Relativism is as relativism does and Barack Obama does it well. His less than tepid response to evidence of a rigged election in Iran a few weeks ago and the subsequent brutalization of the Iranian people by an Islamofascist regime says more about our President’s worldview than it does his foreign policy.
Amid Tehran’s bloody election protests the internet was awash with images of Iranian citizens – many beaten, even murdered – desperately reaching out to Uncle Sam for cover. “Obama, please help us, they are killing our young children,” implored one protester’s sign.
Obama’s response? He launched the most vapidly uninspired course of inaction since the days of one-term Jimmy: “It's not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling,” he lectured.
Critics pounced, calling the President’s hyper-measured reaction “timid” and “passive.” So he stepped it up a notch. This time he expressed “deep concerns about the elections,” promising to “monitor the situation.” Nonetheless he urged calm saying that he was “waiting to see how it plays out.” (Just what Granny needs while she’s being mugged: A would-be champion to “monitor the situation” and “see how it plays out.”)
Of course an abundance of “concern,” “monitoring” and about eighty-nine cents will buy you a bitter cup of coffee. So, as Obama’s critics got tougher, so did his rhetoric. The next day he again modified his official position, this time mustering enough righteous indignation to upgrade from “deeply concerned” to “appalled” and “outraged.”
Still, his instinctive impulse to equivocate was more than Obama could bear. In the same breath he reassured Iran’s despotic Mullahs and their puerile presidential puppet, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that “the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not at all interfering in Iran's affairs.”
Not really a “tear down this wall” kind of moment, but, with this president, I guess it’ll have to do.
All the same, what’s most puzzling to me is why anyone’s remotely surprised. Obama is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal; a postmodern “progressive”; a committed social and moral relativist.
The moral relativist, by definition, is bereft of moral clarity. The only thing immoral is to reckon there are things immoral. The only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth. No fixed right or wrong; no black or white; only shades of gray.