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发帖数: 29846 | 1 By Geoffrey P. Hunt
It was Dorothy's dog Toto, a standard bred cairn terrier, in the 1939 movie
classic "The Wizard of Oz," tugging at the black curtain, who revealed the
Great and Powerful Oz to be nothing more than a humbug,
"Why, you're not a wizard at all, you're just a man! And you're a very bad
man for pretending to be a wizard," exclaims Dorothy. Professor Marvel,
chagrined after having been defrocked, and exhausted, unable to sustain the
charade, replies apologetically, " Oh no my dear, I'm a very good man, just
a very bad wizard."
President Obama, also pretending to be a wizard, was finally defrocked at
his own hand by a pathetic performance in what should have been an
unremarkable low profile legislative routine but which ballooned into the
debt ceiling debacle. Discredited by his serial lying about default and
terrifying seniors about Social Security payment suspensions, while telling
bankers behind the scenes that such calamities would not happen, Obama can't
lay claim to be a very good man, either.
No doubt his intrinsic ethics deficit has been inflated by an ideological
stubbornness about class warfare, higher taxes and bigger government. His
poll numbers are plummeting even among fawning defenders. He is a feckless
bystander, making fools of those swept off their feet in 2008, voting with
their hearts, "someplace over the rainbow" for a Tin Man without an oil can.
And now, Obama's closest allies in Congress finally admit what many of us
knew all along. Like a package constructed of sugar cane and bamboo, he's
as fragile as the wicked witch, melting at the first drops of a splash of
water in his face.
Two Fridays ago Obama himself acted out the dual characters of both the
failed Wizard of Oz and the terrier Toto, at his hastily called late day
press conference when he ordered the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, to
deliver the broomstick of the wicked witch. As everybody knows by now, the
broomstick would be in the form of more tax hikes, the only solution Obama
has for any and all of our "double, double toil and trouble."
Such a broomstick, in lore, would be finding the holy grail, conquering evil
, the sweet fruit borne by a knight errant. But Obama's performance was
more transparent than usual, now obvious to anyone who had been clinging to
the hope that Obama would change himself, yearning for him to display, for
the first time, a glimmer of presidential leadership.
Obama previously sent his knights errant , Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson,
on the same quest for the witch's broomstick. Of course Bowles and Simpson
returned empty handed -- without Obama's singular vision for America --
more class warfare, more taxes, more redistributive spending, thus were
summarily dismissed. To his credit, despite assaults from hard core
conservatives that he has been timid, Speaker Boehner rightfully refused to
seek, let alone find and deliver, the witch's broomstick.
The debt ceiling saga serves up many lessons; the most apparent is the
chronic dysfunction of today's Congressional leaders, unable to muster
sufficient brainpower and courage, unlike Dorothy's companions, the
Scarecrow and the Lion.
A parallel lesson, just as profound and more instructional, is the sorry
consequence that befalls a nation after it chooses a president based on
identity politics alone, where the subject of infatuation is mere vaporware,
just an imaginary figment, a momentary reflection from a wistful gaze into
a crystal orb.
Obama is finished. The election in 2012 won't be close. The Republicans
would have to nominate someone hopelessly inept and obnoxious to enable
Obama's resuscitation.
Obama is sharing the exit script with Oz's onetime Wizard, vanishing as the
hot air balloon ascends uncontrollably. "I can't come back. I don't know how
it works." | N**D
发帖数: 2885 | 2 "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." |
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