Barack Obama Is the Only Sane Man in the World's Room. Source: Barack Obama.

Every day, in every way, he finds new ways to aggrandize his ego and reduce America's position in the world.

Ed Driscoll ruminates on this WaPo article on Obama's version of smart diplomacy, which some experts call Stupid Diplomacy.

By Greg Jaffe and Griff Witte April 18 at 8:54 PM

For someone who preaches the importance of diplomacy and outreach, even to longtime enemies, President Obama can be awfully tough on his friends.

In recent months, he has offended most of the United States' Persian Gulf allies. "All I need in the Middle East is a few smart autocrats," he joked privately, according to a recent profile in the Atlantic magazine. Publicly, he has said he "weeps" for Saudi and Kuwaiti children....

Even the United Kingdom, a U.S. "special" partner, has received criticism. Obama seemed to blame the postwar chaos in Libya on British Prime Minister David Cameron, who he said "became distracted by other things" and didn’t do enough to bring order to the fractious country.

...

One big challenge for Obama will be squaring the careful diplomatic rhetoric that's a standard, and frequently stultifying, part of all presidential visits with his tougher, more honest language from interviews back home.

"Leaders are going to have to deal with that dichotomy," said Heather Conley, a former State Department official and a Europe analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "and I don’t believe it's going to be very easy."

Even before he became president, Obama introduced himself to the world as a multilateralist who aimed to solve the thorny problems of the 21st century collaboratively. "True partnership and true progress . . . require allies who will listen to each other, learn from each other and, most of all, trust each other," Obama told adoring crowds in Berlin in 2008.

Who do you think is to do the Listening and Learning and Trusting in Obama's view of the world?

...

It's possible that some [foreign leaders] may be thinking back to an interview the president did late last year with comedian Jerry Seinfeld.

"How many world leaders do you think are just completely out of their mind?" Seinfeld asked Obama.

"A sizable percentage," the president replied without missing a beat. "Some of these people, you meet them, you’ll just be chatting and you look in the eyes and go, 'Oh, this guy’s gone.'"

Read the whole thing; the authors recount most of Obama's serial insults of allies. (Though the article doesn't bother noting all of his apologizing to enemies, current and former.)

Obama continues fantasizing that he has some powerful charisma and moral authority and that he can reshape the world simply by throwing some shade on parts of the world -- those parts of creation which offend his divine gaze shall reassemble themselves in forms more pleasing to Obama the Almighty.

It's a sick joke -- there has never been a president with less influence and respect around the world, yet he continues to strut and preen as if he is Adam in the garden, charged with naming each of the Ills of the world.

The weaker he is, the more his ego compensates by telling him he is mighty.

There's an old principle: If everyone in the world seems like an asshole, maybe you're the problem. After all, you're the common factor in every single one of your experiences.

And of course there's a big element of this in Obama -- the belief of the heavily feminized, academic-pretense left that world affairs are like a vicious bit of infighting in the university coffee room, and that the way you get results is by shit-talking and scorn.

David French observed this, after a high Obama official -- probably John Kerry or Obama himself -- called Benjamin Netanayu a "chickenshit."

Behold, the beautiful and delicate rhetorical stylings of our cultural and political elite...This is what happens when the academic Left runs American foreign policy.

For those who've lived under a rock for the past four-plus decades, the American academy has been characterized by two prime impulses: one substantive, the other stylistic. First, there's the substantive claim that the problems of the world can largely -- if not entirely -- be traced back to America’s sins and the sins of our Western allies, most notably Israel. These sins have caused the peoples of the world to accumulate a long list of "legitimate grievances," and the problem of anti-American or anti-Israeli violence is therefore best dealt with by dealing with the underlying grievance....

Next, there's the sophomoric, malicious style of campus rhetoric, where stigma is the preferred method of argument. It’s hard to overstate the propensity towards name-calling even of "elite" academics, and the culture of the academy is one where groupthink is enforced and reinforced through vicious rhetoric. Their opponents can’t be merely wrong. Instead they are racist, bigoted, homophobic, or -- despite professed love of the disabled -- "Aspergery."

The arrogance is overwhelming, and the fake tough-guy posture of name-calling elitists is laughable to everyone but themselves.

The Washington Post article repeatedly claims that Obama's rhetoric is "cool" and even "tough." It is nothing. It is the bloodless anger of a hollow-chested academic second-rater, spitting impotent venom at his colleagues in the break-room.

Update: What Obama Knows. Lizzy posts this infamous quote from Obama's fixer/fluffer Valerie Jarrett:

I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is...

He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability --- the extraordinary, uncanny ability --- to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually...

So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. ...

He's been bored to death his whole life. He's just too talented to do what ordinary people do.

posted by Ace at 02:29 PM

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