Today’s youth have been sold a very expensive bill of goods, and find out that what they bought is mostly worthless. Told they must go to college to earn a decent living, they paid ever increasing tuition and fees for pieces of paper that proclaimed them masters of the universe, only to find there was no market for their hard won degrees in women’s studies or medieval art. And so, jobless and penniless, they return home to live in their parent’s basement, wondering where it all went wrong.

You cannot see the stars from parents’ basement
You cannot build a dream from slag and dross
You cannot breathe free air through a closed casement
You cannot roll a stone that’s caked in moss
Your teachers care for politics not learning
Professors herd you inside Marx’s walls
The Constitution’s only fit for burning
You’re less important than their union halls
Diplomas are a shabby piece of paper
Bought at so little effort, great expense
Words that you though profound now gaseous vapor
All that you thought was true so much pretense
You find yourself at last no longer youthful
Your life no longer filled with youthful dreams
You realize your teachers less than truthful
Your lessons mostly cant and leftist themes
Your parents’ basement now a timeless jailor
A gentle room with but symbolic bars
You pace the floor and wonder at your failure
And dream of youth and love and far off stars

The Obama administration came in with a reasonably secure world to work with, and work it they did, to the extent that the results can only be described as an eleven letter word.

One wonders why the White House staff is quite so femalecentric
And why both Secs of State are twin third rates
And Hagel at Defense seems like a choice so far eccentric
That he makes out a genius of Bob Gates
The witches by the cauldron stirring trouble Rice and Power
Make up in charm what they both lack in wit
These names of course explain quite well why things have gone so sour
And why the det cord fuses have been lit
Obama plays the role of the big hot dog without mustard
He stomps his feet and glares and makes demands
But no one pays attention in a world that’s now so clustered
That only Putin knows where Putin stands

The Republican House of Representatives has finally stiffened its spine and is about to create a Select Committee to look into the Benghazi fiasco. Angela Merkel, meanwhile, has blown the whistle on the US eavesdropping on her personal phone calls and is blazing mad. The wheels of the gods grind slowly, and now the wheels are grinding exceeding fine. But worst of all, for the Obama administration, the press is beginning to turn and ask an embarrassing question or two. If Maureen Dowd and the New York Times jumps the reservation all is lost. It is all coming apart for Barack Hussein Obama and his crowd of Mao admirers and communist/fascist apparatchiks. They know it, and will very soon attack each other in order to save themselves, but to no avail. The ship is sinking and the rats cannot get off. The mask is about to be pulled off the Obama administration, and it will reveal a treasonous face.

The White House squad stands silent at attention
The gofers and the aides and power crowd
Their muskets loaded, cocked and at spring tension
 All waiting for the word from Maureen Dowd
That it is time to clean the house of vermin
To disinfect the premises toot sweet
To get the facts that shortly will determine
That all of them be thrown out in the street
They eye each other thinking who will get me
And should I steal a march and fire first
I’ll try to cop a plea if Congress lets me
One shot and quickly all the bubbles burst
The tension reaches boiling in the circle
As Carney eyes the Power and the Rice
Joe Biden grins and blows a kiss to Merkel
Who stands aside and calmly rolls the dice

We all think in terms of what we remember. I have not watched a television series for at least thirty years, preferring to limit my viewing to where they keep score. My thinking is conditioned by my possible misunderstanding of the present and the past, and not liking the present political situation very much. My mystery writing was formed long ago by Raymond Chandler and my science fiction writing by Ray Bradbury, so everything I write is dated, and so, very likely, is every thing I think. In the fifth grade I was told tin was the principal export of Bolivia, and I believed it then and I believe it now. For me, and I expect for most of us, our worldview is conditioned by what we knew or were told or what we experienced in our growing up years, and the contemporary world merely adds a patina, positive or negative, on our preconceptions.

For those of us who grew up when the radio was king
The world is now a very different place
A place where saying love of country is the only thing
Now brings a sneer and laughter in our face
We lived in towns and cities where the doors were never locked
And kids were free to roam the neighborhood
But nowadays those places are long gone and harshly mocked
By people who have never understood
That just because we grew up in a world now in the past
That maybe we had something new to say
That maybe we know something new about the play and cast
And see we’re not so far from yesterday
That things we saw as growing up we’re seeing yet again
The world it changes not nor do the times
For history remains the same except for where and when
There’s no repeat as Twain said but it rhymes

The White House of Obama laughs a lot, especially when they lie and when they are incompetent, which is all the time. But the deeper the country sinks into the black hole brought on by the incompetence and malfeasance and outright fascism of the Obama administration, the White House ceases to be a fun house and becomes a madhouse. And when the funhouse becomes a madhouse, the mirrors reflect the demonic face of a mad King who rules by diktat and by whim, a madness that becomes increasingly mad the deeper into the darkness we go.

The Funhouse beckoned slyly to the fairground’s happy crowd
The entrance so inviting and so near
The cool slim barker crying only hope and change allowed
So step right in, there’s nothing here to fear
We walked inside to find ourselves amused by how we looked
In mirrors briefly lit by lightning flash
But as we walked into the dark we knew we had been hooked
And trusting in the barker now seemed rash
The deeper in the darkness now the mirrors subtly changed
No longer so amusing as at first
The images of monsters loomed so horribly deranged
And soon we understood we had been cursed
The image of the barker now lined every mirrored wall
His grin the grin of evil overdone
We knew that in his funhouse we were trapped beyond recall
As all we had was taken, one by one
With horrifying screams the patrons pressed on in the dark
The exit seeming oh so far away
We knew that we were someplace we would never hear dogs bark
Or see the rising sun bring light of day
Yet in our panic there appeared before us one small door
On opening it showed the fairground bleak
No longer crowded, void of laughter, lacking all allure
And stepping out we found no one would speak
The posters on the midway screamed we owed our lives to him
Whose picture rose in giant size all ‘round
The barker’s face, no longer smiling but severe and grim
Overlooked a fairground without sound
A young man whispered All is lost, all gone as with the wind
Our freedom, rights and Constitution gone
The barker rules by fiat and the rest of us are pinned
The King is loose and we are but a pawn

Back in the day, when elementary school was serious education, we learned how the small town of Rome protected itself from its enemies by placing geese and thistles on the hills surrounding the city, all to give the alarm. Barack Obama does not believe in being prepared, he believes in palaver, talking, making agreements that only he believes in. As a consequence, he has defanged the US military and left the country vulnerable to anyone who wants to do us harm. I do not believe this is incompetence, as many believe, but deliberate policy, intended to harm the country as his communist mother and father so ardently wished.

All those who believe in palaver
Will soon find themselves a cadaver
Don’t worry, Obama is clever
The country is safer than ever
So what if the Russians build missiles
We’re safe with our geese and our thistles
They’ll warn us if danger is lurking
They’ll tell us if something is perking
Our dead eyes will never feed starlings
So sleep well at night then my darlings

Many are the pundits who have psychoanalyzed Barack Obama, and the number of conclusions equals the number of pundits voicing their opinions. For me, Obama is relatively easy, after five years, to peg. He lusts for domestic power the way a drunk lusts for whisky. He lusts for domestic power in order to turn the United States into the fevered radical red image of his communist parents. Neither public opinion nor the Constitution of the United States deters him from the pursuit of absolute power. We shall see if he meekly relinquishes that power at noon on 20 January 2017. I spoke to President Obama just the other day and this is what he said:

Of all the promises I make
There’s only one that isn’t fake
The New York Times thinks this is jake
And that’s my lust for power
I love that I’m the man on top
And your destruction will not stop
I’ll knock out every single prop
To show my lust for power
You kneel to overwhelming might
That I possess by divine right
Respect for law I have but slight
I only lust for power

I sometimes wonder why I’m here, besides the obvious one of adding my DNA to the next generation and beyond, and lately I have taken to believe that my life, and all our lives, are not truly ours, but gifts, a loan from God. How that loan is repaid depends entirely on what we do with that gift.

It has been truly said, my friends
Our lives are ours on loan
At times we need to make amends
And other times atone
For we are granted heaven’s gift
Of God’s eternal life
And whether purposed or adrift
We deal with pain and strife
And yet God’s grace will see us through
If we will but accept
The love that’s ours whate’er we do
And promises He’s kept