The dangerous narcissism of American liberals: AnnaLynne McCord's ‘Mr President Putin’ poem is all too typical of liberal self-indulgence.

‘If I was your mother, you would have been so loved, held in the arms of joyous light… I can’t imagine the stain, the soul-stealing pain that the little boy you must have seen and believed and the formulation of thought quickly taught that you lived in a cruel, unjust world… Oh dear Mr President Putin.’

And thus, with cascading beachy locks and furrowed brow, noted peace bringer and foreign-policy ace AnnaLynne McCord (formerly of teen drama 90210) made a heroic intervention into the biggest Eurasian crisis since the 1990s.

In a two-minute-long poem she apparently wrote, recorded and posted to Twitter on Thursday, she tells ‘Mr President Putin’ and the rest of the world, that if only he had been hugged more as a child maybe he would not have felt the need to invade another country. As Russian tanks rumbled across the Ukrainian plains and people fled for their lives, McCord bravely reached out to the Russian president from her sofa and put herself directly in the firing line of global derision and scorn.

She deserves every minute of it.

If McCord’s poem to Putin isn’t an indictment of Western decadence, self-indulgence and mortifying presumption then I don’t know what is. I can see the funny side, of course. And it’s tempting simply to shrug this off as a dumb stunt. But this is actually no laughing matter. It’s a sign that the West has become so intellectually debased that we no longer deserve to be in charge. Stop the ride. I want to get off.