THE ALMOST FORMER PRESIDENT – AT 11:29 A.M. ET:  I'm not usually a fan of Piers Morgan, the British journalist who used to have a talk show on CNN.  But he's written a superb article on the character of Barack Obama.  The Brits, especially the ones who publish in the Daily Mail, do some of the best reporting on American politics: 

Obama’s spent the past few weeks charging around like a guy who’s watching the clock tick down and is desperate to snatch some semblance of victory from the jaws of a crushing, humiliating defeat.

Since the election, as the New York Times reported, he’s banned oil drilling off the Atlantic coast, named over 100 people to a range of senior government jobs, created new environmental monuments, commuted the sentences of 232 inmates and pardoned 78 others, protected funding for Planned Parenthood clinics, ordered the transfer of detainees from Guantanamo Bay and blocked new Israeli settlements.

As some critics sneer, it’s more governing than he’s done in eight years.

In his most dramatic action, Obama claimed Russia swung the election Trump’s way by hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails and leaking them to Wikileaks to destroy her campaign.

He retaliated by throwing out a load of Russian diplomats.

The fact Obama produced no hard evidence to substantiate this very serious claim didn’t seem to matter to the former constitutional law expert.

Nor did it seem to cross his mind that the really damaging part was the content of Hillary and her team’s explosive emails, not the fact we could all read them.

Oh, and of course there was the small matter of Hillary secretly setting up her own private email server to avoid any of that annoying judicial scrutiny that normally comes with being a high-ranking member of the US Government.

The President’s purpose by blaming Russia is crystal clear: as Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told Fox News host Sean Hannity in an interview that airs tonight, it was to ‘delegitimize the Trump administration as it goes into the White House.’

And...

Donald Trump didn’t win the presidency because of Russia, emails, FBI Director James Comey or the weather in Michigan.

He won because, according to reputable polls before the November 8 vote, 70% of Americans felt their country was going in the wrong direction.

There can be few more damning denunciations of an 8-year White House tenure than two-thirds of the country saying they believe the USA is going backwards, not forwards.

COMMENT:  Our princely president is on Capitol Hill today, organizing Democratic resistance to the Republican plan to overturn Obamacare.  I dunno.  Will someone send a note to Obama – an unsigned e-mail would do – telling him he'll be out of a job in two weeks.  He'll have no official position.  He doesn't own the party, what's left of it.

Read Morgan's whole piece.  An excellent portrait of Barack Obama.

January 4, 2016