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.

Why is everybody so happy? They're talking in hushed tones of 'The First Hundred Days' of the Obama Era as if they had some palpable accomplishment to brag about. The Administration has snuck a few pieces of legislation through the legislative process and people who are paying attention are alarmed at many of their policies. CNBC, a business channel not normally given to political discourse, is inhabited by folks who are able to read and understand what these things mean and the business-types on that channel are aghast. Hard-core conservatives are predictably upset at what they see as a slide to destruction. Even some liberals are looking over the 'accomplishments' and becoming uneasy.

But if you get your news from the 30-second newsbreaks in the commercial intervals during 'Desperate Housewives' you're feeling pretty darn good about Barak. One glance at the cover of People Magazine will fill you with confidence and pride at America's wise political choice. Approval ratings are at 60%. Barak obliges this vast audience with plenty of images that show that he's as photogenic as Bill Clinton, swinging his golf club with a quiet insouciance with his eyes fixed firmly on the future that is just outside the bounds of the glowing photograph. At last, a Democrat who looks sharp in his tailored suit instead of that furtive little weasel Bush! I guess things can only get better, right? He's rolled up his sleeves and done something about the economic mess left to him by the Bush Administration and he's got a lot of swell new solutions for all our other problems so why shouldnt we support him?

But 'The Hundred Days' concept can refer to two incidents in history; the storm of legislation that began FDR's 12-year tenure in the White House or the return of Napoleon from Elba and his march to Waterloo. Both ended badly. Waterloo has become a synonym for hubristic disaster and FDR's hurricane of legislation did nothing to help the country out of the Great Depression and in fact can be accused not only of prolonging and deepening that depression but also can be looked on as the beginning of the trend that has brought us to the current crisis. One thing that Bonaparte and FDR had in common is a boundless energy that they threw into The Hundred Days. Wrongheaded as they were they moved forward rapidly and with purpose.

Not so the sluggish Obama. With a Speaker Of The House described by her colleagues as 'crazy and meaner than a junkyard dog' and possessing a complete lock on The House and a Senate with 59 Democrat votes, needing only one or two feeble RINO votes to perpetrate any legislative monstrosity Harry Reid needs to push through you would think we would be living in a People's Republic by now. But this legislative mountain has so far given birth to a couple of anemic baby mice. They've voted a trillion dollars in handouts to friends, donors and favored sectors of the electorate (labeled 'stimulus'). They've effectively doubled the federal budget. The banks have been strong-armed into the TARP program. A large sector of the auto industry has been nationalized and turned over to the union bosses who destroyed it in the first place. The defense budget has been slashed. But the 'liberal agenda' , the avalanche of legislation putting every dream of every crackpot left-wing college professor or union boss into law that Nancy Pelosi promised in the magic First Hundred Days is surprisingly missing.

Why? The American People have demanded more subsidies, especially in these critical times. This is a free country so where's all my free stuff? Free medical care--that's a right! Free college education for anybody who can scrawl their name on an admission application--another right! And what about the right to stay in your house when you cant pay the mortgage? The right of your union to charge your boss four or five times the wage rate people in other countries earn for the same work? The right of public employees to earn eighty percent of their gross pay (indexed for inflation, of course) when they retire after twenty years of service? The right of illegal aliens to all the benefits available to so-called 'citizens'. The government needs to fix the weather by replacing all smoking power plants with eco-friendly windmills and solar panels and also to replace all those stinky gasoline-powered cars with battery-powered cars that run just as well and eliminate the need for expensive petroleum. All those greedy bankers and CEOs need to be stripped of their bonuses and private jets so that The Children can have a decent education in our cash-starved schools.

The translation of the title of this piece is 'Whom the Gods would destroy they first make demented'. That might be a good replacement for 'In God We Trust' on our currency. The currency that will be increasingly worthless as each new wave of 'stimulus' is poured into a declining economy. The conservatives are waiting for the American People to catch on to the effects of all these Obamunist economic tricks and turn on their authors. Thats a nice thought, but its going to take a lot for these spoiled, dependent slobs to realize that their rights are unsustainable and unworkable and not rights at all. The dementia has eaten into America's brain. They really think that the government can fix the weather. They really think that they can retire at fifty with free medical care, a phat pension, mortgage relief, and an electric-powered Winnebago that will take them on a permanent tour of a well-maintained highway system in a country free from the fear of a terrorist attack or crime by illegal alien criminals surrounded by a world of democratic nations impressed by the sheer morality of America's admirable foreign policy. Thats how demented we have become.

The state of the political culture in this age of Obamunism is like one of those parties that some people throw in their beach houses on sandbank islands when a Category Five hurricane is approaching. What, Me Worry? Everyone is happy waiting for Daddy Obama and those caring, concerned Democrats to drop fat worms into our widely-opened mouths. We just declare the worms exist (nemitodii stimulatus) and there they are! The economic collapse of Europe is interesting but what does a 6% decline in GDP in Germany have to do with us? If the Taliban takes over in Pakistan why should we care? Nuclear Iran? Not our problem. Somali pirates? Hey maybe we can make a movie about these poor saps and have Johnny Depp play the Head Pirate just for laughs!

Because one of the worst mistakes of the Obamunists is the presenting of our bungling non-action in Somalia as some kind of a victory. The pirates got a green light for more thuggery and the world got the message that this four-flushing phony will take a victory on the cover of People Magazine instead of risking a real response to an international crisis. Another is our broadcasting to the world that we intend to prosecute the people who squeezed the secret plans of our Islamonazi terrorist enemies from them while we label our peaceful political opposition as potential terrorists. The world is also looking askance at the ever-increasing bond auctions of our Federal and State governments as they work to fulfill the rights they've told a gullible public they can expect.

So as Barry gives Hero Chavez the ghetto handshake the Taliban moves in for the kill in Pakistan, the North Koreans fire ballistic missiles into Japan's airspace, and Iran readies their first nuke for testing the American press goes insane complimenting BHO on our much-improved image in the world. As the banks slide further toward insolvency, the UAW seizes control of GM and Chrysler, the Fed pours vast oceans of money into a shrinking economy, the cap-and-trade disaster looms and unemployment creeps into double digits the press and the public are agog at the many accomplishments in this First Hundred Days of the New Age. If you deny that socialism doesnt work and I deny that socialism doesnt work then it works! Another Great President said something similar and he had a 60% approval rating, too.

Make no mistake. The problem that this country has is that everybody now expects to get more out of the system than they put in. Everybody. Its mass insanity. Dementia. The Gods are laughing. They know how this story ends. Obama isnt Achilles, he's Hector.