In the past month, President Barack Obama has gone to extraordinary lengths to
show the world his affability, open-mindedness and contrition for America's
sins, both real and perceived. He has conducted an apology tour through Europe,
made overtures to Castro's repressive regime in Cuba and even offered an
obsequious bow to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah. Last week, he backslapped and
joshed with Hugo Chavez, the brutally authoritarian Venezuelan dictator who has
called for America's downfall, denounced Obama's predecessor as "the devil" and
described Obama as "an ignoramus."

While Chavez and his ilk seem pleased by Obama's chummy greetings and
willingness to wink at their open hostility toward America, not everyone is
impressed by the new president's charm offensive. His critics at home argue
that it is unseemly for an American president to show such deference to foreign
rulers hostile to democratic values. They worry that the tyrants Obama seems
intent on cozying up to will read his warmth as a sign of weakness and an
invitation to continue behaving badly.

Obama has brushed aside such concerns like lint off a dinner jacket. It's
important to listen carefully and humbly to one's critics, he says. Making nice
with dangerous dictators makes them "more likely to want to cooperate than not
cooperate."

That claim is debatable. Obama's hobnobbing may have bolstered his personal
popularity abroad, but so far, it has failed to win him any concrete
concessions that benefit the nation he represents.

Still, the humility argument is a powerful one, premised as it is on the very
American idea that tolerance and respect for diverse viewpoints are the keys to
peaceful coexistence. There is only one problem with that argument: Obama and
his administration have refused to show the same tolerance and humility to the
president's homegrown critics as they show to America's enemies abroad.

Consider the report on "right-wing extremism" released recently by Obama's
Department of Homeland Security, which featured nine pages of baseless
speculation about the potential security threat posed by returning military
veterans, pro-lifers, Americans who oppose illegal immigration, Americans
concerned about protecting their Second Amendment right to bear arms and —
horror of horrors — Americans who reject the growing authority of the federal
government. The report acknowledges that DHS "has no specific information that
domestic right-wing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence." Yet
"right-wing extremists" — also known as conservatives who oppose Obama's
policies — "may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about several
emergent issues."

In other words, Obama's socialist-style power grabs on behalf of the federal
government and his stridently pro-abortion policies have rallied fiscal and
social conservatives across America to oppose him. And that, DHS says, demands
heightened monitoring of such unsavory characters by Uncle Sam.

Although the DHS report is an alarming example of the Obama administration's
intolerance of competing viewpoints and willingness to use federal power to
intimidate and marginalize political opponents, it is not the only example.
From his efforts to gut the conscience clause that protects pro-life health
professionals from performing abortions against their will to characterizing
the peaceful anti-tax Tea Party protests as an "unhealthy" development with
sinister overtones, as White House senior adviser David Axelrod did on Sunday,
Obama and his surrogates have demonstrated that their tolerance for domestic
dissent knows plenty of bounds. The candidate who once campaigned on
bipartisanship swiftly changed his tone when he came to power, answering
Republican pleas for greater input in the nation's governance with the curt and
not-so-humble retort, "I won."

If only Obama showed such backbone with the foreign thugs who constitute a
genuine threat to America's well-being, rather than reserving all his tough-guy
talk and tactics for fellow Americans who happen to disagree with him.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St.
Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.