Not even D-Day, June 6th, went by without an international apology from President Obama, despite it being one of the most heroic days in American history and ultimately one of the most successful. If Mr. Obama cannot celebrate the sacrifices of American G.I. in the hellish environment of the Normandy Invasion 65 years without diminishing it, there is little hope he will ever find anything American to be 100 percent in favor of. After visiting the Buchenwald concentration camp and Dresden (presumably for a so-called balanced perspective), Mr. Obama arrived to pay tribute to the heroes of D-Day.
Without being specific, Mr. Obama did not fail to mention that mistakes were made. Nor did he fail to make sure that all faiths and gods were included in his tribute. These are by now signature statements inserted in just about every speech the president makes beyond American shores.
“The nations that joined together to defeat Hitler’s Reich were not perfect,” he said. “They had made their share of mistakes, had not always agreed with one another on every issue. But whatever God we prayed to, whatever our differences, we knew that the evil we faced had to be stopped. Citizens of all faiths and of no faith came to believe that we could not remain as bystanders to the savage perpetration of death and destruction. And so we joined and sent our sons to fight and often die so that men and women they never met might know what it is to be free.”
The president’s penchant for apologizing for his country in speeches to a global audience has by now become almost commonplace, as if to wash his hands of the mistakes of his predecessors – or what he considers to be mistakes. On some level, the White House clearly considers this presidential approach to be the essence of U.S. public diplomacy in the Obama era, and it is compounded by the apologies issues by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as well.
At this rate, we’ll need to update our “Barack Obama’s Top 10 Apologies” list soon.