The real oath of office was administered yesterday, as per the Constitution of course, so the polite term for today's TV event is "ceremonial," a pleasant euphemism for "let's pretend." Today's fake taking of the oath of office by President Obama is the perfect metaphor for the Potemkin nature of his political movement.  His impressive resume in 2008 was comprised of positions in which nobody could remember any particular work or accomplishments of anything useful. His astroturfing approach to politics stretches from community organizing days, bussing and scripting protestors he recruited to public meetings, to the transfiguration  of his campaign organization "Obama for America" into a 401 (c)4 tax exempt political pressure group to gin up media events and stage manage public pressure with plenty of help from his friends in the media..

Fake, fake, fake.

Maybe the general public is really as excited about today's festivities as the cable news coverage would suggest, but somehow I doubt it. Idle pageantry, combined with the visible diminishing of enthusiasm from 2009's levels in terms of crowd size, are omens. It is inevitable that more and more people will figure out in his second term that he is not the person he has been portrayed as in the dominant media. It remains taboo to examine the problems with the documentation of his public biography, but providence has brought a kickoff to his second term that is the perfect symbol of the man.