I find myself weirded-out by the left's penchant for overwrought compliments to His Holiness, the Great Barack Obama. You might think the embarrassment of being nominated for the Nobel Peace prize after only one month in office, and then actually winning, would have encouraged Obama disciples to tone down their worshipful descriptions, but the laws of religiodynamics states that holiness increases. If Obama's person is holy, then his works must also be holy, in the same fashion that reverence for the Word of God is extended to the scroll on which the words are written, and then to the container for the scroll, the the room the container is in, then the building, the grounds and finally the surrounding region.

Rocco Landesman, the NEA chairman

This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.

Its seems like Rocco would like to "be" with Obama, perhaps in a gay way.

Landesman will be subjected to righteous ridicule--Lincoln never wrote a book, and many Presidents, including many recent presidents have written their own works. Presidential memoirs are in fact a tradition started by Ulysses S. Grant, who wrote his as he was dying from cancer in order to provide for his family after his death. They were very well received, even if his two terms in office weren't.

Obama's books were almost certainly ghost-written to jump-start a political career (following the Kennedy model). Writing takes practice. Good writing takes devoted practice. Great writing requires obsession. Obama simply has no trail of written work to give credence to the idea that he is the author of the books bearing his name.

Nevertheless, Landesman, fawning sycophant that he is, nevertheless serves a useful political purpose with this wet kiss. As I mentioned the other day, what will get passed from mouth to ear and facebook posting to tweet is the "impression" that Obama is a powerful writer. The American public doesn't have the bandwidth to absorb the onslaught of rebuttal, and so the Obama administration puts two points on the board.

If one really wanted to parry the thrust, one would have to find the actual ghost-writer. Good luck with that.