huffingtonpost.com
Ukraine and Iraq: A Reminder
Yesterday President Obama gave a
speech
at the Palais des Beaux Arts center in Brussels. His ostensible
audience was the European Union chiefs. His intended audience was all
the second-echelon Great Powers (minus Russia and China). Some phrases
at Brussels showed the usual signs of his workmanship:
I
say this as the president of a country that looked to Europe for the
values that are written into our founding documents and which spilled
blood to ensure that those values could endure.
Those ideas eventually inspired a band of colonists across an ocean.
Dizzying change opens the door of opportunity to the marginalized.
We've
never met these people, but we know them. Their voices echo calls for
human dignity that rang out in European streets and squares for
generations.
Freedom will continue to triumph over tyranny, because that is what forever stirs in the human heart.
Read
those sentences in order and you pretty much have the plot of it. The
stately march of eloquent platitudes, with a dash of humility and an
echo of Lincoln like stardust on his sleeve -- it is the pattern we have
come to know in many settings. And it prompts a thought. The president
might at this point consider the value of not being inspirational.
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