“Descending Into Crankdom”: Rudy’s Warped Obama Hit Falls Flat
Generally speaking, when you start a comment with the qualifier “I know this is a horrible thing to say,” it’s a good sign you shouldn’t say it. It’s sort of like starting a sentence with “This is probably going to sound racist, but…” Just stop. Right there. Don’t go on. You’ve already warned yourself.
Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani has become the latest politician to not listen to his own vocalized alarm bells. After warning a roomful of Republican big-wigs that what he was about to say a horrible thing, Giuliani said a horrible thing.
“I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani told the conservative audience at an event for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in New York Wednesday night. “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.”
What the effing eff, Giuliani?!?
Not that anyone else present dissented or disagreed. Actually I imagine the 60 or so Republicans in the audience then grabbed the party favor dog whistles from in their swag bags and hooped and hollered it up.
Scott Walker apparently spoke as well but his aides insisted his comments were all off the record. Presumably Giuilani’s aides were passed out in a corner somewhere, high on their own horses or something else. And after his speech rant, Giuliani doubled down in an interview with Politico.
While ugly insults against President Obama are so frequent these days it’s hard to be surprised, Giuliani’s assertion that Obama “wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up” is still breathtaking. Made to a room of Republican business executives and media figures, who its pretty safe to assume were mostly white, Giuliani might as well have just outright said Obama “isn’t like us.” It would be refreshing to see the Republican Party, which so desperately wants to appeal to the diversity of American voters, forcefully stand up against those within its ranks who insult that diversity.
It’s striking that Giuliani made his remarks at an event for Scott Walker, who the day before made news by defending the fact that he’d not graduated from college and yet should still be considered qualified to be president. That is also a debate about elitism, about who belongs and who doesn’t. One could imagine a room of presumably top-educated conservatives (Giuliani, for instance, went to NYU Law School) ostracizing Walker. But no, Walker has the pro-business, anti-worker policies to be in the club. Plus, of course, he’s white.
Part of what’s appealing—in fact, the only thing that’s appealing—about Scott Walker being president is that he would represent and connect with the millions of Americans who haven’t gone to college and yet still work hard and deserve their shot at the American Dream. The president should be the president for all Americans, not just those with the same educational background he or she shares. The same should go for race. Giuliani’s remarks echo Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent” remarks in the last presidential election, suggesting that not only was almost half of the country lazy, don’t take personal responsibility and simply “don’t care for their lives,” but that it wouldn’t be his job as president to “worry about those people.” Given the changing demographic realities in America, and the fact that he was running against the nation’s first black president, it was hard to not hear Romney’s comments through the lens of race.
Especially when taken together, Giuliani and Romney’s comments reveal a deeper Republican truth—the idea that certain Americans are more important than others and those Americans should be the ones the president is like and even “loves” and certainly thinks about first and foremost. Call them “job creators” or “patriots” or whatever you want: They’re probably white, and definitely well off. Call it “trickle down politics,” the fundamentally elitist Republican notion that taking care of “us” at the top should be the priority of political leadership. Theoretically, it eventually trickles down, though we’ve been waiting centuries for more than a dribble.
Rudy Giuliani’s comments are narrow-minded, ugly and just plain offensive. But what’s even more disturbing is the biased, morally superior, elitist Republican worldview that his comments merely reflect.
By: Sally Kohn, The Daily Beast, February 19, 2015
“Giuliani Falls In Ditch, Keeps Digging”: For Republicans, There Seems To Be Something Different About President Obama
Rudy Giuliani is apparently under an odd impression: the problems he creates by saying dumb things will go away if he just keeps talking. Someone probably ought to tell him he has this backwards.
The New York Republican declared Tuesday night that President Obama doesn’t love America or Americans. By Wednesday morning, Giuliani insisted this was not necessarily an attack on the president’s patriotism. By mid-day, the clownish former mayor seemed eager to embarrass himself further, insisting, “President Obama didn’t live through September 11, I did”
And by last night, Giuliani’s descent into farce was complete.
Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York on Thursday defended his assertion that President Obama did not love America, and said that his criticism of Mr. Obama’s upbringing should not be considered racist because the president was raised by “a white mother.”
He added, “This isn’t racism. This is socialism or possibly anti-colonialism.”
I see. So, by this reasoning, it seems as if Rudy Giuliani has positioned himself as pro-colonialism.
In the same interview with the New York Times, the failed GOP presidential candidate “challenged a reporter to find examples of Mr. Obama expressing love for his country.” In other words, by Wednesday night, Giuliani, who tried and failed to hedge on his own ridiculous condemnations, was right back to where he was on Tuesday night.
I suppose it’s possible that some of the president’s more unhinged detractors might still find Giuliani’s garbage persuasive. Fox News’ Sean Hannity is on board, as is Gov. Bobby Jindal (R). Giuliani himself, with his challenge to a reporter, genuinely seems to believe there are no examples of the president “expressing love for his country.”
How about last month’s State of the Union address?
“I know how tempting such cynicism may be. But I still think the cynics are wrong. I still believe that we are one people. I still believe that together, we can do great things, even when the odds are long.
“I believe this because over and over in my six years in office, I have seen America at its best. I’ve seen the hopeful faces of young graduates from New York to California, and our newest officers at West Point, Annapolis, Colorado Springs, New London. I’ve mourned with grieving families in Tucson and Newtown, in Boston, in West Texas, and West Virginia. I’ve watched Americans beat back adversity from the Gulf Coast to the Great Plains, from Midwest assembly lines to the Mid-Atlantic seaboard. I’ve seen something like gay marriage go from a wedge issue used to drive us apart to a story of freedom across our country, a civil right now legal in states that seven in 10 Americans call home.
“So I know the good, and optimistic, and big-hearted generosity of the American people who every day live the idea that we are our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper.”
When Republicans panicked over the Ebola threat, Obama reminded Americans about the importance of our nation’s leadership role in the world and celebrated the work that only the United States could do. When Republicans couldn’t figure what to say about ISIS, the president celebrated American greatness once more.
“Our technology companies and universities are unmatched. Our manufacturing and auto industries are thriving. Energy independence is closer than it’s been in decades. For all the work that remains, our businesses are in the longest uninterrupted stretch of job creation in our history. Despite all the divisions and discord within our democracy, I see the grit and determination and common goodness of the American people every single day – and that makes me more confident than ever about our country’s future.
“Abroad, American leadership is the one constant in an uncertain world. It is America that has the capacity and the will to mobilize the world against terrorists. It is America that has rallied the world against Russian aggression, and in support of the Ukrainian peoples’ right to determine their own destiny. It is America – our scientists, our doctors, our know-how – that can help contain and cure the outbreak of Ebola. It is America that helped remove and destroy Syria’s declared chemical weapons so that they can’t pose a threat to the Syrian people or the world again. And it is America that is helping Muslim communities around the world not just in the fight against terrorism, but in the fight for opportunity, and tolerance, and a more hopeful future.”
Maybe Giuliani just doesn’t listen to the president much. Or maybe he flunked listening comprehension.
There is a larger question, though, about why the unhinged wing of the Republican Party finds such nonsense appealing. To be sure, the GOP hated Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter every day of their presidencies, but I don’t recall ever hearing prominent Republican figures invest time and energy into arguing that the previous Democratic presidents just didn’t love their country. Clinton and Carter were attacked constantly, but their patriotism was never really part of the equation.
There seems to be something different about President Obama that brings out something uglier and more visceral from some GOP critics. It’s probably not his policy agenda – the president endorsed Mitt Romney’s health care plan, John McCain’s climate plan, and George W. Bush’s immigration plan – so there must be something else.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 20, 2015
“A Handy Way To Shift The Discussion”: How Republicans Will Use Scott Walker’s Lack Of A College Degree To Stir Class Resentment
Since we’re now all fascinated by Scott Walker, there’s been some discussion in the past few days of the fact that Walker would be the first president in many decades who didn’t have a college degree. He left Marquette after four years, and though he apparently was quite a few credits short of graduating, most people would regard it as an unwise career move when you’ve come that far. Nevertheless, Walker did fine for himself, and some conservatives are now holding up his example as a triumphant rebuke to liberal elitism. Anticipating the scorn Walker will receive from those elitists, they rattle off lists of the high-achievers who didn’t get a degree, like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.
From what I can tell, the only liberal who has actually said that Walker’s lack of a degree is problematic was Howard Dean, in an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. But Dean’s one comment keeps getting cited (see Glenn Reynolds or Deroy Murdock or Charles C.W. Cooke or Chris Cillizza) as evidence that “liberals” are looking down their snooty noses at Walker, and by extension, at the majority of Americans who don’t have a college degree.
Which leads me to believe that this is a vein Republicans may be tapping into repeatedly, particularly if Walker becomes the GOP nominee. It wouldn’t be anything new, though if he himself indulged in it, Walker could come by resentment of pointy-headed intellectuals a little more honestly than, say, George H.W. Bush, graduate of Phillips Andover and Yale, who sneered in 1988 that Michael Dukakis represented the “Harvard boutique.” Walker also recently started battling the University of Wisconsin (beloved within the state, but about which voters in Iowa have no similar feelings, I’m guessing), which should help him portray himself as a crusader against the tenured enemies of real Americans.
Anti-intellectualism has often been an effective way for Republicans to stir up class resentment while distracting from economic issues. It says to voters: Don’t think about who has economic power and which party is advocating for their interests. Don’t aim your disgruntlement at Wall Street, or corporations that don’t pay taxes, or the people who want to keep wages low and make unions a memory. Point it in a different direction, at college professors and intellectuals (and Hollywood, while you’re at it). They’re the ones keeping you down. You got laid off while the CEO took home $20 million last year? Forget about that: The real person to be angry at is a professor of anthropology somewhere who said something mean about Scott Walker because he doesn’t have a degree.
There are going to be more than a few Republicans who see in that argument a handy way to shift the discussion away from economic inequality while still sending the message that they’re on the side of ordinary folks. Here, for instance, is Rush Limbaugh yesterday:
The stories are legion of all the great Americans, successful, who have not graduated from college. And of course the two names that come to people’s mind right off the bat are me and Steve Jobs. And then some people throw Gates in there. So there are three people who have reached the pinnacle, who have not gone to college, and those two or three names get bandied about all the time in this discussion.
But it doesn’t matter. To the elites, that doesn’t matter, it doesn’t mean that they are qualified to be in the elite group. And the elite group in Washington is what we call the ruling class or the D.C. establishment, both parties, or what have you. And it’s especially bad in the Drive-By Media. That is one of the most exclusive and I should say exclusionary groups of people that you can imagine.
If you look at it as a club and look at the admittance requirements, it is one of the most exclusives things to get into. It doesn’t matter how successful you are, doesn’t matter how much money you make, whether you’re more successful than they are, whether you earn more than they do, whether you have a bigger audience than they, doesn’t matter, you are not getting in that club.
Something tells me that somewhere at the RNC there’s an intern who just got an assignment to monitor every bit of mainstream and social media she can for any moment where a liberal says something condescending about Walker. Then Republicans can wave it about like the bloody shirt of liberal elitism. It’s a lot easier than coming up with an economic plan that doesn’t involve upper-income tax cuts.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, February 17, 2015
“New Report Details Kochs’ Plan To Target Latino Voters”: Just Another Flashy Way For The Koch Brothers To Try To Con Latinos
Late last month, news broke that the network of political organizations tied to Charles and David Koch was developing plans to spend nearly a billion dollars in the 2016 elections.
Given that unprecedented investment, it’s essential to understand precisely what the Kochs and their front groups are doing. Yesterday, People for the American Way released a new report exploring one of these groups: the Libre Initiative, which aims to win over Latino voters for Republicans.
With much of its funding coming from the Kochs, Libre has the resources it needs to try to run an aggressive campaign aimed at making inroads in the Latino community. As Politico reported recently, “Libre, which already has a presence in eight states, plans to expand to Wisconsin and North Carolina this year and increase its staff by about 30 percent ahead of 2016.”
The group’s millions go to promoting conservative causes to the Latino community and using deceptive ads to attack Democrats. Civil rights leader and People for the American Way board member Dolores Huerta described Libre best: “This is just another flashy way for the Koch brothers to try to con Latinos into supporting a party that’s run by anti-immigrant, anti-Latino, anti-environmental extremists. We won’t be fooled; the group has the wrong priorities on the issues that matter most to us.” Though the group is doing all it can to push GOP priorities like blocking an increase in the minimum wage and rallying against clean energy development, poll after poll has shown that the majority of Latinos and Libre aren’t on the same page when it comes to these and other issues.
If Libre stuck to debating the issues, that would be one thing. Libre’s real threat — both to Democrats and to the Latino community — is that it uses its considerable financial resources to say one thing and do another.
In typical Koch fashion, Libre has made vicious, often dishonest attacks against Democrats. It’s ironic, albeit unsurprising, that the Democrats Libre attacked in 2014 included some of the strongest Latino voices in Congress, like former U.S. Rep. Pete Gallego (D-Texas). And based on Libre’s actions in the past, we can count on Libre to pay only lip service to supporting immigration reform. So far, the Libre playbook has gone like this: Claim to support immigration reform, applaud Speaker Boehner for making vague remarks somewhat supportive of immigration reform, and — here’s the kicker — run attack ads against Democrats who actually vote in favor of immigration reform.
Activists shouldn’t hold our breath hoping that the Kochs and other deep-pocketed conservatives will stop their lies. Instead, it’s up to us to push back. PFAW’s doing that by reaching out to Latino voters with a focus on the issues that matter and calling out Republicans when their promises just don’t match up with their votes.
Despite Libre’s deep coffers and its apparent desire to win over Latino voters to the GOP, that party’s offensive anti-immigrant rhetoric and actions continue. Just look at the current Congress, where Republicans are hijacking funding for the Department of Homeland Security to block the president’s executive actions on immigration even though, as Ted Hesson wrote at Fusion, “only a small minority of Americans think that’s the best way to approach the issue” in Congress.
As long as Republicans keep opposing policies that most Latinos and Americans as a whole support, it’s unlikely the Libre Initiative will have much success. But given the deep support and huge bank accounts of its two most important funders, the threat posed by Libre is one that we should all take seriously.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For the American Way, The Blog, The Huffington Post, February 19, 2015
“Rudy Giuliani Is A Cretinous Dirtbag”: ‘Obama Never Praises America’ May Be The Single Dumbest Criticism Republicans Have
Not that you needed a reminder that Rudy Giuliani is a contemptible jerk, but the former New York mayor has managed to find his way back in the news in the only way he can, which is to say something appalling. I’m going to try to take this opportunity to explore something meaningful about the way we all look at our allies and opponents, but first, here’s what Giuliani said at an event for Scott Walker:
“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 during the dinner at the 21 Club, a former Prohibition-era speakeasy in midtown Manhattan. “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.”
O.K., so we’ve heard this a million times before, though usually from talk radio hosts and pundits, but less often from prominent politicians. Offered a chance to clarify later, here’s how Rudy explained himself:
“Well first of all, I’m not questioning his patriotism. He’s a patriot, I’m sure,” the former mayor of New York said on Fox and Friends Thursday morning. “What I’m saying is, in his rhetoric, I very rarely hear the things that I used to hear Ronald Reagan say, the things that I used to hear Bill Clinton say about how much he loves America.”
Obama is different from his predecessors in that respect, Giuliani said.
“I do hear him criticize America much more often than other American presidents,” he told the morning show hosts. “And when it’s not in the context of an overwhelming number of statements about the exceptionalism of America, it sounds like he’s more of a critic than he is a supporter.”
He’s not questioning Obama’s patriotism, he’s just saying he doesn’t love America. Got it—thanks for clearing that up. I’m not saying Rudy is foolish and immoral, I’m just saying he’s a cretinous dirtbag. So no offense.
But what I’m really interested in is Giuliani’s explanation that he “very rarely hear[s]” Obama say patriotic things, but he “do[es] hear him criticize America.” It’s safe to say a lot of conservatives feel the same way. They hear these criticisms of America all the time from Obama! But never a word of praise for this country!
It would be great if the next person who interviewed Rudy (or anyone else making the same claim) asked him to name some of these many criticisms of America that he has “heard” from Obama. Because my guess is that he wouldn’t be able to come up with any. What he has heard, however, is other people saying that Obama criticizes America. If you spend a day watching Fox News, you’ll probably hear that assertion a dozen times. The idea that Obama constantly criticizes America, like the fictitious “apology tour” assertion from Obama’s first term, is something conservatives say over and over but almost never back up with any actual evidence.
If pressed, they might be able to come up with times when Obama has said that prior administrations have made mistakes, like the Bush administration enacting a policy of torturing prisoners. But these aren’t criticisms of America per se, any more than Republicans are criticizing America when they say we shouldn’t have passed the Affordable Care Act. If criticizing something the American government did means you’re aren’t a patriot, then the Republican Party is the most anti-American organization in the world today. Al Qaeda has nothing on them.
Perhaps even more revealing is Giuliani’s assertion that he rarely hears Obama praise America. The truth is that like all presidents, Obama heaps praise on America constantly. For instance, here’s a bit of vicious America-hating from his last State of the Union address:
I know how tempting such cynicism may be. But I still think the cynics are wrong. I still believe that we are one people. I still believe that together, we can do great things, even when the odds are long.
I believe this because over and over in my six years in office, I have seen America at its best. I’ve seen the hopeful faces of young graduates from New York to California, and our newest officers at West Point, Annapolis, Colorado Springs, New London. I’ve mourned with grieving families in Tucson and Newtown, in Boston, in West Texas, and West Virginia. I’ve watched Americans beat back adversity from the Gulf Coast to the Great Plains, from Midwest assembly lines to the Mid-Atlantic seaboard. I’ve seen something like gay marriage go from a wedge issue used to drive us apart to a story of freedom across our country, a civil right now legal in states that seven in 10 Americans call home.
So I know the good, and optimistic, and big-hearted generosity of the American people who every day live the idea that we are our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper. And I know they expect those of us who serve here to set a better example.
Look at any major speech Obama has given, and you’ll find similar passages. But Giuliani isn’t lying when he says he doesn’t “hear” that. The words pass through his ears into his brain, but they don’t register, because he decided long ago that Barack Obama is incapable of such thoughts.
And if you read that passage or any of a hundred like it directly to Giuliani, how would he respond? He’d probably say that, sure, Obama spoke those words, but they weren’t an expression of his real feelings; they were artifice, meant to conceal the sinister truth lying deep within. The words tell us nothing. On the other hand, when Obama says something critical about a Bush administration policy, the words reveal his hatred of America.
To a certain degree we’re all prey to this tendency. Once we’ve made our conclusions about who our political opponents are deep within their souls, we want to accept at face value only their statements that reinforce the view we already have of them. But you’ll notice that Giuliani wasn’t only stating his opinion about what lies in Obama’s heart, he attempted to justify that opinion with a statement of fact. Giuliani’s argument is that he concluded that Obama doesn’t love America because he assessed that Obama so seldom says nice things about America. That’s like saying that you think Tom Brady is a bad quarterback because he hasn’t won any Super Bowls. Maybe you have some other reason why you think Tom Brady is a bad quarterback, or maybe you just don’t like him, but if what you offer as the basis of your opinion is his lack of Super Bowl wins, there’s no reason why anyone should take you seriously.
Not that there was much reason to take Rudy Giuliani seriously to begin with. But he’s expressing beliefs that are not just common but absolutely rampant on the right.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Writer, The American Prospect, February 19, 2015
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