Ben Shapiro

What is Barack Hussein Obama thinking?

That's the question that has to be on everyone's lips at this point. We've spent trillions of dollars of taxpayer money we don't have -- to no avail. We've created massive new entitlement programs without funding them. We've emboldened class warfare artists to take to the streets, littering America's public spaces with human debris -- all with presidential backing. We've kowtowed to dictators around the world and created new Islamic terror states in the Middle East. It's as though this man doesn't have the best interests of the United States at heart.

Maybe he doesn't.

Or, perhaps he does. The difference between President Obama and the rest of us is that he believes that America's best interests are served by accentuating her weaknesses, while the rest of us think that America's best interests are served by renewing her strengths.

It used to be easier to credit Obama's ideological agenda to stupidity or ineptitude. It seemed simpler to suggest that he really didn't know what he was doing. "He's never run a business," said the right-wing chorus. "That's why he's incapable of allowing business to run itself." On foreign policy, conservatives suggested that lack of experience was the problem -- if Hillary Clinton had been around to answer that 3 a.m. phone call, they suggest, everything might have been different. He's been leading from behind because he has no idea what he's doing.

Only now, Obama has run the economy into the ground ... and he's doubling down on his agenda. He's now had significantly more foreign policy experience than Hillary Clinton had in 2008 -- it doesn't count when your husband is president -- but he continues to see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a nuisance and the Islamists in Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, Libya, Lebanon and Jordan as potential or actual allies.

The more extreme Obama opponents have suggested that this was deliberate all along. Obama was some sort of Manchurian Candidate, in this view, an agent of a foreign power. It was this fringe element that gave the birthers so much of their momentum. Did the Saudis back him? The Pakistanis? George Soros?

In truth, Obama thinks for himself. He is nobody's tool. But he does see the minimization of American power as a tool toward his own personal power. Obama isn't leading from behind. He's leading from the front -- he's just leading us over a cliff. Obama sees America's proper place in the world as an equal among nations rather than a leader among nations. He believes in the United Nations ideal. He hopes to forge an international consensus with himself at the head -- and the only way he can gain legitimacy in the eyes of the world is to sacrifice America on the altar of the Grand Global Cause.

Obama's most telling comments all underscore this same message. He says all patriotism is equal -- the patriotism of Greeks, of British, of everyone. He rips American "arrogance" while overseas. He excoriates American consumerism, all the while maintaining that if we don't consume more, we'll go bankrupt. He says it's unfortunate that America has a leading role in the world.

When President Obama says that we're all better off than we were four years ago with his policies, he's not lying -- he's speaking the truth according to his own lights. He believes we are better off -- people aren't as jealous of us. We're taking responsibility for destroying the global economy, and now we're going to sublimate our national needs to the needs of the international community.

There's only one problem with this: It's false. The rest of the world still despises us, only now they think of us as easy marks, too. That's why Obama's quest to make himself the world leader at the expense of America will ultimately fail -- no matter how hard he attempts to escape his role as leader of the free world, he will never be able to. He is stuck in an identity twilight -- he's American, but a world citizen; he's rich, but an advocate of the downtrodden; he's corrupt, but an advocate of transparency. The American public now has the responsibility of solving his psychological dissonance by throwing him out of office, allowing him to fully embrace his global agenda without the baggage of his national identity.

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