When President Obama isn’t golfing or vacationing in Hawaii, he’s usually giving an important interview to a YouTube personality famous for drinking cereal from a bathtub. Like an absent-minded professor late for his own midterm, Obama arrived later than nearly every other world leader at a ceremony on Sunday mourning the victims of the Paris attacks.
According to The Washington Times, “Reporters traveling with the president said Mr. Obama had not yet arrived when other world leaders at the G-20 conference in Turkey began their silent observance around a large conference table.”
Unfortunately, this is nothing new. After retreating from the Middle East, abandoning American allies, and issuing empty threats against Assad and other genocidal dictators, Obama has single-handedly compromised the integrity of the United of the States in the eyes of the international community. The world no longer respects America, despite decades of leadership and moral strength. Obama has reversed the efforts of prior presidents in cultivating a foreign presence that demands deference.
Obama leads the cavalry charge against traditional American superpower status, opting for a more demure and reserved global presence. According to this regressive logic, the United States no longer needs to uphold its international commitments and may take sick days when the going gets tough.
In fact, as leaders from all around the world marched shoulder to shoulder with the French president after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Obama refused to join. Instead, he sent lower-tier diplomatic officials in a showing of performative solidarity. Victims of terror have a long memory and will surely remember the insult of absence. This president was so careful not to even tangentially offend the religion of Islam that he avoided even physically stepping foot in a place where Islamic terror was reified.
While Obama appears to have more than enough time to meet, or at least pretend to meet, with the Clock-Boy, Ahmed, now a proud resident of despotic, Islamist Qatar, he couldn’t get himself to appropriately honor the victims of Islamic jihadism.
The president’s cherry-picking of victims worthy of his grace and empathy is truly unprecedented. The same president that refused to meet with fallen police officers dispatched an entire legal envoy to to meet with cop-killed Michael Brown’s family.
Obama is the quintessential social justice warrior, ranking victims by race and color, regardless of case-specific circumstances.
Image (via AP): “U.S. President Barack Obama, centre, walks with British Prime Minister David Cameron, left, at the G-20 summit in Antalya, Turkey, Monday, Nov. 16, 2015.”