Great performers are cursed in these angry times. It seems a wrathful God has it in for those who try to rise above the heads of the common herd. Paul Newmann, thespian and purveyor of salad oil struck down; Michael Jackson, musician and also a purveyor of oily lubricants suddenly snatched from us and now Od, Thailand's best dwarf trapeze artist, perishing in a tragic accident that can only make you wonder if there really is a God or, if there is, why he chooses to be so cruel.

Od was on the top of his game. He had overcome centuries of Thai prejudice that said dwarves could never be the best, could never excel. But Od was the best. He did excel. The audience was in the palm of his stubby little hand. He had fame, he had fortune. he knew he was the master so when he did his triple flip cross-swing the crowd was wowed! Down he flew, onto the trampoline he used to do his dismount, in itself a masterstroke of genius. You got to see a dwarf on the high wire but he wasnt too vain to bounce on a trampoline. Od didnt disdain the simple tastes of the masses, who enjoyed watching dwarfs bounce up and down as much as they loved them swinging and tumbling through the air. But it was this demotic touch that led to his downfall.

Something went wrong. He hit the trampoline at the wrong angle, maybe he was falling too fast, we'll never know because no cameras were present. He bounced, but he didnt bounce straight up in that hilarious dwarf trajectory that audiences had grown to love. He arched. The next act was named Hilda The Hippopotamus. Again one yearns for the presence of a camera. What do you train a hippopotamus to do in a circus anyway? Do they hop up on their back legs or something? This whole circus sounds like it was dreamed up by some mad surrealist impresario who fled The West with its cutsie-pootsie Cirq De Soliel to get back to a more Medieval feel.

Whatever Hilda did during her performance is beside the point because as she waited to go on the bored Hilda gave a gigantic hippo-mouth yawn just as Od came careering off the trampoline. Into Hilda's yawning mouth. She had a gag reflex and swallowed Od. The audience cheered. Od had topped himself this evening, and to be fair, so had Hilda. The people at the circus were upset, there cant be a whole lot of dwarfy trapeze artists running around, certainly none of Od's caliber. It took a while for the crowd to understand what they had witnessed, to realize that Od would not be coming out to take a bow. Ever again.

I'm upset. If those Right-Wingers hadnt blocked Obamacare maybe Od could have been saved! Fortunately ObamaCare doesnt take citizenship into account- we're all citizens of the world after all- and I doubt that there's anything in the legislation wending its way secretly through the back corridors of the House and Senate that says you have to physically be in the United States, either. Of course even under the magically enlightened tenets of ObamaCare this Od situation has some thorny sticking points. Cass Sunstein will of course have added provisions to provide the hapless Hilda with an attorney so that she wont be forced into surgery to alleviate a non-life-threatening condition. Hippos are pretty much vegetarians and its almost certain that a fully-clothed, rhinestone-coated dwarf is going to at least give her a bad case of heartburn but you knife-happy jokers put those scalpels away. Anyway the wait for surgery under ObamaCare might make the whole thing moot by the time its resolved.

But this isnt about ObamaCare, its about how you can be riding high one minute and the next minute you're lower than hippo waste, which I'm told doesnt float. Look at Barry, President Of The World and its Peoples. He gasses up five jets, grabs Oprah and his First Lady and junkets off to Copenhagen to let those EuroTrash lounge-lizards at the IOC know where their next Olympics was gonna be. Him and the Lovely Bride got up to the mikes and delivered a version in which the refrain Me-Me-Me-Me-Me came out so rapidly the drunken sportsmeisters must have thought the Obama's were skat-singing. The IOC had its big, bored hippo-sized mouth open at the time of Obama's speech and the inevitable gag reflex swallowed the Greatest Olympic Pitch Of All Time.

Like Od, Barry Obama is headed for the fertile soup at the bottom of the hippo-pond. At least his poll numbers are headed that way. It turns out that this charming and affable 'Hope And Change' candidate is a stiff, distant, inarticulate and blatantly dishonest radical presiding over an economy where employers are looking at business-gutting legislation that is pending in the house and senate and refusing to hire anyone. The people who voted for his picture on the cover of People Magazine are starting to catch on. You're going to cut Granny's Medicare are you? That sounds expensive for me. Every doctor I know over fifty years old is planning on retiring. The miracle Green Jobs havent materialized. Nothing that people thought these guys were going to do has happened. Instead we got a giant increase in spending and debt and humiliation after humiliation in front of the world. Its not even a year and people are starting to miss Bush.

What's next with this political dwarf? Can he be any more inept? Why are Axelrod and Emmanuel looking more and more like Curly and Larry while we have in the oval office an increasingly long-faced and clueless Moe. I guess we should thank God for Barry's total lack of leadership skills; if he knew what he was doing we would have ObamaCare, Cap And Trade and Card Check by now. Instead the Pelosi-crats passed a trillion-dollar payoff to themselves and threw away any credibility they might have accrued by painting the Bushies as corrupt big spenders. If Barry had any concept of strategy he never would have let Reid and Pelosi pull off a heist like that. Its becoming increasingly clear that neither him or his associates have any clear concept of anything. Harvard grads all. Geniuses. Just like Od was a genius.

Even The President Of The World's vaunted communication skills, always highly overrated, have let him down. He's not a good speaker and now nobody believes him so his delivery doesnt matter anyway. Barry's getting a deer-in-the-headlights look to him. There never was any opposition in Chicago! If somebody was on your team they were on your team, there was none of this blue-dog crap! Even OPRAH doesnt work anymore. Now they're kicking around a 'second stimulus'. Its like a 'second bankruptcy'. Revenues are crashing, and so is Obama's agenda. The Dems just dont understand what went wrong. It must have been the same with Od as he saw that gaping maw of destruction get closer and closer. None of his talent, none of his luck, nothing can stave off your fate once its cast. That goes for everybody, even the President Of The World and all its People.