Writing from Kauai.
Like many Americans, I have been in news blackout mode since just before Christmas, with few exceptions. Less TV. Less web surfing. Virtually no newspapers. While enjoying the tranquility of the Hawaiian isle of Kauai, I received a news alert on my Blackberry on Christmas Day that a Nobel laureate and Eartha Kitt both had died. I am always relieved these days when the news alert is about the passing of some icon, rather than the one that begins, “Dow plunges …”
I can only assume the seductive Kitt made the more tangible contributions during her time on earth. The Nobel Prize and its distinguished “laureates” (such as Al Gore) largely are irrelevant.
If the holiday season is, as the lyricist insisted so many years ago, the “most wonderful time of the year”, it is probably because we can escape the 24/7 news cycles for a week or maybe two. If the mainstream media is trying to destroy our collective sanity, or turn us into a nation of manic-depressives, I fear it is succeeding.
As such, I have been deliberate in trying not to think about, or read news about, Barack Hussein Obama. I even waited until Day 8 of my holiday to don a mostly tongue-in-cheek “Obama/Osama” tee shirt. (Of course, on my morning walk, I immediately encountered some lumpy, pale skinned East Coast lib wearing a Chez Guevara-style Obama-is-God tee. He glared at me as if my shirt said, “Kill Kittens”).
My liberal antagonists howled with laughter upon learning that I was heading to the state of Hawaii for the Christmas holidays after news broke that the Obamas, and a posse of hangers-on to rival the Sinatra Rat Pack, also planned to luxuriate here (on the island of Oahu, thank God).
It is maddening. I have to live in Chicago and endure the hyperventilating of the local, Obama-crazed media — and fellow members who have come from out of town to join them — that has been unrelenting since the tragic events of November 4. And, when I think I am going to finally get away from it, that man of the people Obama boards a chartered United 767 on Dec. 20 that takes off from O’Hare Airport bound for Honolulu precisely 30 minutes before my family and I take off on United’s legendary Flight #1, a regularly scheduled nonstop to Honolulu from O’Hare.
Memo to Al Gore: How many carbon credits did the Obama family use up with that flying symbol of change known as Boeing’s fuel guzzling 767?
The flight attendants on UA #1 were all abuzz about the Obama charter, of course. As they largely ignored me and my wife and daughter, though we occupied their so-called First Class seating, I could only imagine the orgy of Obama worship going on a couple of hundred miles ahead of us, aboard Messiah One.
In flight, I realized why the ascendancy of Obama torments me day and night. It is not only about the fact that he is among the least scrutinized, least tested and most unqualified men ever elected President of the United States. Or that he is radically liberal, an enemy of patriotism, a man who has derided our military men and women. Or that he was a member of a church in which the pulpit was a cauldron of racial antagonism. Or that we have no idea if he is actually a naturally born U.S. citizen. Or that he is unearthing all of the Clinton era weasels to carry out his orders as President (or, perhaps, to tell him what the orders should be). What bothers me, to be brutally honest, is simply this: he is the luckiest man alive.
Why him? Obama is 47. I am 47. He was married on October 3 (1992). My wife and I were married on October 3 (1987). He smoked cigarettes. So did I. (I was smart enough to quit at age 35; Obama apparently falls off the wagon from time to time, but no one seems outraged. Should we not demand a modicum of discipline from the Commander in Chief?).
The parallels end there, thankfully. As I have grown older, my love for America has become deeper and less compromised. My belief in the greatness of America, in its rightful place as the world’s only legitimate superpower, has become stronger. My tolerance for invasive government and its coddling of the weakest among us has expired. Meanwhile, Obama has grown ever more cynical about America.
For the first time in my life (to borrow a Michelle Obama transition) I am of the same generation of a major political figure, a “world leader”, and it troubles me that he has to be some clown from Chicago who has gamed political, academic and religious institutions all of his life without shame or restraint. And I feel very alone, suddenly, because the circle of people I thought were my friends is disproportionally pro-Obama. People I thought of as solid, educated, American values folks are blindly awash with optimism that Obama and his crowd are going to “restore America” and create an all-inclusive Camelot.
The problem is that Obama is not a “restorer”. He’s a “reformer”. His notion of reform is to dismantle the United States down to its very foundation, taking the Constitution down with it. His dream is to preside over a socialist, economically stagnant nation that shrinks into the shadows in the face of real enemies, and, for now, many seemingly intelligent people are ready to go along with that mission. Bartender, another round of Drool-Aid.
“Has there ever been,” to quote the gifted columnist Charles Krauthammer, “a (President-elect) with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?”
Has there ever been a luckier man, a less probable political lottery winner?
Can’t think of one.
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