Some Answers

What's wrong with obama? It's a question that's being asked more and more, by both conservatives and liberals. Here's a few answers that should lend some urgency to the 2010 and 2012 elections.

Concern regarding obama's ability to manage, much less lead, this country has been spreading like oil across the Gulf. As pointed out here and elsewhere, even hard-core liberals are abandoning obama's sinking ship. Left unanswered, however, is the question of why is he becoming such a spectacular failure.

It's not due to a lack of intelligence (intelligence in this case being defined as the ability to learn and to reason, at least to a limited extent). After all, he did get a B.A. from Columbia and his law degree from Harvard, a pair of overrated but nevertheless academically rigorous universities. That indicates some learning ability.

And he did orchestrate his rise through the ranks of community activists into politics. He ran effective campaigns for state senator, U.S. senator, and, God help us, president. This shows he's capable of formulating and executing a strategy.

So why is he such an ineffective president? Some have speculated that it's due to his lack of executive experience. Nothing in his past has prepared him for a job as complex and demanding as leader of the free world. This is a variation of the Peter Principle, which states that "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence," and its corollary: "in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties."

There is some merit in this, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think that at some level obama is deeply and fatally flawed. A recent article, written by a psychotherapist, explored the possibility that he suffers from some form of psychotic disorder.

"Obama's family tree is replete with the unbalanced. His maternal great-grandmother committed suicide. His grandfather, Stanley Dunham, was particularly unhinged: He was expelled from high school for punching his principal; named his daughter Stanley because he wanted a boy; and exposed young Barry to not just drunken trash talk, but unrestricted visits with alleged pedophile Frank Marshall Davis. Barack Sr. was an abusive, alcoholic bigamist.

Obama … seems to have delusions. His believing he has a Messiah-like special gift smacks of grandiose delusions. His externalizing all blame to conservatives, George W. Bush, or the "racist" bogeyman hints at persecutory delusions.

If my assessment is accurate, what does this mean?

It means that liberals need to wake up and spit out the Kool-Aid...and that conservatives should put aside differences, band together, and elect as many Republicans as possible.

Because Obama will not change. He will not learn from his mistakes. He will not grow and mature from on-the-job experience. In fact, over time, Obama will likely become a more ferocious version of who he is today.

Why? Because this is a damaged person. Obama's fate was sealed years ago growing up in his strange and poisonous family. Later on, his empty vessel was filled with the hateful bile of men like Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers.

Obama will not evolve; he will not rise to the occasion; he will not become the man he was meant to be. This is for one reason and one reason alone:

He is not capable of it."

That's one explanation for obama's floundering in office. It certainly explains why he doesn't learn from his mistakes. But it doesn't explain his warped political philosophy, his underlying ignorance of and disdain for the bedrock principles of this country. For that we need go no further than his background and upbringing.

Because obama's formative years were spent outside mainstream America, he is not imbued with traditional or even generally accepted American values. He is basically an outsider.

"One of the reasons a lot of Americans find Obama oddly foreign is that he had an oddly foreign childhood: his formative years were spent in Indonesia. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born there. The rest of Obama's childhood was spent in Honolulu, a Pacific Ocean capital soaked in East Asian culture.

Obama is the first US president who was raised without cultural or emotional or intellectual ties to either Britain or Europe. The British and the Europeans have been so enchanted with 'America's first black president' that they haven't been able to see what he really is: America's first Third World president."

Another commentator has termed this "alien rule:"

"... the Obama administration and its congressional collaborators almost resemble a foreign occupying force, a coterie of politically and culturally non-indigenous leaders whose rule contravenes local values rooted in our national tradition. It is as if the United States has been occupied by a foreign power, and this transcends policy objections. It is not about Obama's birthplace. It is not about race, either; millions of white Americans have had black mayors and black governors, and this unease about out-of-synch values never surfaced.

Awareness began with Obama's odd pre-presidency associations, decades of being oblivious to Rev. Wright's anti-American ranting, his enduring friendship with the terrorist guy-in-the-neighborhood Bill Ayers, and the Saul Alinsky-flavored anti-capitalist community activism. Further add a hazy personal background -- an Indonesian childhood, shifting official names, and a paperless-trail climb through elite educational institutions.

None of this disqualified Obama from the presidency; rather, this background just doesn't fit with the conventional political résumé. It is just the "outsider?" quality that alarms. For all the yammering about George W. Bush's privileged background, his made-in-the-USA persona was absolutely indisputable. John McCain might be embarrassed about his Naval Academy class rank and iffy combat performance, but there was never any doubt of his authenticity. Countless conservatives despised Bill Clinton, but nobody ever, ever doubted his good-old-boy American bonafides.

But far worse is Obama's tone-deafness about American government. How can any ordinary American, even a traditional liberal, believe that jamming through unpopular, debt-expanding legislation that consumes one-sixth of our GDP, sometimes with sly side-payments and with a thin majority, will eventually be judged legitimate? This is third-world, maximum-leader-style politics. That the legislation was barely understood even by its defenders and vehemently championed by a representative of that typical American city, San Francisco, only exacerbates the strangeness. And now President Obama sides with illegal aliens over the State of Arizona, which seeks to enforce the federal immigration law to protect American citizens from marauding drug gangs and other miscreants streaming in across the Mexican border."

So to sum up, obama's family history is suggestive of mental instability, his upbringing instilled in him Third World and un-American values, and his education and early associations in this country reinforced those outsider traits. God help us all.

Hurry November...