The Wizard of Ooze

I’ve been boasting for some time that, so far as I know, I was the first person to liken Barack Obama to Chance the Gardener in Being There. I did so because the Obama we first met appeared to have nothing going on behind the smooth exterior, a fact that allowed people to project onto him all of their beliefs and desires. For a long, long time, using this comparison, I hammered away Obama’s being a political nothing. I’ve concluded, though, that I was completely wrong.

There is in fact, a great deal to Obama, all of which he’s carefully kept hidden. He isn’t Chance the Gardener at all, who truly was nothing. Instead, he’s a weird inversion of the Wizard of Oz. As you recall, the Wizard of Oz presented himself as all-powerful and all-knowing. He warned his audience to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” knowing that a glimpse of this man would reveal the truth: the Wizard had no power at all. He was a charlatan. In other words, the Wizard of Oz pattern has a nonentity masquerade as a person of ideas and stature.

The opposite appears to be true with Obama. He is a person with a long ideological history and lots of ideas, who is purposefully masquerading as a cipher. I’m still right, I think, in deriding his lack of practical experience, but I’m wrong in claiming there’s no there there. There’s lots of there there, and none of it is the kind of stuff that would appeal to the ordinary person. Hence his “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” shtick.

Now that Obama has achieved rather lofty heights, though, people are beginning to notice that curtain flapping in the breeze behind him, and they’re sneaking peeks. And what we’re discovering is that the banal Wizard has a whole lot of ooze attached. Here’s just a partial list, and you should feel free to add your own hidden, oozing realities:

  1. He closely allied himself for 20 years to the arch-racist Jeremiah Wright, whom he described as his mentor, who married him and his wife, who taught his children, and whose radical Church he attended regularly. (No links needed here, right?)
  2. He freely admitted his fervent attachment to his Dad’s political philosophy without apprising anyone of the fact that his father was an extreme Communist.
  3. At the start of his political career, he consciously sought political aid from homegrown Leftist terrorists.
  4. Amidst all the shades of gray that characterize the United States Senate, he stands out as the only Senator with a perfect liberal voting record. That is, he’s so far to the left, even Kennedy and Boxer can’t keep up with him.
  5. The Rezko trial is showing with ever greater detail that Barack Obama entered into shady financial deals with the political fixer in order to finance his lifestyle and his politics.
  6. Obama has tried to hide and has lied about the fact that he is has in the past held (and probably still holds) positions about guns and abortion that lie to the extreme Left of the political spectrum.
  7. Obama is not some naive guy who stumbled into the political limelight because of integrity and talent. Instead, he is a deliberately created product of the Chicago political machine.
  8. Obama distinguished himself from just about every other person in Congress by deliberately turning his back on Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, the extraordinarily brave and principled Bangladeshi newspaper man who is being persecuted by his government for suggesting detente with Israel.
  9. When it comes to charity, Obama gives Scrooge a run for his money. Despite having made significant sums of money and despite already being in the public eye, he and his wife gave just about nothing to charity — and there’s no indication that he offset his financial cheapness with the gift of his own time and energy. True to his liberal credentials, while Obama and the Missus are making money hand over fist, he wants to enact legislation that drags money out of your pockets to force you to fund the charities in which he believes. (That is, he wants to raise taxes.)
  10. Contrary to his faux-humble exterior, Obama is more than willing to lie about his Senatorial accomplishments in order to bloat — I mean, puff — his record.
  11. On the subject of judges, Obama has been open about the fact that he will appoint activist judges. He doesn’t believe that Supreme Court judges should be bound by anything as insignificant as the Constitution. Instead, he says, they should be allowed to base their decisions on “empathy.” I’m assuming he won’t choose judges whose empathy is directed towards fetuses or victims of crime or some weird “conservative” things like that. I’ll leave you to guess where their empathy will lie.
  12. I noted above that Obama has lied about a few things. It also turns out that his best-selling, fame-creating biography also contains some lies, or perhaps we can just call them acts of artistic license. No matter how you want to characterize them, it’s clear that Obama has only a distant relationship with the truth when it comes to shoving his past behind the curtain.
  13. Jeez, thinking about it, Obama lies about everything. Here’s a nice little post listing some of those lies, along with some hits at a complicit media.
  14. Obama surrounds himself with a significant number of political advisers who espouse views about Israel that are at odds with how the majority of Americans view that beleaguered little country. Samantha Powers was the one who first got the spotlight, but more information has been oozing out about his other foreign policy advisers as well.  The problem seems to infect his entire campaign.

No wonder Obama has presented a bland, history-free exterior, and no wonder he’s relied on orotund phrases in his speeches that carry with them no actual meaning. This is not a case of a man trying to be all things to all people. Instead, this is a case of a man desperately trying to divert attention from his true political persona, one that would, I think, revolt most American voters. I’m sure that every morning, Obama rises and recites to himself “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” He knows that he’s done for if some little Toto comes along and the curtain vanishes altogether.