Perhaps the most famous line the history of cartoons was one Walt Kelly gave his much-beloved character, Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Increasingly, it appears Barack Obama feels the same way about America. Call it the PogObama worldview. 
The President’s first hundred days have been a blur of legislative initiatives, policy pronouncements and symbolic gestures that, taken together, constitute the most sweeping and fundamental make-over of U.S domestic and foreign policies since at least World War II. Animating them all is a hostility towards this country’s traditional values, institutions and conduct that is best described by Jeane Kirkpatrick’s phrase “Blame America First.”
To be sure, Mr. Obama has plenty of company in this camp, both at home and abroad. “San Francisco Democrats” (another Kirkpatrickism) like Nancy Pelosi and tyrants like Hugo Chavez (with whom the President did “high fives” over the weekend) and Saudi King Abdullah (to whom the President bowed two weeks ago) are of a mind: The United States owes the world myriad apologies for its arrogance, unilateralism, aggression and other sins. And it needs to make amends in various, substantial and ominously portentous ways, including the following:
Releasing the so-called “torture memos”: The President pandered to the Left last week by ignoring the advice of five past and present CIA Directors and declassifying several Top Secret legal memoranda. They lay out in excruciating detail what “enhanced interrogation techniques” could be used in extreme circumstances to secure information being withheld by al Qaeda and other high value enemy operatives.
While Mr. Obama says that those who followed these guidelines will not be prosecuted, he has, as a practical matter, invited their prosecution by others. Certainly, he left the door open, both here and overseas, to inquisitions of the memo-drafters and their superiors by Spanish judges, witch-hunters in the U.S. Congress, prosecutors with the International Criminal Court, etc.
By effectively declaring “open season” on those in the Bush administration who helped secure this country in its time of need post-9/11, Mr. Obama is not only wronging dedicated public servants who acted in good faith and who prescribed techniques well short of torture. [(As David Rivkin and Lee Casey point out in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, thousands of American servicemen have been subjected to such methods for decades as part of their survival training).] He is also opening his own team to similar jeopardy, perhaps for killing innocent civilians with their Predator strikes in Pakistan or attacks now said to be under discussion on putative Somali “terrorist camps.”
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