MOUNT RUSHMORE

Obama is trying to shape a presidency from the force of his own political personality carved out of a mountain of random eloquence.
---Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal

A mountain of random eloquence. That's good. To this President, words are like dollars--they don't matter until there are trillions of them. Trouble is, the more words spewed about, the less each one is worth. It's verbal inflation.

There is a funny bit in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in which the captured earthlings are tortured by being strapped to chairs and forced to listen to Vogan poetry (and say how much they like it). Vogans, the unpleasant bureaucrats who run everything, are said to have the third worst poetry in the universe. During a recitation by their poet master, four members of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, but the leader of the Mid-Galactic Arts Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.

Obama makes us wonder what is worse: flowery Vogan poetry or grandiose political speeches.

How long before average citizens will groan and roll their eyes when faced with the possibility of yet another Obama speech solving all the world's problems?

Such utopian rambling is not unexpected from a guy who has never really done anything except trade ideas in the incestuous world of leftist intellectuals.

Has there been a president who has been so disconnected from average citizens? How can a man be so filled with the certainty of his beliefs that he wants to make wild-eyed changes in American society with so little input from the public?

Perhaps all this talk is not just the work of a politician in love with his own rhetoric. Perhaps there is a more devious purpose. Perhaps it is a deliberate use of Vogon torture techniques.

"No, not another speech! You can raise our taxes again. Please! Nationalize the food supply! Make us all wear Homeland Security Ankle Bracelets (for our own good). Anything!"

Our readers probably dislike boring poetry and meaningless speeches as much as we do, so our advice to all our fellow earthlings is don't be captured in the first place. Head for the exits. Avoid entanglements with the government wherever possible and become as self-sufficient as you can. We are buying tools as long as the Chinese are selling cheap. We don't know how long they will continue to take our paper for real stuff. Surely the Chinese are not complete fools. They've been around. Great Leap Forward speeches delivered from political messiahs must make their blood run cold. Sooner or later they're going to conclude that our political class is insane, and when that happens, watch the prices of their stuff go through the roof.

We are investing in commodities. The third world needs them to grow out of poverty. The Indians and the Chinese are not going to cripple their economies no matter how smooth a talker Obama is.

The Vogons may be temporarily running the universe, but we are not yet strapped to chairs. We can still make many of our own decisions, and we do not have to listen to their poetry or their speeches.