You know it is sad when common sense doesn’t come into play when one becomes President of the United States.  You would think that for some reason the president got to where he is because voters recognized his intelligence, his leadership abilities, his ability to deliver messages and most of all common sense — to know right from wrong, and to know the good guys from the bad and that the President is in a  leadership role that has nothing to do with popularity.

In a very short period of time President Obama has demonstrated that he wants to be popular — even among the bad guys.  It doesn’t matter in his mind; he has segued from his populist campaign for the presidency to his populist position as the President

From the outset Obama spends a lot of time distancing himself from the past, as though he himself was not representing our nation as President of the United States and its great history. Oh, have we made mistakes along the way, you bet.  But, let us not forget Mr. President, although you were not around at the time — the World would be a different place today if it were not for the USA yesterday and the history that you seem to want to distance yourself from.

The past may very well be a legacy, but not a legacy that you shouldn’t be proud of, nor one you need to apologize for.

I can not put it in a better way than Steven R. Hurst of the Associated Press did in a recent assessment of Obama’s trips to Europe, the Middle East and Latin America:

• Admitted to Europeans that America deserves at least part of the blame for the world’s financial crisis because it did not regulate high-flying and greedy Wall Street gamblers.
• Told the Russians he wants to reset relations that fell to Cold War-style levels under his predecessor, George W. Bush.
• Asked NATO for more help in the fight in Afghanistan, and, not getting much, did not castigate alliance partners.
• Lifted some restrictions on Cuban Americans’ travel to their communist homeland and eased rules on sending wages back to families there.
• Shook hands with, more than once, and accepted a book from Hugo Chavez, the virulently anti-American leader of oil-rich Venezuela.
• Said America’s appetite for illegal drugs and its lax control of the flow of guns and cash to Mexico were partly to blame for the drug-lord-inspired violence that is rattling the southern US neighbor.

We have a situation where, as Hurst said in his piece: “Critics, especially those deeply attached to the foreign policy course of the past 50-plus years, see a president whose lofty ideals expose the country to a dangerous probing of US weakness, of an unseemly readiness to admit past mistakes, of a willingness to talk with unpleasant opponents.”

Obama in a very short period in office has besmirched the history of the country.

Obama has been labeled by French President Sarcozy as “weak and indecisive.”

I’m afraid that the way the global community is perceiving our young president in his short exposure to the world is a danger not only to our legacy, but to our future .

Obama’s administration somehow reminds me of Jimmy Breslin’s novel, “The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”