Posted on 02/25/2015 10:12:11 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
At its essence, politics is the art of answering the question, "What's in it for me?"
If a politician wants to win a vote, whether it's from citizens on Election Day or from another politician in some legislative hall somewhere, he needs to have an answer for the ubiquitous question. And generally speaking, when Republican leaders have put that question to Barack Obama, the president has been unable to provide a viable answer.
But sometimes it is. Like when former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani proclaimed last week that Obama does not love America. Guiliani might not have been racist himself -- although he probably was -- he was speaking to racists in their own language.
Giuliani's comments are a variation on a theme as old as Obama's presidency -- that a president whose policies sit well within the American mainstream, a man strictly vanilla in temperament and personality, is somehow radical, in the expectation that people will believe it because his skin color is decidedly chocolate.
Two days after Giuliani accused Obama of not loving America, his biographer Wayne Barrett wrote a column in which he offered New York Daily News readers a tour of the stone-throwing former mayor's domicile and revealed it to be made entirely of glass.
Giuliani's father was a convicted felon and legbreaker for a loan shark. By a stroke of fortune, Harold Giuliani's felony conviction was under an alias, and he connected the crime to his legal identity exactly once -- to avoid the draft during World War II. Obama's grandfather, perhaps the closest thing the president had to a father figure, served with distinction in World War II.
"I would go anywhere, any place, anytime ... to defend my country," Giuliani reportedly said a week earlier. "That's a man who fights for his people. Unlike our president."
That's odd coming from a man who never served in the military, even though his service eligibility - 1962 to 1970 - coincided almost precisely with the Vietnam War's largest draftee activations.
And the claim, like so many before it, is easily debunked. Going by policy, the only measure that matters, Obama is not only not a radical, but he's less liberal than the last Democrat to hold the office, who himself wasn't much of a liberal.
His signature legislation - the Affordable Care Act - is based on a Republican plan, while former President Bill Clinton's attempt at universal health care was a European-style single-payer plan. More than one-third of Obama's 2009 stimulus legislation consisted of the old conservative standby, tax cuts.
Obama's proposals for gun legislation focused largely on banning the possession of so-called assault weapons and universal background checks. The former had been passed under Clinton and allowed to expire under former President George W. Bush, and polls indicate that the latter is supported by 75 to 80 percent of Americans.
Even the immigration reform executive order has support within the Republican Party's Chamber of Commerce wing.
Again, the simple act of opposing Obama doesn't make someone a racist. But there has always been only one thing about this president that could be considered radical.
And it's not his policies.
See tagline.
That was a comment on the article, of course, not your reply:)
If truth makes it so, guess Im in. Idiots!
I always like to check out the author of these “news articles”.
Eric Poole isn’t an Ellwood City area native, but his children, Gareth and Calista, have local roots going back five generations through their mother, Dawna. The four Pooles live in Ellport. The Ledger is the latest entry in Eric Poole’s checkered employment history, which includes stints at a gun range, as a steelworker and in the food service industry. Since getting his first grown-up newspaper job at the age of 30, he has received more than 30 regional, statewide and national journalism awards, including a first-place Keystone Award in 2008 for selected columns from The Ledger.
He’s sounds like a typical DUer.
He was busy eating dogs and grasshoppers and listening to his Imam.
If he thinks that Obama is less liberal than Clinton, then he is deluded indeed. Obama reversed most of the compromises that Clinton made with the Republicans.
The author is a hopeless twit.
I see the race baiters have consulted their super secret racism decoder rings to determine that Rudy’s comments were racist. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you.
Memo to Rudy..........
When you are catching flak, you’re over the target
Not many people care what this lib rag sheet says as they only have a circulation of 3500.
My wonderful niece was so unfortunate to be born on the EXACT same day as Obama. God was playing a joke on us I am sure. At least the world got one really good person born on that day to counteract the birth of BHO.
Just why is saying ‘I do not believe Obama loves America like other Presidents have loved America,” in any way connected to racism?
Is this writer inferring that not loving America is somehow representative of black Americans? If so, I think he is the true racist here.
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