A Fantasy Election, an Imaginary Man !

Even before his inauguration, Barack Obama was an imaginary man, the creation of his admirers. Think back to the 2008 Time magazine cover depicting him a FDR, the Newsweek cover on which he was shown casting Lincoln's shadow, or the $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize awarded to him ''for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples'' -- this is 2009, less than a year after he had taken office. It was not that Obama had done nothing to deserve these outsized comparisons and honours -- it was not just that he had done nothing -- it was that he seemed for all the world to be a blank screen on which such hysterical fantasies could too easily be projected, a two-dimensional paper doll just waiting to be dressed in leftist dreams.

The idea was that this hollow identity was his own insidious creation, the result of sealed college records, votes of ''present'' in the Illinois state senate and a supra-partisan persona carefully crafted after a scuttled lifetime of revolutionary ferocity in a Marxist milieu. Obama has disowned the depth of his past associations with such fire-breathing America-haters as Bill Ayers (''A guy who lives in my neighbourhood'') and Jeremiah Wright ("He was never my spiritual mentor'' [see Obama's Un-Holy Trinity posting] with startling unconcern. And such previous Obamas as the race-baiting, black-talking demagogue of a 2007 video recently discovered that is not all apparent in the Oval Office Obama. But I think the real Obama has been more or less plain to see. Norman Podhoretz described him best in a 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed: ''a typical product of the anti-American academic left, committed to transforming U.S. capitalism into a social-democratic system like Sweden's''

The Obama of the imagination is the media's Obama. It emanates from a journalistic community that no longer in any way fulfills its designated function, that no longer attempts the fair presentation of facts and current events aimed at helping the American electorate make up its mind. These left-wing outlets like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, NBC News, ABC News, and the CBS News have fallen prey to that ideological corruption that sees lies as a kind of virtue, as a noble deception in service to a greater good. Theirs are largely passive lies and lies of omission. The real corruption is revealed in the way Obama scandals like Fast and Furious, Benghazi-gate and repeated breaking of federal campaign laws have been wildly underplayed, while Romney's simple gaffs are blown out of all proportion.

And it is revealed in Obama' blankness, his make-believe greatness, and the suppression, ridicule and dismissal of any evidence that he is not the man this powerful media faction once wanted so badly for him to be. No other modern president could have associated so intimately with lowlifes like Ayers and Wright and the now-imprisoned scumbag Tony Rezko and not had those associations exposed in every detail. No other president could have made the radical remarks he's made -- about wealth distribution, religion and the federal government's alleged ill-treatment of blacks --and not had them headlined all over for weeks. No other could have presided over such a crippled economy and such universal failures at war and in foreign policy and escaped almost without mainstream blame.

The Way I See It....the media's fascination with the colour of his skin and their mindless awe at his windy teleprompted rhetoric, they constructed a man of stature and accomplishment. Now, with the White House at stake, they're waging an ongoing battle against the undeniable evidence that he has never been, in fact, that man. The result in these autumn days has been media coverage of a fantasy election, an election in the news that bears no relation whatsoever to the election as it is. Polls consistently skewed to favour Democrats in percentages beyond any reasonable construct of reality have left Americans virtually ignorant of the state of the race. Orchestrated frenzies over gaffes by Mitt Romney have camouflaged an imploding Obama foreign policy, an Obama economy threatened by a new recession and an Obama campaign filled with vicious personal attacks and lies.

Governor Romney's unprecedented dismantling of the president in their first debate was surprising not only for Romney's warmth and clarity but for Obama's hapless fumbling, bad temper and inarticulate inability to defend his record. They were simply facets of the man as he truly is, unfiltered by the imagination of his shocked media supporters: a man who has succeeded, really, at almost nothing but the winning of elections; a man who cannot distinguish between his ideology and life; a man who does not seem to know how the machinery of the world actually works. Fantasy is a powerful thing, but reality will out. Perhaps by Election Day, the public will have awakened from the media's dream.