Why did Obama stay home? a number of people have asked. This is John Hinderaker’s answer:

I offer two possible explanations. The first is incompetence. The second is that if it didn’t seriously occur to Obama that he should go, it may simply not have occurred to him to send anyone else.

He also canvasses five other possibilities:

1. Incompetence: This theory should always be on the table when government at any level is involved. And it can explain why Obama didn’t have a top level official appear at the Paris rally.

2. Security: Don’t make me laugh. When Obama wants to do something, he doesn’t let security issues interfere.

3. Terrorism, what terrorism?: The estimable Byron York posits that Obama skipped Paris because he wants to downgrade the issue of terrorism. John finds this theory plausible, and I do too.

4. No sympathy for colonialists: This is a crude summary of an elaborate theory offered by Lee Smith. It’s worth considering, but very speculative. I think Smith may be over-thinking this.

5. He’s too cool: This, in essence, is the theory the White House is now providing.

Others have said that he stayed home to watch the football, which is plausible, although I was able to watch the games easily enough here in Australia. That, too, is not why I think he stayed home.

Here’s my answer. He didn’t go because he supports the other side. He did not want to add even so much as an ounce of support for those who are fighting the Islamists since he wants to see them succeed. I would be happy to entertain some other answer as the real one were it not for the fact that there is not a single position Obama has taken, at any time in his life, that would make me think he is on my side of any important ideological question, and this one least of all.

And having written this, I came across this, by Roger Simon: Is the White House a ‘Sleeper Cell’?. The idea is so obvious, and has been for so long, that I assumed that no one has put two and two together because the conclusions are not just terrible for the politics of it, but is vastly discrediting for the American system of government. Let me go to how Simon ends his article before coming back to the point:

A “sleeper cell” in the White House? It would certainly explain Obama’s not going to France, which was a decision that hurt the USA, hurt the effort against Islamic terror and hurt the president’s already tarnished reputation into the bargain. There are so many other things that the existence of a White House “sleeper cell” would explain that I couldn’t even begin to count them. And as you know, a cell doesn’t have to be violent to be active. There are many ways to do damage.

But who would be a member of this cell? Is it one or all of them? Well that, I am sorry to say, I cannot tell you. I do not have the proper clearance. You are, however, free to guess. Who would stop you?

Simon has clearly come to the same conclusion as I have, but won’t say it. It is just too terrible to have to admit. A Parliamentary system can be subverted, I suppose. But anyone who gets to the top has had to go through the proving ground of the Parliament itself. You must stand your ground on innumerable occasions, being asked questions by people whose interests are to find a flaw in your policies, that being the members of the opposition parties. This is a crucible that simply does not exist in a republican presidential system, and especially one in which the media is as corrupt as that found in the US.

Obama has never had to face serious questioning at any stage of his rise, nor does he now that he has reached the presidency. No one knows who he is, really is, nor has anyone probed him to find out what he truly believes. But you would have to have been born an idiot not to understand exactly what he stood for even before he was elected. Since that time, there has never been an instance that he has stood up to any radical Islamic government. The only time Egypt, for example, caught his interest was after Al-Sisi successful coup. Then, but only then, he was set to punish the Egyptians. Nor did he provide any support of any kind, not even ideological, when the Iranian people tried their own counter-revolution.

This is not a first-time instance, either. The near-as-certain certainty is that the FDR White House was riddled with Stalin’s agents. Not spies who tried to steal secrets, but the actual policy advisers who ran the government. This is the final paragraph of my review of Diana West’s American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character which I titled, with good reason, America, the Big Dumb Ox. This is where the title comes from:

As a result of reading West’s book, I now look on the United States as a big dumb ox, led around by a cabal of its enemies whose intent is to take the beast out to slaughter. It is a very large beast and will not go quietly. But given what you will learn from this book, you will be in some despair in trying to work out what can be done. This is a very troubling book which I nevertheless encourage you to read.

When I see the Obama White House, my attitude is, so what’s new? And what has been the most troubling part in reading West has been the effort made by the “elites” on the conservative side of politics in the US to discredit everything she wrote. The only conclusion vast enough to make sense of it all is the notion of progressive internationalism, whose most important ideal is bound up in the notion of open borders. If Islam, as peaceable as most of its adherents no doubt are, has within it a core of violent primitives, who cannot be contained by the more civilised notions that have been painfully and slowly accumulated in the Judeo-Christian West, then this entire progressive internationalist enterprise is a planetary disaster that will bring on a new Dark Age. But the vision will not disappear, and on we go.

So let me say this straight out. Wherever you are, wherever you are reading this right this minute, you cannot know what political system and religious values will prevail one hundred years from today. You may have your preferences, and you may find it inconceivable that Sharia may dominate the planet. But if the US can elect an Obama in 2008, don’t you tell me what will not happen by the year 2115.