Thursday in Berlin - The Second Coming

In his victory speech upon winning his party’s nomination Obama pronounced a great turning point in history - "generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment" - when, among other wonders, "the rise of the oceans will began to slow." As economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Telegraph column, "Moses made the waters recede, but he had help. Obama apparently works alone."

Just ask the German youth packaged (with the assist of a rock band) for the Berlin spectacle. Veneration, idiolatry swept the audience, gathering most of the press in its wake. Whoa! It seems only yesterday that Obama was just another Chicago politician whose entire resume was a speech at John Kerry’s convention. As we highlighted in detail in an earlier sketch, he’s a short-term US senator without a single legislative accomplishment, a former Illinois senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times (meaning - not willing to commit), a president of the Harvard Law Review and law professor who never produced one single piece of scholarship, not one memorable article, aside, that is from a biography on his favorite subject - himself.

Germans don’t vote for this office but since Thursday’s sermon, poll results are higher among many of those who will. Have the masses been taken in by this messiah wannabe? No doubt. Obama’s handlers are counting on voter illiteracy as their trump card. Americans are tired of conflict; thus, a warm and fuzzy message fits as it sheds the necessity of hard choices; it is a fit because a whole bunch of Americans are blissfully unaware of the dynamics of foreign affairs, ignorant of US and world history.

But Obama as commander-in-chief? Holly mackerel. In an earlier sketch we put a spotlight on the perfect contest for this office - a real life, hands on, taking-of-the-helm. This was 2006 when McCain, as a member of the Senates Armed Services Committee recommended the "surge" noting that initially this strategy would increase American casualties and hardships but then would bring violence under control. Obama as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee presented his solution in the "Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007 (S. 433) which forbade the surge and demanded that most troops be out of Iraq by the spring of 2008. As our friend Rex Murphy of Canada’s GlobeandMail.com puts it, "Obama offered unqualified, insistent opposition to the Petraeus surge, which turned the war around to the point that some of its most relentless critics now maintain ‘it cannot be lost.’ In other words, on the one definitive issue, post-invasion, on his country’s most important foreign involvement, the one decision the inarticulate and sublimely unhip Texan in the White House made alone, and got right; Obama was perfectly, publicly wrong." Too much.

Thus, by Obama’s European tour his handlers looked to build an image, create a statesman out of nothing, knowing as most of us do that this man is profoundly out of his league in matters of foreign affairs; knowing too that they have a leftist on their hands who thinks that war can be wished away by blaming the US for its enemies’ hatred. The tool: create an illusion, the wonderland of ONE WORLD - how did the rest of us miss that!? - and Obama will become its paladin. For example, Obama’s reference Thursday to why Berlin did not starve in 1948 ("But in the darkest hours, the people of Berlin kept the flame of hope burning. The people of Berlin refused to give up. And on one fall day, hundreds of thousands of Berliners came here, to the Tiergarten, and heard the city’s major implore the world not to give up on freedom.") As the San Joaquin Valley’s own Vic Hansen made note, "With all due respect, I don’t believe the world did anything to save Berlin. The city was kept alive not by ‘the world’ or even the courage of the hungry Berliners, but by the skill and courage of the US Air Force."

Fortunately for Obama, this is the stuff that slips by the masses, most of whom, if not suffering from a case of chronic amnesia, certainly struggle to lay claim to events preceding the last super bowl.

Again from Thursday’s worship we witnessed Obama’s soaring rhetoric, his historical revisionism that, "The two superpowers that faced each other across the wall of this city came too close too often to destroying all we have built and all that we love." (a pause for a visit to the men’s room - I will throw up presently.. Ok, back after a clearing of the system) As Hansen notes, "I would beg to differ again and suggest that a mass-murdering Soviet tyranny came close to destroying the European continent (after wiping out millions of its own people)...and was checked only by an often lone and caricatured US superpower and its nuclear deterrence."

Ongoing we will continue to expose the messiah for what he is, or isn’t.

Robert Craven