OBAMABASHI

Ashgabat, Turkmenistan.  I did it.  I've been searching all over the world for a place suitably appropriate for Barack Hussein Obama Junior's megalomaniacal egomania, and I found it here, deep in the middle of Central Asia.

Here is where he can be worshipped as the Messiah he believes he is, worshipped on a scale beyond even his hyper-hubristic fantasies.  America will never give him what he wants.  Here is a place that can.  Here is where he can be Obamabashi.  Obamabashi the Great, the Supreme, the Magnificent.

Here is where he belongs – not in America.

Here he doesn't have to pretend to be a Christian any more – here he can pretend to be a Moslem like he's always wanted to.

Here he can rule a land of true Socialism, one of the last remaining such places on earth.  It has all the retrograde Soviet Marxism he could want.  Everything (except for a few small businesses) is owned and operated by the government – the government even makes fruit juice and blue jeans, and won't allow any competition.

Of course the government owns all the land (except for small areas for garden plots and humble private homes) and all the banks.  There are even statues of Lenin!  It's the socialist paradise Obama dreams about having, and it's all right here ready and waiting for him!

All of this was made possible by a fellow who ought to be Obama's role model and inspiration for off-the-charts egomania.  A fellow whose demi-god personality cult leaves those of Fidel Castro and Kim Jong-il in the dust.  He's just who Obama aspires to be:  Saparmurat Niyazov, known to himself and his worshipful countrymen as Turkmenbashi, Leader of Turkmens.

The Turkmen people were latecomers to this desert land between the Caspian Sea and the great oases of Central Asia such as Samarkand and Bukhara (now in neighboring Uzbekistan:  see Chaos in Kwarezm, May 2005).

It was a lost part of the Persian Empire when Alexander the Great conquered it as an afterthought in 329 BC.  The general that inherited Persia from Alexander, Seleucus (358-281 BC) never paid attention to it, and a Persian-speaking tribe, the Parthians, took it over in the 1^st century BC.

From their capital of Nisa, the ruins of which are on the outskirts of Ashgabat, the Parthians expanded their empire until they ran into that of the Romans'.  Somehow the Romans could never beat them.  At the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC in present-day southeast Turkey, they inflicted the greatest defeat ever suffered by the Roman Army.

As Parthia, the region saw its heyday.  By the time the Arabs showed up spreading Islam by the sword late in the 7^th century AD, Parthia was a memory in the sand.  About a thousand years ago, the ancestors of the Turkmen arrived, the Seljuk Turks.  Their capital at the oasis of Merv (a couple of hundred miles east of here, Mary on the map) became a main stopping point of the Silk Road, the trade route emerging between medieval Europe and Cathay (China). 

Then came Genghiz Khan's Mongols who wiped Merv out in 1221.  Over one million people were slaughtered.  The region became a desert wasteland again, populated by constantly warring clans of "Turcoman" or Turkmen nomads, and utterly unknown to the West for centuries.

But these nomads banded together and fought like banshees against the Russians expanding their empire in the 19^th century.  By 1894, however, the Turkmen were subdued, and the Russkies founded the city of Ashgabat from which to control the area.

When Lenin took over the Russian Empire and called it the Soviet Union, he named Ashgabat as the capital of the newly-created Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic.  The Soviet Russians herded the Turkmen nomads into settlements, and turned them into laborers in cotton fields and the just-discovered oil & gas fields.

Niyazov was born in 1940, and as a scheming clever apparatchik worked his way up through the ranks of the Turkmen Communist Party until he became party first secretary in 1985, then chairman of the ruling "Supreme Soviet" in 1990.  When the Soviet Union disintegrated in December 1991, he declared Turkmenistan independent and himself as president.

Statues and huge pictures of "Turkmenbashi" were soon ubiquitous.  Anything that could be named after him, like the Ashgabat airport, was.  But he hardly stopped there.

It is nigh impossible to even begin to describe the plethora of monuments he built to himself.  I am writing this from an undisclosed location and can't post any pictures, which would help, but they would still only give you a hint.  I have never ever ever never seen anything like it on earth.  It is so far beyond any historical level of egomania that there is nothing to compare it to.

Let's start with the Arch of Neutrality.  This is a giant structure towering hundreds of feet above the city, overlooking the gold (real gold)-domed Turkmenbashi Presidential Palace, the gold-domed Turkmenbashi Hall of Justice, the gold-domed Turkmenbashi Reviewing Stand (for watching parades), and the enormous Turkmenbashi Hall of Spirituality with multiple turquoise domes lining the giant Turkmenbashi Presidential Square.  All of this, including the Arch, is faced with the finest Italian marble.

The Arch of Neutrality is a tower rising on three legs.  On top of the tower is a 30 foot-tall gold (real gold) statue of Turkmenbashi, his arms spread out wide to embrace the world.  The statue rotates through the day so that it is always facing the sun.  At night, the whole edifice lights up in ever-changing colors of bright red, purple, orange, blue and green.

Next to the Arch is a gigantic bronze statue of a bull with a globe of the Earth resting on its horns.  Suspended on top of the globe is a little boy sitting like a Buddha covered in bright gold leaf.  The bull is the earthquake that shook the earth – well, at least Ashgabat, destroying the city in 1948.  The little boy is of course, Turkmenbashi, and the whole thing is to celebrate his miraculous survival of the earthquake.

Then there's the Mosque of Turkmenbashi, with a dome almost as large as St. Peter's covered in gold, huge minarets hundreds of feet high, the entire thing made of gleaming white marble.  Around the inside of the vast prayer hall are not quotations from the Koran as in other mosques, but quotations from Turkmenbashi's book, the Ruhnama (Spiritual Sayings).

This impressive mosque is in the middle of nowhere, near a little village several miles outside Ashgabat.  Why is it there?  Because that little village, Kipchak, is where Turkmenbashi was born.

Back in Ashgabat, there's even a monument to the Ruhnama, with a statue of the book 20 feet high.  Schoolchildren are taught to memorize it, and all Turkmen are instructed to refer to it as "the Sacred Book."

What makes this place so perfect for Obama is that Turkmenbashi died – rather mysteriously in December 2006.  His replacement, a former deputy prime minister reputed to be Turkmenbashi's illegitimate son, is some guy no one cares about with the silly name of Gurbanguli Berdimuhammedov.

The people of Turkmenistan are still in mourning over Turkmenbashi.  They miss him desperately.  They need his replacement, not this colorless bureaucrat who excites no one.  They are ready to embrace the new Turkmenbashi – Leader Obama, Obamabashi!

Obamabashi will love it here.  He will have billions of dollars in oil and gas revenues to build all the monuments to himself that he wants.  He'll hire, of course, the same French and Turkish companies that did such  a fine job of constructing his predecessor's architecture – for it really is exquisitely done, beautiful not tacky, with everything immaculately clean and polished.

He can hold rallies of adoring worshippers in squares that hold a hundred thousand or more.  And the people will always worship him because they have no chance to know any better.  The government owns and controls every media outlet – TV, radio, papers, books, magazines.  There is no Internet – or hardly any.  Less than 1% of the population is connected and that by dialup.  Public Internet cafés are illegal.

Obamabashi can give all his American worshippers Turkmenistan citizenship, and will have the money for them to immigrate here and be given cushy paper-pushing jobs in state bureaucracies.  He can house them by building more of the hundreds of giant skyscraper apartment buildings all over Ashgabat – every one faced in white marble (yes, every one in marble).  All their utilities – air conditioning, heat, water, electricity – courtesy of the state.

All their health care will be paid for, and they can be sure it will be excellent.  After all, Turkmenbashi abolished the Hippocratic Oath and ordered that all Turkmen doctors swear an oath of loyalty to him.  Obamabashi will naturally do the same.

Obamabashi can follow precedence and re-name the days of the week and months.  As Turkmenbashi renamed Tuesday Muzaday, for example, after his wife Muza, and September after his book Ruhnama, Obamabashi could rename Tuesday as Michelleday, September as Audacity, and October as Hope.

It goes without saying that Obamabashi needn't ever worry about elections ever again, for the Turkmen Parliament (all members of which are hand-picked) will declare him, as it did for Turkmenbashi, President-for-Life.

I'm convinced:  there isn't a better place on earth for Barry Hussein and his followers to move to after he loses on November 4.  It's absolutely perfect for him and them.

Yes, yes, I remember what I wrote in History and Insanity.  But no matter how hard I try, I cannot make myself believe the American people are actually crazy enough to elect this putz.

So after he loses, we've got to get rid of the insanity that came way too close to putting him in the White House.  We've got to convince him and his followers that America doesn't deserve Obama, that America isn't good enough for him, that he deserves a country where he can be worshipfully recognized as the Messiah-Savior-Saint he is, where he can be… Obamabashi.

With his magic charm and ability to smooth-talk millions into believing anything he says just because He is saying it, it should be no problem for him to explain that one of his Moslem ancestors migrated from Turkmenistan to Kenya, and that makes him part-Turkmen and a citizen.  Once settled in Ashgabat, he can then easily sleaze his way to power.

And Obamamaniacs needn't worry about having to become Moslems.  The mosques are mostly for show.  Beards are illegal, anyone espousing radical Islam is quietly shot as a danger to State Authority.  Turkmenbashi showed off a goldbrick-glitzy pretend Islam.  I mean, how Moslem can you be when your government produces booze named Turkmenbashi Vodka with your picture on it?

Obamamaniacs can drink all the Obamabashi Vodka they want – the easiest way to drown all those dreams of glory and power in America.

To them, I say welcome to Turkmenistan, where they can have the audacity of hope that it can be the Land of Obamabashi.