I have now had several chances to tell the following
story. Every time the response has been
a look of total recognition of the point accompanied by an affirming nod of the
head:
Earlier this year I was reading about an instance where the
president was clearly not acting in the broad interest of the public. I blurted out a comment along those
lines. Let me mention that my wife is
one of the least political people that you will ever meet. She is all about family and friends. Of course, if you step on her toes by telling
her what she can and cannot do you might get some pushback. Because she does not have a strong interest
in politics I generally make political comments on rare occasion only. When she started to respond to my comment I
was expecting a question asking for further clarification of what I had
said. Instead, she really surprised me
by asking, “do you think the president loves the country?” I didn’t want to give a knee-jerk response. But after a long pause and thought I simply
replied, “no.” She shrugged and that was
that. A few months ago, the same thing
happened, I commented and she questioned.
This time my response was a little different. I said, “honey, I love you, now I want to
fundamentally transform you.” Then she
shot me a look of totally knowing that I was right, that the president doesn’t
love the country. No further questions
needed.
As I said earlier, everyone seems to get this instantly. The exceptions will be few.
Disclaimer: Not responsible for any person who gets clobbered while reproducing this communication experiment.
48 comments:
Well, since Michelle Obama said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime I am proud of my country" when her husband was near to being president, I'd say they didn't think much of the country before that.
Hmm. Howard, before you congratulate yourself for your clever teachable moment, may I suggest it wouldn't have packed quite the punch it did if your wife had said it to you? Ever read Beauty and the Beast?
Patronizing Canadian Alert: Americans sometimes worry too much about this stuff. Your fierce pride and patriotism is your glory, but it can lead you to look too suspiciously at your fellow citizens for some kind of demonstrative proof of loyalty, and even at times be sucked into conspiracy thinking. Eventually some start thinking a traitor is someone who loves America less than they do. I really don't think Obama's disasters are rooted in a dearth of love for America.
Two months ago, ten years of conservative government came to an end here. The Liberal victor is a man-child (son of the infamous Pierre Trudeau)who has made hundreds of promises he can't keep. Not a day goes by when he doesn't feed us some gooey pap about how much he loves Canada, governing from his heart, etc., and all the wonderful things to come for us Canadians, for whom he is also bursting with love. He's in his honeymoon period and is reacting against his very reserved, almost bloodless, predecessor. I'm not optimistic, but I haven't the slightest doubt he loves Canada as much as he keeps on saying he does. But I wish he'd ratchet down the love and worry more about fiscal policy. It feels like we're being force fed cotton candy.
Conservatives should be wary of any leader who keeps talking about how much he/she loves the country and them.
Indeed, the man-child doth protest a tad too much....
(But then, who was it who said that men oft destroy the thing they "love"?...)
File under: The---fundamentally transformed---True North, proud and free
Howard,
But how can we be sure you, and I mean personally you, love the country?
Peter,
...may I suggest it wouldn't have packed quite the punch it did if your wife had said it to you?
You may, and I would agree.
Because such effective communication is so rare, allow me to enjoy this for what it is, no more but also no less.
Conservatives should be wary of any leader who keeps talking about how much he/she loves the country and them.
Also agreed, but actions should inform the matter...
Clovis,
But how can we be sure you, and I mean personally you, love the country?
Even if you're not joking, you realize the difference for someone in high office?
What do you guys think of Jim Webb? I've always liked him and he might even make the smart move of putting Cruz on his ticket to run again Trump.
They'd get our votes and probably a lot of others like us.
I really don't think Obama's disasters are rooted in a dearth of love for America.
Peter, what then as an outsider looking in, do you attribute his "disasters"? I don't think they are disasters. I think they're deliberate attempts to take us down a couple (lots) of pegs and soften us up for a one world government of moonbats.
Peter, wouldn't you like to be a fly on the wall ... .
erp, I will give you a cryptic answer from an outside observer who thinks of himself as a fan. In my experience, almost all Americans think that the high point in history was the American Revolution and the founding. And almost all believe the project became tainted very quickly--within a few years. One side thinks the promise was betrayed by pro-government collectivists, secularists, the accretion of federal government power, foreign influences and, above all, taxation and interference with commerce and property rights. The other side thinks the promise was betrayed by capitalist plutocrats bending the law for profit, racism, religious intolerance and neo-imperialism. Both claim to embody the true spirit of the Founders and both will accuse the other of betraying them. They fight rhetorically to the death (proud, new American Christopher Hitchens once said an outsider observing American politics could be forgiven for fearing you were two speeches away from another civil war), but almost all will join together as one if America is ever really threatened.
Do you remember Michael Harrington, a Boston socialist academic from the sixties who wrote a very popular book? I remember he went on for pages about how much he loved his country. In fact, he so loved America and Americans that he concluded that, unlike other lesser peoples (like Canadians? Surely he was talking about Brazilians?), they were "ready" for socialism. Yes, the left did indeed talk that way back then.
Do you think Wilson loved America? Roosevelt? Johnson? Kennedy? Harry? I assume they did, but then I come from a country where a good measure of nation-building success, even in existentially threatening circumstances, is built on not asking such questions.
Peter, thank you for your response, but my question wasn't whether Obama loves America, but about his disasters. I don't give a rat's patoot if he loves American or not, but I care a lot about his actions, i.e., that he's made us vulnerable from enemies both inside and outside our borders, destroyed the military, changed NASA from a space agency to Moslem outreach, institutionalized crony capitalism aka fascism, enslaved a large part of We, the People with easy welfare, ..., but most of all destroyed equality under the rule of law.
erp,
Most of the disasters stem from a worldview which I will call "faculty lounge cluelessness." Peter might even share that perspective.
Peter might even share that perspective.
As contributing to the president taking actions that are disastrous.
... so you don't think it's deliberate?
Howard,
----
Even if you're not joking, you realize the difference for someone in high office?
----
I do realize you didn't answer my question.
Clovis,
Tell me why you think your question is relevant?
erp,
I think any deliberate aspect is secondary to the cluelessness. One example is here and a partial explanation is here.
Howard, I worked and lived with academics for most of my life. They aren’t all clueless like the Bernie Sanders model. Obama personifies the life form. Narcissism and selfishness are the rule. Somehow in their minds being expert in a tiny portion of human knowledge makes them geniuses. They are all alike because when hiring they choose those like themselves – if somehow they err and a regular person get in, they’re ostracized and booted out after the first cut.
We retired at 53 when all our kids were out of school, had jobs and apartments. It’s a very stressful environment being around these clowns all the time.
I don’t believe for a minute that Obama is calling the shots, but I do believe that he like the rest of his administration would be as gleeful should the U.S. collapse as those people in New Jersey who were dancing in the streets while watching the twin towers fall the ground.
Howard,
Is anything in this post?
...which I will call "faculty lounge cluelessness." Peter might even share that perspective.
Heh, love it. Indeed I would, Howard. In my private moments, I dream of winning a Nobel prize in chemistry, which would qualify me to solve all the world's problems and save humanity in just one op-ed.
Obama's disasters:you must be referring to the 2 wars he lost and the collapse of the financial system he engineered.
Oh, wait . . .
I think you guys would benefit from reading a daily newspaper, daily, and trying to remember what you read.
Start now, before the death panels march you off to the FEMA camps.
I read daily papers for 45 years including the NYT. I don't waste that time anymore and I pity the fool who believes most of what the lamestream media presents.
Howard, couldn't agree more. I wouldn't even have the local liberal rag, but my husband wants a paper to read with his morning coffee.
Even worse than reading the papers are the people who get all their information/news from the morning talk shows. My neighbor continually informs me where I've gone wrong according to Katie Couric and clones.
Possibly you should have read for content. You sure didn't learn about death panels in the Times. Lamestream media is diagnostic; you get your misinformation from Limbaugh, The Blaze etc.
Actually, it was many years of reading for content that alerted me to not suffer the Gell-Mann effect like Murray. The Blaze, no, Limbaugh mostly for entertainment. He is very entertaining with high production values. He is not perfect but there are very few in the media anywhere near as well informed. I get additional entertainment reading and listening to media sources lie about or mis-characterize things he did or did not say. They must use unreliable sources to inform themselves about Limbaugh(flat out false or very selective editing). I know for myself since I listen regularly - for twenty years.
There are now plenty of aggregator blogs and alternative media sources. The loss of their near monopoly seems to be irritating them. A favorite game for NYT is to bury important information deep in an article that is shaped by a misleading headline. The biggest game is simply to omit anything that does not fit the narrative.
True, the reality-based news sources did not report that death panels were to be imposed. To that extent you are correct.
But that was because the idea was imaginary.
There are indeed many aggregator sites; many false, many tendentious. I like RightWingWatch myself because they offer the audio or video clips.
Like when Limbaugh was accused of racism. Skipper went on and on about how that wasn't true, but then we herd the clip.
Correction, you heard a clip without context. I doubt you ever heard a single program. I haven't heard him in years and that only in the car, but he's very witty and without guile. That's why they've never laid a glove on him even though hoards of vile little creatures have been crawling around trying to catch him out.
Just compare his stuff with the entire leftwing media trashing Bush, telling bold face lies and Sarah Palin ditto. Some little twit on SNL makes a snide remark about her seeing Russia from her back porch and suddenly it's part of her bio.
You want disgusting, your side has it in spades.
... BTW your typo was a Freudian slip. Herd mentality indeed!
Correction, you heard a clip without context.
Ding! Ding! Ding!
Just as one example, let me remind everyone here of a deceptively edited 911 call. Even got a producer fired...
I've heard plenty of other egregious examples regarding racism, Rush, all kinds of other people and matters in public forums being misrepresented.
No side has a monopoly on deception, but one seems to be much more of a chronic offender. Beyond the most blatant attempts at deception, there is the more common reporting made consistent with what all the "right thinking" people believe. The conformity and groupthink inside that bubble is impressive. If someone does have doubts about the orthodoxy, dare they voice their concerns and risk paying the price?
This is why I don't like history or any other form of study/inquiry that is context-less.
If you want to see a fun example of what more active editing can do (video).
Perhaps the reason conservatives do very little lying is we don't have the entire media and academe to confirm our lies.
It's difficult for me to watch any movies or TV or read modern books even if they're well written like Joyce Carol Oates and a couple of others is there is always a snide aside, most of the time completely gratuitous about somebody or something not on the plantation.
Then I must drop the book in disgust and rail at the gods. :-) Oops, since I read ebooks almost entirely, I learned that can be very expensive.
The "death panels" were a more accurate description of the ACHA than "if you like your insurance you can keep it" or that the ACHA would "cut the cost of a typical family's premium by up to $2,500 a year". Inexplicably Mr. Eagar seems less than eager to mention those.
'More accurate' means 'totally imaginary.' Got it.
As for Limbaugh's being so well informed, recall that the Internet never forgets. Search for Limbaugh + birth certificate. If you want his racist rant, it's available on Youtube.
So Harry, tell us the real skinny about Obama's birth certificate, especially the part where Soetero adopts him at age 4 and his birth certificate is sealed, altered, what?
And then there's the fact that there is no record he ever reversed his citizenship from Indonesian when he was 18 and then there's the fact that like Dan Rather's famous letter composed on a word processor decades before its invention, the document offered as his birth certificate was an obvious forgery.
Why? Because his father, traveling on a British passport, was already married and couldn't have married his mother in Hawaii, then a U.S. protectorate, or anywhere else. That is if, indeed, his purported parents are his real progenitors.
He's obviously related to Stanley Dunham as he looks very much like him, but exactly who his mother was is open to speculation as no one has ever come forward to say they saw Stanely Ann Dunham pregnant and then at the age of barely 18 she conveniently took the infant at a couple of months old and all on her went to school in Washington state???? Remember this was in 1962 when young girls on their own with babies and no visible means weren't as numerous as they are now. Any record of her being graduated from high school??? Next thing you know, she's a prominent anthropologist with a doctorate.
So many many anomalies that the myth of Obama's past is even more fabulist than Vince Foster's suicide.
Harry, (a) why not turn your mighty intellect on ferreting out the truth about the lies all around you instead of beating the dead horse of Limbaugh’s imaginary racism; (b) Sorry that your relatives didn’t have the ability to get health care for their children where they came from, but the people where I came from figured it out and had it was working very well before your cohort got control.
I listened to supposedly racists comment by Limbaugh on youtube, nearly 10 minutes worth. Read several lists of quotes... waiting, waiting, waiting. Nope, all without context. Many examples of which I know the context. I would say nice try but it is really a very poor try. If you don't have video with context or full transcripts with surrounding material you can't trust... However, it tells me much more about you're emotional need to discredit someone who challenges your worldview.
Search Youtube for 'Chinese' Howard. Sheesh.
erp, it's small wonder you are so confused, you don't read well. I did not say my family could not get health care. I said they worked to get it for poor people who were not getting it from doctors or anybody else. We know you believe that New Yorkers were getting free care from the finest doctors in the city, but, besides being impossible (too many poor people, not enough rich doctors), it didn't happen.
Harry, reread my comment if you want to know what I said.
Erp,
If an American born baby, from an American woman, moves to another country where her mother marries a non-American, does it mean the kid loses its American citizenship? What your laws say?
No, but in Obama's case, he was legally adopted by Soetero and became an Indonesian citizen. When this happens, the individual is allowed to petition the court to restore his U.S. citizen when he reaches the age of 18. There is no record of Obama having done so and in fact, he matriculated at Occidental College as a foreign student, then he mysteriously transferred to Columbia where he was a "ghost" and came out no longer a foreign student was swept away to Harvard where he was named to the formerly prestigious position of editor of the law review without having written so much as a grocery list nor did he make the cut to enter Alan Dershowitz's prestigious constitutional law class.
As an amusing aside, our president actually said that he knows what he did today by fiat was okay because he taught constitutional law. Media reported that with straight faces and without comment.
... when a child is adopted his birth certificate is also sealed.
Erp,
So by US Law, after such foreign adoption (even though with the American mother being together), you "automatically" lose your US Citizenship (that is, if you male no petition later)?
Would you have a link for such law?
I did at one time, but as I said almost all the material in a very large file that I compiled on Obama after the Kerry nomination convention is no longer available. Here's the leftwing website the Blaze's equivocational take on the subject.
I tried to get some info and ran across this highly amusing version of his life which bears only a passing resemblance to what I remembered from my early research, but which alas will be the definitive version for the ages.
Erp,
Per your own link:
----
However, it’s important to note that even if Obama was adopted and became an Indonesian citizen, he would not have lost his American citizenship under existing constitutional law (see the Supreme Court case Perkins v. Elg). Indonesia then and now does not allow dual citizenship, but under American law he would not have lost his American citizenship until he reached the age of majority and chose himself to give it up.
------
Do you disagree? It looks like a pretty straightfoward legal question.
Clovis, basically what I said, except how I remembered it, the person in question would have to petition to restore his U.S. citizenship at age 18, not the other way around. Perhaps case you cite happened after Obama reached 18?
I don't think it much matters because he definitely matriculated at Occidental College as a foreign student. IMO one of the major reasons his first act as president was to have all his records sealed -- the other being Ann Dunham could not have been married to Obama Sr).
Erp,
Supreme Court case Perkins v. Elg is from 1939.
---
I don't think it much matters because he definitely matriculated at Occidental College as a foreign student.
---
I don't know why that matters at all. It is above established that a second Indonesian citizenship was not an impediment for his US Citizenship under US laws. Assuming he had such a second citizenship, and that he used it to enlist at that College, it still bears no importance to the matter of being eligible for the presidency.
Sorry Erp, but you look to be trying a Chewbacca defense here.
Clovis, you misunderstand. I didn't mean that it would be an impediment to the presidency, I meant it would show that eight years after returning to Hawaii, he chose to declare himself a foreign national on a college admissions application rather than a native born son, if indeed there isn't something else going on here.
Chewbacca defense?
You know what was really clever, Clovis? Putting that birth announcement in the Honolulu newspaper. Those Illuminati think of everything!
Also, this is the first place I have seen The Blaze described as leftwing.
There's plenty of controversy surrounding that birth announcement and here's another piece of hot-off-the-press news, Fox News isn't conservative. It's owned by Rupert Murdoch who publicly supported Hillary.
Advice Harry, don't try to kid with a kidder.
Erp,
---
I didn't mean that it would be an impediment to the presidency [...]
---
So I indeed misunderstand the whole reason his birth certificate and citizenship(s) is a topic at all.
AFAIK, it was all about the question if he attended the requirement that a President must be a natural born citizen. Am I wrong?
While we are at the topic, by the way, do you believe Ted Cruz attends that requirement? Because I truly do not understand how his case would be different, or even worse, since no one disputes he was born out of the country. So how can you question Obama on this point and still be supportive of Cruz, dear Erp?
Cruz meets the requirements for a "natural born citizen."
I believe Obama was born in Hawaii, it's the rest of his bio that is mostly bogus as I explained above.
More than you'd ever want to know about natural born citizens.
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