Rudy Giuliani and King Canute

 

By Roger Kimball
PJMedia.com

So White House spokesman Josh Earnest “feels sorry” for Rudy Giuliani. Save your sympathy, Josh: you’re going to need it closer to home as America wakes up to the rude truth of Giuliani’s recent comments about your boss. 

Everyone now knows that “America’s mayor” created a firestorm with his off-the-record-but-nevertheless-reported remarks at a “private” (Ha!) dinner for Scott Walker in New York last week.  Barack Obama, Giuliani suggested, didn’t “love America,” not really. He hastened to add that he was not questioning the president’s patriotism. Oh, no, never that. It’s just that Obama’s habitual denigration of  America (he believes in American exceptionalism in the same way that the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism, he once said) led him to conclude that Barack Hussein Obama was not viscerally connected to this country in the same way that, for example, Ronald Reagan was.

The MSM sure didn’t like that. And they liked it even less when Giuliani decided to underscore his comments in the following days.  Not only did Obama not really love America, Giuliani said, but also he was deeply influenced by America-hating Communists growing up, from his parents to Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers, and the “Reverend” Jeremiah (“God Damn America”) Wright.

Kevin Williamson was right when he observed in his National Review column that for the “progressive” (sorry about “progressive,” but I can’t light on a better term: “liberal” certainly won’t do it) worldview, of which Obama is an example,

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.

Kevin continues, coming close to that alternative for “progressive” I was looking for: “There is a personality type common among the Left’s partisans,” he writes, “and it has a name: Holden Caulfield. He is adolescent, perpetually disappointed, and ever on the lookout for phoniness and hypocrisy.” Sound familiar?

But it is now clear that Rudy Guiliani’s performance these past few days was nothing in comparison to his speech at a conference on Obama’s policy toward Iran on February 13.  Vladimir Putin may be the single most dangerous individual walking God’s snow-covered earth these days, but among state actors the theocratic mullah-mad country of Iran deserves a place at the tip top of badness.  They have, as Giuliani said, probably sponsored more terrorism than any other country.  Their ambitions are boundless. (Ilan Berman has the lowdown on this in his forthcoming book Iran’s Deadly  Ambition.) They hate Israel and have repeatedly said they wish to wipe it off the face of the earth. They are avidly, single-mindedly, tirelessly seeking nuclear weapons.  And Obama is helping them do just that. This is too important an issue, Giuliani said, to be left to a feckless creature like Barack Hussein Obama. Congress should be brought in to study and approve any agreement made with the insane people running the Shia hellhole. He is quite right about all this. His speech was full of wonderful one-liners: Netanyahu is a man that fights for his country, quoth Giuliani, “unlike our president.” “Wake up, Mr. President,” he said. “Come off the golf course.  Come back to earth.” Actually, I’d rather Obama stay on the golf course and out of Washington.

The Left of course is going nuts over Giuliani’s remarks. The off-the-cuff line about Obama not really loving his country was bad enough.  But now it turns out he has turned over the whole slimy rock and look what crawled out: Bill Ayers, Obama’s America-hating Commie parents, the “Reverend” Jeremiah Wright, and on and on. Giuliani understands terrorism as well as anyone and he doesn’t like it. He isn’t afraid to call a spade a spade. When the people committing terrorist massacres do so while shouting “Allahu Akbar,” you don’t neeed an advanced degree in hermeneutics to work out that their activities have something to do with Islam—not the suburban varieties supposedly on offer everywhere that Muslims are not busy beheading, flogging, and incinerating people for the tort of being Christian, or Jewish, or homosexual, or a woman.  No, Giuliani is quite right. He calls a spade a spade.  When Major Nidal Hasan went on a shooting spree at Ft. Hood, shouting “Allahu Akbar” and killing 13, he wasn’t an emissary of the Methodist Church or the Fraternal Order of Elks or the Lions Club.  He was acting out an Islamic jihadist fantasy for which he’d been prepped by imams in Yemen.

The Left-leaning media, from Mr. Earnest down through the New York Times and other rancid specimens of Holden Caulfield group-think, are screaming about Giuliani, who has even received a few death threats.  The positive response, however, has been overwhelming. It’s as if some distorting filter has been removed from people’s ears and, suddenly, they hear the truth, not what the New York Times tells them.  They hear and they are roused to shock and anger.  They hear and they ask themselves, How have I been duped so long?  In the famous story about King Canute, the fabled monarch is said to have dragged his throne down to the water’s edge and ordered the incoming tide to turn back. It didn’t, thus demonstrating the King’s humility and the cravenness of his flatterers.  But I wonder whether Rudy Giuliani may not be a more potent, modern-day Canute, turning back not the nautical tides but the tides of politically correct, anti-American propaganda with which the Holden Caulfields of the world (and they are legion) have been filling the newsstands and the airwaves.  I sense a sudden change in the direction of the Zeitgeist’s current.  I suspect that Giuliani’s impassioned and forthright performance may be a contributing factor.  I pray that it is not too late.