PRESIDENT OBAMA was too busy to attend the celebrations in Germany this week marking the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago. But he did appear by video, delivering a few brief and bloodless remarks about how the wall was “a painful barrier between family and friends’’ that symbolized “a system that denied people the freedoms that should be the right of every human being.’’ He referred to “tyranny,’’ but never identified the tyrants - he never uttered the words “Soviet Union’’ or “communism,’’ for example. He said nothing about the men and women who died trying to cross the wall. Nor did he mention Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan - or even Mikhail Gorbachev.Read the whole thing here.
He did, however, talk about Barack Obama.
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Was there ever a president as deeply enamored of himself as Barack Obama?
To clarify: the title is excerpted from Act 1 of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. The full quote goes: "Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile; So ere you find where light in darkness lies, Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes." It's a warning against spending too much of your life in scholarly pursuits.
Day By Day
Monday, November 16, 2009
Obies Ego
There's a nice piece by Jeff Jacoby in yesterday's Boston Globe on the subject of "Obama's Swelling Ego".