Obama Speech Analysis: A Weird Journey Through the Mind of a Narcissist

By John Hayward

...The President's address was an exercise in psychodrama, a weird journey through the mind of a narcissist who can't believe all the nasty things people are saying about him.

Obama's id is wrestling with the comparisons between his Libyan intervention and George Bush's action in Iraq. He made a point of criticizing Iraq, which had a vastly larger international coalition behind it than Obama does now, united in the struggle to depose an even more gruesome and sadistic monster than Qaddafi. He warned us that we might be stuck in post-Qaddafi Libya for a while because "40 years of terror left Libya fractured." The left never cut Bush any slack for trying to rebuild a country traumatized by decades of terror from Saddam Hussein.

The President's ego is very sensitive to the criticism that his handling of the Libyan situation was lazy and disengaged. He's constructed a new narrative in his own mind, where he "created the conditions for others to step up," leading the Europeans to declare "a willingness to commit resources." Thus does Obama retroactively become the hero of a military operation France, England, and Hillary Clinton dragged him into, and which he authorized with a few peevish phone calls from a South American junket.

Obama is clearly working through some deep issues about the Clintons.

He took a few unexpected, oblique shots at Bill Clinton, noting that "the international community waited more than a year" before intervening in Bosnia, while Obama got ordinance dropped on Tripoli "in 31 days." He also congratulated himself for refusing "to wait for images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action." You might want to put some ice on that, Mr. Clinton.