The leader of the free world

On the flip side, a Quinn Hillyer column at the National Review:

The leader of the free world will be addressing Congress on Tuesday. The American president is doing everything possible to undermine him.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads a nation surrounded by enemies, a nation so small that it narrows at one point to just 9.3 miles. Yet, in a world where the Oval Office is manned by someone openly apologetic for most American exercises of power; and where Western Europe’s economy is enervated, its people largely faithless, and its leadership feckless; and where Freedom House has found “an overall drop in [global] freedom for the ninth consecutive year,” the safeguarding of our civilization might rely more on leaders who possess uncommon moral courage than on those who possess the most nukes or biggest armies.

Right now, nobody on the world stage speaks for civilization the way Netanyahu does.

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Benjamin Netanyahu of course speaks first for Israel, but he speaks also for you and for me, for decency and humaneness, and for vigilance and strength against truly evil adversaries. Congress, by inviting him, is wise. Obama, by opposing him, is horribly wrong. And the civilized world, if it ignores him, will be well-nigh suicidal.

This is what Ed Kilgore says about that:

Throughout the last presidential cycle as just about every Republican presidential candidate not named Ron Paul called for outsourcing U.S. Middle Eastern policy to Israel, I kept wondering how these super-patriots justified explicitly subordinating our national interest to any other country’s. Hillyer goes a step further in basically pledging allegiance to a foreign prime minister and encouraging others to do the same.