Crimes Against Liberty (7 page)

Though Obama frequently denounced President Bush for tarnishing America’s image abroad, he didn’t hesitate to snub Europeans when it interfered with his personal agenda. The day before he was scheduled to receive his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, Obama made news across Scandinavia for declining lunch with Norway’s King Harald V and even deciding not to visit his own Nobel exhibit—a tradition among prize recipients. “Everybody wants to visit the Peace Center except Obama,” reported the Norwegian daily
Aftenposten
. “A bit arrogant—a bit bad,” read the headline. “It’s very sad,” said Bente Erichsen, the Nobel Peace Center Director. “I totally understand why the Norwegian public is upset.”

Obama also skipped a concert in Oslo that had been arranged in his honor, as well as a meeting with Norwegian children who had planned to greet him in front of City Hall. “The American president is acting like an elephant in a porcelain shop,” observed Norwegian public relations expert Rune Morck-Wergeland. “In Norwegian culture, it’s very important to keep an agreement. We’re religious about that, and Obama’s actions have been clumsy. You just don’t say no to an invitation from a European king. Maybe Obama’s advisers are not very educated about European culture, but he is coming off as rude, even if he doesn’t mean to.”
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CAN’T BE BOTHERED

Obama’s impatience for dealing with the day to day details of his office has been widely noted. He has a big vision and doesn’t enjoy getting his hands dirty in policy details, even legislation essential to his agenda. He had a grand vision for socialized medicine that pundits routinely called “Obama’s plan,” or “ObamaCare,” but he didn’t even have his own plan when the Senate passed its controversial healthcare bill on Christmas Eve 2009. He later announced the basic points of his plan, but it was all smoke and mirrors, because the only bill that had been passed, and stood a chance of being signed into law, was the Senate bill. And that bill contained provisions Obama claimed he didn’t approve, and omitted essentials he promised his bill would contain. How else could he get away with lying about the fact that “his plan” would not include federal funding for abortion, for example, when the Senate bill clearly did?

By issuing his demands while standing outside the legislative process, Obama could deny accountability for controversial provisions of the healthcare bill. He was so far removed at times that Republican senator Charles Grassley jabbed him for his “nerve” in going “sightseeing in Paris” while exhorting lawmakers back home to ramrod the bill through Congress.
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He reluctantly learned his lesson when he was pressured into postponing a family trip to Indonesia to stay in Washington until the House voted on the Senate bill. By then, he realized he would have to personally twist arms of recalcitrant Democratic congressmen, some of whom, according to
Politico
, were “ducking” his calls.
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Obama also showed his aloofness in taking a Gulfstream Air Force jet with his wife for an expensive, taxpayer-supported date-night in New York City. So absorbed was this White House with photo-op-itis that it made the enormous blunder of dispatching a backup aircraft for Air Force One for a low-altitude flight over New York City, costing more than $300,000 and panicking some local residents who thought they were witnessing another 9/11-style attack.
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CLINICAL NARCISSISM?

The
Encyclopedia Britannica
defines narcissism as a “mental disorder characterized by extreme self-absorption, an exaggerated sense of self-importance, and a need for attention and admiration from others.” If the condition is acute it can rise to the level of a disorder marked by “deeply ingrained and lasting patterns of inflexible, maladaptive, or antisocial behavior.”
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Narcissism is described in one physician-reviewed online health journal as featuring an “excessive preoccupation with self and lack of empathy for others; an exaggerated sense of the person’s own importance and abilities. People with this trait believe themselves to be uniquely gifted.”

They are “arrogant” and “egotistical” and are “often snobs.” “They expect special treatment and concessions from others . . . and find it difficult to cope with criticism.” They have “a powerful need to be admired” and are consumed with their own feelings, having an “inflated sense of their own importance and of the significance of their achievements.... They feel entitled to great praise, attention, and deferential treatment by others, and have difficulty understanding or acknowledging the needs of others.”
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The
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV-TR)
, a diagnostic manual used by mental health professionals, lists nine traits of a narcissist, at least five of which must be present and continue for a substantial period of time for a diagnosis to be made.
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More than five of these traits easily apply to Obama.

1. Grandiose sense of self-importance.

2. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, beauty, or ideal love.

3. Sense of specialness, belief he can only be understood by or should associate only with other special or high-status individuals or institutions.

4. Need for excessive admiration.

5. Heightened sense of entitlement, leading to unreasonable expectations that others should treat him especially favorably or comply automatically with his expectations.

6. Tendency to be interpersonally exploitive. A person with NPD does not hesitate in taking advantage of others to meet his own ends.

7. Lack of empathy, an inability or unwillingness to recognize or identify with the feelings or needs of others.

8. An envy of other people, or conversely, a belief that other people envy him.

9. A tendency toward arrogant behavior or attitude.

A psychotherapist called “Robin of Berkeley” wrote a fascinating and insightful profile of Obama on the
American Thinker
website, analyzing whether Obama is a narcissist. She says that most highly successful people have some degree of narcissism, and she acknowledges that the identifying attributes of a narcissist aren’t always clear-cut. She surmises that when people ask whether Obama is a narcissist, they aren’t talking about the “garden variety narcissist,” but more likely what M. Scott Peck called the “malignant narcissist” in his book
People of the Lie
. These types, she said, are “very dangerous creature[s] capable of great evil—the Hitler’s of the world, as well as the SS guards.” Peck’s malignant narcissist is “a witch’s brew of psychopathology: a narcissist, sociopath, and paranoid, with a generous dollop of delusional disorder thrown in.”
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Robin admits she can’t offer a definitive diagnosis of Obama, but believes there are reasons to be concerned about his character and his ability to “look reality squarely in the face.” She explains that for people to become well-functioning adults they need to become attached to people in order to develop a capacity for empathy, and they must form a firm and solid identity through healthy role models. She traces Obama’s background, detailing how unlikely it is that he acquired the essential personal relationships necessary to become a well-functioning adult. Without definitely stating whether Obama fits Peck’s description of a malignant narcissist, Robin paints a picture that makes the possibility quite plausible.

Whether or not Obama ultimately fits the definition, his background is instructive for anyone trying to understand his personality and his attitudes, especially toward America and its system of government, its economic system, its record on race and foreign policy, and the overall character of its people. There is simply no way to understand Obama and his grandiose plans for America without examining relevant facts about his upbringing and mentorship.

Robin summarizes pertinent information about Obama’s history that is on the public record. He was raised, she says, “with an odd assortment of characters who seemed to have no clue about the emotional needs of a child,” and “dragged like a rag doll all over the place, and subjected to conditions that had to be disturbing and alienating.” He was abandoned by both parents, “schlepped” from country to country, treated to an alcoholic stepfather and alcoholic father, and eventually left with his grandparents with whom he’d “arrived at an unspoken pact: . . . I could live with them and they’d leave me alone so long as I kept my troubles out of sight.” His grandfather had been abandoned by his own father when he was eight, and he found the body of his mother after she had committed suicide. As an adult the grandfather was so disappointed he didn’t have a son that he gave his daughter—Obama’s mother—the male name “Stanley.” Then he entrusted Obama’s mentorship to Frank Marshall Davis, who was not only a Communist but also “a pedophile . . . an alcoholic, a racist, and a misogynist.”
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According to Robin and others, Davis, who blamed racism and capitalism for most of society’s ills and injustices, strongly influenced Obama. Obama’s search for his own identity was answered when he concluded, under Davis’s tutelage, that he “could wrap his mind around—rage at the system. Obama apparently became filled with resentment and anger even though he lived a privileged life in Hawaii.” As Obama became an adult he surrounded himself with people of a similar worldview who “reinforced and hardened” his own beliefs, people such as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and even his wife Michelle, whose animus toward this country prior to Obama’s ascension are quite well known. Robin concludes that dealing with the hardships he had encountered in life, “he made the personal political,” transferring culpability from his parents and grandparents to racism and the system.

She says she hopes Obama is not, in the end, a malignant narcissist, but closes with a chilling description of such people from
People of the Lie
: “The evil are ‘people of the lie,’ deceiving others as they build layer upon layer of self-deception. . . . Evil may be recognized by its very disguise. . . . We see the smile that hides the hatred, the smooth and oily manner that masks the fury, the velvet glove that covers the fist.... The evil hate the light—the light of goodness that shows them up, the light of scrutiny that exposes them, the light of truth that penetrates their deception.”
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James Lewis, also writing for
American Thinker
, further examines the question of Obama’s narcissism. Lewis acknowledges many people talk like narcissists, such as when teenagers “get grandiose,” but Obama has “turned all his grandiose talk into irrevocable action.” He observes Obama might well be the most radical president in American history. “We don’t have a national crisis today,” writes Lewis. “Obama
is
a national crisis.” Not only is he trying to cram his agenda down America’s throat almost without regard for whether it will damage his chances for re-election, but he has exhibited consistently odd behavior over the last two years, from giving Hillary the finger in the campaign, to “thrilling to the sound of his own voice” in Berlin, to presuming to speak to the whole Muslim world in Cairo at the Al Azhar Mosque, to personally trying “to rescue a scientifically phony climate treaty in Copenhagen,” to reacting with rage when Congressman Paul Ryan dismantled the fiscal credibility of ObamaCare straight to Obama’s face during the healthcare summit.
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This final incident, by the way, seems eerily similar to M. Scott Peck’s description of those hating “the light of truth that penetrates their deception.” Even CNN aired a montage of Obama’s peeved facial expressions at the healthcare summit. Host Candy Crowley observed, “All we’re saying is this is not the face a man who ought to play poker anytime soon. Whether you heard it or saw it, the message was pretty clear, patience and the days of debating health care are growing short.”

As Noel Sheppard of
NewsBusters
noted, this was a mild way of putting it. What Crowley would have said, had this been a Republican president, was, “The president acted like a spoiled child not only in front of America’s leaders but also on national television. The President demonstrated a surprising lack of leadership and diplomacy with his behavior, and not at all what we expected from the most powerful man on the planet whose greatest skill was supposed to be communicating and being able to bring people together.”
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This arrogance was evident in the sheer pretension of the ObamaCare legislation itself. Senator Lamar Alexander described ObamaCare as “the most brazen act of political arrogance since Watergate . . . in terms of thumbing your nose at the American people and saying ‘We know you don’t want it, but we’re going to give it to you anyway.’”
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James Lewis could have cited many other examples of Obama’s narcissistic behavior beyond the healthcare issue, from saying small town Americans “get bitter and they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them,” to Obama’s alarmingly pedestrian, unpresidential, $3 million, taxpayer-funded jaunt to Copenhagen, with his wife flying on a separate plane, to lobby for the Olympics to be held in his hometown of Chicago.
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It was remarkable both in terms of Obama’s audacity in believing he could personally deliver the prize, and his egotism in placing himself center stage in such an endeavor and in demeaning his office by reducing himself to a glorified sports agent.