It’s not me, it’s you

In a year end interview with NPR, Barack Obama tells us that everything he is doing is working out really, really well. Yes, there is criticism, but is caused by one of three factors:

1. He has failed to adequately explain his approach to the American people (implication: his nuanced and highly intelligent approach to foreign and domestic policy (including "extremism") is simply too sophisticated for us bumpkins outside the beltway.
2. His political opponents are his sworn enemies, and their criticism has no merit.
3. His opponents are closet racists, and any criticism is due to the color of his skin.

Peter Wehner provides a caustic response to Obama's narrative that all of his policies are unqualified successes and that the only problem is that maybe his messaging hasn't been adequate:

This is always Obama’s explanation: He’s wonderful, his programs are fantastic successes, there’s nothing he has done wrong or needs to change. The problem is that the American people, slightly dim-witted and misled by the pervasive, suffocating dominance of conservative media in America, are blind to Obama’s stunning historical achievements. His only failure is that he’s focused too much on “just doing the right thing” and not enough on telling his story. You know Obama; he always spends too little time broadcasting his own world-historical achievements.

This is utter nonsense, of course, the delusional excuses of a narcissistic chief executive who constantly feels under appreciated. Obama’s failures are objective failures. They have nothing to do with a problem in communication; it has everything to do with a failure in substance, in conception and execution, in reality.

Yet Obama, operating in his own bubble, surrounded by courtiers and sycophants, believes in his own greatness. He not only doesn’t accept responsibility for his own missteps and mistakes; he cannot even process the information. It doesn’t compute. His mind is as brittle as his personality can be bristly. No one is to challenge the great and mighty Obama.

Kevin Williamson is equally caustic when he respond to Barack Obama's implication that his critics are closet racists. He writes:

In a pre-vacation interview with NPR, the president argued that (as The New York Times decodes the message) “some of the scorn directed at him personally stems from the fact that he is the first African American to hold the White House.” ...

This is kind of clever, in a way. The president says that much of the unhappiness with his administration is “pretty specific to me, and who I am and my background,” which is slippery in that by saying it’s about him, he’s really saying it’s about his critics, and their bigotry and prejudice. “It’s not me, it’s you.”

This is, needless to say, intellectual dishonesty, which is Barack Obama’s specialty. Yes, there are racists in the world, and they are engaged in politics, mainly in the form of basement-dwelling losers with Dungeons and Dragons avatars oinking about on Twitter. They are a significant consideration if you are Donald Trump’s psephological engineers. They are not much of a real factor if you are Barack Obama wondering why you haven’t been celebrated like one of the men on Mount Rushmore.

Something else is going on as well. Obama suggests that his critics dislike him, but haven't a clue with regard to an alternative course of action. For example, during his NPR interview, he stated: “... those who are critics of our administration response, or the military, the intelligence response that we are currently mounting—when you ask them, well, what would you do instead, they don't have an answer.”

That is, to put it bluntly, a flat-out lie. There have been and continue to be many plans offered for defeating ISIS, from no fly zones in Syria to additional boots on the ground, from military actions to remove ISIS' alternative safe havens (e.g., Libya) to modifications in our rules of engagement in Iraq, from changes to our immigration policies for countries that harbor Islamists to changes in the manner we perform domestic surveillance, from arming the Kurds with heavy weapons to diplomatic efforts to get Turkey to provide assistance.

Nah, Obama's opponents "don't have an answer," they have a multitude of answers, but this president is too arrogant to even acknowledge their suggestions, let alone implement any of them.