Does Barack Obama love his country? Call me a rube for saying so, but it’s a fair question.
To ask the question is not the same as venting the familiar swamp gasses: that he’s a foreigner, at heart if not in fact; that he’s a Manchurian candidate sent to undermine the republic; that he’s a secret Marxist or secret jihadist sympathizer; etc. Put it this way: Why would anybody who sees the world the way Barack Obama does love America?
For the progressive, there is very little to love about the United States. Washington, Jefferson, Madison? A bunch of rotten slaveholders, hypocrites, and cowards even when their hearts were in the right places. The Declaration of Independence? A manifesto for the propertied classes. The Constitution? An artifact of sexism and white supremacy. The sacrifices in the great wars of the 20th century? Feeding the poor and the disenfranchised into the meat-grinder of imperialism. The gifts of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Astor? Blood money from self-aggrandizing robber barons.
And this lovely pile of ad nauseum nonsense ends up in an indictment of liberals themselves.
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? There is very little that a man with Barack Obama’s views and proclivities should love about the country, beyond the fact that its people are so vulnerable to insipid sentimentality that they twice elected him president.
And boom, Rudy Giuliani is absolved. He can't be racist because all liberals hate America, so saying that Barack Obama, being a liberal, hates his country is not an opinion but fact, along with the fact that 66 million or so people who voted for him also hate America. We're not a part of Williamson's America, and never will be. We'll always be "the other", to be hated, shunned, pitied, and exterminated.
Nothing's changed since 2001 for the NRO set. It's always "We're taking America back!" for them.
Does Barack Obama love his country? Call me a rube for saying so, but it’s a fair question. OK, Mr. Williamson; you're a rube.
ReplyDeleteI know it's a conservative project to reduce American history to fluffy bunnies and foundation /g/a/r/m/e/n/t/s/ documents, but it's better to acknowledge that historical events happened than to have to cure the ignorance about, say, the Civil War in adults.
Thank you for reading this idiot (Williamson) so we don't have to. Isn't his writing a vast amount of psychological projection, though? Isn't it the so-called conservatives in this country who are screaming about how the system (our current social safety nets, our system of moderately responsible environmental regulation, "gubmint" generally) is rotten, aren't they the ones screaming about how society (gays getting married, women aborting) is rotten, and especially aren't they the ones vilifying the opposition?
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