When you’re finished reading Roger Kimball’s glorious take down of Barack Obama and his Hegel-sized ego in the new HBO documentary “The Final Year,” read Matthew Continetti’s thrashing of Obama as he appears in Ben Rhodes’ forthcoming memoir. All those 27-year-old know-nothings who populate the hallowed institutions of our modern media will no doubt be racing to their local Barnes & Noble to get a copy upon its release.
Here’s Continetti on a really silly (but illuminating) section:
Rhodes gives us a glimpse of Obama’s interactions with the political leader he most resembles. “Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told Mr. Obama that she felt more obliged to run for another term because of Mr. Trump’s election to defend the liberal international order,” Peter Baker reports. “When they parted for the final time, Ms. Merkel had a single tear in her eye. ‘She’s all alone,’ Mr. Obama noted.”
One tear: How noble, how poetic, how sad. Poor Angela. She crushes Greece in a vise, destabilizes an entire continent by inviting a million Muslim immigrants into Germany, and this is the thanks she gets: Brexit and Trump. It never seems to have dawned on either Obama or Merkel that the only people truly invested in defending the always vaguely defined “liberal international order” are the men and women who sit at the top of it. Certainly the voters are not as satisfied with current circumstances as they.
Criticisms that Donald Trump is a petty child who revels in his own vanity and ego unlike any person in human history fall pretty flat when compared to the real thing.