My father, Ronald Reagan, was on his way to board Marine One with a book tucked under his arm when a reporter shouted a question, asking what it was about.
My dad held up the book and said it was a brand-new tome by a brand-new author named Tom Clancy. He described “The Hunt for Red October” as a book about the superiority of the U.S. Navy and how it was used in behalf of freedom.
Thanks to the publicity he gave the book, it shot to the top of the best-seller list, made Clancy famous, and set off his career as a top author who would go on to write numerous best-sellers about the power of the U.S. military as a force for individual rights and freedom.
Compare that with President Barack Obama’s reaction when a foreign dictator gave him an anti-American book.
The other day, Obama allowed himself to be used for propaganda purposes when Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez suddenly arose from his chair at the Union of South American Nations meeting, approached Obama, shoved a book at him, shook hands with him, and went back to his place at the table.
The book, published in 1971, is a vicious attack on the United States, blaming this country for just about everything that has ever gone wrong in the Southern Hemisphere. Instead of tossing this anti-American screed on the table to show his contempt for Chavez’s crude propaganda ploy and the book itself, Obama simply sat down after shaking hands with the dictator.
Thanks to Obama’s having allowed Chavez to use him as a propaganda tool, the 39-year-old book shot up to the No. 2 spot on The New York Times best-seller list.
Anyone who saw videos of this farce had to wonder just how Chavez was able to approach the president without being prevented from getting anywhere near him. If you or I tried it, Secret Service agents would have surrounded us and hauled us away. But Chavez simply got up and strolled, unimpeded, toward the mysteriously unguarded president of the United States.
Remember the shoe-thrower incident and how quickly the Secret Service reacted?
Something smells here, and you should be forgiven if you decide that it was a pre-planned, set-up job arranged beforehand.
Consider what followed. In the presence of the president of the United States, Nicaragua’s communist President Daniel Ortega launched a 50-minute diatribe attacking the United States.
Did Obama return the compliment by defending the United States? Hell, no. Instead, he made a joke about the length of Ortega’s speech, which he allowed to go unchallenged and unanswered.
It is becoming obvious that, above all else, Barack Obama wants to be loved and admired, and he thinks the way to achieve affection is to act like a patsy instead of as the leader of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation, dedicated to individual freedom.
Instead of reassuring those people being ground under the heel of despotic regimes that the United States stands with them and will refuse to bow and scrape before their oppressors, he plays kissy-face with the worst of them.
Apologizing is not a sane foreign policy. It is the foreign policy of a weakling. And it didn’t work in Europe, where the people listened to him begging forgiveness and shook their heads in wonder.
Contrast his behavior outside the United States with that here at home. The namby-pamby, apologetic Barack Obama seen outside the United States disappears here at home, where his administration shows signs of employing the Gestapo-like tactics of foreign despots such as singling out patriotic Americans for opposing baby-killing and out-of-control borrowing and spending, and terming them “extremists” who are endangering our homeland security.
This is getting scary.
Mike Reagan, the elder son of the late President Ronald Reagan, is heard on radio stations nationally as part of American Family Radio (www.afr.net). You can find his newest book, “Twice Adopted,” at www.Reagan.com.
© 2009 Creator's Syndicate Inc.
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