Giuliani’s role as the latest member of “The Emperor is, indeed, naked” crowd has caused any number of Leftwing Progressives and their me-too-for-the-electability toe-suckers on “the right” to clutch their pearls and look for the fainting couch.
Not that denying Obama’s own words and actions is much different than Obama’s denial of Islamist terrorists own words and actions. It is inconvenient for them all to allow actual agency of people revealing their own motives to interfere with the bigger picture — whether it is about establishing a caliphate or fundamentally transforming America.
All roads lead to totalitarianism; therefore, we need to keep the hoi polloi in the dark as long as possible.
Regardless of the blatantly creepy behavior of Joe Biden, remarkably absent from Lamestream Press coverage, Rudy’s opinion is producing all manner of shock and awe. It’s the “Obama is not a good man” kerfuffle inflated to Major Scandal proportions all over again.
One of the few straight-talk people left at NRO, Kevin Williamson is kicking ass and taking names:
It may be the case that the president is a practitioner of the Smokey Robinson school of patriotism: “I don’t like you, but I love you.” Something’s really got a hold on this guy, and it is not an excessive fervor for the American order.
Questions about patriotism and love of country are, according to our self-appointed referees, out of bounds, déclassé, boob bait for bubbas, etc. Those are questions that we are not allowed to ask in polite society. Why? Because polite society does not want to hear the answers. Does Barack Obama like America? The people around him certainly seem to have their reservations. Michelle Obama said — twice, at separate campaign events — that her husband’s ascending to the presidency meant that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” She was in her mid 40s at the time, her “adult lifetime” having spanned decades during which she could not be “really proud” of her country. Barack Obama spent years in the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church as the churchman fulminated: “God Damn America!” The Reverend Wright’s infamous “God Damn America!” sermon charges the country with a litany of abuses: slavery, mistreatment of the Indians, “treating citizens as less than human,” etc. A less raving version of the same indictment can be found in the president’s own speeches and books. His social circle includes such figures as Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn, who expressed their love of country by participating in a murderous terrorist campaign against it.
Does Barack Obama love his country? Call me a rube for saying so, but it’s a fair question. […]
There is a personality type common among the Left’s partisans, and it has a name: Holden Caulfield. He is adolescent, perpetually disappointed, and ever on the lookout for phoniness and hypocrisy. His is the sort of personality inclined to believe in his heart the declaration that “behind every great fortune there is a great crime.” (He also believes that this is a quotation from Honoré de Balzac, whose works he has not read, when it fact it comes from Richard O’Connor’s The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur.) He believes with Elizabeth Warren that the economy is a rigged game based on exploitation and deceit rather than on innovation, productivity, and competition. He believes with Barack Obama that the only reason (e.g.) Staples does not pay its part-time associates more or schedule them for more hours is so that it can pad its executive pay and protect its “billions” in annual profits. (He believes that Staples, whose financials he has not read, makes “billions,” when in fact it does no such thing.) Say an admiring word about Steve Jobs and he’ll swear that there are four-year-olds working 169 hours a week in Chinese sweatshops producing iPods at the point of a bayonet. He believes that most people get into Harvard and Yale because they have influential parents (that’s the University of Texas, unfortunately), that rich Americans mostly inherit their money (in reality, about 15 percent of their assets are inherited, less than for middle-class families), that the U.S. goes to war abroad to enrich contractors at home, and that the entire history of Latin America must be understood through the prism of the United Fruit Company’s maneuverings in 1954.
Give Holden Caulfield a television show and you’ve got Chris Hayes.
Barack Obama has a great, big, heaping dose of Holden Caulfield in him. That and chutzpah: When as a candidate he was in trouble because of his association with the racist lunacy of the Reverend Wright, he responded by giving the American public at large a lecture on racism and its culpability therein, while his minions began proclaiming that the only reason to oppose this politician with the racist associates was — presto-change-o! — racism. But if you believe that the system is basically rotten, that the society that produced that system is basically rotten, that the game is rigged, that your opponents are all phonies and hypocrites, then what’s a little intellectual dishonesty in the service of the common good?
Whenever King Barry is addressing his minions and commences to mock Republicans or other dissenters, it is never from a position of friendly ribbing ala the classic celebrity roasts, but with sarcastic meanness and contempt towards his targets.
His attitude towards America is the same. Obama “loves” America — the America he wants to make, not the America as established.
Obama is the man (or woman) who marries a “project”, a spouse to remake into his own image of what a “perfect” spouse should be. And during that process, he believes belittling all the short-comings of his new bride, real or imagined, at any gathering, isn’t any indication of his lack of love only proof of it. “I just want her to live up to her promise.”
If we would recognize such a private relationship as toxic and abusive, why shouldn’t we recognize that about Obama’s relationship with this country?
His attitude towards America is the same. Obama “loves” America — the America he wants to make, not the America as established.
The question of love here goes to something more fundamental, it seems to me, though this isn’t to say that the questions concerning what the “American as established” don’t enter in, but that those questions, which after all are actually necessarily part and parcel of the meaning of self-government, are in the more important sense a secondary indication of ClownDisaster’s disregard of America as she exists. Nope, the primary indication of his lack of love for America as she exists is revealed in the inability — the condescension immediately apparent in the response to Guiliani (“I feel sorry for him”) — to even pause to consider Guiliani’s expression on its own terms. No lover behaves like this toward his or her beloved. Guiliani’s first statement was reported to include this: “He doesn’t love me. He doesn’t love you.” That’s the particular thing. For Guiliani’s “me” and “you”, these are people who aren’t susceptible to the arguments of the sort we conduct concerning the founding philosophical doctrines of the nation. These “me” and “you” are the elements of the nation, the most fundamental elements beyond which the founding philosophical doctrines never seek to go: indeed, cannot go, but which the likes of the ClownDisaster can always dismiss with a wave of his imperial hand. And does.
Lest ya’ll need reminding, Obama is a goose who’s good ain’t for no ganders.
he likes America better than he like jews
if that makes you feel better
The important thing is Michelle O is finally proud of America. It’s enough for Barry that he’s proud of his self.
Obama likes America enough to lean over the sneeze guard at Chipotle and point at the medium corn salsa.
Obama likes America enough to withdraw troops from Iraq and then show us his shocked face when ISIS carves out a zone of control and murders cartloads of people and puts it on the internet.
Obama likes America enough to strengthen commercial ties to Cuba knowing full well that he’ll get nothing for it but a chance to give Guantanamo Bay back to them.
Obama likes America enough to make sure that Iran has time and cover to develop nuclear energy policies that double as nuclear weapon production polices.
“The American“
Greetings:
I grew up in the Bronx of the ’50s and ’60s. Playing basketball became my preferred way to misspend my youth at a relatively early age. Our small by New York standards neighborhood was both multicultural and diverse but in a Caucasian way so I didn’t really have much contact with Negroes until I began to travel about in search of competition and improvement.
Now, I realize that Eric Hoffer is not widely read these days,but I came into a copy of his something on the “Waterfront” book back then and it made some interesting points about American Negroes and kind of fit well with my tendency to quietly observe people, perhaps not from afar, with whom I’m likely to interact.
When now President Obama first arrived on the scene, the mainstream media treated me to some snippets from a campaign speech he was making, i think in South Carolina. In slipping a bit into his American Negro patois, he urged his listeners not to be “bamboozled” by his competitors. I was a bit surprised by his use of that expression and immediately thought of the aforementioned Mr. Hoffer.
You see, the Bamboozler is kind of an American Negro archetype as an individual who makes his way through the oppressive Caucasian patriarchy by his wits and little allegiance to ethics or morality. I thought that the President’s use of the word was way too risky in a kind of way too close to home kind of way.
So, for me, the question has long been, “Who do you think bamboozlers love?”.
Obama loves America like Godzilla loves Tokyo. It’s not his fault we have these high-tension power lines always in his way, making him fall on our buildings.
Working and Thinking on the Waterfront
sings: “Bamboozled by love… oh lord, the shit done hit the fan.”
But McGehee, Godzilla defends Tokyo every now and then, or other Japanese cities.
I think Obama would call Jet Jaguar a bigot, drive him off, and then assure Megalon that he understands the Seatopian grievances as well as those of of their allies in the M Nebula represented by Gigan.
But how would the special snowflakes deal with it all, boycott&bitch?
geoffb
I think I was reading stuff written in English, but what.the.fuck?
There’s an apropos apothegm of Michael Oakeshott’s that John Hinderaker reminded us of just the other day:
I think this bit is key: “Barack Obama has a great, big, heaping dose of Holden Caulfield in him. ”
Privilege, a sense of entitlement and an air of grievance are a dangerous combination.
The voters would do well to remember that when Shrillary! announces.
Also that she’s from the same Chicago mire as Obama. And what’s worse, she grew up in it.
Correction: The Oakeshott post was by Steven Hayward, not John Hinderaker. As a fan of Hayward, I very much regret the error.
Another must read
Based only on his own words and actions, Obama not only doesn’t love America, he actively works against it’s best interests.
Yet Rudy pointing this out is the problem. I’ma livin’ in Bizzaro World.
Ernst, Steyn is firmly entrenched on my short list of ‘must read’ people, along with the likes of Milton Freidman, Thomas Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson.
Rudy’s a bit late to the party.