"I'm Ready for My Close-up, Mr. DeMille"

Here's The Nyok Times, writing of Barack Obama in the breathless tone of a mid-Victorian maiden contemplating the young Prince of Wales:

“If I am the face of American foreign policy and American power,” Barack Obama mused not long ago aboard his campaign plane, “as long as we are also making prudent strategic decisions, handling emergencies, crises and opportunities in the world in an intelligent and sober way. . . .” He stopped. He wanted to make sure he got this just right, and he had got a little caught up in rebutting the claim, which Hillary Clinton has artfully advanced, that he is not prepared to handle emergencies. Obama stopped picking at his grilled salmon in order to stare out at the sky for a few moments. “I think,” he said, in that deep and measured voice of his, “that if you can tell people, ‘We have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of Lake Victoria and has a sister who’s half-Indonesian, married to a Chinese-Canadian,’ then they’re going to think that he may have a better sense of what’s going on in our lives and in our country. And they’d be right.”

Something about this little speech scares the living bejesus out of me. Actually, two somethings. The first is the way in which he speaks of governing like a child telling someone what he wants to be when he grows up: making prudent strategic decisions, handling emergencies, crises and opportunities in the world in an intelligent and sober way. Lookame, Mom! I'm George Washington!

But the other thing is his narcissistic preoccupation with his own bizarre genealogy. As if the several nations of the world gave a rat's ass whether the President has nappy hair, or an epicanthic fold, or any other ethnic peculiarity! You just know that one thought of that li'l ol' grandmother on the shores of Lake Victoria, and Iran will kiss its nuclear program good-bye.

So if this man is elected, don't be surprised if he moves the White House to Sunset Boulevard.