Apparently Rudy Giuliani has felt enough blowback from his suppositions on who does or does not "love America" to require an explanatory op-ed. You know the type. Gosh, I'm so darn blunt—which is awesome, am I right?—but sometimes I say things that get people angry at me so let me say them again
but fancier.
My blunt language suggesting that the president doesn’t love America notwithstanding, I didn’t intend to question President Obama’s motives or the content of his heart. My intended focus really was the effect his words and his actions have on the morale of the country, and how that effect may damage his performance. Let me explain.
I'd like him to explain what he thinks "notwithstanding" means.
Irrespective of what a president may think or feel, his inability or disinclination to emphasize what is right with America can hamstring our success as a nation. This is particularly true when a president is seen, as President Obama is, as criticizing his country more than other presidents have done, regardless of their political affiliation.
All right, that's something to work with. So you say Obama has
criticized America more than other presidents. Surely, this is the sort of thing that can be backed up. Given that this whole thing started when Obama had the temerity to criticize the Crusades, I have the strong suspicion that the problem is not that Obama criticizes America or even the broader western world more than other presidents, but that people like Rudy Giuliani, who have spent these last sixteen years simmering in a stew of rank nationalism and obsessive partisanism, see his every twitch as a critique of American values.
Giuliani devotes much of the column to self-praise, because of course he does, but does manage to come up with a single concrete example of this criticism that America has had to endure at the hands of the man who insists upon hurting our morale by saying things.
But I can only be disheartened when I hear him claim, as he did last August, that our response to 9/11 betrayed the ideals of this country. When he interjected that “we tortured some folks,” he undermined those who managed successfully to protect us from further attack.
Oooooooh. And
now we see where the problem lies. Obama's insufficient love of country is manifested by his stated disapproval of the American policy of torturing prisoners during interrogation—
this is the thing that makes Mr. Giuliani suspicious as to whether the president really
gets what makes America an exceptional nation. Here we thought Giuliani was merely making a suspiciously race-baiting supposition as to whether Barack Obama "loves America" perhaps based on some Giuliani-offered armchair psychological analysis of his history or upbringing—not so, Rudy says, noting Obama had a
white mother—but in the end the real problem is that Giuliani knows America is a nation that should torture prisoners, and Obama thinks otherwise, and so the only possible explanation for this is that Rudy Giuliani loves and knows and respects America more than the people who maybe think committing a series of war crimes under the banner of
American exceptionalism, so screw you was a mistake.
Glad we have cleared that up. We have had precious few opportunities of late to think less of Rudy Giuliani, now that the political fates had largely removed the need to pay any attention to him. But now we can think even less of him, again, and thank goodness he piped up to let us know that under a Rudy Giuliani America we would torture freely but would not say bad things about America, like criticizing the torture part. That is the sort of country Rudy Giuliani considers us to be, and if you disagree it is because you do not understand America and he does.