May wobbled into the history books as political
observers began to speculate on when retiring President Barack H.
Obama will begin collecting funds for the Barack H. Obama
Presidential Library & Soapbox to be located in Blue Island,
Illinois, just across the street from the waste disposal plant. For
that matter, what will the Obama Presidential Library & Soapbox
look like? What will it be constructed of? By month’s end wags were
snickering that a suitable construction material might be golf
balls, yes, golf balls. After all, the 44th president is probably
the most assiduous golfer since the late president Warren Gamaliel
Harding. Even in times of national calamity he goes golfing. In May
he hit the links even as a suicidal offshore oil rig in the Gulf of
Mexico continued to threaten southern beaches, the fishing
industry, and his dwindling approval ratings with its unwholesome
discharges.
Ironically, the suppurating oil rig belongs to the most
boastfully green energy producer in the world, British Petroleum
(BP), a goody-two-shoes corporation that actually contributes
millions of dollars to the dangerous fuddy-duddies over at the
Nature Conservancy — and you can bet that the Conservancy is not
going to return one nickel. Yet not all the employees of
BP are smug environmentalists, boasting of their moral superiority
over good old American bituminous coal and nuclear fizz. Some even
have a gift for satirizing our fairway-hopping leader. During the
third week of the oil spill BP engineers attempted to occlude the
oil leak by cramming its main pipe with — yes indeed — thousands
of golf balls! Alas to no effect — and so the Obama
administration’s prospects wilt. President William Henry Harrison’s
presidency was the shortest, lasting but a month before he was
felled by pneumonia. Mr. Obama’s term ended at 16 months when he
was felled by golf — and a stupendous inability to learn from his
mistakes.
His pallbearers are the pollsters. By the end
of May the Rasmussen poll gauged his approval rating at a new low.
Only 42 percent approve of Mr. Obama’s performance, and doubtless
many of them thought they were being asked to appraise his golf
game or perhaps his form on the basketball court. Both were
prerequisites for a community organizer in the early 21st century.
Yet as chief executive Mr. Obama bids fair to be the President
Millard Fillmore of our time. Moreover the embarrassments keep
coming in. By the end of the month there were reports that White
House chief of staff Mr. Rahm Emanuel had asked another Democratic
golfer, former president Bill Clinton, to persuade Congressman Joe
Sestak not to challenge Senator Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania
Democratic primary by dangling a federal job before Mr. Sestak. The
effort failed, and Mr. Sestak won the nomination. And there is
more. The American Spectator’s crack investigative team is
checking into reports circulating out of Chicago that in the 1990s
White House aide David Axelrod performed in a punk rock group named
“The Loose Stools.” As we go to print Mr. Axelrod has yet to
respond to our inquiries — more anon.
Yet it was not all bad news for the Obama
administration. Peru released the former Tupac Amaru radical Miss
Lori Berenson from prison, where she had served 15 years of a
20-year sentence for a string of violence on behalf of the Tupac
Amaru Revolutionary Movement, and she now is free to become White
House energy czar or perhaps to build Molotov cocktails in the
White House basement. The Washington Post has put
Newsweek up for sale and might try to sell it at the
forthcoming Sotheby’s antique auction. The European Union, working
with the International Monetary Fund, fashioned a $25.4 billion
bailout payment for Greece, all for naught. During the last week of
May the Greek prime minister’s electricity was cut off anyway.
Britain’s Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, was filmed in a sting
operation by London’s News of the World as she endeavored
to sell access to her ex-husband, the Duke of York, to a reporter
disguised as a Middle East potentate complete with pinkie ring and
armpit stench. Yet apparently it was not as bad as it looked to the
multitudes who watched the former member of the royal family on the
News of the World’s film. Appearing on the Oprah Winfrey
Show, the duchess explained that she was simply inebriated
when she made her shady offer and “in the gutter.” From Papua New
Guinea comes heartening news for opponents of police brutality. No
longer will the local police department recruit police officers who
have undergone penis enlargement. According to chief of police
Bekto Suprapto, a widely respected progressive in those parts, a
future candidate applying for a position on the force “will be
asked whether or not his vital organ has been enlarged.” As in
Hollywood, California, so too in pristine Papua: the male member is
the only recognized vital organ — though in Hollywood the liver
runs a close second.
Pennsylvania state police are on a collision
course with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). In
famed Punxsutawney, trooper Jamie Levier arrested 55-year-old Mr.
Donald Wolfe for giving mouth-to-mouth “resuscitation” to an
opossum felled by a vehicle on historic Route 36. The officer
charged the animal rights activist with public intoxication after
Mr. Wolfe attracted a mob, one of whose rustics claimed that the
idealistic Mr. Wolfe was “kneeling before the animal and gesturing
as though he were conducting a seance.” Another of the bumpkins
charged that the opossum had been “long dead.” Well, does that mean
a member of PETA cannot at least try to revive the poor animal, you
churl! Mr. Wolfe might also have tried the Heimlich maneuver. What
the hell is wrong with that? Chinese authorities continue their
senseless crack-down on sex parties, forgetting apparently that the
late Chairman Mao Zedong was an ithyphallic superstar who lived all
his life on the far most reaches of the sexual frontier. He was a
veritable Nero, a Mr. Hugh Heffner, sans bathrobe and
silly pipe. At any rate, a court in the district of Qin-huai
(pronounced gung hoê´ ) has sentenced Mr. Ma Yaohai
(pronounced ya hoo), a university professor and part-time
gardener, to three and a half years in the hoosegow for organizing
so-called “swingers” for group sex parties. The court also
convicted 21 other members of Mr. Ma’s sex club, though that
twenty-first member might only have been a masturbator. An
indignant Mr. Ma explained to the press that he had only become
involved in group sex after the failure of two marriages and in the
hope of treating a severe case of claustrophobia. He will
appeal.
Finally, congratulations are in order for our
High Spirits correspondent, Mr. Jonathan Aitken, who has taken time
from his reflections on matters of a spiritual and churchly nature
to research the life of Mr. Nursultan Nazarbayev, the only
Communist leader I have ever met, though I am hoping to meet former
president Barack Obama before he leaves Washington, D.C., to begin
work on his Presidential Library & Soapbox back in Blue Island.
Actually, when I met Mr. Nazarbayev he was an ex-Communist leader
and now president of the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. He
greeted me heartily in his presidential palace during a visit with
American journalists. He looked me right in the eye, and with
traces of his former authority seemed to want to crush my
hand.
Mr. Aitken has written the first English-language
biography of Mr. Nazarbayev, Nazarbayev and the Making of
Kazakhstan: From Communism to Capitalism. The book captures
the capitalistic hopes of this oil-rich area with Aitken’s usual
elegance and optimism, but as to its political future I remain in
doubt. On May 21 the Kazakh parliament voted unanimously to allow
Mr. Nazarbayev to run for reelection for the rest of his life,
perhaps even thereafter. This Crisis continues as usual.
