The Obama Trifecta: Incompetence, Arrogance, Animus

Roger Kimball says it well.

I believe that Obama is unique in the annals of American history. It’s not any individual quality — if “quality” is the right word: perhaps “attribute” would be better — that sets him apart. It’s the combination of attributes. What are those attributes?

Peggy Noonan touched on one: enormous, all-encompassing, stupefying incompetence. The man can pose. He can preen. He cannot, judging by his performance these last eighteen months, govern. His handling, which is to say his ostentatious mishandling of the BP oil spill, is only the latest evidence that he is wildly out of his depth. That episode is shaping up to be the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history. What has Obama done to address it? What would he do were we confronted with another sort of existential calamity? How would he react?

But incompetence is only one aspect of Obama’s make up. Two other attributes along with an under-appreciated, or at least under-commented on, character flaw that we must ponder in order to take the full measure of this post-modern American politician.

The other two attributes are 1) arrogance and 2) ideological animus.