Niles Gardiner, in the Telegraph, says it’s time for all the grovelling and up-sucking to stop.

No leader in American history has gone to greater lengths than Barack Obama to make amends for his own country. From condemnation of American “arrogance” in a speech in Strasbourg to acknowledging U.S. “mistakes” before millions of Muslims on Arab television, Obama has rarely missed an opportunity to apologise for the actions of the American people.

President Obama has elevated the art of national self-loathing to new heights, and seems to delight in prostrating the most powerful nation on the face of the earth before its critics and rivals, especially on foreign soil. The Obama worldview revolves around the central premise that the United States must be humble and “engage” and work with its enemies through the application of “smart power”. There is nothing smart, however, in appeasing rogue states such as North Korea or Iran.

The Obama doctrine is now lying in tatters after North Korean tyrant Kim Jong-Il and Iranian demagogue Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met Obama’s recent overtures with missile tests and even a nuclear blast from Pyongyang. The president’s video message in March offering “a new beginning” to “the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” was followed by the launch of a surface-to-surface missile with a range of 1,200 miles capable of reaching southern Europe. Incredibly, the U.S. response has been to slash defense spending, with a dramatic scaling down of plans for a global missile defence shield.

The world today is considerably more dangerous than it was in the days of the Bush Administration, and the Obama White House has nothing to show for its weak-kneed efforts. The brutal truth is that the United States is increasingly viewed as a soft touch by its enemies, increasingly jeered rather than feared.

Read the whole thing.

Jon Ward, at the Washington Times, explains that making concessions to the other point of view, then pivoting and asking for favors, concessions, and understanding of the American perspective is just President Obama’s characteristically preferred technique of deal-making and consensus-building.

Besides incorporating the president’s preferred approach in all circumstances of conflict of sweet-talking manipulation, Obama’s apologies also provide undoubtedly agreeable opportunities for continuing the partisan Bush-bashing, America-bashing narrative fundamental to the left’s world view.

America, to hear President Obama tell it, is an occasionally arrogant nation struggling with shameful legacies of racism and discrimination, one that bears a large share of the blame for the world’s economic and climate crises. Oh, and our train service is lousy.

Mr. Obama’s just-concluded eight-day trip abroad, his first major international foray, also marked the debut of a more humble foreign-policy style, one that sought to use cultural concessions and admissions of past mistakes to disarm other countries before challenging their own policies and attitudes toward America.

Repeatedly on a trip that included stops across Europe and in Iraq, Mr. Obama tried to pre-empt criticism of the United States by expressing it first himself – a sharp break from the practice of President George W. Bush.

Mr. Obama told Europeans that “America has shown arrogance” toward their continent, conceded that the United States bears much of the blame for the world’s economic plight, and said in a speech broadcast throughout the Middle East that America is still dealing with its “darker” legacies of discrimination and mistreatment of minorities.

David Axelrod, one of the president’s closest advisers, said Mr. Obama’s approach is one “he’s always believed in. …

There were moments when Mr. Obama’s determination to show deference to other cultures – countering the image of America as a cowboy nation, uninterested in anything beyond its shores – bordered on the bizarre.

Asked in Strasbourg, France, about a proposed Afghan law that human rights groups say gives husbands the right to rape their wives, Mr. Obama condemned the law, but also said America should be “sensitive to local culture.” His bottom line was that in Afghanistan, the U.S. focus “is to defeat al Qaeda,” but the comment came across as a rationalization of abuse against women.

B. Hussein Obama (appropriately enough, I suppose) gave his first formal interview, not to the New York Times or CBS News, and definitely not to L’Osservatore Romano, but to Al Aribiya.

Mr. Obama demonstrated his new style of diplomatic engagement, and carried on one of his own campaign themes, by distancing himself from his predecessors in the White House and by seizing the initiative in criticizing the United States for himself.

Announcing that he was sending former Senator George Mitchell as his own personal envoy to the Middle East to engage in peace-making efforts between Israel and the Palestinians, Obama, perhaps simply by force of long habit, reverted to traditional leftwing anti-American accusations, accusing the United States of “dictating” and of ignorance.

George Mitchell is somebody of enormous stature. He is one of the few people who have international experience brokering peace deals.

And so what I told him is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating – in the past on some of these issues – and we don’t always know all the factors that are involved. So let’s listen.

As far as I know, the US has made numerous efforts to persuade Israel to make concessions of territory and an independent Palestinian state, and the US has bribed Egypt and Jordan to make peace. The only US diktats made toward the Islamic Middle East have been: Thou shalt not eliminate Israel from the face of the map, and drive its population into the sea, and Thou shalt not aid and sponsor terrorism.

Both seem to me to be perfectly defensible policies, of a purely defensive character, that do not require an apology.

Mr. Obama gets his first Jimmy Carter Award for embarrassing poltroonery.

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Andrew Sullivan snivels admiringly, in the fashion of liberal bed wetters everywhere:

B. Hussein sucking up to the dish-towel-wearing set is a case of “met expectation.”

If you’re the likes of Andrew Sullivan, what do you do with hostile enemies? Why, you brown-nose them! As Andrew explains: “it’s about R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”

Liberals are so chrome yellow that any adversary, however contemptible and primitive, is always an apocalyptic threat, and propitiatory grovelling is always not only in order, it is vital for our survival.

My sense, for what it’s worth, is that Obama is genuine. He doesn’t know whether this bold new play will pay dividends any more than we do. What he does know, I think, is that we have no choice. The trajectory of the current global conflict, centered on the question of Islam and modernity, is an apocalyptic one if the game isn’t changed soon. He is attempting to change the game. Which led me to my second reaction.

Hope.

Pathetic.

Just like Iowahawk, Eric Posner, at Volokh, reflects upon America’s newly restored standing in the eyes of hyper-domesticated and garlic-breathed Europeans generally.

Suddenly, the United States has prestige (again) that matches its power and wealth, and this prestige no other country can touch. People around the world beg the United States to “exercise leadership” and solve the world’s problems (but with “humility,” please!) …

There are two versions of American exceptionalism. American-American exceptionalism is “we’re richer because we’re better.” European-American exceptionalism is “you’re better because you’re richer.” Both sides agree on exceptionalism, and just see different causes and implications. The Europeans expect us, on account of our wealth, to live up to (their) ideals, while we think that our wealth ought to prove to them that our ideals are better than theirs. No one of any importance seems to think that the United States is a normal country. Oh, what confusion lies ahead!

Stephen Hayes reports that David Zucker has in production a satirical new film, titled An American Carol, a comedy whose humor comes at the expense of the anti-American Hollywood left.

An American Carol is based loosely–very loosely–on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. …

The holiday in An American Carol is not Christmas and the antagonist is not Ebenezer Scrooge. Instead, the film follows the exploits of a slovenly, anti-American filmmaker named Michael Malone (played by Kevin Farley), who has joined with a left-wing activist group (Moovealong.org) to ban the Fourth of July. Along the way, Malone is visited by the ghosts of three American heroes–George Washington, George S. Patton, and John F. Kennedy–who try to convince him he’s got it all wrong. When terrorists from Afghanistan realize that they need to recruit more operatives to make up for the ever-diminishing supply of suicide bombers, they begin a search for just the right person to help produce a new propaganda video. “This will not be hard to find in Hollywood,” says one. “They all hate America.” When they settle on Malone, who is in need of work after his last film (Die You American Pigs) bombed at the box office, he unwittingly helps them with their plans to launch another attack on American soil.

The entire film is an extended rebuttal to the vacuous antiwar slogan that “War Is Not the Answer.” Zucker’s response, in effect: “It Depends on the Question.” …

Jon Voight plays George Washington. Dennis Hopper makes an appearance as a judge who defends his courthouse by gunning down ACLU lawyers trying to take down the Ten Commandments. James Woods plays Michael Malone’s agent. And Kelsey Grammer plays General George S. Patton, Malone’s guide to American history and the mouthpiece of the film’s writers.

Argues Assistant Village Idiot, and liberals in New England need to wise up.

Boston fans, you know with a certainty that much of the resentment comes from the mere fact that we won and they didn’t. That other stuff is just scrambling for justifications, because no one wants to admit that they hate you just because you’re successful.

New England and especially Massachusetts, are among the most politically liberal areas of the country. A lot of those Boston fans who know in their gut that they are hated more from envy than from anything they have done to deserve it, nonetheless refuse to understand this about the larger world they live in. These are the folks who believe that America is hated because of our foreign policy, because we exploit everyone, because of George Bush, because of our arrogance.

Not really. Those negative things are partly true, of course, and we shouldn’t go to the other extreme and discount all criticism. But the European elites hate us because we have rescued them, protected them, created the consumer goods and medical techniques they love, and it is too painful to admit that. Middle Eastern countries hate us because we are rich. Because they have contributed nothing to the world for about 7 centuries except the oil they happen to be living over, they must find ways to delegitimise our success. It should be theirs. They deserve it. We must have cheated somehow.

So remember that when you go to the polls Sox fans, Pats fans, Celts fans. You know in your gut the real reason that the rest of the country resents you, and now you know why the world resents America, and rejoices in our losses. Don’t fall for the excuses again.

Also via Dr. Mercury.

Miguel A. Guanipa, in the course of analyzing Obama’s vulnerabilities in the presidential campaign, debunks the conventional leftwing meme that it is American action which produces terrorism, the contemporary political equivalent of the medieval belief in the spontaneous generation of pests and vermin from decaying matter.

With the irreverent chutzpah of a snickering 8 year old tattler telling on his older sibling, Obama indulged an excitable crowd of adoring fans with the rather overused and unproven refrain that — contrary to McCain’s beliefs — Al Qaeda was not present in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion. …

To suggest that American intervention begets more terrorism denotes a subtle endorsement of the novel diplomatic principle that a policy of retreat and noninvolvement would automatically yield better relations with the consistently volatile potentates of Middle Eastern regimes. This simple-minded sequitur continues to galvanize radical leftwing Democrats, who are already sold on the proposition that there is an inverse link between the number of terrorists in the world and the level of what is generally considered by them to be America’s modest record of charity and good will through its international relations role.

It is true that terrorism did not make the headlines as frequently when the United States remained basically uninvolved in the political affairs of countries that harbored terrorist organizations. This does not mean that the latter were heretofore virtually nonexistent and suddenly sprang up in response to the United States’ unjustified military intervention in other countries’ affairs.

This is not only a gross misunderstanding of the reasons for the existence of terrorism, it also dishonors the sacrifices of those who have the courage to be proactive about it, and what is worse, it casts them as the culprits in front of a global audience.

By effectively engaging the terrorists, America has simply forced them to expose their clandestine operations, which only the ill-informed would deny have long been in existence. Until they reached an apex of sorts on September 11, 2001, the media had decided that such operations scarcely merited their attention. Since then, simply recycling the same old tune, that it is our fault terrorism has become such a problem around the world, no longer represents a viable argument against intervention anytime the sitting president perceives a clear threat to national security.

LA Daily News:

Shawn Sage long dreamed of joining the military, and watching “Full Metal Jacket” last year really sold him on becoming a Marine.

But last fall, a Los Angeles Superior Court commissioner dashed the foster teen’s hopes of early enlistment for Marine sniper duty, plus a potential $10,000 signing bonus.

In denying the Royal High School student delayed entry into the Marine Corps, Children’s Court Commissioner Marilyn Mackel reportedly told Sage and a recruiter that she didn’t approve of the Iraq war, didn’t trust recruiters and didn’t support the military.

“The judge said she didn’t support the Iraq war for any reason why we’re over there,” said Marine recruiter Sgt. Guillermo Medrano of the Simi Valley USMC recruiting office.

“She just said all recruiters were the same – that they `all tap dance and tell me what I want to hear.’ She said she didn’t want him to fight in it.” …

After Sage submitted a winning entry to the lawmaker’s Write a Bill Challenge, Assemblyman Cameron Smyth introduced legislation last month that would allow foster teens to enlist in the service without express permission from a judge.

Instead, AB2238 would allow foster children 17 or older to sign up with the consent of a foster parent or social worker.

“Here is one impressive young man who somehow made it through the challenge of the foster system, had a clear sense of a career path and was denied that opportunity by a judge basically because of her personal bias,” said Smyth, R-Santa Clarita, who will honor Sage today at a Royal High assembly.

“I find that to be a horrific abuse of her power.”

Mona Charen searches for the real Obama, concealed behind the pink cloud of rhetoric about “Hope” and “Change,” by actually reading his book.

Barack Obama’s words are often attractive but oddly concealing. His speeches are all balm and mood. It’s all very well to seek, as Obama claims, to transcend old categories, to reject the “old politics.” But then what? This graceful rhetorician leaves you wondering: Who is he really? What does he want for himself and for his country?

In search of answers that go deeper than the Congressional Record, I read his first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.” Once you get past the happy surprise of finding a politician who can actually write, the book contains some disquieting elements. …

Left-wing ideas are not so much articulated in this memoir as presumed. Obama has claimed that his experience living abroad gives him a valuable perspective for a chief executive. Yet his reflections on the effect Western capitalism has had on Jakarta and Chicago’s south side sound like warmed over Herbert Marcuse. “How could we go about stitching a culture back together after it was torn? How long might it take in this land of dollars? … The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastics manufacturer, will have rendered their [Indonesian] culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that’s been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns.”

Obama’s self-portrait in this book is that of a searching, nonjudgmental young man attempting to find his rightful place after a confusing start in life. But he is attracted by the harshly ideological Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose church he joins. Wright peddles racial grievance religion. Following 9/11, he said, “[W]hite America got a wake-up call … White America and the Western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.”

Obama says he doesn’t agree with Wright about everything. Fine. And maybe he doesn’t agree with his wife when she (twice) said that she’d never been proud of her country until its people began to support her husband. But then, what did he mean when he said on March 4 that making a little girl proud to say she is an American is the “change we are calling for”?

One suspects that beneath the soothing talk, there is bitterness in the man that we’d best learn more about before voting.

Obama is the product of two unions between an alienated leftist white American woman and a pair of dark-skinned foreigners. Her liaisons with Obama’s father and stepfather were explicit attempts at rejecting her own identity, family, economic system, and country in favor of the fraught-with-symbolism Other. Obama was consequently brought up in a thoroughly leftist and anti-American domestic culture and social matrix.

His autobiographical writings indicate that he went farther than his mother, disapproving of her interracial unions, and choosing instead to embrace a personal black identity and nationalism, which undoubtedly includes the Kwanzaa-style Western interpretation of the African identity as different from Europe by virtue of inclusion of collectivist and socialist ideals and values.

The New Yorker profiles Michelle Obama, and quotes an oft-repeated speech:

The four times I heard her give the speech—in a ballroom at the University of South Carolina, from the pulpit of Pee Dee Union, at an art gallery in Charleston, and in the auditorium of St. Norbert College, in De Pere, Wisconsin—its content was admirably consistent, with few of the politician’s customary tweaks and nods to the demographic predilections, or prejudices, of a particular audience.

Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she said, as heads bobbed in the pews. “Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young. Forty-four!”

Jonah Goldberg, in the LA Times (now asking for registration), demolishes the leftwing fantasy of the American Empire.

Critics of American foreign policy point to the fact that the U.S. does many things that empires once did — police the seas, deploy militaries abroad, provide a lingua franca and a global currency — and then rest their case. But noting that X does many of the same things as Y does not mean that X and Y are the same thing. The police provide protection, and so does the Mafia. Orphanages raise children, but they aren’t parents. If your wife cleans your home, tell her she’s the maid because maids also clean homes. See how well that logic works.

When they speak of the American empire, critics fall back on cartoonish notions, invoking Hollywoodized versions of ancient Rome or mothballed Marxist caricatures of the British Raj. But unlike the Romans or even the British, our garrisons can be ejected without firing a shot. We left the Philippines when asked. We may split from South Korea in the next few years under similar circumstances. Poland wants our military bases; Germany is grumpy about losing them. When Turkey, a U.S. ally and member of NATO, refused to let American troops invade Iraq from its territory, the U.S. government said “fine.” We didn’t invade Iraq for oil (all we needed to do to buy it was lift the embargo), and we’ve made it clear that we’ll leave Iraq if the Iraqis ask.

The second verse of the anti-imperial lament, sung in unison by liberals and libertarians, goes like this: Expansion of the military-industrial complex leads to contraction of freedom at home. But historically, this is a hard sell. Women got the vote largely thanks to World War I. President Truman, that consummate Cold Warrior, integrated the Army, and the civil rights movement escalated its successes even as we escalated the Cold War and our presence in Vietnam. President Reagan built up the military even as he liberalized the economy.

Sure Naomi Wolfe, Frank Rich and other leftists believe that the imperialistic war on terror has turned America into a police state. But if they were right, they wouldn’t be allowed to say that.

Dennis Praeger explains the fundamental, underlying dynamic:

One of the most widely held beliefs in the contemporary world — so widely held it is not disputed — is that, with few exceptions, the world hates America. One of the Democrats’ major accusations against the Bush administration is that it has increased hatred of America to unprecedented levels. And in many polls, the United States is held to be among the greatest obstacles to world peace and harmony.

But it is not true that the world hates America. It is the world’s left that hates America. However, because the left dominates the world’s news media and because most people, understandably, believe what the news media report, many people, including Americans, believe that the world hates America.