Years ago I wrote a diary that cronicled the Cheney-Rumsfeldt-Neocon orchestrated growth of parallel governmental structures in the US Government to diffuse and then relocate the centers of power away from the  old institutions that were turning out to be resistant to capture or dismemberment.
That tactic- parallel structures- was a brilliant move in the game of power, and, in concert with a deeply infiltrated media that no longer chooses to see them, is more relevant than ever before.
So is, I not so modestly claim, the diary:
"The Quiet Coup".
Since the beginning of his presidency, Obama has been embarrassingly unable to get a grip on the wheel. Public discussion centers  on ineptness, personality, the size and number of the potholes in the road--
Nah. All those old "Parallel Structures" are still there, still working just fine, and have simply shoved Obama and congress out of the game "Begone, putzers! Into your theater in a bubble. Stay away from the instrument panel!"  

Let's look at the obvious things.

--McChrystal and Petraeus, along with a segment of the pentagon, won the obvious battle inside the white House to rethink the Afghan debacle- hell, the definitive book on the subject of the failure of counterinsurgency as a policy was reputed to be required reading inside the White House, and still the decision was to bow to the Ops division of McDonnel Douglas.

-- Literally dozens of warships now cruise the coast of Venezuela, and Colombia has sold itself to  the same guys (above) for peanuts, with eight new facilities and a brand new one literally on the border of Venzuela being built. What was once the Spanish Main now hosts the USS Colombia, as well as the USS Honduras.

-- Gitmo. The new (once the parallel) CIA is untouched. Gone are the analysts, booted to the basement, and here to stay are the ops guys, with their Navy seal- Phoenix project- death squad resumes.

-- The Torture Show, with John Yew smirking in a box seat, gets rewritten- cleaned up for today's rather tolerant K-12 audience. (same spooky guys)

-- K-street social engineering flourishes, hours after the SOTU speech.

-- The bankster-wall street smash-and-grab continues unabated, with the same gang driving the getaway car.

-- (Add yours here)

Each of these issues has worked out in a way that is, in the aggregate, political death for both the Democrats and for Obama.

All the old structures are revealing themselves as useless, sidelined, impossibly compromised or corrupt, sold lock, stock and barrell to the highest bidder. Irrelevant. We can't even keep our food pure, our water clean.
I suspect that it's not so much that Obama is inept, but that he is finding that the world seen from pennylvania avenue --- has bars on the windows.

"I'd rather be a really good one-term President than a two-term president." What a bizarre thing for a young, handsome, bright president to say after only one year in office. It sounds a lot like a declaration of surrender.
Bush also apparently did not fight. Perhaps he did not disagree enough to engage in a dangerous  battle with the Rumsfeld-Cheney boys. We will likely never know whether, allowed to do some real "deciding", he might not have been less of a disaster, any more than we will ever know whether the New Orleans prosecutor Garrison was right in his suspicions of CIA involvement in the Kennedy asassination. In spite of inexorably mounting evidence.
Obama will now fiddle with the things that he is still allowed to touch. Picking lint out of the cigar lighter.
Cleaning the windows.

I admit to being surprised by the completeness of his defeat. He has my sincere sympathy.

Will there be a battle for supremacy among the new centers of power? Is there really any leader at all?  If so, who and where?

So what's the message the court is trying to send?

I think it's one of two things:
It's perhaps simply "Hello out there! We are not irrelevant!" in which case, they're fools.
Or perhaps it's "Look, Sir or Madam (whoever), -remember us?  We're on your side!".
Likely both. In any case, there will be no help for main street there.