Asked if he made any mistakes in his first term, Obama gave the same answer: He insufficiently explained his awesomeness to the public. “The mistake of my first term — couple of years — was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that’s important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people …”

Likewise, after the 2014 elections, when his party lost control of the Senate, Obama’s self-criticism was, “We have not been successful in going out there and letting people know what it is that we are trying to do and why this is the right direction.”

You get the idea. Obama’s idea of introspection is asking, Why are other people wrong while I’m right?

In A Promised Land, this is exactly his approach to his illegal and disastrous war in Libya. Obama invaded Libya without congressional authorization. He knew that this was illegal because he said so himself a few years earlier.

“The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation,” candidate Obama, a former professor of constitutional law, explained correctly in 2008.

The invasion also proved to be a disaster. By intervening in Libya’s civil war and deposing dictator Moammar Gadhafi, the United States and its allies created a power vacuum that empowered ISIS, al Qaeda, and species of terrorists you’ve never heard of. The chaos and bloodshed even spread into neighboring countries. Obama repeated in miniature George W. Bush’s error of the Iraq War, but with a twist — Obama waged the Libya war as a drive-by war, refusing to take responsibility for the aftermath of the regime-change he forced.

So with nearly a decade of hindsight, and watching the aftermath of his illegal regime-change war, what does Obama have to say? Here’s the passage from his latest memoir:

“Given that a number of Republicans had been vocal advocates for intervention, we might have expected some grudging praise for the swift precision of our operation in Libya. But a funny thing had happened while I was traveling. [Obama was overseas when he announced his war.] Some of the same Republicans who had demanded that I intervene in Libya decided that they were now against it …They cast doubt on the legal bases for my decision, suggesting that I should have sought congressional authorization under the War Powers Act, a legitimate, long-standing question about presidential powers, were it not coming from a party that had repeatedly given previous administrations carte blanche on the foreign policy front, particularly when it came to waging war. The Republicans seemed unembarrassed by the inconsistency …”

Spend a moment and take that passage in. “We might have expected some grudging praise,” writes the ex-president after nearly a decade of the chaos he caused and the terrorism that he made possible.

Obama writes that Republicans “seemed unembarrassed by the inconsistency,” presumably for supporting the Iraq War but opposing the Libya War. But Obama famously, loudly, and correctly opposed the Iraq War and declared that presidents can’t launch wars without Congress, except in self-defense. Should we not expect him to be embarrassed by his own inconsistency?

It’s just one passage from Obama’s third memoir, but it’s a revealing one. The lesson this man learned from an illegal, unwise war that repeated the very mistakes he ran against? Man, Republicans are awful because they didn’t praise me when they should have, even if I was wrong.