Comparative Egos

Obama's cool family vacation in Cuba got me thinking. Primarily, I was thinking about leadership styles. Not that there is any leadership style in Cuba. Down there it is all about intimidation and blunt force.

There are two world leaders, today. trying to project a particular style. And they are literally and figuratively worlds apart. Except in the size of their egos, they could not be more different. 

Vladimir Putin goes for the manly man image. Of course he is ex-KGB. He like pictures showing his virility. Putin dressed in a judo-gi practicing martial arts. Bare chested riding a horse at full gallop. Bare chested with a rifle. With various large dead animals. You get the idea. 

He orders his troops to invade small countries that used to be Soviet Republics and they do. No holds barred. He orders his air force to bomb in Syria and they do. Some bombs for ISIS and some for the insurgents. World opinion, he doesn't care. He orders Obama to stand down and suddenly American troops back away.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, projects himself as the metro-sexual man. He is cool. He is un-ruffled. He is disconnected from the reality that the rest of us have to live with. He is the Marie Antoinette of American Presidents.

His image is of a man walking around licking an ice cream cone. He comes out in the rain, with someone that I am sure he considers a lackey, holding an umbrella. In one case, that was a US Marine in dress blues.

He rides a girly bike wearing a plastic helmet. When Americans were slaughtered in California, he was off to the golf course. When Americans were blown up in a Brussels bombing, he went to a ball game with his new pal, who just happens to be a murderous tyrant.

Obama loves appeasing tyrants. He makes one sided deals with them hoping to seem like a peace maker. He is even willing to accept these deals at the expense of our friends.

He claims that the jihadist threat, especially the one posed by ISIS, is not an existential threat. OK, so ISIS is incapable of attacking and destroying the United States. That does not mean that they cannot make small suicide attacks and kill many Americans. It is the style of attack that has happened in Paris and Brussels and Boston that worries us. But apparently, they don't cause our President much concern. 

So our Presidents "stands down", "leads from behind", and only worries about existential threats. But does he even really worry about them or does he just say the words.