It’s not just the fourth quarter. It’s trash talk time.

President Barack Obama’s never done a good job hiding his disdain for the people he doesn’t like—a long list that includes reporters, Republicans, pretty much every member of Congress, the foreign leaders he considers petty and childish (Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyanu most of all). Everyone would see things his way, he tends to project, if only they were a little smarter and thought it through as thoroughly as he has.


Usually when he’s explaining why the world’s wrong and he’s right, he’s looking down his nose and drily lecturing, getting deep into wonky policy explications that leave even his staff yawning and too confused or bored to explain.

On Friday afternoon in the State Dining Room, at a wide-ranging press conference, he was just having a good time.

He showed up ready to mock, with an unimpressed, exaggerated upside down smile just one right cheek mole short of a Robert DeNiro impression. The smile popped up again and again, as he swept his hand to dismiss questions, cutting off one reporter reciting criticism of him versus Putin with a wrap-it-up finger motion and saying, “I get it,” then sneering through a takedown that ended with him taking a beat like he’d been training at the Friar’s Club: “So – what was the question again?”

On Jeb Bush's dismissal of a school shooting in Oregon as “stuff happens": “I don’t even think I need to react to that one.''

On the upcoming fight with Congress over the debt ceiling, with a laugh: “I’m sure the speaker’s race complicates these negotiations.''

The most pronounced smirk came as he brushed off people who don’t agree with him on guns: “There are all sort of crackpot theories floating around,” Obama said, “some of which are sometimes ratified by elected officials in the other party.”

Not that he didn’t have things to be genuinely torn up about: He was announcing the departure of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, one of the few members of the Cabinet left from the days when the administration was all promise and potential, and an actual friend. He’d kicked off the week shadowboxing with Putin and having to sit through a 90-minute bilateral that went nowhere, only to wake up the next morning and find out that Russia had just started bombing American interests in Syria before they’d remembered to return the calls to administration officials looking to work out a plan. And Thursday night, he’d stood in the White House briefing room grieving another mass shooting, tears in his eyes as he admitted there wasn’t much he could do except keep talking about it, and have his staff spend the evening tweeting about it.

But Obama’s been in "rhymes-with-bucket-list" mode for months, riding high from a spring where all of a sudden his presidency seemed to come together, embracing poll numbers that he and the West Wing assumed were never going to go up, and watching with glee as he’s outlasted people who’ve made his life hell (not a lot of weeping in the Oval Office about John Boehner’s tail-between-his-legs resignation).

Even a very bad week, capped off by Hurricane Joaquin ensuring he’s not getting any rounds of golf this weekend, didn’t shake that.

His administration’s history in Syria is such a jumbled mess of false starts and assumptions proved wrong that he spent half an hour in response to the first question asked, and managed to say nothing new. But, hey, he said, that’s a lot better than what anyone else has got.

“When I hear people offering up half-baked ideas as if they are solutions, or trying to downplay the challenges involved in the situation, what I’d like to see people ask is, ‘Specifically, precisely, what exactly would you do and how would you fund it and how would you sustain it?’” Obama said. "Typically what you get is a bunch of mumbo jumbo.”

Putin, meanwhile, is just a liar, Obama said—a silly, weakened, ridiculous liar, as anyone could see. Obama smacked away statements the Russian president made in public and in private in their Monday sitdown. He even did a double shot of mine’s-bigger-than-yours, tearing into the size and growth of the Russian economy and noting with pleasure that though Putin seemed confident in his America-bashing, Assad-supporting address to the General Assembly in New York, “I didn’t see after that speech at the United Nations suddenly that 60-nation coalition we have lining up behind him.”

Obama said he knows Putin wants to draw him into a proxy war in Syria. Of course he does—that’s what a small power like Putin would want to do, he said. But he’s not biting, and he sees a quagmire coming for the Russians (just like Putin’s other “brilliant” geopolitical moves around Ukraine) despite all their strutting.

“Mr. Putin had to go into Syria not out of strength, but out of weakness,” Obama said, to protect Assad, “his client.”

This is a predictable routine from a flailing leader whose “actions have been successful only insofar as its boosted his poll ratings inside of Russia'' -- which is a lot "easier to do when you've got a state controlled media."

So on Syria, Obama said, he’s not surprised by the Russian moves (although his aides this week spent time expressing their own surprise at what the fighter jets were doing up in the air around Damascus).

“What they’re doing now is not particularly different from what they’ve done in the past,” Obama said. “They’re just more open about it.”

And back in Washington, there won’t be a fight about the debt ceiling, he explained, basically because he said so: “We’re not going back there.”

Obama did more of a second grade teacher routine than the usual college professor, walking the room through his rundown of what the debt ceiling is and why Republicans don’t understand what the difference is between raising it and new spending.

“It’s not that complicated. The math is the math,” he said.

Or, of course, they could do what they were doing in insisting on a government shutdown unless he defunded Planned Parenthood, and “throw a tantrum.”

“Thank you guys for your patience,” Obama said, ending the press conference, speaking to the children of the outgoing and new Education secretaries, who'd sat through the hour-plus news conference. But it also sounded like he was dismissing everyone else from class, ahead of the weekend. “You can now go home.”

