Obama the Clown

Beclowning is unbecoming for an American President. But for Barack Obama the clown suit fits fine. Our enemies are laughing; we are not.

The past week has seen the latest manifestation of the disgraceful way Barack Obama has acted as President.  During an interview with Buzzfeed, Barack Obama mugged for the camera. His full narcissism was on display as our selfie-obsessed president became the first American president to use one of those selfie-sticks that have come to be increasingly banned in public spaces for their sheer obnoxiousness.

Other stills can be found at my previous blog, Obama the Fool. As video of this frivolous behavior, that includes the inability to dunk a cookie into a glass of milk, trying on shades, drawing a picture of Michelle, sticking his tongue out, tossing an air basketball-can be found here. Even the New York Times described such behavior as humiliating yet Obama joked about his behavior by saying “Yolo”-you only live once.

Tell that to the grieving parents of Kayla Mueller, the American who went to Syria to help refugees, but was kidnapped and murdered by Islamic extremists. The White House found out about this murder the day of the Buzzfeed interview but, hey, the show must go on. This display of narcissism and silliness also took place shortly after the video was released by that same group of the immolation meted out to a captured and caged Jordanian pilot and while our embassy in Yemen was falling to Iranian-backed militants and our military forces fled for their lives. Lest we forget, Barack Obama just a few months before had trumpeted Yemen as an example of the success of his strategy for dealing with terrorists he had dismissed as just being a Jayvee team. How true!

Has there ever been a tech toy more suited to a man than the selfie photo is to Barack Obama? He is obsessed with them to the point that his outré behavior may start giving them a bad name. Investors Business Daily was spot on-calling it selfie-indulgence. Indulgence and Barack Obama are a perfect match.

Michael Ramirez was inspired by the above photo to draw his own cartoon (a cartoon of a cartoon?):

But the juvenile behavior was clear while he was a candidate in 2008. The faux Greek columns and temple in Denver were shockingly tacky:

 

He was god-like even then-joining the pantheon of other immortals, apparently.

Then there was the presumptuous Barack Obama presidential seal of 2008:

It has never stopped -- even after he moved into the Oval Office. He rarely met with anyone outside his own small circle of sycophants (even the arch-liberal New York Times columnist Roger Cohen has dubbed his circle -- approximately the size of an atom -- a Team of Idolizers. 

Obama is a loner who doesn’t really like people. Neera Tanden, a long-time Washington fixture and a former high-level aide to Obama said :

“The truth is, Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people.

There are exceptions: NBA stars who play basketball pickup games with him (and who wouldn’t know him from any Joe down the street but for his title), a few donors, and a lot of rappers and rockers. Jay-Z in the Situation Room gets a welcome at the White House while leaders of American allies are dissed regularly :

Experts from the reality-based community are met with indifference at best by the Commander-in-Chief, if not by contempt. Leon Panetta, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton offered advice on how to deal with adversaries and were ignored and eventually left. Well-respected professionals have refused to serve in the Cabinet (for instance, Michele Flournoy, who made clear she did not want to be promoted from Assistant Secretary of Defense to be the first female Secretary of Defense).  Flournoy was too smart to waste her time with a president who would rather rely on Valerie Jarrett for advice on…just about everything.  Jarrett has been nicknamed Valputin for a reason and also been characterized as The Worst White House Aide with a perfect record for giving bad advice. And there is a lot of competition for that designation.

The White House has declared their foreign policy doctrine: “Don’t Do Stupid Shit.”  Really? How juvenile can they be inside the White House? It started with the juvenile Reset button stunt and spiraled downwad into self-parody.

Judging from this set of photos from the official White House Flikr feed, the question answers itself:

As Jim Geraghty writes at National Review, they sure seem to play a lot of football at the White House. Maybe too much given the disastrous lack of leadership that had afflicted America (and the world) for the past six years.

And how can we forget that Barack Obama turned the famous Resolute desk of various presidents over the last 100 plus years into a footstool?

Granted, he was not the first president to do so, but bad manners are bad manners.

And Barack Obama knows about bad manners -- that might be one area where he excels.

His gum-chewing during his inauguration was bad enough, but was par for the course (could not resist that one). He has gum-chewed his way through the presidency. He gum-chewed during D-day ceremonies; while meeting with Chinese leaders, where it was called rude and disrespectful, and then with Indian leaders shortly thereafter (for good measure he insulted India by characterizing its history as a racist one). Indian media characterized it as an “ungainly sight” (he actually took the gum out of his mouth and put it back in.)

Returning the bust of Winston Churchill, disparaging Canada as greedy despoilers of the earth, stiffing British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, having an aide call Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “chickenshit” (Netanyahu served years in the Israeli Special Forces, led a commando assault into Syria, and lost his brother in the heroic Raid on Entabbe while Barack Obama was preparing for his “chooming days” at an elite Hawaiian prep school) -- bad manners in abundance.  Where was the media when Barack Obama had the disgraceful gall to snap selfies of himself and others during the funeral ceremony of Nelson Mandela?

 

Where has the media been during all of these embarrassing actions by Barack Obama? Where it has always been: in his back pocket.

Even Barack Obama characterizing Vladimir Putin as like a “bored kid in the back of the classroom” was needless trash talk.  Putin’s people tweeted their own contempt for the true bored kid:

(Putin does not have to worry about IRS audits -- or anything else from this president.)

The worst display of bad manners -- and an image that revealed to the world something that has been shockingly obvious for a while -- Obama’s complete lack of empathy for Americans who suffer at the hands of Muslims -- was this photo taken after announcing the beheading of James Foley.

 But this was a man whose perfect crease in his pants led New York Times columnist David Brooks to declare him fit to be president.  That was all it took for that bromance to take hold.

How tacky has it been for President Obama to ask people to put his campaign fund on their wedding registries, anniversary and birthday gift lists or grovel for donations by offering meetings and photo-ops with him as the sweepstakes “prize.”  Why not a dunking booth?

Then there are those hard-hitting interviews. How many press conferences has Obama had during his presidency? One used to sense that Bill Clinton, at least in his pre-Monica days, actually looked forward to sparring with reporters. One does not get the same vibe from Barack Obama.  Instead he chooses to sit down with sophisticated interlocutors such as The Pimp With a Limp or discussing his favorite type of pepper with a New Mexico talk show host as he trolled for the knucklehead vote (Obama’s base, to a great extent). There were interviews with You Tube stars such as GloZell Green -- she of the green lipstick whose comic shtick consists of such chomping away on Froot Loops cereal soaking in a bathtub of milk (who is the bigger Froot Loop, GloZell or Barack Obama?) and the relatively restrained Zach Galifianakis, who has his own goofy You Tube show, Between Two Ferns. This descent into the depths of popular culture makes Barack Obama’s appearances on the Daily Show and David Letterman look like he is being interviewed by Edward R. Murrow by comparison.

Why does he engage in this loutish behavior? Is it to be entertaining to his base (the same people who reveal their ignorance of American history and current events on the videos that are shown by Bill O’Reilly and comic talk show -- in other words, people he shares intellectual kinship with)?  He is a man steeped in popular culture; he is in fact our own pop culture president. So he may not be able to show his bona fides as commander-in-chief but he has Jersey Girls and NCAA bracketology down pat. He watches television and  sports obsessively yetblows off Daily Intelligence Briefings. His aides are reduced to handing him memos for decision-making that consists of multiple choice answers (see How Obama Makes Decisions if you are not depressed enough by now).

He may not know they speak German in Austria and that Hawaii is not in Asia and there are not 57 states in America but he knows how to sing a duet with BB King at the White House (do we really need a singing president?). Does he just want to distract Americans from the problems and disasters he has created?

At what cost this frivolity?

When enemies see a president who can’t figure out how to dunk a cookie in a glass of milk, do they see someone who can handle Vladimir Putin or the mad mullahs of Iran? Can allies trust such a man? When the White House says their foreign policy consists of not doing stupid shit and then does stupid shit, what do foes think?

Do they respect a commander-in-chief who wastes his time on such low-level pursuits, who prefers play to work (he has always had a work ethic problem)? He was never fit to be president and he has not matured into the role. He may have actually regressed. He has diminished the presidency and diminished America.

In his first inaugural address, Obama said: We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things."

He was getting started bringing childish things into the White House and outwards to the world.

Why didn’t Obama save some money and pose as the Pajama Boy from the Obamacare ads:

Certainly, pajamas could be found fit for the kid in the White House.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/02/obama_the_clown.html