But … that’s so unlike Obama. I need to correct CK before I praise him, though: The One doesn’t blame the United States for colonialist attitudes towards the Middle East at the beginning of the speech. He blames “the West,” which is certainly true if the West includes Great Britain and France (and it surely does). In fact, he explicitly says further on, “Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire.”

That said, I’m embarrassed I missed the superb point he makes at the end about Obama’s moronic moral equivalence on women’s rights in my post earlier. It really is the most offensive part of the speech. I wonder, though, if The One feels compelled towards relativism because he’s a leftist or simply because, for all the hype, his oratory is formulaic and always includes a passage about how both sides to whatever conflict he’s addressing have legitimate grievances. That’s the real secret to his “post-partisanship”, I think: Unless absolutely forced to, he eschews taking a stand so that he can play President Above-it-all. To see just what a hack he is, have a look at this and note step 8 vis-a-vis Krauthammer’s critique. Inevitable.