Barack Obama has Lost His Halo

The silver has tarnished. Sure, it only took three and a half years, and it's happening for all the wrong reasons. Yet the luster is gone. In the eyes of the rest of the world which had so longingly adored him, President Barack Obama has become just another US President.

From some fronts, that was to be expected. The Muslim world, for example. The President never closed the prison at Guantanamo Bay, got the credit for, shall we say, taking care of Osama Bin Laden, and has angered Pakistan. Russia thinks less of him, but, of course, our relationship with Russia is still adversarial and probably will be for several years to come.

The most ominous drop in the warm fuzzies comes out of China, where his approval ratings have dropped thirty percent since 2009, from 57% to 27%. Beyond that, the general feeling of the rest of the world is that the United States still continues to act unilaterally, and that bothers them. The policy of drone attacks to fight terror is also listed as a concern.

Yet everyone still wants Barack Obama reelected. That by itself is cause enough for us to give him the boot come November.

We will freely admit that we aren't particularly concerned with the opinion of the rest of the world with regard to our elections. It goes hand in hand with the fact that we also aren't particularly concerned with elections in the rest of the world ourselves, in the nations that actually have meaningful elections, anyway. Why ought we care about what China thinks about our elections or our President, seeing as they are still essentially tyrants? The fact too that the America haters don't appear concerned with the still bellicose Russia strikes us as rank hypocrisy as well. That the United States continues to remain the object of most of the world's vitriol despite the Chinese, the Russians, and the terrorists and those who harbor them, strikes us as little more than, well, perplexing would be a kind word for it. We simply are not the threat which they are.

As such, world opinion about our elections should mean little to us. Especially as so many who criticize Mr. Obama still want him re-elected. Why would they want that, other than as an attempt to dictate our own policy?

The devil with that. If you aren't going to like us anyway, if you aren't going to like who we elect anyway, if you aren't going to like what we do anyway, then that's all the more reason to not take your view into consideration. We'll elect who we want. And it actually gives us a certain childish pleasure that whomever we elect in November you won't like anyway.