The fall of the Berlin Wall happened twenty years ago. Unlike other world leaders, past and present, President Obama could not attend. He claims to be too busy. So, while even Mikhail Gorbachev and current Russian president Dmitry Medvedev attend the fall of that Communist symbol, Mr. Obama sends his regrets. Though this is the celebration of a great victory, both symbolic and concrete (no pun intended), for freedom and self-determination, he cannot take time from what, exactly? His Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech? When the occasional pundit likens Obama to Ronald Reagan, it is imperative to keep in mind Obama’s conduct here. Reagan stood for the spread of freedom fostered by a strong and confident United States. Obama? Not so much. I shall be charitable here and not endorse the comments that I have read on other sites that Obama would have gladly attended the construction of that wall. But one wonders just a little, given Obama’s fondness for appearing in the company of world leaders, why he would absent himself. Perhaps it is exactly the presence of so many, with festivities focusing on this event, that made Obama feel diminished. He would be just one of the crowd. After all, it would not be like an adulatory campaign appearance at a Berlin rock concert, a venue much more to the liking and in the comfort zone of a man who has yet to make fully the transition from campaigning to governing.
“The facts of life are conservative.” - Margaret Thatcher
Recent Articles
-
NPR and the “tyranny of constituency”
I have been re-reading quite a few of the Federalist Papers for the constitutingamerica.org project and for a summer class I am teaching on the Foundations of the Constitution. A recurrent theme therein is the…
-
Daily Briefing 06/26/10
First Alvin Greene in South Carolina; now this. A Congressional candidate in Texas wants to impeach President Obama and, during the campaign, carried an oversized picture of the President with a Hitler-style moustache. Obviously, this is the type…
-
Laugh it off!
Iowahawk’s occasional guest columnist T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII returns, somewhat chastened over his earlier gushing and fawning over Barack Obama. “Each day seems to introduce some new crisis on the world scene with hint…
-
Alexander Hamilton on tax policy
Why are certain basic economic proposition known to everyone but Democratic (and unacceptably many Republican) politicians? Here is Alexander Hamilton, writing more than two hundred years ago about the usefulness and limitations of consumption taxes. Hi…
-
Daily Briefing 06/24/10
The Supreme Court has unanimously decided three federal “honest services” fraud cases by (rightly) limiting such cases to bribery and kickbacks, as intended by Congress when the law was drafted, rather than the more…
1 comment
Trackback link
http://www.tokenconservative.com/2009/11/08/happy-20th-anniversary-of-the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall/trackback/
November 10, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Pingback from Hair Washing and ‘Miami Vice’: Obama’s Busted on Ducking Out of the Berlin Wall Anniversary with His “Too Busy” Excuse « Frugal Café Blog Zone