Bob McCarty Writes

Like no writers before him, Fred Siegel captured in words the phenomenon that is Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama in a recent article published in The Australian. It begins this way:

POLITICAL campaigning necessarily produces a wide gap between words and deeds. This is the price of bringing together a broad coalition with disparate interests. All effective politicians are at times authentically insincere or sincerely inauthentic. Exaggeration, embellishment, overstatement, doubletalk, deception and lies presented as metaphorical truths are the order of the day.

So, of course, Barack Obama is no different. He exaggerates the credit he deserves for a limited piece of ethics-reform legislation. He embellishes when he presents himself as having had a consistent record on the Iraq war when in fact he’s done a fair amount of zigzagging.

And it ends this way:

The ideal, the aspiration, is so rhetorically appealing that it has been assumed to be true. They remind one of Woodrow Wilson’s answer when asked if his plan for a League of Nations was practicable: “If it won’t work, it must be made to work.”

In between, Siegel crafts a well-written, must-read piece that points out lies, misconceptions and thought processes — of politicians and voters alike — that might very well result in art, such as the Political Graffiti cartoon above, becoming cold, hard reality.