The government in exile — the real one, according to the media — has had a busy week at home and abroad. “President Obama” has given up leading from behind and presumes now to lead from overseas. His secretary of state has a new mission, as missionary to the safe places where snowflakes fall.
Mr. Obama joined German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin to lecture America and the West to quit being so beastly to the strivers of the Third World, and open wider the borders of the West. “We can’t isolate ourselves,” the former president said from a platform at the Brandenburg Gate. “We can’t hide behind a wall.”
This is the message that resonates with Mrs. Merkel and many of the globalists Europeans, even it strikes a sour note in the US and Britain, coming just days after the spawn of a Libyan immigrant murdered nearly two dozen Britons, including several children, and then blew himself up at a concert arena in Manchester.
Timing is everything, as the man said, and the US president in exile used his appearance in Berlin as a coming-out party after nearly six months of playing celebrity in borrowed houses across the South Seas and the Caribbean, playing at golf instead of government. But boredom set it and when Frau Merkel agreed to receive him as a fellow head of state, well, why not? She knew she could count on him to deliver platitudes and goo-goo worthy of an American president in exile.
“One way we can do a better job is to create more opportunities for people in their home countries,” Mr. Obama said. “If there are disruptions in these countries (our job), if there is bad governance (our job), if there is war (again our job), or if there is poverty in this new world we live in, we can’t isolate ourselves — we can’t hide behind a wall.”
Then the treacle turned to mush. “A child on the other side of the border is no less worthy of love and compassion than my own child. We can’t distinguish between in terms of their worth and inherent dignity, and that they’re deserving of shelter and love and education and opportunity.”
Well, who could argue with that. Everybody likes children. But like so many liberals and “progressives,” the former president does not mean that what he says should be taken literally, or even seriously. Walls, after all, are relative. America can’t have one, but he can. The president lives in an enormous rented mansion behind a brick and stone wall built just for him, and which he has fitted out as the White House in exile, with a staff and lots of electronic communications gear, requiring the seizure of a quarter of a mile of a quiet residential street to be guarded by a Secret Service detail not much smaller than the platoon of heavily armed agents who kept him safe, sound and ready for action at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
