Those of us who supported the president’s election, and we constitute a majority of voting Americans, have the right to take personal offense at the disrespect the man is shown on a routine basis. This is particularly true when that disrespect is extended by implication to us. Just look at what former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani had to say at a Manhattan fundraiser for Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Does this offend you?
“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said, as quoted by Politico. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”
The most you can say for this remark is that at least Giuliani knew he was saying a horrible thing.
It would be easy to to chalk this up to a personal grudge about the president’s skin color and his father’s background and the time he spent in Indonesia as a child or the Pakistani students he befriended in college or whatever secret Kenyan Muslim conspiracy you might wish to espouse. But this is an attack on the whole left and all of Obama’s supporters. In fact, it goes even deeper than that and can be considered an attack on academia and the very concept of “reality.”
You can see the exact same attack in the war on AP history classes, where the right is accusing teachers of pushing “an emphasis on race, gender, class, ethnicity, grievance and American-bashing while simultaneously omitting the most basic structural and philosophical elements considered essential to the understanding of American History for generations.”
It’s an attack on anyone who doesn’t think America and traditional forms of Christianity are synonymous. And if you can’t single out Islam for particular condemnation, you simply don’t love your own country.
The rise of ISIS presents the left with some intellectual challenges, but these conundrums are minuscule when compared with the reckoning the right should be making with the Middle East their Great Decider created with his deeply serious Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out decision making in foreign policy.
It’s true that the president had an unusual upbringing, but his core values are indistinguishable from the values of the academy. If that’s a strictly leftist thing these days, it’s not because we weren’t brought up to love America. It’s because the right has turned education into an enemy nearly as threatening to them as the Islamic State.
