A Speech Too Far

I heard a leader today. I heard the leader of an embattled outpost of western values and the staunch guardian of Judeo/Christian ethics, draw a line in the sand contrasting the harsh differences between those who would destroy the only democracy in the Middle East and those who would preserve it intact. I should have been listening to Barack Obama but it was Benjamin Netanyahu who brandished the torch of truth, justice, and freedom. As he did so, he held the leaders of Iran accountable for their continual lies, hatred, and unremitting violence, and condemned those who seek to bestow any kind of legitimacy upon the genocidal Ahmadinejad and his determined, murdering, collaborators and proxies throughout the Middle East and the world.

Yesterday in stark contrast, Barack Obama, the supposed leader of the free world and commander-in-chief of the greatest military power the world has ever seen, gave a speech that showed it is more dangerous to be a friend of the United States than it is to be her enemy. As he betrayed Israel and acted as the legal counsel for the so-called Palestinians by promoting his plan that encourages them not to make any concessions, and by using his talent of expanding the least amount of thought into the greatest number of words, he demonstrated the truth of Gerald Warner's observation in the London Daily Telegraph that if Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda still wish to destroy America they had better hurry up before Barack Obama does it first.

Addressing the United Nations, an increasingly corrupt and spineless group of beggar nations that continually vote against the United States with the one hand while the other is always outstretched for more American aid, Obama displayed why he is the greatest security risk we have to which our entire history affords no parallel. His speech was virtually a reprise of the miserable one he gave in Cairo a few months ago but it contained even more historical inaccuracies and dangerous nonsense from which the inevitable wrong conclusions and decisions flow like the cascading waters of Niagra Falls.

Clearly Obama has not had the good sense to fire his speech writer otherwise one assumes, not altogether with confidence, that he would not have lectured us with these preposterous notions: "In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world nor do alignments rooted in the cleavages of a long "Cold War." Obama and his speech writer inhabit the same alternate universe where history is denied, truth is replaced with distortion, wishful thinking is preferred to reality, and where activity is confused with achievement.

As a devotee of "soft power", except where Israel is concerned, of course, Obama displayed his belief that the United States is no longer the world's pre-eminent force, that he no longer intends to maintain our dominance, and has deliberately set us on a course of decline making us just one country among many. As this speech and his speech in Cairo so plainly show, Obama thinks that all the world's problems are the fault of America and the West and that amends must now be made and that he has been ordained and duly dispatched to make them. The downright evil represented by Islamic terrorists, Iran, and North Korea is all America's fault. His faith is placed in the entirely corrupt United Nations and farcical international courts, whose goal of a one-world government with a flag nobody salutes and an anthem nobody sings is much closer to his heart than American exceptionalism which, in fact, is anathema to him and his retinue of camp-followers. Unfortunately for Obama's vision, the founding principles and ideals on which the United Nations was built have been crushed by the realities that Obama maintains do not or should not exist.

As for "No balance of power among nations will hold", where on earth did he come up with that penetrating insight? For over three hundred years England maintained the balance of power in Europe by forming alliances with its weaker states against the most powerful one. This helped her frustrate the ambitions of Phillip II of Spain, Louis XIV of France, and Napoleon Bonaparte. It allowed her build an empire and together with her mastery of steam, coal, and iron, gave her manufacturing pre-eminence accounting for over 50% of the world's industrial production by 1870! Some balances of power work after all. Imagine that.

The absurdity of " No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation..." is so obtuse that it turns history and current reality on its head. He ignores the ambitions of Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China but he does so because it is America to whom he really refers. In Berlin, in Cairo, and in front of the United Nations he indulged in an orgy of self-abasement producing a litany of indictments against the United States setting forth his belief that our sins are so enormous that we lack the moral authority to justify our power and dominance. The only way, he has convinced himself, to regain this moral high ground, and coincidentally help his domestic agenda, is by unilateral strategic retreat. This is why our missile deployments promised to Poland and Czechoslovakia have been cancelled; it is why our own missile defenses have been reduced and it is why he is unwilling to do what our military commanders in Afghanistan have advised is required for victory; it is why he does not support regime change for Iran but only for Israel; it is why his policies are a triumph of one-way multiculturalism over diplomacy that, so far, have produced nothing in the way of concessions from our enemies or help from our friends. It is why he is the arch appeaser of our time. It is why he is a disaster.

He flatters and panders to the Islamic serpent; our financial aid is sent to our enemies in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East; favors are dispensed to anti-Americans in South America and all over the world, but for our own citizens there are crippling debts, higher taxes, lax immigration policies, prosecution of CIA officers charged with the interrogation of those who killed three thousand of our people; reckless endangerment of our security by transferring terrorist prisoners to our soil; the attempted abridgement of free speech; the deliberate and willful destruction of a free market economy and the middle class; the exportation of talent and entrprenneurship; the importation of Mexican poverty and for our allies, who would stand on either hand with us, the cold shoulder of indifference and neglect.

None of this is inevitable. As it has been done, much of it can be undone. In order to do so the American voter will have to come to the sinking realisation that Barack Obama is a charming liar at odds with American exceptionalism; that he has abandoned the idea that America has a special role to play or that our values and institutions should be adopted by those countries that do not yet enjoy them and that his utopian notions imply that democracies should seek no alliances against dictators. They need to understand Obama is the victim of an ideology where everyone is equal; where there are no leaders; where there is no good, no evil, just a static government imposed lackluster conformity masquerading as equality, thus ensuring that when the conflict comes America, thanks to his ideology and his policies, will be so constrained that she will not be the nation to emerge victorious. In the meantime, while Obama knows it is not possible to keep the balloon rising without the usual infusion of hot air the rest of us should recall the lines from Hamlet "...that one may smile and smile and be a villain."