Wednesday, October 23, 2013

The Egotist

The Obama Administration is either utterly indifferent to the ideas of the Republicans, or determined not to allow objective assessment of its failures into the hands of its adversaries, or both:

Mike Hash, who directs the Office of Health reform at the Department of Health and Human Services, will brief House Democrats Wednesday about implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

The closed-door session, which will start at 8:50 a.m., marks the first time the administration will have briefed members of Congress on the online enrollment system since its troubled rollout on Oct. 1....

House Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) office is crying foul that House Republicans aren't included in the briefing. It is asking that the same briefing be provided to the GOP.

Imagine the reactions from the press were a Republican Administration to treat its Democrat adversaries in the same fashion. Quoth Sara Noble at the Independent Sentinel:

John Boehner and Republicans in Congress are being punished by a dictatorial President with a get-even mentality and will be kept out of the loop as a result. They will not be given information about the website problems.

We have never had a president like this who completely ignores the opposition party and half the people in the nation....

Mr. Obama will only deal with the Democrats in Congress and he barely deals with them.

Mind you, Obama doesn't much like it when the shoe is on the other foot:

There was an unimaginable scene as the president strolled into a meeting of other leaders, only to find there literally was not a seat for him at the table. He quickly said he would "sit by my friend Lula," Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Reporters summoned to a quick photo op of the session witnessed an unusually chaotic scene for a diplomatic setting.

Mr. Obama was heard raising his voice as he asked, "Mr. Premier, are you ready to see me? Are you ready?"

The question was aimed at Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.

There was an uncharacteristic edge to Mr. Obama's voice as he addressed the Chinese leader....

When Mr. Obama arrived for that meeting, he found the Chinese leader conferring with his counterparts from Brazil, India and South Africa.

A senior official denied that the president and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton crashed the meeting. The official explained Mr. Obama merely showed up at the appointed time to confer with Wen and found the other leaders there too.

Top Obama aides learned of the meeting only moments before the president arrived.

It appears that the other potentates at that meeting actively wished to exclude Obama, but he would have none of it:

Barack Obama is not used to being the guy not invited to a party. At the Copenhagen global warming conference, however, he found that not everyone wanted to hang with him. Our president can't take a hint.

After Mr. Obama's bilateral meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, the Chinese began sending lower-level functionaries to the multilateral meetings. A frustrated Mr. Obama pressed for another bilateral meeting, which was scheduled for Friday at 6:15 p.m. Other leaders of the countries known as the "BASIC" bloc were harder to pin down.

The Obama team tried to schedule a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and was told he was at the airport readying to leave. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva also was unavailable. South African President Jacob Zuma said there was no point meeting without India and Brazil. Then the Chinese pushed the bilateral meeting back to 7 p.m.

"We were told they were at the airport," a senior administration official said. "We were told delegations were split up. We were told they weren't going to meet." So imagine Mr. Obama's surprise when he arrived for the bilateral powwow and found all four leaders in the room already in deep discussion. "Are you ready for me?" he said with an "uncharacteristic edge" to his voice, according to a CBS News report.

"We weren't crashing a meeting," an Obama flack later explained defensively. "We were going for our bilateral meeting." But that didn't stop him from walking in where he wasn't invited. Clearly, Mr. Obama learned a few things from his own White House party crashers.

There was no chair at the table for Mr. Obama so he announced he would sit next to his "friend Lula," whose staff had to scramble to make room for the president and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. On Monday, Mr. da Silva used his weekly radio program to rebuke the United States for its stance at Copenhagen.

After Mr. Obama arrived, the BASIC group was basically held hostage. They had tried politely to keep Mr. Obama at arms length, but since he showed up, decorum mandated that they find a way to save face.

The pattern should be clear by now. Indeed, it should have become clear long ago.


Many commentators have pegged Barack Hussein Obama as a malignant narcissist. While the categorization seems appropriate, it omits another feature of his character: his megalomania.

The megalomaniacal narcissist is the supreme egotist. He's the least stable, and therefore the least tolerable, of all psychotics. His ego, its assertion, and its defense dwarf everything else in the universe. ("If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now." -- from Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy) It forbids him to imagine a state of affairs in which he would be wrong, especially wrong at someone else's expense, and would therefore be morally obligated to apologize and make amends. No one with a lot of nice furniture or fragile knickknacks would knowingly admit a megalomaniacal narcissist to his home.

Megalomania plus narcissism gives rise to rage in the face of opposition or persistent difficulties. Obama hasn't yet descended to the nadir of such behavior:

"You don't oppose Kimba. That's treason. For that he has your whole family murdered." [From Norman Jewison's script for The Dogs of War.]

...but I occasionally wonder, given his "jokes" about having the IRS audit his political enemies, just how far he is from adopting a few less overtly violent measures for the suppression of his opposition: perhaps on the level of Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.


Obama's inability to concede the serious faults in his "signature legislative achievement," his refusal to take into account any of the positions or statements of his political adversaries, his enduring hostility toward Fox News for daring to employ editorialists who question his policies, and his repeated use and encouragement of the foulest terms of denunciation for the GOP have made it perfectly clear: the "most powerful man in the world," who cannot abide being omitted from a meeting of other national "leaders," is a megalomaniacal narcissist, an egotist of the highest degree. And he has three more years to run roughshod over the United States of America.

Anyone know of a nice high mountaintop I could fortify?

1 comment:

FTWPhil said...

Obamacare is a manifestation of Mugabe's land redistribution.

Watch the film "Mugabe and the White African", and pray that's the worst we see. Us "bitter clingers" are the colonialists. Of course most here know that, but share that film with the fence riders.