The woman who wrote and sings these lyrics is not the SUNY/Purchase graduate whose work seems to worm its way into these posts so often, but another graduate of the same school, which either attracts, nurtures or teaches its children well. So, it's not Regina Spektor, but Jenny Owen Youngs who has lamented that

I can't make real life
as good as television.

and, as this week served to illustrate, nobody else can either. Still, as Katrina "exposed" a gross incompetence that at least half of the country thought was already well established, the ups and downs of a week of truly banal theater may have opened a new, better and far more compelling narrative than we have seen in quite some time.

The most recent example of Widely Accepted Truth, following the long awaited declaration that President Bush was the emperor to whom Hans Christian Anderson was referring, was that President Obama was elected to change everything and he would do that by the force of his wisdom, his history and ours, the Rightness of His Cause, and his Way with Words.

But Widely Accepted Truths are often trotted out, repeated and pulverized into our minds so that they can be debunked at a later date. Alas, the absurdity that a single person could change an entirely polarized and all but completely broken political culture, all by himself, while the rest of cheered him on by blogging, and tsk, tsking when we disagreed, has met that fate.

Yes, the president has brought some of it on himself. His immediate predecessor, with a Vice President who learned at the feet of the master---the only president ever forced to resign from the office---had made the presidency seem so all powerful and almost monarchical, that it was not entirely surprising that even after he left, the President would talk about "my Secretary of the Energy" and occasionally suggest that "my administration" was going to do things that the government would actually have to do, and, perhaps, would do only if Congress agreed.

A public which defines civic responsibility as being to vote every fourth year and to otherwise sit back and talk about "what Obama has done" is bound to be disappointed constantly. People who believe that the things they say to their friends and neighbors basically represent the majority opinion of the country, will almost always be mystified as to why the President doesn't just "do" what we all want, or say what we all believe.

We saw this week just how wrong that is, but not by design. Many people, including the fool writing this drivel, saw the president's oval office appearance last week and could not understand the unhappiness with it expressed first by the television proletariat and then all over the internet and in what's left of newspapers. After all, he hit all of the issues that needed to be addressed:

As the cleanup continues, we will offer whatever additional resources and assistance our coastal states may need. Now, a mobilization of this speed and magnitude will never be perfect, and new challenges will always arise. I saw and heard evidence of that during this trip. So if something isn't working, we want to hear about it. If there are problems in the operation, we will fix them.

But we have to recognize that despite our best efforts, oil has already caused damage to our coastline and its wildlife. And sadly, no matter how effective our response is, there will be more oil and more damage before this siege is done. That's why the second thing we're focused on is the recovery and restoration of the Gulf Coast.

and, more importantly, considering what a president is supposed to be doing:

One place we've already begun to take action is at the agency in charge of regulating drilling and issuing permits, known as the Minerals Management Service. Over the last decade, this agency has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility -- a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves. At this agency, industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight. Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations.

and even way, way more importantly:

a larger lesson is that no matter how much we improve our regulation of the industry, drilling for oil these days entails greater risk. After all, oil is a finite resource. We consume more than 20 percent of the world's oil, but have less than 2 percent of the world's oil reserves. And that's part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean -- because we're running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.

For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we've talked and talked about the need to end America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked -- not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.

We are cleaning up the mess. We will help the people in the gulf to recover. We will regulate the oil industry. We will find another way to power our lives.

There is very little else a president can say in an oval office statement. He cannot, my fellow bloggers, talk for an hour, and call people names.

So some of us thought the speech was as good as could be reasonably expected, until we saw Rachel Maddow's "re-write." Except for her use of the word "liar" and "lie" which should not be used in this type of discourse, what she wrote is exactly what should have been said.

And of all the many salient points our "fake President" made, one of her best ones was one which was directly opposite from that of our ever hopeful real President, who said he would be

happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party -- as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels

Our "Fake President," oddly, was the one who more directly responded to the world that actually is, rather than the one we would like:

Our nation's regulatory oversight of the oil industry has been a joke in many ways, for decades -- from the revolving door of industry apparatchiks taking supposed "oversight" jobs in government, in which they just rubberstamped the desires of the industry to which they were loyal -- to energy industry lobbyists, themselves being allowed, in secret meetings, to write our nation's energy policies.

In light of the state of the Gulf right now, my fellow Americans, the details of how industry has infiltrated and infected the government that was supposed to be a watchdog protecting the American public from them -- those details are enough to turn your stomach. But no detail tells you more about the corroding power of the industry against the interests of the American people than the simple fact that they have been allowed to drill in American waters, without being forced to first prove that drilling is safe....

Now that we have, at the hands of the oil industry, experienced the worst environmental disaster in American history, the time for talk is over. The world is different now. Our country is different now. The scales have fallen from our eyes. People say we're not ready? They're right. We're not ready. We also weren't ready to fight in World War 2 before Pearl Harbor, but events forced that upon us, and events have forced this fight upon us now. I no longer say that we must get off oil like every president before me has said too. I no longer say that we must get off oil. We will get off oil and here's how:

The United States Senate will pass an energy bill. This year. The Senate version of the bill will not expand offshore drilling. The earlier targets in that bill for energy efficiency and for renewable energy-sources will be doubled or tripled.

If Senators use the filibuster to stop the bill, we will pass it by reconciliation, which still ensures a majority vote. If there are elements of the bill that cannot procedurally be passed by reconciliation, if those elements can be instituted by executive order, I will institute them by executive order.

The political cowardice that has kept politicians from doing right by this country, finally, on energy, and standing up to the oil industry -- that cowardice has been drowned; drowned in oil on Queen Bess Island. There is a new reality in this country that has been forced on us by this disaster.

What we saw in the ensuing days: the apologies to BP, the pitiful attempt to attack the president for forcing public accountability upon a private corporation which has damaged natural resources, showed, as apparently few things have, exactly what we are up against.

And after Laurence Lewis spelled it out in Daily Kos, all but using crayons to do so, the real president joined in maybe a few days late, but his comments are meaningful nonetheless.

And the hope---yes, that word again---is that, indeed, this is the moment the scales have fallen from our eyes. One of our political parties has been taken over by the greedy and the crazy, and they are not on our side. They were, as our greatest president told us in 1936

unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred.

The hatred continues to this day. It is directed at our president, mainly, but it is directed at the rest of us, too. We, too, can welcome that hatred and, as President Roosevelt showed us, use it against them.

(If, by the way, he is going to adopt at least some of Rachel Maddow's re-write, it would have been nice if he used the "Oh, and also -- I've decided I'm not a White Sox fan anymore. I'm a Red Sox fan" but you can't have everything.)

Otherwise, this may be the week it really started to change and that would be real good news. But, then again, there was this, a subject for another day, perhaps next weekend, which tells us all just how long a road there is ahead of us, and how hard this battle will be if we are to win it.