Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Newsmax.com
NEW YORK – In a blistering attack on President Obama, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer told a black tie Manhattan audience earlier this week that America is set on a “course toward decline” that could end its post-World War II position of military and economic hegemony in the world.
Krauthammer charged that “the liberal internationalism of today is different” from – and “goes far beyond” – the center-left foreign policy of Bill Clinton. The Obama global vision has at its foundation a “distrust for and distaste of American dominance,” according to Krauthammer, and embraces the idea that America is “congenitally sinful” and “that we can’t be trusted” as a player on the world stage.
The nationally-syndicated opinion writer and regular television commentator for both Fox News and PBS was delivering the Manhattan Institute’s prestigious Walter B. Wriston Lecture at the Pierre Hotel in New York City. Previous honorees include Justice Clarence Thomas, economist Milton Friedman and writer Tom Wolfe.
Wheelchair-bound and limited in his use of hands and arms since a spinal injury in the 1970s, ex-psychiatrist Krauthammer projected an almost Doctor Strangelove-like image to the packed ballroom, periodically sipping a strategically-placed glass of water through a straw after delivery of a joke or applause line.
The president has taken the “imperfect union” motif of his Philadelphia race speech from last year’s campaign and “carried” and “amplified” it in numerous presidential addresses, “particularly ones on foreign soil,” Krauthammer said. Yet after Tehran’s killing of pro-democracy demonstrators in June, the president “holds his tongue,” believing that the Eisenhower Administration’s coup in Iran denies the U.S. the moral authority to express outrage.
The Obama Administration has reclassified acts of terrorism as “man-caused disasters,” Krauthammer said, conducted a “unilateral abrogation” of missile defense “in a century that will be dominated by the ballistic missile,” and is now risking losing both Afghanistan and Iraq.
[Yet after just nine months of what Krauthammer calls a “new liberalism” foreign policy, “we couldn’t even sway the Olympic Committee” to award the 2016 games to Chicago, let alone convince our European allies to provide more help in Afghanistan.
A staunch supporter of Israel, Krauthammer said the Jewish state “will risk a rupture with America” in taking action against the threat of Iran’s nuclear program.]
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