By Selwyn Duke

As you probably know, Barack Obama has been doing much to polish up his credentials as a patriot.  Thus, while speaking to an audience in North Dakota recently he said:

"I love this country not because it’s perfect, but
because we’ve always been able to move it closer to perfection."

The problem is that what he describes isn’t love.  To explain this, I’ll quote a criticism G.K. Chesterton made of Rudyard Kipling’s patriotism in the former’s book Heretics.  He said of Kipling:

"He admires England, but he does not love her;
for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons.
He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English."

As Joseph Sobran said about this:

"Of course Chesterton
was right. You love your country as you love your mother — simply
because it is yours, not because of its superiority to others . . . ."

Without a doubt, you love your mother not because of any qualities she may possess — wisdom, goodness, fortitude or charitableness — but because she is your mother.  After all, if you said you loved her because  of her kindness, but then she became senile and ceased to be so and you ceased to exhibit that "love," did you ever really love her in the first place? 

In professing his "love" for his country, Obama provides a reason; that isn’t love but, at best, admiration, which is conditional. 

And something else strikes me about his comment.  If I said, "I love my mother not because she is perfect, but . . . .," wouldn’t it strike you as strange?  After all, since we’re all sinners, it goes without saying that my mother isn’t perfect.  Thus, you would have to suspect that there’s a reason why I’m stating the obvious.  Perhaps I believe my mother is ridden with something a great deal more troublesome than what we consider normal imperfection.

So it is with countries; since they comprise people, they also are all imperfect.  So you could ask why Obama made this tautological statement.  Does he believe that America has a checkered past, one so much more egregious than that of other nations that it would be embarrassing to profess his "love" for her without such a gratuitous qualifier?   

Perhaps we should demand more specificity.  What makes us so much worse than other nations, Mr. Obama?

In reality, Obama neither loves nor admires our country.  How do I know?  Because left-wing black folks never do.  They embrace leftist ideology — which involves contempt for America and the West in general — because they’re inculcated with the idea that the nation is irredeemably bigoted and has kept them down.  You can thank Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, et al. for that.

Of course, none of this means his mouth won’t get him out of the trouble it got him into.  He’s more Teflon than Reagan ever could be. 

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