Best Berlin Wall video you will see today
There are lots of good ones out there. Scott put up Reagan’s speech, of course. Clyde had Sen. McConnell’s tribute to the event (video added). Hot Air has a few good ones, all of which are worth a few minutes.
But this is the one that got me. Freedom-loving people the world over, and especially our allies who were liberated from the yoke of Communist tyranny, are celebrating the triumph of good over evil.
So ask yourself as you watch it, what the hell is wrong with Barack Obama?
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Bill_Dupray and Bill_Dupray, Bill Dupray. Bill Dupray said: #tcot Best Berlin Wall video you will see today: There are lots of good ones out there. Scott put up Reagan’s spe http://url4.eu/iqsM [...]
Gosh, this is making Austan Goolsbee’s crack about conservatives being the East German Olympics judge even more fitting. Because let’s face it – if he had gone to Berlin, he’d be criticized by Republicans for spending more time away from Washington, and then for not giving a sufficiently exceptionalist speech about why America is so great. I mean, I’m surprised you’d even bother asking ‘what the hell is wrong with Obama’ given that you’ve already made up your mind.
I think it was a wise choice on his part to sit out the 20th anniversary of 1989’s stirring events. Frankly, I wish Obama hadn’t gone to Copenhagen in October for the Chicago Olympics bid, I hope he doesn’t go to Oslo in December to pick up ‘his’ Nobel Prize, and I hope he focuses on governing because he’s spent enough time making the case to the rest of the world about how he’s different from George W. Bush. Now he needs to focus on domestic victories here in America which he hasn’t really done since the stimulus.
Maybe the President just isn’t the kind of jelly doughnut the struggle requires.
My aunt and uncle were stationed in Germany in the 80s with their two young children. I vividly remember getting a piece of the Berlin wall in the mail when I was a kid, and my mom explaining to me what it meant.
I was just seven when the wall came down, but I remember being excited. Our family is all from Poland, another country ravaged by communism, so we knew what it meant for the wall to come down. It was exciting. The wall coming down and the Challenger exploding are the two historic events from the 80s that I remember – one sad, one happy – both memorable.
Great video. Thanks for posting.
I know a woman who worked for the CIA who went across the border into East Germany and got a family out. It was truly a life and death struggle with an evil regime. People should never forget such recent history and it is part of Obama’s job to remind them. And he won’t do it.
In response to another comment. See in context »That’s about as sincere an argument as the time you said that the President was responsible for Neda Agha Soltan’s death.
In response to another comment. See in context »Those are two different things. The Iran criticism was that he should have taken some action in support of freedom (or do we not do that anymore?).
This one is a lot easier. Would it be so terrible to remind Americans and others around the world who are too young to remember the Berlin Wall about how freedom is good and despotism is bad and that we support the former, not the latter. I really believe Obama is a moral-relativist, so I think he made a conscious choice to stay home in order to not upset the Russians. It is political-correctness, writ-large. That same philosophy is what got us into trouble at Fort Hood. There is evil in the world and you cannot be afraid to offend somebody in trying to root it out. Otherwise your good-intentions will get you killed.
In response to another comment. See in context »So now you’re blaming Obama for what happened at Fort Hood. Charming.
Do you have any evidence that President Obama didn’t go to Berlin because he didn’t want to piss off the Russians? Or is it another crass assertion like your literal statement that if Obama had said more about Iran, Neda Agha Soltan would still be alive?
I think President Obama stayed home from Berlin because he had other things to deal with. I prefer that he found the time today to help the nation mourn what happened at Fort Hood in a moving speech that promised justice for Major Hasan and the awful crime he committed and reminded us all about the sacrifices our men and women in uniform are making. I don’t believe he would have been able to do both.
In response to another comment. See in context »Michael this isn’t about Berlin or the fall of the commies, this all about the right’s weird canonization of Ronnie. They somehow feel that Obama not going is a slight against Reagan, it’s weird.
In response to another comment. See in context »An inspiring video indeed: from Kennedy to Reagan. Wonderful! But it really deserved better than a partisan framing; the question to ask is what does this mean. I can’t tell from you picture how old you are (lucky you!), but once a month in early grade school we practiced getting under our desks to protect us from “the bomb.” While ours is still a terrifying world, the source of that fear finally went away when the wall came down. I remember watching and cheering the East Germans pulling down the concrete and crossing over.
Also, as Victor Sebestyen argued in Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire freedom loving people were not liberated, they liberated themselves. We helped, but they did it.
You do yourself a great injustice by framing this as a partisan…thing. Shows your true colors.
What is wrong with President Obama? Nothing
The point of this exercise is to show my true colors.
In response to another comment. See in context »14 days before JFK gave his famous speech at the Berlin Wall in June 1963, Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi, shot in the back. The Segregationists who hijacked the Republican Party the following year, in 1964, with the election races of Goldwater and Wallace, was and is the Berlin Wall of America. That wall has yet to completely be torn down as evidenced by your question about Barack Obama. If and when the Republican Party fully denounces the hijacking by the Segregationists and later the Christian Extremists in the late 70’s, we might see our own Berlin Wall finally come down. It’s so easy to get weepy and self congratulatory about our role in other countries while turning a blind eye to our own particular versions of oppression.
Hmmm. Funny, I thought the segregationists were Democrats. Dr. King was a Republican.
In response to another comment. See in context »That is true until 1964. Prior to that year Republicans were the beacons of Civil Rights, but during the Presidential Race of 1964, especially with the help of George Wallace, who promised to deliver “a conservative message to one of the two parties” completely changed the landscape. Dr. King’s father was a staunch Republican until 1964. Dr. King himself did his best to avoid partisan politics because he didn’t want the civil rights message to get lost, but he openly supported LBJ in 1964. The truth of history is the segregationists completely changed parties in 1964, becoming Republicans, opening the door for Nixon’s “silent majority” which was code for racism. The split became further polarized by the hijacking of the Republican Party by the christian extremism of Falwell and Robertson and their ilk. If you want to stop history in 1963, then yes, segregationists were historically Democrat.
In response to another comment. See in context »Bill,
It’s odd to regard your certainty that the Cold War brought down the Berlin Wall. After Korea, we fought very little Cold War with China and yet communism has fallen there and, in fact, has spawned a centrally-controlled economy that will prove more fit for the 21st century than our our form, laissez-faire capitalism. As Todd points out, the Cold War brought the world to the brink of extinction. It also cost many lives. If something is a bad idea it will collapse under its own inadequacy and the people’s opposition to it.
In fighting the Cold War and giving the Soviet-bloc peoples an enemy we may have prolonged their suffering. We certainly paid a high price in our country both in lives and military spending.
And now the myth is being re-enacted, now against the Islamic world. Noam Chomsky has a chilling term for it: The New Military Humanism.
Oh please Bill spare us, if the prez had been in Germany today you would have been whining he’s not at Ft. Hood for today’s memorial service. This is a petty post on your part.
He could have done them both. No time-machine necessary.
In response to another comment. See in context »