The Clampdown

President Obama, in the first of many attempts to suck up to the Middle Eastern nations he’s currently attempting to court with his golden tongue, has declared America to be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.

I’m not even sure where to begin with this. First off, I suppose, is the fact that it’s not even remotely true. But that’s really sort of beside the point.

Most importantly, when one thinks of a “Muslim nation” the image that springs to mind is a nation where the citizenry is a) Muslim, and b) governed by Muslim beliefs. So far, at least, we’re not there or even approaching the runway. We may need to reassess after this grovel-fest is over, but for now it’s safe to say that if there were 200 million Muslims living in America, and America was still governed with freedom of religion and a separation between Church and state, then we would still not be a Muslim nation. We would be a nation with a large Muslim population. The single largest ethnic group in America are whites, but this is not a “White nation,” despite the handwringing of race pimps like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. A better case can be made to say that America is a Judeo-Christian nation because America was established as a nation of laws, and those laws were based solidly in the Judaic and Christian philosophies.

So the question becomes, “Why did Obama say this?”

I’m leaning on the idea that this guy is nowhere near as smart as we all thought he was. Clearly he’s got an amazing ability to absorb facts and data and retain them, and his skill with a prepared text is unmatched by any politician I’ve seen. But unlike Bill Clinton, who had the same abilities, I don’t really see Barack Obama as any kind of intellectual heavyweight. His ideas are really just the same lefty rhetoric that we’ve been hearing since the 1960s.

Let’s take a look at the whole interview he did with France’s Canal Plus:

• He refers to the loss of the Air France jet as “an aviation problem.”
• He insists that Muslims need to understand how we in the West feel about terrorism. I assume he means that we don’t want to be attacked anymore, as if he believes that Muslims thought that we were really hoping they’d kill thousands of our citizens one beautiful Tuesday morning. In the spirit of moral equivalency, he also states that the West has to “educate themselves more effectively on Islam.” Someone’s crying, Lord…come on, sing it with me! You know the words!
• He offers really jejune statements like “those who build as opposed to those who destroy I think leave a lasting legacy,” a sentiment that is so simplistic it borders on feeble-minded and is also very debatable (so Stalin, Hitler, and Mao did not leave lasting legacies? Oh…he meant good legacies…well then, yeah, duh…unless you count things like destroying colonial rule in America, or destroying the South to free the slaves, or destroying Berlin to eradicate the Nazi movement, or destroying the Berlin Wall, or, well, never mind). It was the kind of a hollow, yet lofty, line that sounds really impressive when you’re in high school and you think your teacher is way cool.
• He thinks that his speech and “a roundtable discussion” are the stepping off point for getting Muslim extremists to lay down their knives and relinquish control back to the pilots.
• He says Muslim nations are making “investments in education” as if what children are being taught in many of these Wahabbi schools is not part of the problem.
• He believes that France (!) is one of the countries leading the way on climate change and the economic recession. Well, it’s good to know that he’s taking climate advice from a country that saw thousands of people die in a heat wave in 2003 and economic advice from a Socialist country that had double-digit unemployment and anemic economic growth for years before the economic collapse.
• When asked what he likes about France, he at least has the decency to stop and think before falling back on the food and the wine.

The entire interview should be subtitled “One President In Search Of A Teleprompter.”

But the saddest part of all of this, to me at least, is that Obama’s overseas trips from Europe to South America to the Middle East, infested with moral equivalency and mea culpas, reveal the President of the United States to be a man who is embarrassed by his own country. That is truly a shame.