Eve: May I ask your name? Chance: Chance. Eve: Chance? Chance: Chance, the gardener. Eve: Chauncey Gardiner? Mr. Chauncey Gardiner. Are you related to Basil and Perdita Gardiner?

– Being There, 1979

People tell us who they are, but we ignore it. Because we want them to be what we we want them to be.

–Don Draper, Mad Men

President Obama used his third Oval Office address in seven years to say “Honey, I shrunk the country.” (I know–third metaphor.)

No other way to put it. Tonight America and the world witnessed a man reduced to his feeblest worst, an imposter posing as an American President, a child in a grown-up’s suit. Obama is Chance the gardener–a simpleton with a simplistic, childish worldview.

Obama told us his worldview in 2008, but we didn’t listen. We made him what we wanted him to be. (I’m using “we” to represent the American electorate–not necessarily the reader of this blog.)

Want to know why gun sales are setting records? It’s not because of terrorism or crime, both of which have exploded on Obama’s watch. People are buying guns because the government has lost control.

More damning, Barack Obama chose to lose control. The Paris attacks, the San Bernardino massacre–these are Obama’s policies played out in real life, like a horror movie that breaks the fourth wall.

I’m not saying he’s a Muslim or an ISIS sympathizer. I am saying he sought to diminish America’s stature in the world. He campaigned on putting America in its place. He believed that America was no more virtuous that any other country, including Nazi Germany and the Ayatollah’s Iran.

And, as Reverend Jeremiah Wright would say,** Obama’s chickens have come to roost. **

With US investigators increasingly convinced Farook and Malik were only beginning their planned mayhem when gunned down by heroic San Bernardino cops, it’s pretty clear that the world needs a virtuous nation at its head.

For nearly 100 years, that virtuous nation was the United States of America. But Barack Obama stopped all that. **He thought the perpetrators of the Arab Spring were America’s equals in virtue. **

They were not.

The next election will be a referendum on America’s place in the world. Are we just a punching bag for terrorists? Or are we the shining city on a hill with a perpetual rendezvous with destiny?

Vote wisely, my friend. You didn’t the last two times.

Hennessy's View

The Unbearable Lightness of Being There

Comments on this post are for paid subscribers