Pride (In The Name Of “Change”)
Otto at The Otto Show on Feb 27 2008 at 6:43 am | Filed under: Election 2008
I’m wondering…why are we supposed to be upset with Bill O’Reilly and not Michelle Obama?
O’Reilly dared to mention the word “lynching” and the name of a black person in the same sentence. Never mind that there was nothing derogatory in his statement, just the mere presence of the “L” word indicates…pretty much whatever we want it to mean.
Meanwhile, some of the same people trying to lynch Bill O’Reilly (it’s okay - he’s white!) are also playing word games with Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle. This is another example of one person being wrong by having his words twisted around and another person being defended by having her words…twisted around.
It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. Michelle Obama drew some deserved criticism for a recent speech where she said (her words), “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.”
The defenses range from the leftist standard of saying that anything unpatriotic spoken by a member of the left is really patriotic (in it’s own peculiar way) to mincing words that she either left out or meant to say. One pro-Obama comment to USA Today emphasized that the word “really” (as in “really proud”) makes all of the difference. Another opinion piece on Newsvine tries to convince us that national pride and love for country are two different things, that because Michelle Obama has virtually never been proud of her country, it means she loves her country. Leftists are torn between being proud of her remarks and mincing words in clumsy attempts to soften or redefine them.
There is legitimate criticism of her remarks - it isn’t based on her feelings but rather her choice of words. Words have meanings and any speech writer worth their credentials would know better than to put such careless language in a presidential campaign speech (and any serious speaker would know enough to question them prior to saying them). This is one of the inherent problems of a leftist being put in a position to make public comments about the nation that don’t jive with run-of-the-mill Americans, whether those comments touch on patriotism, racial issues, issues of life…few honest comments from the left are supposed to be taken at face value by non-leftists.
One attempt to convolute the meanings of her words suggests that she is simply not proud of certain things about her country. Basically, because we invaded Iraq, she is justified in suggesting a lack of pride in her country…if that is what she really said, which we’re supposed to also believe isn’t what she really said.
It doesn’t really add up.
I’m not proud of the entitlement state we are sliding into. I’m still proud of America.
I’m not proud of the tens of millions of abortions in the last few decades. I’m still proud of America.
I’m not proud of our disgraceful abandonment of Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam War. I’m still proud of America.
I’m not proud of the Democratic Party (or Republicans at times for that matter). I’m still proud of America.
Never mind that Michelle Obama has come back with the ‘clarification’ that she is indeed proud of her country. She had followed up the line in her speech claiming a sudden pride in America by saying that, “Not just because Barack is doing well, but I think people are hungry for change.”
In her clarification however, she seemed to backpedal on this by saying her pride is based on how her husbands supporters are rallying around him. The rhetoric of “change” is almost as annoying as her anti-pride remark. She doesn’t care about “change”, she cares about change that benefits her candidate husband. Michael Bloomberg could run on the silly campaign strategy of “change” and if Obama supporters left his side to swarm around Bloomberg, I suspect that her “pride” for the country’s rally around “change” would magically disappear. Every election to a leftist is about change…unless the incumbent is a leftist.
There is an oft ignored lesson in this for Democrats: you can’t win elections by being honest. No one in the Obama camp thought at the time that there was anything wrong with expressing a decades long lack of pride in America. It wasn’t until reactions woke them up that they suddenly realized that these rather simple words needed ‘clarification’.
Clarification is necessary because honesty in this regards will cost her husband votes. Until her husband loses, she will come up with ways to be proud of this country.
For the rest of us, it’s not that challenging.
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