Its the difference between those who live their faiths and those who profess to believe in God and then shaft their neighbors, bear false witness and cheat the poor.

Obama patriotic? Sure doesn’t everyone hang out with communists and terrorists?

Liberals are, for the most part, too mired in their own self-importance to be able to spare much time, effort or attention to something like that! That does not, however, prevent them from having contempt for people who are patriotic!

Rick, you are an uncommon genius! Duck the flack and continue…I am not Abu Manzanar fodder.

I’ve read your blog long enough to know that you don’t really give a crap what I, or anybody else thinks about you, and I admire that part of you as much as your keen insight and elequent pen. But if you will forgive me for my armchair psychoanalysis (in other words, don’t flame me for this, I already know you don’t care), I think you suffer from white guilt. For some reason, you seem to give him the benefit of the doubt on every non-provable question, when on every PROVABLE question he has demonstrated either overt dishonesty (”I never heard those issues”) or extreme evasiveness/dismissiveness (”that’s a distraction”). Since I have never seen you give others, even conservatives a pass, I have concluded that you want to make up for past failures of our ancestors. Or something. Neither I nor my ancestors ever owned a slave (I’m betting your ancestors didn’t either). Whatever racial sins I have ever committed have been atoned for by 38 years of affirmative action. I am proudly color-blind, and will NOT give him a pass simply because his skin is darker than mine.

Look, I don’t hate the man, I fear him- I fear higher taxes (both personal income and capital gains), I fear mass murder in Iraq after he pulls out our troops, I fear a president that will forego 225 year of precedence by holding one on one, face to face talks with terrorist nations, I fear the appointment of 3 more Souter clones, etc. (he has promised all of these, and more!). I think it is your duty (and mine, and every conservative in this country) to NOT give him the benefit of the doubt, because he has proven that he doesn’t deserve it.

It seems to me that you are explaining (eloquently) why us “yahoos” question his patriotism in one sentence(”voters place themselves in Obama’s shoes and ask themselves if they would act the same way as the candidate has acted for the last 20 years”), then in the next sentence, hope for everybody to ignore those questions and simply acknowledge that he is a patriot. By my definition of patriot, I cannot, and I am somewhat surprised to see that it passes muster with you.

The point is well taken and each must decide for themselves about what Obama feels. My sense is that it Obama doesn’t see Wright or Ayers as unpatriotic or “mainstream” because of the elitist liberal circles he runs in. And that goes back to we all have different ideas of what constitutes patriotism. Imposing your view or my view of patriotism just can’t be done for the reasons I explain above.

ed .

Both sides in an argument may love “America” and be “patriotic”, while having very different and perhaps incompatible conceptions of what America is and should strive to be.

I fear there is no way to condense the discussion sufficiently without it degenerating into a battle of symbols, and those symbols then take on completely different meanings by each camp.

Where is Obama’s allegiance to the most essential principle serving as the soul and spine of America, “We hold these truths to be self-evident , that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”?
How can he be believed to be patriotic when he has not supported our military while they have been under fire in defense of innocent Iraqis and Americans?
How can he be patriotic to find no moral/ethical problem in AGAIN betraying and abandoning the majority of Iraqi civilians and our democratically-oriented Iraqi military allies?
Obama’s positions in these crucial areas spits in the face of our Declaration of Independence.

When I was a youngster, my father had a summer cabin in upstate New York. Down the road, we had a neighbor who was a professional magician. One of the secrets he shared with me was not to look where the magician wanted you to look.

Senator Obama is quite expert at getting people to look where he wants them to. He can wax poetic about his patriotism when he wants to, but the proof of the pudding is elsewhere. Verbally, he can affirm his willingness to shed his blood but I don’t see any discharge papers or Purple Hearts. He wears no lapel pin but has no compunction to line up eight flags behind him when it serves his purpose. He and his wife have benefited from opportunities available to only a few and yet his wife’s comments about paying off student loans, this country being mean, and her being proud of her country don’t survive the consistency test.

Senator Obama would have us believe he is a uniter, but his associates seem only to be from one (far) end of the political spectrum. We are to believe he is post-partisan yet his voting record is the most liberal in the US Senate. We are to believe that his lack of managerial leadership experience is an asset in a time of war on two fronts. If his judgement can be so far off on these issues, why should anyone accept his self-assessment of his patriotism?