El Generalissimo

There’s a certain fascination with those leaders who not only fail but fail spectacularly, men who are so profoundly incompetent yet charismatic that they can convince entire nations to follow them to their doom. Simon bar Kochbar, Peter the Hermit, Robespierre, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, and Nicolai Ceaucescu all come to mind as men who captivated their people with charm and brutality and led tens of millions to their deaths because they didn’t know what they were doing, and although the number of his victims was thankfully far fewer, my personal favorite has always been Generalissimo Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. A master of fiery rhetoric and navigating the dangerous world of Mexican politics, Santa Anna rose to ultimate power not once but twice, wielding a combination of deceit, treachery, egotism and ruthlessness. Dressed in elegant uniforms and styling himself the “Napoleon of the West,” he spent two years putting down revolts during which he never faced an opponent on equal terms until he was defeated by Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto, the result of which was the loss of Texas, the Presidency of Mexico and exile to Cuba. Given the opportunity to return to Mexico to broker the peaceful annexation of Texas by the United States in 1845, Santa Anna promptly violated the terms he had accepted, resumed the Presidency and defiantly announced that any attempt to annex Texas would be considered an act of war, thrilling his countrymen with patriotic fervor against the hated gringos. However, his actions could not equal the passion of his speeches. After wiping out a 63-man patrol of the U.S. Army along the Rio Grande (outnumbering them by at least fifteen to one), Santa Anna proceeded to lose every battle for the next two years until the Americans marched through Mexico City and Mexico was forced to surrender almost everything between the Rio Bravo and the Canadian border, some 500,000 square miles of territory. That being the final straw, what was left of the Mexican government deposed the Generalissimo again, unable to endure the loss of half their land and unwilling to risk the loss of even more. However, there is no explanation as to why so many Mexicans would trust Santa Anna a second time against a far stronger United States when he had already lost Texas to a weaker foe. Such is the lure – and the cost – of personality.

Barack Hussein Obama, 44^th President of the United States, Priest-King and Sultan of the Caliphate of the West, is another of history’s epic failures. A man who, by his own account, enjoyed a sheltered upbringing and has no obvious reason to hate his own country, nonetheless hates it with passion, is ashamed of and embarrassed by it. Mesmerizing the entire world with his predictions of a post-political paradise, he ascended to the most powerful office of the most powerful nation in the history of the world and immediately set about deconstructing it. With America suffering through the worst economic recession in thirty years, he insisted on a massive public spending bill that rewarded his labor union allies but no-one else; issued thousands of new regulations designed to throttle productivity and growth; fanned the flames of racial division; precipitously retreated from Iraq and apologized profusely for America when no apologies were called for; added $9 trillion in debt when we already owed $10 trillion that we couldn’t pay; punished the coal and oil industries and threw $4 billion away on solar energy and pond scum; fired the CEO of General Motors when he had no legal or Constitutional authority to do so; passed the largest entitlement program in the history of mankind, folding the nation’s health care industry into a Federal government already bloated, inefficient and corrupt; used the IRS to flay his political enemies and wiretapped reporters who were insufficiently loyal; changed Obamacare 51 times without legal authority; released over 100,000 illegal immigrants from incarceration and relieved 800,000 others from the threat of prosecution; traded five Taliban commanders for one U.S. Army deserter; blamed a terrorist attack that left four Americans dead on an Internet video that nobody had ever heard of; cut $1 trillion from the Pentagon budget as the world burned from Islamic terrorism and Russian and Chinese adventurism; normalized relations with a Cuban regime that still executes political prisoners;  and contracted an agreement with Iran that gives them $150 billion in frozen assets and relief from international sanctions in exchange for allowing inspections at some sites with 24 days’ notice and trusting Iran to inspect others themselves. If we wrote a script for the most laughably incompetent way to govern the greatest country that has ever existed, a script calling for destroying America economically, socially, militarily and diplomatically, we could do no better.

Like so many failures of the past, Priest-King is deluded. From his youth, he has held a messianic vision of himself, exacerbated by the fervent and repeated assurances of others that he was simply more intelligent, more sensitive, more intuitive, more articulate, more sophisticated, more anything than anyone else.  People like him, they trust him, they believe in him, they do things for him that are unethical, immoral and even illegal because they think he is so transcendent, charting the course from mere hubris to demagoguery, from petty huckster to dictator. The fact that economies behave at odds with his design does not deter him, neither do the realities of war, diplomacy, law or human nature, because it is his intent that matters, not the results. Of course, he would prefer that people could keep their health care plan and doctor and hospital and save $2500 per year and Obamacare itself only cost $1 trillion, but if they can’t and it doesn’t, it’s not important: He intended it to be so. If Russia intervenes militarily in Syria, ordering us to stop our airstrikes and evacuate our personnel so they can bomb our allies, he dismisses their aggression as proof of their weakness and then plays golf because it’s not his failure to assert American power that invited their intervention, but his intent that Syria should be peaceful and united and free of Assad.  Priest-King employs a serene detachment from reality, operating in a sanitized ether (“ISIS is contained”) in which the only permanent element is his ego, standing golden and majestic and aloof from the tragedy he has wrought. And what an ego, validated in 2008 and then again four years later, even after the voters (“the proletariat,” though he dare not utter it) had volumes of proof of his massive ineptitude and unsuitability for his office, even after they knew that he was an ideologically-driven, cardboard cutout! And validated again with the Nobel Peace Prize, simply for being black (a fact that he does not dwell upon, otherwise it might bother him), leaving him unique among the leaders of history! Yes, his “strategy” against ISIS reads like an Ed Wood screenplay, yes, 129 people were just gunned down and blown up in Paris because of his fecklessness (“a setback,” in his words), and France will be leading the fight against the homicidal savages and not the United States, but doesn’t that validate his foreign policy since Day One? The world is working out its own problems without first relying on American money and tanks and isn’t that a legacy worth having?

In fourteen months, if he decides to obey the Constitution, Priest-King will relinquish the Presidency and assume his role as one of the Beautiful People, shuttling from Chicago to Washington to Martha’s Vineyard to Geneva on private jets, dining on poached salmon, sipping champagne and dispensing his wisdom at $500,000 a pop. A Presidential Library and Museum will be built in his honor, he will receive a $400,000 annual pension and Secret Service protection for the rest of his life, an office and staff at the taxpayers’ expense, and he will write a memoir extolling his achievements for $25 million or so. He will establish a foundation and persuade Leftist millionaires to contribute to it, he will appear on television and at movie premieres and swanky social occasions and he will never drive a car again, and he will accumulate fabulous wealth, and as far as I’m concerned, he can have it all: Having left us a weak, impoverished, disrespected, divided and leprous nation, he can have the most lavish exile in the history of exiles as long as he never, EVER returns.