What you named as an alternative explanation was actually the one I was attempting to express. I don’t at all believe that Obama is a ‘Manchurian candidate’ planted by hostile powers to bring us down; I believe he is sincerely following his ideology, and that ideology — reinforced by the influences you name — has him believing that America is a fundamentally flawed nation that needs to be transformed (‘into his image’) in order to achieve redemption. That was what I meant by malignant intent: a deliberate desire to bring America down to a lower level in the world, with him operating not as an agent of a foreign power or even of a revolutionary cabal, but by his own position of self-appointed redeemer.

Arrogance, intolerance, narcissism, perhaps even megalomania (too early to tell on that one) … but I would be willing to bet that, through it all, he genuinely believes he loves his country and is doing everything he does ‘for our own good’.

Funny how those who overtly or not-so-secretly despise religion, seem not to recognize the quasi-religious attributes of their own holy crusades.