Words Or Deeds?

There are no perfect human beings. Does it not follow that there are no perfect politicians?

I admire Rudy Giuliani, without a need to agree with 100% of his positions and sentiments. One of the principal reasons I admire him is his forthrightness, which has been on vivid display this past week:

Needless to say, Obama’s media defenders are apoplectic about this blasphemy:

MSNBC’s Steve Benen called the mayor “clownish.” The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson strongly implied that Giuliani was racist. Writing in The New York Daily News, Wayne Barrett noted that Giuliani secured a deferment allowing him to avoid service in the Vietnam War, and added that documents indicate his convict father and five uncles also managed to avoid service in World War II. Who’s the patriot now, huh?...

Maybe the most excessive pile-on could be found, as it so often is, on MSNBC. There, the cast of Morning Joe scrambled over one another to not only denounce Giuliani’s comments but to air 14-year-old grievances against the mayor and to insist that Republicans should entirely abstain from criticizing the outgoing two-term president ahead of 2016....

“Yes, Mr. Mayor, it is racist and it sounds, frankly, kind of unhinged,” The Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson insisted.

When Donny Deutsch, who was apparently personally offended by Giuliani’s remarks, attacked him for “co-opting the tragedy that was 9/11” and accused him of being a “fringe” element of the GOP, he inspired a panicked series of repudiations from his fellow panelists. Deutsch didn’t seem to realize that his assertion had exposed the fabricated nature of Giuliani-gate, day two.

The media have pressed various Republican luminaries to add their voices to the chorus of denunciation. So far, no prominent GOP figures have done so.

Remember how livid John “mind my camera” / “the next JFK” Kerry was when he sensed that someone had “questioned my patriotism” -- ? Come to think of it, do you remember the following episode?

Double Standards Department, please pick up on Line 1! But as much fun as this is, I digress.

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Kevin Williamson makes an obvious point:

Rudy Giuliani is in the stocks for saying that he does not believe that President Barack Obama “loves America.” He said this at a small, private dinner for Scott Walker, who probably will not be inviting Giuliani to very many events in the near future.

Giuliani went on to say that he wasn’t questioning the president’s patriotism — angels and ministers of grace defend us! — only noting that the president’s rhetoric is decidedly low-cal on the American exceptionalism but full-fat when it comes to criticism. It may be the case that the president is a practitioner of the Smokey Robinson school of patriotism: “I don’t like you, but I love you.” Something's really got a hold on this guy, and it is not an excessive fervor for the American order.

Questions about patriotism and love of country are, according to our self-appointed referees, out of bounds, declasse, boob bait for bubbas, etc. Those are questions that we are not allowed to ask in polite society. Why? Because polite society does not want to hear the answers.

...but do please remember, Gentle Reader, that “obvious” means “overlooked.”

It’s Question Time here at America's House of Commons, my friends. No, the question of the day isn’t does Obama love America? That’s hardly tough: He doesn’t. He resents America, maybe even hates it, and there’s absolutely nothing in his actions to indicate otherwise. If he harbors “love” of any sort for these United States, it would be of the George Bernard Shaw variety:

OCTAVIUS. Even if it were so—and I don’t admit it for a moment—it is out of the deadliest struggles that we get the noblest characters.

TANNER. Remember that the next time you meet a grizzly bear or a Bengal tiger, Tavy.

OCTAVIUS. I meant where there is love, Jack.

TANNER. Oh, the tiger will love you. There is no love sincerer than the love of food. I think Ann loves you that way: she patted your cheek as if it were a nicely underdone chop.

If we were discussing anyone not in national politics, we would recur to ancient, well-proven wisdom:

When deeds clash with words,
believe the deeds.

Isn’t that what every last one of us has been taught? Is there any reason to think we somehow missed a conclusive indication to the contrary?

How a man can rise to the highest executive position in the nation despite a profound resentment of that nation, carefully inculcated practically from birth, is the deepest question. But I have still another one in mind for particular consideration today.

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Leftists routinely drip venom and hurl the basest of insults at anyone on the Right they deem a threat to their agenda. They do so with a complete absence of inhibition that speaks of a passion to eclipse all the other passions in their souls. That they permit no one on the Right to say anything even moderately critical about their luminaries without a counter-barrage that would dwarf Somme, Verdun, or Third Ypres is the most significant aspect of the thing. Why?

The esteemed Ace of Spades provides the first part of the answer:

Progressives play this game where they launch nothing but nasty Marxist Critiques upon America, agitating for the country to remake itself entirely, but want to claim simultaneously: We love America as much as anybody.

Oh you most certainly do not! Definitionally, you do not: One who "loves" with a long list of caveats and criticisms does not love as much as someone who loves completely (or with a much shorter list of caveats and criticisms).

Furthermore, progressives take patriotism itself to be a the sanctimony of the unsophisticated. Or, as Oscar Wilde called it, "the virtue of the vicious."

Progressives, when they're speaking honestly (that is, when they're not speaking in front of TV cameras), love to lampoon their fellow countrymen's unsophisticated, stupid, and obese love of country.

Progressive “love of country” is comparable to Nurse Duckett’s “love” of Yossarian:

Nurse Duckett found Yossarian wonderful and was already trying to change him.

Pace Rand, to love is to value one’s beloved as highly as oneself. If the beloved has flaws, they’re no worse than one’s own flaws, though perhaps different. One does not set out to “fundamentally transform” a beloved.

But the second part of the answer to the question impends, and here it is:

The great majority of Americans do love America.
We react with anger toward mock-countrymen who don’t.

But the progressive agenda – i.e., unlimited power for them and complete subjugation for us – paradoxically depends upon securing our cooperation. They must somehow persuade us to elevate them to power. Therefore, they can’t afford to have us angry at them. They must pretend to hold the same values we espouse. They must posture as lovers of America despite being nothing of the sort.

When their mask slips, or when it’s wrenched off by a Rudy Giuliani, they panic. They know their enterprise has been put in mortal danger. Nothing will serve but a backblast so vicious and so violent as to drown out the evidence of their duplicity.

I suppose this reduces to just one more argument for rejecting the Left in all its manifestations and defeating its initiatives wherever it might advance them. Yet it must be said. What Giuliani said must be said. What the various leftists who slammed him for it said must be held up to the light. No one must be allowed to avert his eyes. Once the truth of Giuliani’s words is generally conceded and the Left’s reasons for its hysterical denunciations of him are appreciated, it will be their Waterloo.

Food for thought.