Well played, Chris.
I would first note that AE does not mean that America is always right or has always been right. AE is (or should be) based on the triumphs of America, its continuing trajectory toward the realization of its noble ideals; not that it has realized those ideals. I also truly believe that no country lives up to those ideals as faithfully as the United States.
Obama’s election shows how far this country has come. Of course there are still bigots in America upset about the election. Every country in the world has bigots. Could someone like Obama have been elected in the UK? Italy? Canada? Japan? Brazil? I honestly cannot think of another nation where a person of the non-majority race could reach the presidency or its equivalent.
Of course Americans still “marginalize” some groups, as do people in every other country in the world. That, by the way, is a conveniently vague term. Try being Christian in China. Try being an untouchable in India. Try being gay in Saudi Arabia. Try being a Muslim convert to Buddhism in Indonesia. Try being a woman wearing pants in the Sudan. Marginalization in those countries means lashings, mobs, honor killings, secret detentions, systematic state discrimination, etc. The Multiculturalist Moral Relativist (MMR) too often equates the glass ceilings and racial profiling in the US with the transparent oppression in other countries.
It is this mentality that allows the world’s worst human rights abusers to sit (and chair) the UN Human Rights Committee (China, Venezuela, Iran). This is how Yasser Arafat gets a Nobel. This is why a Spanish judge will indict George Bush for war crimes, while ignoring warlords in Darfur. MMR has real consequences. The number of free countries (open elections, representative government, free press) is declining.
I want to make clear that I am not suggesting that our president supports any of the above, much less that he has caused a global decline in freedom. The point of my post is to advocate that he return to the inspiring words of his inaugural speech.
People do vote with their feet. I couldn’t put it better myself. I remember all those news stories about a huge liberal emigration to Canada in ’04 after Bush’s reelection. It didn’t happen. And people from around the world still flock here. There must be something exceptional about this Union.
As for specific speeches where Obama apologized, see http://www.heritage.org/research/europe/wm2466.cfm. I’m not sure all of those speeches should be classified as apologies, but it is a good reference for Obama’s shift from Bush’s diplomacy.
If your political views are refined enough to know where you stand on card-check, cap and trade, the public health option, cash for clunkers, deficit spending, government bail-outs, etc., then you should have a pretty good idea whether you’ll vote R or D in 2012, even without a crystal ball.
