Obama Apologizes to Germany for America

Barack Obama delivered a rousing speech to a German crowd estimated at over 200,000 strong this past week in Berlin, during a campaign trip overseas. It's a familiar scene because this is where Obama is strongest: Delivering a prepared speech in front of a large crowd. This one was particularly bad because a) He delivered it while pretending to be POTUS; b) He delivered it on foreign soil while campaigning for a U.S. election; c) He apologized to foreigners for the alleged sins of this country.

Read Obama, Don't Listen
As I listen to his speeches now, I mentally separate the variations in his tone and pitch from the actual content of the speech. When you do this it's much easier to focus on how lacking and wrong the substance of his words actually are. And when you notice that the screaming fans are so caught up in the emotion his voice is able to generate (that you're separating/ignoring) and not the content, you realize that people aren't listening and don't care what he's actually saying, and the idea that these lemmings will vote for him in this condition is truly frightening.

I just ran across a piece in The Weekly Standard by Andrew Ferguson where he attempts to do an "in-depth" look at the speech itself. He starts off by mentioning that he had missed the speech on TV (as did I) and so went to Obama's website to actually read the thing. Then he describes, 10 times better than I just did, why it's so instructive to read Obama's speeches rather than watch or listen to them:

To an unnerving degree his appeal relies on sight and sound rather than sense. Better, in my opinion, to stick to the printed word. On paper (or the computer
screen) his words can be thought about and chewed over. You can understand him
at your own pace, undistracted by that rich baritone, the regal bearing, the
excellent drape of his Burberry suits.

What Ferguson concluded as he read the speech was that there really wasn't much to say about it, because Obama himself really wound up saying not much of anything:

Instead, in the heart of Europe, before 200,000 breathless admirers, Obama pulled himself up to his full height, lifted his chin, unlimbered those eloquent hands, and said nothing at all.

Ferguson, thus, instead spends the rest of the piece describing Obama-as-human-cliche-machine, which is entertaining in itself.

The Substance of the Speech
The text of Obama's speech in Berlin can be found here (ht: Power Line). It has all the normal fear-mongering about global warming and how the Obamessiah will make that go away for us, as well as the afore-mentioned verbiage about how America hasn't lived up to its own ideals about truth and justice.

Laura Ingraham, unusually substantive in her daily email blast, had this to say:

Make no mistake: Barack Obama's speech in Berlin's Tiergarten park was one of the most revealing and, frankly, terrifying moments of the campaign so far. We witnessed a man who may very well be the next president of the United States APOLOGIZE to a bunch of foreigners for his own country's failings! He told the crowd of 200,000 that he addressed them "as a fellow citizen of the world" and then dropped this bomb: "I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we've struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We've made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions."

Apparently lost on Obama and the crowd was the incredible irony that a Nazi flag would be flying over Berlin at this very moment if it weren't for the sacrifices made by the United States and our allies in WWII; hundreds of thousands of Americans died to liberate Europe and prevent the spread of tyranny around the world.

The crowd, of course, was enthralled with the speech. But there's a very simple reason why Obama's been received like a rock star everywhere he goes in Europe: the European people have no desire to see America remain the world's number one power!

Here's the bottom line: The United States can't afford a commander-in-chief who travels to other countries with his hat in his hand and begs for some understanding. We need a president who will stand up for America, not apologize on her behalf. And if Obama had no qualms about delivering this speech to the European public, what's to stop him from doing it in private with Ahmadinejad in Iran?

Say goodbye to America, the superpower; say hello to America, the good global citizen.

At the end of the day, none of these Germans, who were treated to a free concert and free beer just before Obama's appearance (heard that on the news?), cheer for him because he's proposing that America is not enough like Europe, and that he'll fix that. And they can cheer all they want, because none of them will be able to vote for him in November. The last thing this country needs is to be more like Europe, which is in the throes of death even now. America has risen to greatness because we have perfected what Europe started (and then abandoned): a Judeo-Christian based, capitalistic society with a secular government. The further we get away from that ideal, which is what the Left is always pushing for, and the more socialistic and atheistic we get, like Europe, the more tenuous our survival becomes.