June 22, 2013

An Uncontrollable Ego

ByJames Lewis

IRS. FBI. NSA... Under Obama they consistently exceed their previously understood legal powers. Yes, there was technical consent by the secret FISA court for massive NSA spying. In times of national threat the FISA court is a pushover; just imagine if they said "No" and we had another 9/11/01. So they drove a dagger into the U.S. Constitution rather than stand for principle, the way Chief Justice John Roberts helped damage the Constitution by voting for ObamaCare, and the Burger Court shafted the Constitution and ruined millions of young lives with unrestricted abortion.

Perhaps the most damaging Leftist assault ever was reverse discrimination to make up for white racial sins going back to the slave trade that ended in 1865; that racialist revenge narrative still drives reverse discrimination, forty years after the start of "affirmative" action. It will never end, as long as there is a penny to be made on racial blackmail.

The equal protection clause is gone. Every time the left imagines another victim group, that gaping wound in constitutional protections grows larger and larger -- first on behalf of American blacks, then for all "people of color," then women and gays, and now, illegal immigrants. Reverse racial discrimination has empowered an unelected political class growing fat and thuggish on a new spoils system. With ObamaCare, racial spoils may capsize our elected ship of state, leaving only an EU-type corruptocracy.

The Left has pushed against the Constitution beginning with the Wilson administration and World War I. What's different about Obama is his Leninist grandiosity, combined with amazing oppositional-defiant disorder. In street language that means his f-u attitude. Obama takes pleasure in waving his finger in the air while violating our most precious values. Obama's narcissism and oppositional-defiance therefore control his official actions.

The week after Obama's first inauguration, commuters in New York City were shocked when Air Force One buzzed the Statue of Liberty. When the White House was queried nobody took responsibility. But only the President of the United States can override standing orders and FAA safety rules in that symbolic act of giving the middle finger to the whole country, within sight of the ruined Twin Towers. Buzzing Lady Liberty was only one of dozens of acts of symbolic defiance that Obama has indulged in over the years. Psychiatrically these gestures have two features: first, they are unnecessary to achieve any rational goal; and second, they always reveal rage and hatred against "middleclassness," as Jeremiah Wright calls it, the values that normal Americans hold dear.

Emotionally Obama's arrogance is based in deep feelings of inferiority, a mental plague that infects much of the left. Oppositionalism is at the very roots of the Left's glorification of revolution.

Marx and the other hard Leftists make it very clear that "revolution" means civil war, as bloody as is necessary to alter human nature forever. When in the end human nature prevails, the Left always forgets its failures and discovers new messianic figures, like Obama himself, to forge another great new future.

Today the Europeans are genuinely afraid of Obama. If you doubt that, look at these two news photos. The first shows Frau Merkel looking with fear and doubt in her eyes at Obama in Germany this week. Merkel started life as a communist in East Germany, but seems acutely aware of personality cults like Stalin's and Obama's. She fears what she knows. The second photo shows Britain's David Cameron doing that little head bow that politicians do around Obama. Both photos show fear of Obama's arbitrary temper and rage, which is by now understood by governments around the world. It was France's Nikolas Sarkozy who first called Obama "aliene," meaning "estranged from reality."

Merkel's look is particularly revealing, because it was her job this week to protest against Obama's unbounded NSA spying against Germans and other Europeans, who have known Obamas before --- Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and a raft of other control freaks who became enraged when their orders were not followed. Led by our loathsome media, many Americans took the public revelations about Obama's abuses of power with a shrug. The Germans did not, because they still suffer from earlier generations of Obamas.

Oddly enough, after the massive trauma of World War II, inflicted by Germany on Europe and America, there seems to be more sensitivity about massive abuse of power over there than in the USA. Their wounds are fresher than ours. We still imagine it can't happen here. The German press knows better, and therefore went ballistic about the NSA revelations.

The Muslim world has come to the same conclusion. The farcical Arab Spring started after Obama told Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak to leave office, arbitrarily, in the single most blatant act of public imperialism in American history. Obama thereby dislodged the most crucial pillar of Middle East stability in the last forty years: the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty established between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. Israel gave up the Sinai Peninsula and in exchange Sadat recognized Israel's right to exist. It was the only genuine peace treaty of the last sixty years, and Obama destroyed it.

The result hasn't harmed Israel so far, even though Obama considers Israel the obstacle to perfect, lasting peace. No. The result has been chaos and starvation in Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood. Tens of millions of women who lived in relative freedom are now confined by Shari'ah law. In Syria an estimated 100,000 Arabs have killed each other so far, and last week Syria slipped toward the much-feared regional war between Shiites and Sunnis: Iran, Assad, and Hezbollah against Egypt, Libya, and Al Qaida, all financed by the Gulf Arabs. Russia is backing Iran and Assad, and the U.S. is foolishly backing Al Qaida, who hate us.

This is not a foreign policy. It is a jerry-rigged contraption to try to save the day after the Arab Spring destroyed all the unstable Muslim regimes.

In 2009, Obama proclaimed his Muslim sympathies from Al Azhar University in Cairo. Today no Muslim believes him anymore. Based on his own messianic authority, Obama has brought nothing but war and suffering to the Middle East. The Iranians hate him as a point of principle. The Saudis fear him as a wild man who has brought Mecca and Medina within easy range of Iranian nuclear weapons. Israel has not been damaged so far, but they don't want a wild man running U.S. policy either.

Obama has almost four years to go, unless he becomes UN SecGen, in which case he may be around for another decade to impose his Leninist vision on the world. So far, Obama has made things worse, much worse, both in foreign and domestic policy. Free-market capitalism is a robust system, one that has recovered from massive misgovernment before. Politics is worse today than it has been for decades, because of the rise of the Boomer Left, culminating in Obama the Messiah.

Yet precisely because control freaks cannot run our hypercomplex economy, they do not know what is going to happen, and neither do we. Nobody could predict the web, just as nobody could predict the internal combustion engine. Nobody predicted massive shale discoveries that are turning us into a net hydrocarbon exporter in the middle of the greenest administration in history. Nobody can predict the new age of biogenetic engineering. Nobody knows what will happen with ObamaCare, except it will be one unholy quagmire.

Wise policymakers understand the limits of their power and end up practicing the rule of "First, Do No Harm." We now have a U.S. president who has turned that upside-down: First, do some harm.

It hasn't worked, and it won't. Obama is a loose cannonball. He has only one guiding principle, the aggrandizement of his own ego. But just one Nobel Peace Prize, just one presidency, can never be enough for his insatiable needs. Obama will always need more.

Obama wants to control everything except himself. That has always been a formula for tyranny, and Obama is no exception.

Character is destiny.

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