Mr. President, You Are Sick With Self Love

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Huffington Post:

On the surface, all seems well. The administrator of NASA, Charles Bolden, gives a very warm and enlightening interview to Al-Jazeera saying that as top official of America's space agency one of his directives under President Obama is to further engagement with the Muslim world. To reach the stars, we must first have tea in the desert. Romantic and fair-minded, it seems.

But then there's the Obama administration's rose-colored relations with Russia, progressing swimmingly even as the FBI blows open a Cold War-style Russian spy ring and as Putin, Russia's dictator-in-all-but-name, runs roughshod over human rights, civil rights -- basically just rights in general.

Over the years, Mr. Obama has emphasized through his numerous personal scrapes-and-bows that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, was never America's top diplomat. That role was always Mr. Obama's, whose bowing is nothing more than protocol for America's first Diplomat-in-Chief.

For Obama, it seems, all is diplomacy. We voters were clued into this when then-Candidate Obama took a detour on the campaign trail to stomp in... Germany. But thinking of how badly the world thought of us, we endorsed the view. We too wanted a little brand management.

What we got was a president who suffers from amour-propre. Amour-propre, which translates to self-love, was the term used by philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau to describe a man's need to value himself on the basis of other people's opinions of him. Rousseau contrasted the disease of amour-propre with the healthy amour-de-soi, a love of self which motivates a man to protect himself and his life without really caring how others see him (but still acting with pity and compassion, which Rousseau considered innate).

It's what we today call narcissism, which we use to indicate someone who puts himself at the center of everything, who thinks so much of himself, but has so little personal foundation, that he has to look elsewhere -- outside himself -- for approval and justification.

It might be that Mr. Obama doesn't suffer from amour-propre on a personal level; after all, he is an accomplished man with a close family, and maybe even a sense of proportion. But on a national level -- as president -- the evidence is glaring.

For our current president the setting of American life is neither the small town nor the big city. It's global society. At Mr. Obama's first major appearance abroad, in Berlin in 2008, he declared himself "a citizen of the world" and a citizen of America. And then he told the German people: "I know that I don't look like the Americans who previously spoke in this great city."

Mr. Obama knows all too well how he, as an American, looks in the eyes of others. During the 2008 election cycle, Americans were bombarded by polls in the media measuring just how much other countries despise us. Obama, with his ear to the world, capitalized on this notion: the world must approve of us and he, the great changer, could bring that approval.

While some nations might heartily approve of the American president who is also a citizen of the world, the American people are sorely divided. The essential disconnect between Mr. Obama and the people is that for the people, global approval would be nice, but home-front prosperity and security are essential. The reverse is true for Mr. Obama, who believes by some unexplained logic that global opinion drives economic growth and protects against enemies.

But Obama has learned quickly that the logic of global opinion is largely a myth. What's left is a government of sticks and carrots. The man who ties his fortunes to the opinions of others must, in Rousseau's words:

[be] sly and artful in his behaviour to some, and imperious and cruel to others; being under a kind of necessity to ill-use all the persons of whom he stood in need, when he could not frighten them into compliance, and did not judge it his interest to be useful to them.

It's governance a la Rahm Emanuel.

While Mr. Obama may be a citizen of the world, his voters are citizens of America. It's because of this that, try as he might, he cannot ignore the domestic interest: dwindling quality of life in America. So busy worrying about how the rest of the world sees us, it seems that Mr. Obama has lost sight of how we see ourselves.
________

The Endless Ego demands having an eternally high opinion of one's self.

[Argyle58]

Wow, HuffPo. Will the MSM soon follow?

[nickydog]

I can't believe this came out of the Huffington Post!

[righteousmomma]

I can't believe this either but Rush read several items today where other liberal supporters are turning or have turned on him. I will post some of Rush when the transcript is available.

[Geee]

Not only is it amazing that this came from the Huffington Post, but it is amazing that WVR actually logged on to the Huffington Post

[righteousmomma]

Here from The Daily Beast is someof what Rush was saying:

 

http://tinyurl.com/33k6d78

 

The Elite Turn Against Obama

by Lloyd Grove

July 7, 2010 | 6:46am

 

You’d think the well-heeled and enlightened eggheads at the Aspen Ideas Festival—which is running all week in this fashionable resort town with heady panel discussions and earnest disquisitions involving all manner of deep thinkers and do-gooders—would be receptive to an intellectually ambitious president with big ideas of his own.

 

In a way, the folks attending this cerebral conclave pairing the Aspen Institute think tank with the Atlantic Monthly magazine might even be seen as President Obama’s natural base.

 

Apparently not so much.

“The real problem we have,” Mort Zuckerman said, “are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.”

 

Obama’s top economic adviser, Larry Summers, and his departing budget director, Peter Orszag, can expect heavy weather when they land in Aspen later this week to make their case to this civic-minded clique of wealthy skeptics.

“If you’re asking if the United States is about to become a socialist state, I’d say it’s actually about to become a European state, with the expansiveness of the welfare system and the progressive tax system like what we’ve already experienced in Western Europe,” Harvard business and history professor Niall Ferguson declared during Monday’s kickoff session, offering a withering critique of Obama’s economic policies, which he claimed were encouraging laziness.

 

“The curse of longterm unemployment is that if you pay people to do nothing, they’ll find themselves doing nothing for very long periods of time,” Ferguson said. “Long-term unemployment is at an all-time high in the United States, and it is a direct consequence of a misconceived public policy.”

 

Ferguson was joined in his harsh attack by billionaire real estate mogul and New York Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman. Both lambasted Obama’s trillion-dollar deficit spending program—in the name of economic stimulus to cushion the impact of the 2008 financial meltdown—as fiscally ruinous, potentially turning America into a second-rate power.

 

“We are, without question, in a period of decline, particularly in the business world,” Zuckerman said. “The real problem we have…are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.”

 

Zuckerman added that he detects in the Obama White House “hostility to the very kinds of [business] culture that have made this the great country that it is and was. I think we have to find some way of dealing with that or else we will do great damage to this country with a public policy that could ruin everything.”

 

Ferguson added: “The critical point is if your policy says you’re going run a trillion-dollar deficit for the rest of time, you’re riding for a fall…Then it really is goodbye.” A dashing Brit, Ferguson added: “Can I say that, having grown up in a declining empire, I do not recommend it. It’s just not a lot of fun actually—decline.”

 

Ferguson called for what he called “radical” measures. “I can’t emphasize strongly enough the need for radical fiscal reform to restore the incentives for work and remove the incentives for idleness.” He praised “really radical reform of the sort that, for example, Paul Ryan [the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee] has outlined in his wonderful ‘Roadmap’ for radical, root-and-branch reform not only of the tax system but of the entitlement system” and “unleash entrepreneurial innovation.” Otherwise, Ferguson warned: “Do you want to be a kind of implicit part of the European Union? I’d advise you against it.”

 

This was greeted by hearty applause from a crowd that included Barbra Streisand and her husband James Brolin. “Depressing, but fantastic,” Streisand told me afterward, rendering her verdict on the session. “So exciting. Wonderful!”

 

Brolin’s assessment: “Mind-blowing.”

 

In a session Tuesday morning, Silicon Valley guru Michael Splinter piled on. “From an industry standpoint, it’s below what a lot of people in industry have viewed as the solution to the jobs problem,” Splinter, president of the Applied Materials solar energy company, complained about Obama’s economic performance. He was speaking to an agreeable audience in an interview with Atlantic Media owner David Bradley. “When I talk to venture capitalists, their companies are starting to move their manufacturing operations out of the United States…Our corporate tax rate, on a worldwide competitive basis, is just not competitive. Taiwan is lowering their rate to 20 to 15 percent in order to stay competitive with Singapore. These countries have made it their job to attract industry. You don’t get that sense here in the United States.”

 

The consensus was similar in an afternoon panel discussion on the decline of the American middle class. “He said jobs were going to be his No. 1 priority—there’s a huge disconnect between Washington and what’s going on out in the country,” nominal Obama supporter Arianna Huffington said. “The president’s economic team kept talking about a ‘cyclical’ problem. Larry Summers said jobs were a lagging economic indicator. All these things are simply wrong. The president put all his trust in the wrong economic team—an economic team that didn’t understand what was happening...”

[Geee]

Great articleRighteousmomma!