RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is just not conceivable that in voting for Barack Obama Americans intended that their muscular, brave, glorious, rights-cherishing force-for-good nation should become indistinguishable from the incarnation of feckless pusillanimity that is the European Union; that the American secretary of state should be the moral and spiritual twin of the EU’s High Representative; that each wary, vacillating toe we dip in the world’s water should splash us with toxicity; that our every uncertain foreign venture should cover us in ignominy. And yet, with one exception—the tracking down and assassination of Osama bin Laden—that is precisely what the last two-and-a-half years have brought us.

Mrs. Clinton’s diligence long ago added up to the appearance of competence and taught her to believe she had abilities; her fashionable championing of the radical feminist politics of her youth taught her how to get attention with a reflexive if possibly inauthentic anti-Americanism; and her lucky bet on what proved to be a sure thing in a husband—politically, that is—taught her to compromise with the Devil. Mr. Obama’s Hawaii- and Indonesia-bred remoteness from the mainland of America taught him alienation from his country of birth; his absent father and distant mother—and the difficulties he faced, eventually, being bi-racial in a mostly white world—taught him to be guarded; and the perhaps somewhat exaggerated acclamation he received during his Harvard and Chicago years taught him to harbor a peevish faith in the superiority of his own intelligence.

The combining of these two strains of self-approving incompetence and disdain for a hearty patriotism has been a misfortune for U.S. foreign policy, and may yet end up being a calamity. In the meantime, Americans with greater ambitions for their nation are stuck at the Hillary Clinton hen party, praying for deliverance, and enduring, aghast, both the hostess’s didacticism and the condescending interjections of her irritable, cock-of-the-walk boss.