The continuing disasters in the Middle East, particularly the bloodbaths in Syria and Egypt, bring forth claims from leftists and Progressives that “something must be done.” I blush to admit that those on the right are equally verbose in calling for doing something.
And naturally our government, embodied by our “smartest-guy-in-the-room” President, his Secretary of State John Kerry, the National Security Advisor Susan Rice and our apparently part-time Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power are telling us that they are actually going to “do something.” Lucky us. We wait with bated breath to be told what they will do.
Why, they tell us, they are going to convene yet another peace conference. Oh, goody! And just who will be invited to these conferences? There will have to be more than one, obviously. There will have to be one for the Syrian debacle, another for the Egyptian collapse and the ever popular Palestinian disaster.
Well, for Syria, we could invite Bashir al-Assad and the Muslim Brotherhood.
For the Egyptian situation, we could invite General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. (They should be easy to find. Just check the jails in Egypt.)
And for the Israeli/Palestinian spat we could ask Bibi Netanyahu and (playing the role of the Palestinians will be) the Muslim Brotherhood.
Of course we could always call upon the psychic Jean Dixon and ask her how that would all work out, one can imagine the answer we would receive would be along the lines of “About the same as every other peace conference.”
Obama, Kerry, Rice and Power have wrapped themselves in self-righteousness
So our foreign relations hierarchy of Obama, Kerry, Rice and Power have wrapped themselves in self-righteousness and claimed that they will be riding to the rescue of the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people whose lives are being threatened by power-hungry dictator wannabees, as if they were some sort of knights riding their white chargers into battle against…well, that part is a little hazy since what or who they are against is never clearly defined.
Meanwhile, the cuts in our defense establishment that President Obama mocked Mitt Romney for even daring to mention, have changed their white charger into a sway-backed nag that should be headed for the glue factory.
Yet these four believe that they have the “moral high ground.” Why would they believe that?
As Progressives, morality is just a word in the dictionary between “ludicrous” and “preposterous.” Morality has been defined as:
Among those who use “morality” normatively, all hold that “morality” refers to a code of conduct that applies to all who can understand it and can govern their behavior by it. In the normative sense, morality should never be overridden, that is, no one should ever violate a moral prohibition or requirement for non-moral considerations. All of those who use “morality” normatively also hold that, under plausible specified conditions, all rational persons would endorse that code. [emphasis supplied] --Gert, Bernard, "The Definition of Morality", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
These four stalwarts who have declared themselves to hold the moral high ground are selective in what that phrase means and when it can be applied.
Apparently it is a moral imperative to demand an end to killing when the Muslim Brotherhood is involved in any way (and losing), but killing in Somalia is just fine, they can let that slide. Russia invading and seizing a part of Georgia gets a pass as well. Demands that Swiss banks obey U.S. banking regulation is simply for the protection of Americans from greedy, immoral Swiss bankers (here they claim the moral high ground, at least by their own lights), but child labor in Southeast Asia that benefits major Democrat donors is ignored.
The moral high ground doesn’t belong to someone because they posture and preach about it only when it appeals to a political base. Pontificating about Trayvon Martin’s death in Florida and ignoring the death of Christopher Lane in Oklahoma inherently mocks any claims to holding the moral high ground. Pontificating about anything for nothing more than political advantage not merely lacks any moral support, it is a grotesque amorality on display for all the world to see.
Faux morality is particularly ironic when it comes out of the mouth of a President who claims to have read Saint Augustine
This faux morality is particularly ironic when it comes out of the mouth of a President who claims to have read Saint Augustine when deciding who should live and who should die with a drone strike as if he were a 21st century Valkyrie. I’m not sure which parts of Saint Augustine Obama was reading and if he communicated the thoughts of Augustine to his staff and advisors, but he must have skipped past one of the simplest statements of moral philosophy ever to have been written:
“Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.”
Claiming the “moral high ground” is a display of hubris, but even tolerating some hubris could be tolerated if the claim was supported by consistency in opposing everything that is “wrong”. Vacillating on what is morally unacceptable and what isn’t becomes, in itself, immoral.
So how about telling our employees in the White House, the Congress and the judiciary to get off their high horses. Those poor creatures can’t support the weight of your hypocrisy any more.
