An easy joke but a good one.

“When you stop to think about it, folks, doesn’t it make sense?” Limbaugh asked. “Our president, Barack Hussein Obama, has been running around the world for nine months telling everybody how much our country sucks…. Why would anybody award the Olympics to such a crappy place?”…

“[Obama] doesn’t realize that the hatred for this country has not abated. There may be some love for him, but their certainly is no respect for him,” Limbaugh said.

“He doesn’t understand how delighted the world is to make him look foolish in order to take a swipe at our country,” Limbaugh said of the president. “We’ve got a two-year-old manchild with a Mars-sized ego, which today crashed and burned.”

The IOC’s rejection of Chicago’s bid was a “bitch-slap,” Limbaugh said. “Upside the head.”

Even Brazil’s president thought The One had it in the bag. Whether Rush is right that this was a message to Obama that anti-Americanism is bigger than him or George Bush or whether the IOC simply balked at the fact that Team Barry’s presentation was, true to form, less about nuts and bolts than about romantic feelgood Hopenchange nonsense, I think Jay Cost’s on target about what it means for the permanent campaign here at home.

I, for one, am exhausted by our new permanent campaign. That might sound strange coming from somebody who runs the Horse Race Blog, but it is true. The ominpresence of the Obama campaign apparatus is, frankly, wearing me down. I can’t get away from him or it, even in my down times. Watching the Office on TBS used to be a real pleasure for me and the missus, but now we must be interrupted by the President of the United States cracking lame jokes at us in the promotion of a second-rate comedian. There is no escape. And so it continues today. What should have been a story about Chicago – or better yet, Rio (good for you, Rio!) – is now a story about…Obama. Of course. Because just about everything in the public sphere must, must become a story about Obama. Because Obama injects himself and his campaign appartus/mindset/worldview into everything.

I was hesitant to place a bet on the outcome of the health care debates, but I’ll place one here. Sooner or later, the American people are going to say, “Enough is enough” with this constant, incessant politicking that is inevitably built around the person of Barack Obama.

It’s the person of Barack Obama that beat Clinton and McCain, though, not anything important having to do with policy. Just compare his personal approval ratings with the approval of his domestic measures. Can you blame them for thinking that the key to solving every problem is a big, bright flash of that thousand-watt smile?

Incidentally, I’m already seeing lefties on Twitter grumbling that The One’s opponents are “enjoying” today’s failure, as though it’s unpatriotic not to be heartbroken that a billion-dollar graft opportunity for Richard Daley and his slimy cronies — which even Chicagoans were evenly split on, mind you — got flushed down the toilet. The fact is, it’s only because the stakes for the country were so low and Obama’s ego so overweening that an “unforced error” this dumb can be laughed at. But keep an eye out for tut-tutting about it from the left, along with the inevitable blaming of Bush and playing of the race card in some form or fashion. The script is always the same.