Required Reading

1) From the New York Times, "Playing Innocent Abroad" by David Brooks

Brooks takes a savage scalpel to Barack Obama's soon-to-be- infamous Ich bin ein Weltburger speech. ("Weltburger" means "citizen of the world," by the way.)

Obama speeches almost always have the same narrative arc. Some problem threatens. The odds are against the forces of righteousness. But then people of good faith unite and walls come tumbling down. Obama used the word "walls" 16 times in the Berlin speech, and in 11 of those cases, he was talking about walls coming down.
The Berlin blockade was thwarted because people came together. Apartheid ended because people came together and walls tumbled. Winning the cold war was the same: "People of the world," Obama declared, "look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together and history proved there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one."

When I first heard this sort of radically optimistic speech in Iowa, I have to confess my American soul was stirred. It seemed like the overture for a new yet quintessentially American campaign.

But now it is more than half a year on, and the post-partisanship of Iowa has given way to the post-nationalism of Berlin, and it turns out that the vague overture is the entire symphony. The golden rhetoric impresses less, the evasion of hard choices strikes one more.

Here's the big problem with the "citizen of the world" claim as well as the rest of the speech - it sells America's sacrifices short, and it completely denies American exceptionalism. It's a lovely sentiment for Obama to insist in regards to the Berlin Airlift that "Berlin kept the flame of hope burning" and then praise Berlin's then-mayor for offering some rhetoric that inspired the world. It comes as little surprise that the hero of Obama's little drama would be the verbally adept Mayor - we all know that Obama prefers focusing on the rhetorical side of things rather than on the actions that made a difference. I can even understand how it's in the interest of trans-Atlantic relations to pretend that the Germans and Americans were co-equals in that particular episode.

But we weren't, and it's interesting to note how Obama's frequent forays into rewriting history seldom accrue to America's greater glory. America did the heavy lifting during the Berlin airlift; Germany was the beneficiary of said heavy lifting. And when the talk turns to the Berlin Wall coming down, again it was America that led. While Ronald Reagan was implementing the policies that led to the Berlin Wall's destruction, he and his policies were about as popular in West Germany as the Ebola virus. Or George W. Bush. Of course, things remain the same today. America bears the brunt of fighting the war on terror, while most of our Continental allies content themselves with carping about the means by which we do so.

Mind you, I'm not complaining about our Continental allies. As Donald Rumsfeld might say, they are what they are. It's America's duty to lead in every necessary fight simply because no other nation is willing or able to pick up the burden. It's been that way for almost a century. When Obama somberly mentioned to his German audience the problems in Darfur and Burma, he surely knew that nothing good would happen in either place unless America opts to bear still more burdens. If he doesn't know that much, then even I've underestimated his historical ignorance.

It's a decided oddity that a guy who seeks the U.S. presidency is so reluctant to salute America's greatness. It's odder still that on foreign shores he granted his so-called global citizenship co-equal or perhaps superior status to his American citizenship. Then again, given the scant regard he's willing to express for America's accomplishments, I guess it all makes a sort of sense.

2) From The Daily Dish, "Citizen of the World" by Patrick Appel