Blaming America

The Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote a wonderful column on April 22nd entitled "Obama Blames America."

Her editorial catalogues the new low to which our current president has sunk in his serial and expansive, named criticism of those who have preceded him in the office, including George W. Bush and Harry Truman.

The president's lengthy confessions of imagined sins of America to audiences abroad speak, once more, to his self-delusional rock star image, which evidently has replaced, if it ever were present, the self-image of representing our country as its senior statesman.

I believe Ms. Rabinowitz is correct when she closes her piece with the passage,

"Since that bridge too far to Europe, ordinary Americans, including some who voted for Mr. Obama, have shown evidence of a quiet but durable resentment over the list of grievances against the United States that the president brought to the world's attention while overseas. There are certain things that can't be taken back. There are images that are hard to forget. Anger of this kind has an enduring power that could, in the end, haunt this presidency."

It's a big mistake for a president to presume a mandate that was never given, nor won. Despite Wonderboy's remonstration to Republican Congressman Eric Cantor that the former can ignore the latter's suggestions because "I won," it doesn't work that way, for long, in our democracy.

He didn't win a mandate to repudiate every, or any, former presidents' actions. As many of my friends, and several pundits have remarked, that is a distinguishing characteristic of a banana republic, i.e., the criminalization of policy disagreements.

Most Americans didn't vote for a president so that he could accuse their country of imagined sins, simply to curry favor with foreigners. Anyone who criticizes Harry Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb merely displays his incredible ignorance of the realities of the time, and of the history of that era.

Can you imagine those overseas speeches in which he blames America for various sins being used in upcoming campaigns?

Such a person is, I think, simply unfit to hold the office of president. As Ms. Rabinowitz suggests, these faux-confessions are very likely to have a seriously negative effect on this president in the next months and several years.