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This time of year I am invariably reminded of The Wizard of Oz.

You see, during my childhood, we – at least, before the advent of cable, Betamax and VHS – were afforded only a handful of TV stations: CBS-, NBC- and ABC-affiliated local TV stations. Consequently, we were assured of viewing favorite programs – “The Charley Brown Christmas Special,” “Frosty, the Snowman,” and, most significant of all, “The Wizard of Oz” – only once a year.

My parents invariably recalled, far into my adulthood, how I would cry at the end of the “Wizard of Oz,” knowing that a full year would pass before I could view it again. And I can still remember the glee I would feel whenever I spotted one of the early November issues of “TV Guide,” the cover of which typically carried a screen shot from the movie as a teaser for the upcoming broadcast, which invariably occurred on the Sunday evening following Thanksgiving.

Still, despite my sheer fascination with this 1939 classic, I invariably found the last few minutes of the film, when Dorothy and her fellow travelers discover the real nature of Oz, well, rather disappointing and even a bit jarring.

We are exposed all through the film to an entity who seems magical, omnipotent, even godlike, in some respects, only to discover that he was a flim-flam artist from the American Midwest who had employed his wiles and verbal acuity to deceive an entire kingdom.

I was reminded of this childhood reaction reading Victor Davis Hanson’s latest piece on what amounts to the unmasking of the leftist elite class, which once struck millions of ordinary Americans not too long ago as standing at the cusp history – a talented vanguard of this nation’s elite-educated best and brightest who would finally consummate St. Barack’s call for a fundamental transformation of what they regard as a flawed American Experiment.

As Hanson argues so brilliantly, we now have seen the left for what it is: a relatively small legion of weak, immoral, self-serving, sniveling ciphers – not talented or principled people at all, merely mediocre, grasping people not that much different than the mythical Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs, who shortened his name to OZ after it occurred to him that the first letters of his names spelled out “O.Z.P.I.N.H.E.A.D.”

Pinhead, after all, is a self-defeating term for a flim-flam artist with lofty aspirations.

But it’s a term that fits our benighted ruling class pretty well.