Upside-Down

I have watched each president closely throughout my adult lifetime. Although I have disagreed with some of their policies,  I do believe that each had tried his best to improve the lot of Americans at home and conducted a foreign policy that was in the best interests of the country that elected him. Each of those presidents had successes and failures—sometimes, impressive successes and sometimes, serious failures. Almost all were flawed men, but that's no surprise, because all were human.

President Barack Obama is absolutely unique among these men. Brett Stevens (no friend of this president) comments:

There is an upside-down quality to this president’s world view. His administration is now on better terms with Iran—whose Houthi proxies, with the slogan “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, damn the Jews, power to Islam,” just deposed Yemen’s legitimate president—than it is with Israel. He claims we are winning the war against Islamic State even as the group continues to extend its reach into Libya, Yemen and Nigeria.

He treats Republicans in the Senate as an enemy when it comes to the Iranian nuclear negotiations, while treating the Russian foreign ministry as a diplomatic partner. He favors the moral legitimacy of the United Nations Security Council to that of the U.S. Congress. He is facilitating Bashar Assad’s war on his own people by targeting ISIS so the Syrian dictator can train his fire on our ostensible allies in the Free Syrian Army.

He was prepared to embrace a Muslim Brother as president of Egypt but maintains an arm’s-length relationship with his popular pro-American successor. He has no problem keeping company with Al Sharpton and tagging an American police department as comprehensively racist but is nothing if not adamant that the words “Islamic” and “terrorism” must on no account ever be conjoined. The deeper that Russian forces advance into Ukraine, the more they violate cease-fires, the weaker the Kiev government becomes, the more insistent he is that his response to Russia is working.

To adapt George Orwell’s motto for Oceania: Under Mr. Obama, friends are enemies, denial is wisdom, capitulation is victory.

For the Obama administration,  I would add—deceit is truth, incompetence is achievement, and divisiveness is a good thing.

I wish this were not so. I wish that Barack Obama wasn't a prisoner of an ideology that warps his worldview, causing him to look at decades-long friends as enemies, and allows him to hope against hope that vicious adversaries will change their ways. I wish this president valued honesty as a virtue, and placed competence above ideology. I wish that Barack Obama were a better president and a better man. Sadly, he isn't.