Some of the media elites gave old-fashioned patriotism a clout to the jaw on May 1, May Day.  When a reporter for a major American television network calls Fidel Castro “Cuba’s revolutionary hero,” without a hint of irony, you know that somebody’s confused about what’s honorable and patriotic.

In May Day reports from Havana, CBS correspondent Liz Palmer managed to utter the oxymoronic phrase not once but twice, on CBS’s The Early Show and again on the CBS Evening News.  Palmer also praised new dictator Raul Castro’s efforts to “improve workers’ lives.”

Leaders of communist revolutions are not heroes.  Without exception, they have been depraved monsters, responsible for murder, torture and economic destruction.

Palmer was born in England and educated in Canada, but somewhere along the line she should have learned that the Castro boys rejected the most basic American cultural and political values, namely the rule of law, respect for God-given human rights, the democratic republican form of government and the free market.

Defending these values, and celebrating the nation that adopted them, prospered from them and offered them to the world, is the core of American patriotism. Yet during the May Day episode of ABC’s Good Morning America, anchor Charlie Gibson reduced patriotism to a campaign issue.  Chatting with Arianna Huffington, Gibson said Republicans “have owned, the, quote, ‘issue’ of patriotism for some time now.”

Is defending America a mere campaign tactic?  Shouldn’t it be the bottom line of American politics?

This apparent disrespect for patriotism extends beyond the media elite to encompass the political elite as well.  May 1 was the legal deadline to build 700 miles of double-layer fencing along the Mexican border.  Only 90 miles of fence had been erected by the deadline, and only 12 miles of that is double-layer. 

Rather than celebrate the completion of a barrier that would greatly improve national security and the rule of law, Americans spent May 1 watching thousands of illegal aliens marching in the streets of major American cities waving Mexican flags (until politically savvy organizers confiscated the Mexican flags and replaced them with Old Glory).  Some of the protestors reportedly carried signs calling for the surrender to Mexico of one third of U.S. territory, everything from Texas to California to Washington State. And those were the reasonable ones.  The extremists were calling for non-indigenous Americans to return to Europe and Africa.

No matter what laws they pass, the Republican administration and Democratic Congress apparently do not intend to take control of the border, and the media are giving them a free pass.  Old-fashioned notions like patriotism and borders are passé, at least according to the secularist, egalitarian, internationalist value system that dominates American elites.  Continued...