The American Spectator

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Dropping an Obama

2.21.08 @ 12:01AM

BELLE OF THE BALL
Re: Philip Klein's Michelle, My Belle:

Michelle Obama stuck her foot in her mouth. For that she has been pilloried. Can we now move on to something more substantive to talk about, or will conservatives be happy to continue emulating the obsessive nitpicking that defines hypersensitive liberals?
-- Arnold Ahlert
Boca Raton, Florida

I've never understood how being critical of one's own democracy, one we are responsible for collectively, is negative. Would letting a kid do anything with constant praise be considered love? Or being a responsible adult? Since when is praise and constant pride helpful to nations or citizens. Aren't we supposed to be engaged, in a democracy, in making the nation and world a better place? Why this I am proud all the time? How is that a helpful thing?

I just don't get it, this America is special, any country is special -- it is rude, and strange, and leads to nothing. What if people came to your house and you kept saying I am so proud of my house, my house is the best house in the world?

It's weird, and I wish there was a way to have a real discussion on nationalism and civic responsibility instead of whether a relatively young public figure has had reason to be especially proud of her nation so far-- I haven't been since I was a child, that was the 60s and 70s -- I don't think Carter was great, or Reagan, we haven't had a great president. We haven't defeated the Nazis recently, and have instead done a lot of things I am ashamed of and feel terribly guilty about as someone who is part of this democracy!

Scratch the surface of our military industrial economy and how it affects the world, ourselves and the next generation, and ask, does this make you proud? I mean, why that word, doesn't work for me. I have enormous hope for my country, enormous, and would like to be proud, would really love that, and hope for that.

That is not negative, that is hopeful, denial is depressing.
-- Betsy Podlach

Sir Richard Francis Burton, English explorer, linguist, author, soldier, and first Caucasian to visit Mecca during the Hajj, said, "Tell me a man's religion and I can tell you about half the man. Show me his wife, and I can tell you the rest."

What would the famous Englishman say about Senator Obama?
-- Ira M. Kessel

Klein didn't say it. Podhoretz didn't say it. Nor did Rush or Sean. But does anyone else really think that Michelle, not my belle, said "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country" for the first time ever? I think not.

Michelle and maybe Barack and almost certainly all of their ideological sycophants have been saying exactly that over and over, party after party, rally after rally, year after year, kind of like the incantations of monks over the centuries between the fall of Rome and the Age of Reason. The biggest shock to Michelle had to be that repeating, just one more time, in a public context, what she had said innumerable times privately, would cause such a fuss.

It should be a red flag for any thinking man to always come to the conclusion that he's "right" and they're "wrong". But I suggest that the most reliable standard to be applied to "right" and "wrong" is which utterance survives public scrutiny and the light of day and which doesn't. By that standard, red flag or no red flag, nothing a Democrat/Liberal says is "right", because it never survives public scrutiny and the light of day.

Learned your lesson, Michelle?
-- Frank Natoli
Newton, New Jersey

Philip Klein wrote, "What is most striking about her remarks is that they stand in stark contrast to the tone that has characterized Obama's rhetoric ever since he burst onto the national scene in his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech."

Not really.

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