DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE LEFT SIDE OF HISTORY ****
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-left-side-of-history/print/
“As frustrating as HealthCare.gov may be sometimes,” Obama told ObamaCare navigators and volunteers. “We’re on the right side of history.”
It wasn’t the first time that Obama had invoked the right side of history to rally the troops. During the Arab Spring, as Mubarak resigned on his orders, he said, “History will end up recording that at every juncture in the situation in Egypt, that we were on the right side of history.”
It’s hard to be on the right side of history at every juncture. But Obama believed that he had achieved the feat by backing Mubarak, then backing his overthrow and then backing the Muslim Brotherhood.
Two years later, history recorded that Obama was on the wrong side of history with the fiction of the Arab Spring being swept away by the impersonal forces of history which despite liberal claims to the contrary do not care who was claiming to be on their good side last week.
After lying to Americans and telling them that his intervention in Libya was about protecting Benghazi from a massacre that was never going to happen, he told the Democratic National Committee; “We’re on the right side of history now throughout the Middle East, because we believe in preventing innocents from getting slaughtered, and we believe in human rights for all people.”
The Libyan rebels began targeting Africans and Christians, then they attacked the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, and today the country is run by warring militias; including Al Qaeda groups which recruit fighters and obtain weapons for their campaigns in Mali and Syria.
In the summer of this year, Obama told Democratic members of Congress who were concerned that the ObamaCare rollout was going to be a mess, that there was no reason to worry. “We are on the right side of these issues and the right side of history in terms of providing health care to Americans.”
Now the right side of history is starting to look like the left side of history.
At least one of the Democrats, Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter, decided that she had been on the wrong side of history and voted for the “You Can Keep Your Plan” Act.
The right side of history is where the left wants to be, but it’s a famously elusive place.
Hillary Clinton warned Russia and China that they had to stand on the right side of history against Assad. Since then Obama has moved closer to the Russian side of history than the Russians have to his side.
Afterward, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov wrote an editorial titled “On the Right Side of History”; sardonically mentioning that his regime’s solution was the way to stay “as it has become fashionable to say, ‘on the right side of history.’”
After her resignation, Hillary Clinton took credit for the Arab Spring telling The Economist, “I do think we are on the right side of history” and insisted that “focusing on how to assist these new governments… that are heavily dominated by Islamist parties, is very much in America’s interests.”
Fast forward through a little history and the Tunisian Islamists she was discussing are on the ropes and on the wrong side of history.
In 2008, Bill Clinton told the Democratic National Convention, “The Republicans said I was too young and too inexperienced to be commander in chief. Sound familiar? It didn’t work in 1992 because we were on the right side of history. And it will not work in 2008 because Barack Obama is on the right side of history.”
Clinton was inexperienced. His failure to cope with Al Qaeda led to September 11 and his failure to force Saddam Hussein to comply with his agreements led to the Iraq War. Clinton left behind a mess for Bush to clean up. If he was on the right side of history, the world he left behind would have been a lot neater.
Now his wife is preparing to launch a presidential campaign by arguing that her husband was a liar, that Obama was inexperienced and that she can do better.
During the presidential debate, Mitt Romney challenged Obama, warning that “We’re four years closer to a nuclear Iran.”
Obama arrogantly retorted, “They can look at my track record, whether it’s Iran sanctions, whether it’s dealing with counterterrorism… and they can say that the president of the United States… has stood on the right side of history.”
On this side of history, Obama ‘s track record is that he trashed Iranian sanctions and attempted to give their nuclear program a blank check. Al Qaeda is romping around the world while he scrambles to appease the Taliban. If that’s his idea of the right side of history, then it also happens to be the side of history favored by Iran and Al Qaeda.
Obama wasn’t the first man of the left to believe that he was on the right side of history.
Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had told Western diplomats, “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!”
Eight years later, he had been removed from power and was being written out of Soviet history by his own comrades. His only recourse was to smuggle his memoirs to the only place that would print his version of history… the United States.
Khrushchev had told Nixon that his grandchildren would live in a Communist America. Nixon had replied that the Soviet leader’s grandchildren would live in a capitalist Russia. Both men proved to be right and wrong at the same time. Christopher Cox Nixon lives in Bill de Blasio’s New York while Khrushchev’s son applied for permanent residency in the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union.
History is famously elastic and only progressives believe that it has a right side and a wrong side. There is no such thing as the right side of history; just as there is no such a thing as the right side of age. History, like age, is mortality. The only truly inevitable outcome of history is death.
History does not have sides; only outcomes.
Everything wrong with Obama’s attitude can be gleaned from his quote. “If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress.”
It’s the sort of quote that sounds inspirational if you don’t think too much about the implications of a world leader who already claims to know what the right path is and believes in determinedly moving down it, without regard to consequences, because he is certain that if he persists, progress will come.
Obama believes that the left side of history is the right side of history and has a radical faith that whatever goes wrong will eventually be set right again by the inevitable progressive force of history.
He believes that ObamaCare will work because socialized medicine is on the right side of history and the free market is on the wrong side of history. It is this faith in a radical muse of history that will fix websites, soothe terrorists and calm the angry peasants that moves him from one disaster to another.
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