The Anti-American President

TIA Daily

 July 2, 2009

Barack Obama’s Anti-American Bias

by Robert Tracinski

While President Obama refused to “be seen as meddling” in Iran , he has been quick to meddle in Honduras .  When asked on Monday whether the administration would recognize Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the legitimately elected president of Iran —despite the fact that he blatantly stole the election—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton replied with the non-answer, “We’re going to take this a day at a time.” But the administration had no such reticence about the arrest and deportation of Manuel Zelaya, the now-former president of Honduras . President Obama himself described it as “illegal” and opined that “Zelaya remains the president of Honduras “—which was news to both the Congress and the Supreme Court of Honduras. (In fact, Obama got the story exactly wrong. It is Zelaya’s attempt to unilaterally re-write the constitution and install himself as a Chavez-style strongman that was illegal.)

So what’s the difference between Iran and Honduras ? Why refuse to meddle in one case—and meddle up to his elbows in the other?

The difference, I am afraid, is this. Giving moral and material support to Iran ’s dissidents would serve America ’s interests. Condemning Zelaya’s ejection from office as an illegal “coup”—and thereby handing over Honduras to Hugo Chavez’s neo-socialist mini-empire—sacrifices America ’s interests.

The explanation, in short, is that Obama is acting on the basic premise of anti-Americanism. Note that in both cases, Obama cited America ’s history of involvement in other countries’ affairs as evidence of our past sins and lack of moral authority. Thus, in his view, America can only legitimately act overseas if we demonstrate that we are not being imperialists but are instead working against our own interests.

In the final days of last year’s presidential election, I offered the following warning:

In this election, there is one crucial question about the character of these two men that does highlight a sharp and morally revealing difference between them. It also happens to be the most basic and elemental question one can ask about a man who would be president of the United States . Does he love America ?

To ask that question is to immediately invoke Obama’s close, long-time associations with his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and with one of his key Chicago political sponsors, the unrepentant former Weathermen terrorist William Ayers. Associations of this kind matter because they reveal who and what a man will tolerate, and more: they reveal what he regards as normal, what he is comfortable with. They reveal, not just Barack Obama’s convictions or his calculations, but his sense of life….

A man who is comfortable with hatred of America cannot be allowed to sit in this nation’s most powerful office.

A few people scoffed at this idea, replying that simple love of America is too woozy and emotional a criterion, or that a president’s “sense of life” is irrelevant to how he makes decisions. But now we see that this aspect of Barack Obama’s character is making a very real and material difference.

This is a revealing moment, and the president’s different reactions to Iran and Honduras confirm our worst fears about him.

From the views he learned at his mother’s knee, to those he imbibed at Reverend Wright’s church, to those he heard from his friend and political mentor Billy Ayers, Obama has spent his whole life steeped in the slander that America’s assertion of its interests in the world has created an evil empire that must be dismantled. And now that he is in office, he is setting about to dismantle it.

I’ve been worried that Obama will be another Jimmy Carter—but he is worse. He is the first actively anti-American president in our nation’s history.

Barack Obama has just sold out the Iranian people to torture, murder, and oppression, and he is about to sell out the people of Honduras to the poverty and anarchy of a socialist dictatorship. And who knows where he will abandon our interests next. A crisis in Iraq ? A failure to interdict North Korean arms shipments? A new Russian attack on Georgia ? Or some new disaster that we cannot anticipate, which will arise opportunistically to take advantage of Obama’s weakness?

Based on what we know so far, we can assume that in any such conflicts, the first instinct of the “leader of the free world” will be to abandon the defenders of liberty and appease the tyrants.

I fear that we will still be paying the price for this anti-American leadership many decades from now—that my son will have to fight in a war that could have been avoided if President Obama had not deliberately sabotaged America’s power.