You have to hand it to Barack Obama -- no matter what your other opinions of him. It is a downright marvel how he has managed to cram his hundredweight of hubris into the little two-ounce drawstring snuff pouch which is his otherwise unremarkable mind.

How else to explain the stunning subterfuge he tried to pull on us -- and on the whole world -- in the last few weeks? Blaming American laws and freedoms for permitting a citizen nobody to make a movie which Obama falsely maintained stampeded an Arab-mob-that-wasn't, to cover for his failure to protect his own envoy and three other good men from sanguinary and unspeakable torture-mutilation-murder by a pack of assassin rape-butchers? Thence flying off the next day in splendor to Oz, to blithely extort mountains more lucre from his cultic worshippers?

Richard III had nothing on this moral cripple.

A man willing to do and say these things will do and say anything at all. How likely does it now seem that the bin Laden saga happened as he told it?

Granted, there is nothing unique about the rise of rapacious misfits who gravitate to government, slavering for ever more power. They've appeared throughout history, often getting very far before they're stopped. Yet even the dour and humorless defenders of the honor of the prophet were not roused to mass "demonstrations" by the farcically inept "movie" of which Obama and his harridan secretary made so much. But it gives daunting pause to think that the American people should be complacent any longer about this recrudescence in its midst. Perhaps our historical moment of character and courage is sadly past. We'll know very soon. The choice is between decency and depravity. This election is about nothing less.

For it is Americans, this time -- we, by the scores of millions -- who figuratively should be pumping our flintlocks and torches in the air, massing to march, demonstrating without end, and getting ready to tar and feather this toxic, sinister jackanapes and ride him and his ghouls on a rail out of town forever.

Richard Kantro may be reached at rk4at@hotmail.com