08 Apr 2009 Outrage of the Day: President Obama Denigrating Bush in Europe

No one is under any illusion that Barack Obama and George W. Bush see eye-to-eye on all or even most policy issues, so President Obama’s criticisms of President Bush while on foreign soil are unnecessary and, to my way of thinking, tacky.

If Obama won’t forgo digs at his predecessor out of a sense of dignity and appreciation for the office of the President of the United States, or appreciation for the old dictum that politics stops at the water’s edge, then he might at least remind himself that inevitably, one day (Obama confidently says this won’t be until 2017), he himself will be a former President of the United States, and will want to be treated with the same amount of respect President Bush showed to him.

I agree with what Charles Krauthammer said on Fox’s “Special Report,” by way of NRO with a hat tip to Jake Tapper and Karen Travers:

Where does one begin? Obama says in America there is a failure to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world.

Maybe that’s because when there was a civil war in Europe’s doorstep in the Balkans and genocide it didn’t lift a finger until America led.

Maybe it’s because there was an invasion in Kuwait it didn’t lift a finger until America led.

Maybe it’s because with America spending over half a trillion a year keeping open the sea lanes and defending the world, Europe is spending pennies on defense.

It’s hard to appreciate an entity’s leading role in the world when it’s been sucking on your tit for 60 years as Europe has with regard to the United States, parasitically…

And then he goes on and calls America arrogant, dismissive, and derisive regarding Europe. “The London Telegraph,” a correspondent in Strasbourg, said this was the most critical remarks he had ever seen a president give on foreign soil, and I think he’s right.

When Kennedy arrived in Paris, he did not attack Eisenhower and the United States. When Obama’s elected president, he is president of all of the United States, including Americans who opposed him, and he owns American history, including a past he may not have wanted to engage in.

I think what he did is, in order to gain the adoration of the crowd, he denigrated his country in a way that I think is disgraceful.

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Labels: Europe, Foreign Policy, Outrage, White House