UNITED NATIONS — UNITED NATIONS — President Barack Obama’s walk along the historic Great Wall of China, an obligatory stop for visiting American Presidents from Richard Nixon to George Bush, provided more than a photogenic backdrop; it evoked the political metaphor for the recently concluded Sino/American summit which while superficially smooth and stage-managed, nonetheless saw Beijing meticulously block key items on the U.S. agenda.
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Lev Navrozov l
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Only in the e-mails of my readers do I find the adequate horror of the “China danger.” Otherwise I could spend in the United States months, with a TV set always turned on the news and never learn that China does exist, except in connection with U.S. President Obama’s visit to China.
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A little traveling, like a little learning, can be a dangerous thing. Barack Obama on the loose in a foreign land is enough to frighten protocol officers and embarrass the rest of us.
He went off to Asia to tell the Chinese a thing or two about world trade, to prepare the world for a treaty to make the sun change its spots, and of course to pay his respects to assorted heads of state, with particular attention to any royal head (perhaps even including Miss Universe) who crosses his path.
So far it's a memorable trip. He established a new precedent for how American presidents should pay obeisance to kings, emperors, monarchs, sovereigns and assorted other authentic man-made masters of the universe. He stopped just this side of the full grovel to the emperor of Japan, risking a painful genuflection if his forehead had hit the floor with a nasty bump, which it almost did.
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Communism is alive and well. The Berlin Wall - the symbol of a divided Europe during the Cold War - fell on Nov. 9, 1989. Celebrations will be held Monday to commemorate the 20th anniversary of that historic event.
The fall of the Berlin Wall is widely considered the defining moment marking the collapse of communism. Eastern Europe was liberated from Russian occupation. Two years later, the Soviet Union disintegrated. From the rubble emerged newly independent states. The Baltic nations - Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia - regained the freedom they had lost during World War II. Even Ukraine escaped from Russian subjugation, attaining its dream of national statehood. The Soviet empire's implosion represented a great advance in human freedom, enabling hundreds of millions of people to escape communist tyranny.
"The world can sigh in relief. The idol of communism, which spread everywhere social strife, animosity and unparalleled brutality, which instilled fear in humanity, has collapsed," Russia's first post-communist president, Boris Yeltsin, said in an address to the U.S. Congress. "It has collapsed, never to rise again."
Benjamin Disraeli's most famous advice to aspiring politicians was: "Never complain and never explain." For the greatest orator of our time, a man who makes Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and Henry V at Agincourt look like first-round rejects on "Orating With The Stars," President Obama seems to have pretty much given up on the explaining side.
Mr. Obama tried explaining health care with speech after speech after exclusive interview for months on end, and the more he explained, the more unpopular the whole racket got. So he declared that the time for explaining is over, and it's time to sign on or else.
Meanwhile, to take the other half of the Disraeli equation, Mr. Obama and his officials and their beleaguered band of surrogates never stop complaining.
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The most recent whine - the anti-Fox campaign - is, apart from anything else, unbecoming to the office. Mr. Obama is the chief of state of one of the oldest free societies in the world, but his official White House Web site runs teasers such as: "For even more Fox lies, check out the latest 'Truth-O-Meter.' " It gives off the air of somebody only marginally less paranoid than this week's president-for-life in some basket-case banana republic ranting on the palace balcony because his interior-security chief isn't doing a fast enough job of disappearing his enemies.
A telling event occurred on Sept. 15, Day 6 of the drip, drip, drip ACORN video rollout. President Obama met for lunch with former President Bill Clinton at trendy Il Mulino in New York City.
For the second consecutive day, the New York Post featured the ACORN scandal on its cover - complete with James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles in their outrageous "pimp and ho" costumes.
Does anyone think the president and the former president were unaware that the city in which they were dining was mesmerized by the ACORN scandal - especially since ACORN had bragged that its employees had kicked Mr. O'Keefe and Ms. Giles out of their New York office?
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The time was the mid-60s in Saigon, in many ways the nadir of the American effort in Vietnam, in its way worse than the Embassy rooftop depaftures of 1975.
Washington had staged a military coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem, the only anti-Communist leader with credentials, then had him murdered. There was a revolving door of politically incompetent military trying to run a country the Americans were also trying to micromanage.
There was the media, not exactly informed but egotistical enough for some their veterans to gloat over their "victory" over Diem. It would still be a few months before they played their second hand in misinterpreting the Tet Offensive.
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