“An Empty Shell Mouthing Mere Platitudes”

Victor Davis Hanson has a very pithy look at Obama and the remarks he made recently on foreign soil:

What disturbed me about Barack Obama's Berlin speech were some reoccurring utopian assumptions about cause and effect — namely, that bad things happen almost as if by accident, and are to be addressed by faceless, universal forces of good will.

Unlike Obama, I would not speak to anyone as “a fellow citizen of the world,” but only as an ordinary American who wishes to do his best for the world, but with a much-appreciated American identity, and rather less with a commonality indistinguishable from those poor souls trapped in the Sudan, North Korea, Cuba, or Iran. Take away all particular national identity and we are empty shells mouthing mere platitudes, who believe in little and commit to even less

…With all due respect, I also don't believe the world did anything to save Berlin, just as it did nothing to save the Rwandans or the Iraqis under Saddam — or will do anything for those of Darfur; it was only the U.S. Air Force that risked war to feed the helpless of Berlin as it saved the Muslims of the Balkans. And I don't think we have much to do in America with creating a world in which “famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.” Bad, often evil, autocratic governments abroad cause hunger, often despite rich natural landscapes; and nature, in tragic fashion, not “the carbon we send into atmosphere,” causes “terrible storms,” just as it has and will for millennia.

Did you get that? "I...don't believe the world did anything to save Berlin". The "world" is not some amorphous, conglomeration of well being that intercedes on behalf of "goodness". Governments intervene. Men intervene. Men with principle.
Not touchy feely, "Can't we all just get along" spineless politicians who will tell you whatever their pollster told them you wanted to hear.

Read the entire piece. Victor Davis Hanson is a national treasure.

Cross Posted at Say Anything