It has become a commonplace to observe how far the Democrat party has evolved from the firmness of purpose expressed in Kennedy's inaugural address. The Obama administration is mired up to its genitals in the swamp of relativism seemingly capable only of vomiting up apology after apology out of its dismay over what we have done in the last half-century "to assure the survival and success of liberty."
Whether Kennedy read these words of his speech writer, Ted Sorensen, because he really believed them or because he was insecure and felt it was necessary to dress his new administration with an aura of square jawed purpose is not entirely clear to history. One can review Kennedy's performance at the Vienna summit with Khrushchev, his decision to go ahead with the Bay of Pigs but also his failure to support it, his performance under pressure during the Cuban missile crisis, and come to either conclusion. Kennedy was at the end of the day a politician but he was also an Irish-American patriot. The same could hardly be said of his brothers. Teddy even treacherously consorted with the KGB to gain the White House.
If one looks at the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama it is difficult to see any coherent driving purpose except acceptance of the notion that the nation state is an evil institution and the American nation state is the most evil of those institutions because it stands athwart the march of socialism toward utopia obstructing progress.
In the shack-up of modern progressive neo-communism with Islamic jihad under Obama we see the inversion of Kennedy's words to the effect that we will support any enemy and subvert any ally to assist in the survival and success of statism and one world socialist government.
Ultimately, one is driven to believe that the ultimate rationalization moving the Obama administration is nothing more elevated than, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." The leftists which now inhabit not only the Oval Office but the State Department and the CIA are so purblind in their hatred of American exceptionalism that they will court Islamic terrorism in the homeland, believing in their arrogance that they will be able to triumph over Islam just as they will have defeated American capitalism. They will stand over the ruins of both.
