My new book Presidential Puppetry can help viewers better understand the implications of President Obama’s State of the Union address last week.

Obama, shown below, announced to a joint session of Congress Jan. 28 his plans for 2014 and beyond. His rhetoric soared. But specifics fell far short of his promises during his 2008 presidential campaign, as Atlantic columnist Conor Friedersdorf noted in The Decline and Fall of ‘Hope and Change.’

Puppetry shows via a century of history why Obama is a status quo centrist playing the role of reformer. Like his parents, he has a hidden national security background that helps show why he is a minion for the truly powerful and not a master.

Obama’s ascent to the presidency was enabled by wealthy, powerful figures who remain in the shadows while the public receives from his handlers only a few core talking points about his past along with a lot of superficial conventional wisdom. It this is news to you, it shouldn’t be after two election campaigns and all these years.

That’s why I’m creating a national initiative called “The Truth Patrol” to get to the bottom of other secrets that confuse millions of trusting voters, with the inevitable result of a breakdown in democracy. This is not necessarily an anti-Obama effort, although his most devout loyalists will see it that way. In fact, many right-wing haters will be dismayed also because they have been duped also about his background.

The true powers guiding government — I call them “Puppet Masters” but others use such terms as “Wall Street,” or President Eisenhower’s term “The Military Industrial Complex” or even “The Secret Team” — help enable and thereby control top candidates from both the Republican and Democratic Parties.

The hidden oligarchs are always in control of government no matter how an election turns out. The mainstream media are unwitting accomplices for the most part. They focus on manufactured events like the president’s annual speech, not on the goals of billionaires who are shaping both public policy and news coverage.

“Andrew Kreig is doing the important work the journalism establishment has abandoned,” wrote David Cogswell of Hoboken, New Jersey in a five-star review on Amazon.com Feb. 1. “The political battles of Bush versus Kerry, Clinton versus Bush, Obama versus Romney,” Cogswell continued, “are elaborate dramas staged for us by hired performers who take their orders from a shadowy ruling elite. Kreig lays out the facts as you normally don’t see them.”

Today’s column recaps the treatment Presidential Puppetry: Obama Romney and Their Masters has received since the end of the year following its launch at the National Press Club.

Radio host Susan Lindauer, right, for example, repeatedly described to her audience during a two-hour Jan. 24 interview revelations that complemented her own as a former intelligence operative, political prisoner, and author.

Many in the general public suspect the worst of our leaders and hunger for specifics denied them by information gatekeepers in the traditional media. Last week, I visited a friend in a hospital who mentioned my book to an orderly, who promptly bought a copy because the concepts matched his suspicions of the president’s past.

By contrast, professional journalists in Washington often admit privately that they do not know much about the president’s family background aside from the familiar talking points: Obama was a community organizer, friend of radicals in Chicago, Harvard Law Review editor, University of Chicago constitutional law instructor, etc.

Missing from that collection of partial disclosures are the key influencers upon him, his team and other recent presidents.

I have documented them with the help of many dogged and valiant sources cited in more than 1,100 endnotes. The full story will help those willing to explore reality outside Washington’s political matrix.

You can see the evidence yourself for free once we start excerpting the book this month here in serial form. In the meantime, provided below are highlights from recent newspaper, radio, video and web coverage that helps illuminate what the president and his opponents are going to do for the rest of his term.