First Things editor Joseph Bottum appeared PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer to discuss President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech. As Joseph says, the speech was “incoherent” yet “a very American speech.”
Watch the video or read the transcript on the PBS website.
December 11th, 2009 | 9:28 am
Bottom: “This is a man accepting a peace prize while he is at war, and rhetoric won’t really fix what logic says is broken.”
This is Bottom’s only explication of his claim that Obama’s speech is “utterly incoherent.” As a pacifist, I tend to agree with Bottom. Especially for Christians who follow the one who gave himself up at the hands of his enemies en route to the world’s redemption (and thus peace), killing others for the sake peace is a betrayal of the gospel.
However, Bottum is no pacifist. Moreover, surely he knows that advocates of just war argue all the time that just wars are themselves compatible with the gospel’s commitment to peacemaking. And Obama clearly self-identifies in this speech as an adherent to this tradition of thought. Is Bottum suggesting that the just war tradition is incoherent?
Finally, Bottum’s rhetorical strategy in this PBS segment is interesting. Undercut Obama where you disagree with him (“inchoherent”). But when Obama says many things that you agree with, indeed that you’ve agreed with in print, don’t give him credit for it; rather, make it look like he’s just repeating what other great Americans have said (“a very American speech”).