Posted on 02/24/2015 11:57:29 PM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Does anybody really buy the Left’s faux outrage over former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani’s opinion, offered at a private event for Wisconsin governor Scott Walker last Wednesday, that President Obama does not love America? After all, it’s a matter of orthodoxy on the right that Barack Obama’s opinion of America ranges from mild disapproval to outright hatred. In my own estimation, it is somewhere between.
A thought experiment for you: How do you think a spouse, a friend, or a colleague would react if you suggested — in your nicest voice — “I think you’re wonderful, but I want to fundamentally transform you”? After all, nothing says “I love you” like telling someone you want to change everything about her. A proper reaction would sound something like, “Go transform yourself, buddy.”
Yet in 2008, just before his first election, then-candidate Obama said, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” To be sure, he went on to specify a few items of economic policy that fell into his transformative plans. But it is simply not credible to believe that he was speaking only of “expanding the middle class,” as he suggested in a 2014 interview with Bill O’Reilly.
Instead, the transformation that Obama envisions encompasses everything from government control of health care to massively diminishing the power of the United States in international affairs so that “no world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.”
None of this is surprising from a man who said, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” After all, nobody is exceptional if everybody is, and if the U.S. isn’t exceptional, that’s just one less reason to love it.
Barack Obama is a man whose childhood father figure, Frank Marshall Davis, was an America-hating, Stalin-lauding Communist; Obama spent nearly two decades imbibing the hateful ignorance of his pastor and mentor, the Reverend Jeremiah “God D— America” Wright, and began his political career (or at least fundraising for it) in the living room of anti-American terrorist Bill Ayers. Nothing about these facts paints a picture of a man who likes — or is even tolerant of — the United States of America. Sprinkle in an “apology tour,” a refusal to wear an American-flag pin, and a wife who was never proud of her country until her husband became president, and the picture becomes even clearer.
Every politically attentive conservative and libertarian knows these stories and perceives them as filling in enough of a jigsaw puzzle of a man (about whom so many secrets remain) that the image is discernible even if not complete: Barack Obama is the first American president who misunderstands and dislikes his own country. The degree to which he errs in each of those ways is a subject of legitimate debate.
While most on the right won’t say that Obama hates his country, their common attempts at politeness and neutrality tend to include caveats so broad as to disprove the claim: “I’m sure he loves his country. He just thinks it could be much better if we handled [insert policy area here] in a completely different way.” The problem is that the statement can be uttered with equal accuracy, in the second sentence at least, by filling in the blank with approximately every aspect of the relationship of government to the citizens and of the United States to the world.
Again, consider Barack Obama’s statement, on the occasion of his first nomination, that “tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another.” To assert that he does love his country would require either an outright lie or a redefinition of the word “love” in a way that would befit Newspeak far more than English. Or he could love America in the same way that a lion loves a baby zebra.
Rudy Giuliani, meanwhile, used “love” as you and I understand it when he said, “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. 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.” Giuliani made clear in a subsequent interview that he does not view President Obama as having the same patriotism that he’s seen in other Democratic presidents, including Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter; this is not just about mistrusting liberals.
At least on the right, Giuliani’s view, for which he is admirably unapologetic, is barely controversial and would be entirely unsurprising except that few public figures (apparently none of equal prominence so far) have been willing to voice it. The political Left, however, went into full outrage mode, with many in the “mainstream” media, and even Megyn Kelly on Fox News, calling for an apology. CNN’s Gloria Borger called Rudy’s remarks “hateful.” Some tarred Rudy a racist: always the Left’s tactic of first and last resort when trying to silence their critics.
Now the media (again, including Fox) are asking other Republicans whether they agree with Giuliani, as if a “yes” answer would be a scarlet letter pinned to the chests of politicians who will never see Barack Obama’s name on another ballot and who simply don’t fear a president with such low approval ratings. Indeed, Republicans entering a crowded primary season could find tactical advantage in insinuating, subtly or unsubtly, negative opinions of our current president.
Those Republicans need to avoid falling into the trap — not the trap of fielding a question (this applies as well to “Do you think Barack Obama is a Christian?”) and offering answers that really won’t hurt them. I mean the trap of allowing the media to protect Barack Obama by focusing unduly on those answers (which, when stated, give an erroneous impression that the question is relevant, not to mention that it wastes time), and thus to make the conversation be about his motives rather than his policies and actions.
If Barack Obama wants to turn America into an insolvent social-welfare state like so much of Western Europe, does it really matter if it’s because he loves America or because he hates it? If the president wants to put America in the weakest international and military position it has been in for generations, who cares if it is because he hears the voice of Frank Marshall Davis or because he believes that our enemies will be pacified by a group hug? Hey, maybe they love America too!
The questions of a politician’s worldview and underlying motivations are exceptionally important prior to an election. Whether Obama does or doesn’t love the United States should have been a critical question going into the 2008 election, as it was an excellent predictor of his conduct in office. (By 2012, we already understood the man rather well, yet he was still reelected — which says more about American voters and the Republican candidate than about Barack Obama.)
But once in office, particularly when it comes to domestic politics, the personal history and emotions underlying a political philosophy are nearly irrelevant. While Rudy Giuliani’s comments may, as some have suggested, “not be helpful,” it is only to the extent of allowing the Left to turn them into a shiny object distracting television reporters and editorial writers from the actions of a lawless and often clueless president.
As to whether Barack Obama loves his country, I think Rudy is spot-on; my wife (no liberal, she) gives the president the benefit of the doubt. But the question of who is right is unimportant, because, as we both agree, President Obama is doing great harm to the United States.
Whether or not that comes from “love” just doesn’t matter.
— Ross Kaminsky is a self-employed financial-markets trader and investor and a senior fellow of the Heartland Institute. He hosts The Ross Kaminsky Show on Denver’s NewsRadio 850 KOA and fills in for radio talk-show hosts across the country. You can reach Ross by e-mail at rossputin@rossputin.com.
"Sept. 11. Afghanistan. Iraq. Fort Hood. The ground zero mosque. ISIS. Paris.
Again and again, Republicans demand to know why President Obama won’t name the enemy. They say he’s too forgiving, too afraid of ideological conflict, too reluctant to wage all-out war, too eager to find people of good will on the other side.
Maybe they’re right. Maybe he should come out and say it: The GOP is trying to destroy him.
Anyone who has watched Obama’s genteel response to his Republican tormentors shouldn’t be surprised at his delicacy about Islam. He resists generalizations and looks for common ground, whether the context is terrorism or domestic politics. No matter what Republicans do—heckle his speeches, impugn his patriotism, shut down the government, threaten a credit default, stage countless votes to repeal his health care law—he refuses to categorically condemn them.......
[SNIP]
For Democrats, this can be exasperating. It’s especially exasperating when Republicans refuse to take responsibility for, or even disown, outbursts from their colleagues, such as Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” or Rudy Giuliani’s “I do not believe that the president loves America.”......
Please. If we’re going to start calling out religious and political groups for extremism, we could start at home with Republicans. Too many of them spew animus. Too many foment sectarianism. Too many sit by, or make excuses, as others appeal to tribalism. If Obama were to treat them the way they say he should treat Islam—holding the entire faith accountable for its ugliest followers—they’d squeal nonstop about slander and demagogy. They’re lucky that’s not his style."
"It is amusing to watch the furies unleashed in both the White House and the liberal media over former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s citing of the Communist Frank Marshall Davis as an influence on the young Barack Obama. And Giuliani’s insistence that, partly as a direct result of that influence, the president doesn’t “love America the way we do.”
On Sunday, Davis biographer Paul Kengor wrote a terrific piece laying out the history of the Davis-Obama relationship in detail. The full title of Mr. Kengor’s book, notably is The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor. As Kengor points out in detail, Rudy was right. But well aside from that is the larger issue of the influence of Communism itself on the modern Democratic Party and its ideas. Far from being the province of supposedly nutty, frothing far-right zealots, this issue was discussed years ago by none other than Ronald Reagan.
So let’s begin with the specifics. As is well recorded, both in the day and ever after in Reagan lore, on October 27, 1964 actor Reagan gave a nationally televised speech at the end of the presidential campaign on behalf of GOP nominee Senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was fighting a losing battle against LBJ in a moment that turned out to be the high-tide of American liberalism. The Reagan speech, eventually titled “A Time for Choosing,” pulled no punches on the subject of ties between the Democrats and communism. The speech was a rousing success. Not only did it raise a stunning (in the day and even now) $8 million for Goldwater's last few campaign days, it not so coincidentally launched Reagan's own political career as a twice elected California governor and president of the United States — all four victories coming in landslides. Said Reagan:................."
Excellent posting!
Thank you so much.
While Rudy will never be a favorite son here, at least he’s voiced the sentiments a whole lot of us have been waiting to hear!
Let the record show that it finally took a New Yorker to slam 0bama good on the ugly truth. :)
The issue is a remarkable 1983 KGB document on Kennedy, which I published in my 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (HarperCollins). The document is a May 14, 1983 memo from KGB head Victor Chebrikov to his boss, the odious Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov, designated with the highest classification. It concerns a confidential offer to the Soviet leadership by Senator Kennedy. The target: President Ronald Reagan. (A pdf file of the original Russian language document and an English translation are available here.)
With Kennedy's death, this stunning revelation is again making the rounds, especially after Rush Limbaugh flagged it in his "Stack of Stuff." I'm being inundated with emails, asking basically two questions: 1) is the document legitimate; and 2) what does it allege of Senator Kennedy?
First off, yes, the document is legitimate. If it were not, I would have never reported it. Over the years, from my book to radio and web interviews, I've provided specifics. Briefly summarized, here are the basics:"...........
My sense is that the outrage is half-hearted as the Democrat-Socialist cult has grown weary of obama and is actively looking for a new secular messiah to fill the void in their lives and lead them to utopia ... a person to be annointed at a later date (but just in time for the 2016 campaign, that's for sure!)
UNCUT VIDEO: Gov. Scott Walker: ‘It’s One Thing to Fight, It’s Another to Win’ [Walker staying on message during Greta's interview lastnight]
On January 21, 2009, about three-quarters of the way through his first inaugural address, after paragraphs of bromides about American greatness, he alluded to the menace of militant Islam:
For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth…
It has become customary in our time to speak of America as a Judeo-Christian civilization because the facts of history show that, so “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus” as a new formulation of the melting pot meme was a major departure.
In fact, although the settling of the original Thirteen Colonies was almost exclusively the handiwork of Christians from northern Europe, by the time of the American Revolution there were already six Jewish communities, one in each of the major colonial cities. Jews fought and died in the Revolution, and in 1802, when the military academy at West Point opened its doors, one of the first two volunteer cadets was a Jew.
Jews have been part of American culture ever since in the Military, Medicine, Science, Technology, Literature, Theater, Music, Movies, Television, Academe, Law, Journalism and Business..............
Muslims, by contrast, played no role in the making of America. There is no evidence of a Muslim presence before the 20th century. Yet here on that January day was the brand new American President orating that the U.S. was “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus…”......................................."
Finally, for any who doubt this critical portrait: remember, too, that the day after his first inaugural speech and that evening’s series of inaugural balls and festivities, when he entered the Oval Office the next morning to begin work as president -- with the U.S. economy in a crisis not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s -- he asked that his first phone call as president be put through not to some expert on economics but Mahmoud Abbas, the Holocaust Denier and international Muslim terrorist criminal...."
Rudy’s a popular son in my book. He would have made a splendid President of the United States and still would. A Rudy Giuliani is exactly what is needed to lead the country.
His support for “a woman’s right to choose,” buried him here and he’s a practicing Roman Catholic.
Rudy said what should be said.
If Giuliani thinks Obama doesn’t love America, then fine. It’s Rudy’s opinion on a subject that really doesn’t matter. I don’t think Obama loves America. Does anyone really care about that? I didn’t think so.
Obama probably thinks that Giuliani doesn’t love communism. I wonder if anyone will ask him?
The left doesn’t love America.
>> the Left’s faux outrage
The bane of the social psyche.
There is a certain irony in this hoopla over Walker not answering the inane questions by reporters.
Obama, and they the media bend over backards (to the point of being able to lick their heels) in telling us Islam is a religion of faith and peace. That the overwhelming majority of Muslims are peaceful, and those infinitesimally small number of extremists who happen to be Muslims doing workplace violence aren’t doing such in the name of Islam.
Moreover, the media (and the President/government) go out of their way to condemn any Christianity related action - even centuries old - as equal to or worse than the virtuously nonexistent happenstance Muslim workplace violence not-really-Islam, per se.
Okay, work on that premise then. Then why does Democratdom, the Media and Muslims bristle like a wet cat when the possibility is put forth that the President is indeed a Muslim and NOT a Christian? Hmmmmmm?
By raising the stink over what a nobody like Giuliani said the left has completely hidden the fact that Walker also attended the meeting and also addressed the group. What he said was not reported on and it’s like he was never there. That’s probably their purpose behind the hoopla to begin with.
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