Jim Geraghty of National Review Online assesses former President Barack Obama’s disturbing return to the headlines.
[W]e must turn our attention to the recent comments of former president Barack Obama, who was pretty quiet for most of his post-presidential life, but who is now emerging at this emotional time to offer an assessment that Politico calls “jaw dropping.” I think it is more accurately characterized as appalling: Obama says that when it comes to Middle East violence, “you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean — that all of us are complicit to some degree.” The hell we are! This is a not-so-subtle effort to spread the blame around as widely and thinly as possible, to hand-wave away the fact that we’ve had now ten years of Democratic presidents hell-bent on reaching a deal with Iran and putting more and more money in the hands of the Iranian regime. Go figure, when you provide a financial windfall to the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, you get bigger and bloodier servings of state-sponsored terror. …
… First, any time you see someone insisting, “No one’s hands are clean,” or that everyone is to blame, there’s a good chance you’re hearing from the person who actually is to blame. Because while life gives us a lot of problems for which there’s a lot of blame to go around — poverty, violent crime, schools that fail to educate kids — in every circumstance, some people are more to blame than others. The easiest way to ensure that no one is actually held responsible for what happened is to insist that everyone is to blame for what happened. Claiming, “It’s everyone’s fault” is a sly way of ensuring the consequences will be indistinguishable from the conclusion, “It’s no one’s fault.”
Are “all of us complicit” in the horrors of terrorism and violence in the Middle East? I suspect you’re reacting, “Me? What did I do? I’ve just been sitting here.” Most of us either have never been to the Middle East, or have only been there for short visits. How the hell are we “complicit” in Hamas slaughtering toddlers?
