No littler man has ever been president

Why were President Obama's remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast so deeply offensive? David Gelernter writes:

It wasn’t easy to say right away. We have two minds that work simultaneously, our feeling mind and our thinking mind; they nearly always reach the same conclusion, but our feeling minds often get there first by a mile — they feel instantly that something is wrong — and we are left sputtering inside, angry, in need of a few moments to say why.

...A sensitive-minded Christian has every reason to grieve over those long-ago events — and perhaps in a certain, limited sense, to feel guilt over them. But the president obviously doesn’t feel the slightest grief or guilt; he was telling us what we ought to feel. He was trivializing the barbarity of ISIS by connecting it to the fossil remains of long-extinct Western behaviors, trivializing ISIS by tying it to infamous ancient crimes that have, for the average inhabitant of the earth, no emotional significance whatsoever.

...Yet if his goal had been merely to rub out all rage and bitterness against ISIS as if it were a cigarette butt to be casually flipped to the ground and squashed by the presidential foot, he wouldn’t have achieved half the offensiveness he actually managed. For the president had no interest in claiming his own share in the guilt of the Inquisitors; his goal was to demonstrate his long heritage of victimhood and show off his moral superiority. He explained that the Inquisition had led via slavery right to Jim Crow; and where Jim Crow is concerned, he embodies all suffering victims (not that he actually has any ancestors who were slaves).

...But no one is actually standing by to denounce Islam on the basis of Christian superiority over the last two millennia, which means the president made it up out of whole cloth — or else it is a hallucination; perhaps he can’t tell the difference any more. So long as he has made his own superiority to all petty passions clear, so long as his own moral farsightedness is reaffirmed yet again, the speech is a success. No littler man has ever been president.

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