Book Review

When I first heard about something called the Pocket Obama, I thought it was a joke. Apparently it’s not a joke. Or rather, it is a joke, but an unwitting one.

Now, if this thing had been designed to include genuinely memorable quotations from the president’s speeches and writings, it would vie with Teeny Ted from Turnip Town as the world’s smallest book – and would have the further distinction of not even requiring nanotechnology. Frankly, I cannot recall anything he’s said, so far, that is particularly worth preserving for the sake of posterity. In fact, only a handful of phrases stand out in my memory, at all, and they don’t do him great credit:

“That’s not the Jeremiah Wright I knew.”

“Yes we can!”

“Uh…um…uh…wait a minute, let’s start over…”

“Can I just eat my waffle?”

“Not tonight, Michelle; my DNA is too valuable to just give away.”

Ok, I made up that last one. But really, this is all getting to be too much. Do we want the man to govern wisely (a tall enough order for practically anybody, under almost any circumstances)? Or do we expect him to pick up where Jesus, presumably, left off? The whole Obama phenomenon is looking like little more than an instance of mass hysteria with manufactured religious overtones, under cover of which the leftists in government, academia and the media are trying to hard-wire the ideology of the nanny state – or, if you prefer a classical metaphor, they’ve slipped a Trojan horse filled with socialists through the gates.

Friend and commenter Jeff notes this (typically) solid editorial by Victor Davis Hanson.