Barack Obama: Magician, Grifter, Con Man !

Kimberly Strassel's pen drips with sarcasm in the WSJ today, and it's good stuff:

And now, America, we introduce the Great Obama! The world's most gifted political magician! A thing of wonder. A thing of awe. Just watch him defy politics, economics, even gravity! (And hold your applause until the end, please.)

To kick off our show tonight, Mr. Obama will give 95% of American working families a tax cut, even though 40% of Americans today don't pay income taxes! How can our star enact such mathemagic? How can he "cut" zero? Abracadabra! It's called a "refundable tax credit." It involves the federal government taking money from those who do pay taxes, and writing checks to those who don't. Yes, yes, in the real world this is known as "welfare," but please try not to ruin the show.

For his next trick, the Great Obama will jumpstart the economy, and he'll do it by raising taxes on the very businesses that are today adrift in a financial tsunami! That will include all those among the top 1% of taxpayers who are in fact small-business owners, and the nation's biggest employers who currently pay some of the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world. Mr. Obama will, with a flick of his fingers, show them how to create more jobs with less money. It's simple, really. He has a wand.

Next up, Mr. Obama will re-regulate the economy, with no ill effects whatsoever! ....Our magician will show the fault was instead with our failure to clamp down on innovation and risk-taking, and will fix this with new, all-encompassing rules. Presto!

Did someone in the audience just shout "Sarbanes Oxley?" Usher, can you remove that man? Thank you.

And just watch the Great Obama perform a feat never yet managed in all history. He will create that enormous new government health program, spend billions to transform our energy economy, provide financial assistance to former Soviet satellites, invest in infrastructure, increase education spending, provide job training assistance, and give 95% of Americans a tax (ahem) cut -- all without raising the deficit a single penny! And he'll do it in the middle of a financial crisis. And with falling tax revenues! Voila!

Obama promises change, but he simply cannot make the vast institutional overhaul he is touting, not without wrecking the economy and reducing us all to the same shared just-above-poverty-level state.

But maybe this is the "fairness" that the socialist Barack Obama hopes to bring about through his "change". All as one, writhing in the mud....America, reduced to third world status as a beautific Barack smiles down upon us.

With the markets volatile (yeah, like it's never happened before) and ignorant voices calling for more and more "reform", is it safe (or sane) to give the reins of the economy over to the unseasoned Barack Obama - friend of radical Bill Ayers, disciple of Reverand Jermiah Wright, and supporter of ACORN?

With the excuse of a "crisis", American capitalism - the prime mover of the world - will be downgraded by Obama and the Democrats from a eight-cylinder Mustang to a three-cylinder Metro. And while Americans sink deeper and deeper into poverty and despair, they will tell us it is all for our own good, as the Left has proven itself ideologically rigid; incapable of correlating cause and effect. And besides, the decaying of American society may be the desired effect; after all, isn't that what Ayers/Wright/Obama have been preaching all these years?

This is the change that Obama believes in. God help us all....