Back in 1984, when the late Jeane J. Kirkpatrick gave her famous "Blame America First" speech to the Republican National Convention, liberals at least waited for something bad to happen before blaming America.
Today, Obama Democrats have now mastered the treacherous art of the pre-emptive global apology. Foggy Bottom is crammed with so many "human rights" zealots embarrassed by the country they serve that the State Department mission statement should be replaced with a condolence card.
Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Michael Posner is probably not the first Obama State Department official to badmouth America in front of foreign delegations. He was just dumb enough to get caught.
Last week, the former head agitator at the transnationalist outfit Human Rights First trashed our country's human rights record to Chinese government officials.
Posner is an unrepentant open-borders radical who has long fought immigration enforcement and vociferously opposed post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism measures to detain enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay. He was active in supporting the establishment of the International Criminal Court, an American sovereignty-undermining tribunal that would trump U.S. judicial authority over war crimes and "crimes of humanity."
And New Yorkers may recall that he joined with Human Rights First board member Tom Goldstein, far-left billionaire George Soros and other American self-loathers in the failed effort to turn the Sept. 11 Ground Zero Memorial into a national guilt complex to showcase how George W. Bush-era counterterrorism policies were curtailing civil liberties.
In short, Posner views our homeland security policies as unforgivable sins of discrimination. And he couldn't wait to let China know it.
From Posner's press briefing on Friday:
Q: Did the recently passed Arizona immigration law come up? And if so, did they bring it up? Or did you bring it up?
MR. POSNER: We brought it up early and often. It was mentioned in the first session and as a troubling trend in our society, and an indication that we have to deal with issues of discrimination or potential discrimination. And these are issues very much being debated in our own society.
The Arizona law is indeed being "debated in our own society" -- mostly by a parade of willful ignoramuses from Homeland Security Department Secretary Janet Napolitano to Attorney General Eric Holder to State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, who have all gone on television to attack the Arizona law and then admit they have yet to read the legislation.
At least all the know-nothings in Washington who voted to cram the health care and stimulus bills down our throats without reading them had a semblance of an excuse. Those mammoth packages were thousands of pages long. The Arizona law is a mere 10 pages.
The betrayal of America's interests by the Obama State Department cannot be understated. Posner proactively brought up the Arizona law "early and often" as an issue of "discrimination or potential discrimination" to smear his own countrymen in front of one of the world's leading repressive regimes -- so repressive, in fact, that Posner's own boss, Hillary Clinton, once demanded that former President Bush boycott the ChiComs over their miserable human rights record. Posner had nothing publicly to say at the briefing about China's own draconian immigration enforcement measures, let alone how it treats its own citizen political dissidents.
But this extreme moral equivalence is par for the course. Remember: The State Department's legal adviser is former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh, who believes that America is such a flagrant violator of international law that it belongs in an "axis of disobedience" with totalitarian regimes like North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- and that U.S. Supreme Court rulings should "tip more decisively toward a transnationalist jurisprudence."
And remember: One of President Obama's closest foreign policy advisers is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Harvard law professor and State Department transition team leader Samantha Power, who pooh-poohs the threat of nuclear Iran and praises Obama's commitment to "crossing boundaries" and "talk to dictators," as the New Statesman reported.
Then there's Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is busy coddling another government that has been bashing Arizona's law while unapologetically policing its own southern border and kicking out illegal immigrants without a shred of due process: Mexico.
Instead of voicing concern about endangered American citizens, Clinton fretted about the political well-being of Mexican President Felipe Calderon: "We don't want to make his life any harder," Clinton said. I guarantee you he won't show any of the same concern when he comes to Washington on Thursday to beg for more U.S. aid while attacking America as a racist, fascist country.
Foggy Bottom isn't just stuck on stupid. It's stuck on American self-sabotage.