By Mark Steyn
Descending
from the heavens for the G8 summit at beautiful Lough Erne this week, President
Obama caused some amusement to his British hosts. The chancellor of the
exchequer had been invited to give a presentation to the assembled heads of
government on the matter of tax avoidance (one of the big items on the agenda,
for those of you who think what the IRS could really use right now is even more
enforcement powers). The president evidently enjoyed it. Thrice, he piped up to
say how much he agreed with Jeffrey, eventually concluding the presentation
with the words, “Thank you, Jeffrey.” Unfortunately, the chancellor of the
exchequer is a bloke called George Osborne, not Jeffrey Osborne. President
Obama subsequently apologized for confusing George with Jeffrey, who was a
popular vocal artiste back in the Eighties when Obama was dating his composite
girlfriend and making composite whoopee to the composite remix of Jeffrey
Osborne’s 1982 smoocheroo, “On the Wings of Love.”
I
suppose it might have been worse. When Angela Merkel proposed a toast to a
strong West, he could have assumed that was the name of Kim and Kanye’s new
baby. At any rate, President Obama’s mishap had faint echoes of a famous social
faux pas during the Second World War. Irving Berlin, the celebrated composer of
“White Christmas,” was invited to lunch at 10 Downing Street and was surprised
to find that Churchill, instead of asking what’s that Bing Crosby really like,
badgered him with complex moral and strategic questions and requests for
estimates of U.S. war production. It turned out the prime minister had confused
Irving Berlin with the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, then under secondment to
the British embassy in Washington, and thought it was the latter he’d invited
to Number Ten. In the Obama era, any confusion is the other way around. It
would be a terrible thing for the president to invite the eminent rapper Jay-Z
to lunch only to find himself stuck next to the turgid British philosopher
Professor Sir Jay Zed. Although Obama’s confusion went largely unreported in
America, the BBC’s enterprising Eddie Mair got Jeffrey Osborne on the line and
inveigled him into singing George Osborne’s best-known words — “Tax cuts should
be for life, not just Christmastime” — to Jeffrey’s best-known tune.
The
following day Mangue Obama — whoops, my mistake, Mangue Obama was the prime
minister of Equatorial Guinea from 2006 to 2008, and has a way smaller and less
incompetent entourage — Barack Obama departed for Berlin (the German city, not
the American songwriter or British philosopher). Five years ago at the
Brandenburg Gate, he thrilled a crowd of 200,000 with his stirring clarion call
to himself, “Ich bin ein Baracker.” This time, he spoke to an audience barely a
fiftieth of that size — 4,500, most of whom were bored out of their lederhosen.
As I wrote of Obama’s Massachusetts yawnfest in 2010, he went to the trouble of
flying in to phone it in. If the BBC’s mash-up of Jeffrey Osborne’s 1982 Billboard
hit and Chancellor Osborne’s recent speech at the Mansion House in London was
something of an awkward fit, you could slip large slabs of “On the Wings of
Love” into Obama’s telepromptered pap and none of the 27 Germans still awake
would have noticed the difference:
Peace with justice means extending a
hand to those who reach for freedom, wherever they live. Come take my hand and
together we will rise, on the wings of love, up and above the clouds, the only
way to fly . . .
Peace with justice means pursuing the
security of a world without nuclear weapons — no matter how distant that dream
may be, just smile for me and let the day begin. You are the sunshine that
lights my heat within, and we can reject the nuclear weaponization that North
Korea and Iran may be seeking, because we are angels in disguise, we live and
breathe each other, inseparable . . .
The effort to slow climate change
requires bold action. For the grim alternative affects all nations — more
severe storms, more famine and floods . . . coastlines that
vanish, oceans that rise, you look at me and I begin to melt, just like the
snow when a ray of sun is felt. . . . This is the future we
must avert. This is the global threat of our
time. . . . That is our task. We have to get to work. We’re
flowing like a stream, running free, flowing on the wings of
love . . .
The wings of love don’t seem to carry Obama as far as they used to.
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews blamed the lackluster performance on the sun’s
glare affecting his ability to read the text. That’s how bad it is:
Global warming melted his prompter. But the speech itself was barely
distinguishable in its cobwebbed utopian pabulum from the video for a
nuclear-free world just released by Michael Douglas and other
celebrities. And Mr. Douglas, who recently gave a fascinating interview
to the Guardian in which he blamed his cancerous walnut-sized
tongue tumor upon his addiction to oral sex, at least has a better
excuse as to why his silvery tongue doesn’t work its magic quite the way
it used to. Der Spiegel, which is the very definition of
mainstream media in Germany, described the president’s Berlin stop as a
visit by “the head of the largest and most all-encompassing surveillance
system ever invented” — and under the headline “Obama’s Soft
Totalitarianism.”
Obama
isn’t a “soft” totalitarian so much as a slapdash one. His apparatchiks
monitor the e-mails of both Jeffrey and George Osborne, but he still
can’t tell one from the other. Likewise, in Syria as in Libya, “the
largest and most all-encompassing surveillance system ever invented”
can’t tell a plucky freedom fighter itching to build Massachusetts in
the sands of Araby from your neighborhood al-Qaeda subsidiary whose
health-care plan only covers clitoridectomies.
His G8 colleagues have begun to figure out that America no longer
matters. To be sure, the trappings of the presidency are a lagging
indicator: He still flies in with more limos and Secret Service agents
than everybody else, combined. Then again, the other American story to
catch the fancy of the Fleet Street tabloids in recent days is that of
the unfortunate Las Vegas man with the world’s biggest scrotum, weighing
140 pounds, yet unable to perform. Of his talks with Vladimir Putin,
the president said, “With respect to Syria, we do have differing
perspectives on the problem, but we share an interest in reducing the
violence.” Putin aims to reduce the violence by getting his boy Assad to
kill everyone he needs to. Obama aims to reduce the violence by giving a
speech about the “intolerance that fuels extremism” — or is it the
other way round? The world understands that Putin means it and Obama
doesn’t — just as in Afghanistan everyone knows the Taliban means it and
the fainthearted superpower doesn’t.
Thanks to the stork
delivering his bundle to Miss Kardashian (see above), Americans seem not
to have noticed that the U.S. has just lost yet another war. But in
Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, they noticed, and they will act accordingly. On
the wings of love, up and above the clouds, Obama wafts ever higher on
his own gaseous uplift. Down on solid ground, the rest of the world must
occasionally wonder if they haven’t confused the U.S. delegation with
the world’s most empty-headed boy band.
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