This Job, Too, Is Beneath Obama

by Mark Steyn - June 11th, 2010 - Orange County Register

A man who speaks fewer languages than the famously moronic George W Bush, [Obama] has nevertheless grasped the essential lingo of the European transnationalist: Continental leaders strike attitudes rather than effect action – which is, frankly, beneath them. One thinks of the insistence a few years ago by Louis Michel, then the Belgian foreign minister, that the so-called European Rapid Reaction Force "must declare itself operational without such a declaration being based on any true capability." As even the Washington Post drily remarked, "Apparently in Europe this works."

Apparently. Thus, Barack Obama: He declared himself operational without such a declaration being based on any true capability. But, if it works for the EU, why not America? Like many of his background here and there, Obama is engaged mostly by abstractions and generalities. Indeed, he is the very model of a modern major generalist. He has grand plans for "the environment" – all of it, wherever it may be. Why should the great eco-Gulliver be ensnared by some Lilliputian oil spill lapping round his boots?

Transnationalist. Yes. That seems to label Obama rather accurately. Actually I think that Steyn may have summed Obama up better than most have been able to with that one word. Obama is not American. He is a transnationalist. He loves America as a part of the greater humanity. He is only disappointed he has to pretend to care about America as anything other than a part of something more important. That sums Obama up perfectly.

The best line in the article though is; "There are millions of people like Barack Obama, the eternal students of a vast lethargic transnational campus for whom global compassion and the multicultural pose are merely the modish gloss on a cult of radical grandiose narcissism."

That perfectly describes a couple of people in my own family. Steyn, as usual, is on a roll!