Next week, Germany will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall – recalling the peaceful events that sparked a new birth of freedom for a country that had been split in half, dividing family, friends and even the world since 1961. The commemorations will go forward, however, without America’s president.
Remarkably, President Obama, who could find time to fly to Copenhagen to lobby for Chicago’s Olympic bid, declined the invitation from German chancellor Angela Merkel to attend the festivities. That’s notwithstanding the central role that America played in the ultimate destruction of the Iron Curtain – and the bipartisan nature of its efforts, from the Berlin airlift to President Reagan’s famous exhortation to his Soviet counterpart to “tear down this wall!”
No one but the President and members of his inner circle know the real reason that President Obama has refused to go to Berlin. It’s hard not to suspect, however, that his reluctance springs both from a misplaced sensitivity to the feelings of our former Soviet adversaries – and worse yet, from a misguided sense of shame about America’s Cold War triumph.
Since his inauguration, after all, President Obama has bent over backward to appeal to America’s most virulent adversaries. He has listened without objection as a madman like Hugo Chavez excoriated the United States in the ugliest of ways. He’s handled American-hating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with kid gloves. To curry favor with the Chinese, he’s stiff-armed the Dalai Lama. And in a complete inversion of President Ronald Reagan’s policies in the years leading up to the Berlin Wall’s fall, Obama has sought to please Russian president Putin by scrapping plans for a missile defense system in the former Soviet satellites of Poland and the Czech Republic. Given his manifest concern for the tender feelings of America’s adversaries, it’s not hard to imagine Obama shrinking from a celebration that he might feel they would interpret as American triumphalism.
http://townhall.com/columnists/CarolPlattLiebau/2009/11/02/why_wont_obama_celebrate_freedoms_victory
