THE PEACOCK IS A CREATURE MOST AMERICANS SEE ONLY IN A ZOO. What makes the peacock most zoo-worthy, of course, is its extravagant plumage — a trait unique to the male of the species. The plumage of the female (or peahen) is a dull camouflage brown. Whenever a peacock sees a peahen, he instantly deploys his colorful tail feathers.
Like the male of many species, the peacock is omnivorous, polygamous and has “a reputation for being loud.”

There are some striking similarities between the attributes of this exotic bird and the current occupant of the White House. Scarcely two weeks after the terrorist attack on our embassy in Benghazi, Libya, President Obama visited with the ladies of “The View.” Greeting these archetypal peahens with the characteristic flare of an aroused peacock, the president announced: “I’m just supposed to be eye-candy for you guys.”

Thus too, no doubt, does the president regularly flaunt his plumage before the peahens in the White House. Their number is legion and ever changing. Here are just a few in purely alphabetical order:

Sharon Bowen, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, Anita Dunn, Felice Gaer, Marie Harf, Caitlin Hayden, Sarah Ingram, Lisa P. Jackson, Valerie Jarrett, Charlene Lamb, Lois Lerner, Bernadette Meehan, Samantha Power, Jen Psaki, Susan Rice, Kathleen Sebelius.

Never heard of Bowen, Gaer, Hayden, Ingram, Meehan, or somebody else on this list? That’s because these ladies are deep inside the White House bubble. They’re all well concealed by their dull brown plumage and unremarkable credentials. You can look all these people up on Google. You’re not likely to find much about Charlene Lamb, though — except on her Facebook page. Yet she was a key linchpin in the Benghazi scandal, so she’s probably been scrubbed from the Web.

Only one of Obama’s peahens seems to have captured the always-on spotlight of both conservative and liberal pundits. In February 2012, American Thinker News Editor Ed Lasky observed that “surprisingly little analysis has gone into figuring out the mystery of how Obama actually goes about making decisions.” Lasky faulted Obama for relying too much on his old Chicago friends like Axelrod, Emanuel and Daley—all long since departed from the White House. The only female Chicago crony remaining (besides FLOTUS and her mom) is Valerie Jarrett. Lasky refers to Jarrett as Obama’s personal Svengali.

Then, in August 2012, AT contributor Karin McQuillan picked up on this same theme: “No one outside Michelle (Obama) has the access or power over Obama’s decision-making like Jarrett does.”

New York Times columnist Jo Becker must have been monitoring AT, for on Sept. 1, 2012 she grabbed the ball in her lengthy (3,000-plus word) op-ed titled “The other power in the West Wing.” Becker, of course, is an aggressive progressive — her most recent contribution to the far-left canon being a book about the crusade for same-sex marriage, “Forcing the Spring.”

Being a journalist with all the right left-wing biases, Becker manages to dig deep. In her own words:

“… (I)nterviews with more than a dozen former and current administration officials offer a portrait of a woman wielding a many-faceted portfolio of power.” In describing Jarrett, Becker cites numerous instances when Jarrett’s “unmatched access to the Obamas has made her a driving force in some of the most significant domestic policy decisions of the president’s first term.” Probing the darker side of Jarrett’s persona, Becker observes that “She is the only staff member who regularly follows the president home from the West Wing to the residence, a practice that has earned her the nickname ‘the Night Stalker.’”

Wow! Almost sounds like the stern maternal character Angela Lansbury played in “The Manchurian Candidate.”

All of this, of course, is part of the overall White House “narrative” so many Americans have been hoodwinked into believing during the past six years. It’s like the many myths that have developed around the peacock over the past several millenia. Thus, in India, which some believe to be the peacock’s original habitat, this gaudy bird became a symbol of royalty and power. Centuries later, in early Christian and Byzantine culture, the peacock became a symbol of the resurrection, because it replaces its feathers every year.

There’s nothing magical or majestic about the peahens in the White House, though. They’re just appallingly uninformed. As former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld might say, they “don’t know what they don’t know.”

On the domestic front, we’re just beginning to see how dangerous this level of ignorance can become as the virtual children’s crusade from Central and South America begins to overwhelm our southern border. It is Obama’s glad-handing visits to Latin American trouble spots like Venezuela and his many “democracy without borders” speeches that have triggered this newest crisis, by signaling to desperately poor parents and ruthless coyotes that El Dorado is just an easy wade across the Rio Grande. But this children’s crusade, like those of the 12th century in France and Germany and the one in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, can only end in suffering.

So what are we to think? Is this all part of some Svengalian plan to “completely transform” America, or is it just the unintended consequence of a “good” intention?

It really doesn’t matter. What matters is the uncontrollable cascade of calamities that are sure to follow. The president recently flew to UC-Irvine to give a commencement speech that insists we stop the rising ocean tides caused by man-made global warming. But has anybody at NOAA calculated the carbon footprint of a million or more starving immigrant children who can’t read or write English and may be carrying on or in their little bodies some of the most virulent diseases known to mankind? Guess that’s just something else the White House peahens don’t know they don’t know.

As we might have expected, on Friday the 13th in June, a Wall Street Journal news story headlined “U.S. Weighing Direct Military Assistance to Iraq” revealed that one senior White House official said, “They’re looking at everything and anything and have been told explicitly by the White House to think outside the box of what is possible.” Wow — that’s really informative! Wonder which Obama peahen came up with that mouthful of cotton?.

The one thing this report made crystal clear is that POTUS doesn’t want any “boots on the ground.” He’d much rather put his own boots up on the Oval Office desk and take a snooze. What was it Sarah Palin recently said? Like all peacocks, “He’s lazy!”

Bruce Robinson is a writer and former Benicia resident.