The Great Appeasers

The Media have made much about the fact that Barack Obama scores highly in popularity polls with the rest of the world, and have spared no effort to portray that popularity as a repudiation of George W. Bush and his policies, and a validation of Obama and his. OffHisMeds is amused at the simple-minded notion that personal popularity equates to sound foreign policy, since from the end of WWII through to present day, foreigners of all stripes - and particularly our allies - have demonstrated their ability to dislike America for no better reason than, well, because we're America.

Democrats have capitalized on anti-Americanism by making it a staple of their foreign policy, flogging the electorate with a tired stereotype animated by Guilt. And where there is Guilt, there must be the Guilty.

Enter George W. Bush.

In the current Democrat narrative, George W. Bush represented the Old Order, unapologetic about America's right to exist, and unwilling to admit to being responsible for all of the World's ills. That is not totally true, of course, because even Bush, for all that he got right on foreign policy, tolerated and even promoted some truly anti-American organizations and ideas, among others the United Nations, Global Warming and the State Department.

It did him no good, and Democrats demonized him anyway, just as they had his even more moderate father, and Ronald Reagan before that.

Now, there's a number of reasons that the rest of the world might have occasion, reasonable or not, to dislike us. For one thing, at some point in time over the past 200 years, we have either waged war or supported allies in wars in much of Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Mexico, Canada, Central and South America and Africa.

It's not to say that all of those countries didn't have it coming, and ironically, virtually all of them were started by Democrats, but that's not the reason America is disliked. No, to understand animus towards the USA, OffHisMeds must take you in his Wayback Machine to 1997 and the infamous British Nanny who murdered an American baby in her care. Her name was Louise Woodward, and the accusations against her were that she abused the infant - including slamming his head onto a flat surface - because she was upset with restrictions placed on her social life by the child's parents. She was convicted of Manslaughter, served 279 days of her sentence, then deported back to England.

What is instructive about this was the reaction of the Public back in Great Britain to the story and the verdict. Before, during and after the trial, Louise Brown was and is singularly popular with the British people. Numerous polls show the kind of favorable ratings that Barack Obama and other poll-driven politicians can only dream about, but for the Hate America crowd within the Democrat Party, there's one major problem: during the trial, George W. Bush was not the President; Obama's soul-mate Bill Clinton was.

One could dwell on how demented it is for Brits or anybody else to cheer for people who kill Americans, but you'd go crazy trying to keep track of every country that enables the murder or debasement of Yanks. Citing yet another instance of British ignominy, recall that recently, Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was released by the Brits to Libya where he returned to a hero's welcome. The Brits supposedly released him on "compassionate" grounds this past August, allegedly because he had only 3 months to live. Well, four months later, al-Megrahi is still alive and living it large, his health miraculously intact.

His longevity and the timing of his release calls into question the "compassionate grounds" argument put forth by the Brits. While much has been made of the fact that Great Britain was awarded a huge oil and gas exploration contract with Libya mere days before al-Megrahi's release, this was about more than simple greed. No, what really stinks about this singular act of betrayal by our British cousins is that al-Megrahi was released - in part - specifically because he blew an American airliner out of the air, murdering hundreds in the process.

As proof, OffHisMeds asks you to consider the likelihood of a foreign national being released in Britain if his crime had been, say, drug smuggling, money laundering or - god forbid - acts of terrorism against Great Britain and Her Majesty's subjects. Not surprisingly, there is no precedent for such a humanitarian gesture. In the case of terrorists acts against Britain, dozens of IRA terrorists languished in prison for decades, with ten of them even starving themselves to death in British prisons during the 80's to protest their incarceration. Britain's principled response? Let 'em die. And they did.

Too bad Ireland couldn't dangle the carrot of a thumping big multi-billion dollar oil contract to get their terrorists out of jail. Apparently, the criteria for British humanitarianism begins and ends with the convergence of profits and Jihadists who kill Americans.

Which brings us back to the question of why the much-beloved Barack Obama and his ass-kissing predecessors get so little traction with the world community. After all, Bill Clinton groveled every bit as enthusiastically to World Opinion as Barack Obama, and literally invented the practice of apologizing that Obama now uses with such abandon. And yet on Clinton's watch, terrorists bombed the USS Cole, bombed the Kobar Towers, bombed US embassies, and blew up - for the first time - The World Trade Center. You'll also recall that the Jihadists then spent literally the rest of Clinton's administration on the planning, training and infiltration necessary for the return engagement to the WTC in 2001, most of it on US soil. And of course, let us not forget that America's single greatest foreign policy humiliation occurred when our embassy in Iran was overrun and our diplomats taken hostage during the presidency of the previous "most popular man in the world", Jimmy Carter.

Kind of makes you wonder what all this much-sought-after popularity on the part of these Great Appeasers has gotten us, other than the back of everybody's hand. One recent story has spotlighted the fact that for decades Brazil has allowed dozens of American children to be kidnapped with impunity and held in Brazil; last month Iran arrested 3 American hikers and will try them for espionage; in June, North Korea convicted two Korean-American journalists reporting on human rights abuses of espionage and sentenced them to 12 years hard labor; China continues to hold Chinese-American citizens protesting human rights violations in prison, denying them access to American lawyers or diplomats; France has provided haven to Roman Polanski for decades, even though he drugged, raped and sodomized a 13 year old girl, American, of course.

Polanski raped the girl and then absconded under the watchful eyes of the Carter administration, by the way.

The list goes on, but how to reconcile these insults with Obama's, Clinton's and Carter's great esteem for the good opinion of the rest of the World? After all, Appeasement has never worked and rarely been practiced when Republicans were in power, the most famous result of which was the release of the American embassy hostages in Iran on the day that Ronald Reagan was sworn into office. Other examples abound: Reagan called the Soviet's bluff on nuclear proliferation, and they collapsed into the dustbin of history. Nixon mined the harbors of Haiphong and the North Vietnamese fell over themselves rushing to the negotiating table. George W. Bush called Saddam's bluff, invaded Iraq and established a functioning democracy - not to mention a huge American military presence - smack in the Jihadist's back yard.

So what do we learn from all this? What we learn is that Hating America is the second most popular leisure-time activity in the World, behind Soccer. We learn that the third most popular leisure-time activity in the World is jerking Democrat politicians' chains, leading them to believe that everlasting popularity - and dare we say it, a Nobel Prize - is within their reach with just a few more acts of contrition, a few more transfers of cash from the American Treasury, and the abandonment of just a few more of the principles that define America.

What we also learn, though, is the extent to which American Exceptionalism defines our relationship with the rest of the world. Most Americans really do believe that there is something unique about America, something "better" in the way we conduct our affairs - politically, economically and culturally - than any system that has come before her.

We are, and that pisses the rest of the world off.

THAT is the reason Brits not only defended Louise Brown, the Au Pair Nanny Murderer, but celebrated her; It's the reason Mexican soccer fans spit on visiting American soccer players and cheered when our Miss World competitor fell on her ass in Mexico City; it's the reason ze French actively worked to undermine NATO for fifty years, and it's the reason Spain (and much of Europe as well) has embraced a fad called "Universal Jurisdiction", the practice of prosecuting people of other countries for crimes, even if the acts were not committed on Spanish soil and did not involve Spaniards in any way. In it's current application, the primary purpose of Universal Jurisdiction is to accuse, extradite, incarcerate, try, convict and imprison American leaders for being, well, American, with our friends the Israelis running a close second for being, well, Israelis.

America and Israel by their examples are a threat to most of the rest of the world, and the established order. While we can laugh at the world-class inferiority complex afflicting Spain and most Spaniards - the Basques being an honorable exception - their surreal extra-jurisdictional maneuverings have real-world consequences. Any American involved in water-boarding, for example (with the possible exception of George W. Bush) could not safely travel to Spain or other countries of a similar bent, including, not surprisingly, Great Britain.

Which brings us back to Barack Obama's adulation mongering. Isn't it amazing that so few commentators make the distinction between affection and respect? If it's a given that people will love us as long as they can jerk our strings, it's instructive that America has rarely, if ever, been loved and respected at the same time. And the World most explicitly does not respect Barack Obama, as was illustrated most recently by his humiliation at the hands of the International Olympic Committee. You could see the rejection of his advocacy for the Olympics in Chicago coming a mile away. Rubbing salt in the wound, the IOC actually dumped Chicago in the first round, this despite the personal assurances by Obama that America would treat athletes well and not terrorize visitors. Only a Democrat could legitimize a world-view that could presume that America would do anything less, groveling before the Vengeful Clerks of the IOC, fruitlessly, as it turns out.

This kind of behavior on the part of the IOC is nothing new, which presents Democrats with a conundrum. How to explain the IOC rejection unless they admit that Obama is a clueless amateur in world affairs? How do you explain the provocations in the past year of Great Britain, Iran, Korea, China, Pakistan, Mexico, Russia and most of South America during the presidency of The Enlightened One?

The short answer would be that Obama is a world-class foreign policy screw-up, but that's not it. The simple fact of the matter is that Obama's Appeasement is part of a 4 decade history of pandering to America Haters by the Democrat Party, notwithstanding that he has taken it to a whole 'nother level. And the reason is that the Democrat Party has targeted American Exceptionalism for extinction. Desiring to control the American populace in the manner of Euro Socialists, Democrats must first undermine all the things that make America exceptional, including Capitalism, personal freedoms, and America's belief in such things. Obama is but the logical extension of the policies of Carter and Clinton.

There's a million English Nanny Murderers and crazed Jihadist airplane bombers lurking in our future, not despite the efforts of the Democrat Party, but because of them.