Something has gone fantastically wrong with the American system of governance. It is partly that the Democrats have gone not just full socialist but have pivoted anti-West. It is also that the media has been corrupted by this far left message which only allows a filtered version of events to enter the national conversation. This is a column from The Wall Street Journal: America at Obama’s End. I don’t think it comes anywhere near the assessment it needs to make, although there is some soul searching going on somewhere.

We are near the end of the seventh year of Barack Obama’s presidency, and by any measure the United States is a fractured nation. Its people are more divided politically than any time in recent memory. Personally, many are anxious, angry or just down.

Whatever Mr. Obama promised in that famous first Inaugural Address, any sense of a nation united and raised up is gone. This isn’t normal second-term blues. It’s a sense of bust.

The formal measure of all this appeared last week with the release of the Pew Research poll, whose headline message is that trust in government is kaput. Forget the old joke about the government coming to “help.” There’s a darker version now: We’re the government, and we’re here to screw you.

But it’s not just Obama since Merkel in Germany seems to have the same ethos, as do others. But the American contagion is the worst and will require a very fresh and different start to overcome the eight years of Obama-led havoc that will not be easily reversed. Yet what may be the sourest note of all in this article is how it ends:

Mr. Obama has repeatedly mocked institutions he didn’t control and abused the powers of those he did. Almost always, the ridicule and condescension came in front of cheering audiences. It’s hardly a surprise that Donald Trump is exploiting and expanding the loss of public faith. Mr. Obama spent seven years softening up Mr. Trump’s audiences for him.

We may get a third Obama term after all.

It turns out not even to be about the president at all, but to warn Americans not to vote for Donald Trump as if it would be the same as four more years of Obama.

[Via Instapundit]

Let me start with this: Iraqis think the U.S. is in cahoots with the Islamic State, and it is hurting the war

On the front lines of the battle against the Islamic State, suspicion of the United States runs deep. Iraqi fighters say they have all seen the videos purportedly showing U.S. helicopters airdropping weapons to the militants, and many claim they have friends and relatives who have witnessed similar instances of collusion.

Ordinary people also have seen the videos, heard the stories and reached the same conclusion — one that might seem absurd to Americans but is widely believed among Iraqis — that the United States is supporting the Islamic State for a variety of pernicious reasons that have to do with asserting U.S. control over Iraq, the wider Middle East and, perhaps, its oil.

“It is not in doubt,” said Mustafa Saadi, who says his friend saw U.S. helicopters delivering bottled water to Islamic State positions. He is a commander in one of the Shiite militias that last month helped push the militants out of the oil refinery near Baiji in northern Iraq alongside the Iraqi army.

The Islamic State is “almost finished,” he said. “They are weak. If only America would stop supporting them, we could defeat them in days.”

Match that up with this: Obama’s Increasingly Surreal War on ISIS.

America’s role in the Global War on Terror grows stranger by the hour. President Obama’s fight against ISIS and other radical Islamic terrorists — such as it is — has entered the Twilight Zone. That is the only explanation for Obama’s increasingly bizarre tactics and statements against these existentially dangerous savages. . . .

All told, the obsessive pursuit of “no civilian casualties — zero,” as retired four-star General Jack Keane quotes Obama as demanding, has led U.S. pilots to report that they fly sorties over ISIS territory and return to base with 75 percent of their bombs undropped. . . .

The Pentagon’s inspector general is probing reports that Defense Intelligence Agency analysts who described ISIS’s threat as grave and robust were told to “cut it out” and “toe the line.” E-mails to that effect may have been destroyed in order to cover up this apparent undercooking of the books. . . .

Standing beside the new leader of the Free World, France’s Francoise Hollande, Obama declared on Tuesday: “Next week, I will be joining President Hollande and world leaders in Paris for the global climate conference. What a powerful rebuke to the terrorists it will be when the world stands as one and shows that we will not be deterred from building a better future for our children.”

It’s less than not serious. Obama personally stands in the way of a coherent American foreign policy. And then there’s this: State Department ‘troubled’ by Moscow’s move against Soros groups.

The U.S. State Department says it is “troubled” by Russia’s decision to ban two of liberal billionaire George Soros’ pro-democracy charities and label the organizations a threat to national security.

“Today’s designation of the Open Society Foundations and the Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation as so-called ‘undesirable’ organizations will only further restrict the work of civil society in Russia for the benefit of the Russian people,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Monday. “This action is yet another example of the Russian Government’s growing crackdown on independent voices and a deliberate step to further isolate the Russian people from the world.”

The Russians must know something. In fact, Soros hides virtually nothing about his anti-Western hatreds. There’s lots around if you care to look but here is something recent: Rebuilding the Asylum System. That is, promoting the invasion of Europe by millions of refugees. This is who the State Department defends while Putin proscribes his organisations from operating within Russia.

There seems to be some resentment hereabouts.

Maurice Newman has an article in The Oz today on Waffling West empowers Islamic terror. And there he wrote, in the kind of article that has already virtually disappeared, about how there is something else that is the Number One issue to allow you to show you are being tough-minded even while studiously ignoring ISIS.

Left leaning, Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman sympathises. “When President Obama describes climate change as the greatest threat we face, he’s exactly right. Terrorism can’t and won’t destroy our civilisation but global warming could and might.”

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius agrees “climate change is a threat to peace” and a significant cause of terrorism, sentiments echoed by Prince Charles.

All this reminded me of an article some time back by Ed Driscoll on Freudian displacement. He began with this:

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. “I really consider this a national security issue,” says celebrity activist and “An Inconvenient Truth” producer Laurie David. “Truth” star Al Gore calls global warming a “planetary emergency.” Bill Clinton’s first worry is climate change: “It’s the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it.”

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can’t deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it’s Kyoto that’ll save you.

But then a quarter of an hour later, having thought about his original post, Driscoll went on with a much fuller discussion on how fighting climate change gives some people the pretence of being tough. Link to it all since it is short but subtle, and explains quite a lot. A sample:

While the hawks among us worry about preventing the Armageddon that’s coming, our modern-day hippies just want to make sure the planet is pristine when it does. In fact, the more menacing terrorism becomes, the more some people seem to worry about the weather. Scared and unsure how to fight terrorists, they confront “climate change,” which only requires spending trillions of other people’s dollars on something that may not need fixing or may not be fixable. No wonder some of these people chain themselves to trees – they think money grows on them.

It’s funny when you put it that way, but it’s actually not funny at all. That the US could twice elect Obama at such a moment – and in Australia replace Tony with Malcolm – is the surest sign that we would happily sign the surrender documents if only it wasn’t all too obvious to the other side that this is what we have in effect already done.