Kevie D has an absolutely epic rant over at the National Review, a rant that starts with Rudy Giuliani’s howler that Obama doesn’t love America but goes beyond it to argue, with hilarious vehemence, that our two-term president doesn’t even like America before somersaulting to the astonishing conclusion that no one should love America because, gosh darn it, we just aren’t lovely any more!
Kev “proves” his first point via a stunning series of analogies. See, the thing is, Obama is a lot like Holden Caulfield. Well, he is! Barack is a “progressive,” that is to say, a partisan of the Left, and “[t]here is a personality type common among the Left’s partisans, and it has a name: Holden Caulfield.” Would you like to know what Holden thinks? “He believes with Elizabeth Warren that the economy is a rigged game based on exploitation and deceit rather than on innovation, productivity, and competition.” Not only that, “[s]ay an admiring word about Steve Jobs and he’ll swear that there are four-year-olds working 169 hours a week in Chinese sweatshops producing iPods at the point of a bayonet.”
Well, I’d like to say to Mr. Williamson that explaining President Obama’s true character by imagining what a fictional character would think were he an actual person on the grounds that the president, in his heart of hearts, resembles that character and thus does think what that fictional character would think is a bit of an epistemological tangle.
After “crushing” the president via Holden, Kev finds himself stuck with the task of explaining how this, well, this total schmuck ever got himself elected twice to the presidency, an enigma Kev can only resolve by concluding that the American people are dangerously “vulnerable to insipid sentimentality,” a thought so depressing that Kev can’t help wonder if, well, if America is worth loving! He quotes a similarly depressed William F. Buckley, circa July 4, 1998, wondering if an America that twice elected Bill Clinton president deserved to be loved. Quoting (who else?) William1 Burke, that “a society, to be loved, must be lovely,” Bill (Buckley) worried that the “disfiguring contemporary data on crime, abortion, drugs, etc.” indicated a lessening of loveliness in the U.S.A. “Some probationary flags are flying,” sighed Bill.
One might unsportingly note that both crime and abortion rates fell steadily throughout the Clinton era, while the National Review itself endorsed the repeal of many drug laws (appropriately enough, because Buckley was a heavy user if not abuser of both prescription drugs and alcohol for most of his life). One might also unsportingly note that the same trends have continued during Obama’s two terms, along with a stock market at near-record highs, low inflation, and a 5.7% unemployment rate.
But does that make Kevin happy? No way! “That was 1998,” he says, referring to Buckley’s whiny pout, “a decade later2 and the signs would be far more than probationary. That much is plain to Rudy Giuliani, and it should be plain enough to the rest of us, too.”
So, what Kevin is really saying that Obama doesn’t love America because he shouldn’t! A country that twice elected him president doesn’t deserve to be loved! By anyone!
