Bozell Column: Obama's World Class Arrogance
When President Obama came to the U.N. General Assembly on September 25, his arrogance was on full display. He skipped meeting any world leaders, but did find time to sit down and talk about his lover moves on ABC’s “The View.” Topics included how he’s a “romantic husband,” how he “tucks in” his wife at night, and how his first kiss with Michelle is now memorialized by a monument in Chicago.
Meanwhile, Israel is preparing for war against a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. Yawn.
Obama also skipped the traditional luncheon, leaving UN secretary general Ban-Ki Moon looking like “a jilted prom date,” reported CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “I think he must be busy with something at this moment,” Moon said at the lunch, drawing laughs. “Or perhaps he must be stuck somewhere in traffic.”
But the arrogance was also there in Obama’s UN speech. In one passage, he flagrantly drew a straight line from blasphemers of Jesus Christ to his own critics, as if those two groups are similar in their willingness to offend messianic figures.
“Like me, the majority of Americans are Christian, and yet we do not ban blasphemy against our most sacred beliefs,” he declared. Then it was all about him: “As president of our country, and commander in chief of our military, I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day, and I will always defend their right to do so.” Anyone who’s heard him diss the Supreme Court for the Citizens United verdict, affirming political free speech, knows that’s baloney.
Our Obama-worshipping media played the second half of that clip as if Obama were somehow being humble – which thoroughly distorts the picture. The media coverage of Obama’s speech overlooked Obama’s bizarre statement that “We not only respect the freedom of religion, we have laws that protect individuals from being harmed because of how they look or what they believe.”
No one in the liberal media thought it sounded ridiculous after the Obama administration doubled down on the Catholic Church with ObamaCare, insisting that faithful Catholics must fund insurance coverage for contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients. No one blinked after the “filmmaker” who made the Mohammed-mocking YouTube video was suddenly jailed in California (perhaps for years) for ahem, “violating probation.”
The media certainly skipped the Obama soundbite that rocketed around Twitter within minutes, the pandering passage about Mohammed. “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” he proclaimed.
Then he did his typical triangulating with religions: “But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated or churches that are destroyed, or the Holocaust that is denied.”
Our media failed to report the obvious: Obama is AWOL when it comes to condemning desecrations of Christianity. Where is he with the constant, obscene attacks against Catholics at home? Where is he on the assault on Christianity all across the Muslim world? How about Israel?
Rep. Michael Grimm (R-New York) recently called on the president to “stand up for America’s values and beliefs and denounce the ‘Piss Christ’ that has offended Christians at home and abroad.” The urine-soaked crucifix image (funded by the National Endowment for the Arts) is once again being honored in a gallery, the Edwin Tyler Nahem Gallery on West 57th Street in Manhattan, a short cab ride from the United Nations.
Obama had nothing to say. There were no calls to the gallery the way Team Obama called YouTube and asked for censorship. There were no $70,000 advertising buys in Christian countries to pacify rioters. There was just silence.
But in his speech, Obama employed New York City as a model of religious tolerance. “For as the city outside these walls makes clear, we are a country that has welcomed people of every race and every faith” – except the Christians are always fair game for mockery.
William Donohue of the Catholic League protested the exhibit at the gallery scene. He also made a video where he put a bobble-head doll of Obama in a jar with “faux feces” and asked for a federal grant like Andres Serrano received. ''It's brown Play-Doh,” he explained. “You get the point, right? The cultural and political elite are basically secularist. They don't believe in God. This is their god. Liberalism is their god,” he said, pointing at the Obama jar.
At the center of that secularist elite is our very politicized media, the ones who are rigging this election and allowing Obama to say all sorts of ludicrous things about religion and to skip all sorts of meeting with world leaders.
