Does Barack Obama Love His Country?

“Call me a rube for saying so, but it’s a fair question,” Kevin D. Williamson writes at the newly revamped NRO and goes on to answer it:

To ask the question is not the same as venting the familiar swamp gasses: that he’s a foreigner, at heart if not in fact; that he’s a Manchurian candidate sent to undermine the republic; that he’s a secret Marxist or secret jihadist sympathizer; etc. Put it this way: Why would anybody who sees the world the way Barack Obama does love America?

For the progressive, there is very little to love about the United States. Washington, Jefferson, Madison? A bunch of rotten slaveholders, hypocrites, and cowards even when their hearts were in the right places. The Declaration of Independence? A manifesto for the propertied classes. The Constitution? An artifact of sexism and white supremacy. The sacrifices in the great wars of the 20th century? Feeding the poor and the disenfranchised into the meat-grinder of imperialism. The gifts of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Astor? Blood money from self-aggrandizing robber barons.

There is a personality type common among the Left’s partisans, and it has a name: Holden Caulfield.

As Glenn Reynolds writes, “judging by the foaming-at-the-mouth response from Democrats, Giuliani’s remarks hit a nerve:”

They did so because Obama has given people plenty of reason to doubt how he feels about America — at least, America as it actually is — and because Giuliani’s remarks represent the end of people treating Obama with kid gloves. In this, Giuliani’s remarks are comparable to Jonathan Chait’s It’s Okay To Hate George W. Bush piece, a signal that opened up the floodgates of liberal negativity toward Bush.

And on Twitter today, Frank Fleming squares the circle:

There are two things the left hates: 1. Patriotism 2. Having their patriotism questioned

— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) February 20, 2015

Related: “Patriotism, Giuliani and Ron Fournier’s Credibility Problem,” from John Nolte at Big Journalism. Plumping for Obamacare in 2013, Fournier certainly had no qualms about calling over half the country unpatriotic.

And Noah Rothman of Hot Air spots the allegedly “objective” MSM (no really, some of them still hold themselves out as that) “unexpectedly” moving in JournoList-style lock step “to defend Obama’s honor from Rudy Giuliani.” Which is likely playing well inside of Manhattan, the Beltway, Berkeley and the networks’ green rooms. Out in the real world in-between, not so much.