Let me start where Ed Driscoll at Instapundit starts, with Sharyl Attkisson’s comments on Obama’s failure to read intelligence reports that he disagrees with even before he reads them. But there’s more, and this is only what we actually know about.

The New York Times sounds like it grudgingly concurs with Attkisson’s assessment of our epistemically closed president, though you have to scroll down eight paragraphs deep past their deliberately underplayed headline, “In Rise of ISIS, No Single Missed Key but Many Strands of Blame,” to find the story’s real lede:

A 2012 report by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency was direct: The growing chaos in Syria’s civil war was giving Islamic militants there and in Iraq the space to spread and flourish. The group, it said, could “declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria.”

“This particular report, this was one of those nobody wanted to see,” said Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who ran the defense agency at the time.

“It was disregarded by the White House,” he said. “It was disregarded by other elements in the intelligence community as a one-off report. Frankly, at the White House, it didn’t meet the narrative.”

As John Fund wrote last year, the eye of the narrative draws ever-tighter in the cloistered Obama White House:

Chris Matthews of MSNBC, the former White House speechwriter who once rapturously recounted that he “felt this thrill going up my leg” as Obama spoke, didn’t hold back on Wednesday’s Hardball. “Let’s get tough here,” Matthews began, as he lambasted Obama for being “intellectually lazy” and “listening to the same voices all the time.” He even named names, saying that Obama had become “atrophied into that little world of people like Valerie Jarrett and Mrs. Obama.”

The headline on that last story begins, “As the Obama Administration Crashes and Burns”, but what satisfaction is there in that if Obama’s aim from the start was to take the West down as far as he possibly could. We are all part of the wreckage. It’s only taken seven years for most Americans to work it out, and even then it is more than possible that he would win re-election a third time if he were allowed to run again.