A COLOSSAL FAILURE - AT 8:09 A.M. ET: That's a perfectly reasonable description of Hillary Clinton's mission to Moscow, which just concluded without so much as a nice going-home gift. 

I've always liked Wes Pruden of the Washington Times because he takes no prisoners and says things bluntly.  He would not have been hired as a diplomat in the unarmed army of Obama.  Pruden:

A soft answer can sometimes turn away wrath, but not always, and presidents have to be wary of showing timidity and weakness in the face of a bully. This is the expensive lesson the tinhorns of the world are teaching Barack Obama. So far he is not an honors student.

He'll get an "A" from MSNBC anyway.  Easy grader, if you're a liberal.

Throwing Poland and the Czech Republic under that celebrated bus, a cramped space already brimming with old friends, pastors, mentors, tutors and even members of his own family who are no longer useful, was costly. It's never easy to be a friend of America, and Mr. Obama is making it impossible to be one.

He got a humiliating reminder of reality this week when the Russians, to whom he had paid such humble obeisance, gave him a hard slap across the face, just to remind him who he is and who is meant to be in charge of the world.

Don't worry, be happy.  We're talking.  We're sensitive to other cultures.  We're showing our good side.  Hillary smiled in Moscow.  Ah, for the good old thinking of the sixties, when she lectured a U.S. senator about Vietnam at a Wellesley College commencement.  Those were the days when you could bash America and be so proud.

Mrs. Clinton could not even see Mr. Putin, the real head man; there was a conflict of schedules and he had to depart for Beijing. This was a remarkable snub, treating the secretary of state as if she were merely the representative of the PTA, lobbying for more vegetables in the school lunchroom. Maybe there really was a conflict; maybe Mr. Putin had scheduled a haircut at the only hour she was available.

Ouch.  Hillary wronged by another man.  Will there be anger?  Will there be pain?

Mrs. Clinton and her acolytes at the State Department, ever eager to seek the softest way to say nothing, tried to put a nice face on her visit to Moscow. The United States, Russia and China are "closer than before" on their policies regarding Iran's nuclear-weapons program, Mrs. Clinton told a radio interviewer. She seemed to be taking care not to say that actual positions are closer, just that everyone understands those positions: Russians tough, Americans soft.

That says it.  But are enough Americans concerned?  Our colleges, and, increasingly, our high schools, are churning out students who are taught a moral equivalence in international relations.  Some of those students go into journalism and teach moral equivlance to readers and viewers.  Unless we get to the root of America's corrupt educational system, and increasingly twisted press, we will be in mortal danger of a "citizen's surrender," which is what has happened in much of Western Europe.

October 16, 2009