[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]Finally, someone of stature is noising around America’s most ignored secret:

The many calculated shadows that have been craftily constructed to shield President Obama’s pre-White House life from scrutiny.

Readers of this newspaper know more details of the off-stage life of a former Mrs. Noonan than Americans do about Swish.

I don’t know what he is papering over, but I know that his tail-wagging acolytes are shielding him at a furious pace.

Haley Barbour, the astute Governor of Mississippi, said yesterday:

“This is a President that we know less about than any other President in history.”

Who can doubt that?

Two years ago last month, when John McCain named Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, the selectively incurious New York Times overnight dispatched a 32-person team to Alaska to dig up the least important dirt they could uncover on a soon-to-be demonized Republican.

Like a little boy whose shoe came untied, the Times, alternately, wails about what a horrifying person Sarah is to her family and to her former constituents while tracking her every day to the lip of the bathroom doorway.

But Swish Obama?

Feh? Who needs more than his age and athletic talents?

Who cares about his Life Before the White House, the stunningly disinterested Times tells readers daily?

The Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Baltimore Sun, the Allentown Call and the Los Angeles Times sling their lantern jaws skyward, the way our Sacred Leader does, and say “None of our business. It is private.”

To this day, you can check with any of the above newspapers, on a daily basis, however, and find nasty, backbiting snippets about the habits of Sarah, Glenn Beck or Rush.

But Swish? Out of bounds. “Hey, baby, what he did before the White House is his business. We are not nosey.”

Almost as soon as Mr. Barbour made his bullseye observation yesterday morning, the left media spun into mockery-and-denial mode. They pivoted so fast their stubby widdle pencils almost poked ’em in the proboscis.

Catty Ruthless Marcus of the Washington Post was one of the first reliable liberal toadies hustled into print.

The headline over her latest I-ain’t-kidding essay read “Why does Haley Barbour think we don’t ‘know’ Obama?”

Like your favorite neighborhood tomcat, Ruthless leaped atop the nearest backyard fence and began howling that the Mississippi governor must have overdosed on something.

Less than any President in history? she asked, cleverly.

“Really? Less than Benjamin Harrison? Franklin Pierce? By the time he launched his candidacy, Obama had written an autobiography and a second, more policy-oriented book threaded through with examples from his personal experience — though Barbour said he hasn't read these. What is it, exactly, that we don't know about him?”

Surely you jest, Ruthless. Two autobios on a life heavily underachieved? It is not clear he wrote either. This is a P.R. man’s ideal robot, tootsie.

Permit me to tell you more, Ruthless: What do we know about Swish’s formative years as a student? There has been a Kremlin-style blackout of his college years. What do we know about his transformation into professional life, his many days with the terrorist Bill Ayres, his announced but never demonstrated 20 years in the church of the racist but partially white Jeremiah Wright? Tell me, Ruthless, because despite your crowing, your knowledge bank of Swishie is as empty as mine.

Ruthless, whose Post essays have been distributed to Southern California in recent months, may be the only liberal in the country puzzled that huge chunks of Democrats and Republicans think Swish still is a Muslim.

The very thought made Ruthless stomp her angry feet. In a snit, she wrote:

“I don’t pretend to understand the mass delusion about Obama's religion, most prevalent among members of Barbour’s party, but I suspect there is something significant in Barbour's characterization of Obama as an unknown quantity. Except I would translate it this way: This discomfort, among a disturbing segment of Americans, is not that Obama is unknown as much as that he is unfamiliar. It’s not that, as Barbour put it, those who question Obama’s religion ‘just don't know him’ — it’s that they don't know anyone like him.”

Scoot over, Murgatroyd. Ruthless, another Whore for Obama, has called us racists for not being an Obama footstool as she is.