Mister Moleman and his Friends

Peter Wehner at Contentions, the Commentary blog, has an excellent short posting about the Obama Doctrine:

“At a new conference yesterday, President Obama took a shot at defining the Obama Doctrine. Here’s my effort at defining it: The Obama Doctrine means criticizing past presidents, Democratic and Republican; apologizing for past American sins, real and imagined, to both allies and enemies of the United States, on domestic and, preferably, foreign soil — in the hope that doing so allows Obama to speak with greater moral force and clarity. The overriding goal of the Obama Doctrine is to make the person it is named after look good, rather than, and if necessary at the expense of, the nation he was elected to represent.“

He omitted only to mention the tendency to show toughness by pressuring our allies, and to show understanding by going easy on our enemies.   To repeat myself only slightly:

President Obama’s recent forays into the wider world have been positively Chamberlainesque (although there is no evidence that Chamberlain ever actually bowed to Hitler.) His humble apologies for our sins, his delicate refusal to criticize Iran’s warmongering or Saudi Arabia’s persecution of women or China’s dictatorship, his pious moral equivalence of Israel and Iran/Hamas/Hezbollah. And now the bi-lingual embrace of “mi amigo” Chavez.

Obama’s entire pre-presidential experience and body of work can be summed up as “effective self-promotion.” If he continues to think that the solutions to every problem is “More Obama,” then we are all in for a very rough time.