Last October the Associated Press re****ted that Barack Obama had made a
decision not to s****t an American flag pin on his lapel:
Asked about it Wednesday in an interview with KCRG-TV
in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Illinois senator said he
stopped wearing the pin shortly after the attacks and
instead hoped to show his patriotism by explaining his
ideas to citizens.
"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 im****tance to our national security.
"I decided I won't wear that pin on my chest," he said in
the interview. "Instead, I'm going to try to tell the
American people what I believe will make this country great,
and hopefully that will be a testament to my patriotism."
But did anyone notice that when Obama gave his "major speech on race"
Tuesday--the one necessitated by the revelation that his "spiritual
mentor"
had, among other things, called on God to "damn America"--he did so amid a
row
of American flags? We checked the video and counted eight of them.
We didn't write about this back in October, because the whole kerfuffle
was,
at its root, silly. There are many ways of expressing patriotism, and if
wearing a flag pin is not Obama's idiom, who cares? It WAS arrogant of him
to
imply that his own patriotism was more "true" than that of pin-wearers,
but
one could put this down to defensiveness at being asked a "gotcha"
question.
But in light of his October comment, what are we to make of his
extravagant
use of the Stars and Stripes on Tuesday? If a flag pin on a lapel is "a
substitute for true patriotism," is that not also true of eight flags on a
stage as a backdrop to a political speech? Obama proclaimed himself too
good
for cheap symbolism, but resorted to it the first time he faced a real
crisis.
Is he really any different from the run-of-the-mill politician?
--
It is simply breathtaking to watch the glee and abandon with which
the liberal media and the Angry Left have been attempting to turn
our military victory in Iraq into a second Vietnam quagmire. Too bad
for them, it's failing.
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