Much as I dislike His Earness for other reasons, I have to say that his Hiroshima speech, transcribed here by the NYTimes, isn’t bad at all—assuming the transcription is accurate. He preached against war in general and nukes in particular. Who could argue with that?
“Some day,” he said, “the voices of the hibakusha [bomb survivors] will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the memory of the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, must never fade. That memory allows us to fight complacency. It fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change.”
The usual crazies have portrayed the speech as pandering to Japan’s old warlords and glossing over their attack on Pearl Harbor. I don’t see it. Nor the Daily Wire’s “one of the most repulsive speeches in American history.” It’s hardly that.
The Wall Street Journal had it right (so to speak): “In solemn comments, Mr. Obama neither apologized for nor justified the U.S. atomic bombs dropped both here and in Nagasaki that killed more than 200,000 people, and instead focused on a nonnuclear future, seeking to avoid inflaming passions on either side of the Pacific.”
It’s ludicrous, even harmful, for a politician’s opponents to misrepresent his benign actions when there are malignant ones worthy of whacking.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 