"And true to his Irish heritage, Obama has spent a lifetime offering perhaps the greatest list of astounding shams ever told..."
Best Irish poet ever?
By Tom Adkins
For centuries, Ireland graced the world with poets, writers and musicians, from Yeats to Ó Sandair to Heaney to Lynott who, with a mere twist of a syllable, a clever dash of sarcasm, a tear or three and a smile or two, made us giggle, cry, croon or swoon, sometimes in the same sentence.
Continued...
Then again, for every James Joyce, there are thousands of Cliff Clavins, half-wits who offer useless information that might be right, but you won’t bet your paycheck. But the guy sells a steaming crock o’ blarney with a flair more entertaining than a Leprechaun with his shoes on fire. So you listen. All night. Into the wee hours. And you laugh. And you buy him another Guinness.
But every once in awhile, one of these scayle-tellers rises from the prattle, ascending upon lofty lexis, splendiferous manner and scintillating oratorical skills. Kings and queens, angels and the devil himself bow to his gravity. This master of blather arrives at a perch so unworthy of evidence that we are astounded. Don’t they know? Didn’t anyone check? Of course not. When the whiskey is flowing, nobody stops a great story.
So where do we find the latest famed Irish tall-tale-teller, who regales us with such panache that the world overlooks his phony resume and bows at his feet? Easy! Ring the doorbell at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue . And ask for Barack O’Bama.
What? Barack “The Crock” Obama? Actually, yes, Turns out, his great-great-great-grandfather hails from a fair Irish town whose name offers a pair of magnificent concurrent ironies, Moneygall. Fulmuth Kearney apparently sailed to America in 1850. A descendant coleen married a Kenyan, and bequeathed us the Messiah himself. Well! Now we know where he gets the skills, eh, laddies?
And true to his Irish heritage, Obama has spent a lifetime offering perhaps the greatest list of astounding shams ever told:
I was conceived during the Selma riots. Grandpa marched with Patton, and my nonexistent uncle liberated Auschwitz . I came to America via the Kennedy airlift, my mom was on food stamps, and I worked my way through law school. I registered for the draft, became a constitutional lawyer and wasn’t interested in politics.
I passed welfare-to-work laws, and wrote a bill that gave medical benefits to veterans. Some staffer filled out that old questionnaire.
I never heard Rev Wright’s racist rants, didn’t know about Louis Farrakhan, and barely knew terrorist William Ayres. Tony Rezko? Some guy who coincidentally bought that lot next door to my house. And I can’t find my birth certificate.
I am/am not against FISA, free trade and/or single-payer health care. I might/might not be against gun control. I never take money from lobbyists, and won’t hire them. Jerusalem will remain an undivided Israeli capital. Or maybe not. I’ll halt all military operations in Iraq by 2010, and the surge? Still hasn’t worked. And I’ll bring Bin Laden to justice. Or kill him without a trial.
Every economist on Earth, living, dead and yet unborn, agrees we should spend our way into oblivion, creating 4 million new jobs by giving tax cuts to 95% of Americans, simultaneously cutting spending and the national debt. And not one of those 9,000 earmarks exists.
I’m a political unifier bent on healing centuries of racial divides, political wounds…and the oceans.
Wow. Could olde Oscar Wilde himself dream up such glorious fiction? I think neigh!
You know, we rarely challenge a storyteller in the middle of a good one. Why? Who knows? In the end, maybe we just like a good yarn. It’s not just politics. Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay, David Koresh… we should have beaten them with our shillelagh. Instead, we gave them our money, dignity and our lives. Yet they simply told us the feint we wanted to hear.
Except this time, we didn’t fall for a mere bard with a little Irish in him. Drunk with lazy boredom brewed from freedom long removed from challenge, America elevated a master word-slinger who rose unchallenged to the top of the world, and now steals our fortunes and freedoms with a story built upon a massive pile of teleprompter tweaked tales.
When it all goes to hell, what do we do this time? Blame the Irish? We voted for the best storyteller in the bar! And on inauguration day, Tommy Flanagan delivered the punchline: “Karl Marx!” What the hell…at closing time, who knows the difference?
