Obama's Messianic Foreign Policy

In a recent response to the circulation of a photograph of Barack Obama dressed in what has been described as "traditional Somali garb" Obama's foreign policy adviser, Susan Rice, said that the circulation of the photograph was divisive and suggested "that the customs and cultures of other parts of the world are worthy of ridicule or condemnation."

The statement, of course, begs the question "Are some customs and cultures of other parts of the world in fact worthy of ridicule or condemnation?" Being bolstered by the certainties of my own "expatriate empiricism", my first reaction was simply to say to myself "yeah and so what?" I mean despite the political incorrectness, the harsh reality is that some of the customs and cultures of other parts of the world are in fact worthy of our ridicule or/and condemnation.

I don't suppose Susan Rice has ever come face to face with the proclivities of a cultural who experience no moral dilemma with beating their wives to within an inch of their lives or with customs of a primitive society who to this very day still dine on the occasional "long pig". But you see, this is where expatriate empiricism trumps not just the liberal academic intelligentsia of the West but the profound intellectual arrogance of Barack Obama's ivy-league foreign policy advisers.

Aside from the fact that the photographs of Barack Obama in of themselves never actually "said" or "suggested" anything, it was Susan Rice's recondite statement concerning the photograph that I found confounding. Not just because Susan Rice's statement and vociferous indignation seemed to be completely devoid of any literal meaning, or attributed to any logical thought process, but because I question how a foreign policy adviser who subscribes to the doctrine of cultural and moral equivalency can effectively advise the Presidency on issues that concern not only nation's interests, but our national security as well.

"Why must we change and yet our enemies get to remain the same? Don't ever expect to hear the Obama camp ever answer that question. The harsh reality is that for Barack Obama and his foreign policy advisers, this isn't about what is in America's best interests or even our nation's national security. It is about America changing and seeking atonement by redressing the sins of the past. Led by an administration who is predisposed to see America not as an exceptional nation, but as a bully, a war-mongering ogre, perpetually bloodied with the guilt of imperialism and inescapably tainted by a past history of inequality and racism.

Understanding Obama and his foreign policy

As Spengler would so adroitly point out, "Cherchez la femme" - When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman. As Mona Charen would uncover in Obama's own book he inadvertently sheds some light on his formative years and the political views of his mother.

"Looking back, I'm not sure Lolo ever fully understood what my mother was going through ... why the things he was working so hard to provide for her seemed only to increase the distance between them ... He landed a job in the government relations department of an American oil company. ... Sometimes I would overhear him and my mother arguing in their bedroom, usually about her refusal to attend his company dinner parties, where American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo's back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the quality of Indonesian help. He would ask her how it would look for him to go alone, and remind her that these were her own people, and my mother's voice would rise to almost a shout."

"They are not my people!"

Herodotus once said that "If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably - after careful considerations of their relative merits - choose that of his own country"

A young mulatto abandoned by his black Kenyan father and cared for by his white American mother, an anthropologist and Islamophile who hated America and subsequently went native. We may never completely understand the pathological self-criticism that Obama holds deep down in his soul, the overwhelming guilt that consumes him or the messianic aspirations that he now seems to revel in.

What we do know is that in Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates would advance argument that piety to many gods, who all want conflicting devotions is impossible. Something the Democrats and their Golden Calf have yet to realize.