NATIONAL REVIEW
by Victor Davis Hanson
November 18, 2014

Obama’s legacy: government-induced chaos at home, moral equivalence abroad

……Benjamin Netanyahu may be many things but he is certainly neither a coward nor a chickens**t. Such smears are the final sad epitaphs to this administration’s failed relations with the Jewish state. It takes neither a genius nor a moralist to distinguish a liberal state that phones to warn apartment dwellers about the targeted areas of its attack, and the terrorist clique that shoots its own who try to follow such warnings and save themselves. Only a moral adolescent could fail to distinguish a tiny beleaguered democratic atoll from the surrounding violent seas of tribalism, misogyny, homophobia, religious fundamentalism, economic Neanderthalism, autocracy, and terrorism. It is not difficult to appreciate that the liberal society in question has led the way to global breakthroughs in everything from neurosurgery to drip irrigation, while the illiberal model surrounding it leads only in discovering ingenious variations on how to blow civilians up. Hating Israel, saying it is morally no better than its enemies, and damning its democracy as demonic proves also a good guide to what is insane in the present age.

A final litmus test: Distinguish between those who blacken their country’s reputation abroad and those who do not. The sickness of Barack Obama’s apology tour was not just in his moral equivalence, or in his ignorance of history that treats the sins of mankind as if they were the supposedly unique failings of the United States, but also that Obama has a propensity to speak ill of the country that gave him everything when he is among those who bear that country such ill will. Do we remember how he sat mute when Daniel Ortega damned the United States at the Summit of the Americas in 2009? Has he ever heard of Churchill’s dictum (offered to the House of Commons in 1947) that “When I am abroad I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the Government of my country. I make up for lost time when I am at home.” How about the deplorable habit of elite Americans traipsing down to Mexico — whose immigration policies are medieval compared to our own — only to loudly trash the immigration laws of their own country? If Americans abroad express no confidence in their country, then why should our enemies fear us or our friends support us? On America’s worst day it is far preferable to any alternative abroad. Unfortunately, those who are most able to travel overseas are often from the very class that finds it fashionable to caricature their homeland. But it is a major character failing nonetheless.

READ MORE