Pro-Con: Should President Obama have attended ceremonies commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall? No

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The fall of the Berlin Wall was a great and wonderful moment in the history of Europe and the world.

It is also worth mentioning that it was an event created entirely by Germans. Germans in Berlin tore down that wall and elected to rebel against the Soviet domination that it represented.

The communist governments of central and eastern Europe fell because their nations no longer accepted them and their Soviet masters.

It might very well be more appropriate that the American president not be there, lest we be treated to yet another self-congratulatory paean to how we Americans won the Cold War, which tends to obscure and marginalize the very central role that the peoples of the communist states of Europe had in toppling that oppressive and degrading system.

Republicans object to so many irrelevant things that Obama does — and they treat absolutely everything as some supreme, unpardonable error — that it makes it impossible to take any of their criticism seriously.

Daniel Larison, The American Conservative

Posted on Mon, Nov. 09, 2009 10:15 PM

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