A week or so ago I had a good laugh at the expense of National Review roving correspondent Kevin D. Williamson, who worked himself into a tizzy over the State of the Union circa 2015, bouncing off of Rowdy Rudy Giuliani’s celebrated banalities regarding President Obama’s supposed lack of patriotic fervor. Kevin concluded his rant by citing, and expanding upon, the qualms expressed by William F. Buckley back in 1998, who claimed to observe “probationary flags” flying in response to the supposed decline of American loveliness, a decline due, according to Bill, to “disfiguring contemporary data on crime, abortion, drugs, etc.” Today, according to Kev, “the signs [are] far more than probationary”—meaning, I guess, that America should be in jail.
For both men, of course, the true “disfiguring data” were the outcomes of the past two presidential elections. A country that elects Democrats president doesn’t deserve to be loved! This is a most amusing meme, and it pops up again in a recent post by the usually more sensible David Weigel, now writing for Bloomberg Politics, who wants us to know “Why Conservatives Are Fed Up With the Rudy Giuliani Story,” the argument being that when a prominent conservative says something deliberately offensive and preposterous about the president of the United States, the media shouldn’t cover it.
There is an argument for that position, of course, because Republicans are always accusing President Obama, and Democrats in general, of being unpatriotic. Ann Coulter’s entire career is built on the charge that Democrats are “traitors.” “Moderate” Republicans like Peggy Noonan take it for granted, or affect to do so, that to be a patriot is to be a Republican. The Democratic Party is the “I Don’t Love America” Party.
Weigel doesn’t make that argument, of course, Instead, he quotes, without a shred of irony, the long litany of right-wing gripes against “the media,” whom they ludicrously see as an all-powerful parental figure who hates them. “You always take his side!”
Yes, the media always takes the Democrats’ side. There is no Wall Street Journal, no Fox News, no Rush Limbaugh, no Drudge Report, no Koch, Inc., nothing at all but the fucking New York Times, which is read as gospel by every fucking American. In his wrath, Weigel even goes back to the 2008 election, which he appears to regard as the root of all evil:
Some of the anger at Obama grows out of the belief that, as a candidate, he was sold as more moderate than he was. He was challenged not by a Giuliani,* but by Arizona Senator John McCain, who prevented aides from attacking Obama over the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, and waited until their final debate to bring up former Weather Underground terrorist and Obama friend Bill Ayers.
Yes, Barack Obama won the 2008 election because the media wouldn’t tell the truth about Obama’s radical past. The fact that President Bush had lied us into a costly, unnecessary, and counterproductive war, that the country was sliding into near economic collapse, and that John McCain was reacting by running around like a chicken with his head cut off, had nothing to do with it.
If Republicans really believe half the shit that Weigel says they do, they’re facing a damn steep learning curve. Maybe not George McGovern 1972 steep, but, you know, pretty goddamn steep.
*Weigel’s notion that Giuliani—thrice-married, pro-abortion, pro-gay rights, pro-gun control, pro-immigrant, with a mob enforcer/convicted felon dad and Bernie Kerik hung around his neck—could have/should have been the Republican nominee shows that Dave is a bit cognitively challenged himself.
