Copyright 2010 by John T. Reed

Why does he say and do these things?

We see it again and again on TV and in the print media and we hear it again and again on talk radio. No one from any point on the political spectrum can figure out what the underlying theme is in Obama’s various actions and statements. He recently took both sides of the mosque issue in a 24-hour period and the consensus seems to be that he did not need to take any side, let alone both.

There always ensues tortured, convoluted analyses of why he did that and what he was trying to accomplish with it. These analyses are themselves illogical and unpersuasive and, to the extent that they seem to have any merit, they are invariably refuted days or weeks later when Obama pulls another inexplicable stunt that, if nothing else, cause the previous pundit to abandon his previous theory.

Sir Walter Scott explained Obama in 1808

I think I have the explanation that covers it all. On 8/19/10, in a dialog with Chris Wallace, O’Reilly seemed to partially figure it out as well. Wallace said Obama was arrogant. O’Reilly said it appeared to be plain old incompetence.

He used to comment about Obama with kid gloves, reveling in his scoop of getting an interview with Obama during the campaign. Apparently O’Reilly has now abandoned hope of that lightning striking twice and is saying what he really believes about Obama. I think O’Reilly is half right about Obama. He is incompetent. The other half is he is dishonest.

Obama’s seemingly contradictory and erratic statements and actions were explained by Sir Walter Scott in 1808 in his poem Marmion. The pertinent lines are:

Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!

Pundits are trying to explain a tangled web with coherent political theory. You cannot explain a tangled web at all—at least not with political theories.

One of the lessons we were explicitly taught at West Point was never bluff with regard to your knowledge. If you don’t know, admit it immediately.

Obama did not go to West Point. He went to Harvard Law School. I did not go to Harvard Law School. I went to Harvard Business School. Bluffing did not come up at Harvard Business School except that it is an acceptable negotiating technique. I do not know what they teach about bluffing at Harvard Law School, but I surmise they like it because legal practice involves a lot of negotiating and trials involve bluffing. For example, there is an old saying in law:

If the law is on your side, pound on the law.
If the facts are on your side, pound on the facts.
And if neither are on your side, pound on the table.

Pounding on the table when you have no “cards” is a form of bluffing. Pounding on the table is all Obama knows how to do.

Many have observed that Obama seems uninterested in and uncomfortable with governing. He likes and is comfortable with campaigning. So he has simply refused to govern and has kept on campaigning as though elections only decide things like your home address and which plane you take to get to your next campaign appearance. He outsourced the stimulus, health care, earmarks, and finance bills to Congress resulting in 2,000-page monstrosities. In contrast, the most famous bill of the 20th century, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was 16 pages long. President Johnson was totally in charge of that one.

Obama is, in fact, a liar and an incompetent.

Rush Limbaugh says Obama is the least competent person in every room he enters. That is an exaggeration. One presumes he is often alone with Michelle and/or his daughters and that he is probably the most competent person in the room at those times. Other than that, however, I have trouble thinking of a room where Limbaugh is wrong about that. I welcome other examples of exceptions to that rule from readers.

Most competent in a 6th grade classroom?

One reader said he may have been the most competent guy when he spoke to the 6th grade class with a teleprompter given the poor quality of many public school teachers. I know education majors typically had lowest SAT scores of any major when they were in college. But I still suspect they are more competent at teaching a class than Obama is at anything. He is not a very high bar. Obama might beat a public school teacher in a BS artist competition, but until less both the teacher and the secret service left the room, I doubt Obama would be the most competent person in that class room. And if they took the teleprompter with them, I suspect he would lose an “are you smarter than a 6th grader?” competition.

Obama is incompetent to be president of the United States. He is actually incompetent to be much of anything. See my article in which I put him through several different low-level job interviews during the campaign. His resume is essentially empty. “Community Organizer” is not a job or career any of us ever heard of before Obama. We know about race hustlers like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright, but Obama never admitted he was a race hustler. And if he was, he was not successful at it.

Won by default and “present” except when he was on vacation

He was a state senator. He got that job by disqualifying all of his Democrat opponents from the primary because of technicalities in their filing documents. In the job of state senator, he famously voted “present” often. When he ran for Congress, he was defeated by a convicted felon (weapons charges) ex convict who pointed out that Obama was in Hawaii and missed a vote on the most important bill of the year: gun control. That was reportedly the main reason Obama lost.

He was also a U.S. senator. He won that because both his Democrat primary opponent and his Republican general election opponent self-destructed in sex scandals, the latter resulting from a Chicago newspaper getting Jack and Jeri Ryan’s sealed divorce papers opened up. Because he was a rising Democrat star, the party leadership in Congress made him head of a Senate committee as a rookie—almost unheard of. He ignored the committee chairmanship, never held a single committee hearing, and spent almost his entire senatorship campaigning for president.

Empty suit mediocrity

He is an empty suit. Hoover Institute Fellow Shelby Steele called Obama a “mediocrity.” I do not recall ever hearing anyone talk about Obama’s “core values.” Reagan’s core values were often talked about and guided him as president. Hillary has core values. The reason Obama’s are not talked about apparently is he has none that anyone can perceive. Indeed, there is no evidence he has a core anything or even a core itself. I think he is a psychiatrically defective narcissist and sociopath.

We do not need political pundits to analyze narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder (sociopathy). We need psychiatrists. If that’s who was analyzing Obama on TV, I think viewers would see the first coherent explanation of why Obama says and does what he does. Trying to fit his erratic, inconsistent behavior into a political strategy is simply a search for an answer inside the wrong silo (academic compartment that is very deep in knowledge about an academic specialty but dangerously ignorant of knowledge in nearby related compartments).

• Is he anti-war as he claimed and used to win the Iowa caucuses? He sent 30,000 troops to Afghanistan and changed his mind about closing Guantanamo.
• Is he opposed to don’t ask don’t tell? He says he is, but he has done nothing to repeal that law which was signed by Democrat Bill Clinton. Even the military generals who previously opposed it now say it was a mistake. So who is stopping Obama from repealing it?
• Is he a socialist? He says no but he presides over a federal government which runs FNMA, FHLCM, Sallie Mae, GM, AIG, Chrysler, and many banks and has massively increased control over health care and finance.
• He claims to oppose tax increases on those who make less than $250,000 but has already signed many into law as parts of stimulus, health care, finance reform, etc.

As a result, everyone at both ends of the political spectrum is mad at him. Many in the left middle are still OK with him but more because they are not paying attention or feel they have no alternative than because he is consistently left middle. He is consistently nothing.

Can’t keep his story straight

The fundamental problem is Obama is both incompetent and dishonest. He simply cannot keep his story straight because he there is no story. Liars have trouble keeping their story straight about what happened because what they say happened is totally made up. There are no underlying facts or memories to recall when discussing the subject over time. Obama can’t remember what lie he told last time the issue in question came up. He is making it all up as he goes along.

He seems to figure that act got him from nowhere into the Oval Office in the past so he must be very good at it and certainly adequately good at it to bullshit the American people and the world for another six and a half years.

In fact, he is in over his head. He has no core values or principles or vision. He has no pertinent training or experience.

Mr. Cool

He seems to think he is Mr. Cool. Witness his self-conscious, loose-limbed act when he meets other people in front of a camera and his preying mantis forearm position when he self-consciously descends the Air Force One steps without ever, ever, touching the hand rail. Truly cool people do not do an unvarying shtick when they meet others, nor do they think about where their hands are when going down stairs. On an unusual set of stairs like those from a jet doorway, truly cool guys would probably hold the hand rail and would not care or even think about what anyone thought about their doing so.

He seems to fancy himself Mr. Bring Us All Together notwithstanding consistent evidence to the contrary in the Cambridge beer fest, Copenhagen I (Olympics bid for Chicago), Copenhagen II (Global warming conference), sucking up to all the countries of the world and getting nothing for it, the health care meeting with Republicans, and so on.

He seems to think he can Cool Guy and “dialog” America and the world for the next six and a half years and that will be sufficient to get him re-elected president and subsequently, President of the U.N General Assembly. He seems in denial that he could be failing and there are no signs that evidence of that, like the various state elections that his side lost, shake him out of his delusion. It appears that even a thumping in the fall of 2010 that gives the House back to the Republicans and causes Nancy Pelosi to go back to being San Francisco Congresswoman Pelosi will not wake him out of his dream world. He seems very close to oblivious to what is happening. His party seems to mirror that, perhaps because with him in the White House for another two and a half years, they feel they have no choice but to pretend they think he is doing a great job. Pretending Obama is doing a great job as his approval rating falls by the week and his disapproval rating rises by the week is not likely to endear Democrat candidates to the electorate.

Obama thinks he can fake it—pretend to be cool and confident and have everything under control, blame everything bad on Bush, and take credit for anything good that happens, like the oil leak being plugged, even though he had nothing to do with it. His reaction to polls that show none of this is working with the voters anymore seems to be to blink and think, “That can’t be right.”

The Great Unsustainable

There is also The Great Unsustainable. Everyone including Obama himself says current federal spending and borrowing is unsustainable. They are right. I just wrote a book about what happens when the unsustainable stops being sustained (How to Protect Your Life Savings From Hyperinflation & Depression). What happens is the world bond market stops buying U.S. bonds. Selling those bonds is how we borrow so we can deficit spend and pay off the old bonds that we sold to deficit spend in past years. When the bond market stops buying those bonds, we have two choices:

A. default on the national debt and cut spending, mainly entitlement programs, about 45% or
B. sell the bonds to the Federal Reserve

Choice A would rock the world of the people who receive entitlements: Social Security recipients, Medicare and Medicaid patients, federal pensioners and people and entities around the world and in the U.S. who purchased U.S. bonds.

Choice B would cause hyperinflation. That means, the U.S. dollar would become worthless in months.

The longer Pelosi, Reid, and Obama are in power, the sooner that day will come. If they are in power when it hits, they will try every doomed-to-fail program imaginable like wage and price controls, confiscation of gold, prohibition against sending money to other countries, tariffs, and so on. That will make things far worse if you can conceive of them getting any worse than choices A and B. See the typical government reaction to financial crises chapter in my Hyperinflation/Depression book.

Not only is Obama and his party in denial, the American people and most of the pundits are also in denial. Some cannot admit they were wrong about Obama. Others cannot bring themselves to believe that in the most perilous economic situation in the history of the U.S.—far more perilous than the Depression because we only had a 17% debt-to-GNP ratio then; about 90% and soaring like a rocket now—we have an incompetent in the White House and borrow-and-spend maniacs in charge of the House and Senate. Since all the Congress knows as the solution to everything is borrow and spend, they will try to throw more of that “gasoline” on the “fire” when it breaks out.

I predict that some of Obama’s inner circle will start writing exposes about his emptiness, dishonesty, and incompetence. Their alternative is to accept blame for what has happened and what will happen in the future.

But the bigger issue is the end of The Great Unsustainable. How long we have until that happens is not possible to predict. There are too many variables worldwide. But the president, Congress, and the American people need to get over the mass denial, recognize our precarious situation, and take emergency steps to minimize the damage now.

John T. Reed