Myth has it that Roman Emperor Nero (15 December 37 AD – 9 June 68 AD), fiddled while Rome burned. Historians tell us this story isn’t 100 percent true. Violins didn’t technically exist in 64 AD, but Nero — and the six-day Great Fire of Rome that destroyed approximately three-quarters of the city — were real enough. At the time, Nero blamed Christian scapegoats (then an obscure sect) for all the trouble. Sounds a lot like our current Islam-inclined U.S. president, and a political landscape where history is repeating itself.

Another telling parallel, like every opportunistic fascist, Nero happily used the crisis to clear land for his planned palatial complex — the Golden House — the Domus Aurea. You read that correctly: the buildings and ornamental gardens were already planned. This disruptive circumstance — which made half of Rome’s residents homeless — makes for nice symbolism for Mr. Obama’s own corrosive philosophy, the “fundamental transformation of America.” That too is burn, baby burn, metaphorically-speaking, of course.

In Nero’s time, his understandably skeptical citizenry suspected he caused the calamity to promote his personal agenda, but nothing was ever proven. Mr. Obama is no different in this regard. For example, his longstanding, well publicized attitude of “stupidly-acting cops” and “if I had a son he’d look like Trayvon” similarly exploit misfortune to advance his own anti-law and order mindset. In this same vein, using televised speeches to figuratively “crack a few police noggins together” foments crises that force the vague “change” of Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan.

As a result of the last more than seven chaotic years of his Constitution-violating overreach, the political needle has swung violently hard left. He has accomplished this with an imperialist’s disregard for established law. Moreover, he has also ignored custom by jerry-rigging the reassuring presidential podium into a rabble-rousing bully pulpit. His aforementioned publicly uttered racial pronouncements have encouraged the vigilantism of the Black Lives Matter mob. However, the Obama clan has no skin in the game. Unlike the rest of us, they enjoy armed 24-hour Secret Service protection.

This past week, to add further injury to the Western psyche, his anti-American ideology was in full flower from nearby Cuba, a totalitarian slave-state, and communist bur in America’s side since JFK’s 1960s. His extended selfie photo op, a three-day Obama family vacation, will do nothing to promote human rights or the American ideals of freedom or liberty. This “unconventional” choice contrarily highlights Mr. Obama’s paper tiger legacy while simultaneously further obscuring his still-undisclosed true intentions (amid an already murky personal background.)

Unfortunately, a checkered reputation is not new phenomenon in politicians. Today, as Nero, our national leaders are similarly skilled at keeping their own fingerprints off of suspected wrongdoing. Think of Hillary Clinton’s habitual lies, stream of subject-dodging double-speak, and her many scandals: Benghazi, Server-gate and Charity-gate (also known as “Clinton Cash” influence-bartering). All of this brown haze, its corrupt stink dogs Democrats like a nebulous, intangible political smog. It doesn’t matter too much with a supportive propagandist MSM in tow.

Obama mindlessly fritters away his last year while the never-say-die Clinton political machine sputters to a predetermined inevitability. (A so-called “Democratic” presidential nomination that in reality is ironically autocratic.) Nero, too, was known to “fix things” to his liking. How is that different from the ongoing absence of Justice Department indictments against she who promises a legacy-preserving Obamaesque third term? Beyond that, same as long-dead Roman emperors, Mr. Obama shares pleasure-seeking for personal gratification (read: once again, that meaningless Cuba “ego” trip). History’s echo warns that all men of their ilk practice big-government, top-down pandering to the public (when it serves their personal interests). No sweet Shakespearean rose is this, but an ancient weed known in today’s age as progressivism.

Also analogous to Nero’s insensitive “playing” is Mr. Obama’s enjoyment of baseball in Havana with Bolsheviks. His very presence there bolstering the world standing of brutal leftist dictators. Meanwhile, the smoldering terrorist-bombed Brussels airport that killed many (including four Americans, two young marrieds Justin and Stephanie Shults among them) is bereft of his attention and his set-in-stone schedule (read: attending a Las Vegas fundraiser after the aforementioned Benghazi attack or golfing directly after presidential remarks regarding the terrorist beheading of American journalist James Foley). How is any of this behavior fundamentally different from Nero’s reported “fiddling” response to Rome’s catastrophe?

Yet, in the final analysis, Mr. Obama might be more cold. Even Nero was sensible enough not to get caught the next day dancing a celebratory jig or Mr. Obama’s equivalent, an oblivious tango in Buenos Aires. For our president’s sheer insensitivity, perhaps a closer personality model is another, Roman Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (nicknamed “Caligula”). Known to be similarly self-consumed, power-loving and unfeeling to human suffering, both men specifically share a public contempt for his government’s respective Senate. Although the circumstance is unsubstantiated, to the Roman version of this deliberative body “Caligula” appointed a horse as senator. For his part, Mr. Obama simply employs an ultra-constitutional middle finger to Congress. As a result, societal chaos was a hallmark under both men’s regimes. Incidentally, “Caligula” means “little boots,” making his example also a perfect fit for Mr. Obama’s dancing feet. Cha-cha-cha.

David L. Hunter is on Twitter and blogs at davidlhunter.blogspot.com. He has previously been published in multiple in The Washington Post, The Washington Times, FrontPage Mag, and extensively in Canada Free Press and American Thinker.