I read the inaugural address rather than watch it. What dreck. What drivel. Here is what jumped out at me:

The commitments we make to each other: through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.

The things that are ruining this country actually “strengthen” us. The extra taxes required, which discourage entrepreneurs from hiring people to expand their businesses, actually “free us” to take risks. Orwell could not have put it better.

Thank God for government’s benevolent hand, without which Americans would not be free to take risks. How did we ever fly the first airplane, or run the first automotive assembly line, without Social Security and Medicare to fall back on?

I feel a Michelle Obama-sized eye roll coming on. Let’s hand the mike to Allahpundit:

The twisted irony of Obama’s presidency, particularly in light of his emulation of Lincoln and Reagan, is that, like them, he does face a momentous crisis that requires leadership commensurate to the moment. He just doesn’t have it in him to lead on it, or maybe he’s too busy with other priorities. An economic rebound in his second term will delay the reckoning with entitlements for a few years longer so his legacy is probably safe in the near term, but if he doesn’t do something wildly unexpected in the next four years to deal seriously with mandatory spending, then his place in history is secure. He’s the guy who expanded health-care entitlements at a moment when Medicare spending was starting to go haywire, the guy who doubled down on the welfare state as the bill was coming due, the guy whose second-term agenda was even more aggressively liberal than his first despite trillions more in debt over four years. You wanted him, America, you got him. Good luck.

Don’t forget: he’s not just the guy who dodged all these tough choices. He’s also the guy who lied to his countrymen about the need to make them.

Boy, this has been a wretched day.

“Attempted” because he wasn’t home:

Cops raced to Chris Brown’s Hollywood Hills home Monday afternoon … after someone called 911 and reported a domestic incident involving a gun, but we’re told it was all a prank.

Law enforcement sources tell TMZ … the caller claimed a mother and father were in a fight and the father went to another room in the house to get a gun. At that point the caller hung up, never mentioning it was Chris Brown’s house.

When cops arrived there was no evidence of a gunman or for that matter any dispute.

Chris was NOT home at the time.

Somebody’s having a good old time laughing at the cops.

“bo” signifies the tweet came directly from the President himself.

Bloomberg:

The president and his family arrived at St. John’s at 8:35 am EST.
The service ended at 9:39.
BO tweeted at 9:25.

Mediaite:

Following President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address, the president and Michelle Obama sat with House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) for a traditional lunch in the Capitol Building. As the president and the speaker exchanged friendly banter during the lunch, however, the first lady’s body language signaled that she was not thrilled with the subject of conversation — at one point, she gave the speaker a pronounced eye roll.

During an evidently amiable conversation between Obama and Boehner, the president tapped Michelle Obama. The first lady did not appear as thrilled with the exchange as the two principals – she forced a tight smile and allowed herself an eye roll when her face was turned.

The video:

Mediaite calls it an eye roll. I call it a sneer.

Frankly, the exchange was probably more lighthearted than the video shows, based on grinnin’ Barack’s reaction. I just have a poor reaction, I suspect, because I find these people to be so distasteful on every level.

[Guest post by JD]

To quote a wise man, “it’s sad that anyone spends time writing such drivel, but it’s tragic that it’s seen as worthy poetry from a worthy poet. Isn’t this the same English language that was used by Shakespeare, Milton, TS Eliot, and Yeats?”

Inaugural Poem, by Brenda Shaughnessy

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of the poetry collections “Our Andromeda,” “Interior with Sudden Joy” and “Human Dark with Sugar,” a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
To President Obama on his Second Inauguration
If poetry is truth that makes us more human,
then this poem’s already been written. Voting wrote it,
in booths on ballots. O you are still president
and that is our poetry. The plain truth made beautiful.

You look better than new, and we know better too.
This election wasn’t just you fresh and flush
in dewy new votes like first kisses raining down
your elegant self those hurricane days and worrying nights.

That first debate. Let’s face it, O you scared us
witless.  A couple slips—flat-toned, something off—remind us
you’re just a person, trying, tired, flawed. Let’s be clear.
That night we grew feverish and bright with fear.

Shipwreck?  O I wasn’t even on the boat and this election
nearly killed me.  Just watching felt like drowning.
Some nights Rachel Maddow was my lone flotation device
and even she was deflated.  I felt my life slide down

a sharp terrible world of rumor and fakepaste
and crazycrap and drowned mouth and what could happen
if someone wound up running the country
like a country club. To club us with. A national revival

of the belief that women are mere vessels for children
and for men. Where soldiers can only ever start poor
and end destitute if not dead. Where kids are cherished only
in the womb but loathed in the world.

Where the rich few deny the many poor and the poor
still buy the load. Where the fact and fate of my daughter,
my daughter’s body, everybody’s daughters’ bodies,
become matters of state. 

And O my little boy’s only five years old.  
He needs medicine the way the sky is up. 
He needs the hospital to stay out of the hospital,
the way the sea is both fierce and calm. 

Insurance companies always bet against the sea. 
Thank you for not letting them do that to my family.  
Thank you for knowing that a child’s surgery
shouldn’t bring the family to bankruptcy.

So we might be considered whole—not fragments,
fractions, a slice of number that could be spent,
we believed in you wholly. You always knew
what that meant. You never called us your 53%.

So we might have a song of our own, we voted, we sang.
We sang a song of saying so, singing O.
So we might be heard, we voted. O, out of many, one. 
Out of everyone, you.  You never left us, but welcome back. 

You’ve come so far, and you’ve far to go. You know
the way, O. Lifted up in a diner, adored and exhausted,
traveling in a motorcade, in love, in tears, entrusted, accosted.
Everywhere you went you knew what we meant.

We meant there were 100% of us. Some of us were old 
just trying to live. Students trying to pay.
Or female intent on staying president of our own bodies.
All of us fighting, O.

You always knew what that meant.
We were ourselves and we had nobody else to be
and we were barely making it.
We looked hard into ourselves and we saw you there.

We were stranded and we were beautiful,
O we were your many and your varied
and your weary, tear-filled people and you knew us.
You knew us and we knew what that meant, O President.

I will be over in the corner hurling.

— JD

Today, we (re)inaugurate a liar.

What stunned House Speaker John Boehner more than anything else during his prolonged closed-door budget negotiations with Barack Obama was this revelation: “At one point several weeks ago,” Mr. Boehner says, “the president said to me, ‘We don’t have a spending problem.’ “

There is no possible way Barack Obama is that stupid.

He knows spending as a percentage of GDP has exploded under his presidency.

Source

He knows that whether the top tax rate is 90% as it was in 1960, or 30-40% as it’s been since 1990, federal revenue is always 15-20% of GDP:

Source

We don’t have a spending problem? That’s precisely what we have and Barack Obama knows it.

And he doesn’t care.

When this guy was first elected, I knew he was going to enact disastrous policies. But the reality, while it has been less disastrous in many ways than I imagined, has been far worse on the economic front than I could have dreamed possible.

I worried that he would destroy the balance of the Supreme Court. So far, he hasn’t been able to. I worried that he would close Guantanamo, try people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court, and generally close down the war on terror. He tried some of that, but on balance, he’s been OK fighting terror.

But on the debt and deficit, he has been an unparalleled disaster.

Barack Obama has exploded our debt and shows no signs of letting up. The damage he is wreaking upon this nation will take decades to recover from — if we ever do. He is certainly making my children’s futures far more miserable.

Meanwhile he grins his way through his narcissistic life as if he hasn’t a care in the world.

Over the past four years, this guy has proven himself to be a horrible human being. I say this, not as a hyperpartisan who started out inclined to hate any Democrat with my heart and soul before he had spent a day in office. I say it as someone who has watched him spend four years ruining my kids’ future with the power he had. He has enacted rules changes that reward sloth and discourage work. He has enacted crushing regulations that stomp into the ground any plans that a business might have to grow and create jobs. He has taken credit for “creating or saving” jobs while enacting policies that anyone with a room temperature IQ knows are destined to keep unemployment high. He has taken companies into banktuptcy and told bondholders to go screw themselves while putting his union pals ahead of them in line to collect the scraps. He has taken away the last chance to let the free market control health care costs by pushing through ObamaCare — the biggest change in the relationship of individuals to their federal government since FDR. He has relentlessly engaged in rhetoric that he knows is dishonest class warfare. He has beat a cowardly retreat from any hint of “entitlement” reform that might keep my children from working all their lives to pay outlandish taxes to fix his mess. And that’s if my children don’t die in a nuclear war that comes about from the collapse of the world economy that is likely to happen due to his incredible abdication of any responsibility for making our spending relate to our revenues.

In short, he is ruining my children’s future with a big idiot smirk on his face.

I don’t care whether he is intentionally trying to ruin the country’s economy, to drive us into European-style socialism, or whether he is just fiddling while Rome burns because that’s the easiest thing to do politically, and he knows our crap feckless media won’t call him on it. It doesn’t matter. Either way, he knows better and is not doing what is necessary.

In the past four years he has shown himself to be a wretched, God-awful excuse for a human being. God help the country that today officially “welcomes” another four years of this unthinkable set of economic atrocities.

This guy’s wife said, when he was elected the first time around, that it was the first time she had ever really been proud of her country. Now we live in a country that has re-elected this buffoon — and for the first time in my life, I am not really proud of our country. How dare he parade around children to read letters about a real tragedy, to enact a cynical gun-grabbing agenda for cheap partisan gain. After what he has done to my children’s future, the idea that he would use children as props for any policy advantage is infuriating enough to make me want to bang my head against the wall hard enough to bring down the house around my ears.

And watching our media lionize this scumbag is more than I can take. You can bet I won’t turn on the television today. If I did, I’d throw a shoe at it.

I see nothing but misery on the horizon, and we’re rushing headlong towards it, led by a pompous, self-satisfied, grinning narcissistic fool.

Happy Inauguration Day, everyone.