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I know most of America understands this, but let me say it anyway. President Obama's speech to the middle east was not meant for the neocon, warmongering fringe psychos like Charles Krauthammer. He was apoplectic on Brett Baier's show today on FOX because Obama's team didn't craft a speech that the AEI would approve of. It was meant to reach out to the Muslim population and try to repair some of the damage caused by war hungry neocon fanatics that got their wish under George Bush with disastrous consequences.

Kauthammer: The damage in policy was rather small. The damage to our position philosophically was large. On policy the speech was small because the speech was so abstract and vapid in self absorbed that it didn't touch on a lot of policy except on Iran. Here he was exceedingly weak, that was the weakest statement on Iran on Nukes in at least eight or nine years from anyone in the west....there was once again apologies over and over again. Apologies in moral equivalence....

Moral equivalency was his theme and he gets crazier as he goes on...What he obviously means is that George Bush and Cheney are no longer in power to incite violence around the world...

President Obama's message has a much greater chance to start influencing some hearts and minds in the middle east where we need to do exactly that. I hope they realize that we all don't want to invade their countries and turn them into Christians. On that major point he succeeded. To all the neocon pundits that unfortunately dominate our airwaves I think I speak for many liberals when I say: Go Cheney yourself.

I want to give some props to Ed Morrissey (who I disagree with on most issues, but met and like personally) for not taking the usual conservative line as he called the speech: Quite Good. The readers on Hot Air were not too please with Ed on this one. I doubt you can read many of their comments because you'll constantly read teabagger nonsense about Obama like this: 'The first Muslim president,' and so forth...
And Malkin's comment section is much different then ours because we don't pre-screen and then approve people like they do.

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(We weren't too popular then either.)

Seems not a whole lot has changed the last 40 years, with regards to our standing in the eyes of the world. We have been liked as a people, but despised as a government. How we've managed to trash allies and solidify movements against us. How we've been actively engaged in mutual alienation of every country around us. I was thinking about that as I watched the BBC coverage of President Obama in Cairo this morning. How the right wing so desperately wants us to be isolationist in our foreign policy while at the same time embracing cheap sources of overseas labor in the name of Free Enterprise. And how much work needs to be done in the area of diplomacy just to put things on even keel again.

I thought maybe the problem was the result of the last 8 disastrous years. No. It goes back a lot further than that. According to this documentary from the Second Sunday Radio series "A World Reflection: How they see us", it's been going steadily downhill since the mid-1960's. A long time for a lot to go wrong. And a snap of the finger isn't going to make it right.

As with everything that's been done the past 8 years, repairing damage and surveying the wreckage is going to take a long time. Maybe even decades.

But here is how it was viewed on September 12, 1971.

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Is Liz Cheney drawing a check from the RNC? I know she's Newt Gingrich's VP and all, but this is ridiculous. She's learned well from Daddy Dearest.

Greg Sargent:

That’s not really an exaggeration! On an appearance on MSNBC, Liz Cheney appeared to say that Obama’s speech in Cairo today showed that he wants to deal with terrorists by “hand-holding.” Check out what she said starting around 30 seconds in.
Here’s a transcript:

“I think that if we lived in a world where terrorism, and the slaughter of innocents, and Iran’s hegemonic hopes for the Middle East could be met, could be defeated, could be dealt with by sort of hand-holding going forward, then we’d be in a much simpler environment. But these are very, very tough issues. And I was troubled by the extent to which I heard moral relativism.”

That’s some highly suggestive language coming from Ms. Cheney, isn’t it?

In reality, in his speech today, Obama strongly denounced 9/11-denial to an Arab audience, said American troops are in Afghanistan out of “necessity,” because terrorists are “determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can,” and said America’s commitment to destroying terror networks “will not waver.”

She's just in line with the usual conservative nutty attacks. Remember when Rove said this about liberals in 2005:

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(The C&L video archives rule again!)

Rove last night also criticized Democrats for responding weakly to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Rove said

Rove should have been fired for this, but the media never minds when conservatives call liberals traitors. Froomkin wrote an excellent piece on this. Nothing has changed much from 2005, has it?