Everyone one, it seems, is trying to comprehend Barack Obama. It can even be said of his most loyal disciples that while their legs no longer tingle, their noggins are becoming mighty itchy. Politicians (even the newly labeled “professional Left”) and members of the media alike finally are allowing their head scratching to be seen in public.
Is head banging next? The Ground Zero mosque has put a lot of people over the edge. Even those who expected the Obama Honeymoon to be eternal (this time would be different, they promised) are ready for their first post-wedding spat.
After Obama went out of his way to get in the middle of the back and forth about the New York mosque, a much broader spectrum of weighers-in emerged to question his need to always stoke the embers of debate with gasoline.
As columnist Victor Davis Hanson so lucidly notes in a recent dispatch, this President who does not comport himself presidentially keeps stepping into things that “belie his former image as a conciliator and healer.”
Hanson reviews the most absurd on the list: Harvard professor “Skip” Gates becomes a typical victim of racial profiling by white law enforcement, in this case the Cambridge PD officer who “acted stupidly”; and trampling the will of Arizonans and the American people, Obama orders a federal lawsuit in response to the state’s passage of tough and overdue illegal immigration controls.
Now Obama has deliberately placed himself in the middle of a very understandable debate about a proposed Islamic “cultural center” two blocks from 9/11’s Ground Zero, formerly the site of the World Trade towers where more than 2,900 perished.
Obama says opposing the mosque defies America’s tradition of religious freedom so he’s all for it. (He then promptly left for 10 days on Martha’s Vineyard). This proclamation could give the impression that the mosque site is an issue detached from any emotion whatsoever, that it’s not a decidedly political move.
So what are we to make of Obama as he approaches the midway point of his reign? Some have pointed out that, in many cases, Obama is merely doing precisely what he said he would do as President. People thought they were hearing dramatic rhetoric but his was a defiant vow to “fundamentally transform”. It is useless to apply a template of logic to Obama and what drove him to radical Socialism, just as it is useless to use logic to decipher the actions of any radical force.
To comprehend Obama is to adopt the mindset of someone in the world of foreign intelligence. Hard as it is, the breakthrough comes when we learn to anticipate the next move no matter how illogical or ill advised it would otherwise seem.
Radio host Michael Medved proposes that Obama’s intellect is indisputable but that he is demonstrating total incompetence, not merely with regard to the side, hot-button issues but on big ticket items like the stagnant economy. That Obama does not place a jobs-and-growth gag order on Joe Biden speaks volumes.
Incompetence, indeed. But what if it’s something more? Could it be that Obama is ideologically insane? Is he simply hell bent on undoing a United States he has long despised as an oppressor, a global bully? Does he do and say the opposite of entrenched public opinion because he mocks the notion that the public should have an opinion, steeped as it is in free-market, Constitutional rubbish?
In example after example Obama demonstrates that, though he is certainly “smart”, he’s also ideologically unstable. He believes he was born to his mission. The histories of weakened and fallen nations are littered with such men.