AND DAMNED IF HE DOESN'T.

This week Obama met with members of the 1963 Loyola Ramblers basketball team:

Aside from toppling two-time defending champion Cincinnati to win the title, the Ramblers are noted in the annals of sports for having four African-American starters at a time when colleges in the South refused to take the court against a team with even one minority player.

Nice feel-good civil-rights story -- but not for Andrew Malcolm of IBD! Title:

The celebration of racial progress that Obama will hide today

Whatever could that mean?

President Obama is addicted to photo ops, especially sports ones with happy collegiate and pro champions giving him his own monogrammed team jersey of the sort he never got to wear in actual competition. 

The smiling audience and the president basking in the reflected winning glory of athletic champions is a sure-fire, feel-good TV story, especially in summer. Poker aside, there's hardly a national title that Obama hasn't celebrated for photographers at the White House.

Oh, so Malcolm's upset that Obama's hogging the spotlight? Actually, just the opposite:

The man who once promised the most transparent administration in history has decided to celebrate with the aging national champions in the Oval Office by himself. Just him. In private. "Closed press," as they call it, like his CIA intelligence briefings. No public sharing of this good news story with fellow Americans. 

Add that to the lengthy list of Obama disappointments.

The great thing about a column like this (half of which, BTW, is just random insults) is that, if Obama chose last-minute to hold the event in a stadium instead, Malcolm could have just flipped the two sections: Obama secrecy CIA "most transparent" har, but when reflected winning glory addicted to monogrammed jersey ops! Lengthy list of disappointments! It would work just as well.

Conservative column writing has been a version of Mad Libs for a while now, but they seem to have almost eliminated the need to make it look coherent. Soon they'll just ship the punters a bunch of refrigerator magnets (UNDER THE BUS, MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY, BENGHAZI, etc.) and let them mix and match themselves.