Has the president lost his ability to discharge the powers and duties of office?

Is it now time to invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment?

Has our president officially lost his ability to discharge the powers and duties of his office?

Anyone who listened to President Obama speak to reporters in Paris on Tuesday would reasonably conclude it is high time to start drawing up the papers to transmit to Congress for his removal.

If you are one of the millions and millions of literate Americans out there who have simply tuned this president out the past three or four years, that is certainly understandable. But if you tuned in to the long, rambling, empty press conference, you would have been truly alarmed.

Without the use of the teleprompter, his speech can be described only as “halting.” It was impossible to count the number of times he seized up, able to deaden the silence with only a drawn-out “uh,” “um” or “ahhh.”

The White House dutifully scrubbed all the halts and stutters from the official transcript, and it was impossible to count them in real time. But a sample of his incoherent word salad found him stuttering about every 15 words, which comes to more than 330 “uh-um-ahhs” in a single appearance.

This is not the same soaring speaker who inspired so many in 2008. This is a broken-down man who has lost the only gift he ever had. Hope and Change have been hijacked by Hopeless and Changed.

President Obama is so old and gaunt, he makes Keith Richards look like Justin Bieber — no offense to Keith Richards. At least Mr. Richards makes sense when he opens his mouth.

It took the doddering president 47 minutes and over 5,000 words to answer just six questions. And by “answer,” I simply mean he unspooled a torrent of disjointed words and broken sentences.

Part of the looniness of it all stemmed from the giant scam he and other world leaders are trying to put over on advanced countries, punishing them for their industriousness by redistributing billions and billions of dollars from hardworking American taxpayers and handing it over to tin-pot dictators in disheveled Third World countries.

“You go down to Miami, and when it’s flooding at high tide on a sunny day fish are swimming through the middle of the streets,” he said at one point. As if this were some kind of evidence that high tides or flooding are somehow caused by global warming.

Never mind that a) the argument makes no sense; and b) local media refuted the canard.

But President Obama’s fevers went well beyond global warming hysteria.

Asked about the “mass shooting” where a nut job shot three people at a Colorado abortion clinic, President Obama once again became exasperated with the American people.

“I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings: This just doesn’t happen in other countries.”

He actually said this. In Paris. Not three weeks after gunmen mowed down 129 people enjoying freedom in the French capital.

Either the man is incapable of remembering Islamist terrorist attacks or he’s simply losing his marbles.

Then, of course, there is this business of comparing radical Islamic terrorism to — global warming? He actually insisted that global warming is an even greater threat than terrorism itself.

Again, he said this. In Paris. Not three weeks after the worst terrorist attacks in a civilized country since 9/11.

Someone alert the Senate president pro tempore. Somebody call the speaker of the House. And let’s all dust off the 25th Amendment.

• Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com and on Twitter via @charleshurt.

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