Bozell Column: Obama Welcomes America-Bashing

Of all the bizarre fictions that the media have spread about Barack Obama, the strangest is that’s he non-ideological. The supreme purveyor of this fantasy is Obama himself. During his trip to Tobago to meet with Latin American leaders, the president claimed "we can make progress when we're willing to break free from some of the stale debates and old ideologies." That’s a pretty funny sentence when your foreign policy reeks of Jimmy Carter, fermented since 1977.

In a room stuffed with Marxist crackpots like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Obama came not to lecture, but to charm. America’s just one country among many, and he was "inclined to listen and not just talk." There were no "junior partners" in the Americas, just partners. He came not to defend America, but to calmly hear it trashed, and win people over with his charisma. Obama believes in his charisma far more than he believes in America.

"I didn’t come here to debate the past," Obama declared. "I came here to deal with the future." Obama explicitly claimed his own biracial skin displayed a new openness on America’s part: "As has already been noted, and I think my presence here indicates, the United States has changed over time."

Now there’s a powerful defense of your country, President Obama.

Obama’s so egotistical he thinks America has two historical eras, Before Obama and the Glorious Now. After sitting through a 50-minute diatribe from that communist thug Daniel Ortega, who ranted that America had unleashed a century of expansionist aggression, Obama’s response wasn’t national, just personal: "I'm grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old."

Apparently, that sorry act of aggression was John F. Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs attempt to rid Cuba of Fidel Castro. Few corrected Obama’s mistake – that lost battle occurred a few months before the world was transformed by his birth. Obama was asked later what he thought about Ortega's speech, and he only said "It was 50 minutes long. That's what I thought."

There’s another powerful way to defend your country, President Obama.

Obama was just as non-confrontational with that other thug Chavez, who pressed Obama with a copy of a book-length anti-American diatribe called "The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of Pillage of a Continent." Its author, Eduardo Galeano, typically described America under President Bush as a terrorist war machine in a 2006 Pacifica Radio interview: "This $2,600 million spent each day to kill other people, this machine of killing peoples, devouring the world resources, eating the world resources each day. So this is a terrorist structure indeed, and we are in danger, so President Bush is right, I think. We are suffering a terrorist menace."

But when Chavez handed him Galeano’s thirty-year-old communist diatribe, Obama could only say "I think it was, it was a nice gesture to give me a book. I'm a reader." Being obsessed with himself, Obama also said he should have given Chavez his books. Obama added that Chavez’s harsh rhetoric didn’t mean they couldn’t engage in civil dialogue. There’s only one thing wrong with that sentiment: it’s not civil dialogue for Chavez to demand that Obama read about how his country is bleeding the Americas to death.

Yet one more powerful – oh, never mind.

American reporters saw this as a glorious moment. Time’s Tim Padgett said the hate-America gift was appropriate, because Obama "proved at the Trinidad summit to be the first U.S. President to get it." Obama "gets" the America-haters. But how would Obama respond to the charge that Franklin Roosevelt’s "Good Neighbor Policy" or John Kennedy’s "Alliance for Progress" was just more imperialistic aggression? Is it simply inappropriate to defend American presidents, even when they’re Democrats? The "evil empire" narrative must always be listened to with respect – and without rebuttal?

Only Obama deserves respect, apparently. Padgett thought the Latin leftists should show respect by reading the president’s own masterful books in order to admire his "common-sense, post-ideological political philosophy."

To glimpse at the warped worldview of our media elite, look no further than a news "analysis" by Steven Hurst of the Associated Press, who compared Obama favorably to....Mikhail Gorbachev. Apparently, like Gorbachev, Obama presides over a corrupt and crumbling empire: "During his short – by Soviet standards – tenure, he scrambled incessantly to shed the ideological entanglements that were leading the communist empire toward ruin. But Obama is outpacing even Gorbachev."

The leftist media look at Obama and see themselves. There are no "ideological entanglements." They’re just out to make the world a better place, insisting that America needs to shrink itself into a smaller, quieter, less "judgmental" partner, and do so while the Western hemisphere goes off a left-wing cliff.