“Blame it on George.”

What’s with Obama’s “apologizing” overseas for Bush’s “mistakes”? It bothers me a lot. National Review's Rich Lowrey gets a piece of what’s happening in criticizing Obama for an ineffective foreign policy:

Barack Obama added a line at the last minute that wasn’t in the prepared text of his nuclear-disarmament speech in Prague: “I’m not naïve.” He needed the disclaimer because, nearly simultaneously with his speech embracing the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons, Kim Jong Il launched a three-stage rocket over Japan. Coincidence?

. . . The nuclear gambit is emblematic of Obama’s “excuse me” — or excuse my predecessor and my country — diplomacy. He played to the European crowd by chastising Bush and his countrymen for their arrogance. He took responsibility for starting the financial crisis. He noted his country’s diminished power, with evident satisfaction. All of this can be justified as winning over Europe with a soft sell, if it weren’t that he got nothing for it.

Obama pleaded for more troops in Afghanistan. . . Sarkozy responded with no additional troops, [but] pronounced himself greatly pleased to be working “with a U.S. president who . . . understands that the world does not boil down to simply American frontiers and borders.”

I see it differently. Like Nixon, who had an “enemies list” that began with CBS News and the New York Times, Obama’s war is at home. His enemies are Republicans: Bush, and whatever Republican takes Bush’s place. Overseas, he searches for allies who agree with him that “bad America” (as opposed to Obamamerica) is the real enemy of the world’s people. Therefore, Obama’s war against Republicans is the right war.