Big Lizards looks at the life and times of Barack Obama and finds that his real life certainly doesn’t match the tales of hardship and woe that the spinmeisters are promulgating. Horatio Alger he ain’t!

I confess, I was surpised at what an adventurous, danger-filled life he lead, the things those oyster-eyes of his have seen. I learned a great deal I had never known about Obama. I think that after you hear about his disadvantaged upbringing and his sorrows, that you, too, will wish we could give him some sort of prize… other than the presidency, of course, since he’s way too liberal and has virtually no experience. And there’s that age thing, but I think I already covered that.

Obama was born in war-ravaged Honolulu in 1961 (what did I tell you?) His father was a Harvard economist, while his mother was an anthropologist from Kansas; yet despite this deprivation, Obama has gone on to be one of the most celebrated men of recent history.

He spent his formative years learning, teaching, and defending his ancestral manse from marauding members of the haole tribe, who frequently raided to capture slaves for the Dole Pineapple plantation — which still grew pineapples, rather the tourists, in those days of yore.

During this period, Obama was described by many as the mainstay of the community, the one to whom everyone turned for advice on minimum wage, military redeployment, and animal husbandry. But then, at age two, tragedy struck: Obama’s parents divorced. When Obama was six, his mother packed him off to the jungles of Indonesia, where he excelled in the simple but effective guerilla tactics that would later serve him so well as a statesman.

Rescued at age 10, when his mother returned to sanity and to Hawaii — deadly though it may be, he still called it home — he enrolled in the fifth grade.

We skip seven years, thankfully. I don’t know if my heartstrings can take much more of this. When next we intersect the Great Man, he has graduated high school and enrolled in a junior college in Los Angeles. But he never forgot his deep, ethinic roots. Many years after leaving, he said:

The irony is that my decision to work in politics, and to pursue such a career in a big Mainland city, in some sense grows out of my Hawaiian upbringing, and the ideal that Hawaii still represents in my mind.

King Kamehameha himself would have been proud of the Kenyan-Kansan-American Obama, spiritual heir to the island majesty.

But such genius could never be satisfied by the cramped confines of Occidental College. Bursting forth, like Minerva from the brow of Zeus — or was that Athena from the brow of Cicero? — Obama and his entourage transferred base of operations to the world-renowned Columbia University in New York City (Los Angeles not having been quite liberal enough).

Obama was a pioneer in more ways than two: he took a daring combination major of both political science and international relations, demonstrating the finely honed ability to juggle many more balls than most men can ever dream of handling. I should rephrase that, but I’m under a deadline here.

Surprisingly, considering the manifold difficulties and dangers faced first by the boy, then the man, Obama graduated with a B.A. But he was not content to rush immediately to Harvard Law, as so many other lesser men have done. Nay, Obama knew that the first duty of any man who has clawed his way out of the Honolulu ghetto was to give back to the community.

Heh heh, the ghettoes of Honolulu. I just love it. Better put your Presidential aspirations on the back burner, pal.