Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Our national embarrassment went to Berlin last week. Jennifer Rubin starts our look at the speech he gave.
One hardly knows where to begin when it comes to President Obama’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate, but I will start with an overarching point. There is no reason — with Iran edging closer to nuclear weapons capability; jihadism on the march in the Middle East; China engaging in cyberterrorism; and Bashar al-Assad continuing his mass murder with Iran’s and Russia’s assistance — for the president to be talking about nuclear arms reduction. This is the triumph of ego and cluelessness over common sense. His speech has nothing to do with the multiple threats and challenges we face. It seems he has nothing useful to offer on our real problems so he’ll go back to an oldie-but-really-bad-idea from his college days — a nuclear freeze. (This is what comes from the White House running national security policy rather than anyone with a modicum of appreciation for the world as it is.)
That said, I’ll be more specific about the speech’s faults. There are more, but I will focus on 10 of them:
1. “Today, 60 years after they rose up against oppression, we remember the East German heroes of June 17th. When the wall finally came down, it was their dreams that were fulfilled. Their strength and their passion, their enduring example remind us that for all the power of militaries, for all the authority of governments, it is citizens who choose whether to be defined by a wall, or whether to tear it down.“ The president frequently leaves out what brought down that wall — the West’s determination over decades not to relent against the Soviets. I know it’s incompatible with his agenda, but to leave the Soviets, the Americans and the Cold War out of the equation is absurd. …
Andrew Malcolm has his thoughts.
This was not the moment he was looking for.
Barack Obama returned to Berlin Wednesday to give a speech where he originally wanted to appear back in 2008, the Brandenburg Gate. He was a mere candidate then and German Chancellor Angela Merkel vetoed the event as too political for the historic site.
So, the 2008 Obama campaign took its $800,000 and staged his speech elsewhere before about 200,000 Berliners, none of whom could vote in the U.S. election. But it looked great on TV back home.
No doubt every American remembers where they were and what they were doing that July day when they first realized that Barack Hussein Obama was a messiah. Or thought he was. He gave a speech that melted his adoring media, what became known among several people as his “moment” speech. Obama said that word 16 times.
“People of Berlin, people of the world,” the ex-state senator intoned on that long-ago day, “This is our moment. This is our time.”
Well, what a difference 1,791 days makes. American presidents often travel abroad to change the subject from troubles at home. In Obama’s case, things like serial scandals involving the IRS, the FBI, the State Department, the Justice Department and still unexplained lack of security and emergency response that got four Americans killed in Benghazi.
And presidents go to Berlin to say famous things. Ronald Reagan: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” John Kennedy: “Ich bin ein Berliner!” (I am a Berliner.)
But there Obama was Wednesday before a foreign invitation-only audience 1/50th the size of 2008. To the distant crowd watching him behind a thick bullet-proof glass barrier, Obama was a diminished stick figure. …
Scott Johnson at Power Line notes George Will’s take.
Reading Obama’s speeches is a little like reading New York Times editorials. They don’t withstand close scrutiny, but that’s the least of it. They should be accompanied by a warning that they may be hazardous to your health. They kill brain cells.
George Will suffers through Obama’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin so that we don’t have to. Will takes up the arms control thread in Obama’s speech.
Arms control is only one theme in a desultory speech full of bromides that act as a general anesthetic on the conscious mind. Virtually everything in the speech is off. If Obama praised apple pie, he would do so in a way that would make you think there must be a strong case against it if you could only concentrate on what he is saying. …
Here’s George Will.
The question of whether Barack Obama’s second term will be a failure was answered in the affirmative before his Berlin debacle, which has recast the question, which now is: Will this term be silly, even scary in its detachment from reality? …
… In Northern Ireland before going to Berlin, Obama sat next to Putin, whose demeanor and body language when he is in Obama’s presence radiate disdain. There Obama said: “With respect to Syria, we do have differing perspectives on the problem, but we share an interest in reducing the violence.” Differing perspectives?
Obama wants to reduce the violence by coaxing Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who is winning the war, to attend a conference at which he negotiates the surrender of his power. Putin wants to reduce the violence by helping — with lavish materiel assistance and by preventing diplomacy that interferes — Assad complete the destruction of his enemies.
Napoleon said: “If you start to take Vienna — take Vienna.” Douglas MacArthur said that all military disasters can be explained by two words: “Too late.” Regarding Syria, Obama is tentative and, if he insists on the folly of intervening, tardy. He is giving Putin a golden opportunity to humiliate the nation responsible for the “catastrophe.” In a contest between a dilettante and a dictator, bet on the latter.
Obama’s vanity is a wonder of the world that never loses its power to astonish, but really: Is everyone in his orbit too lost in raptures of admiration to warn him against delivering a speech soggy with banalities and bromides in a city that remembers John Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” and Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down this wall”? With German Chancellor Angela Merkel sitting nearby, Obama began his Berlin speech: “As I’ve said, Angela and I don’t exactly look like previous German and American leaders.” He has indeed said that, too, before, at least about himself. It was mildly amusing in Berlin in 2008, but hardly a Noel Coward-like witticism worth recycling.
His look is just not that interesting. And after being pointless in Berlin, neither is he, other than for the surrealism of his second term.
Bill Kristol’s turn.
… Half a century ago, President Kennedy declared, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’ ” A quarter-century ago, President Reagan challenged the general secretary of the Soviet Union: “Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev—Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” President Obama, by contrast, declared nothing notable and challenged no one powerful. With the Berlin Wall down and the Cold War won, the president of
the United States talked at length and had nothing to say.It would be too harsh, perhaps, to say that Obama’s remarks served only to ratify the judgment rendered the week before by Bill Clinton: that President Obama is pretty much “a total wuss.” It wouldn’t be too harsh to say of Obama’s foreign policy what Winston Churchill said in 1936 about the Stanley Baldwin government: He is “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.” …
We close today with Power Line’s post on “Our Dimwitted President.”
President Obama seems incapable of going abroad without embarrassing himself. Via InstaPundit, we learn that when he was in the U.K., Obama couldn’t keep Chancellor George Osborne’s name straight. Obama repeatedly called him “Jeffrey.” The repeated gaffe became so obvious that Obama apologized:
According to the Sun and the Financial Times, Mr Obama apologised to the chancellor for calling him Jeffrey three times during the meeting – saying: “I’m sorry, man. I must have confused you with my favourite R&B singer”.
That would be this Jeffrey Osborne. The real Jeffrey Osborne was excited to hear about the mishap, and George Osborne was gracious about it. But good grief: the first obligation of a diplomat is to keep track of whom he is speaking to. One can imagine the hilarity if George W. Bush had referred to Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister during his administration, as “James Brown,” confusing the Prime Minister with his favorite R&B singer. Or perhaps, given Bush’s musical tastes, Sawyer Brown, or Zac Brown. Would such a gaffe have been laughed off? I doubt it.
Speaking of embarrassments, Telegraph, UK with Hagel’s latest.
Chuck Hagel, the US defence secretary, has apologised to a professor of Indian descent after jokingly asking if he was a member of the Taliban.
Mr Hagel’s spokesman insisted the offhand remark, which came after a speech at the University of Nebraska on Wednesday, was not meant to refer to anyone in the audience or to the professor’s Indian heritage.
At Wednesday’s event, after discussing prospects for talks with the Taliban insurgency, Hagel waited for another question and pointed to the back of the hall, saying:
“OK, so who has a – way up in the back there. You’re not a member of the Taliban are you?”
His attempt at humour appeared to fall flat, judging by the long pause that followed, according to a video of the event broadcast by the Pentagon channel. …