Other presidents have been wrong. Other presidents have been misguided. Other presidents have been weak and pusillanimous and pathetic.
Only one truly disdains America. His name is Barack Obama.
How else to explain his latest outrage against the country that elevated him to the ranks of world leadership? Last week, the Obama State Department submitted a report to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights on the supposed human rights violations taking place in the United States. According to the Washington Times, the report describes how the United States discriminates against the disabled, homosexuals, women, Native Americans, blacks, Hispanics and those who don’t speak English. There is the expected pandering to Muslims…the report notes that until recently, the U.S. engaged in torture, unlawfully detained terrorist suspects and illegally spied on Americans communicating with terrorists … but the report assures readers that Mr. Obama has been putting a stop to all that.
Beyond the outrage felt by Governor Jan Brewer, whose move to protect Arizonans’ human rights was offered up as an example of an abuse of human rights by Mr. Obama’s State Department report (gotta protect those drug cartel murderers!), for many citizens, this report is a rank anti-American manifesto and the last straw. Many believe it to be outright evil, that there is no other word to encompass Obama’s disgraceful and indefensible decision. This odious report has placed America — us — on a list of human rights violators that includes Iran, North Korea, and Sudan. And Mr. Obama and his administration have done it purposefully, intentionally, and with malice aforethought.
The truth, on the other hand, is that every demographic group mentioned in the report as victimized by America is better off in America than in any other country on earth. That’s why they stay here. If they don’t like America, they’re free to leave at any time. We’re not the Soviet Union or China, restricting population flow. European glories are only a plane ticket away.
But they don’t leave. That’s because the people of America have a higher standard of living, more opportunity for high-quality health care (at least for a little while longer), a better shot at a decent education, and more personal freedom to pursue occupations of their choice — and life, liberty, and happiness — than in any other place on the planet.
But according to Obama, splinter groups of Americans (including women, who compose a majority of the population) are hapless and defenseless victims of our “downright mean” country, a description coined by Mrs. Obama during Mr. Obama’s campaign for president. The State Department report is a typical liberal look-at-America-through-a-toilet-seat perspective, construing every minor problem as systemic and considering all forms of law enforcement discriminatory. The report is unseemly and deeply offensive to the American people.
Worse, it’s not just Obama and his thumb-sucking minions whining about America to other Americans — at least that wouldn’t be purveying false notions about America outside our borders. No, lying to Americans about the cruelty of their country isn’t enough for Obama — he must preach it to the world. Because in Obama’s worldview, the world is the ultimate arbiter of America, even though that quaint document, our Constitution, specifically grants such responsibility to the American people alone.
It’s nonsensical from a legal point of view, and Obama’s a lawyer. One of the chief notions in legal academia is that a judge’s political perspective shapes his decisions no matter how hard he attempts to be objective. The same holds true for countries — Iran will judge us through the Iranian anti-Semitic, anti-American, anti-freedom, fundamentalist Islamic perspective it uses for everything else. Yet Obama inexplicably sees the judgment of countries like Iran as important and wants to lay bare before the world each of our minute flaws — some real, some imagined — for careful examination and exploitation by our most implacable enemies, with much of that exploitation dangerous to our national security and to ordinary Americans.
Perhaps it’s because Obama has spent most of his life in a Christian country that he doesn’t understand how the world works — over here, we don’t cast the first stone. Instead, we target the most egregious human rights violators and try to curb their violations. Maybe Obama thinks the rest of the world will act in truly Christian fashion, too, and focus on the true human rights violators even if we expose ourselves to the tyrants, dictators, and mullahs. That would make him an idiot.
More likely, Obama just doesn’t give a tinker’s damn whether the world flays us because he thinks America’s minor flaws are major ones. It is possible that Obama dislikes America because this is the country that produced his rootless life and gave leeway to his drunk, child-abandoning Kenyan father. More likely, Obama is displeased with this country because he spent his childhood wandering from identity to identity until he found one that justified his alienation — identity as a Marxist racialist — an elevated identity in the left’s hierarchy of the victimized.
Whatever the reason, Obama has no soft spot for America. The unpresidential condescension he feels for our country and its religion- and gun-clinging citizens oozes from his pores and spills out of them in unguarded moments. And that disrespect — the kind that comes only from those who are clueless about leadership — gives both aid and comfort to our enemies and leaves those who wish to share in the bounty of our freedom and liberty in the dark.
What American president would do that?
Carol A. Taber is president of FamilySecurityMatters.org.
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