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Sometimes I marvel at President Obama’s apparent lack of an embarrassment  sensor. How can he stand before the American people and deliver speech after  speech making the same tired points and pretending he is delivering the speech  of the century?

Is he truly impervious to feelings of self-consciousness, or is he trying to  play us for fools?

The upshot after Obama’s nearly five years in office is that the economy is  still sluggish. Unemployment and annual deficits remain disturbingly high based  on historical standards; our national debt and unfunded liabilities represent an  existential threat to America; Obamacare hangs like an ominous tornado  playground over the economy and every employer and health-care consumer in the  nation; America is in steady economic and military decline at the hands of a  president who is in denial about it, indifferent to it or intentionally pursuing  it; and the president and his renegade Justice Department and administrative  agencies are riddled with scandals and gleefully flout the Constitution, the  rule of law and the legislative branch.

Yet despite all of this, Obama tells us that everything is great and that  things would be even better if it weren’t for partisan, obstructionist  Republicans. (If the economy is so wonderful, why is Obama hopscotching the  country trying to convince us of what should be self-evident?)

Obama’s refusal to accept responsibility for his policies and his  scapegoating have reached comical proportions. Indeed, his economic adviser  Austan Goolsbee once virtually admitted that Obama should only be associated  with his economic record if and when we begin to see sustained positive  results.

Such is the mentality of ideologues. No amount of failure is proof of their  policies failing. Others must always be blamed.

Obama no longer dazzles us with his smoke and mirrors; he bores us with them,  droning on and on for more than an hour without offering any new ideas to turn  the economy around – because he has none.

Obama is as bereft of new ideas as a ventriloquist’s dummy. He is a prisoner  of his own theological affinity for expansive government as a panacea. His  liberal ethical code tells him that growing government is a moral imperative  that must supersede everything else, even economic growth and prosperity for the  very people to whom liberals claim allegiance.

As long as they are reliably growing government, statists such as Obama will  not be held to account by their fellow liberals for their policy failures and  for spreading misery, because they are doing god’s work, whatever that might  mean to them. If his “stimulus” fails to produce jobs, it doesn’t matter,  because a) his intentions were good, b) Republicans didn’t let him spend even  more, and c) things would have been worse without it – even though the weight of  the evidence and history prove otherwise.

So don’t ever expect Obama’s soul mates in the liberal media to hold him  accountable for his record or to compare it with that of other presidents. If it  is worse, it will not be his fault. His failures will always be because of the  “mess he inherited,” even though no other president has ever enjoyed that absurd  luxury.

But even measured against the situation he inherited, Obama has made sparse  improvements, and in most cases, things have gotten worse, including the  millions who have given up and left the workforce, the millions who have joined  the government dependency rolls, the catastrophic national debt and our woefully  insolvent entitlement programs, which he steadfastly refuses to reform.

For all his hoopla about hope and change, Obama is nothing more than a  gloom-and-doom liberal who doesn’t even aspire to robust economic growth. His  sole focus is not on growing the economic pie but on redistributing what he  believes is a finite one.

That’s why the thrust of Obama’s disgraceful speech was on class envy,  resentment and warfare. He forever castigates producers and the wealthy and  promises a continuation of policies that are antithetical to growth, except for  the growth of government.

As long as Obama is in office and his policies are pursued, America will be  shortchanging itself and suppressing the entrepreneurial spirit and liberty of  the American people, without which America is destined for ongoing  decline.