I'm Sorry...... So Sorry!

[Warph]

Okay.... getting back to the subject of Obama bashing America.... I've commented about Obama's constant bashing of the United States before foreign audiences.  Why does Obama persist in doing this?  Here are four possible reasons:

First, it's what Democrats do.  Obama isn't the first Democratic president to "blame America first."  Rather, he is following in the footsteps of Presidents Carter and Clinton. Both must somehow have thought, as Obama professes to, that our friends and adversaries would react to our self-abasement by embracing policies more to our liking.  Both found out that nations and factions act as they do out of self-interest, not in reaction to American words.  Obama caught a glimpse of this phenomenon in Europe last week.  But Obama has already done as much America-bashing in a little more than two months as Carter and Clinton did in their entire presidencies.  Moreover, if memory serves, neither Clinton nor even Carter went hat-in-hand to our sworn enemies while in office, as Obama has done with Iran.  (Carter suggested that we had an "inordinate fear" of Communism, but I don't think he apologized to the Soviet Union for it).  Thus, there seems to be more at work here BIGTIME than mere adherence to past Democratic wishful thinking.

Second, Obama hopes to shift blame for any inability to obtain cooperation from foreign leaders to that familiar target, President Bush.  Obama is capable of being gracious but not, apparently, when it comes to the man who bore the burdens of Obama's current office for eight years.  Through his apologies and mea culpas on behalf of the U.S., Obama suggests that our problems in the realm of diplomacy are the fault of his predecessor.  This sort of blame-shifting is a convenient and time-honored ploy by the democrats, although not so much in the realm of foreign policy.

But Obama's apologies are rarely for American policy during the past eight years.  Instead, at least by implication, they typically reach back for decades.  This is America-bashing, not simply Bush-bashing.

Third, maybe Obama just doesn't like the America that existed prior to January 20 of this year, and feels compelled to say so.  I think it's clear that, indeed, Obama didn't much like America as it was until it had the er... ah... wisdom to elect him.  One doesn't attend the sermons of the America-hating Rev. Jeremiah Wright year-in and year-out and hang with a bunch of Chicago scumbags if you think well of the United States.  An even clearer glimpse into Obama's real view about our country was offered when Michelle Obama declared that, until the rise of her husband, America had done nothing of which she was proud.  Obama defended the statement and lied to the American people by saying her comment applied to our politics.

It's less clear, however, that Obama feels compelled as a matter of principle to express his dislike of America.  Obama didn't do so very much during the presidential campaign, and he remains a political animal.  There's little reason to suppose that he's revealing these feelings now because he needs "to speak truth to his [his own] power."  Obama's dislike of America may be a necessary condition for the way he's acting, but I don't think it's a sufficient one.  Case in point:  The Obama administration continues to populate key legal positions with leftist-leper lawyers like A.G. Holder and, especially, loonie law professors like Harold Koh.  The selection of Harold Koh, the dean of Yale Law School, to be the State Department's legal advisor is the latest example, and among the most disconcerting.  This is a very bad move for America as we will find out in the future.  Koh would be particularly well positioned as State Department legal adviser to implement his socalistic views and to inflict severe and lasting damage.  Koh is a transnationalist and as the S.D. legal advisor he will use American courts to import international law to override the policies adopted through the processes of representative government.  Hmmmm.... I wonder where that will lead to? 

I will probably post my discontent about Koh in later posts.

Fourth, Obama's American bashing is the product of his EGO.   Many have described Obama as "bestriding the Western world in the guise of a philosopher king."  By distancing himself from America's foreign policy, he presents himself as something greater than a mere American president attempting to project American power and American ideas.  Any president can do that.  So grand is this American president that he will project his own special synthesis of world ideas, at least rhetorically.  The sad thing is, for America and its people, in doing so, he will impress elites here at home and abroad, and enhance his personal popularity, if not that of the country.  In acheiving this, he hopes his intellect will be admired and he will become a beloved figure throughout the world.    Hmmmm..... again I wonder where that will lead to?    Gosh, golly, gee... can you say "New World Order?? 

These explanations are not mutually exclusive, of course, and Obama's "America bashing" may be over-determined.  However.... explaining the gusto and persistence with which Obama bashes America may require resorting to my fourth explanation.

[Varmit]

Couldn't have said it any better. 

[Warph]

Me either.

[larryJ]

There's no smiley for---------------------------------------------GROAN--------------------but hey, thanks Warph.  I enjoyed the post and couldn't have said it-------------------well, I couldn't have said it.  I think for a president to act in the way he is acting is unacceptable and downrght scary.  The question is, does his rhetoric and hiis actions put the country in danger?  If one of our enemies detemines us to be vunerable and notices that we don't have our AK's in our houses anymore, are we in trouble?  I have to go now.  I am going to the hardware store for a new shovel for my new bomb shelter like the one I dug in the sixties.

[Diane Amberg]

A bomb shelter? Is Wichita likely to attack? Are you serious? A tornado cellar I could understand....but a bomb shelter? Sheesh. Lets go shoot pirates instead.

[Wilma]

That sounds good to me, Diane.  Do you think we could make them run?

[Diane Amberg]

Maybe we can make them swim.

[Varmit]

Run or swim...either way they would be wasting perfectly good oxygen that folks who deserve it could be using.


Oh, and just an FYI, witchita is on the target list, but only in a nuclear sence, so even if it did get hit, it wouldn't really matter, because we wouldn't know it.

[Warph]

Run or swim...either way they would be wasting perfectly good oxygen that folks who deserve it could be using.

Oh, and just an FYI, witchita is on the target list, but only in a nuclear sence, so even if it did get hit, it wouldn't really matter, because we wouldn't know it.

LOL.... good point, Varmit 

[Warph]

April 8th post I described Obama in Europe as "bestriding the Wesern world in the guise of a philosopher king."  Today Charles Krauthammer eloquently employs the same metaphor, describing Obama as "the philosopher-king who hovers above the fray mediating between his renegade homeland and an otherwise warm and welcoming world."  Krauthammer adds details we missed concerning Obama's bootless denigration of the United States on foreign soil.:

Our president came bearing a basketful of mea culpas. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own people for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness, for genocide, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.

And what did he get for this obsessive denigration of his own country? He wanted more NATO combat troops in Afghanistan to match the surge of 17,000 Americans.  He was rudely rebuffed.

He wanted more stimulus spending from Europe. He got nothing.

From Russia, he got no help on Iran. From China, he got the blocking of any action on North Korea.

And what did he get for Guantanamo? France, pop. 64 million, will take one prisoner. One!  The Austrians said they would take none. As Interior Minister Maria Fekter explained with impeccable Germanic logic, if they're not dangerous, why not just keep them in America?

When Austria is mocking you, you're having a bad week.

In Obama, we seem to have Jimmy Carter on stilts..... Warph