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In this issue
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review April 21, 2009 / 27 Nisan 5769

The insults were only for America

By Wesley Pruden


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The president's critics ought to lighten up. We should give him credit for not knowing any better. (He was "finished" and "polished" at Harvard, after all.) Barack Obama is an accident of history, a street hustler from the South Side of Chicago with the gift of gab who landed on the world stage like a whale beached at the whim of a storm, the wrong man at the right time.


He landed on that beach just as the nation, or a large part of it, desperately wanted absolution for the sins of the past, some real and some only imagined, and suddenly we had our own Susan Boyle, a honey-tongued idol of the moment. He not only had the gift of gab, useful for presidential candidates as well as aluminum-siding salesmen, but a gift for the seductive language of the black pulpit. The masses, for whom the poetry of the King James Bible and the musical cadences of Sunday morning are as foreign as the culture of rural Timbuktu, eagerly stepped forward to take the pledge of the cult.


Only Barack Obama knows what's in his heart, but there's the possibility, not heretofore considered by his critics, that the blundering loose tongue he packs with his teleprompter, scorning the dignity and good name of his country for the cheap applause of tin-pot dictators eager to throw rotten bananas at their betters, comes easy and naturally to him.


This wouldn't be one of Dr. Freud's difficult cases. He was born to a mother obsessed with the pursuit of inappropriate men who would treat her badly, abandoned by his father from Kenya, uprooted again from life with a stepfather in Indonesia and ultimately raised by a grandmother he would later publicly scold for her presumed racial bigotry. Why wouldn't he feverishly pursue sanction and esteem, however mindless much of it would be, wherever he could find it?


Only a man with a screwed-up psyche, the likes of which we've probably never had in the White House before, would fly off to foreign shores to campaign against his predecessor and to offer abject apologies to anyone listening for the harm he imagines his country did to others, while carefully excluding himself from any of the criticism.


All for the embrace, physical and otherwise, of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez, of Evo Morales and Danny Ortega. Most of us would say, in word or deed, "insult my country, dude, and you're insulting me, so back off." But this is the kind of fierce pride in home, kith and kin that Barack Obama never knew; he even married a woman who said she never felt love of country until her husband reached the front gate of the White House.


The president's excellent adventure in Trinidad and Tobago began when he accepted a book from Senor Chavez, "Open Veins of Latin America," a Marxist screed meant to insult and offend. Mr. Obama did not seem affronted, and let pass the opportunity to rebuke Senor Chavez for his manifold sins and abuses of his own people. The president didn't even have a DVD of favorite movies to offer in return. (Mr. Obama might have given him a copy of a best-selling biography of Senor Chavez, "Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot.")


He let pass the further insult, given the timing, of the Chavez suggestion that after the president finished the book there could be talks about renewing diplomatic relations. This would have been the further opportunity to discuss Senor Chavez' support of Colombian drug terrorists and his support of Ahmadinejad and his race to build a nuclear weapon to intimidate the Middle East.


If President Obama judges his Latin American trip by the personal accolades, the trip was a roaring success. Nearly every criticism of the United States was prefaced with assertions that none of the insults of America were meant for Mr. Obama. The president let these cheap accolades pass with a grateful smile. He listened to a 50-minute diatribe by Danny Ortega, cataloging American sins over a century (and conceding nothing about the brutal sins of the Sandinistas). When he followed the commandante's jibe at the United States for its support of the Cuban exiles' attempt to land at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, Mr. Obama said only that he was "grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old."


Everybody laughed, but Mr. Obama even got that wrong. He was born three months after the Bay of Pigs landing. The history of the country that elected him president has never been of much interest to Barack Obama - he once referred to "the 57 states" - and we shouldn't be surprised by anything he does and says now.

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JWR contributor Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.

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