RUTHFULLY YOURS

The allies required 363 raids between 1942 and 1945 to level the city, while President Obama leveled himself with only one. The allies required 200,000 tons of high explosives for the deed, finally including the famous blockbuster, while Mr. Obama made “mission accomplished” with a load of attitudes, platitudes and a ton of what one London newspaper called “pure mush.” It was mush ground from stale corn.

He delivered his remarks in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, almost exactly a half-century after John F. Kennedy thrilled the Germans and reassured Europe with his “ich bin ein Berliner” speech, declaring that he, too, was a Berliner resisting aggressive Soviet communism. Mr. Obama, fresh out of inspiring bloviation, gave the Berliners only a laundry list of fears to terrorize themselves with – the West’s inventory of nuclear weapons, global warming, Guantanamo, poverty across the world and the heartbreak of teenage acne.

Said Nile Gardiner, who once worked for Margaret Thatcher, in London’s Daily Telegraph: “It was a combination of staggering naivete, the appeasement of America’s enemies and strategic adversaries and the championing of more big government solutions.”

The Europeans are learning what many Americans are only just now learning, that the Barack Obama they lost their heads over in 2008 was a figment of the imagination of juveniles from 8 to 80. Five years on, says Ralf Fucks, chairman of the board of the Heinrich Boll Foundation and a man who spells his name carefully and pronounces it (“fukes”) even more carefully, the Germans have undergone “a brutal sobering up.” He decries “the permanent state of crisis” and the difficulty presidents and chancellors face when trying to guide and shape events under “a constant pressure to act.”