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“I think that is interesting,” Steyn said. “I mean, I think that if you look at Obama, he was wafted upwards basically through Columbia, Harvard Law, the Harvard Law Journal, community organizing, the Illinois legislature, the United States Senate – without ever lingering in those jobs long enough to have to do anything. He basically was someone who was kind of just wafted upwards through the system until he became the beneficiary of the ultimate waft into the Oval Office. And for the first time – for the first time in his life the words he said, and the actions he takes have consequences – for the first time ever. This is a guy who, you know as far as I know, has never had a paper route. This is the first time what he does has consequences and so the senator’s words are interesting.”

I was reading about African-Americans who graduated from Ivy League colleges in the '60s and '70s, the first large intakes involving what would later come to be known as affirmative action. The expectation was that they'd be grateful for the opportunity. In fact there was much anger. They'd become very resentful and embittered.

Obama wasn't a part of that generation, but the attitude was very much in the air among his older African-American contemporaries. There's a sense of entitlement that takes life's obstacles as personal affronts or insults. One could speculate about the reasons, but at this point it's not something one can be surprised about.

“And the fascinating thing about this 1967 borders stuff is whether he intended it as a conscious shift in U.S. policy that would allow the Israeli government or whether it – with the casual arrogance of his half-wit 12-year-old speechwriter, it just somehow got in there and he finds himself up there saying it,” Steyn said. “That’s what I don’t understand.”

I suspect he just read what was on the teleprompter. You can psychoanalyze it as an indication of a mental conflict or ambivalence -- wanting to lean in both directions at once -- but it's doubtful that it was intended as a major policy departure.

“As we were talking last week, you know I think he has a — I think it’s hard to avoid the growing feeling that he is a contempt for long-time American allies,” he said. “I think he has in that sense a contempt for the United Kingdom and India. I hear from Indian politicians all the time and Indian diplomats who are amazed at his off-handedness toward India. And I think Israel falls into that category too. There are deep-seated historical reasons for this. I think there are perhaps some peculiar psychological ones in the back of his mind too.

More than France, or Germany, or Austria? If the "anti-colonial" idea so many people attribute to Obama has any relevance it's here. It shows up in the crappy present he got Britain's last PM, rather than in his policies at home: take someone of Obama's exact background minus the Kenyan dad, and he'd pursue Obama's whole domestic agenda, so it's not anti-colonialism that fuels his health care or energy or stimulus policy.

Arguably some remnant of his father's anger is behind his attitude in foreign affairs. But what about our old friend, narcissism? Couldn't it just be that Britain or India or Austria really doesn't make much of an impression on him?

Politicians can be funny in that way. They can be extremely ingratiating with people they need something from. But if you don't have anything to offer them, you're off the radar screen.

[gitmo]

Well, I sat there for four months, along with him, actually, that’s not true, with three other people, watching him meticulously plan the boldest, the boldest decision, the boldest undertaking any president has undertaken on a single event in modern history.

Obama undertook something more bold, more daring, than the D-Day invasion, the standoff against the Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba, confronting the Soviets to tear down the Berlin Wall, or halting all air traffic in the US and declaring War on Terror after 9/11? What could that undertaking have been? I've seen nothing in this man's actions that would compare to any of these.