When Red Lines Meet The God Complex

Years ago, I was in a Barnes & Noble (in the days when you could still find one) and I saw a book called “Richard Nixon: A Psychobiography.” The book purported to be a psychological portrait of President Nixon and, granted, his psyche I’m sure is an interesting study, but I passed on the book figuring it would be just more “Nixon was the devil, JFK was God” drivel that is crammed into the American History section.

Nevertheless, in the age of Obama, I have to think that our current president might make an interesting psychological case study for some impertinent (by liberal academic standards) researchers in the field. While Nixon was a man of many complexes and neurosis, with Obama, we may be witnesses to a pure, full-on God Complex. This term is defined as:

“….an unshakable belief characterized by consistently inflated feelings of personal ability, privilege, or infallibility. A person with a god complex may refuse to admit the possibility of their error or failure, even in the face of complex or intractable problems or difficult or impossible tasks, or may regard personal opinions as unquestionably correct. The individual may disregard the rules of society and require special consideration or privileges.

This notion was on full display today when President Obama stated, with regard to Syria:

“I didn’t set a red line, the world set a red line,” Obama said. “My credibility’s not on the line. The international community’s credibility is on the line. And America and Congress’s credibility’s on the line.”

Now, you can of course make that argument that he knows full well he set the red line, but he’s trying to cover his ass and knows his foot-soldiers in the Media will help him out. In fact, NBC’s Chuck Todd, one of Obama’s most loyal reporters, called this not a lie but a “new answer.” But I have to wonder if this doesn’t go beyond just being a sleazy politician. Notice what Obama says after stating he didn’t set the red line: The world set the red line…the credibility to be lost is the international community’s, that of the U.S. Congress and America as a whole. But Obama is not a part of any of those groups in his mind. He is Obama…he, like Evan Thomas once noted, is above it all. He is never wrong, always right and when something does go wrong, it is our failing, not his:

EVAN THOMAS: Well, we were the good guys in 1984, it felt that way. It hasn’t felt that way in recent years. So Obama’s had, really, a different task We’re seen too often as the bad guys. And he – he has a very different job from – Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is ‘we are above that now.’ We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial. We stand for something – I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God. He’s-

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

Yeah, indeed.