James Kirchick of the New Republic writes in The Weekly Standard about “The Democrats’ Popularity Fetish.” He rightly points out that Obama’s cavalier attitude towards free trade and towards meeting with dictators is hardly going to make America popular outside our country.
But he closes by questioning whether we should be all that concerned about “global opinion.”
Conservatives have long liked to sneer at global opinion, and it’s true that popularity shouldn’t be our first priority. They don’t really need encouragement in that attitude by Kirchick.
But I say we should care about others’ opinions. GWB would have done well to at least respect it. If Stalin cared enough about world opinion to hide his crimes from view, shouldn’t we care about it, too?
But it’s interesting that the same Democrats who lecture us about how we need to take foreign opinion into account have a remarkably insular view of the economy.
Example:
Here is a press release from Nancy Pelosi in September 2003, complaining that Bush missed a chance to get a United Nations mandate re Iraq.
And here is the same Nancy Pelosi in her blog, talking as though the universe ends at the U.S. border. She blames high oil prices on “two oilmen in the White House.”
HT to Ann Coulter who hit a bullseye:
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, or as she is called on the Big Dogs blog, “the worst speaker in the history of Congress,” explained the cause of high oil prices back in 2006: “We have two oilmen in the White House. The logical follow-up from that is $3-a-gallon gasoline. It is no accident. It is a cause and effect. A cause and effect.”
Yes, that would explain why the price of oral sex, cigars and Hustler magazine skyrocketed during the Clinton years. Also, I note that Speaker Pelosi is a hotelier … and the price of a hotel room in New York is $1,000 a night! I think she might be onto something.
Is that why a barrel of oil costs mere pennies in all those other countries in the world that are not run by “oilmen”? Wait — it doesn’t cost pennies to them? That’s weird.