Posted on 04/27/2013 5:59:36 AM PDT by billorites
Tuesday morning, a peculiar announcement trickled out of the White House press office: President Barack Obama would be holding a moment of silence for the victims of the Boston bombings. At the White House. By himself. No press or other intruders allowed.
Except the White House photographer.
That Obama assumed Americans would want an iconic photo of him privately mourning the victims of the bombings was emblematic of a kind of hubris that has enveloped the president and his White House as the president commences his second term.
Hubris in a leader is an obnoxious thing, leading to imperiousness in governing. And it’s also a dangerous thing for a second-term president, often spelling trouble.
Unfortunately, this president’s acts of high handedness and self-absorption have been accumulating in the past several months at a blistering pace.
Even as the nation’s workers wilted under a struggling economy and high unemployment, Obama decided to take two round excursions to Hawaii at taxpayer expense over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Just six weeks later, he jetted down to Florida for a luxury four-day golf vacation where he played with Tiger Woods. Meanwhile Michelle Obama also took another vacation, skiing in Colorado.
Even as the sequester began to force those who work for him in the federal government to take furloughs and government services were scaled back – including, famously, the White House tours – Obama stepped up his golf, roaring out of the White House in his motorcade three Saturdays in a row for the 50-minute round trip drive to the Joint Base Andrews course.
In a true Marie Antoinette moment, Obama offered to pare back his pay by five percent as a show of empathy for those being furloughed. At annual salary of $400,000, that would force him to get by on a meager $380,000, in addition to a couple of hundred thousand extra dollars he can probably expect to make this year from book sales.
He had Memphis soul music legends throw a command performance for himself and the first lady in the East Room. He commended California’s attorney general for being the hottest of all the state AGs. He gave himself an exclusive viewing in the White House theater of the Jackie Robinson biopic, “42.”
On Saturday night, he’ll be partying with journalists and their celebrity guests at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association bash.
All while the nation continues to suffer under his stewardship of the economy.
When gun legislation he backed failed to pass last week, he threw an epic hissy fit in the Rose Garden, proclaiming his opponents liars who thought “it wasn’t worth it” to protect kids from gun violence.
He said contemptuously that what “binds Republicans together” is their commitment to helping the rich. He delivered his budget two months late to Congress.
Such disregard for appearances and disdain for his opposition suggests a president who perceives himself as free from the fetters that keep normal people in line and give presidents a sense of perspective.
Obama is already giving off that “L’etat, c’est moi” vibe, effectively legislating from the Oval Office.
He is picking and choosing which laws to enforce - like deciding not to deport certain groups of immigrants who would have been protected by the failed Dream Act and opting not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act.
This could be just the beginning. He vowed last week, as he has in the past, to advance his gun control agenda on his own. “Even without Congress, my administration will keep doing everything it can to protect more of our communities,” Obama said.
The vast new Obamacare law gives him an endless array of regulations to implement, offering a cornucopia of opportunities to interpret the statute in ways that give him powers he shouldn’t have. The 900-page immigration bill may do the same, should it pass.
But hubris may not only lead a president to stretch power, it can result in abuse of power.
Certainly the core of Watergate was corruption, but only a sense of hubris could have convinced Richard Nixon – late in his first term - that he could get away with the covering it up.
When Bill Clinton bounded out of the White House residence to see Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office, he had to believe he was impervious to the rules that govern others – not just because of his behavior, but because he thought he wouldn’t get caught in flagrante delicto in the fishbowl that is the White House.
And what special exemption from reality did Ronald Reagan think he had when he convinced himself that he wasn’t paying ransom when he sent arms to Iran to try to secure the release of hostages the controlled in Lebanon?
If Obama starts to get too grand a sense of himself and sheds the last vestiges of concern for how others perceive him, it could lead him, as it has so many in positions of power, to believe he is beyond accountability. And that could end up as a tragedy for him, and for the nation.
Wasn’t his hubris obvious to Politico five years ago?
Some of us were aware of this five years ago.
Asking God to bless Planned Parenthood, and by extension Gosnell goes way beyond hubris. And yet there are plenty like Chris Matthews who bleat, “he speaks with the voice of a god and not of a man.”
The thought of having the press fawn over this turd of a man for the next twenty or thirty years after he leaves office makes me want to puke.
Both of these guys pop into my mind anytime someone raises the hubris issue ~ not because of their hubris, but that of their top end campaign aids.
Obviously Duncan and I differ very little on the issues, and Obama and I probably don't agree on any issues at all, but the campaign strategy behind these fellows was essentially identical AND equally repulsive.
Seriously, sitting here in Virginia there are few state office candidates who ever drew my attention yet Obama's people did ~ they had it that he was the second-coming of Zeus or something, and that we were all idiots if we didn't support him.
Been years since we've discussed Duncan's campaign strategists methods, but they were the same.
I didn't believe it about Obama, nor Hunter, nor any candidate or would-be candidate.
It is truly vile and perverse how the libtards are always concerned about how the effects of the jug-eared ignoramous' stupidity and arrogance will impact him first, and the rest of the country second. Scum.
Obama has always had a grandiose sense of self. Yet it has taken the “smartest people” five years to see him as he is?
Does this mean the msm is going to start covering Obama the way they should have been all along? Or will this piece stand alone, a single offering to “balance”, while Politico and the rest of them return to clothing a naked emperor?
The tragedy for Obama is that he was not aborted, his unfulfilled destiny. The tragedy for our country is that he was elected by the morally retarded, twice. Significantly, his support comes from the very citizens who would have been proud to abort him as an unwanted pregnancy. Certainly everyone’s health would have benefitted.
The irony is that the only citizens who would have fought to preserve his life from the horror of abortion are those he views as his enemies.
That he survived the ravages of a fellow traveller mother, grandparents and a putative father can be viewed, albeit twisted, as an immaculate birth. He is, after all, the curse that has come upon us following our failure to abide by the principles our founders established.
IMHO, this shallow, petty man's hubris borders on mental illness.
Hey Keith Koffler... just what was it that disengaged your head from your anus orifice... the realization that everybody, including you, are to be made to suffer, so those at the bottom feel better about their own miserable lives? As we used to say, EAT IT.
The long knives are out.
I think it was Zerxes...
one of those guys anyway
“If Obama starts to get too grand a sense of himself... “
STARTS to get to grand a sense? The man stated in 08 that his election would cause the oceans to recede and this author thinks obama is just “starting” to get a grand sense of self?
And Nemesis appears to be on sabbatical.
Typical that the writer HAD to somehow equate Reagan with Obama and Clinton. Was Iran-Contra ever proven?
Was Iran-Contra ever proven?
Was Iran-Contra ever unpatriotic?
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