In the 1951 film People Will Talk, one of the characters says to the antoganist, "Professor Ewell, you're a little man.  It's not that you're short.  You're...little, in the mind and in the heart.  ...And as it turned out...you're even littler than you were before" (Joseph Mankiewicz).

It was at the 2012 Republican Convention that Clint Eastwood addressed Obama, personified by an empty chair.  It is unfortunate for our nation that Obama was re-elected, but he was, and his pathetic "lead from behind" strategy toward all things related to foreign policy and national security has been a predictable disaster.  The world is in chaos, and much of the blame can be placed squarely on this president of the United States.  He backed the wrong horse in Egypt, in Libya, in Syria.  He loathes Israel and Netanyahu.  He has imported to the U.S. tens of thousands of Muslim refugees from the Middle East without properly vetting them and has left the Christians to be victims of genocide.

How many of those who have been given asylum here, or their children, will commit terrorist acts against innocent Americans?  There are bound to be more than a few.  But Obama will not be perturbed.  He called the Paris attack an act of "random violence."  Tell that to the families of the victims of the Orlando massacre.  Obama rarely speaks of defeating ISIS, only of managing them as one would a persistent rash.  He denies the increasing strength of ISIS, and yet it arose on his watch, because he withdrew so completely from Iraq.  He gave these vermin the opportunity and the space to grow and to threaten everyone in their path with 7th-century brutality. And he called them the J.V. team.  President Obama has terrible judgment rooted in his rigid ideology, his view that America is not a force for good.

Obama's speech on Tuesday, ostensibly to address the Orlando terrorist attack, was instead an all-out attack on Trump and other critics who have long been mystified by his inability to call radical jihadism what it is: a faith-based death cult rooted in the text of an unreformed religion.  He was so very obviously, as many have noted, far angrier at Trump and his critics than he has ever been at any of the terrorists who have attacked and killed Americans on home soil.  His speech was a furious defense of his nonexistent strategy to defeat ISIS, which he insists on calling ISIL.  (ISIL denotes a much larger area and is a designation that is meant to take attention away from the administration's failure in Iraq and Syria.)  He is very clearly not as angry at the terrorists as he is at Americans who advocate defending ourselves against them.

The left accuses Trump of being thin-skinned, and indeed he is, but no one is thinner-skinned than Obama.  The speech was a fatuous, derisive rant entirely in his own interest, a pathetic defense of his own failures.  He barely mentioned the Orlando victims.  And to make the whole disaster worse, some Republicans have acceded to Obama's specious anti-gun nonsense this time.  The American people are being betrayed all around.  All mass shootings in this country have taken place in gun-free zones; in the words of John Lott, they are killing fields.

America has been very poorly served by President Obama, as we have been by too many members of Congress.  The Republican leadership have thoroughly betrayed the conservative voters who gave them their majorities.  Who knows at this moment in time what will become of America?

One thing is certain: Obama is a small man, and after his latest rant, he is even littler than before – hardly big enough even for that empty chair.