Barack Obama and the Patriotism of Dissent

Don Feder, at FrontPageMagazine, discusses Barack Obama's recent speech on patriotism, as well as Richard Stengel's recent article at Time, "The New Patriotism":

The Left's patriotism-deficit has less to do with dissent than a very real and ingrained hostility toward America.

Its recitation of our national saga runs from slavery to Wounded Knee, to the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, to segregation to My Lai and Abu Ghraib -- excluding everything else. Liberals love America; they just can't find anything positive to say about it, other than Susan B. Anthony and Rosa Parks.

The article also discloses, "The American who volunteers to fight in Iraq and the American who protests the war both express a truer patriotism than the American who treats it as a distant spectacle with no claim on his talents or conscience."

This is a truly weird moral equivalency -- one which equates the young Marine who loses a limb in a Baghdad bombing with the moron Marxist who claims the Marines are the equivalent of the Waffen S.S. and the Iraq war is really about "blood for oil."

In trying to rationalize how the Left can hate our history and heritage while still claiming the mantle of patriotism, Stengel explains: "For liberals, America is less a common culture than a set of ideals about democracy, equality and the rule of law." Toward the end of his Independence speech, Obama informed us: "Patriotism is always more than just loyalty to a place on a map or a certain kind of people. Instead, it is loyalty to America's idea...."

In other words, the Left's loyalty isn't to America as it is, but to an ideal America reflected in certain principles. The problem with this proposition is that leftists have betrayed both America and the ideals on which it was founded....

At the Independence rally, standing in front of not one but four American flags, lapel pin firmly in place, hand over heart -- all that was missing was John Philip Sousa and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir -- Barack Hussein Obama "tried to reassure voters about his patriotism" (in the words of ABC News).

When was the last time a presidential candidate had to reassure voters that he actually liked his country? Do you wonder, then, that the Democrats consider patriotism Obama's Achilles heel?

Just because he refused to wear an American flag lapel pin last year, just because he wouldn't hold his hand anywhere near his heart while the National Anthem played, just because Frau Obama suggested that she never had a reason to feel pride in America until her husband's presidential campaign, just because his minister of 20 years regularly reviled the United States from the pulpit, is that any reason to question Obama's patriotism? That's a rhetorical question.

"At certain times over the last 16 months, I have found, for the first time, my patriotism challenged," Obama disclosed to gasps of astonished outrage from the audience.

But he wasn't about to take it in a supine position. "I will never question the patriotism of others in this campaign," the Democrat promised. "And I will not stand idly by when others question mine." Yeah, like anybody's going to question the patriotism of the candidate with the crippled arm, the result of six years of torture as a POW.

Obama went further, charging that the "question of who is -- or is not -- a patriot all too often poisons our political debate" -- the flag-waving equivalent of the politics of personal destruction.

You can see why left-wingers get antsy when the discussion turns to love of country.

Treason permeates the Left. Its bastions -- Hollywood, academia, the establishment media and the mainline churches -- are nests of treason.

In a world where America fights for its survival against a jihadist threat dedicated to ushering in a new Dark Ages -- in an era when 3,000 Americans died in the bloodiest attack on the continental U.S., another 4,000 died in Iraq and more than 30,000 were wounded in that conflict -- it's not hard to see why the left is frantic to avoid a candid discussion of patriotism.

Last week's Fouth of July was a productive one for faux-patriot America-bashers.

Quaker Dave, who defiantly resists the term "radical," wrote on the Fouth of July, "Why I’m Not 'Patriotic'":

If anything, patriotism should be about devotion to a different set of ideals and actual practices ... It should mean love of one’s fellow human beings, not blind “love” of some notion of “country.” Most “countries” are contained within abitrarily drawn borders, which in most cases were crafted ages ago by folks who are no longer in the picture anyway, usually at the expense of other folks.

The reference to those folks from "ages ago"? These are the "dead white males" the postmodern left's is fond of excoriating. But don't miss this part:

Don’t tell me I don’t love my country unless you can demonstrate your own devotion to making things better for the people around you, and not just to making things more comfortable for yourself.

Aahhh!! ... self-interest is EVIL!!

Don't tell that to the American revolutionaries, who fought simply for egalitarian opportunity, to own a piece of land in the absence of the type of hierarchical and oppressive lord and peasant relationships that had characterized feudal Europe for centuries (Source: Gordon Wood).

And don't forget: Matthew Yglesias laments the defeat of British hegemonic control of the American colonies. Hail to the king!

The lefties just don't get it:

To some degree, patriotism must mean loving your country for the same reason you love your family: simply because it is yours" (Source: Peter Beinart).

See also, "How Obama Is Redefining American Patriotism."

Image Credit: The People's Cube