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Barack Obama hasn’t had an honest-to-goodness press conference with the White House press corps since April. Helen Thomas is gone, but a fair number of them are still on his side.

Instead he has deigned to be interviewed by such tough critics as Jon Stewart, Jay Leno, David Letterman, the ladies on The View, MTV, and a few ridiculous local radio shows.

They’re all good at what they do, but they are there to entertain, not to hold a president’s feet to the fire and insist on answers to tough questions.

So how in the heck did Kyle Murphy Clark slip past the guard? To be sure, he was only doing the job any good reporter should do: recognize the issues of the day and ask the unresolved questions. But that is exactly what Obama and his people have avoided the past six months in every forum apart from the debates.

Murphy Clark asks a tough question on Benghazi, then follows up with a more direct question when Obama said many words but did not answer. Recognizing that Murphy was actually being a reporter and not just another entertainer Obama began to filibuster. Murphy only got in a few questions, but he made his questions worth it.

Watch the whole thing:

Here are a bunch more. I do not pretend that this is an exhaustive list of the lies, flip-flops, failures, and dangerously incompetent things Barack Obama has done as president, but I do think it’s a good sampling.

Let’s get right to it:

While campaiging In 2008 Barack Obama decried adding $4 trillion to the debt over Bush’s 8 years* to get it to the lofty heights of $9 trillion as “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic.” Now, after fewer than four years of Obama the debt is $16 trillion.

Bonus second lie on this one is that also during the 2008 campaign Obama said he would not question the patriotism of anyone. He promised it. Ah, well.

Then there was the follow-on lie (or indication of gross incompetence, either way it ain’t attractive) that came once he was president: “I am pledging to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office.”

He was already president, so the economy was already in the tank, he already had grand designs for the Stimulus and a health care overhaul, and he already knew he was dealing with the war on terror and ongoing wars. Yet he still pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. And yet, each of his years has had a deficit in excess of $1 trillion. One might use words like “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic” to describe such governance if one were so inclined.. At the very least, even if we cannot call it a “lie” because he really believed it at the time, it is gross incompetence.

That leads us to his claim that if he didn’t have the economy turned around in three years he’d be a “one-termer proposition“, which doesn’t jibe with his recent comment that it will take more than one term.

On the stimulus. It was sold to the American people largely on the strength of loads and loads of “shovel-ready jobs,” public works projects, we were informed, that were ready to go—designed, scheduled, entirely ready to go—but were merely waiting for the funding. The stimulus didn’t work and the economy isn’t turned around in part because those shovel-ready jobs “were not as, uh, as shovel-ready as we thought.” (A laugh line, apparently.)

He lamented gasoline prices, and they’ve gotten worse.

He said he would not allow lobbyists in his administration. He has.

And then there’s this video. You really should watch that one and just sit agape at how bold and sweeping his plans for government transparency were. They were inspiring, really, they were. The problem is that the promises didn’t seem to last beyond the point when the sound waves dissipated in the arena. He promised to let bills passed by Congress be online for five days before he signs them (he hasn’t); he promised to root out earmarks and porkbarrel corporate welfare (he’s done quite the opposite, and frequently); he promised to put meetings between lobbyists and policy makers online (hasn’t happened — they frequently meet in a nearby coffee shop to avoid all scrutiny); he promised to make it harder for lobbyist cash to influence government (his own campaign has the most lax standards possible, making it impossible to know if donations are coming from overseas or from people who have already maxed out their giving); and he promised to make government more open and transparent (The Fast and Furious coverup, the Benghazi coverup, and the process that cobbled together the healthcare law say otherwise).

And then there’s Libya.

It wasn’t the movie. They knew it wasn’t the movie from early on. At the very least the evidence that it most definitely *was* the movie, which was their claim for more than a week afterward, was tenuous at best. They continued to insist it was the movie until they simply could not any longer. And that sordid affair just keeps getting worse.

Eventually we found out that they knew within 24 hours that it was an assault by organized terrorists. We found out that Stevens had been requesting beefed up security in Benghazi, to no avail. Then we found out there never was a protest before the attack that simply “turned violent.” Next we find out that the administration knew within 2 hours of the start of the 7-hour attack that the White House had information about the nature of the attack and that a terrorist group had claimed responsibility. Today it comes to light that the CIA guys on the ground requested military backup while it was happening, and was denied 3 times, leaving Stevens and Smith to fend for themselves, and forcing Wood and Doherty to disobey orders in order to go to the rescue of their fellow Americans under attack.

The question becomes, at what point do people begin to recognize that President Obama is a pathological liar, grossly (and now fatally) incompetent, or both?

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*If you go back and check, more than half of the debt Bush racked up was after the Dems had taken Congress in 2006. The Dems controlled the purse strings in the House of Representatives, so while Bush’s presidency did add a whole lot to the national debt the congressional Dems share the blame on that one.