Obama’s psychiatric disorder

Posted on March 21, 2014 by lawofmarkets

It has become pretty clear that Obama is not all there, living in a fantasy world of his own. Here is the latest version:

For anyone who has observed Barack Obama over the years, it’s obvious that a fundamental part of his self-identity involves seeing himself, and having others see him, as pragmatic rather than ideological, reality-based, driven by reason instead of bias.

This has never actually been true. Mr. Obama is, in fact, unusually dogmatic, blind to counter-evidence, and mostly unable to adjust his views to the way things are. So when his worldview collides with reality, he often can’t adjust. He instead creates his own make believe world.

And so on and so forth but to what end? He is supported by the Democrats, the media and by those at the bottom of the income pile whose lives can never be made materially better by asking them to work for what they get.

Mr. Putin, meanwhile, is in the process of restoring the Russian empire. He is besting Mr. Obama at every turn, from arms control agreements to Crimea and Ukraine to Syria, Egypt, and Iran. Russia has established a major presence in the Middle East for the first time since the 1970s. Early in his presidency President Obama canceled a missile defense agreement with Poland and the Czech Republic–and got nothing in return from Putin. Our adversaries are emboldened; our allies are afraid. Confidence in America is collapsing.

Yet the president seems clueless to all this; his failures don’t seem to compute with him. Even Jimmy Carter eventually understood the errors of his ways and adjusted his dealings with the Soviet Union. Mr. Obama remains off in his own world.

In psychiatry, there’s a condition known as dissociative disorder. It’s considered to be a coping mechanism, when the person literally dissociates himself from a situation or experience too traumatic to integrate with his conscious self. A person escapes reality in ways that are unhealthy.

And not just him but all of those highly educated idiots who voted for him twice and support him still. Call them nuts if you like, but they are running America.

The new world order

Posted on March 18, 2014 by lawofmarkets

This is one tenth of the story it ought to be given the corruption of the media and its infusion into the left. That the elites in the United States no longer have the ideological understanding of what constitutes a free society is melded into every policy you see. If occasionally someone at Fox, or Rush Limbaugh, or a Sarah Palin, or the right-side blogs gets into these issues, the sum and substance still amounts to almost no opposition at all. So the headline this morning at Drudge actually shows someone who understands just what a buffoon Obama is and what a train wreck American foreign policy has become:

RUSSIA LAUGHS AT OBAMA ‘SANCTIONS’; CALLS HIM ‘PRANKSTER’

“Prankster” is merely what they say in public. The words they must use in private must add no end to the hilarity as they look over Obama and Kerry, and before that Hillary. They show such immense disdain because they can. The consequences will continue far into the future.

And speaking of that future, how’s this for the new world order, also from Drudge, RUSSIACHINA PUSH FOR CONTROL OF INTERNET…

The United States is planning to give up its last remaining authority over the technical management of the Internet.

The Commerce Department announced Friday that it will give the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an international nonprofit group, control over the database of names and addresses that allows computers around the world to connect to each other.

Administration officials say U.S. authority over the Internet address system was always intended to be temporary and that ultimate power should rest with the “global Internet community.”

But some fear that the Obama administration is opening the door to an Internet takeover by Russia, China, or other countries that are eager to censor speech and limit the flow of ideas.

“If the Obama Administration gives away its oversight of the Internet, it will be gone forever,” wrote Daniel Castro, a senior analyst with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

Castro argued that the world “could be faced with a splintered Internet that would stifle innovation, commerce, and the free flow and diversity of ideas that are bedrock tenets of world’s biggest economic engine.”

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, called the announcement a “hostile step” against free speech.

The world moves faster than you can ever believe and at the moment is accelerating into who knows what but has a very bad feel about it.

Obama, Mom jeans and John Kerry

Posted on March 16, 2014 by lawofmarkets

There really is idiocy about. If you are paying attention, even slightly, you would know that there are no end of problems in the world, from international terrorism, missing planes, poorly performing economies, and in the US, the disastrous introduction of the Affordable Care Act. But in the midst of all this, we can see what has really been on the mind of the American President:

Obama also took to the airwaves to set the record straight about his sartorial style. Earlier this month, former Gov. Sarah Palin criticized Obama’s weakness for the current situation in Ukraine, saying that while Russian President Vladimir Putin “wrestles bears and drills for oil,” people “look at our president as one who wears mom jeans.”

“I’ve been unfairly maligned about my jeans,” Obama told Seacrest on Friday. “The truth is, generally I look very sharp in jeans.”

This is what worries him. He is a teenage girl at heart. No gravitas, no seriousness, just a man who can read a teleprompter with only the occasional mistake (see “r-s-p-e-c-t”). That he spent a nanosecond on something no one in the world had thought twice about until he raised it himself is a spooky reminder of what a nitwit he is, incapable of any kind of useful concentrated thought on any issue of substance.

Meanwhile re the Ukraine, this is what John Kerry had to say:

We hope President Putin will recognize that none of what we’re saying is meant as a threat, it’s not meant in a personal way.

It is meant as a matter of respect for the international, multilateral structure that we have lived by since World War II, and for the standards of behavior about annexation, about succession, about independence, and how countries come about it.

Unless you are very low on the low-information voter totem pole, Americans must be truly embarrassed by who they elected as President. I only wish it was just a matter of embarrassment. This catastrophic period of American governance will rebound through the rest of this century and affect far more than we can even begin to foresee.

That is just the message of assurance Putin needed so you will not be surprised to find that Russia has begun its invasion of the Ukraine.

I just can’t get no rspect around here

Posted on March 9, 2014 by lawofmarkets

Ever wonder why his university transcripts are unavailable. Wonder no more.

UPDATE: Another take on the same moment.

Spelling R-E-S-P-E-C-T should not be difficult but is within the capabilities of any properly educated individual. Obama hesitates, either because of a teleprompter breakdown or because he really doesn’t know how to spell the word off the top of his head. George Bush may have had a few such moments, and Dan Quayle actually was given a cue-card by the teacher that had “potatoe” on it. But this is significant because someone who thinks there are 57 states in the US, and cannot spell a simple word whose spelling is actually repeated twice in Aretha Franklin’s song, is making decisions that will affect all of us into the distant future. Just how ignorant is he?

But do you think this is going to be an issue for the American mainstream? The media bias in the US is so tremendous that they make our ABC seem almost impartial. The US now seems to choose presidents in much the same way they choose American Idol. Populist Cool wins against Wonky Competence. Obama will feel no embarrassment since that is not in its nature being in his own mind perfect in every way. But the US should feel embarrassment that their system has allowed an incompetent, shallow, far-left poseur to reach the top of its political tree. And with Hillary maybe next, it has a fair chance of continuing for as far as the eye can see.

Don’t call me stupid

Posted on March 5, 2014 by lawofmarkets

How do you solve a problem like Obama? He combines that fantastic combination of arrogance, ignorance, laziness and stupidity, and yet with the American institutional respect for the Presidency (at least amongst Republicans) it is hard to get Americans to make personal statements about their head of state. So now the Iranians have done it for us:

President Barack Obama is a “low-IQ US president,” whose threat to launch a military offensive should nuclear talks fail is an oft-cited punchline in the Islamic Republic, particularly among children, an Iranian general said on Tuesday.

“The low-IQ US president and his country’s Secretary of State John Kerry speak of the effectiveness of ‘the US options on the table’ on Iran while this phrase is mocked at and has become a joke among the Iranian nation, especially the children,” General Masoud Jazayeri said, according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.

You don’t often find me agreeing with Iranian generals. The effect of marijuana on the intelligence of adolescents is well understood and there was the young Barack, member of the “Choom Gang” in his high school days. But it is even potentially worse than that if we come to this editorial in The Washington Post of all places, titled President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy:

FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other leaders, in this vision, would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world. Invasions, brute force, great-power games and shifting alliances — these were things of the past. Secretary of State John F. Kerry displayed this mindset on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday when he said, of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, “It’s a 19th century act in the 21st century.”

That’s a nice thought, and we all know what he means. A country’s standing is no longer measured in throw-weight or battalions. The world is too interconnected to break into blocs. A small country that plugs into cyberspace can deliver more prosperity to its people (think Singapore or Estonia) than a giant with natural resources and standing armies.

Unfortunately, Russian President Vladimir Putin has not received the memo on 21st-century behavior. Neither has China’s president, Xi Jinping, who is engaging in gunboat diplomacy against Japan and the weaker nations of Southeast Asia. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is waging a very 20th-century war against his own people, sending helicopters to drop exploding barrels full of screws, nails and other shrapnel onto apartment buildings where families cower in basements. These men will not be deterred by the disapproval of their peers, the weight of world opinion or even disinvestment by Silicon Valley companies. They are concerned primarily with maintaining their holds on power.

This sense that Obama lacks a fixed sense of reality, that he is incapable of dealing with conditions as they are, is also found in an article by Elliot Abrams which is titled, If he believes it, it must be so and subtitled, “Obama’s scary interview”. Here is his summing up of Obama’s thoughts on Iran:

When it comes to Iran, Obama shows an attitude that can only be described as solipsistic: what’s in his mind is reality. And any other reality is just plain silly.

He has his own private reality that is not shared by any of his major advisors. A low-IQ president with a private reality of his own who will not listen to anyone else is not a good bet at making serious decisions.

How can Obama be influenced? At the moment in many cases he is prevented from doing what he might wish to because of constitutional constraints. But how can he actually be influenced? I can only think that that Iranian general might be onto something. Just call him stoopid. Say out loud that what he is doing is stoopid. That he is stoopid. His decisions are stoopid. His policies are stoopid. It’s just a thought but given that other obvious characteristic of the Obama personality, his incredible vanity, it might at least get him to concentrate a bit more on the issues and less on playing golf and shooting hoops. The US is heading for a train wreck, and will take the rest of us with it if he can’t be stopped. If they won’t impeach him, they must find some way to discipline him so that the stated policies of a president of the United States are no longer seen as an international joke.

Obama and his world of fantasty

Posted on March 5, 2014 by lawofmarkets

He doesn’t say it, of course, but Benjamin Netenyahu and the entire Israeli government does not trust Obama on a single thing. Not for his promise of support, not for his ability to understand the political and military realities and certainly not on his willingness to stand by Israel when times get tough. The only thing he absolutely believes about Obama is that he will do as much damage to Israel as he is capable of getting away with. The interview with Obama conducted by Jeffery Goldberg, which is reported in an article by Elliot Abrams subtilted Obama’s scary interview, should be read if your interest is in the preservation of the Israeli state in the midst of the most hostile American government since its founding in 1948. One exchange after another shows Obama either lying outright, or as Abrams suggests, living in a fantasy zone in his own head unaffected by reality. The final para:

Change is apparently not scary to Mr. Obama, who is confident all his policies are right. Those who disagree are uninformed, or itching for conflict, or ignorant about the risks they will soon face, or sadly unable to adapt to world events. This is the Obama who said of his own nomination that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” If he believes it, it must be so. The Goldberg interview reveals that five years in, nothing has changed.

Obama may well be mentally disturbed, more than just a narcissist but someone who is fully detached from reality. He knows everything, and is smarter, shrewder, more insightful than anyone else. Other than in his ability to rise to higher and higher political offices, nothing he has every attempted has succeeded, but in no case has he ever shown self-doubt or any recognition that the things he set out to do did not work out in reality. There is no discussing anything with such a person and normally you would not have to. And then there’s this from The Washington Post about Obama’s escape from reality in relation to the Ukraine. This is an editorial titled, President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy:

FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other leaders, in this vision, would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world. Invasions, brute force, great-power games and shifting alliances — these were things of the past. Secretary of State John F. Kerry displayed this mindset on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday when he said, of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, “It’s a 19th century act in the 21st century.”

That’s a nice thought, and we all know what he means. A country’s standing is no longer measured in throw-weight or battalions. The world is too interconnected to break into blocs. A small country that plugs into cyberspace can deliver more prosperity to its people (think Singapore or Estonia) than a giant with natural resources and standing armies.

Unfortunately, Russian President Vladimir Putin has not received the memo on 21st-century behavior. Neither has China’s president, Xi Jinping, who is engaging in gunboat diplomacy against Japan and the weaker nations of Southeast Asia. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is waging a very 20th-century war against his own people, sending helicopters to drop exploding barrels full of screws, nails and other shrapnel onto apartment buildings where families cower in basements. These men will not be deterred by the disapproval of their peers, the weight of world opinion or even disinvestment by Silicon Valley companies. They are concerned primarily with maintaining their holds on power.

OK, the President of the United States is disconnected from reality, a man who lives in his own head with a reality separate and distinct from the actual world of events. But is that it? Merely to note that this is so and then do nothing? Let your country be ruined along with your friends and allies because all avenues of escape are closed? If we know he’s crazy, why don’t we bloody do something?

The end of the age of austerity even before it began

Posted on February 22, 2014 by lawofmarkets

The US is heading the way of Detroit. Is there really no stopping this pillage. The headline is just as mad as the text of the story: With 2015 budget request, Obama will call for an end to era of austerity.

President Obama’s forthcoming budget request will seek tens of billions of dollars in fresh spending for domestic priorities while abandoning a compromise proposal to tame the national debt in part by trimming Social Security benefits.

With the 2015 budget request, Obama will call for an end to the era of austerity that has dogged much of his presidency and to his efforts to find common ground with Republicans. Instead, the president will focus on pumping new cash into job training, early-childhood education and other programs aimed at bolstering the middle class, providing Democrats with a policy blueprint heading into the midterm elections.

Does anyone in the United States think that public spending has actually been restrained? Do they actually also think that more spending will give them faster growth and higher employment? And the policy blueprint is a series of unproductive, wasteful projects that will waste more value than it creates. Early childhood education is just so value adding, in about twenty years when these children finally start to work and are so much more productive because of their early start on the education treadmill.

By the time of the next election, there will be a much reduced USA for others to salvage. It’s clearly a train wreck that no one can stop.

Top ten revelations about Obama from Robert Gates’s memoir

Posted on January 8, 2014 by lawofmarkets

The one thing that cannot be a revelation is that Obama is unfit to be president. From the Wall Street Journal, Top 10 Revelations From Robert Gates’s Memoir, a 600-page tome titled, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.

1. Contempt for Congress
Mr. Gates expresses open disdain for Congress and the way lawmakers treated him when he testified at hearings. “I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned and prone to put self (and re-election) before country.” Mr. Gates said he fantasized about storming out of hearings and quitting. “There is no son of a bitch in the world who can talk to me like that,” he writes of his fantasy.

2. Contempt for Vice President Biden
Mr. Gates expresses particular dissatisfaction with Vice President Joe Biden. He describes Mr. Biden as a “man of integrity” who “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Specifically, Mr. Gates said he opposed Mr. Biden’s proposed limited strategy in Afghanistan to focus on counter-terrorism: “Whac-A-Mole hits on Taliban leaders weren’t a long term strategy,” he writes.

3. Suspicion of White House Control
Mr. Gates described the White House and its national security team as too controlling and says that he found himself at odds with Mr. Obama’s inner circle. At one meeting in the Oval Office in 2011, Mr. Gates said he considered resigning because of the White House micromanagement and strategy. “I never confronted Obama directly over what I (as well as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta and others) saw as his determination that the White House tightly control every aspect of national security policy and even operations,” Mr. Gates writes. “His White House was by far the most centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ruled the roost” in the 1970s.

4. Friction with the National Security Staff
In particular, Mr. Gates said he was incensed by the National Security Staff and their controlling nature. “Much of my conflicts with the Obama administration during the first two years weren’t over policy initiatives from the White House but rather the NSS’s micromanagement and operational meddling,” he writes. “For an NSS staff member to call a four-star combatant commander or field commander would have been unthinkable when I worked at the White House – and probably cause for dismissal. It became routine under Obama.”

5. White House vs. Pentagon
“The controlling nature of the Obama White House, and its determination to take credit for every good thing that happened while giving none to the career folks in the trenches who had actually done the work, offended Secretary Clinton as much as it did me,” Mr Gates writes. In one meeting, Mr. Gates says that he challenged Mr. Biden and Thomas Donilon, then Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser, when they tried to pass orders to him on behalf of the president. “The last time I checked, neither of you are in the chain of command,” Mr. Gates says he told the two men. Mr. Gates said he expected to deal directly with the president on such orders.

6. Mr. Gates as Peacemaker
Mr. Gates writes that “presidents confronted with tough policy problems abroad have too often been too quick to reach for a gun. Our foreign policy has become too militarized, the use of force too easy for presidents.” For too many people, he writes, “war has become a kind of videogame or action movie: bloodless, painless and odorless.”

7. The War in Iraq
On Iraq, Mr. Gates writes that he hoped to “stabilize the country so that when U.S. forces departed, the war wouldn’t be viewed as a strategic defeat for the U.S. or a failure with global consequences… Fortunately, I believe my minimalist goals were achieved in Iraq.” The book is coming out as al Qaeda forces have seized control of key Iraqi cities and the Iraqi government is struggling to uproot the militants.

8. The War in Afghanistan
Mr. Gates writes that Mr. Obama had early doubts about his decision in late 2009 to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. “I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for the mission,” he writes. Mr. Gates says that Mr. Obama was taken aback by a 2009 request from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then commander of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, for a major military surge. “I think Obama and his advisers were incensed that the Department of Defense – specifically uniformed military – had taken control of the policy process from them and threatened to run away with it.”

9. Obama’s Domestic Politics
Mr. Gates says that domestic politics factored into “virtually every major national security problem” the Obama White House faced. At one point, Mr. Gates writes, he witnessed a conversation between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton in which the president “conceded vaguely” that his opposition to the 2007 military surge in Iraq was a political calculation. Mr. Gates called the exchange “remarkable.”

10. Hatred for D.C.
Mr. Gates writes that his reputation for having an even temper often masked his outrage and contempt. “I did not enjoy being secretary of defense,” he writes.

Here is an excerpt from the book at the Wall Street Journal.

Obama was wrong

Posted on January 6, 2014 by lawofmarkets

Well of course he was wrong but for Obama’s constituency logic and facts have nothing to do with how you should vote. It is part envy, part self delusion, part religion, part fashion statement, part greed for unearned wealth, and part guilt that gets people to vote for an incompetent like Obama and then keep on going through thick and thin. Romney was appealing to a constituency that is getting thinner on the ground: people who value personal freedom, understand the issues and want to do something about our problems in a realistic way. The media, academic world and the low information voters were a deadly combination, especially the media who now dictate terms. Someone once said he’d rather be right than president. That, you may be sure, is not the Obama mantra.

There is also a pessimism that has entered the soul of Americans, particular amongst those more or less like myself. From the article the salient opening paragraphs:

Ask people to imagine American life in 2050, and you’ll get some dreary visions.

Whether they foresee runaway technology or runaway government, rampant poverty or vanishing morality, a majority of Americans predict a future worse than today.

Whites are particularly gloomy: Only 1 in 6 expects better times over the next four decades. Also notably pessimistic are middle-age and older people, those who earn midlevel incomes and Protestants, a new national poll finds.

“I really worry about my grandchildren, I do,” says 74-year-old Penny Trusty of Rockville, Md., a retired software designer and grandmother of five. “I worry about the lowering of morals and the corruption and the confusion that’s just raining down on them.”

Imagine Rudd-Gillard only much much worse for as far as the eye can see and you can only begin to imagine just how dark the future must look to people who think hard work and effort ought to be at the core of the culture.

UPDATE: I just thought I’d change the title since it gets closer to the point. The original title was “Romney was right” but that’s neither here nor there. That Obama has not a success to his name – other than winning the elections – is far more to the point.

[Via Instapundit both here and here]

Not a word can you believe

Posted on December 7, 2013 by lawofmarkets

The fantastical will to lie at every moment is a pathology beyond comprehension to the normal mind. Obama denies ever knowing his uncle in Boston, denies he ever stayed with him when he was a student. Roger Simon discusses this improbability and takes it further. Who is this man, the President of the United States?

Around Obama there is an unprecedented silence, almost a media omertà. So much remains unknown about this man, although we do know, through the debate surrounding David Maraniss’s failed and tentative biography, that the president lied about his personal history on multiple occasions in his autobiography Dreams from My Father.

He, of course, lies when the truth will cause him harm, but he also lies when it should make no difference. Now he admits he lied about living with his uncle, although no one in the media describes it quite like that:

The White House said Thursday that President Barack Obama briefly lived with an uncle who faced deportation from the United States, correcting its previous statements that the president had never met Onyango Obama.

The 69-year-old, Kenyan-born half-brother of Obama’s estranged father was granted permission this week to stay in the U.S. after ignoring a deportation order two decades ago. The uncle is also known as Omar Obama.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said that when the case first arose, officials looked for records of a meeting but never directly asked the president.

A wilderness of mirrors.

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