In the first few decades of the country’s history, presidential
candidates didn’t even campaign, seeing the act of shilling for
votes as inherently undignified. Surrogates would campaign on their
behalf. Now presidential candidates not only campaign but seek out
the stupidest shows to retail their demagoguery. “It is dying but
it laughs,” the Romans said of their disintegrating empire. Obama’s
America is dying too as it laughs with Whoopi, Joy, and Dave.
Low comics have become presidential vetters and late-night talk
shows have become places of refuge after a terrorist attack.
Between the back-slapping and guffaws, Letterman asked Obama if “an
act of war” had occurred. Obama deflected the question, launching
into a sermonette on how the Islamic world needs a slight attitude
adjustment. Try to be nicer in the future, was the sermonette’s
essential message.
This week he kept up the patter on The View and at the
UN. It is a toss-up as to which forum was more fatuous. His UN
speech was hailed as a robust defense of free speech. Never mind
that his administration tried to suppress the “Innocence of
Muslims” video and sent police to the filmmaker’s home on
“unrelated” charges, hauling him off so that it could blast
pictures of his arrest to North Africa and the Middle East.
“The strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression,
it is more speech — the voices of tolerance that rally against
bigotry and blasphemy and lift up the values of understanding and
mutual respect,” said Obama, who is on record supporting
“hate-crime” legislation that would ban politically incorrect
speech in the public square.
The real reason Obama doesn’t suppress free speech is that he
can’t get away with it. At least not yet. As he wistfully noted in
his speech, “at a time when anyone with a cellphone can spread
offensive views around the world with the click of a button,”
government regulation of free speech is simply
impractical.
But such musings didn’t stop him from contacting YouTube to take
the video down. He remains convinced that the source of Islamic
terrorism is not centuries-old jihadist theology but Western
provocation, and that if he just delivers a few more
kindergarten-level instructions on anger management — “there is no
excuse for violence” and so on — the problem will disappear.
Desperate to keep his “Bin Laden is dead” boast intact, he can’t
even bring himself to use the word “terrorism.” To the ladies of
The View, he only allowed that the Libyan debacle wasn’t
just a “mob action” and that “threats” still exist.
He emphasized that the terrorists represent only a minor
“strain” in Islam. This is a lie, and not even a particularly
flattering or useful one, as it invites the question: Is the U.S.
really so weak that a tiny fringe can kill its diplomats and storm
its embassies? For some reason Obama thinks the humiliation is
lessened by arguing that the culprit was not a giant but a
pipsqueak.
And he seems to think that this little band of jihadists will
lay down their arms now they have seen his “disgust” on The
View and heard his respect for “the Prophet” at the UN.
Notice that both Hillary Clinton and Obama have taken to
referring to themselves as “believers,” of what it is not clear,
apparently thinking that that somehow improves their credibility in
the eyes of jihadists, as if to say to them: We are not just rotten
secularists, so listen up when we tell you that violence is no
answer to blasphemy.
Jihadists torching the American flag on embassies and replacing
it with the black flag of radical Islam don’t appear to be in the
mood for such lectures. But Obama kept trying at the UN,
encouraging members to model their behavior after his measured
response to “awful” insults, adding as a curious aside that “Like
me, the majority of Americans are Christian, and yet we do not ban
blasphemy against our most sacred beliefs.”
Which sacred beliefs would those be? On multiple occasions,
Obama has criticized the Bible, referred to Jesus Christ as “a” son
of God (not the Son of God), dismissed St. Paul as “obscure,” and
called Abraham a nut on whom he would have called Child Services.
Moreover, most of the anti-religious blasphemy comes
from Obama’s Hollywood pals, such as Da Vinci Code
star Tom Hanks, who considers opponents of gay marriage
“un-American.”
It is an election year, so Obama has to fake up a certain
level of piety. On his campaign website, he now calls himself a
“committed Christian” and has rolled out a four-minute ad on his
outreach to “people of faith.” But the key religion on his mind is
Islam, whose adherents don’t typically watch The View or
take civility lessons from the UN.
