In one sense, Senator Obama's speech in Germany yesterday is the perfect cultural balm for a world weary of the travails of modern existence.  That's only to say he has perfect pitch when it comes to blending in with those for whom hope is a defense, for whom a Statist response to every ill, real or perceived, is comforting.

One of the bleaker symptoms of this generation is its peculiar insistence that, for everything from child-rearing to advancing one's career to dealing with one's impending mortality, its challenges are unprecedented.  It's also the case that its arrogant self-regard and intellectual hubris has assured them that the only goal of countless generations that silently toiled throughout the centuries was to prepare the world for the gift of this generation.

To call this permanently petulent generation anything other than a whining, self-aggrandizing lot is to miss the most glaring development on our cultural landscape since the dawn of civilization.  The irony is that it dovetails perfectly with Obama's recycled bromides about breaking down walls and eliminating our differences, messages that resonate with this lost generation, one that yearns to be moored to something, anything that purports to relieve it of responsibility and accountability.

Indeed, Obama's message has the vacuous ring of false advertizing that promises riches or products that deliver the impossible, which belies two thousand years of history during which civilization advanced only as a result of hard work, sacrifice, competition, and ingenuity.  But, in our intellectually sybaritic age that lionizes a unipolar approach to education by revising history and vilifying conservatism, Obama's best hope is to convince us that Herculean tasks are de rigueur for this first-term senator.

That's why he treated the world to a speech that meticulously avoided confrontation with the real world, one where platitudes reign and the grim truths about the human condition are redacted.  In their place is the self-serious image of Obama as the world's savior, as the Uber-Therapist here to treat a beleagured generation, to cleanse us of our secular sins. 

There seems to be an inverse relationship between age and eagerness to seek out oracles such as Obama, which is why so many are convinced the youth vote will carry the day for him--the younger they are the more energized they seem.  That's in large part because they're fueled by an idealism that blinds them to the fact that his policy recommendations, from taxing his way out of economic trouble, to an untoward dependence upon soft power, are relics from a past best left buried.

It's fascinating political theater to see people drawn to a magnetic personality, which is a timeless phenomenon, but one upon which reality ultimately intrudes.  That time will come, and as the media slowly awakens to the fact that it does, in fact, have a responsibility to move beyond its infatuation with Obama, the truth about this candidate will be come undeniably apparent.

One of the perennial mysteries of modern liberalism is its apparent indifference to the virtues of sacrifice for a greater good, in particular when it comes to victory in war.  Many contemporary commentators have pondered under what circumstances liberals generally, and Senator Obama specifically, would risk their lives for a profoundly vital goal, and their list is rather short.

Add to this conundrum Jeffrey Klein, writing in today's Huffington Post, who goes to great length to demonstrate that McCain is a war president, which is only to say, a commander-in-chief determined to complete a war that the vast majority of Democrats supported just a few years ago.  Leave it to a liberal to craft an argument that provides a cynical justification for voters to vote for McCain:

McCain's entire war strategy relies upon Nixonian political logic:  Americans will vote for the candidate who won't countenance defeat not because they're attached to the country we're liberating, but because they can't accept that many American lives may have been lost without purpose.

 In their world of distorted logic, the goal of victory in Iraq, with the indisputable by-product of a less inflammatory, more stable Middle East, is not something Americans can hang their vote for McCain on.  What Klein and his ilk seem incapable of grasping is that the cause in Iraq was just and remains so, and therefore, the lives that have been lost weren't in vain.  Indeed, that's why Obama's military and foreign policy credentials are being questioned by mainstream Americans--he seems to glibly wend his way through flash-points such as Iran, convinced that his approach will be successful where all others for the past 30 years have failed.

Perhaps most despicable is Klein's argument that McCain's endorsement of American exceptionalism is tantamount to the zeal the terrorists bring to their own cause:

McCain calls withdrawal from Iraq a "morally reprehensible abandonment of our responsibilities."  His faith in America's transcendent moral destiny is a mirror image of the terrorists' paranoid nihilism, and hence a boon to their cause.

 This is at once an abhorrent assertion and a dark glimpse into the bleak moral soul of liberalism, a polity that so thoroughly disdains America's unique moral standing in history that it is compelled to liken it to the savages that slaughtered 3,000 innocents on 9/11.

The deeper gloss on this contorted piece is that it conveniently overlooks or implicitly denies the existence of the scourge of radical Islam, a plague that's infecting susceptible nations worldwide.  Indeed, he smugly ends his piece with the left's horror scenario:

If he's elected president, he'll surely find no shortage of wars he is dying to win.

It's a prospective irony lost on liberals that the "aggressive diplomacy" that Obama champions for Iran will never produce the advances he is apparently convinced it will.  In light of the fact that Iran is likely to obtain a nuclear weapon within twenty-four months, Americans are correct in asking exactly what this eminently untested man would do?

In that regard, having a "war president" at the helm is positively virtuous, especially when compared with a half-term senator with a checkered history as a community activist.