Obama and Europe: the same moral arrogance -- and ignorance

By James Lewis

Obama won't debate John McCain in free-form Townhall settings, so he is jetting off to Europe, where millions of liberal suckers will fall down, kiss the ground, and worship him. He figures he deserves it.

Senator Obama should be running for President of Europe, not America, because Europe and Obama deserve each other. They share exactly the same attitude of moral arrogance and ignorance about reality.

Obama can loftily dismiss genocidal Iran as a "tiny country" that poses no threat to anybody. That was when he was lying to his own troops on the Left. Today Obama is talking more sense about Iran, but still not nearly enough to match the reality of the threat. Those deliberate, cynical, arrogant lies are typical of Europe's tenured Ruling Class -- socialists to a man and woman, amazingly arrogant, and completely helpless in the face of real danger. Europe's rulers have rejected tough choices, so when Slobodan Milosevic was committing daily genocide and mass rape in the Balkans, our moral superiors in Europe called on Bill Clinton to bomb the Serbs, and Good Ole' Bill obliged his friends. Europe didn't want to get its hands all dirty.

Yesterday, Balkan genocide and Saddam; today, Robert Mugabe and the jihadicide in the Sudan. It's all the same. Europe wrings its hands when real people get killed and tortured and blames George W. Bush. Sound familiar?

Liberal Europe suffers from an abysmal case of moral and physical cowardice, as German publisher Matthias Doepfner and writer Henryk Broder said so eloquently three years ago in the newspaper Die Welt. Broder wrote:

"Appeasement generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore nearly 500,000 victims of Saddam's torture and murder machinery and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace movement, has the gall to issue bad grades to George Bush... Even as it is uncovered that the loudest critics of the American action in Iraq made illicit billions, no, TENS of billions, in the corrupt U.N. Oil-for-Food program."

... "We saw it first hand: Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War, freeing half of the German people from nearly 50 years of terror and virtual slavery. And Bush, supported only by the Social Democrat (Tony) Blair, acting on moral conviction, recognized the danger in the Islamic War against Democracy." ...

"In the meantime, Europe sits back with charismatic self-confidence in the multicultural corner, instead of defending liberal society's values and being an attractive center of power on the same playing field as the true great powers, America and China."

"On the contrary - we Europeans present ourselves, in contrast to those "arrogant Americans", as the World Champions of "tolerance" ... Why? Because we're so moral? I fear it's more because we're so materialistic, so devoid of a moral compass."

Arrogance. And ignorance.

Where have have seen that before? How about among our very own Democrats, and their most liberal Senator Barack Obama?

Keep that in mind, as Obama does his triumphal tour of sophisticated Europe, and our newspapers fall all over themselves congratulating him.

And keep your air sickness bag handy.

James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.com