World Apology Tour in Review

Jim Geraghty at Campaign Spot reminds us that, despite media reports to the opposite, not all has gone well on the Obamessiah's tour:

This weekend, when you’re told Obama had a fabulous week abroad, recall:
One of his chief foreign policy advisers declared, “bows to nobody in his understanding of this world.” To support this statement, she cited his living overseas from age six to age ten.

He told CBS News that the U.S. could have stopped Osama bin Laden from escaping to Pakistan in 2001 if they hadn’t invaded Iraq in 2003. In the same interview, he admitted his policy of targeting bin Laden “is the current policy.”

He said that knowing what he knows now, he still would have opposed the surge. (You will hear a lot about this one in the fall.)

Petraeus objected to Obama’s Iraq withdrawal plan in an “animated” discussion. (You’ll hear a lot about that one, too.)

He told Katie Couric he wouldn’t answer questions about a “hypothetical” like Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear program sites.

He told Charlie Gibson that his position on moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem isn't one of the "things that I should say on Charlie Gibson's evening news."

After insisting his speech was not “political,” it was revealed his campaign was printing up German-language fliers to promote it.

He insisted that his answer in the YouTube debate included caveats and provisions that he didn’t mention at the time.

After telling skeptics to “look at my deeds,” Obama bragged about passing a bill out of a committee that he doesn’t serve on, calling it, “my committee.”

Obama canceled a planned short visit to the Rammstein and Landstuhl US military bases in Germany to visit wounded troops. But he found time for a workout.

His supporters put campaign posters uncomfortably close to the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism.

His speech in Berlin erred in describing the walls falling in Belfast, and as Josh Trevino notes, would probably have a hard time pointing to the portion of Atlantic coastline that “cars in Boston and factories in Beijing” have shrunk. (His statement “The rubble of this city had yet to be built into a wall” is only a metaphor, and a clunky one at that. By the time construction of the wall began, World War Two had been over for sixteen years. It consisted of wire fences for the first four years.)

Having said all that, yes, he did take some pretty pictures.

This morning an Israeli newspaper published the prayer that Obama stuck in the Western Wall in Jerusalem. I was a violation of Obama's privacy, but since his staff stuck campaign posters all over the entrance to the Western Wall, I'd say they're even.

It read like a well written, focus-grouped Christian prayer, though I'd expected it to say "Lord, I'm only sticking this paper in the wall so Katie Couric, Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams will continue to worship me".