[NOTE: More on this topic here.]
I don’t think he loves it in any conventional sense. You don’t want to “fundamentally transform” something you love.
Or do you? For example, a family can get together in an intervention to try to motivate a loved one to stop doing drugs. They’re looking for a fairly fundamental transformation to occur, and yet they still love the person.
In fact, they would say they’re doing this because they love the person. And that’s how I think Obama would answer when questioned about why, if he loves America so much, he wants to fundamentally transform it, and why he criticizes it so much. He’d say he does it because he loves it so much.
Now, I happen to think the evidence is overwhelming that he not only doesn’t love America but that he doesn’t even like it. It’s a feeling I have about a lot of liberals I know, too, those who can’t seem to conclude a simple conversation about a seemingly-innocuous and non-political topic without dragging in some observation about how awful America is. It’s like they have a nervous twitch or Tourette’s; every now and then they just have to say it.
But I also think that Rudy Giuliani and other politicians would do well to stay far away from this particular topic. It gives the opposition a golden opportunity to pile on with the “mean, hateful Republicans” meme. And for what? The only people who respond positively to such statements about Obama and America are the already-convinced.
And it’s a thing that is inherently unprovable and unknowable, anyway, because it’s a statement about what’s in someone’s heart. The most we can say is that Obama’s behaves as though he doesn’t love America. But again, why bother?
As soon as I heard the story, though, a memory rose from my youth. We’re at a dinner of my extended family. Is it Thanksgiving, a birthday, or what? I don’t know, but at the table sit my mother and father, my brother and me, my maternal grandmother, and the uncle who is my father’s brother.
The conversation veers, as it so often does when my uncle is around, to the political. My uncle is around quite a bit, because he lives very nearby, as does my grandmother. All the adults at the table are liberal Democrats except for my uncle, who is a Communist (although carefully not a member of the Party), a fact I’ve known for just about forever because he is quite free with his pro-Soviet commentary. It is one of the leitmotifs of family life—that, and the rising volume of my father’s voice as he argues with his brother in frustration.
To my uncle, nothing America does is right. But everything the USSR does is wonderful. When I was young I got an education in what the mind of a leftist fanatic looked like, and it was astounding how he could take any event that you would think might reflect poorly on the Soviets, and flip it around somehow to make it sound okay and even benevolent (at least, to him).
My father’s family had come from Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, and my uncle had been born there and had come as a tiny child. My father, the younger one, had been born in the United States. They grew up poor and struggling and were self-made men. Like Obama, they were raised among many people who were pro-Communist, but that was in the days before and immediately after the revolution. With my father, Communism never took. But it established deep deep roots in my uncle.
My mother was from a very different background. Her family had been in this country since early in the 1800’s. They were liberal Democrats, including her mother, who was the only grandparent I really knew. My grandmother was a patriot. She had plaques on the walls of her apartment thanking her for her service on behalf of soldiers during the war, and she would listen to my uncle—the brother of her son-in-law—with growing fury.
And that’s what I remember best—when my grandmother could take it no more and finally would say something to him. She was already around eighty years old and her voice shook, but not with age. It shook with frustration and barely-suppressed outrage, as she said forcibly but not loudly (the intensity of her emotion actually weakened her voice rather than strengthened it; that same thing happens to mine if I get angry enough): “America has been good to you. If you hate it here so much, why don’t you go back to Russia where you came from?”
With a little smile, he would answer, “I have to stay here where I’m needed, to help bring about changes to make America better.” If pressed on the question of whether he loved America (a question he never was asked), I imagine he would say that he did, although I don’t know. But that would be an awfully odd sort of love, wouldn’t it?
Obama—as Giuliani also pointed out—was influenced by Communists in his youth. True enough, and if they were not necessarily members of the Communist Party, I know full well that doesn’t mean much. I know the milieu to which Giuliani is referring, and a person being raised that way (I was not) doesn’t always mean that person swallows Communism whole. AFter all, my father didn’t. But it certainly can mean the person becomes a leftist (call it socialist, Communist, whatever you like), and I think that in Obama’s case, as I’ve said many times, the evidence is that he’s a man of the far left and has been for his entire life. He has learned to hide that in order to get elected, but he certainly didn’t hide it very well (although well enough, well enough).
There is a dilemma for those who would criticize Obama such as Giuliani. Giuliani is out of office, and probably never will hold office again, so he is free of the need to be all that careful in order to protect his political career. When he made the original statement about Obama’s lack of affection for this country, Giuliani was at a rather small (about 60 people) and seemingly private Republican dinner. But Giuliani should know that nothing of that sort can be considered to be private anymore, and that whatever he says will be reported on if the press or the left thinks it can harm the right. So whatever he says, it will be extrapolated by the left and the MSM to be a demonstration of the animus that dwells in the heart of all Republicans. I think it’s best to not go in that direction. Leave it to the talk show hosts.
On the other hand, if no politician ever goes in that direction, we maintain the fiction that Obama is just an ordinary bloke who loves America and wants whats best for it, rather than a leftist who wants America to lose power and status in the world. But I think the best way to point this out is to stick to the facts and not the feelings, and the facts are what Obama has done to show his leftism and dislike of America. And he’s done plenty.
