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Yes, Rudy, It Was A “Horrible Thing To Say”-And Horribly Stupid!

Rudy Giuliani says, although Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and white grandparents, he “doesn’t believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.” Yes, Rudy, it was a horrible thing to say—and horribly stupid. I found out through this kerfuffle that Rudy loves himself so much he wanted to live a very long life so he could love his country more. So Rudy, this patriotic champion of country love and classified 1-A, managed to evade the Vietnam War by getting six draft deferments. He almost got to prove his everlasting love of country one time when his draft board turned down his request for deferment. But Rudy got a federal judge to convince his draft board he was too important as a law clerk to waste his time in Vietnam with lowly grunts and dogfaces. Deferments run in the family. During World War II four of his uncles sought deferments.
When I think of it, Rudy might be the champion draft dodger in history, a patriotic position I thought Dick Cheney held with his record of five Vietnam deferments. New Yorker magazine writer Andy Borowitz has a gift for satire and comedy. He wrote this fake radio address last week: “In his weekly radio address, President Barack Obama reaffirmed his love of country, telling the nation, ‘I love America—even its idiots. Expanding on this theme, the President said, ‘America is made up of all kinds of people: young and old, weak and strong, smart and dumb. And when the really dumb ones get up and act like total clowns, I still love them, because they are part of America. In fact, a really big part.’ In a call for unity, the President concluded, ‘Let’s all work together for the United States of America. And if that means putting aside our differences—including our sometimes vast differences in intelligence—so be it.”
   Not only is Rudy a chickenhawk draft dodger, he really has a problem with “love,” so to speak. During one of his love periods he married Regina Peruggi, a second cousin he had grown up with. But love apparently disappeared quickly, so Rudy asked his best man, a priest, to arrange a Roman Catholic annulment because he said he shouldn’t have married a second cousin in the first place. Later he married Donna Hanover and had two children with her. When he was mayor of New York City and living at Gracie Mansion, he marched out one morning to a TV press conference and announced he was going to split from Donna. That’s how Donna found out he didn’t love her anymore. Maybe Rudy just doesn’t have a very good understanding of that wonderful emotion. Or maybe he is an erratic serial lover without lovable characteristics.

Did Obama’s Election Pour Salt On One Of The Nation’s Festering Wounds?

Some people thought that the election of a mulatto to the U.S. presidency after hundreds of years of black slavery, a civil war that caused the death of 600,000, the “Separate but Equal” policies, and Jim Crow laws meant we had come to the tipping point in race relations. The problem is it tipped backward instead of forward. Polls indicate that a majority believe race relations are getting worse in this country. Many still vote race instead of economics, vote race instead of political ideology, and vote race instead of for the common good of society. Evidently many people still believe in the medical and scientific “facts” published by Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright a decade before the Civil War in a series of articles called “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race.” At that time there were three million black slaves in the US valued at over $2 billion working as the property of others. The doctor opined that blacks were lazier than other races because they had a “deficiency of red blood in the pulmonary and arterial systems.” He said they loved to dance and waste time because they had a “profuse distribution of nervous matter to the stomach, liver, and genital organs.” He added that blacks absolutely hated to be whipped because they had the “sensitive skin of children.” He claimed that he had also discovered a medical condition that he called Drapetomania that was peculiar to blacks.  That syndrome motivated them to run away! He said this terrible affliction had two effective cures: treating one’s slaves kindly but firmly, or, failing that, “whipping the devil out of them.”  Well, so much for internal medicine, cardiology, and psychiatry in the 1840’s and 50’s. That good ol’ Southern boy Newt Gringrich, former Speaker of the House and perennial presidential candidate, revealed his “Cartwright” knowledge of Negroes in a Fox News interview in 2014: “Black children have no habit of working unless it is illegal. I’m assuming that there’s some rhythm to Barack Obama that the rest of us don’t understand. Whether he needs large amounts of rest (He’s lazy and needs lots of blood work!), whether he needs to go play basketball for a while, um, watch ESPN, I mean, I don’t know what his rhythms are.” Newt is one of millions in the South who have never gotten beyond Cartwright.

What Religious Bigots And Republicans Really Think Of The Black Man In The White House

If you really want to find out what Republicans think about Obama, just Google “The Pretty Damn Exhaustive Obama Nickname List.” I’ve been collecting comments on Obama for the years he has been in office. I thought I would reveal a few for your edification. We have the former Navy Chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt who said there was a huge conspiracy by Obama and friends to rid the armed forces of Christians! Did you know Obama was creating an atheist army to attack all those god-fearing Christians?! The chaplain’s charge: “The Obama administration is stockpiling armored personnel carriers, and the Department of Homeland Security has billions of rounds of ammunition; who are they going to use that against? If there’s no Christians serving in the government, eventually that is all going to be turned against us.” He is only one of many nutcases loose in the “Christian” world.
Here are just a few prize examples of nutcase nicknames and comments made about Obama by Republicans and so-called conservatives: Obama is an alien who doesn’t think the way we do and is the son of a Kenyan anti-colonist / the rainbow king / Obamahammed / marshmellow balls / Il Douchebag / the Kenyan Kid / Chimpy the Kenyan / Comrade Obama / Dog-eating Sarong Boy / the Food Stamp President / Barack Illyich Lenin / Barack the Magic Negro / Barack Ovomit / Barack Omelonpatch / the Boy president / Chairman Mau-Mau / lawless / Kommandant-in-Chief / socialist dictator /Kenyan socialist Muslim dictator / African witch doctor / beige puppet / the Islamic atheist Marxist Kenyan, and thousands of other comments. Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said he didn’t know if Obama is a Christian, although Obama has declared that fact dozens of times. A white “Christian” Marine veteran wrote this: “The American Dream ended on November 6th, 2012 in Ohio. The second term of Barack Obama will be the final nail in the coffin for the legacy of the white Christian males who discovered, pioneered, settled and developed the greatest Republic in the history of mankind.  A coalition of blacks, Latinos, feminists, gays, government workers, union members, environmental extremists, the media, Hollywood, uninformed young people, the ‘forever needy,’ the chronically unemployed, illegal aliens and other fellow travelers have ended Norman Rockwell’s America.” My God, bring on the violins, the organ, Kleenex, and another Confederacy.

Rudy: “We’re The Most Exceptional Country In The World”

Well, Rudy, you may be right. Among modern industrialized countries we have the most billionaires in the world—and the highest rate of children in poverty. We probably have the finest health care for the rich—and the most confused, godawful, most expensive health care mess for the 99 Percent. We have many of the finest universities—and the most greedy private “institutions of higher learning” stealing from veterans and poor students and profiting from their student loans. We have the best pre- and post-natal maternity care for the rich and insured--and one of the poorest rates of child mortality in our universe. We have some of the best K-12 schools for the wealthy in exclusive suburbs—and some of the worst in the ghettos of our cities.  We have one of the highest rates of cash and asset inequality in the world—and almost 50 million people in abject poverty.  I could go on and on. Obama made the mistake of speaking the truth saying that “American exceptionalism is no more exceptional than the exceptionalism of any other country in the world.” Rudy said that statement demonstrated a “lack of moral clarity.”
How can a president hate America but be patriotic? Rudy says he is not questioning Obama’s patriotism. Oh? George Bernard Shaw, author of “Arms and the Man” and other political plays, said this about patriotism in the 20th Century: “Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.” That explains why there are so many exceptional countries in the world—all 196 of them at present. But Count Leo Tolstoy wrote about czarist Russia and the way the rulers manipulated the mindless zeal behind patriotism: “Patriotism for rulers is nothing else than a tool for achieving their power-hungry and money hungry goals, and for the ruled it means renouncing their human dignity, reason, conscience, and slavish submission to those in power…Patriotism is slavery.”   When this half-white—or half-black--son of a white mother who had to depend on food stamps for a time when she was going to school was elected president in 2008, 48% of Republicans polled by the Pew Research Center said Obama was not “patriotic.” After Rudy dropped his verbal garbage about love, now 69% of Republicans say Obama does not love America, consequently he also is not patriotic. This amounts to pure racial hatred. Remember before DNA that a drop of Negro blood determined that you were actually black? The League of the South, a spin-off organization of the Ku Klux Klan, recently announced it will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the “execution of the tyrant Abraham Lincoln” on April 14. League President Michael Hill in his blog thanked John Wilkes Booth for his “service to the South and to humanity.” The song “Dixie” has been proclaimed the national anthem of the South by the League.

At One Time Politics Was Describe As “The Noblest Profession”

Dwight Eisenhower said that. I wonder what he would think of the Congressional approval rating at 8% in a national poll. Only 20% of reliable voters now trust Washington to do the right thing. After six years of Obama’s presidency more than a third of Republicans still believe he was not born in the USA. Heck, over 20% believe he is the Antichrist! Is it possible to get anything done in Congress when 66% of Republicans say they do not believe in global warming? When 49% of Republicans do not believe in evolution? When 57% of Republicans support establishing Christianity as our national religion? I see North Dakota Senator Jon Hoeven read George Washington’s farewell address the other week which warned against the loss of religion and morality in public life. George led the good “exceptional” life, leading his nation in war and peace—while 318 black slaves who worked his property made him rich and beloved. At one time he said he would free them at his death. He forgot. There is that oft-used expression by Navy Commodore Stephen Decatur: “My country right or wrong.” I think that should be changed to: “My country damn well had better be right.” That’s what makes a country exceptional.
      
Raymond is a former Marine officer and school board superintendent and resides in Detroit Lakes.