A Job Too Big for Cupid
By Wesley Pruden
WashingtonTimes.com
Cupid From a painting by
L.G.B. Perrault
Rudy Giuliani would shoot Cupid, and not with an
arrow dipped in Love Potion No. 9. He would use a
Smith & Wesson .358 with a slug bathed in garlic.
Mr. Giuliani thinks
Barack Obama does not love America in the way
that most of the rest of us do. This makes every
liberal’s teeth itch and every pimple break out in
acne. All the party hacks demand that His Former
Honor be put against the wall for saying what nearly
everybody else thinks is obvious, that the president
never wastes an opportunity to lecture, knock, slam,
snipe and swipe at the object of his love all
sublime, and that’s not what a smitten lover does.
Mr. Obama dispenses only tough love. He
understands the first article of tough love, why
send a rose when you can send a cactus? But tough is
not always appreciated as a synonym for love. A
woman wants an occasional Valentine, not a bucket
and a mop. The president’s country would appreciate
an occasional kind word, too.
Does a woman’s heart burst with gratitude when she
hears the voice of her lover singing the praise of a
flame deep in the past? Not often, in my experience.
Is there a woman in the land whose heart bubbles
with warmth and gratitude at a recital of her
faults, failings, imperfections and blemishes? None
that I know of, but maybe that’s just me. Giving a
woman — and a country — a list of rivals whose
attractions and allures she might usefully emulate
is what love is all about, no? A wise man, or even a
dumb one, would not to try this recipe at home.
Saying the obvious is usually dangerous, if not
foolish. When the Democratic hacks called out
Mr. Giuliani the usual Republican suspects fell
quickly in line to echo the partisan outrage, not
reading what
Mr. Giuliani said, but what the Democratic hacks
said he said. This what he said: “I do not believe,
and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do
not 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.”
He did not question the president’s patriotism, as
Mr. Obama himself questioned George W.’s
patriotism in his 2008 presidential campaign, when
he called Mr. Bush “unpatriotic” merely for adding
trillions to the national debt (which
Mr. Obama would duplicate, and then some, in his
own first term). He did not question
Mr. Obama’s morality, his honesty or his
integrity. He merely said he didn’t think
Mr. Obama loved America the way he did and the
way most Americans, unsophisticated and untutored in
“nuance” as they may be, love America. How could he?
He was never encouraged to love America that way,
growing up surrounded by those who owed America only
their contempt.
Not for him to count the ways to love America, “to
the depth and breadth and height” his soul could
reach, sentiment so easily applied to God and
country. Sentiments like that make those squirm
whose hearts never skip a beat at the very sight of
the flag rippling in the breeze, whether warm or
icy.
Mr. Obama has no trouble counting the ways that
America has failed him. “We are five days away from
fundamentally transforming the United States of
America,” he told a rally on the eve of his election
in 2008. How could he love a country that needed
“fundamentally transforming”?
Even the first lady, who knows her husband better
than anyone else, said in 2008 that “we are going to
change our conversation. We’re going to have to
change our traditions, our history. We’re going to
have to move into a different place as a nation.”
Then came his “apology tour” of the world,
apologizing for America’s “arrogance” in France, for
its “imperfections” to the Islamic world, for its
“unfulfilled promises” to Latin America, to the
world for “going off course” in the war against
terrorism, to the Turkish parliament for “our own
darker periods in our history” and to the world and
even to himself for not appreciating himself as much
as he should have. “I would like to think that with
my election and the early decisions that I have
made,” he told a press conference in London in
early2009, the world would have behaved itself
better.
Come on,
Rudy. What could move a man to love a country as
bad as that, any more than a man could love a woman
who needed so much rehabilitation and
reconstruction? You might as well pull the trigger.
Even Cupid couldn’t fix this.
• Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The
Washington Times.