Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
How Obama Loves America
The latest brouhaha the media has managed to stir up surrounds Rudy Giuliani’s remarks suggesting that Barack Obama does not love America (see video here). There are too many articles from pundits much more talented than me who have dissected Obama’s peculiar kind of patriotism for me to add anything new to the subject. But every time I think of this president and the country he’s sworn to protect, it brings to mind that old English proverb “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”
Forget his platitudes and endless rhetoric Look at what he has managed to accomplish:
- Increased the National Debt from $10.6 billion to $18.1 billion today, an increase of over 70%.
- Engaged in policies resulting in an increase in the price per gallon of gas from $1.86 to $2.30, down from the 2012 high of $3.71 (with no thanks to his policies). Much of the windfall in profits flowed to regimes opposed to US policy and supportive of terrorism.
- Health care spending by the government has increased from $961 billion in 2008 to $1.213 trillion in 2013, an increase of 26%. This despite Obama’s assurances that he was going to bring healthcare costs down.
- Government spending on welfare has gone in the same period from $385.9 billion to $510.5 billion, an increase of 32%, as more people turn to the government and away from self-reliance. A record 20% of Americans received food stamps in 2013.
- According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of the US population working has dropped from 66% to 63% from 2008 to 2014 after holding steady at 66% during the previous administration. Fully 11,472,000 people have left the workforce since Obama’s took office.
- A search on US household income shows that median income has shrunk on a non-adjusted basis from $55,380 in the 4th quarter of 2008 to $53,891 at the end of 2014, a decrease of 3%.
- What kind of a diplomat has Obama proved to be? According to a BBC poll conducted in 2013, “negative views towards the U.S. are so pervasive that the country presently ranks second most unpopular in the world – just ahead of Iran – and less popular than rivals Russia and China.”
- After ushering in what many hoped would be a new era in race relations, according to a study cited in a Salon article, “The election of the country’s first black president had the ironic upshot of opening the door for old-fashioned racism to influence partisan preferences after it was long thought to be a spent force in American politics.”
- Numerous scandals have plagued this administration including giving guns to Mexican cartels, NSA spying on American citizens, CIA spying on Senate members, failure of multiple business that received government dollars (think Solyndra, etc.), IRS targeting of conservatives, IRS auditing of those opposed to Obama, stonewalling by the EPA and IRS of congressional investigations, Veteran Administration cover-ups of neglect and maladministration, the inept rolling out of Obamacare, etc., etc. etc.
Sadly, the list goes on and on. Sure Obama loves America… he loves her to death.
Image Credit: Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com.
Published in General
I wouldn’t have said what Rudy said, but now I wish I were in his shoes. Because now I would challenge the media this way: “How else would you explain this Administration?”
Under what theory would you explain this Administration’s refusal to fight the enemy, or even name the enemy as an enemy? How else would you explain the reflex to lecture Americans about Christian sins and the demand that we redress the enemy’s grievances? The only way to explain this behavior is to adopt the premise that America’s insertion into world affairs is negative.
Besides, as many others have said before me, this story about Giuliani is generating so much media attention because the media don’t want to pay attention to all the other assorted Obama/Democrat failures and scandals. They want to keep a negative focus on the enemy … i.e., us.
The list you have compiled is frustrating to read. I blame Obama, but I also blame Congress. Good Lord.
What the heck do they do all day?
You’d think they’d be working on any one of these problems day and night.
Government just gets more destructive and more useless and bigger and more powerful with each passing day.
For sure the blame can be spread around. Congress seems so spineless.
I love that Rudy said it. It by not backing down and it becoming a story, I think we’re seeing that people are more receptive to information they should have been exposed to in 2007. Ayers, Dorn, Rev. Wright, Frank Marshall Davis, his Mother & Father, his Grandparents – this guy has been marinating in anti-Americanism & Socialism since birth.
“Sure Obama loves America… he loves her to death.”
Is there anyone among your conservative family members and acquaintances that did not know – from his first presidential campaign statements – that he does not love America?
It required the worst kind of partisan willful blindness – to miss his contempt for this exceptional land.
That is a pretty sobering list. What do you think the liberal list of accomplishments looks like…
1) Obamacare
2) Ending? Iraq war
3) Ending Afghanistan war
4) New EPA regs. on greenhouse gases.
5) No Keystone XL
Others?
The spread of gay “marriage”
Obama loves the America that doesn’t exist yet, which he wants to bring about. Most Americans love America for what it is and has been.
One of the latest unforgivable acts by the president was to bring up the Crusades in a misguided, politically-correct statement of moral equivalence. “Crusaders” is a perjorative term that terrorists use to refer to Christians. It was invoked at the recent beach slaughter of Egyptian Coptic Christians. Obama discussing the Crusades in an disapproving way essentially gives support to the enemy. It is as if LBJ referred to blacks with the N-word in a public speech during the civil rights movement. The president compounded his error by referring to the massacred Christians – clearly killed because of their faith – merely as “Egyptian citizens.” (In contrast, Obama immediated decided that the killing of three American Muslims in North Carolina – reportedly over a parking dispute – was motivated by religious hatred, and he showed no reluctance to say so publicly.)
Whose side is he on, anyway? And now, he’s again obstructing the Keystone XL pipeline. A progressive who stands in the way of progress. Honestly, I’m not sure that substantially more damage could be done by a real “Manchurian Candidate” president directed by our enemies.
I am curious about this one:
Would I be correct in supposing that the study cited in Salon treats, say, Republican opposition to Obamacare and to immigration “reform” as a case in which “old-fashioned racism” influences “partisan preferences?”
Obama loves America the way Ike loved Tina (warning – adult language):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DadlLq2yrBw
As the incidence of lectures on how racist and Islamophobic Americans are and how we need to stop worrying about some terrorist blowing up a bus and focus on climate change become more and more frequent, I keep hearing the faint refrain of “Eat the cake, Anna Mae” in the back of my mind…
I think yes, Paul. See what I bolded above and it kind of answers itself. They won’t blame Obama for reviving it himself — they must mean the reaction to him as the reason. Also, if they were going to blame Obama it seems they would say so. The ambiguity is there to invite conservatives to agree with this but if they say so it can be slammed down with the reasoning you are suggesting.
The Republican president who takes office in 2016 is going to have a lot of work to do.
Unfortunately, the link from the Salon article to the study it cites no longer brings up the study. Strange because it did when I posted this. In any case, I think your analysis is not off the mark of the point they are trying to make. They conveniently define the study’s author’s meaning of “old-fashioned racism” as being the “belief in the biological inferiority of blacks, and support for racial segregation and discrimination.” Now I don’t know if that is what he meant by that. My observation is that if racism on the part of whites has increased after Obama’s election so has racism by blacks. I think the entire atmosphere of race relations has been poisoned by this man.
http://thefederalist.com/2015/03/02/the-loves-of-barack-obama
Hadley Arkes on the many loves of Barack Obama. It is a matter of the principled grounds on which Obama can love in the first place.
“Obama has clearly found much to love in this country. He loves his friends and loyalists, he loves basketball and his favorite music, and the celebrities who welcome him to their homes. But by his own words, he loves something quite apart from the truths that were thought to mark the distinct meaning and character of this country. As Lincoln said, that “truth” of the Declaration was the “electric cord” that connected the generations. It explained why people could regard this country as theirs even though their families were not part of the generation that fought the revelation. It’s the thing that drew people to this country.”