In his Washington Post column today, E.J. Dionne writes:

Obama’s willingness to point to our imperfection drives many conservatives crazy. Writing on Commentary magazine’s Web site, Peter Wehner, the director of strategic initiatives in the 43rd president’s White House, expressed his discomfort with “the ease and eagerness with which he (Obama) criticized the country he represents.” Wehner said he got “a queasy feeling” from “the growing sense that Obama is willing to denigrate America in order to boost his own personal popularity in other countries.”

That Obama would run down his country for his personal benefit is a serious charge. It also ignores what Obama actually said and did.

In his Strasbourg speech, Obama spoke of times “where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.” Is he wrong about that? Has everyone forgotten about “freedom fries” and “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”?

Dionne went on to add this:

But Obama offered his apology as a prelude to criticism of a European “anti-Americanism that is at once casual but can also be insidious,” which failed to recognize “the good that America so often does in the world” and instead chose “to blame America for much of what’s bad.” Obama wasn’t aggrandizing himself. He was making a shrewd pro-American argument: We’ll acknowledge our mistakes, but you need to admit yours.

Here are a few thoughts in response:

1. Let me see if I have this straight. The grounds for an American President going overseas to apologize for American arrogance, dismissiveness, and derision are phrases used (based on what I found on Wikipedia) by two relatively obscure Members of the House of Representatives, Robert Ney and Walter Jones, Jr., in the case of “freedom fries”; and Jonah Goldberg of National Review, the New York Post, and Fox News commentator John Gibson, in the case of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” (a phrase I wasn’t even aware of until now).

If Barack Obama intends to apologize for comments he (and Dionne) find insufficiently soothing and which are made in a nation consisting of 300 million people, thousands of state legislators, 50 governors, 435 House Members, 100 Senators, a Supreme Court, federal courts, and district courts, then his apology tour is only just beginning. If the chief exhibits for Dionne’s case for apologizing to Europe are the phrases “freedom fries” and “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” during the lead up to a war, it seems to me like an excuse to apologize for America.

2. Obama’s remarks in Strasbourg — which according to the Daily Telegraph “went further than any United States president in history in criticizing his own country’s action while standing on foreign soil” — were not the only troubling incident. As Charles Krauthammer put is in his column last week, “Our president came bearing a basketful of mea culpas. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own people for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness, for genocide, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.”

3. Dionne applauds Obama’s “shrewd pro-America argument: We’ll acknowledge our mistakes, but you need to admit yours.” I have seen the first part — acknowledgment of American errors by an American president on foreign soil; what I haven’t seen is the second part: foreign leaders apologizing for their displays of anti-Americanism. This is what also troubled Krauthammer: What did Obama get for his “obsessive denigration of his own country?” The answer is: nothing at all.

4. If Dionne really wants to get angry about American rhetorical arrogance and apologize for it, perhaps he can take to task the President who called America the “last, best hope of earth” and referred to Americans as God’s “almost chosen people.” That President would be Lincoln.

5. My source of criticism (as opposed to “craziness”) wasn’t simply the act of apology for past sins; there can be something useful and constructive in such a thing, done in the right manner and under the right circumstances. What troubled me more, as I wrote last week, is that “At convenient points on his overseas trip President Obama purposefully disfigured reality in a way that reflected poorly on America. That is to say, an American president played up cartoon images of the United States in order to get foreign audiences to applaud him. It is rare for the leader of a nation to revise history in order to make his nation look worse.”

I accept that America in an imperfect nation. But I do think that Dionne and Obama would be hard-pressed to name another nation in history which, given the relative power the United States has compared to other nations in the world, has acted with such inordinate restraint, respect for the views of other nations, and in a manner that has so advanced human rights and human flourishing around the world. Even if you believe the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were not worth the cost in American lives and treasure, they were still noble acts of liberation. And the people in both countries live under governments that, while flawed in many respects, are incomparably better and more humane than the ones preceding them.

I also hope that if our president goes overseas and apologizes for the United States at almost every stop, the grounds of his criticism are legitimate; that, when addressing those who reflexively rail against America, he is more forceful in her defense than in upbraiding her; and that he achieves something of substance in return for his criticisms. By these measures, Obama’s mea culpa tour failed, in my estimation. If it turns out that he is later able to leverage his words to advance justice and American interests, then I will be pleased. I would also be surprised. Let’s just say the early signs aren’t encouraging.