The modern president is America’s shrink, a social worker, our very own national talk show host. He’s also the Supreme Warlord of the Earth.

This messianic campaign rhetoric merely reflects what the office has evolved into after decades of public clamoring. … Americans, left, right, and other, think of the “commander in chief” as a superhero, responsible for swooping to the rescue when danger strikes.

Gene Healy in the June 2008 issue of Reason.com.

Right now, Obama is expected to walk out on the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, extract the oil – if a vacuum cleaner can do it, so can the President – and hurl the damned stuff into outer space. (Aliens don’t vote.)

But this is only the first of three disquieting features of the current crisis. Americans ar confronted by a technological problem to which there is no immediate technological solution. This must be somebody’s fault, goddammit. Worse,  the problem is oil, a substance worshipped wherever two or three SUVs are gathered together. It’s as if holy water turned into sulphuric acid.

We know what America does when foreigners  threaten its oil supplies. The question now is what it will do to itself faced with this more intimate threat. Be very glad that Obama is in office. George W. would by now have annexed the Home Counties.