As a recent Politico headline quipped, “For Obama, Hipness Is What It Is”, which is a polite way of describing the man as an aloof, self-obsessed narcissistic nihilist. (See also: Maher, Bill for this phenomenon writ small.) And with its president asleep at the wheel, in his latest column, Mark Steyn sums up the state of the world with a suddenly rudderless America:
What’s the greater likelihood? That in 10 years’ time things in Pakistan will be better? Or much worse? That nuclearization by basket-case dictatorships from Pyongyang to Tehran will have advanced, or been contained? That the bleak demographic arithmetic at the heart of Europe and Japan’s economic woes will have accelerated, or been reversed? That a resurgent Islam’s assaults on free speech and other rights (symbolized by the recent U.N. support for a global Islamic blasphemy law) will have taken hold in the Western world, or been forced to retreat?
A betting man would check the “worse” box. Because resisting the present careless drift would require global leadership. And 100 days into a new presidency Barack Obama is giving strong signals to the world that we have entered what Caroline Glick of The Jerusalem Post calls “the post-American era.” At the time of Gordon Brown’s visit to Washington, London took umbrage at an Obama official’s off-the-record sneer to a Fleet Street reporter that “there’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.” Andy McCarthy of National Review made the sharp observation that, never mind the British, this was how the administration felt about its own country, too: America is just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. In Europe, the president was asked if he believed in “American exceptionalism,” and he replied: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
Gee, thanks. A simple “no” would have sufficed. The president of the United States is telling us that American exceptionalism is no more than national chauvinism, a bit of flag-waving, of no more import than the Slovenes supporting the Slovene soccer team and the Papuans the Papuan soccer team. This means something. The world has had two millennia to learn to live without “Greek exceptionalism.” It’s having to get used to post-exceptional America rather more hurriedly.
No wonder our transnational legacy media adore him so.
Update: England’s Gerald Warner approaches the topic from a slightly less nuanced direction: “Why does President Pantywaist hate America so badly?”
More: As Michelle Malkin writes, in “The only 100-day retrospective you need to read”, the New York Post catalogs, “100 days, 100 mistakes.”
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