QUOTE OF THE DAY - AT 6:41 A.M. ET:  From distinguished author and scholar Mark Helprin, in the Wall Street Journal.  He reflects on the fact that Obama cancelled the missile shield that President Bush had promised Eastern Europe, and agreed to vague negotiations with Iran, even though Iran has taken its nuclear program off the table.  Obama took these two actions in the same week:

Stalin tested Truman with the Berlin Blockade, and Truman held fast. Khrushchev tested Kennedy, and in the Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedy refused to blink. In 1983, Andropov took the measure of Reagan, and, defying millions in the street (who are now the Obama base), Reagan did not blink. Last week, the Iranian president and the Russian prime minister put Mr. Obama to the test, and he blinked not once but twice. The price of such infirmity has always proven immensely high, even if, as is the custom these days, the bill has yet to come.

But who is to warn the American people, especially young Americans?  We have a profession of journalism that has now lost most of its World War II generation of reporters, for whom the word "appeasement" had meaning.  We have an academic arena controlled by the political left, pounding into young heads the idea that it is America, and not totalitarianism, that is responsible for the problems of the world.

And we have a president whose life has been influenced by extremists, who share a dark view of the United States and its history.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, whose name is forever linked with the appeasement policies that led directly to World War II, also believed his mission in office was to correct the flaws in his country's past, especially what he perceived as Britain's harsh treatment of Germany after World War I.  We see in American and allied military cemeteries around the world exactly where that led. 

Today the president addresses the UN General Assembly for the first time.  Will he speak as president of a nation that has done more to bring democracy and progress to the planet than any other, or will he grovel before the scores of corrupt dictatorships and professional "victims" who make up much of the "community of nations"?  The speech will be a test of whether he's learned anything in his eight months in office, or whether he still believes himself to be The One, a blessing to Earth, a man whose wisdom is above that of all men.  We'll know in hours.

September 23, 2009