What Obama's prayer breakfast comments reveal about his Iran policy
National Prayer Breakfasts are usually occasions of inspiring messages and fellowship across religious and political divides.
In recent years "Braveheart" writer Randall Wallace, Bonhoefferbiographer Eric Metaxas and Dr. Ben Carson have amped up the content with the effect of increasing the breakfast's visibility and reach. I have played each of these messages on my radio show to great effect.
This year NASCAR legend Darrell Waltrip was the keynote speaker and he too hit a home run (or whatever the appropriate stock car analogy would be) and I again played his remarks to an enthusiastic response from the audience.
But I ended up playing President Obama's riff on the Crusades and the Inquisition, slavery and Jim Crow far more often than anything Waltrip said. In fact, though a lot of MSM outlets spent a lot of time this week on Brian Williams, the country as a whole was first stunned, then mystified and finally angry about the president's deep dive into moral equivalence.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has burned a Jordanian fighter pilot to death in recent days, but as Charles Krauthammer pointed out to me on Friday's program, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431. There is a gap. The gap matters. There is a pressing problem of national security and an interesting problem of historical excess. The president confused the two.
George Will speculated to me that the president's remarks followed the modern imperative that one "judge not lest ye be judged to be judgmental," and that in "some circles [such remarks are] considered a kind of sophistication, to be above judgment."
Those circles do not include ordinary voters and, not surprisingly, Hillary did not tweet applause as she is wont to do when she approves of the president's ramblings. She won't, I suspect, and will hide from reporters who might dare ask her what she thinks of the president's non-high horsing, as he put it.
Here's what's going on, and it isn't simple cluelessness from a president who so often displays just that.
The president is getting close to a compete appeasement of Iran's nuclear ambitions. When that capitulation happens, the domestic political outrage will be intense, and not just because of the danger a nuclear Iran poses to Israel and the region but also because of the evil regime's 35-year history of murder, mayhem, assassination and state-sponsored terror directed at Americans.
The president's prayer breakfast cliche fest is just the first draft of his rationale for the "all regimes alike" argument which precedes the "all regimes can change" conclusion that will buttress the collapse before Iran's demands.
So Thursday's incoherence wasn't just presidential riffing into a rhetorical ditch. It was part of the softening up of the outrage that will follow an announcement of capitulation to Iran's dream of a nuclear capability.
The Hudson Institute's Michael Doran published a must read, lengthy, but riveting assessment of the Obama-Clinton-Kerry policy vis-à-vis Iran last week: "Obama's Secret Iran Strategy." Google it. Read it. And ask your senators to do so as well.
Senate Democrats led by alleged friends of Israel Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin are refusing to work with Republicans and serious Democrats to stop this deal before it becomes real. Reid, Schumer and Durbin are midwifing a nuclear Iran. That's their legacy. Nothing else.
Hugh Hewitt is a nationally syndicated talk radio host, law professor at Chapman University's Fowler School of Law, and author, most recently of The Happiest Life. He posts daily atHughHewitt.com and is on Twitter @hughhewitt.
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