For Woody - a diatribe on Hussein

[karl]

Knock, knock. Anyone home? Anyone there? Barack Obama seems to exist only as the sock puppet of his handlers, of the people who have maneuvered and manufactured a political commodity.

Who else do you know has written two memoirs before the age of 45? "Dreams of My Father" was published in 1995 when he was only 34 years old. The "Audacity of Hope" followed in 2006. Did he, indeed, write these himself? Why?

His political skills consisted of rarely voting on anything that might be deemed controversial. He went from a legislator in the Illinois legislature to the Senator from that state because he had the good fortune of having Mayor Daley's formidable political machine at his disposal.

He was in the U.S. Senate so briefly that his bid for the presidency was either an act of astonishing self-confidence or part of some greater game plan that had been determined before he first stepped foot in the Capital. Many of us wonder why he was selected to be a 2004 keynote speaker at the Democrat convention that nominated John Kerry when virtually no one had ever even heard of him before.

The mainstream political media just "happened" to fall in love with him. It was a schoolgirl crush with febrile commentators like Chris Mathews swooning over the man.

He outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton in primaries. He took Iowa by storm. A charming young man, an anomaly in the state with a very small black population, he oozed "cool" in a place where agriculture was the antithesis of cool. He dazzled the locals. And he had an army of volunteers drawn to a charisma that hid any real substance.

But all of those gilded (and guided?) years leading up to the White House have left him unprepared to be President. Left to his own instincts, he has a talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. It swiftly became a joke that he could not deliver even the briefest of statements without the ever-present Tele-Prompters.

None of his "classmates" at Harvard remember him being there at all. That is more than a little strange. I can remember the names and faces of every one of my 145 classmates from medical school.

When anyone else would quickly and easily produce a birth certificate on demand, this man has spent over a million dollars to deny access to his. Most other documents as well - the paper trail we all leave in our wake - have been sequestered from the view of the American public. Obama has lived a make-believe life whose true facts remain hidden.

We laugh at the ventriloquist's dummy, but what do you do when the dummy is President of the United States of America ?"