I always love it when one of my favorite conservative cultural advocates is able to articulate a concept precisely as I feel it but thus far have been unable to logically frame into words. Star Parker has done exactly this in her latest article about Barack Obama's speech in Berlin. When it seems as though both the naïve and intelligent within the U.S. and beyond its borders are now swooning over Obama's poetic emptiness, Parker is not afraid to do what even certain conservatives have failed to do by cutting straight into the hypocritical, inherent contradictions of Obama's latest message:

The headline on the website of German magazine Der Spiegel about Barack Obama's speech in Berlin: "Huge Crowds Left with Mixed Feelings."

Two hundred thousand turned out for the speech, but CNN's Candy Crowley reported an "absence of euphoria" at the event...

What they got was the global version of "There is not a White America and a Black America and Latino America and Asian American America -- there is the United States of America."

His message: "The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down."

"The walls between races and tribes" must be torn down? Didn't anyone tell poor Barack that his joke wasn't funny? Perhaps he could get away with it in America, where being color-blind, race-blind, gender-blind, and altogether just blind in general passes as the norm in the name of political correctness. In the rest of the world, however, reality is unavoidable:

At least some of the Germans listening to Obama surely sensed there was something problematic with what he was saying. His analogy of the tearing down of the Berlin wall to tearing down all lines of distinction between nations and religions was obviously fractured. The Berlin wall was a political wall that divided one people. It separated Germans from other Germans, a far cry from distinctions between nations and religions that Obama apparently wants to obliterate.

The German, French and British each have a strong sense of national history and identity...

Perhaps the realities of Europe delivered an unanticipated surprise to the slick marketing machine driving the Obama presidential campaign.

The inherent contradiction with Obama's view is that while he puts on one face to profess his deep love for his country and its identity, he will just as soon put on another to declare that the root of all evil lies in the fact that separate and distinct cultures, races, religions, and borders merely exist. Essentially, this is what he is trying to "tear down," as if by wishing away humanity's differences we would all suddenly hold hands, love each other, and proclaim loyalty to liberal ideology. What he doesn't explain, though, is how he can assert any kind of devotion to the United States while dreaming that our borders would disappear. Can one truly be a patriot who would, rather than preserve and protect the integrity of its homeland's boundaries, have all the qualities that make it unique and distinguishable blurred away into a global melting pot in some kind of crusade against difference?

Star hits the nail on the head with her critique:

For Obama, differences seem to be what cause the world's problems. We endlessly hear the story of his mixed-race background and his translation of his personal history into a message of the meaninglessness of difference.

It may come as a surprise to Obama, but for Christians, for Muslims, and for Jews, their differences do not amount to barriers to a better world but sources of meaning that define themselves and the world.

They want to be Christians, Muslims, and Jews. They just want protection. They want to be able to be who they are and live peacefully and securely. Those disturbing this security are the problem. Not the differences.

This is exactly what the Democrat's presidential nominee doesn't understand - that by forcing nations, cultures, and belief systems together against their will is not only absurdly laughable as a solution to problems, but that even more significantly, it would be down-playing and even eliminating the very identities by which people define themselves and through which they derive meaning.

Ultimately, as Parker says, Obama's views show that he does not fully understand or appreciate the real meaning of freedom.

He does not seem to grasp that the beauty of freedom is its respect for differences and creation of conditions, legal and political, which allow them to exist, flourish, and provide benefits to all. In fact, politicians with agendas to "unify," who think they know who and what everyone should be, are invariably those who threaten freedom.

Were Barack Obama simply an ordinary citizen living in America, this failure to recognize what Parker calls the "beauty of freedom" would be a real pity, as his value of liberty and country would always be somewhat lacking. Now, however, as a result of a decision by the American people, Obama is no longer just an ordinary citizen but a national leader and worldwide figurehead with political influence. And as such, this failure, which intrinsically misconstrues freedom, identity, patriotism, and "difference" itself, is more than just a real pity; it is now a real danger.