Just when it looks like Barack Obama is getting dragged under for the third time by angry domestic politics, he bounces back up — in Norway, of all places — and reminds us why Americans elected him in the first place.
The president's remarks while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Thursday strengthened the case for giving it to him, though maybe not in ways expected by those who most applauded the decision.
When the prize was announced in October, there was speculation that the socialist-leaning Nobel committee was trying to co-opt him toward a Euro-leftist foreign policy – wary of American power and laced with pacifism. If that was the plan, it didn't work.
Obama on Thursday delivered the unanswerable rebuttal to those who argue that war only begets more violence and can never be justified. In two words, Adolf Hitler.
“I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people,” Obama said. “For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies ... To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”
The president immediately turned his guns on the “reflexive suspicion of America, the world’s sole military superpower.”
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