Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Oz

“I’m off to see the wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz . . .”

I would guess that most everybody remembers the Wizard of Oz, the 1939 movie starring Judy Garland as Dorothy, Ray Bolger as the scarecrow, Jack Haley as the tin man, and Bert Lahr as the lion. It probably would have won the Academy Award for the Best Picture, except for the fact that Gone With the Wind was also a 1939 film. To refresh everyone’s memory, Dorothy and her dog, Toto, were just trying to get back to good old Kansas. The scarecrow needed a brain. The lion was searching for courage. The tin man was missing a heart.

As I thought about this movie, I wondered, “Are there similarities to today’s political landscape?”

The Emerald City of Oz could be Washington D.C., and the Wizard could be the president, as was theorized many years ago. Could there be more?

Kansas could represent the good old U.S.A. The tornado that ripped through Kansas in the movie is the 2016 presidential election that took Dorothy (a typical American) into a strange and unknown place. All Dorothy wanted was to get back to good old Kansas (“there’s no place like home”) with Auntie Em and Uncle Henry. In my Wizard of Oz allegory, the Wicked Witch of the East and the Wicked Witch of the West are the coastal elites and their left leaning newspapers and liberal T.V. networks.

So far, so good, but then I began to have a bit of difficulty.

Initially I thought obviously the scarecrow would have to represent the Democratic politicians, as if they have a brain, they rarely use it. But upon further consideration, the way the Republicans have handled this whole health care debacle is certainly indicative of their need of a brain, similar to the scarecrow. Without question the Republicans are the personification of the cowardly lion. They would not recognize courage if they accidentally bumped into it. However, then I was left with the tin man who was missing [a] heart? As was pointed out in The Wall Street Journal by Fred Barnes the Republicans certainly have no heart, as having heart is the sine qua non of teamwork, which seems sadly to be lacking on the Republican side of the aisle.

So after much personal deliberation, I think that the Republicans, particularly in the Senate, deserve the Oz trifecta as they have no brains, no heart, and NO COURAGE!

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