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.
“In fact, it goes even deeper than that and can be considered an attack on academia and the very concept of “reality.””
they finally start catching on.
“He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. And that’s why I’m endorsing Barney for President.”
I hate you,
You hate me,
We’re a dysfunctional family…
If I were PBO I’d totally call Giuliani to say, “Rudy, I love you.”
This from the assho… Mayor who loved his city so, so very much, that instead of putting his Command Center in Brooklyn or Queens – where the exerts told him – but in the World Trade Center – which had already been attacked – so that his f*ck-pad where he was going to meet his then mistress for a ‘quicker-pecker-upper, wasn’t far from the Mayor’s residence.
Oy…
I’m deeply ashamed to come from the same ethnic group as this man. He offends us all.
If there’s anyone who can possibly offend me more than Walker, its got to be Giuliani.
This white’s-only history movement is really getting old.
Anything else is not really History!
Saw Walker on CNBC this am. He was asked about Rudy’s statement and all he could not state that the president did love america. Walker has just got the drivers seat of the clown car.
I’m shocked that Walker would be asked about this. Did he actually give a straight answer? Will anyone ask Scott why he didn’t just get up and leave when Giuliani began attacking the Commander-in-Chief while our troops are risking everything for freedom and the homeland?
Or are there different rules for Democrats and Republicans? (File under “No shit, Sherlock.”)
○ Giuliani: Perfect Time for Netanyahu to Address Congress
○ Rudy Giuliani: Obama propaganda to blame for NYPD officer murders
○ Rudy Giuliani attacks Obama over Israel record – 2012
Why doesn’t he just go ahead and change his first name to Benito?
It’s about shock value. He got what he wanted, badly needed attention for his flagging public presence. Does he still have a public presence?
i’m not offended.
i’m quite glad i wasn’t brought up the way rudy was brought up.
Guiliani seems to have been given the position of Designated Slanderer by Team Conservative, since his comments have been beyond any reality or rationality for some time. They are also becoming more and more audible dog whistles, and are obviously intended to be extremely offensive. Note that Team Conservative does not distance them selves from his ravings and he often speaks at GOoP fundraisers, so this is a team play and Rudy isn’t some free agent just seeking relevance and facetime.
To keep the historical analogies flowing, it certainly seems these “Doesn’t Love America!” libels are also directed at the left, and we are basically entering a New McCarthyite period, which our Right feels empowered to return to after their roll-out of the New Jim Crow has proven so wildly successful and popular with working class whites. So if you’re not for more wars against Islam, you Don’t Love America!—this is to be the new pitch.
We recently had some rightwing federal judge compare the left’s statements about Bush’s War to Hitler’s lies about Germany being stabbed in the back in WWI. As usual it is the American “conservatives” who are actually attacking historical (and scientific) reality, in particular the sorry course of Bush’s War and its run-up. It is the American Nationalistic Jingoistic “America-Lovin'” Right who are the ones peddling the shitbrain brownshirt Stab in the Back stories. It’s always back to manufactured fear and the massive national benefits of war and aggression and military domination for authoritarian rightist movements.
Walker better be brushing up on the New Reality if he’s running because it’s gonna be “All ISIS All the Time” from here on out. The fact that he obviously can’t bear to read anything longer than a couple sentences might be a drawback after the primary….foreign policy has so many words, goddammit!
They’re all coming from the same place as IS. Everything that’s happened since the Enlightenment is evil, and if you don’t believe that then you don’t love your God/Country/Tribe.
You write that this horseshit…
But…but…but…wait a minute, here!!!
Since when is modern academia some kind of bastion of reality? Sure, there are a few people doing good work inside of that system, but not a very big goddamned percentage. Most of them are just clever plagiarists, rewriting the work of others. From the lowest underclassmen at lousy schools right on up to the highest tenured professors at elite universities…and beyond, to the vapid political hustlers who head the administrations of those universities…where is the “reality?”
Here?
Here?
Please!!!
The fish rots from the head. Bet on it. Done mostly rotted already.
As is astonishingly common the case, a right-wing troll hits the nail right on the button without knowing how, why or even that he hit it.
Carrion on both sides of the case.
Carry on…
AG
Giuliani is behaving like a man trying to wave off a criminal investigation through blackmail and defamation. Or do a Hail Mary for political office.
He has embedded himself in the media, so he is the go-to attack dog when there is silliness to spew.
It is very offensive from the guy who used 9-11 noun verb to promote the trashing of the Bill of Rights and to stampede public opinion into a war footing that has made the danger metastasize while he feathers his nest as a “security consultant”.
You can see the same attack in the red scare of the Truman administration and the attacks of Joe McCarthy on the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. And in the FBI’s lectures on religion and family under J. Edgar Hoover.
The GOP has a fondness for Parson Weems’s style of history.
It is the continued lust for a total conservative victory and permanent conservative majority in stasis forever. The Thousand-Year global republic that rules the world of happy families and free markets.
And it starts with a fundamental denial of the plain meaning of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
If that’s the case, expect Mario Cuomo’s boy Andrew to somehow follow suit, because he appears to be directly in
Pete Brouhaha’s…errr, ahhh, sorry, I meant Preet Bharara’s…sights for conduct unbecoming the heir to a political dynasty.Of course…this is not likely to happen. It’s one thing to take down an essentially local crook…Silver has no silhouette to speak of outside of NY State, and he kept as low a silhouette as possible inside the state as well. He wuz in it for the money and power, not for national office. But Cuomo is a whole ‘nother ballgame. Probably just as crooked but much more able grant…”favors” out of state to those who wish to see him go higher. Maybe Bharara will find it more difficult to pin him…specially using the national media…or maybe he’s just got his hand out for higher favors than Silver’s team could grant.
We’ll see.
Won’t we.
Cuomo gets a pass and within a decently circumspect Bharara’s star suddenly rises?
“Coulda be.” as I believe Yul Krynner said in “The King and I.”
“Coulda be.”
Watch.
AG
There is a very simple explanation for this,Booman :
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/06/wolff200706
Please understand that this is very basic, core, fascist rhetoric. The premise of fascism is that there is a core of “good” people who represent the “real” country and a mass of outsider “bad” people who are undermining they country because they don’t believe in the country’s “real” values. The next step is to call for the elimination of the “other”.
Conservatives have always employed this in the U.S. Nixon played on this – having his designates state that anyone who voted for McGovern did not love his/her country.
Of course, fascists exist in every human population, the question is to what degree and how comfortable they are in expressing fascist rhetoric. We certainly have seen with the rise of the right wing media bubble that within that bubble they feel they can say almost anything.
It’s also true that for every instance of fascist group thinking there is also a problem that their concept of their “values” and the reasons why they “love their country” never stands up to examination. Generally it plays on the “we never admit to any mistake or never being less than #1 by any measure”. But in practice the values are always to support the fascist masters. If Reagan or Bush did X it proves he loves his country. If Clinton or Obama do exactly the same thing it proves that they don’t.
In the end it’s all about and us-or-them construct that – without exception – is based on race and/or religion.
If one could retain one’s current income and wealth, how many USians would choose to live here and not somewhere else? Hell, some want a one-way ride to Mars with little to no time there upon arrival.
All this “love” of god and country speak is meaningless and immature. Particularly coming out of the mouths of those that behave like parents stealing from their kids’ piggy banks.
I’d like to move back to my grandfather’s home town . Doesn’t it look beautiful? Like California but greener.
Why Parents Routinely Raid Their Kids’ Piggy Banks
No wonder USians don’t give a shit about what AGW will mean for their children and grandchildren. Why their “comfort,” convenience, and excess comes before not only the world but their own children as well.
Damon Linker’s viewpoint misses the point and overstates the current power of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. That 8 million figure is the total population of the land area that ISIL’s troops are currently defending, expanding, or both. Although their ambition is to control that territory, if their current troop strength is really 100,000 and half of them are new recruits (a bunch from the West) it is unlikely that they can administer that territory to make those 8 million military assets. Linker is buying the claims that ISIL is in fact state-like if not a state, which means being able to effectively employ the power of total conscription and command-and-control of the economy on a war footing. There is no evidence that that transfer of loyalties has occurred yet. However reintroducing US troops into the area could cause the backlash that makes it true. Choose between the butchers of Fallujah and the butchers of Mosul, who at least speak your language and don’t call you “raghead”. Is that not what Bill O’Reilly and Rudy Giuliani are demanding?
The fact that some folks have just awakened to the religious difference between al Quaeda’s radical Wahabbism and whatever you want to call the religious doctrines of ISIL is more a product of the media ignorance of ISIL’s presence in general and the fact that neither US intelligence (or that part of it that feeds what Congress and thus John McCain knows) nor the US media had heard of ISIL until the June blitzkrieg means that Linker is covering the tracks of the US national security establishment by attacking “liberals”. What were the conservatives doing a year ago and still doing? Arguing that the US should arm opponents of Assad’s regime. What are they doing now? Arguing that we should nuke ISIL.
Republicans have proven too reckless to handle US foreign policy, and they are now trying to politically force President Obama into recklessness through shaming him and scaring weak-kneed members of the Democratic caucus who a long time ago should have called out the Republican’s disrespect for the President and empty claims of national security expertise.
Republicans need to be reminded forcefully and unmistakably that the fact of history is that 9/11 happened on their watch. While they were busy planning the war in Iraq and Russia and looking the other way.
The President must not submit to their propaganda blackmail that seeks to divert attention from the disastrous invitation of Netanyahu. It is time to suspend all US foreign aid to Israel until they stop their violations of human rights of people in occupied territories. An announcement of support for the right of Palestine to seek redress at the International Criminal Court might be appropriate. It is time that the President remind the Israeli government who is the vassal in this relationship and who needs who.
The Republicans so much want President Obama’s presidency to be a complete disaster that they will send US troops into a war again just so they can look tough. The Republicans are willing to endanger national security just to punish a Democratic administration. The sad part is that there are senior official in the US national security establishment will to help the Republicans do this.
I am impressed. I stopped reading after the straw man first sentence. I find the use of straw men deceitful. I have better things to do than read something such a dishonest person would write.
Which reminds me, what’s with the movers and shakers like Giuliani dressing in drag?
So that’s how you spell his name. I thought that it was spelled ghouliani.