By George H. Wittman
The American Spectator
12.15.2009
For the most part the audience at the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony sat on their hands. They had expected one of Barack Obama’s patented attacks on his own country as an explanation of how the U.S. was changing under his leadership. What they heard was quite different and quite confusing.
Subsequent commentary in the United States on President Obama’s speech was equally confusing. Republicans were pleased by the theme of “just wars,” while Democrats generally thanked their stars that their adored leader hadn’t once again trashed his own country abroad. Of course the media exulted over Mr. Obama’s ability to speak with clarity on matters they judged carried great philosophical import.
While the Nobel Prize audience was stunned by President Obama’s defense of the use of military power to protect the defenseless and to correct injustice, most of the American public was simply surprised that they had waited this long for what since WW2 has been viewed as the basic principle of U.S. foreign policy. Conservative America adjudged that Barack Obama finally had awakened to the fact that the United States is a sovereign country with its own dominant interests rather than simply a member of a global affiliation of disparate entities whose sovereignty has been established by consensus.
Unfortunately such is not true: Barack Obama had made a purely domestic political decision…
…It was a brilliant display (by Obama’s speechwriters) of political legerdemain. In the end, however, it was really just a very clever shifting of ground so as to secure a philosophical foundation that would allow furtherance of a domestic program aimed at a massive federal intervention in traditional American business and social affairs.
The Right fell hook, line and sinker for the Obama rhetorical tactic. Indeed the performance in Oslo was politics at its most sophisticated…
The article continues at Spectator.
