RUTHFULLY YOURS

The president’s actions are often at odds with his professed affection for America and Americans. Does President Obama love America and the American people? Debate on this matter has roared since former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said Wednesday night at a private dinner in Manhattan, “I do not believe that the president loves America. . . . He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me.” While people loudly have defended and denounced Giuliani’s remarks, the correct answer to this question is: “Who knows?” The valid measure of Obama’s love for this country and its citizens — from, say, 0 to 100 percent — cannot be discerned by Giuliani, White House spokesman Josh Earnest, or anyone else.

No one can get inside of Obama’s mind to divine the truth behind this query. It is, however, perfectly fair to ask if Obama’s statements and actions parallel what one reasonably would expect from someone who loves the United States and those who call it home. • If Obama loves America, why does he associate closely with those who remain proud of bombing its most enduring institutions? Obama began his race for the Illinois state senate with a 1995 reception at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, co-founders of the Weather Underground. In the 1960s and ’70s, this violent, rabidly anti-American terrorist group bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the headquarters of ITT and the NYPD — among many other targets. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” Ayers has said. “I feel we didn’t do enough.” He also declared: “I’m a radical, leftist, small ‘c’ communist.” “Kill all the rich people,” Ayers demanded in 1970. “Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents.” That year, Dohrn said, “We are not just attacking targets, we are bringing a pitiful helpless giant to its knees.” Obama and Ayers jointly served on the boards of Chicago’s Woods Fund and the $160 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Ayers founded and of which he helped get Obama named chairman. According to multiple campaign-finance databases, through the day that Obama was elected president, Ayers’s April 2, 2001, check to Obama for $200 was the only recorded political contribution that he had made to any candidate ever. • If Obama loves America, why did he belong for 20 years to an anti-American church?

Between 1988 and 2008, Obama attended Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Its pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, married Obama and Michelle and baptized their daughters. While Obama was a member of Wright’s church, the minister responded to the September 11, 2001, attacks by blaming the victims of this atrocity. As Wright saw it, “the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yard.” He added: “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” On April 13, 2003, Wright notoriously preached these words from his pulpit: Not God Bless America. God Damn America! That’s in the Bible. For killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating us citizens as less than human. God Damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God and she is Supreme. •

If Obama loves America, why does he not trumpet it as the most special of countries? Instead, Obama said this on April 4, 2009: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” • If Obama loves America, why does he stoop before royalty? Obama repeatedly has bowed to monarchs, including Queen Elizabeth II, Japanese emperor Akihito, and the just-deceased Saudi king Abdullah. Americans who love our country know that U.S. citizens do not bow before royalty. As a nation born in rebellion against the divine right of kings, Americans inherently recognize that we have earned the right to stand before royals and look them straight in their eyes as equals, not bend our backs before them in submission. And yet Obama repeatedly has humiliated the nation he represents by behaving as if he were inferior to those who sit on thrones.

Obama’s bow before the Saudi king was “a shocking display of fealty to a foreign potentate,” the Washington Times opined. The bow was an extraordinary protocol violation. Such an act is a traditional obeisance befitting a king’s subjects, not his peer. There is no precedent for U.S. presidents bowing to Saudi or any other royals. “There is no reason for an American president to bow to anyone,” former vice president Dick Cheney told Politico. “Our friends and allies don’t expect it, and our enemies see it as a sign of weakness.” • If Obama loves America, why does he flat-out lie to the American people? While selling Obamacare, his signature domestic “reform,” Obama said, “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period.” PolitiFact selected this as its 2013 “Lie of the Year.” This was not something that Obama said once off the cuff. Rather he repeated these and similar words at least 37 times in public and on camera. Obama knew damn well that this was a lie, even as he restated it in a fraudulent effort to pass Obamacare. As NBC News reported in October 2013, the White House estimated in 2010 that up to 67 percent of those in the individual market might see their health plans cancelled.

Indeed, they were among the roughly 6 million people whose plans were killed when Obamacare stumbled out of the gate in fall 2013. Despite this advance knowledge of what would befall these Obamacare victims, Obama lied, over and over again, to the American people. The alternative was to tell the truth and perhaps fail to throw a federal lasso around 17 percent of the U.S. economy. Among other vital matters, Obama also lied brazenly when he repeatedly blamed an anti-Islamic Internet video for the Benghazi massacre. Also, according to Obama’s political guru David Axelrod, Obama lied about gay marriage, pretending for years to oppose it while he actually supported it. • If Obama loves America, why does he place its people in physical danger in order to hurt Republicans? This is exactly what Obama did as the sequester went into law on March 1, 2013. Two days earlier, the Department of Homeland Security freed 2,232 illegal-alien detainees, including 629 convicted criminals — some of them felons. DHS claimed it had no money to keep these people incarcerated, even though the sequester had yet to begin. These included convicted drunk drivers, robbers, vandals, drug smugglers, and firearms violators.

All told in 2013, rather than deport 36,007 illegal-alien convicts, Obama released them into the general population. Among these hoodlums’ crimes: 426 sexual assaults, 303 kidnappings, and 193 homicides. Obama also tried to cut money to FDA food inspectors and even to FAA flight controllers. “The FAA management has stated in meetings that they need to make the furloughs as hard as possible for the public so that they understand how serious it is,” one employee of that agency complained in the Wall Street Journal. Another, concerned that the administration wanted to congest the skies, said: “Whether in HQ or at the field level, it is clear that our management has no intention of managing anything. The only effort that I see is geared towards generating fear and demonstrating failure.” Amid budget battles, presidents have closed memorials and museums on the National Mall in hopes that angry tourists will pressure Congress into seeing things the White House’s way. Obama steered this so-called Washington Monument strategy into potentially deadly territory. Obama could have taken PBS off the air and fingered the GOP. He could have derailed Amtrak and told people to yell at John Boehner about it. But no. Of all the federal activities that Obama could have targeted, why would he free foreign felons and attempt to defund food inspectors and flight controllers? Because if something went tragically wrong, Obama could blame it on Republicans.

If the GOP took the rap for a sequester-related E. coli outbreak or aviation mishap, it could hobble Republicans for years. Obama’s actions would have set the groundwork for such a catastrophe, but fortunately, Congress arranged funding for these programs and, thus, neutralized Obama’s reckless disregard for the safety of the American people. • If Obama loves America, why did he make life miserable for the brave and beloved veterans of World War II? During the October 2013 government shutdown, Obama spent some $100,000 to erect metal barriers around the World War II Memorial — an open-air structure that never closes. As men who stormed beaches in Normandy and Iwo Jima in their 20s visited Washington in wheelchairs in their 90s, Obama’s barricades around their memorial were designed to make Republicans look cold and heartless. “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can,” a frustrated National Park Service ranger said to the Washington Times as the shutdown began.

Instead, Obama exposed himself as someone who physically abused the Greatest Generation just to embarrass his opponents. This event gave Americans a chilling glimpse at the depths of Obama’s cynicism and his eagerness to divide the nation for his own political advantage. • If Obama loves America, why does he allow the mass slaughter of our cherished national symbol? A company that accidentally kills protected wildlife may be granted a five-year permit to do so. After that interval, the Fish and Wildlife Service typically evaluates the damage and the firm’s efforts to mitigate or prevent such harm. FWS then may issue the company another five-year permit. Obama has given the owners of giant industrial wind farms a far better deal — for them, anyway. Federally subsidized wind turbines routinely slice right through raptors, including golden eagles and even bald eagles. Obama is granting wind companies not five-year but 30-year permits to chop to pieces rare and beautiful birds, including the priceless symbol of this nation.

That Obama is handing out 30-year bald-eagle-killing licenses screams volumes about his devotion to this country. • If Obama loves America, why does he not abide by his own standards about federal indebtedness? On Obama’s watch, the national debt has soared from $10.63 trillion on the day he was inaugurated to $18.14 trillion today — a 71 percent increase. For the first time, such profligacy cost America our long-established AAA bond rating. For comparison, at this point in his administration, President G. W. Bush had swollen the national debt from $5.73 trillion to $8.77 trillion — a 53 percent boost (from a much smaller base). On July 3, 2008, Obama called this “unpatriotic” — an even more direct assault on Bush’s patriotism than anything Giuliani said about Obama. By Obama’s measure, his own hike in America’s red ink is worse than Bush’s and, thus, is even more unpatriotic.

These statements, actions, and policies are not what one normally would associate with love of one’s country and countrymen. Rather, these examples seem to describe someone who thinks of America as just another spot on the globe — nowhere special. Based on Obama’s record, Americans do not seem to him like citizens to be held in the highest esteem, honored, protected, and served with dignity. Instead, they are subjects to whom it is just fine to lie brazenly about the most vital matters. For Obama, it’s permissible to put citizens in mortal danger in order to score cheap partisan points. America’s most celebrated veterans can be disrespected and highly inconvenienced for the same motive. This republic’s beautiful, graceful symbol can be chopped in half with impunity across three decades because wind energy moves Obama to tears. On reflection, Rudy seems right: Obama likely considers America and the Americans unworthy of his love. This country is just a stage for, and its citizens mere extras in, an endless drama about what really matters to Obama: his personal aggrandizement, Democrats’ partisan advancement, and their control of the American people. — Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/414340/obama-loves-us-he-loves-us-not-deroy-murdock?target=topic&tid=3263