Can’t this guy ever win?
Maybe Im wrong, so I read the transcript of his speech:
“Apologize” . . . “Sorry” . . . nope, neither word in the speech. Maybe a reasonable regret that we had to drop two fucking nuclear bombs on these assholes to stop them from butchering people, OK.
Apology? Don’t see it here, Republicans. 
Political commentators, especially writing in the N.Y. Post, aren’t concerned with facts.
And I still can’t believe no other U.S. President has been there.
Um, ok. In the interests of full disclosure I’m a Republican, I don’t agree with any of what I consider Obama’s core beliefs, I think he is a socialist, self-loathing American etc., but no, I don’t see a specific apology in his speech at this function. I seem to remember that Bill Clinton did issue an actual apology for the bombings during his administration, which I felt (and still feel) is totally inappropriate.
If you’re looking for an answer the best I can say is that those on the far right will interpret just his going there (Hiroshima) as an apology in and of itself, regardless of what he actually says. I don’t. It’s been 70+ years, everyone knows it was a desperate time that warranted desperate measures, the concept of ‘nuclear war’ doesn’t apply at all to Hiroshima nor Nagasaki, the Imperial Japanese Govt committed more war crimes than the Nazis did, preventing an actual invasion of Japan actually saved millions of Japanese lives (much more than Americans) etc., so what else is there to say?
Current partisan politics dictates that it will be viewed by the right with disdain as an unwarranted apology. Don’t read too much into it…
There is one part in Obama’s speech that implies that Americans have something to be forgiven for:
Perhaps those criticizing the President’s remarks view this as implying that America did something morally wrong by dropping the atomic bombs.
Suppose Obama had apologized - so what?
No.
From the moment he became president there has been a determined contingent in politics willing to throw the country under the bus if it would make Obama look bad for a single moment.
No. If you remember anything, it was a lie you were told. No American President has ever apologized for the atomic bombings. Bill Clinton specifically disavowed it. As a rule, the United States never apologizes for the larger strokes of its foreign policy.
Clinton apologized to the Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in detention camps for no other reason than their ethnic background and proximity to the California border. That had nothing to do with the country of Japan, and everything to do with the constitutional rights of people who were for the most part, citizens, and otherwise people here legally, entitled to constitutional protection. It was quite appropriate.
Well, sometimes presidents make genuine blunders that do need reparations, like what was done to Americans of Japanese descent (some of whom had sons and brothers enlisted in the US military), but for the most part, hindsight and changing political climates (like people being anti-nuke) may make the actions of a previous leader unpopular. The seated president has enough to do without trying to second-guess his predecessors, and aside from having better things to do, if he starts that precedent, people will second guess him, and not just his own action, but his reparations. The patchwork never ends.
I guess you can’t be bothered to actually read. If you did, you would have noticed that Bolton’s piece was written BEFORE Obama actually got to Hiroshima.
Emphasis added, for the reading-challenged.
But liberals are well-known for not allowing inconvenient facts to get in the way of their opinions.
Making the accusation (“Obama’s shameful apology tour”) before the event even happens is better?!
Oh, but Bolton misrepresents the past ones too. Obama didn’t apologize in Egypt, or Europe, or Cuba either.
How is that different from conservatives?
Here are the words he used:
Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.
He could have been talking about Pearl Harbor and the heavy toll the world paid for Japan’s role in WW-II.
He then goes on to say:
"Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past.
It’s no accident that he chose Hiroshima. It’s specific to the use of a nuclear weapon by the United States against Japan. As Commander in Chief he did this on the eve of a national holiday honoring those who fought and died defending their country. He laid a wreath honoring the collateral dead from a country responsible for starting one of the worst wars in human history. A country that committed some of the most atrocious crimes directly on civilians and not the result of collateral damage. He talks of 100,000 dead when Japan slaughtered 10’s of thousands of Chinese over the Doolittle Raid alone.
There was nothing subtle about the symbolism of his actions or the words in his speech:
“Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.”
There’s your apology. We should take stock of who we are for what we did to defend ourselves in a war they started that killed 60 million people.
It’s a standard political tactic that has incredible sticking power.
E.g., people remember Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. But he actually never used that word.
Ditto Howard Dean’s “scream” speech, etc. (Of course Trump doesn’t scream during his speeches, he justs talks very, very loud.)
Jesus fucking hype over nothing. Can we just admit that nuclear weapons, like all indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction, are terrible devices we have invented and deployed out of desperation and (often) an unwillingness to sit down with our ideological opponents and negotiate a more moderate peace (or else confront directly and restrain, instead of letting them consume over half of central Europe), without being accused of being weak or conciliatory? And it is not wrong to acknowledge that while the military junta controlling the Empire of Japan long before and during WWII committed great atrocities and injustices and deserved to be removed from power by force, the resulting effort resulted in the deaths of millions of civilians, many women and children, who had absolutely no say in the decision by Japan to engage in annexation and warfare of various nations.
We will never start making good decisions about how to deal with injustice on the world stage until we start recognizing that some of the decisions made in the past had adverse consequences that, in hindsight, we would prefer to avoid. This is not tantamount to admitting wrongdoing or letting the true malefactors off the hook any more than recognizing that driving through a blizzard was probably not the best decision you could have made.
Stranger
So, is Bolton going to apologize to Obama for expecting him to do something he didn’t do?
As for lies, did Trump ever find footage of Muslim celebrators of 9/11?
Not a single word of that is an apology. In fact, it’s very specifically avoiding an apology. It’s like if a celebrity came up and said “we all need to ponder how the things we do hurt others” when asked to apologize for some scandal. Would you think that was an apology?
An apology requires a statement of remorse (I’m sorry, we apologize, etc), an acceptance of wrong action, and a promise not to do it again. This doesn’t have any of those, so it isn’t even a partial apology.
All Obama did was come by and say that the fact that nuclear weapons were used was regrettable, and that he felt the pain of those who suffered. He didn’t have the U.S. take blame for the act, nor did he blame the Japanese for making it necessary, nor anything about the totality of the circumstances of the War. Nothing.
He took a place that has a lot of hurt, both real and symbolic, and showed empathy and compassion–all without blaming anyone.
Kind of a distortion, there. Yes, the Japanese were aggressors, but the more detestable participants were a group called “America First”. They vehemently opposed any involvement in the hostilities in Europe or the Pacific, including Lend-Lease aid to Britain and FDR’s oil embargo on Japan that ultimately goaded them into attacking the US.
If the US had become involved two or three years earlier, perhaps the atrocious slaughter on the beaches of Normandy could have been avoided. Perhaps Japan’s adventurism in Japan could have been driven back earlier. Perhaps millions of lives could have been spared. But the leaders wanted more time for the Soviet army to be cudgeled by the Germans, so that the USSR would be greatly weakened.
I have no love for the Imperial Japanese assault on Asia and Oceana, but choosing to be a spectator to it is far from taking the higher ground.
Why should he apologize for something that happened before he was born? He had nothing to do with it.
wait what? Pacifists were more detestable than those who started the war? Really?
The United States was still dealing with the Great Depression. It had not rebuilt it’s military after the last war. It took years to ramp up the equipment and public support to wage yet another war to end all wars.
“Adventurism”? That wasn’t a bold political move. What Japan attempted to do was destroy a major segment of the US fleet in a bid to keep the United States from entering the war.
We didn’t have the capacity to drag an out-of-date Army/Navy/Air Corps half way around the world. That was something that required a massive buildup. Even after entering the war our soldiers were training with wooden guns and broom handles. We didn’t have a single bomber, fighter or battleship that was worth a shit. at the start of WW-II.
I guess it was too subtle.
Obama’s “we” there, and his “us,” throughout the speech, refers not merely to Americans, but to all of humanity.