Bush Defends Obama
Laura defends Michelle.
Not surprising. The Bushes were always classy people. Too bad years of withering and often irrational criticism have obscured that fact. Now that it’s almost over, I think we’ll start to have a more unjaundiced view of these folks.
By the way, I basically think she’s right, and it was just careless phrasing on Michelle Obama’s part. But also a “you’d better learn right quick” lesson for Michelle.
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I don’t know. While normally I’m all for taking the charitable interpretation of people’s words, I’ve met way too many hard-core democrats for whom the words "for the first time in my life, I’m proud of my country" are in accurate only in that if you really pushed them, they’re not really proud of their country now. (And I’m not talking about people on the internet, but people that I know in real life.)
It’s like when I hear people get angry that someone is questioning their patriotism, but if you were to ask them, they would claim that patriotism isn’t good. I’ve never figured out why someone who thinks that patriotism is a vice gets angry when someone else questions his patriotism. But I’ve met people like this IRL.
So the question is, is there some reason to believe that Michelle Obama is regularly proud of her country? It’s not the only moral default position; it’s rationally tenable not to be proud of the United States. Like all human institutions, it’s very far from perfect. Very religious people might easily say that they do not think that their country is good because, "there’s no one good but God". They might say that they’re not proud of their country because pride is a sin. I don’t think that most people would hold it against them.
Why shouldn’t leftists get to believe a secular version of that? And if they do, why should we all assume that Michelle Obama doesn’t?
While it’s possible that Michelle Obama did mis-speak, no leap of imagination is required to think that she does indeed believe what she said. I work with a number of people with that exact same mindset. One of them is adamant that the Unites States had been a third world nation for the last 8 years and no matter how many times you point out the obvious fallacies of that belief, facts just roll off his back like water off a duck. It’s like he lives on a different planet. The real irony is that he’s probably "a proud member of the reality-based community."
That said, I was unsurprised that Laura Bush would defend Michelle Obama, though I’m certain had their roles been reversed, Michelle Obama would not have done the same.
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I believe that Michelle Obama is proud of her country and happy to be a citizen of the U.S. I also think that she has spent a lot of time in, and is most comfortable with, an environment where criticizing the U.S. is popular, common and very hip. In that particular rarified atmosphere, what she said would pass with out comment, but it also has less meaning then others from outside the environment would give it.
Sort of like when a teenager talks about how life is so unfair and that they will just die if something most of us would consider trivial happens. We generally understand that the teenages is being overly dramatic and those words don’t really mean what they say.
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