Friday on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report” during the “All-Star Panel” segment, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer criticized President Barack Obama for the speech he had given at Hiroshima, the site where the first atomic bomb had been dropped, earlier in the day.
Although he said it wasn’t an explicit apology, the implicit apology “dishonored our nation.”
We saw it today. Here’s a guy who went around the world when he’s inaugurated — I don’t want to use the word “apologize,” but confessing of long history of American sins, from the maltreatment of Indians to the coup of Iran in 53, the coup in Guatemala, the list is very long, and it’s sort of — he closed the circle of that apology tour today in Hiroshima.
And to say it wasn’t a formal apology, of course he wasn’t going use the word, and, yes, he did speak of war in the abstract. But he did it in Hiroshima. If you want to do a speech about war in the abstract you do it in Prague, which is what he did in 2009. When you do it in Hiroshima, of course you’re talking about World War II, of course you’re talking about American dropping the bomb, and of course the implication is that we have a sense of guilt about, not an overt apology.
This is a visit he should have made next year as a private citizen, in which case he can speak like a naive private citizen about escaping the logic of fear. What other way is there of dealing with nuclear weapons other than the logic of fear, i.e., deterrence? Eliminating them is never going to happen and will weaken us. Do we want to be without nuclear weapons when there’s a nut case, Pyongyang, who is acquiring them, with apocalyptic, genocidal mullahs in Iran are acquiring them? Of course not.
And the president speaking as president representing the United States, I thought it was embarrassing, the utopianism, and the implicit apology dishonored our nation. It’s not something he should have done.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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