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.