The Year Zero on the Obama calendar

From Rich Lowry:

The calendar says Pres. Barack Obama took office in 2009, although that’s only a technicality. In his own mind, Obama ascended in Year Zero, a time of ritualistic cleansing in preparation for the relaunching of an America free from its past sins.

Has an American president ever appeared less vested in his nation’s history than Barack Obama? He shrugged off a rancid attack on the United States by Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega at the Summit of the Americas, including a rant on the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961, by saying he’d only been 3 months old at the time. Nothing to do with me.

It’s Obama’s own personal novus ordo seclorum. Or as an Obama official put it, “His expectation is that these debates of the past can remain that, debates of the past.”