Metro

O’s split personality

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If this is what he meant by “going Bulworth,” heaven help America.

Beset by growing world disorder, a sluggish economy and big scandals at home, President Obama tried to reset his presidency last week with a long speech on national security and terrorism.

At least that’s what he said the speech was about. In reality, it was — surprise — about him. Both sides of him.

It turns out the president doesn’t like war, but believes it is sometimes necessary. He doesn’t like it when our military causes civilian casualties, but says bad things happen in war.

He believes drones save lives with their precision, but he’s not sure he should have unilateral power to use them. He ponders “profound questions” about targeted killings of al Qaeda leaders, but concludes they are legal and moral.

Does the name Hamlet ring a bell?

White House insiders recently told a reporter that Obama fantasizes about “going Bulworth,” a reference to the 1998 film where Warren Beatty plays a politician who chucks caution to speak his mind. They implied that Obama is frustrated by “distractions” like Benghazi, the IRS targeting of conservatives and the Justice Department snooping on journalists and wants to get back to building utopia.

Yet the Obama on display Thursday was more a man tormented by self-doubts than frustrated by opponents and problems. He was navel-gazing out loud, describing his soul-searching adventures and using his favorite personal pronoun — I — nearly 50 times. He took both sides of issues so often that Politico headlined its story “Obama Debates Obama.”

Liberals who view ambivalence as proof of superior morality and intellect probably swooned. Hairsplitting and hand-wringing makes them feel good about themselves, which, as George Will noted, seems to be the whole point of modern liberalism.

By that standard, the Obama presidency is a raging success. Relentlessly self-aggrandizing about its “unprecedented” approach to everything under the sun, it is, as a result, blind to the problems of everyday Americans. With the scandals, especially the abuse of power by the taxman, further eroding trust in government, even supporters are wondering whether they represent evidence of incompetence or corruption.

Neither option seems to worry Obama, with his speech full of semantic preening instead of persuasive policy ideas. In one passage, he insisted that America was not engaged in “a boundless ‘global war on terror,’ ” calling our efforts instead a “series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists” around the world.

That was a distinction without a difference, given how we’re playing whack-a-mole with the al Qaeda offshoots popping up around the globe. And he didn’t mention Iran’s quest for nukes, which would combine terrorism with weapons of mass destruction.

Similarly, he said the 2002 law authorizing the invasion of Iraq, which Obama has used repeatedly, is outdated and must be changed.

“This war, like all wars, must end,” he declared. That’s a dangerous approach to a war we didn’t start. Has he told our enemies it’s over?

While asserting his holier-than-thou claims, he rejected all other views as illegitimate. He said he wants to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, insisting that only “politics” prevent it.

See, if you don’t agree with him, you’re corrupt or dumb.

He wanted it both ways on prosecutor snooping, too. Last week, he said he had no problem with seizing phone records of journalists in leak investigations and expressed “full confidence” in Attorney General Eric Holder, but now says he is “troubled” by the possibility Holder’s probes might chill journalism and wants Holder to investigate himself. Obama’s in his fifth year, and it’s still amateur hour in the White House.

The president reportedly worked on the speech for months, and probably expects the planet to heal as a result. But with his administration facing multiple crises, Americans would be better off if he spent more time giving them reasons to trust their government and less time with his head in the clouds. The nation needs a hands-on leader, not a dreamer-in-chief.

And the next time he needs to share his personal torment, he should just call a shrink.

Weiner’s screwy policies

With Anthony Weiner embracing the penis jokes head on, I smell a rat. His willingness to apologize repeatedly about his pervy past obscures another reason why he’s not fit to be mayor: His policies would wreck Gotham’s economy.

Weiner, who loudly pushed a single-payer health-insurance plan in Congress, wants the city to have its own. He doesn’t explain how that would be possible, beyond folding city workers and the uninsured into one plan and assuming it would work out. As he wrote in an opinion piece, “The solution is a single-payer plan for the Big Apple that saves money on insurance-company overhead and keeps the money in health care.”

Naturally, he also favors tax hikes on high-income earners — just a “small surcharge,” he promises — and wants to soak foreigners who buy property here. He calls them “oligarchs and potentates who are parking their money.”

That’ll stop them and their cursed riches at the border.

On education, Weiner is for “whatever works for our kids.” Stop the presses.

The positions are consistent with his record in Congress, where he always voted for higher taxes. Bigger government was never big enough for him, and he stained every debate with smears and tirades.

Although Gov. Cuomo slammed Weiner by saying “shame on us” if he’s elected, Weiner’s lurid past may shrink as an issue to some voters. But before they buy his claims of being a new man, they ought to take a closer look at his ideas. They’re also obscene.

Bar hopping on the city’s dime

Good to see our tax dollars at work.

A Post report on a gay-bashing incident on the Lower East Side said two male victims went bar-hopping, drinking shots and beer, then to a pizza joint “before walking back to a homeless shelter where both were staying.”

After being beaten by attackers, one of the victims described the episode on his Facebook page and displayed his battered face.

Not to minimize the assault, but if the victim can afford a device with Internet access and money to burn in bars, he should be paying for his own pad instead of sponging off taxpayers.

Through mayor’s looking glass

Mayor Bloomberg must be a fan of “Alice in Wonderland,” where the world is upside down and words mean the opposite of what they say.

Claiming critics of his bicycle-share program are opposed to the “free market,” he said on WOR radio that “if people want to use ’em, they use ’em. If people don’t, they don’t.”

He didn’t explain what kind of “free market” it is when city workers use middle-of-the-night raids to install the ugly rows of racks, move some because they were health and safety hazards — then lie about the reasons.

Of course, the mayor doesn’t have to explain anything. He’s in government.