“Self-Styled Super-Patriots”: Loving An Imaginary America, Hating The Real One
Leave it to Matt Taibbi in a return to the pages of Rolling Stone to come up with a unique perspective on Rudy Giuliani’s rants about Obama not loving America: it reminds Taibbi of communist bitter-enders in post-Soviet Russia:
Rudy Giuliani is giving me Soviet flashbacks…..
Not to go too far down memory lane, but in 1990, I went to Leningrad to study. The Soviet empire was in its death throes and most people there, particularly the younger ones, knew it.
But some hadn’t gotten the memo yet, and those folks, usually nice enough, often older — university administrators, check-room attendants, security guards, parents of some of my classmates, others — were constantly challenging me and other exchange students to East-versus-West debates, usually with the aim of proving that “their” way of life was better.
By the time I left Russia a dozen years and a couple of career changes later, a lot of those people still hadn’t gotten the memo. They were deep in denial about the passing of the USSR and spent a lot of time volubly claiming ownership of words like we and our and us in a way that quickly became a running joke in modernizing Russia.
U Nas Lusche — roughly, Ours is Better or It’s Better Here — was the unofficial slogan of the pining-for-the-old-days crowd in post-communist Russia….
[T]he Soviets also had a strong sense of exceptionalism. It was something that was carefully nurtured and encouraged by The Party and had been spread successfully from the Kremlin to the remotest drunk-tank in Kamchatka.
But the problem with exceptionalism is that it can turn unintentionally comic with the drop of a hat. You’re made to believe you’re at the center of an envious universe, but then the world changes just enough and suddenly you’re a punchline clinging to a lot of incoherent emotions. I watched this happen with my own eyes to a lot of people in the former Soviet Union.
And I feel like it’s happening here now, with Rudy and the rest of the exceptionalist die-hards. They’re hanging on to a conception of us that doesn’t really exist anymore, not realizing that “America” is now a deeply varied, rapidly-changing place, one incidentally that they spend a lot of their public lives declaring they can’t stand.
And that’s the real irony and outrage: self-styled super-patriots who make it more apparent every day that they don’t much like, much less love, their country.
The Giuliani crack-up started up a long-overdue discussion about what exactly it means when patrician pols like Rudy accuse others of not “loving America” enough.
After all, which America do they mean? The one that will be majority nonwhite by 2042? The one that twice elected Barack Obama president? The one that now produces more porn than steel? The one that has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates and one of the highest immigration rates? That America?
Are they big fans of South Park maybe? The Wu-Tang Clan? Looking? Because it’s ironic: The heavy industry and manufacturing might that was a key source of American power in the days of Giuliani’s youth is now in serious decline, but Hollywood (and American pop culture generally) is a bigger, more hegemonic world power than ever.
Yet the current batch of exceptionalists mostly despises Hollywood, one of our few still-exceptionally-performing industries. They liked it better in the days when John Wayne was the leading man, Rock Hudson was in the closet and nobody made movies about copulating cowboys or Che’s motorcycle trips.
And here’s the classic Taibbi-esque coup de grace:
Conservative politicians like Rudy are a bizarre combination of constant, withering, redundant whining about Actual Current America, mixed with endless demands that we all stand up and profess our love for some other America, one that apparently doesn’t include a lot of the rest of us or the things about this country we like.
I feel sorry for Rudy that he can’t love this country the way it is. I love America even with assholes like him living in it.
Kinda the way I feel about Erick Erickson insisting that Barack Obama and I can’t possibly be Christians.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 23, 2015
“What It Means To ‘Love America'”: To Believe We Should Evolve And Change Toward Becoming A More Diverse And Just Society
On May 30, 2013, Kalief Browder was finally released after more than three years in Rikers Island. His crime? There wasn’t one. He was accused of stealing a backpack and the backlog in the courts meant that Browder, who refused to plead guilty to a crime he didn’t commit, stayed behind bars until the prosecutor finally dropped the case. He attempted suicide while in prison.
Meanwhile, it was announced today that Maureen McDonnell, wife of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, has been sentenced to one year and a day. The former governor received just a two year sentence. That means that after being convicted in federal court on fourteen counts of corruption, both McDonnells will likely serve less time in jail than a black teenager who was never convicted and never even went to trial.
This is what FBI Director James Comey meant in his speech last week, titled “Hard Truths About Law Enforcement and Race” when he said, “there is a disconnect between police agencies and many citizens – predominantly in communities of color.” Comey went on to say that bridging that divide is a two-way street that requires law enforcement and communities of color seeing each other more fairly and equally.
But as Jonathan Capehart has pointed out, unlike when President Barack Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder discusses race, the right and its organs like Fox News paid Comey no attention. Because when a white male Republican law enforcement official points out the racial imbalance in America’s justice system, the right wing noise machine suddenly goes silent.
And that goes to the heart of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s ghoulish, repulsive, race-baiting assertion that President Obama doesn’t “love America.” The fact is that Giuliani’s view of America and its history privileges the powerful, so any acknowledgment of the Kalief Browders of the world must be a sign that someone doesn’t “love America.” This has also been manifested in the growing national fight over AP History classes, which conservatives now complain are insufficiently patriotic. Last fall, thousands of students fought back against the right wing ideologues on the Jefferson County School Board here in Colorado a valuable lesson in civil disobedience; and more recently an proposal by Republicans in the Oklahoma state legislature to defund AP history classes gained national attention.
Maybe some of us love our country enough to believe its judicial system should hold the powerful as much to account as the powerless. Maybe some of us love our country enough to believe access to health care shouldn’t depend on your income, that a poor kid with asthma deserves a doctor as much as a rich one. Maybe some of us love our country enough to believe that sacrificing our soldiers to war shouldn’t be done out of dishonesty or caprice.
Maybe some us love our country enough to believe that Dr. Marting King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail is a profoundly patriotic document. Maybe some of us love our country enough to believe that we should embrace and correct its flaws, not turn a cruel and blind eye to them. Maybe some of us love our country enough to believe it should evolve and change toward becoming a more diverse and just society, not remain calcified by class.
And maybe some of us love our country enough to believe that it is the Rudy Giulianis of the world, and his cowardly enablers like Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker, who betray what we stand for and who we aspire to be as a nation.
By: Laura K. Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, February 20, 2015
“Obama Loves America, But Not The One Giuliani Does”: Clearly Part Of The Permanent Conservative Strategy Of ‘Otherizing’ Obama
Rudy Giuliani oversold it, naturally. In an attempt to save America from the grip of a president who’d already been in office for six years, or perhaps just desperate to get back into the headlines, the former New York mayor and presidential also-ran said Wednesday, “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. 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.” And then, to make matters worse, he insisted his remark wasn’t racist because Obama “was brought up by a white mother, a white grandfather, went to white schools, and most of this he learned from white people.”
“This isn’t racism,” he added. “This is socialism or possibly anti-colonialism.”
On the list of hateful things uttered about Obama by his political adversaries, this one is near the bottom (and that’s saying something). After all, Giuliani wasn’t questioning Obama’s parentage, nationality, sexuality, or his children’s behavior. By comparison, simply saying the man doesn’t love America seems tame, merely a softer brand of birtherism (a line of attack Giuliani once rejected). It’s clearly part of the permanent conservative strategy of otherizing Obama, of which birtherism was one of the most openly racist examples.
The irony, of course, is that Obama’s childhood and family background perfectly fit the conservative fantasy that Giuliani promotes. Obama was the child of an immigrant and a woman from the heartland, raised partly by a grandfather who helped liberate a Nazi concentration camp while serving our country and a Rosie-the-Riveter grandmother who worked on the Boeing assembly line during World War II. By any Norman Rockwell-ish estimation, that’s about as American as you get.
As a New York Daily News editorial put it:
It is impossible to say which is more appalling:
Giuliani’s willful ignorance of Obama’s heritage (his grandfather served in World War II while his grandmother worked on a B-29 assembly line); Giuliani’s division of the country into right-thinking Americans (Republicans) and unworthy others; or Giuliani’s sense that he had hit on a winning political tactic in poking the hornet’s nest of haters.
And yet, we should not be so surprised; this is what Giuliani does. Rather than seek to mend the racial division during David Dinkins’ term, Mayor Giuliani saw an opportunity, instead antagonizing the city’s communities of color. He charged William J. Bratton, the police commissioner then and now, with implementing the ineffective and unjust “broken windows” strategy. And we can’t forget his unflinching support of the New York Police Department in the wake of abuse after abuse—when police sodomized Abner Louima with a broomstick, and when they gunned down unarmed black men like Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond. Now, with words like these about the president, Giuliani is trying to create racial divisions on a national level.
But if we simply dismiss Giuliani’s latest remarks as a joke and then move on, we’ll miss an opportunity ourselves. His words were “un-American” in the sense that they were an ad hominem attack on a sitting president. In another sense, though, they were quintessentially American. Our country’s history is full of agents like Giuliani who provoke racial strife and spew stereotypes that benefit the privileged class. Obama wasn’t raised with the same kind of “love of country” that Giuliani was because the president grew up as a member of a group whose social mandate from birth, for survival’s sake, is to engineer change in a society—to correct the very systemic disadvantage that Giuliani is desperate to save.
Giuliani is probably right: Obama doesn’t love America, not the one Giuliani does. But the inverse is true, too: Giuliani doesn’t love America, not the one Obama is trying to build.
By: Jamil Smith, The New Republic, February 20, 2015
“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
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