There is a man in the White House with a wife and two daughters. We see him getting on and off Air Force One or a big presidential helicopter. He waves at people. He wears a nice suit and looks neat and trim. We see him sauntering up to a podium to say a few words. Nothing he says seems to be of any importance. He has a Press Secretary who speaks for him at the daily press briefing.
The reporters ask real questions and receive word-shadows for answers.
When he speaks to American soldiers or lays a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier he is like a robot who doesn’t believe what he says. He’s been programmed like a mechanical entity. He mouths 19th century platitudes about the redistribution of wealth or the class struggle. There is nothing there. There is no is. There is no soul. There is just an empty suit.
Like a mannequin he wears his Brooks Brothers suits well. When he plays golf he wears the regulation shorts, Polo shirt, and golf shoes. He plays mechanically. He seems to actually like golf, but Marxists don’t play golf. None of the Soviet leaders played golf. Terrorists don’t play golf. If they did, they wouldn’t be terrorists.
When the Phantom plays golf, he does it to forget that he is a phantom, a ghost, a soulless entity. That’s why he escapes to fast-food hamburger restaurants, so that he can feel like a human being.
He smiles when the server asks if he wants that burger with fries. Such words are music to his big ears. They confirm that he is a living entity.
On special occasions the Phantom will speak to Congress and spend about an hour reading a speech on teleprompters. During one of his speeches, he scolded the Supreme Court judges seated before him for making a decision he did not approve of. That was the only sign of life during the speech. The rest was the usual forgettable babble.
In a recent speech in Ossawatomie, Kansas, the Phantom raised Theodore Roosevelt from the dead and told the American people that what was needed was what TR advocated in 1910. The Phantom is now capable of raising the dead and promoting a dead philosophy of government. He seems to be comfortable with the dead, while living Americans watch and wait. What are they waiting for? A removal of the dummy from the haunted White House and for a live human being to become leader of the United States.
The Phantom President likes to remind Americans that their country is no more special than Kenya or Pakistan. Americans are a mob of selfish people who have enriched themselves by stealing from poor nations. Americans need to pay more for their energy. They need to suffer more and pay higher taxes. The rich are the enemies of the poor and need to pay their fair share. “Fair share” is one of the dummy’s favorite phrases. He utters it at every chance he gets. He doesn’t know what it means, since the rich pay most of the taxes on incomes in this country, whereas the poor only pay sales taxes.
The Phantom President loves food stamps for more and more people, because they will love him the way the North Koreans loved Kim Jong-il and shed shattering, hysterical tears when he died. The Phantom wants to be remembered as the generous god of bounty and bailouts. He wants to be remembered as the President who raised the national debt to such unsustainable levels that it may all come crashing down on the heads of the American people who deserve to know what it’s like to be bankrupt.
The Phantom enjoys his travels aboard Air Force One. There he is treated like Kim Jong-il. He gets the kind of food he likes. Steaks cooked to perfection. The staff caters to every wish a phantom can have. That is why he likes the long trips, to Australia and China, so that he can rule like an emperor without any complaints from Republicans. Air Force One is even better than North Korea. There is no rationing on Air Force One. There is only luxury and pleasure, and any movie he wishes to see.
The Phantom President also claims that he is a man of peace. He has ended the war in Iraq by withdrawing all of our forces, which is what he promised to do and what all of the warring parties were waiting for. So now the civil war can really begin between the Sunnis and the Shia, with Iran taking the side of the Shia, now that the secular Sunni Saddam Hussein is no longer around to stop them. And he will do the same in Afghanistan. But it will take a little longer.
He wants peace, sweetness and light, to prevail between Israel and the Palestinians. But the ghost has little power to impose his will. A Phantom doesn’t have much power to do much of anything on the international scene. The Israelis see him as a phantom except in the Security Council of the United Nations, while the Palestinians can’t make heads or tails of him. He cannot even convince the Iranians to give up their quest for nuclear weapons. It appears that the Phantom is impotent because his programming has not provided him with a plan for action.
The Phantom likes to borrow money to pay for all of the things that government now does. He has no limits on how much we must borrow, for to him a government budget has no meaning. He will not let a meaningless budget limit his desire to spend. He is only capable of spending money, and the more money he can cajole the American people to give him, the more he will spend. He is programmed to spend as much money as possible. He likes dealing in trillions because since he has the mind of a computer, trillions can be easily handled with no complaints from the computer. Americans who want to limit his spending are bad people. They refuse to understand how much this Phantom President loves to spend.
The Phantom is also interested in your health, and he spent his first months in office contriving the most expensive and tyrannical healthcare program in American history. He wants to know everything about you, what you eat, whether you are fat or thin, how much you weigh, what ails you, whether or not you are happy or depressed, how much you earn, whether or not you smoke or drink, how old you are, so that he can determine whether or not you are eligible for expensive medical treatment or should be encouraged to die instead of costing the government too much money. He will even help you commit suicide, if that is your patriotic wish. The Phantom President only wishes the best for his subjects. That’s why he’s so worried about your health. Can’t you appreciate what the Phantom wants for your own good? Don’t you realize that his mechanical heart beats for your benefit?
The Phantom President is a creature of the Shadow Party, a political haunted house inhabited by masked individuals pretending to be what they aren’t. Their leader is himself a shadow, flitting about the world stage, with fantasies of messianic power. He topples leaders in small countries where it only takes a few million to dazzle the eyes of the ambitious. It is his personal game of international chess that invigorates his ego but is never fully satisfied. That’s why he wants to control and shape the future of the United States. That would really satisfy his ego. But his Phantom President has hit a wall of opposition, and his foundations and organizations are spinning into irrelevance.
Some people complain that the Phantom President is not a leader. They want him to lead. But he never intended to lead. He has been programmed to be the President of retreat, retreat from greatness to mediocrity, from optimism to pessimism, from prosperity to recession, from military strength to military impotence.
The Phantom President has about a year to get done what he was programmed to do: reduce America to second-rate status in the world. That’s the least that the Big Ego in the shadow hoped his dummy-in-chief could achieve. But even the emperor of the Shadow Party can’t get everything he wants. Money can buy just about anything, but it cannot buy the hearts and minds of true Americans who venerate George Washington, the U.S. Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence. It cannot buy the hearts and minds of those who believe in individual freedom and the greatness of America’s future. Hopefully, the Phantom President will dissolve in November 2012 and be reconstituted as a private citizen ready to give speeches at $50,000 a shot. And he will solicit funds to build his presidential library — his House of Lies — in Honolulu.