President Barack Obama’s call yesterday for “restraint on all sides” as defenseless Coptic Christians were attacked and murdered in Egypt in a government-supported Islamic pogrom was typical of his administration’s response to attacks by states against civilians.

Though he has, in some cases, come around to criticizing and even toppling regimes, Obama’s first instinct is to treat the perpetrators and the victims as equals.

The sole, and repeated, exception is Israel, which the Obama administration criticizes and condemns for legal activities such as construction within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem. By contrast, the administration coddles the unrepentant, terror-promoting Palestinian leadership–a fruitless effort, greeted with contempt rather than gratitude.

The same tendency is apparent in Obama’s newly-uncovered attempt to apologize for the atomic blast at Hiroshima, which the Japanese, appropriately, rejected. Obama has had trouble, especially early in his presidency, distinguishing defense from aggression–especially when that defense is on behalf of western democracy.

That is worse than moral equivalence; it is “immoral equivalence,” because it destroys the moral distinction between freedom and tyranny. (more…)

Our nation is in trouble and it goes far deeper than the current economic crisis of the past few years.  Nor, despite all the rancor and the loud shouting back and forth, is the problem attributable to any single controversial issue . . . albeit the important issues that are dividing us are clearly a symptom of our woes.

Since we are a nation of immigrants, there have always been tensions within our vibrant democracy from divisions along obvious fault lines:  race, religion, class, geography, national origin and even age.  But what has, from the beginning, distinguished our collective ethnic citizenry and made America wonderfully unique among the nations of the world was that, unlike virtually all of the countries from which we came, once we attained citizenship we were accepted, truly accepted, as Americans.   We have overcome many crises because, with the obvious exception of the stain of slavery, our constitutional system of division of power between the states and the federal government and the separation of federal authority among these distinct branches of government, has depended on, indeed even demanded, political compromise to advance policies with any semblance of shared goals.  But over the last two decades the notion of shared goals and the ability to fashion compromises have all but disappeared, widening the fault lines and leaving the nation polarized and government often paralyzed.

There is irony in this increased polarization given our preoccupation, sometimes to the point of absurdity, with political correctness.  Either we have become unbelievably thin-skinned as a people or our preoccupation with political correctness has led to a process of balkanization as each ethnic group sees the “national pie” as a zero sum game:  “we win, you lose.” This comes at the expense of putting America first.  The price has been high.

When our president feels that apologies are necessary to improve our relationships with long- time allies and to reset our relationships with others, including those who have, for many years, been hostile to the United States; when an American ambassador, by his mere presence, implies an American apology for the awful devastation visited upon the victims at Hiroshima, without any acknowledgement by the Japanese government, after more than 60 years, that it was an imperialist Japanese government that was responsible for bringing war to the Pacific with their unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor, we diminish the noble cause for which over one-half million Americans gave their lives. The Japanese are certainly entitled to convene in memory of those who lost their lives at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it is their national day of remembrance. Our presence was neither called for nor appropriate. They and we have gotten past that dark and deadly time.  We are, today close allies and trade partners.  The last war-related joint ceremony in which we participated with the Japanese was in 1945 on the deck of the US Missouri in Tokyo Bay.   We should have left it there.

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Initially, we weren’t certain whether Obama’s deep bow to the Japanese Emperor was an excessive execution of standard protocol, or yet another stop-over in Obama’s apparent World Apology Tour. The University of Connecticut Republicans have cleared this up for us.

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This week, President Obama took the unprecedented step of personally chairing a meeting of the United Nations Security Council. In an address to the General Assembly the day before, The President of the United States, with American power and influence on the decline around the world, declared yet again that, “No world order that elevates one nation… over another will succeed.”

It seems lost on the American President that he was not elected to create or perfect a world order, but to elevate the interests of the United States. He was not selected by a world assembly but by Americans, who extracted from him a sworn oath to defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign or domestic. That same Constitution calls the president the Chief Executive of the Untied States. Imagine if the chief executive of Wal-Mart attended an economic forum and suggested a willingness to make his company less successful in the interest of promoting the perceived success of his competitors. It is unlikely that he would remain CEO for long… (more…)