Egomania is all the rage in politics today.  We know about the Current Occupant of the White House, whose me-me-me song has become so repetitive that even his worshipers are bored.  No!  Not another TV special on the Thoughts of Chairman 'Bama!  Spare us!

Obama’s Napoleon Complex is catching on.  Everybody now wants to be a hyper-narcissist.  In the case of BHO and Putin, it’s plain in their body language at all those summits where nothing gets done.  It’s instinctive.  They can’t stand each other.
Putin has created what the old USSR would call a “cult of personality,” something that became unfashionable after Lenin and Stalin almost managed to destroy the Russian economy.  Russians joke about Vladi’s boastful exploits – mostly staged photo ops.  Here’s Vladi shooting the biggest sniper rifle you’ve ever seen.  There’s Vladi mercifully releasing a grizzly bear in Siberia (who wandered off into China, much to the consternation of border villagers).

What should scare every sentient person in the world is that Obama and Putin allow their supersized egos to spill over into policy decisions and military actions.

This is dangerous. Obama spins grandiose promises off the top of his head – the “red line” in Syria was a classic case of mouth running without brain.  Putin instantly called his bluff by taking the side of the awful Assad regime against the awful rebels – pardon me, the “moderate Syrian rebels” of Obama’s imagination.

What a couple of goofballs.

It now looks like Putin has done exactly the same thing by imperial overreach against Russia’s neighbors: Georgia first, then Crimea, now the Eastern Ukraine.  But the man can’t shut up, so he has also threatened the Baltics and the other former Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe.

This comes at a time when Russia has by no means recovered from the breakdown of the Soviet Empire.  Male life expectancy is still lower than in any other industrialized country, mainly due to the national addiction to vodka and despair.  The economy is hurting from anti-Putin sanctions.  The Russian military are nowhere near the Soviet level; as in the days of the tsars, Putin’s military power is largely a stage prop.  One significant sign is that Ukraine has been able to resist Russian tank movements into the eastern region, something that was inconceivable during the Evil Empire.

Vladimir Putin is a very smart man, but not as smart as he thinks.  Russia’s new imperial adventure is beginning to look like Obama’s blundering in Syria.  Both of those conflicts are killing real human beings, so they are not funny.  But if the Greek gods were watching from Mount Olympus, they would be rolling with laughter.

Now that we can actually watch top politicians around the world in unguarded moments, political junkies are in shock.  Respect for world leaders used to depend on major media censorship, enforced by nasty thugs if necessary.  That is how Saddam Hussein was able to convince liberals around the world about his loveable qualities.  CNN did the job for him.      

No longer.

I cite a just few more cases.

There is Turkey’s neo-Sultan Recip ErdoДџan, who has just built himself a half-trillion-dollar palace, quite a feat in a poor country .

ErdoДџan prides himself on being the first of the neo-Ottomans.  In case you forgot, the bad old Ottoman Sultans used to strangle their brothers with a special leather cord, in case they might try to stage a palace coup.  The garrote ensured a period of stability for a new Sultan.

All that came to an end in 1924, and Turkey had seven decades of blessed sanity, only to get stuck with Mr. ErdoДџan.  ErdoДџan staged the Mavi Marmara stunt against Israel, and he is said to be “Obama’s best friend in the Middle East.”  The neo-Ottoman neo-Sultan has another rampant ego, about the size of the Graf Hindenburg.

There is nothing new to say about the obscene grandiosity of the ayatollahs, those messianic priests who claim to speak for Allah while living it up with wine, women, and song.  When Obama surrendered on the nuclear issue last year, a bunch of mullahs and Revolutionary Guard types flew to Cairo, where the news photographers caught them getting off the plane.  They were laughing themselves sick, with tears in their eyes – celebrating their success in suckering Obama.  And they looked very drunk.  (Drinking, whoring, and drugs are a very public secret for the mullah cult.)  The cult makes no bones about its intentions to conquer the world, and in that process the mullahs have made enemies of 80% of Muslims who are Sunnis, and therefore despise Iran’s heretics.

In reaction to the Iranian threat, the Saudis are turning, of all possible allies, to Israel.  Their oil minister said this week that Saudi Arabia preaches tolerance for all faiths, and that certainly meant they were happy to sell oil to “the Jewish State” of Israel.  That wording was calculated to stick the fickle finger to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian corruptocrat, who has been swearing up and down that he will never, ever recognize a Jewish State in the former British protectorate of Palestine.

What all these political narcissists have in common is reckless overreach.  Untamed narcissists are notorious for it and should never be allowed to run a hot dog stand, much less a country, until they have earned their fair share of bloody noses.

Obama’s overreach even has Sen. Charles Schumer saying the Democrats should never have rushed through that elephantine Obamacare bill, which nobody read at the time or can understand, even today.  This drives the True Believers to howls of despair, of course, and on the web that can’t be kept a secret.

Hubris brings nemesis – sometimes with a brief delay, but with utter and complete inevitability.

Obama is President Overreach.  Vladimir Putin has followed suit with old-fashioned tsarist thuggery against his neighbors, thereby forcing the Europeans to finally get serious about their defense budgets.

Overreaching actions beget nasty reactions.  German rearmament is a classic Russian nightmare, and now Putin has made it all but inevitable.   

Now Obama’s “good friend” Recip ErdoДџan is reviving the Ottoman Empire.

ISIS, his bloodiest competition next door in Iraq and Syria, has eager young recruits coming from all over the world to get themselves killed, reportedly being raped as part of their initiation rite.

ISIS is claiming to revive the Caliphate, but so is ErdoДџan.  Iran’s Islamic Republic can easily rename itself the Islamic Caliphate, so we will have at least three competing Muslim Empires – the neo-Ottomans in Turkey, the neo-Caliphate of the Mahdi in Tehran, and the neo-Umayyads of Arabia, called the Islamic State.   

All at the same time, and, Allah willing, all equipped with nuclear weapons.

What all these folks have in common is a kind of sickness of the ego, stemming from a big inferiority complex.

In normal times, these clowns would be funny.

These are not normal times.  This age is defined by the uncontrolled spread of nukes and missiles.

The ultimate irony is that Obama, of all people – the candidate of love and peace, who promised to stop the rise of the oceans – has ended up enabling the uncontrolled spread of weapons of mass destruction, by Iran and North Korea, the two biggest rogues in the world.

Give that man a Nobel Peace Prize.

Somebody is going to have to clean up this mess.   

It won't be our Current Occupant.