In his goodbye speech, Douglas MacArthur, told America that “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” Were we quite fortunate with older presidents.
Throughout President Trump’s first foreign trip, the recently-departed tenant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will also head across the Atlantic — now, to Berlin, where he will be having a meeting with his old friend, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
As reported to The Washington Times, Merkel and Obama (quite a paler version of Laurel and Hardy) will both be making an appearance on Thursday at a forum named “Being Involved in Democracy: Taking on Responsibility Locally and Globally.”
Even though this may sound to you like the type of book that Noam Chomsky would write the forward to, it’s in fact part of the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag (German Protestant Church Conference) event meant to define commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. The event is of course funded by the Obama Foundation.
“President Barack Obama’s attending the Kirchentag in Berlin, which will ring in the Reformation Summer, underlines the international character of our 500th-anniversary celebrations,” written on the event’s website by Bishop Heinrich Bedford-Strohm says.
“The churches form a global civil society network of over two billion Christians. Together, as people of faith, we live from the firm hope for a better world. Anyone who is pious also has to be politically minded. I am looking forward to enthusiastic debates during the Reformation Summer 2017.”
Watch the video here.
This is in some way ironic when you think about the fact that the President did not exactly have a tendency to protect the rights of Christians at home or abroad throughout his time in office.
Another ironic thing about this is the event location — Berlin’s iconic Brandenberg Gate. In 2008, then-Sen. Obama wanted to speak there in the course of the campaign trail, however Merkel vetoed it, considering it unseemly for an individual to hold a campaign speech in front of one of Germany’s most holy landmark.
So, rather than accepting tradition and withdrawing into the background to give his replacement some room, he flies all over the world telling us all how we should have listened to him — even as our actual, chosen president goes on his first international tour.
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