary of an appropriately realistic and circumspect leader.
President Obama ought to ponder why it is that a significant portion of his constituency doesn’t find the title of Mark Steyn’s latest to be all that extreme: “The End of the World as We Know It.” Steyn enumerates a number of uncomfortable developments on the world scene, but among the most chilling thought comes as an aside (emphasis added):

On the domestic scene, he’s determined on a transformational presidency, one that will remake the American people’s relationship to their national government (“federal” doesn’t seem the quite the word anymore) in terms of health care, education, eco-totalitarianism, state control of the economy, and much else. With a domestic agenda as bulked up as that, the rest of the world just gets in the way.

One wonders if the president’s comfort level has something to do with the likelihood that his response to Steyn’s title would be something along the lines of, “Yup. The country, too.”
We will soon find out unequivocally, as our country shifts its stance, whether the United States, as it has stood in the world, really has been a force for good or for ill.