“Let me eat shrimp,” said Barack Obama to a reporter this
week as he toiled in Martha’s Vineyard. This Marie Antoinette
wannabe has no intention of letting anyone get their hands on cake,
I fear. Black bread and thin gruel, more likely.
If historical and monarchical metaphors are the order of
the day, we might reach more readily for Nero of Rome, said to have
fiddled while his domain sizzled. The state of our economy is shaky
at best, while global crises whirl unabated from Tehran to
Pyongyang to Islamabad and even in pronounceable places like Wall
Street. The President is being flip like Wilson, recalling the
apocryphal Antoinette apothegm, but more significantly he seems to
be floating aimlessly like flotsam and jetting aimlessly like
jetsam, recalling Nero’s neurosis.
What I’m sayin’ is that the man is hopelessly lost. He has
no clue what to do next, but the show must go on. He has his game
face on, but the game may be over.
THE GREEK COLUMNS FRAMED Senator Obama as he accepted the
nomination to run for President. “Narcissus!” shouted some.
“Hubris!” shouted others. Now after nineteen months of Greco-Roman
wrestling with the big job, he seems to have decided it’s all Greek
to him and it is time for that Roman fiddle.
Seeing him in this condition makes a soul feel sorry for
the poor lug. The Bard of Avon is calling him “more to be pitied
than censured.” He was just a regular sweet kid who was born in the
U.S. of A. (Hawaii says so, Kenya believe it?) and told that he
could be anything he darned well wanted to be, including the
President. Gladdened by this uplifting vision, he hustled off to
school in Iowa or Indonesia or wherever, cheered by the bell or the
muezzin or whatever.
Then he initiated his brilliant precautionary approach,
which was a harbinger of his later health plan: taking the drugs
before the illness arrives. From there he began hanging around with
some Commies, not because he believed in that stuff, but to broaden
his horizons and see all sides of this great country. Then he went
to that college in Cambridge which confusingly is not called
Cambridge here in America but something funny beginning with a
Har.
Onward ho to the church of the Reverend who thinks 9/11
was God’s retribution for Hiroshima. Obama prayed there, baptized
his children there, and named his book after one of the Rev’s
sermons, not because he believed in that stuff, but to broaden his
horizons and see all sides of this great country. Next he proceeded
to the U. of Chicago where he made common cause with an American
radical who tried to blow up the Pentagon and regrets failing,
William Ayers. Obama palled around with him not because he believed
in that stuff, but to broaden his horizons and see all sides of
this great country.
He then community-organized for a while, and so
effectively did he organize that indeed the black community in
Chicago is now in fabulous shape. He was loosely affiliated with
ACORN, an organization specializing in election fraud (doing it,
not stopping it), not because he believed in that stuff, but to
broaden his horizons and see all sides of this great country.
Afterwards, Obama had a proto-Mafioso get him a good deal on a
house that fell off the truck. He was friends with this paragon of
corruption. not because he believed in that stuff, but to broaden
his horizons and see all sides of this great country.
As a State Senator, he courageously jumped in to make sure
that the overzealous religious fanatics did not get a chance to
save the lives of babies who survive abortion. Why should the poor
mother be saddled with a wailing, pooping little brattinsky as a
result of medical malpractice?
Thence to the United States Senate from Illinois, where he
amassed the single most liberal voting record, not because he
believed in that stuff, but to broaden his horizons and see all
sides of this great country. Then he went on the campaign trail and
managed to win a nomination without ever winning a major primary.
Looking at this amazing track record of coming up from the wrong
side of the tracks, how could his career become
derailed?
Well, enough of this fiddle-faddle. I must go back to the
Summer of Recovery and stand behind our young President. Remember,
Rome was not built in a day.
