For the President, It REALLY IS All About Him

Mona Charen writes on the galling level of hubris on display in President Obama's U.N. speech:

President Obama’s speech to the U.N. has been called naïve and even “post-American.” It was something else as well: the most extravagant excursion into self-worship we have yet seen in an American leader.

[...]

... Obama announced that we no longer “have the luxury of indulging our differences to the exclusion of the work that we must do together. I have carried this message from London to Ankara, from Port of Spain to Moscow, from Accra to Cairo, and it is what I will speak about today.” Note the personal pronoun. But what message has this evangelist carried to all these world capitals? That hope and change have been vouchsafed to the fallen world in the person of Barack Obama?

During last year’s campaign, Michelle Obama and her defenders insisted that her phrase “For the first time in my adult life I’m proud of my country” (for supporting her husband) was unfairly wrenched from its context. Maybe, though she said it more than once. But President Obama’s indictment of the U.S. before the U.N. suggests identical sentiments. “I took office at a time when many around the world had come to view America with skepticism and distrust,” the president said. And mostly, it seems, those views were justified. America had acted “unilaterally, without regard for the interests of others.” Addressing himself directly to America’s critics, the president began with, “For those who question the character and cause of my nation . . .” He could have mentioned the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the billions spent on fighting AIDS in Africa, tsunami relief, the Green Revolution, and defeating Nazism and Communism, just for starters. But that’s not what the president had in mind. “I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months. On my first day in office, I prohibited without exception or equivocation the use of torture by the United States of America. I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed.” The audience, composed in part of regimes that pluck out the eyeballs of political enemies and hack off the hands of suspected thieves, applauded vigorously...

(emphasis added)