“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said during the dinner at the 21 Club, a former Prohibition-era speakeasy in midtown Manhattan. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country."Po' Wudy... The pwesident doesn't wub him.
So Obama doesn't love America because he doesn't love Rudy Giuliani, Scott Walker, and the Wall Street fat cats who are vetting Republican presidential candidates to see which one will march to their tune? Is there anything substantial for Giuliani's claims?
Giuliani continued by saying that “with all our flaws we’re the most exceptional country in the world. I’m looking for a presidential candidate who can express that, do that and carry it out.”In other words, Giuliani believes that Obama doesn't think we're special.
But Giuliani is clearly being hypocritical here. He and Scott Walker and the fat cats in the room clearly don't love the president. The clearly don't love liberals, they clearly don't love people demanding everyone be paid a living wage and the people demanding Wall Street bankers be held responsible for the economic catastrophe they caused in 2009.
Does it even make any sense to talk about loving a country? It's clear you can love your spouse, your children, and your pets. You might even be able to love the mountains, skiing, poker, history, porn, mathematics, science, religion, god, your AK-47, and any number of singular things.
How can you love an amorphous collection of 300 million individuals?
But how can you love something that is an amorphous collection of more than 300 million individuals, and a myriad of ethnicities, religions, political parties, businesses, local governments, and a hodge-podge of inconsistent laws and regulations, and its evil history of slavery and lynchings?Clearly, you can't. You can only love a subset of those things. And when people like Rudy Giuliani say they love America, what they really mean is that they love themselves and the people who are like them, and the policies that promote the things they want to happen.
Conservatives claim to love the Constitution and the Founding Fathers, yet they selectively pick and choose a very limited and specific subset of history and law that bolsters only their beliefs. They minimize, ignore and deny everything that doesn't comport with their extremely limited and self-serving view of history and law.
These days it's common to hear people on both the left and the right say things like, "I love America, but I hate what it's become." I.e., I don't like the changes the other guy is making.
Lectern pounders like Giuliani don't love America, they love the sound of their own voices.
The only people who truly love this country are geeky poets who wax rhapsodically about the contradictions and conflicts inherent in a democracy, people who can accept everyone for who they are despite their warts. People who wish the best for everyone in the country despite their ethnicity, economic status, and political leanings. Lectern pounders like Giuliani don't love America, they love the sound of their own voices.I don't trust people who boast loudly and proudly that they are patriots who love their country. Being a patriot is like being a hero: it's not a title you can bestow upon yourself, it's an honor that is bestowed upon you by others for your selfless actions. "He was a patriot," is something that only someone else can say about you after you're dead.
"He was a patriot," is something that only someone else can say about you after you're dead.
People who claim to be country-loving patriots are just puffing up their own importance by attaching themselves like leeches to the simplistic concept that is what they want America to be, not what America the real country actually is.What Rudy Giuliani is really saying, "I love the great country of America, so I'm great too. Obama doesn't think America is great, so he's not great." This is the rhetoric and mindset of a five-year-old.
People like Obama don't run around chanting "USA! USA!" constantly because it's phony boastful jingoism that means nothing. This country has a lot of problems (something which Giuliani readily admits), but chief among those problems is the attitude of the Republican Party that they can spend the entire eight years of the Obama administration torpedoing Obama at every stage, constantly threatening government default, sabotaging foreign policy with the Adoration of the Netanyahu, without harming the fabric of this country.
In modern history Democrats have never displayed such unanimous and unalloyed animus against Republican presidents (even as ones as incompetent as George W. Bush, whom Democrats supported even as he railroaded us into war in Iraq) as Republicans have displayed against Obama. You have to go back to the Civil War, when southern Democrats reviled Lincoln like the devil. But of course, that's misleading, because all the southern Democrats have now joined the Republican Party and all the Lincoln Republicans have become Democrats.
Even during the Watergate hearings, Democrats displayed far more decorum toward Richard Nixon, a paranoid thug who had to resign in disgrace for his criminal activities, than Republicans have displayed toward Obama. A president whose greatest crime in their minds -- as witnessed by the Republican legal and legislative agenda -- is a law expanding health care for the American people.
If Republicans really love America, they should prove it by working with the president to make this country a better place, rather than sitting back and incessantly sniping.
11 comments:
I like my car. I like the color, the size, the wheels, the engine and the interior.
I can say I like my car.
My neighbor says he likes his car. But he wants it to be a truck. He doesn't like the wheels or the tires. He doesn't like the engine, the color, the interior, the radio or the floor mats.
Does he really like his car?
Obama and the progressive wing of the left want change. Change? Like a different car? How can one believe that when someone says they want to fundamentally transform America(1) that they love what they have. They want something different when they say that.
(1)Yeah, he's backtracked on that bit.
I actually think that Republicans and Democrats want many of the same things (good economy, solid health care, strong defense, improved education, immigration fixes). It all depends on how you define change and what "fundamentally transform" means. I've always been for what works and discarding what doesn't (example: supply side economics).
Thus far, the president has ideologically governed like Dwight Eisenhower so he really hasn't changed much. The problem is really the Republican party. They have grown older and become more frightened. They really don't want to give him a win on anything because they are babies.
The Giuliani comment strikes me as being indicative of him trying to stay relevant in the political world more than anything else.
the president has ideologically governed like Dwight Eisenhower so he really hasn't changed much.
They really don't want to give him a win on anything
Has he governed like Ike because those were his intentions or because that's all he could get politically?
I don't see the downside to the opposition party 'not giving a win' to the other side if that results in the governance being moderated.
Democrats have never displayed such unanimous and unalloyed animus against Republican presidents
Okay, so quote me some of that Democratic love for W why dontcha? I'm not asking for some from Rachel Maddow or Harry Reid or even Senator Obama - just from ANY Democrat.
Well, juris, as conservatives like to point out, Democrats supported W in the invasion of Iraq. Here is a list of some other bills they worked on together...
http://democrats.senate.gov/2007/07/26/the-110th-congress-democratic-accomplishments-and-republican-obstructions/#.VOvPtvnF_To
If it weren't for the Democrats willingness to do what was right for the country during collapse of 2008 (as opposed to simply letting Bush fail massively), our economy would have been (and still be ) really awful.
There wasn't much love in that post M. Where did Dems sing W's praises - that is the implication of N's story.
Hint: you could of course go back to No Child Left Behind. That had bi-partisan support (and bi-partisan opposition).
If it weren't for the Democrats willingness to do what was right for the country during collapse of 2008
Ahhh, but that's presupposing that when the GOP blocks things that Obama wants - that they agree it would actually be right for America as opposed to blocking it because they don't think it's the right thing.
I think if it was "their guy" they'd be doing many of things that Obama has done...very tribal, remember? Consider as well that many elements of the GOP base think that many Congressional Republicans aren't any different than Democrats, especially in terms of spending.
That's a good point, juris, on NLCB
I think Nikto was speaking of a longer period of history than just W. Remember Tip and the Gip?
That he has done? Or that he has tried to do?
And of course the left isn't any less tribal.
I think the president has always been a lot less liberal than his supporters would want and too liberal for today's ideological spectrum. Certainly, he would have liked to spend more money on infrastructure (as Ike did) if given the chance by Republicans in Congress.
Of course, back in Ike's day, the ideological spectrum ran from the far left side of the field to about the 40 yard line on the right side of the field. Most policies were made in between those markers. Today, we are flipped with policies running from the far right side of the field to about the 40 yard line on the left side of the field. Even the president is more to the right of Ike on issues such as defense spending (see: military industrial complex). We have, however, seen a rise in the progressive movement on the left so perhaps the next election we will see a full football field (far left to far right) which could make things very interesting.
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