Bloodthirsty Liberal

I’m grateful to Peggy Noonan for thinking for me.

If the president and his first lady are not loyal first to America and its interests, who will be? The president of France? But it’s his job to love France, and protect its interests. If America’s leaders don’t love America tenderly, who will?

…

And if you feel you’re losing America, you really don’t want a couple in the White House whose rope of affection to the country seems lightly held, casual, provisional. America is backing Barack at the moment, so America is good. When it becomes angry with President Barack, will that mean America is bad?

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Michelle Obama seems keenly aware of her struggles, of what it took to rise so high as a black woman in a white country. Fair enough. But I have wondered if it is hard for young African-Americans of her generation, having been drilled in America’s sad racial history, having been told about it every day of their lives, to fully apprehend the struggles of others. I wonder if she knows that some people look at her and think “Man, she got it all.” Intelligent, strong, tall, beautiful, Princeton, Harvard, black at a time when America was trying to make up for its sins and be helpful, and from a working-class family with two functioning parents who made sure she got to school.

That’s the great divide in modern America, whether or not you had a functioning family, and she apparently came from the privileged part of that divide. A lot of white working-class Americans didn’t come up with those things. Some of them were raised by a TV and a microwave and love our country anyway, every day.

Does Mrs. Obama know this? I don’t know. If she does, love and gratitude for the place that tries to give everyone an equal shot would seem to be in order.

It doesn’t seem too much to ask, does it?

The same goes with wearing a flag pin on your lapel, if you ask me. Now, before you start baying about meaningless gestures, stop. Just stop. If the gesture had no meaning, why did he do it?

He told us why he did it. And that’s all I needed to hear.

“You know, the truth is that right after 9/11, I had a pin,” Obama said. “Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we’re talking about the Iraq War, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security, I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest.

“Instead,” he said, “I’m going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.”

He had the pin on—but he took it off. I guess he wasn’t feeling very proud of his country, either.

As a private citizen, that’s fine—even to be expected from a Democratic Senator. But from your President? Do we have to ask him to love his country—and to show it? Are Mr. and Mrs. Obama’s I-love-you-I-love-you-not daisy plucking show of patriotism how we want to represent our country?

As Obama has learned, words matter. So do gestures. We know the Obamas by theirs.