“The difficult we do immediately.  The impossible takes a little longer.”

- Motto of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during World War II

According to the Book of Genesis, it took God six days to create Heaven and Earth and all they hold.  Beginning with a vast nothingness, He first created Heaven and Earth.  But this was an Earth without form, with darkness on the face of the deep, so His next step was to create Light and separate the Light from the Darkness so we would have both Day and Night.

His second day on the job, God decided his vision for the Earth would require both land and water, so he said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.”  And, so, at the end of the second day there was land, there was water and there was Night and Day. 

Now, this is a significant accomplishment for just two days work.  I suspect that, upon accomplishing similar major feats in just two day, most of us would take the next couple of days off and revel in the magnificence of our accomplishments.  But not God.

Plunging right ahead, God showed up for work on the third day, rolled up his sleeves and proceeded to really get down to business.  On this day, not only did he organize the dry land and waters into Earth and Seas, but he also caused the earth to bring forth grass, herbs to “yield seed after his kind,” and trees to begin yielding fruit.  Not bad for just one day’s work.

With similar herculean efforts, God spent the next couple of days creating the sun, the moon, the stars, time, creatures of the sea and creatures of the air. 

Finally, not being satisfied to just work a five-day, 40-hour week, God showed up at the office on the sixth day and proceeded to put in his most productive day yet, creating not only the beasts of the Earth, but also his most impressive work – Man.

Then, as we all know, God decided he had put in a pretty good week’s effort, so he took the seventh day off to rest.

As of this writing Barack Obama has been President for 46 days and to listen to his critics and much of the press, he should have accomplished at least as much in those 46 days as God did in the six He spent creating Heaven, Earth and all the Earth’s inhabitants. 

There is a surprising amount of ire, even outrage, that Obama has not yet solved the financial crisis, overhauled our healthcare system and extricated us from the conflict in Iraq.  Apparently, many Americans, including large segments of conservative Republicans, feel that by now he should have rescued us from the eight years of plague, devastation and misrule visited upon the nation by the Bush administration.

As befits anyone holding the office of President of the United States, Barack Obama is certainly a legitimate target for criticism; it goes with the territory.  But the criticism being heaped upon Obama is largely lacking in rational, coherent discourse.  Instead, we see wave after wave of attacks that are based not on rational thought but on fear, anger and downright hatred.  The quality of such criticism is not only unfair, it is unhelpful and downright unhealthy.

In response to Rush Limbaugh’s pejorative mantra, “I hope Obama fails,” which has become the battle cry of the proponents of right wing radicalism, we see supercilious attacks from the Right on matters that have little, if any, effect on the crisis at hand, while the Right virtually ignores or, worse still, takes a combative attitude toward attempts to address matters of real substance.

More than 4 million jobs have been lost since this recession officially began in December 2007, at the beginning of George W. Bush’s last year in power.  And now, instead of applying their energies to figuring out how to put Americans back to work, we’ve got the Right wigging out over earmarks.  The truth is that some earmarks are good; some are bad.  But, collectively, they account for less than 1 percent of the national budget and freaking out over earmarks is like worrying about the arrangement of the deck chairs while the Titanic slowly slips below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

To listen to his critics is to hear Obama blamed for the continuing collapse of the stock market, criticized for not moving fast enough to revive the suicidal financial industry, castigated for trying to stem the flood tide of home foreclosures, disparaged for trying to bring health insurance coverage to some of the millions of Americans who don’t have any, vilified for running up huge budget deficits as he tries to fend off the worst economic emergency since World War II and maligned for not taking time out from all of the above to deal with — get this — earmarks.

In the midst of the craziness, conservatives are busy trying to blame this epic economic catastrophe — a conflagration of their own making — on the new president.  Forget Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush and George Herbert Hoover Bush and Phil Gramm and Newt Gingrich and all the rest.  The right-wingers would have you believe this is Obama’s downturn.

As conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote, “The markets’ recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions — the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic — for enacting his ‘big-bang’ agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.”

In other words, Obama is seizing upon the current catastrophic situation in order to convert our democratic society into a socialist state. 

Krauthammer, though, is almost genteel compared to the sentiment expressed a couple of weeks ago by the perpetually hysterical Alan Keyes, a Republican who was beaten by Mr. Obama in the Illinois Senate race in 2004.  According to Keyes, “Obama is a radical communist, and I think it is becoming clear.  That is what I told people in Illinois, and now everybody realizes it’s true.”

None of us can possibly know whether President Obama’s ultimate rescue plan for the financial industry will work.  After all, we’re in unchartered waters here.  But what I do know is that the renegade clowns who ruined this economy, the Republican right in alliance with big business and a fair number of feckless Democrats, have no credible basis for waging war against serious efforts to get us out of their mess.

It seems reasonable to expect that Obama will have to take a bit longer than God to fix the world, especially since God didn’t have the Republicans trying to block his every move.