The Kowtower In Chief

Burt Prelutsky
Monday, April 13, 2009

During the presidential campaign, we were told that Barack Obama was another Lincoln. At the time, I recall thinking that he might very well be another Lincoln, but certainly not Abe. Then we were told he was another FDR, which was certainly closer to the truth, and not just because they both smoked cigarettes and made Narcissus look like a shrinking violet. But, now that he’s been in office for a while, he mostly reminds me of Wile E. Coyote. He thinks he’s very clever, but he keeps falling off the cliff while holding the anvil he intended to drop on the Roadrunner.

I felt that those people who insisted last year that, down deep, Obama was a Muslim were being unfair. While I had to question what sort of Christian would have sat in Jeremiah Wright’s church, soaking up all that racist swill for 20 years, at least the Trinity United Church of Christ wasn’t a mosque. But I have to confess Obama seems to be doing everything he can to make me question my earlier judgment.

At a time when Iran, not to mention North Korea, is shaking a nuclear-armed fist at the world, Obama is telling Russia he’d like to dismantle our nuclear weapons. I’m afraid that, as a means of providing America with a viable national defense, his approach verges on the suicidal. On the other hand, if it’s his intention to join the likes of Kofi Annan, Yasser Arafat, Al Gore, Le Duc Tho and Jimmy Carter, as Nobel Peace Prize winners, it’s an absolutely brilliant strategy.

As if his kowtowing to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah wasn’t contemptible enough, Obama then flew to Turkey, where he announced: “We convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better, including my own country.” Even those of us who never entirely bought the notion that Obama had been born in Kenya began giving it careful consideration after that asinine remark. For years now, atheists have balked at the idea that the United States was created by a group of extraordinary Christians who shared Judeo-Christian values. But even they only went so far as to insist that some of our forefathers weren’t religiously devout, but were merely deists. But until now, nobody had ever seriously suggested that Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison and Monroe, drew their inspiration from the Koran.

One of my readers wrote to say that after watching the Obamas behave like hicks when they visited Queen Elizabeth, he felt as if a pair of hillbillies was representing America. That made me think there might be a TV series lurking there, an updated version of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” with the lucky family moving east, instead of west, after their gusher comes in.

As if all these gaffes weren’t bad enough, we have the current administration bowdlerizing the language. There are thousands of American G.I.s being deployed to Afghanistan, but nobody is permitted to call it a “surge” because it might remind people that Sen. Obama voted against the surge in Iraq.

God forbid we mention “Islamic fascism,” lest King Abdullah forget how cute our president looked bowing and scraping to him. Furthermore, we are no longer supposed to call “the war on terrorism” the war on terrorism because, I suppose, it might give certain people the idea that we actually hold a grudge against the barbarians who are sworn to kill us.

So far as I’m concerned, the only term they’ve come up with that I approve of is “man-made disaster,” which was invented by Janet Napolitano. Understand, I don’t sanction her using it as a euphemism for 9/11. The only reason I like it is because I think it so perfectly defines the Obama presidency.