Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani caused an uproar this week when he questioned whether President Barack Obama loves America. Progressive, er, I mean “objective” journalists were beside themselves over the prospect of a Republican saying about a Democratic president the things Democrats and the media routinely said about President George W. Bush, or members of Congress during the government shutdown. Such nerve!
The fact of the matter is Obama does love America…he just doesn’t like it very much.
What would your significant other say if you went to them right now and said, “Honey, I love you. In fact, I love you so much I want to fundamentally transform you?” After the laughter stopped and they realized you were serious, I imagine it would begin with expletives and escalate from there.
Now, you may love this person, but it’s pretty clear the person is not your biggest fan if he or she wants to “fundamentally transform” you. Remember, fundamental transformation is not “you could lose a few pounds” or “I wish you’d quick smoking;” it is a swipe at their essence.
In 2008, Barack Obama campaigned on the idea of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” I suspect many, if not most, of his supporters never gave that phrase a second thought. But it was the core not only of his campaign, but of his professional life.
Community organizers don’t protest a system they think needs tweaking. They protest when they view the system as fundamentally flawed, founded on a corrupt premise and in need of replacing. People don’t take to the streets to add a couple of minor regulations to a capitalist system; they want to tear it down because they deem it “unjust.”
Progressive community organizers don’t try to solve a problem, because any given problem is not something that can be addressed when the underlying system is the real problem.
As Obama put it when he was secretly taped at an organizing meeting during his activist days, “More broadly, we progressive community organizers exploit the anger that festers when people feel that injustice and corruption leave them with no chance of improving their lives.”
Can you believe that?
It’s not true. Obama actually wrote that line in a Los Angeles Times column this week, only where I wrote “we progressive community organizers” the president wrote “groups like al Qaeda and ISIL.”
If you read the first statement and thought the president could have said that, you’re not that far from where Rudy was coming from. That either version is believable is telling.
The line I edited sounds like something Obama would have said. It’s not hateful to say it. It’s not racist. It’s just a fact. And it being a fact is why so many on the left have accused Giuliani of being a hater or a racist – they don’t want people to think too hard about it.
The president has said some positive things about the country, but he’s said many more negative ones. To deflect criticism of radical Islam, he brought up slavery in the United States. Slavery here ended 150 years ago, yet Barack Obama invoked it to draw moral equivalence between us and ISIS, a group actually currently enslaving human beings. You can either think he drew that comparison because he doesn’t like both very much, or he’s a fan of both. Neither option is particularly flattering.
When Obama speaks positively of the country, people who pay attention to what he says know to wait for the other shoe to drop. It’s like, “So and so is one of my best friends, but … “ And what comes after the ‘but’ is all you need to know.
Like a parent who loves his kid but thinks the kid is fat, stupid and/or lazy – the president does not like this country a whole lot. That’s fine; he doesn’t have to. But he shouldn’t be leading what he has such a problem with…unless he wants to fundamentally change it, which he does.
So the real problem isn’t that the president doesn’t like the country very much, it’s that so many people voted for, and still support, a man who doesn’t like the country very much.