"Aimless Obama Walks Alone". Or Perhaps: Narcissus Unhinged?

That's the title of the Michael Goodwin piece in today's New York Post.  And it reads scary.  Goodwin paints the picture below as a man "isolated", I see it as a man slowly but definitely going insane:

The reports are not good, disturbing even. I have heard basically the same story four times in the last 10 days, and the people doing the talking are in New York and Washington and are spread across the political spectrum.

The gist is this: President Obama has become a lone wolf, a stranger to his own government. He talks mostly, and sometimes only, to friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett and to David Axelrod, his political strategist.

Everybody else, including members of his Cabinet, have little face time with him except for brief meetings that serve as photo ops. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner both have complained, according to people who have talked to them, that they are shut out of important decisions.

The president’s workdays are said to end early, often at 4 p.m. He usually has dinner in the family residence with his wife and daughters, then retreats to a private office. One person said he takes a stack of briefing books. Others aren’t sure what he does.

If the reports are accurate, and I believe they are, they paint a picture of an isolated man trapped in a collapsing presidency

Not a good place for a man with his finger on the nuclear trigger to be, at least as far as the world is concerned. As far as us as a nation, well, it's not a good place for our president to be, especially as he comes from a philosophical  tradition of preferring to destroy one's perceived enemies, if they will not bend to their will. And since Obama has turned more and more to blaming the American people for his failures...

And this narrative is not new. Sean Hannity reported, shortly after the 2010 election debacle:

“There are some Democrats that cue me into things. I got to tell you that the feeling among some people in the White House is that this president is unhinged, that he’s detached, that he’s losing it, he’s obsessed with critics, very specifically obsessed with Fox News, he can’t stand Biden, he hates the Clintons, the Clintons hate him. That the only thing he is passionate about seems to be ESPN and playing golf and and playing some basketball, the only thing that gets his interest..."

From an unsourced former insider at the Obama administration:

"...just a few days before I left, I saw first hand the President of the United States yelling at a member of his staff. He was yelling like a spoiled child. And then he pouted for several moments after. I wish I was kidding, or exaggerating, but I am not. The President of the United States threw a temper tantrum. The jobs reports are always setting him off, and he is getting increasingly conspiratorial over the unemployment numbers. I never heard it myself, but was told that Obama thinks the banking system is out to get him now. That they and the big industries are making him pay for trying to regulate them more. That is the frame of mind the President is in these days.... "

Observed behavior, from a "debt ceiling" news conference in late June:

The President came before reporters without any news to make. He seemed to want to vent a kind of unfocused rage at Congress for something...

It all had the feel of a childish tantrum by a person who desperately wishes he were living in a different reality—one in which he is the heroic man of action and his opponents are irresponsible and weak. But the fact is, the president and congressional Democrats have so far utterly failed to offer any path out of our fiscal problems—problems that they have greatly exacerbated....

But overarching all of this there seemed to be a deep rage against the realities of the moment he has found himself in, and the part he has found himself playing in that moment.

What do the gods do, when they have become trivialized, when they have become exposed, when they have been humiliated?  What do the gods do, when they have become obsessed, have become unhinged?

The gods destroy.

The signs are there.  We have been warned.  And may God have mercy on this nation his once loved...