The New Patriotism

For years, liberals have bullied conservatives away from the perfectly legitimate questioning of their non-existent patriotism.  Barack Obama's is a prescient and relevant example:

When you won't put your hand over your heart for the national anthem - even for show, as Hillary Clinton did - are ashamed of the American flag, quite clearly bought into Uncle Jeremiah's "God damn America!" growl, saw no moral objection to seeking out the patronage and mentorship of a hard-left domestic terrorist and traitor, and sought to inflict defeat and needless casualties upon American servicepeople in harm's way in Iraq (and Afghanistan), you are not a patriot.  PERIOD.  But no, none on our side had the cajones to come out and say it and stick by it and throw libs on the defensive about their lack of patriotism.  We left the word's definition out their defenseless, a scrawl on a blackboard that could be easily erased and a new definition substituted.

Welcome to the new definition:

The extent to which the 1960s counter-culture has become the culture and 1960s anti-Americanism become the new patriotism is amazing. That's why Obama could launch his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist and pay almost no price for it. As Chris Matthews lectured Pat Buchanan on Hardball last Friday night, Ayers was a terrorist with a worthy motivation: he bombed the Pentagon because he wanted America out of Vietnam, a blameless goal indeed. Under the Left's tortured understanding of the new patriotism, even Jeremiah Wright is pro-American: his fulminations had the purpose of drawing America into the light.

Patriotism is now measured not by respect for the conservatism contained in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution but by the level of one's enthusiasm for the America to come.

To be a good American now means you nod vigorously as an Obama supporter at a cocktail party bashes the Boy Scouts as bigots while explaining to you why Obama's association with the "distinguished" education professor (as Congressman Rahm Emanuel put it) Bill Ayers is no big deal. It means you chuckle along with Joe Biden as he tells Ellen DeGeneres that conservative Californians are deluded to oppose gay marriage.

Or it means listening in hushed awe as unimpeachable American hero Colin Powell calls the most liberal Republican presidential nominee ever "narrow" and insufficiently "inclusive," and scolds unnamed Americans for objecting to the notion of a Muslim president. (I was half-expecting him to join Barney Frank in calling for the elimination of the Constitution's prohibition on foreign-born presidents. Surely that's not "inclusive" either.)

What was once considered the anti-American Left now has the power to define who is and who is not a good American. Seeing victory in sight, they grow more bold and unapologetic. Over the last few days, instead of denying charges thrown at Obama, they have readily conceded them and basically said: So what?

To them, Obama's "spreading the wealth around" comment isn't a cringe-inducing gaffe but an appaluse line and sound basis for policy. What's wrong with the state redistributing wealth? more than a few of them have asked, including, by the way, Colin Powell after his Meet the Press appearance before reporters.

Here, too, we see the new Americanism at work: where the founding fathers saw King George III's overtaxation as an occasion to start the country, an enlightened modern American is expected to join Joe Biden in welcoming new taxes as a "patriotic" duty.

In plain, non-Vulcan English, in Obamerica, "patriotism" = liberalism/socialism/paganism, and tradition/conservatism/constitutionalism = treason.  Wouldn't questioning the "patrotism" of center-right dissidents, such de-legitimizing/de-citizenizing/de-humanizing of non-Democrats be a necessary semantical prerequisite to further authoritarian crackdowns and an eventual Castro/Chavez-style New Left dictatorship?

It's already an established fact that President Hussein will use his (half) race as a PR truncheon to stifle opposition to his rule and his policies.  If all his foes are "racists" by dint of their very opposition, why not brand them as "traitors" as well?

I ask anew, and will never stop wondering after it's over: do ANY Obama voters outside the B.O. death cult have ANY idea what they're getting themselves, and OUR country, into?  Are ANY of them still capable of thinking rationally, and for themselves?  George Neumeyr thinks they are, but won't do so in time:

Politics and parasitism would appear to be the only obstacles that could stop them: fearing a backlash, they might temporize and moderate their plans, or like Bill Clinton they might not want to risk total chaos by devouring the conservative host whole. Liberalism, after all, has to feed off the lingering order of conservatism for it to exist at all. Were liberalism implemented fully and purely, the disorder unleashed, as even Clinton sensed, would make life increasingly impossible.

Then again, absolute power could corrupt absolutely and Clinton-era circumspection may now appear to the Democrats hopelessly passé. Debates in D.C. seem to shift ever leftward, with last year's liberal positions becoming this year's unacceptably reactionary ones -- a trend that is bound to accelerate under a Democratic monopoly of all three branches of government....

Under the unholy triumvirate of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid, good Americans will be expected to entrust their economy to redistributionists, their defense to pacifists, and their culture to proponents of abortion and gay marriage. Expect a crisis within six months should Obama win, promises Joe Biden. Perhaps he is right, but the first one is more likely to be domestic than international. 

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, I figured, given that he only carried 43% of the popular vote and clearly had no mandate for the ambitious "change" platform on which he ran, that he would govern close to the centrism he had professed in the campaign in order to build up his base of support for his 1996 re-election bid.  However eager he and Hillary and the counter-culture McGoverniks were to remake the country in their own reprobate image, they wouldn't be so foolish as to gallop so far to the Left of where the majority of the country was and provoke a huge backlash that would disrupt their long-term Marxian blueprint.

I was wrong.  The Clinton administration and its Donk congressional majorities triumphalistically roared into 1993 and 1994 as if politics had ended with Mr. Bill's ascension.  They were honest about who and what they were - their smug arrogance and malicious contempt for the "Joe the Plumbers" of the fruited plain - and what they wanted to do to us (gays in the military, a hackneyed hybrid of pacism and "humanitarian" militarism, a huge tax hike, and the blessedly abortive "Health Security Act"), they provoked a huge backlash, and two years, fifty-two lost House seats, and eight lost Senate seats later, Sick Willie had discovered "circumspection" as the only means of avoiding the same electoral fate his congressional comrades had suffered.

Bill & Hillary were True Believers, but they were poll fetishists as well, and valued their own political survival above the Left-Wing Cause.  Losing Congress hurt the latter but nourished the former and dragged Mr. Bill to a second term.  Barack Hoover Obama is at least as much of a True Believer as Mrs. Clinton was, and his fellow Legion of Doom members Crazy Nancy and Dirty Harry make Tom Foley and George Mitchell look like Birchers.  Once they hold total power within their grubby paws, they will go even more hog-wild than their early-'90s forebears did.  But they will do so not in an economy on the upswing, but one reeling from the effects of their party's Financial Logic Bomb and unable to absorb the hammer blows of higher taxes and reduced foreign trade.  A situation that will rapidly become a runaway collapse that could only further empower the federal government and (in a non-election year) the party in control of it.

I say again: this could be 1992, and it could be 1976; or it could be 1932.  If the latter, the Obama/Pelosi/Reid axis may well get their chance to "[replace] the Declaration of Independence and Constitution....with ['The New Patriotism'] and the platform of the Democratic Party."