Mr. Incredible

Over at The Corner, a fellow calling himself David Kahane (a pen name of a Hollywood writer) posts this splendid exercise in hypothetical prestidigitation. Watch in amazement as obvious counter-factuals turn out to boast the blunt currency of quotidian reality. You scale the heights of subjunctive fantasy only to find yourself delivered to the stern threshold of the indicative. The barely possible transfigures itself into the ineluctable. “What if” becomes “of course.” Check it out:

What if a guy nobody’s ever heard of, from Hawaii no less, with a Muslim African father and a Muslim Indonesian stepfather and a mom from Kansas named Stanley inexplicably glides from Punahou to a short sheep-dip at Occidental to the Frankfurt School’s favorite Ivy League haunt, Columbia, to Harvard Law? What if he’s such an arrogant, aloof suckup of no particular ability or accomplishment that his fellow students openly ridicule him with the invention of the “Obamamometer,” which measures epic brown-nosing on a scale from one to ten? What if he’s blissfully unaware of his own deficiencies, and instead comes to believe that he’s earned everything that’s come his way — or ever will?

Sound incredible? Read on:

And what if this guy – let’s give him a patently implausible, comically grandiose name like “Barack Hussein Obama II” – moves to . . . New Jersey? Arkansas? No, I’ve got it – Chicago, Ill. – falls in with . . . wait for it . . . former domestic-terrorist fugitives, adopts a racist pastor to burnish his hitherto-nonexistent “Christian” credentials, and becomes, say, a state senator? Even better: a U.S. senator! And what if he gets a guy named . . . Jake Lingle, yes, that’s it! – to use his Chicago Tribune connections to destroy not one but two opponents, both over divorce records! And what if this obscure senator, after less than two years in Washington and with a grand total of one speech to his credit, decides to run for president on a platform of “fundamental change?”

What if his opponent is a creaky, cranky, cantankerous old fart who hates his own party and then – I know this bit is unbelievable but we’re still spit-balling here – out of the blue selects some dizzy moose-hunting dame from . . . Alaska! . . . to be his running mate? And what if she electrifies his doomed candidacy (heck, even he doesn’t really seem to want to win) and sends him vaulting into the lead in the polls? What if he’s on the verge of actually defeating BO2 when Barry’s media pals lay down some serious covering fire and then, mysteriously, the booming U.S. economy collapses almost overnight as George Soros strokes a white cat and chuckles menacingly?

Read the rest of this comic tragedy here.