It was an amazing week for Barack Obama — perhaps the most remarkable in his disastrous presidency. We watched history unfold as it did in Greek mythology — with all of the ills that would confront mankind escaping from Pandora’s box.

Sunday, June 8: The week began with a “prayer summit” and tree-planting at the Vatican Gardens in Rome — hosted by Pope Francis and attended by Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. There were hugs all around, with prayers in Hebrew, Arabic, English, and Italian. It was a love-in as well as a pray-in — marked by the planting of an olive tree as evening fell.

Then all hell broke loose — not at the Vatican, but 3,300 miles to the east at Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport. At about the same time that the ceremony in the Vatican Garden was breaking up, the Pakistani version of the Taliban — Tehreek-e-Taliban — attacked the country’s busiest airport — killing 18 airport security and administrative officers and setting off a raging fire. Armed with rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons, the ten assailants (all killed in the battle) were stopped just 25 yards short of three planes filled with passengers. The Taliban poses a real threat to Pakistan as well as Afghanistan. If terrorist groups were to succeed in toppling the government of Pakistan, they could beat the Mullahs in Iran to the punch in becoming the first radicalIslamist state to gain a nuclear arsenal. How do you deter an enemy state with nuclear weapons that celebrates death and the thought of self-immolation? Pakistan is equipped with dozens of ready-to-fire nuclear weapons.

Monday, June 9: Obama came out snarling in signing another executive order — this one designed to make it easier for college students to renege on their debts… and easier for Obama and the Democrats to wage phony class warfare with the blatant falsehood that the program could be easily financed by closing “tax loopholes” on “millionaires.” “This should be a no-brainer,” the president declared. “It would be scandalous if we allowed those kinds of tax loopholes for the very, very fortunate to survive while students are having trouble just getting started in their lives.”

Sure, it’s a “no brainer” to tell students that they can borrow any amount of money to go to the college or graduate school of their choice and know a) that they will never have to spend more than 10 percent of their discretionary income in monthly loan payments, and b) that they can walk away from the unpaid balance after a 10- or 20- year period — with maximum loan forgiveness for those who go to work for the government or philanthropic organizations.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told reporters at the White House that the administration could not say how much it would cost taxpayers to extend the cap on the monthly payments to an additional 5 million students — which includes many who have already graduated and are still struggling to find good jobs. “We’ll figure that out on the back end,” Duncan said.

Meanwhile, back at the front end, student debt in the U.S. now totals more than $1.2 trillion. Out of 37 million borrowers, 5.4 million, or 15 percent, have already defaulted. A total of 600,000 borrowers who graduated in 2010 had defaulted by 2012, according to the Education Department data cited in the Wall Street Journal.

Why not extend the same pay-if-you-can, early-forgiveness program to every other type of debt, including car loans, credit card debt, and — just to give taxpayers one break — easy repayment of mounting pension obligations to public sector employees?