Yesterday I mentioned the glass security enclosure Obama used in his Berlin speech was being symbolic of the bubble he has been living in the last several years (probably his entire life). The fact is, Obama was in a display case for the world to see, floundering on the bottom of a slowly boiling fish tank. Today I see two more colorful reviews of the reality of Obama’s Euro trip thus far…
Wes Pruden: “Barack Obama’s really bad trip”
Berlin hadn’t seen bombing like this since the allies turned the city into a wasteland in the spring of 1945, when American B-17s and B-24s, British Lancasters and Russian heavy artillery took turns making the rubble bounce. This week the bomb was the bomber himself, and when the day was done, the legend of the irresistible eloquence of Barack Obama lay in shreds and tatters.
The allies required 363 raids between 1942 and 1945 to level the city, while President Obama leveled himself with only one. The allies required 200,000 tons of high explosives for the deed, finally including the famous blockbuster, while Mr. Obama made “mission accomplished” with a load of attitudes, platitudes and a ton of what one London newspaper called “pure mush.” It was mush ground from stale corn.
He delivered his remarks in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, almost exactly a half-century after John F. Kennedy thrilled the Germans and reassured Europe with his “ich bin ein Berliner” speech, declaring that he, too, was a Berliner resisting aggressive Soviet communism. Mr. Obama, fresh out of inspiring bloviation, gave the Berliners only a laundry list of fears to terrorize themselves with – the West’s inventory of nuclear weapons, global warming, Guantanamo, poverty across the world and the heartbreak of teenage acne.
[…]
The Europeans are learning what many Americans are only just now learning, that the Barack Obama they lost their heads over in 2008 was a figment of the imagination of juveniles from 8 to 80.
And then there is George Will: “Obama hits a wall in Berlin”
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?
Before Berlin, Obama set his steep downward trajectory by squandering the most precious post-election months on gun-control futilities and by a subsequent storm of scandals that have made his unvarying project — ever bigger, more expansive, more intrusive and more coercive government — more repulsive. Then came Wednesday’s pratfall in Berlin.
There he vowed energetic measures against global warming (“the global threat of our time”). The 16-year pause of this warming was not predicted by, and is not explained by, the climate models for which, in his strange understanding of respect for science, he has forsworn skepticism.
Regarding another threat, he spoke an almost meaningless sentence that is an exquisite example of why his rhetoric cannot withstand close reading: “We may strike blows against terrorist networks, but if we ignore the instability and intolerance that fuels extremism, our own freedom will eventually be endangered.” So, “instability and intolerance” are to blame for terrorism? Instability where? Intolerance of what by whom “fuels” terrorists? Terrorism is a tactic of destabilization. Intolerance is, for terrorists, a virtue.
It is axiomatic: Arms control is impossible until it is unimportant. This is because arms control is an arena of competition in which nations negotiate only those limits that advance their interests. Nevertheless, Obama trotted out another golden oldie in Berlin when he vowed to resuscitate the cadaver of nuclear arms control with Russia. As though Russia’s arsenal is a pressing problem. And as though there is reason to think President Vladimir Putin, who calls the Soviet Union’s collapse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” is interested in reducing the arsenal that is the basis of his otherwise Third World country’s claim to great-power status.
Shifting his strange focus from Russia’s nuclear weapons, Obama said “we can?.?.?. reject the nuclear weaponization that North Korea and Iran may be seeking.” Were Obama given to saying such stuff off the cuff, this would be a good reason for handcuffing him to a teleprompter. But, amazingly, such stuff is put on his teleprompter and, even more amazing, he reads it aloud.
Neither the people who wrote those words nor he who spoke them can be taken seriously.
More…
So, anybody know if Barack Obama is scheduled to visit Japan anytime soon?
“Remember – ANYTHING you type in here, Ron Burgundy will say, live, on-air…”