Posted by
Mike Bates on Tuesday, April 07, 2009 1:58:26 PM
Watching Barack Obama this past week was painful. The new president
went out of his way to display his fresh style of leadership. It won
rave reviews from many foreigners, the mainstream media and others who
hold the United States in contempt.
A key component to Obama’s approach is apologetically groveling. The United Kingdom’s Telegraph reported:
President Barack Obama has offered an apology for the Bush era,
declaring that America had ‘shown arrogance and been dismissive, even
derisive’ towards its allies. President Obama said the US had ‘failed
to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world.’
His speech in Strasbourg went further than any United States president
in history in criticising his own country’s action while standing on
foreign soil.
Now a man who brought along an entourage of 500 people and 12
teleprompters, a guy who gave his acceptance speech in the midst of a
temple façade, knows more than a little about arrogance. So he goes
overseas and knocks his own country.
Even The Washington Post took note of how penitential Obama sounded:
Obama’s deferential approach was manifest in his public statements,
which described shrinking U.S. influence as a positive development. At
times the president sounded almost apologetic about past American
primacy.
Expressing regrets about America is something that apparently comes
easily to Obama. Certainly he’s had enough experience in apologizing
for his own fumbles.
He said he was sorry for comparing his bowling prowess to the Special
Olympics. He had to call Nancy Reagan and apologize for saying she
held séances in the White House. Last May, he told a local TV reporter
he was sorry for calling her “sweetie.”
The following month two Muslim women wearing headscarves weren’t
allowed to sit behind candidate Obama at a campaign rally. Of course,
he called them to express regret for the incident.
In 2007, he claimed we “have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young
Americans wasted.” That elicited Obama contrition. The candidate had
to apologize to his Democratic primary opponent for a staff memo
referring to “Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab).”
Obama’s penchant for apologizing is a Democratic presidential
tradition. He’s well on his way to matching Apologizin’ Bill Clinton.
You’ll remember that Bill apologized for slavery in Africa:
“European-Americans received the fruits of the slave trade and we were
wrong in that.” In Rwanda, he apologized for not doing anything earlier
in his administration when massacres killed more than 700,000 Hutus and
Tutsis.
In Guatemala, he said said he was sorry about America’s support of
military and intelligence units in our fight against Communism in the
region. At home he apologized to black World War II veterans who
didn’t receive the decorations to which they were entitled. He
apologized to the survivors of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.
The president who gave phone sex a bad name had these words for his contributors when the scandal could no longer be hidden:
“I’ve done my best to be your friend, but I also let you down and I let
my family down and I let this country down.” Clinton even managed to
apologize for an apology. After admitting in a speech that he’d
“raised your taxes too much,” he caught heat from Congressional
Democrats and decided hiking taxes had been the right thing to do:
"So, if I said anything which can be read in any other way, then I
should not have said that. And I certainly did not mean to do that,
and I accept responsibility for it, because I am very, very proud of
what I did."
No doubt, Clinton was proud of raising taxes. But in terms of spending
other people’s money, he’s a miser next to the current president. And
we’ll not hear any apologies for that from Obama.
He prefers to do his sniveling overseas.