As the Orange County Register said:

What’s the saddest statistic of the political season? Here’s one contender: a Google search for the phrase “Obama ISIS buck pass” yields about 478,000 results.

That’s what happens when a president makes comments like the ones Barack Obama made during an interview on “60 Minutes.” There, he haplessly explained that Jim Clapper, director of national intelligence, acknowledged he’d underestimated how quickly ISIS could rise to threaten the Mideast.

True enough – but also misleading, and another unforced error for our clearly beleaguered president. Mr. Obama should have recognized that he had opened himself up to legitimate charges of buck passing.

But instead of facing the music – as John F. Kennedy did in the wake of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 – Mr. Obama all but hid behind his new press secretary, Josh Earnest.

And the poor devils who tried and failed to get the Hack Golfer in chief to do something before the problems in the Middle East went out of control? From the Washington Post, Leon Panetta is fighting back and fighting mad:

Panetta criticized his former boss for having “lost his way” — allowing the power vacuum in Iraq that created the Islamic State, rejecting Panetta’s and Hillary Clinton’s advice to arm the Syrian rebels and failing to enforce his own “red line” barring Syria’s use of chemical weapons.

The interview was timed with this week’s launch of Panetta’s book, in which he wrote that Obama “avoids the battle, complains, and misses opportunities.” Panetta also wrote of Obama’s “frustrating reticence to engage his opponents and rally support for his cause” and his tendency to rely “on the logic of a law professor rather than the passion of a leader.”

For the record, Hillary Clinton was just as bad as Obama no matter what Mr. Panetta says. The word Benghazi comes to mind when her name is invoked. But all is not lost and Mr. Obama has one loyal follower: Choo Choo Biden.

Obama’s most loyal mouthpiece at the moment may be Vice President Biden, who in a speech at Harvard last week condemned as “inappropriate” the books by former administration officials. But having Biden speak for you is of dubious value: The vice president’s criticism of Panetta was overshadowed by loose remarks in that same speech that led Biden to apologize to the governments of Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

The smartest man in the room? This is what the Democratic Party deems Hope and Change. Perhaps Mr. Obama would have been more personally involved if he had something he truly loves at stake.