[Romney] did some interesting things there on health care, you know. We got some good ideas from him.
Only one sitting president in the last 82 years has publicly uttered the magical phrase “American exceptionalism” – care to guess who it is? Ronald Reagan, he of the “shining city on a hill?” George W. Bush, who closed his speeches by asking that “God continue to bless” America? Nope. The only president to publicly discuss (and for that matter embrace) “American exceptionalism” is Barack Obama.
I would have been surprised were it otherwise. It’s just how FOXmemes work.
You can support democracy in which the risk of Islamists gaining power and influence is present or you can support secular autocratic regimes that reduce the influence of Islamist groups through repressive means, but you can’t do both.
Here’s John Boehner oh so earnestly confused as to why Obama just doesn’t understand how great America is.
BOEHNER: Well, they — they’ve refused to talk about America exceptionalism. We are different than the rest of the world. Why? Because…
Naturally, the right’s own Jeff Miller (R,FL) had this to say:
“I don’t think we need the president to remind us how great this country is“
Obama: wrong on reminding us of American Exceptionalism repeatedly, wrong on repeatedly reminding us of American Exceptionalism.
Obviously very early, but signs say that it could go for Obama in 2012…under certain circumstances:
Texas ought to stay safely in the GOP column for 2012 but with a weak nominee Obama would have a chance and these numbers are further confirmation that you’re probably talking about 400+ electoral votes for the President next year if his opponent is [redacted].
But unsaid, and what ought to scare the pants off the GOP in Texas: that any potential candidate would poll as losing Texas to Obama right now is, shall we say: interesting.
Not KBH’s Senate seat, not the 2012 cycle, but soon and for a long time: Texas will be blue. The demographic tontine that is the core of the modern GOP will make it ever more so. I think I’ll even live to see it be a fairly reliable blue. And that will be a big, big deal.
MR. GREGORY: There’s been a lot of talk about discourse, about how you all can get along a little bit better and do it a little bit more civilly. And I wonder, this is the leadership moment here, OK? There are elements of this country who question the president’s citizenship, who think that it–his birth certificate is inauthentic. Will you call that what it is, which is crazy talk?
REP. CANTOR: David, you know, I mean, a lot of that has been an, an issue sort of generated by not only the media, but others in the country. Most Americans really are beyond that, and they want us to focus…
MR. GREGORY: Right. Is somebody brings that up just engaging in crazy talk?
REP. CANTOR: Well, David, I, I don’t think it’s, it’s nice to call anyone crazy, OK?
MR. GREGORY: All right. Is it a legitimate or an illegitimate issue?
REP. CANTOR: And–so I don’t think it’s an issue that we need to address at all. I think we need to focus on…
MR. GREGORY: All right. His citizenship should never be questioned, in your judgment. Is that what you’re saying?
REP. CANTOR: It is, it is not an issue that even needs to be on the policy-making table right now whatsoever.
MR. GREGORY: Right. Because it’s illegitimate? I mean, why won’t you just call it what it is?
REP. CANTOR: I–because, again…
MR. GREGORY: I mean, I feel like there’s a lot of Republican leaders who don’t want to go as far as to criticize those folks.
REP. CANTOR: No. I think the president’s a citizen of the United States.
MR. GREGORY: Period.
REP. CANTOR: So what–yes. Why, why is it that you want me to go and engage in name-calling?
MR. GREGORY: No, I’m just…
REP. CANTOR: I think he’s a citizen of the United States.
MR. GREGORY: Because, because I think a lot of people, Leader, would say that a leader’s job is to shut some of this down. You know as well as I do, there are some elements on the right who believe two things about this president: He actively is trying to undermine the American way and wants to deny individuals their freedom. Do you reject those beliefs?
REP. CANTOR: I…
MR. GREGORY: As a leader in our Congress.
REP. CANTOR: Let me tell you, David, I believe this president wants what’s best for this country. It’s just how he feels we should get there, that there are honest policy differences.
MR. GREGORY: Fair enough.
Lemkin: Well, that was easy…what, it only took about 1500 words worth of exchange to admit the simple and well proven empirical reality that Obama was born in the United States. All of next month on MTP, presented without commercial interruption: we go to work on gravity and evolution. Two “theories” and 672 hours of unrelenting follow-up questions to establish Mr. Cantor’s entirely straightforward, no-nonsense positions. Only on NBC.
They don’t want civility. They want silence from the Republicans. And the sitting together being kissy-kissy is just another way to try to silence Republicans, and also to show – to keep the American people from seeing how few of them there are in the U.S. House now. Then when people stand up to – what the Democrats are going to be doing when Barack Obama spews out all his venom, then, um, if they’re scattered throughout all the Republicans, then it won’t be as noticeable as if we’re sitting apart. So it is a ruse and I’m not in favor of it and I’m talking about it and I hope other members of the Republican conference in the House will not take the bait.
Michael Chabon considers the President’s speech:
Having struggled all the way through to make my own sense of sorrow and confusion congruent with what I saw happening in Tucson, having found that point of tangency at the rueful and admonitory heart, the father’s heart, of the speech, I fell all the way out again, right at the end. “If there are rain puddles in heaven,” the president said, evoking the words of an unnamed contributor to an album of photos of babies born on 9/11, “Christina is jumping in them today.”
I tried to imagine how I would feel if, having, God forbid, lost my precious daughter, born three months and ten days before Christina Taylor-Green, somebody offered this charming, tidy, corny vignette to me by way of consolation. I mean, come on! There is no heaven, man. The brunt, the ache and the truth of a child’s death is that he or she will never jump in rain puddles again. That joy was taken from her, and along with it ours in the pleasure of all that splashing. Heaven is pure wishfulness, an imaginary solution to the insoluble problem of the contingency and injustice of life.
But I’ve been chewing these words over since last night, and I’ve decided that, in fact, they were appropriate to a memorial for a child, far more appropriate, certainly, than all that rude hallooing. A literal belief in heaven is not required to grasp the power of that corny wish, to feel the way the idea of heaven inverts in order to express all the more plainly everything—wishes, hopes and happiness—that the grieving parents must now put away, along with one slicker and a pair of rain boots.
“I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.”
I think there’s more then a few dead kids lately that prove you wrong. Goddamn Pollyanna platitude-spouting optimists. You know what the best part of America’s collapse is? Watching hope founded on nothing fade into the sadness of reality.
Uh, did you even bother to take a look at the whole speech?
Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, “when I looked for light, then came darkness.” Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.
You are free to carp about Presidential use of scripture in this day and age, but there is very little Pollyanna in there. In fact, I’d say that’s the strength of the piece. But feel free to go on living in your sad little world in which everything is a magically irrefutable sign of decay, collapse, and entropy. Some would even call that “simple explanations in the aftermath.” Others would call it the worst brand of faux intellectualism in which all news must be greeted with a world-weary chin rub, an “I seen that one coming,” followed by a “and that’s why I never vote.”
In which case: well played.
Excellent analysis from Dave von Ebers of the Obama administration’s continuation of the wrongheaded indefinite detention policies that concludes thusly:
Obama is wrong to continue the Bush policy of indefinite detention of Guantánamo detainees, and the Executive Order we’re about to see will exacerbate, not solve, that problem. I disagree – vehemently, even – with what the President’s doing here.
Lemkin 