Obama's Addiction Problem

 

By Ed Lasky
AmericanThinker.com

His choom gang days are over, but Barack Obama still needs to get high -- just in a different way than smoking pot.

An early sign could be found in his boast as he stepped forward onto the stage during the 2004 Democratic National Convention -- his launch into the political stratosphere.

“I’m Lebron, baby, I can play on this level. I got some game.” The tingle no doubt went up both his legs. The adrenaline rush must have lit him up. He was referring to basketball superstar Lebron James (and we know how much Obama admires sports stars).

Has he been trying to recapture the glory of that heroic moment? Has he been spiking the football to win adulation -- much of it coming from himself and his followers? There does seem to be a pattern.

What if Obama needs to get this high, constantly?

Barack Obama enjoyed his Lebron James moment so much that he repeated it, and then some, a few years later when he took the unprecedented step for a candidate of delivering a speech before roughly 200,000 Berliners in July 2008.  

He seems to revel in using big venues to spike the football since he followed his Berlin Obamapalooza with his speech before a faux Greek temple at Denver’s Mile High Stadium

He was compared to God by Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, so perhaps his appearance in Denver just brought him closer to his fellow deities. Perhaps he was inspired by his Greek Temple time to interject himself by flying to Europe to try to bring the Olympic flame to Chicago, as he thought his mere presence would be enough to bring the games to his hometown. Had he been successful another spiking of the football surely would have followed. Obama, a modern Olympian, brought the games to Chicago. He could have boasted: I got the games.

Once he was elected, he compared his accomplishments to those in the pantheon of presidents: Washington, Lincoln, and FDR.  When then-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told him in 2009 his legacy would be that he prevented the second Great Depression, Obama replied, “That’s not enough for me.”

“That’s not enough for me.” The same words could be said by many an addict.

Does Barack Obama constantly need to get a political and diplomatic high to feed his ego? Can this explain his actions?

 He was pleased that the Affordable Care Act came to be known as Obamacare -- even though he actually had little to do with its drafting and passing (other than to be called in by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as muscle to deal with recalcitrant Democrats). He has routinely claimed it is working either exactly as it should, or better than even his own administration thought it would. He could barely skip golf to herald every “green energy’ scheme as a miracle bestowed by him. They were all good photo-ops for a man who likes the pizzazz of the paparazzi so much he has become one with his penchant for selfies.

He needs his fix on a regular basis and will do what it takes to get one. When his fast track trade bill faced resistance from fellow Democrats, he vented his anger by saying that their votes against its passage  were a “vote against me.”

Barack Obama ignored the Constitution and granted de facto amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. He spiked the football by boasting he “changed the law.” Who else can claim to have single-handedly changed the demographic and political future of America with a stroke of a pen?

On foreign affairs he has charted a path radically different from every president before him; that is, those who actually had experience and appreciated the advice of experts compared to, say, the JayVee team of tweeters Obama assembled to be his foreign policy team.

He dramatically promised a “reset” with Russia with much fanfare because, after all, everything Barack Obama does has to be accompanied by fanfare.  Al Qaeda was “decimated” and “on the run,” according to President Obama. Why would a commander-in-chief engage in such fantasy and use such a triumphant, spiking, tone? He boasted of opening a relationship with Castro’s Cuba-despite its harboring of American cop-killers and terrorists. Why take that radical step that no other President has in the past 50-plus years? Perhaps that was the very reason: because no other President has done so he felt compelled to make history (he did say the good thing about being president was that “I can do whatever I want.”) Why was his outreach to the Muslim world done from the parliament in Cairo? No other president had spoken in that venue. Spike!

 His desire for détente with Iran started early and secretly in his presidency and was a radical change in foreign policy-appeasement, if not surrender, to a regime with much American blood on its hands. His nuclear deal with Iran was going to be the Obamacare of Obama’s second term, so said his failed fiction writer/foreign policy guru, Ben Rhodes. He later said that a deal with Iran would have “my name on it.”  No previous arms treaty -- and this is a treaty, despite what Democrats and some Republicans misrepresent it to be -- has ever born the name of a president. He was so eager to spike the football that he boasted that even the flimsiest of agreements to continue to negotiate was “historic.” So was the Munich agreement.

But Obama has a heroic image of himself and his team of idolizers know how to create and burnish that image. His entourage knows what he wants and are chosen to deliver it-in abundance.

The shameful exchange of five arch-terrorists for Bowe Bergdahl, accused deserter, was hailed by Barack Obama from the steps of the White House.  Susan Rice was deployed to lie once again -- this time she declared Bergdahl had served with “honor and distinction” -- perhaps the White House actually does feel a deserter is serving with honor and distinction. Barack Obama’s exchange had to be portrayed as a brilliant one. As will be his closing of Guantanamo Bay and his passing out Get out of Jail cards to murderers.

In fact, everything the White House told us about Bowe Bergdahl was wrong. But facts do not matter just the need to peddle a good story.

His deal with the Assad regime in Syria to prevent its use of chemical weapons was called a “signature diplomatic achievement.”  Joseph Biden called Iraq one of Obama’s ”great achievements.”  The truth was that Iraq was a success by the end of the Bush presidency – a hard-earned success that Obama subsequently threw away when he abandoned Iraq.

The attacks on Libya that brought down the Gadhafi regime was also a signature achievement that Obama declared was a “recipe for success” and Hillary Clinton weirdly chortled over the murder of Muammar Gadhafi. Yemen was a model of how to succeed against terror -- except it was a failure, as was the Libyan fiasco.

We don’t even need history to show how disastrously wrong all these claims have been, since we are living in the nightmare Barack Obama has overseen: terror groups in control of the largest amount of territory and wealth in history, genocide in Syria, murders of Christians throughout the Middle East, Yemen collapsing, the mullahs in control of at least 5 (and counting) Middle East capitals, refugee crises, Putin reassembling the old Soviet Empire, the fall of which he declared to be the worst event ever to happen in the 20^th century, Iraq falling under the control of Iran, Afghanistan soon to become Talibanland -- again. There are clear signs that Barack Obama is determined to be the father of Palestine. How many presidents can boast of having created a new nation? That will be a Lebron James moment on steroids.

And to top it off, Obama is paving the way for Iran to have a nuclear arsenal that will lead to nuclear proliferation throughout the most unstable region in the world, singularly destroying 70 years of American nonproliferation policy. His appeasement overtures to Iran have alienated the Sunni Muslims and given rise to ISIS -- who now rampage across most of the Middle East and swaths in Africa. Sunnis will not forget how America empowered their Shiite enemies, and there are nine Sunnis for every Shiite in the Muslim world.  The math is simple. The terrorism has just begun. Quite a record for our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president, and he still has 17 months left in his presidency. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote, Barack Obama is a master of trading future calamity for temporary gratification.  As is true of most addicts.

He doesn’t seem to even care about the future world he will be leaving behind.  He tried to reassure opponents of the nuclear deal with Iran that it will not be able to develop nuclear weapons on “my watch.” He also admitted that at the end of the ten-year deal being negotiated (well, not really negotiated since Barack Obama has granted a cascade of concessions), Iran will be able to develop nuclear weapons in short-order.  In other words, a nuclear Iran will be a problem for others to deal with while Barack Obama gets to celebrate a “historic deal.”

The problem with Obama’s need for a fix is that he may be the one that gets the highs but we are the ones who will have the hangovers.