Someone who tells you that two plus two is three is only a liar if he can add. Obama can't add, but this doesn't mean he's stupid.

Stupidity is a failure to grasp the most obvious elements of reality, but in order to fail, you have to try. Obama doesn't try.

Obama dwells in a different realm from truth, and questions about him are typically undecidable.

An excellent example of Obama's spooky propensity for undecidability is his apparently naive belief in the willingness of Republicans to compromise with Democrats about taxes and spending.

How stupid is Barack Obama pretending to be?

No one will ever know for sure, or even develop a convincing argument one way or the other, because the otherwise universal law of non-contradiction does not apply to Barack Obama, and nothing about him ever has to be one way or the other.

So while Obama played dumb, and pretended to believe that Republicans would compromise with Democrats about taxes and spending, and zero Republicans actually compromised in the House of Representatives...

A grand total of three Republicans compromised in the Senate, for the trifling price of another $40 billion in tax cuts, so you can't really prove that Obama was wrong, and you can't really prove he was right.

Barack Obama isn't a man of either/or. He's a man of both/and, and if his famously bipartisan inclusivity just happens to include mutually exclusive alternatives, that's just tough luck for the rest of us, who dwell in a realm of stark alternatives.

We have a house, or we don't. We have a job, or we don't.

But while the rest of us lose jobs and houses, Barack Obama is still floating along in a warm and fuzzy world where everything is whatever he wants it to be at the moment, and if he wants to talk like a Harvard professor at press conferences while he also pretends to be so incredibly stupid that he thought Republicans would compromise with Democrats about taxes and spending...

It isn't really a problem for Barack Obama.

But it's a crushing problem for hundreds of thousands of the rest of us, who are losing our jobs and houses every week, while $9.7 trillion flows out of the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve into the bank accounts of exactly the same bank speculators who destroyed the American economy.