- Wingnuts like Sarah Palin spread bullshit (Obama apology tour Hiroshima skreeeee!)
- The bullshit is blue-checkmark-verified as bullshit.
- Credentialed conservatives deliver a qualified defense of the bullshit in the form of harrumphs ("[Charles] Krauthammer: Obama's 'Implicit Apology' in Hiroshima 'Dishonored Our Nation'")
No, Obama did not explicitly apologize for America's dropping of the atomic bomb. Rather, he worked around to it by implication, stripping the act of almost all historical context, lumping together all civilizations and nations, and all wars -- whatever the reasons -- in one big stew, and urging, as his solution for the planet (imperfect America included), a "moral revolution" of which he evidently considers himself the prophet...On and on she goes with this elevated speech ("one of Obama's prime rhetorical tools, here on full display, is the logical fallacy," yecch) for thousands of words, eventually getting to this:
Obama ended his speech by calling on the world to choose a future "in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare, but as the start of our own moral awakening."
That's a neat rhetorical flourish, a dollop of whipped cream on the narrative jello. It's also an apology for America. It resets the world's clock to Obama-time; implying that Truman was morally asleep when, as this narrative has it, out of the blue sky he ordered the bombing of Hiroshima. As one more slap at America from America's own president, it is far more likely to embolden America's enemies than to discourage the spread of nuclear weapons.So, an anodyne sentiment at a public event encouraging men of good will to look to the future is reinterpreted as a gesture of contempt toward the past. Stands to reason -- if you think things might get better, then you must think everyone who came before you was stupid, fighting World War II was a mistake and Truman was an asshole! Well, you can do what you want to us, but I'm not going to sit here and listen to you bad-mouth the United States of America!
No one will attentively read Rosett's whole skein, but true believers will scan the end and see that someone who knows big words said Obama's speech was "an apology for America," and that's what they'll remember, even years from now in their survivalist bunkers -- that time Obama apologized for Hiroshima, between the time he made Islam our national religion and the time he got a judge to go after a perfectly innocent Donald Trump.
One of the good things about this wretched election cycle is that the propaganda has gotten so shitty, if it still works we'll know there's no hope.
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