By DON MELVIN and ROD McGUIRK
Associated Press
In Europe, where more than 200,000 people thronged a Berlin rally in 2008 to hear Barack Obama speak, there’s disappointment that he hasn’t kept his promise to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, and perceptions that he’s shunting blame for the financial crisis across the Atlantic.
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hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/O/OBAMA_WORLD_VIEW?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-05-12-02-30-29
Anybody who promises the world a eutopia is going to be a pretty unpopular guy when people figure out that he can’t deliver on his promises and that the world is, in fact, a fallen place.
The world’s been this way since Adam ate the apple and there’s not a thing that any socialist can do about it. They can try to create a heaven on earth through wealth re-distribution and corrupting natural law until the cows come home, but the reality stands that the only way to make this earth a better place by living the life Christ taught us and spending our time focusing on making it to the real eutopia which is the one that comes after this life!
Here too.
Jon
We’ve had disappointing presidents for a long time. And as far as I can tell, other world leaders haven’t exactly set the world on fire with their ideas or leadership.
I’m not an Obama fan, but the reality is that the Abraham Lincolns, FDRs and Winston Churchills are few and far between. And usually they arise in a crisis - the potential division of the Union over slavery, the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler, with Stalin waiting in the wings.
Secondly they have their own faults, being human - FDR misjudged Stalin, and at one stage preferred to trust Stalin rather than Churchill.
Churchill, for all his warrior and statesmanlike qualities, was an imperialist to the core. Had he stayed in power after WWII, I’m pretty sure he would have tarnished his image in economic and foreign policy matters as the British Empire declined.
I’m not going to comment on Abe, since I don’t know enough about him.
Finally there’s the old partial truism - we get the leaders we deserve. That’s not quite correct - I can’t think what the Cambodians did to deserve Pol Pot, or the North Korean people the ratbag regime they’ve got now. But still, I think there’s some truth in it - Obama’s pro-abortion stance didn’t happen in a vacuum - he’s grown up in a culture where it was already accepted to a large extent. So the community voted in a man who reflected their general moral values.
Love the way you subtly spelled Utopia with the lower case EU … it took me two readings to “get it” but wickedly funny. The EU *was *sort of promising a Utopia too.
On the serious side, you’re right, Jesus nailed it when he told us to do His Father’s will - “… on Earth as it is in Heaven.” Not to work out a worldly alternative.
i remember how hundreds of thousands of people would show up to see obama when he was outside the u.s.
i couldn’t believe how naive and blind they were.
that his presidency has been a disappointment is no surprise to me. i didn’t vote for him, but was willing to give him a chance and after his first two weeks in office, i knew we were in trouble!!! i can think of stronger words to describe his presidency than disappointment.
the problem is, these people around the world won’t be able to vote in our election.
and what scares me is how many people will still vote for obama in this election despite the fact he has proved that he is a terrible president.
I think the word “disappointment” is way too light to describe it. Like you said, it is very scary to know many, especially many Catholics, are still going to vote for him. The only thing we can and must do is to pray and help wake people up. I hate to see the word “despair” to be used by any chance.
that is the saddest reality for me is how many Catholics support Obama.
Seriously. I often used to wonder in history books at how many Russian Jews initially supported the Bolsheviks. Doesn’t anybody have any foresight? Can’t people see the long term effects of new principles being enacted? Apparently not.
And not only Russian Jews. Italian Jews enthusiastically supported Mussolini back when Hitler was just a tatterdemalion leader of a group most had never even heard of.
Why should they not have supported the Bolsheviks? All they got from the Tsar were pogroms and prejudice.
Consider the wreck the Italian economy was in back then. Why not Mussolini? A man promises hope and people naturally gravitate to him. And, for a good while, il Duce delivered on his promises.
You mean like promising hope an change?
I’m not sure that’s “all they got”, but they certainly did worse after Stalin murdered virtually all of the prominent ones and, of course, it is generally recognized that the “Doctor’s Plot” was the initial moves toward a pogrom. Never would the Tsar have sent so many to anything remotely resembling the Gulag.
Lenin and Stalin, true, did enlist a good number of Jews as tools before they were purged and killed. But even in the earliest days, and even among the elites, it was plain that the utmost cruelty for the slightest deviation was a hallmark of the Bolshevik regime (Solzhenitsyn remarked that the Gulag began "…with the shots of the cruiser “Aurora”, and it was true.)
Except, of course, that Mussolini was strongly anti-Semitic and made no secret of it. Jews, particularly middle-class Jews, assumed he was just doing that in order to appeal to the unlettered and unwashed and didn’t mean it.
The communist never had much support from the people - their support came from the army. The “people” just knew they didn’t more of the Czar, the war or the hunger - the uprising that started in the breadlines caught everyone off guard - including the communist. Using the army they were in position to fill the vacuum.
Just as the fall of communism in 1989-1991 caught everyone off guard - from the CIA to the Communist themselves. And it started in the foodlines again - just as it had 72 years earlier.
It may be noted, too, that even in Germany many Jews did not get out when they could have because they just assumed (convinced themselves) that Hitler’s anti-semitic rhetoric was mostly just talk.
Most of the time when political leaders say threatening things, they should be taken seriously. When Obama said, for example, that he intended to “fundamentally change” the U.S., he undoubtedly meant it, and nobody should assume he intends some kind of mild changes to what otherwise would be a continuity.
And, in the rest of the world, when Obama, for example, encouraged the “Arab Spring”, which he very much did, it’s possible that others outside the U.S. believed he meant it. Even if they disbelieved it then, they can believe it now, as he goes about supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and allied groups taking over the Middle East. That’s very close to Europe, for example, and I don’t see how many Europeans could regard it with equanimity.
Probably didn’t. Look at his lackluster support for putting Jews into internment camps and his reluctance to send them to German concentration camps.
And things got worse, didn’t they? THIS is why people really ought to ask “WHAT sort of change? WHAT sort of hope?” Details are why people shoud support or oppose policies, not personalities and frustrations with the status quo. Things CAN get worse. That’s why proposals for change need to be scrutinized first.