Kenyan expectations also overblown

Roger and Kate, friends of mine from Denver who are Christian missionaries in Mozambique, happened to be in Nairobi, Kenya, for a conference the first week in November, during America's election. Their report in an email to me not only illustrates the contrast of cultures and customs from there to the US. It also points up how not-Kenyan our next President is in some of his ways. Roger wrote as follows:

Everyone in Kenya wanted to know for whom we would vote. Where we were staying lacked television and internet, so our son had to text message us from elsewhere with news about the election. Among those at the conference who favored McCain, it created a pall over the morning, but the Kenyans were elated.

The following day was declared a national holiday - Obama Day. Obama poster-size calendars were passed out in the newspapers as the "Year of Obama." They all think that it will be easier for Kenyans to get visas to the U.S. and/or the U.S. will now solve all of the problems with the Kenyan government.

After all, in Africa, this is what family does. If one comes into wealth, he is expected to share that wealth and opportunity with the rest of the family. They don't see nepotism in quite the same light as we do. Now one who is considered one of their own has just "inherited" the wealth of the richest nation on earth and they are expecting great things.

It makes me both proud and sad - proud that they think so highly of the U.S. that we can solve all of their problems - sad to think that there is going to be great disappointment one of these days. Fortunately, by the time that I was leaving, cooler heads in the newspapers were trying to explain to the people that countries like the U.S. are subject to rules about what they can and cannot do.

So "in Africa, this is what family does... share that wealth and opportunity with the rest of the family." On the one hand, this would help explain the redistributionist views Obama has expressed, as well as the starry-eyed expectations of some supporters in this country -- notably Florida's famous Peggy the Moocher, who told a TV camera all the expenses she counts on him to cover for her.

But on the other hand, elated Kenyans need to remember the President-elect's cool disinterest in being a sugar daddy even to his own blood relatives, including the half-brother living in a hut near Nairobi on $1 a month, and the destitute aunt in public housing in Boston (who is apparently not even a legal US immigrant). He hasn't lifted a finger to help either of them. Good luck to everyone else in the old country.

It sounds as though Nairobi media were already starting to cool the locals' overheated hopes by the time Roger and Kate left in mid-November. But just to be safe, maybe Kenya should be added to the itinerary of those Obama press spokesmen who have been working to dampen stateside expectations about his administration.

Will BHO tack to center like Sarko?

Rush Limbaugh’s giddiness since the Republican election loss has proved infectious among French advocates of American conservatism, admittedly a rare breed but a committed one nonetheless. Why the Gallic mirth? Well, consider this. During the French presidential campaign back in early 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy pledged that, if elected, he would bring profound change to economically sclerotic France. “La rupture” he dared call it to liberal and even some center-right catcalls and hisses.

About 18 months on, those previously doing the catcalling and the hissing are now cheering and blowing kisses to their Nemesis-turned-fellow-traveler. How come? Well, in France’s predominantly leftist political culture, President Sarkozy has realized that his approval ratings as well as his chances of reelection in 2012 depend to a large extent on his ability to tack to the left.

Judging by his social and economic record so far, his reelection campaign started about a year ago. He calls it “pragmatisme”. Let’s take it for what it really is and call it Socialism, the “spread-the-wealth” kind of Socialism America voted for more than a week ago. Even on foreign policy, Sarkozy is turning out to be a typically French fair-weather friend, gesticulating against America’s Missile Defense just to placate his KGB pals over in the Kremlin.

Given la rupture’s slim hopes of survival in post-election worlds, President-elect Obama’s “Change we can believe in” may well follow Sarkozyesque revert-to-cultural-type political meanderings after all.

In other words, in a (still?) predominantly center-right country like the United States, Obama may well realize that sticking to some lite version of pro-family-strong-defense-tax-cutting conservatism is his best political option.

Even Rush himself not so facetiously let the cat out of the electoral bag a few days before the vote. In a brief exchange with Rudy Giuliani over Joe Biden’s Obama’s-gonna-be-tested-gaffe, Rush hinted that Biden’s pleas to liberal faithful for support of Obama’s response might actually imply that the next president would be as tough as George W. Bush.

Nothing for conservatives to worry about then? Maybe so, unless a majority of the American people, including 20% of conservatives, are so enamored of Sarkozy and Socialistic France that they are prepared to take their cue from Tocqueville’s ill-advised descendants and ditch freedom for the smothering embrace of Welfarist paternalism.

In that case, freedom will have been no more than one election cycle away from extinction. Conservatives, French and American alike, would then all be laughing on the other side of their faces.

Note: “Paoli” is the pen name, er, nom de plume, of our French correspondent. Monsieur is a close student of European and US politics, a onetime exchange student in Colorado and a well-wisher to us Americans. He informs us the original Pasquale Paoli, 1725-1807, was the George Washington of Corsica.

Radio host's mission of mercy

Looking out the airplane window, on about the twelfth hour of a fourteen hour flight to Ethiopia, the hazy streak of water I’d been watching suddenly divided in the Sahara dust. The map suggested we were flying over Khartoum, where the White Nile and the Blue Nile become simply the Nile, en route to Cairo. As the plane followed the White branch southeast towards Ethiopia, it began to sink in that our team of twenty-plus health care volunteers was getting pretty far from home.

With two dentists, two plastic surgeons, one obstetrician and an assortment of nurses and students, the International Medical Relief team arrived in Addis Ababa and then flew to our destination of Mekele, a remote city in Northern Ethiopia not far from the Red Sea. It was August 2008.

Walking into the Mekele Hospital the next day, we found several hundred prospective patients on hand to welcome the Americans. Word had gotten out, with demand for health care apparently quite profound in one of the poorest regions of the eighth poorest nation on earth.

I was informed that 305 individuals had gathered around the dental clinic, marking a spectacle of chaos. The dental team lugged its bags and suitcases through the crowd and into the clinic, laid out instruments, set up a sterilization area and started the screening process.

Along with Dr. Don Vollmer of Castle Rock, and Keren Etzion, a pre-dental student from New York, we took down each name and set up basic treatment plans and arranged general appointment times for the week ahead. We were joined by two capable Ethiopian dental technicians and eight nurses who rotated into the clinic.

Over the next five days we worked our way through the list of patients. One after another, with subsequent patients thronging the doorway. The most necessary procedure, by far, was the extraction. Some patients required scaling and debridement – with periodontal disease almost universal in the area – and some inquired about fillings. On the occasional tooth which afforded reasonable access to a spoon excavator, we carefully placed Geristore dual-cure restorations and hoped for the best.

The dental chair was a creaky 1973 Dental-Ease model which could be moved up and down if you held the wires just right around the plug-in. A bent-arm lamp was used to help with lighting, though my battery-pack loupe light attachment proved indispensable.

It was a definite jolt to the standard dental routine to find myself working in a small, hot room with a dozen spectators around the chair chattering in Tigrigna, with dozens more clamoring outside waiting to get in. Working during the August monsoon season, a string of afternoon rain storms battered the tin roof of the clinic, offering the sensation of doing dentistry to the sound of machine-gun fire overhead.

The electricity often went out during these storms, leaving the clinic room completely dark save for a beam of LED light between my forehead and the tooth I happened to be working on. As the days went by, focused and intense, I realized I had stopped noticing when the power had gone off – just kept on working away.

Though many of the Ethiopian patients were living with staggering levels of suffering, in terms of their dental and overall health, I was amazed by their optimism and good cheer. Quick to smile, quick to laugh, you wouldn’t imagine that Ethiopians have endured the history of famine, war, and dictatorship that they have.

I’m not exactly sure what to make of that, nor am I sure how best to respond to such scenes of hope and heartbreak, courage and happiness against the odds. But I do hope to find time to work again in Ethiopia someday, and am thankful for the chance to have spent some days in the Mekele Hospital last August.

Matt Dunn, D.D.S., is a founding partner and frequent cohost on Backbone Radio. He practices dentistry in Denver at the Cody Dental Group.

Memo to BHO: Enemies aren't 'just like us'

For months I've tried to show why Obama is unfit to be president. I have recently focused on his "spread the wealth" socialist economic plan, his years in church listening to a hate-spewing pastor and his time at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge with William Ayers -- but my first and biggest concern with Obama has always been in the area of foreign policy. Barack Obama's foreign policy is typical among the left's "internationalist" wing -- those who see themselves as "citizens of the world", and who come to look at international cooperation as not simply a means but an end in itself. Obama has worked during the campaign to sharpen his edge and give the voters a sense that he will not hesitate to use force to protect America -- something any candidate in this day and age must say. But his inclinations are toward multilateralism, and he has said clearly that as president one of his first orders of business will be to bring "humility" to U.S. foreign policy -- principally by listening to the ideas and needs of other nations. My sense is that Barack Obama will return the U.S. to a "U.N./EU first" kind of foreign policy, where we are careful not to offend while trying to protect our interests both here and home and abroad. It won't work.

My concerns about Obama and foreign policy have been heightened (if that is possible) over the past few days by two events.

First, I was extremely troubled reading an interview given to the New Yorker's Nicholas Lehman by senior Obama military adviser Maj. Gen. Scott Gration (Ret.). This interview reinforces Obama's internationalism, but it does so in a very dangerous way:

"Gration was impatient with the idea that conflict is the natural state of the world, to be managed rather than resolved. “People are more alike than their cultures and religions,” he said. “When Obama talks about global citizens, it’s the same framework. You see, religion and culture - they’re the way people communicate their values. They want stability, order, education. This is just humanness. Then you add on your religion, your culture - that’s how you execute it.” His implication was that if we can get past the religious and cultural identities that serve as host organisms for conflict, and deal with people at the level of their humanity and their basic needs, then we can make real progress - especially if Obama personally holds an office that permits him to set the tone and lead the effort (emphasis added)."

The "level of their humanity"? What humanity is that? You mean the humanity that beheads prisoners and blows up buildings?  Or straps explosives on the bodies of children in martyrdom operations?   Oh, but of course, this is another extension of "the One" using his cult of personality to sit down with radical jihadists and find a "common ground".  This is udoubtedly one of the more dangerous statements I have heard since 9/11.  It is also typical of the left which does not wish to admit that radical Islam exists and is fundamentally an extension of the teaching of Islam itself. 

Of course, we shouldn't be surprised by this, for it is prototypical idealism at work -- the notion that people's values are essentially the same, and that it is some external factor (poverty, oppression, imperialism) that makes people violent. Forget the fact that the perpetrators of 9/11 and the suicide bombers in London on 7/7/2005 were all educated, middle class Muslims who were indoctrinated with hatred. They were not poor or oppressed. They were, however, evil. This is something that the Obama team apparently can't get their minds around.

We should all be very afraid of this.

Second is the statement that Joe Biden made yesterday in Seattle before a liberal audience that he expects that in the first six months of an Obama administration, the U.S. will be attacked. He fears that our enemies will test the young president, much like the Soviets did Kennedy in 1961-1962. Here's what Biden said (courtesy of the The Weekly Standard):

"It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking.... Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy....

I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate… And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you - not financially to help him - we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right."

This is troubling on several levels. It seems to be an acknowledgement that Obama represents a weak, inexperienced leader who invites an attack -- and that from what Biden is saying that Obama is going to flub the response -- at least initially -- and will need support and understanding. This is not confidence inspiring coming from the #2 spot on the Democratic ticket.

But it is not the 1960s anymore -- and while the stakes during the Berlin blockade and the Cuban missile crisis could hardly have been higher, our enemy was operating within the same rationality model that we were. It is clear that Khruschev and the Soviets backed down from Cuba because they understood that they could not survive a nuclear confrontation with the U.S. In other words, rationality prevailed. We don't have such a luxury today -- when we face an enemy who seeks suicidal martyrdom in their evil deeds. There is no rational basis (at least Western-style) where deterrence works with Islamic jihadists.

So if we are attacked, the devastation could be enormous -- and our response will be less far less important than the initial attack against us.  

Can we really afford this kind of on-the-job-training in the era of suicide bombing?

Enough with the Euro-smugness

From east to west, living room to board room, Americans are watching a slew of disturbing TV news stories . The focus of the citizen is overwhelmingly on the economy and his or her own, modest and hard earned treasure pile. This is not surprising, after all the Dow is behaving like a drunken clam and the finance sector is as chaotic as a college department meeting. The media is constantly rattling everyone’s cages and our commercial breaks are now plagued with the most annoying ads known to man: those of the goldbug.

In the depths of an election the worry meter on many Americans is high. We all want answers to our economic question and, in general, want to see this country restored to a place of prosperity, power, and might. But across the eastern ocean, in the world-weary lands of Western Europe, a strange and different dialogue is bubbling to the surface. In it, the cause for America’s troubles is not practical or function but moral and the feeling is not of despair but strangely, of glee.

As the United States hits a rather large bump in the road, many in Europe’s chattering class are taking up a rather despicable tone. This tone, in the forefront hammers home the idea that America’s Economic woes derive somehow from moral failing, that her age of dominance is over, and that both are happy occasions to root onward.

Moral supremacy and the role as judge has always been a part of the European tradition. Since 2000, this proclivity has been primarily focused against the United States and Israel in discussions that usually, either, apologize for Islamic terrorism, lift up the European ‘way’ as just, or simply scapegoat America for a host of domestic European problems. Recently, full and front page articles have popped up in major European papers claiming that the age of American dominance is over.

Strangely these articles and comments come with, not just a statement of fact, but a moral judgment and indictment of American and her way of life. Quite often the words ‘redneck’ ‘bubba’ and ‘empire’ appear when authors mention America and her apparently lost power.

Moreover, in these periodicals there is also an obvious bit of smug cheer. That is to say, that Americans current crisis is not just mentioned it is cheered on with a form of moiling academic demonology. In these circles, somehow, the financial troubles of America and Americans is actually a good thing.

Such feelings and statements are as uninformed as they are vile. To state things as they are and point out fault is one thing; but to actually root for calamity and chaos is quite another. Moreover, it is quite self-destructive. An important fact seems to escape most European chatterers, that is, if America ‘goes down’ that Europe will not be far behind.

We have already seen this as European markets have tumbled in the wake of U.S. financial problems. In a more abstract sense, a removal of U.S. power abroad would force Europe to actually grow up. Specifically, they would have to actually spend money on national defense and foreign policy as opposed to simply relying on the ample subsidy provided by both the United States and NATO.

The historian or more mature reader can attest to the fact that such disruptions from Europe are not exactly new. For years, on many European College Campuses, it has been both fashionable and convenient to viciously assail the United States. Such criticism usually comes in the form of vaguely defined critiques of U.S. policies and or a bizarrely styled bit of political wishful thinking that is not founded in the realities of America or Europe.

Even further back it should be remembered that in the 19th century it was the keen desire of many European Nations to subjugated American foreign policy and behavior to their will and call. Happily this did not happen and it is important that it does not happen now. Listening to friends is fine, but doing whatever they say while they slap you in the face is not.

Unfortunately, it is likely that these academic and anemic voices will continue to blame the United States with the smug liberal tone of Maddow, Mahr, Obama and Pelosi. This blame game will probably disparage the United States for the global economic crisis without the responsibility of say acknowledging that Europe readily invested in America and made economic blunders of its own. This is a shame and will only hinder Europe’s own recovery.

Relations between Europe and America have always been complex and full of recrimination. I like Europe, I like their food, silly accents and women, and I also share their desire for close relations. But I don’t appreciate their chattering classes smug back biting and moral judgment. I’d also say that if Europe wants closer relations and wants to influence U.S. policy, it would help if they don’t constantly attack the U.S. with puerile name calling and instead replace it with a real dialogue.