Giuliani Is a Moron—Not That I’m Questioning His Intelligence
Giuliani on Obama:
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.
Later, he explained:
I’m not questioning his patriotism.
Right. because when you say that someone doesn’t love his country, that has nothing to do with his patriotism.
Late edit: Giuliani is now taking the coward’s way out. Instead of apologizing or at least admitting that what he said was stupid, he’s now trying to make himself the victim by claiming that he’s getting death threats. This is a common tactic, used for example by Sarah Palin as an excuse to cancel an event that had to close because attendance would be so low, and as a general “I’m the victim” ploy to avert unwanted attention for a gaffe.
This is not to say that Giuliani didn’t receive any death threats (though there is no evidence and no known police report); rather that death threats are kind of ubiquitous in this day and age. Obama has gotten endless overt and covert death threats on a regular basis throughout this presidency.
Now, if Giuliani had any evidence that he was getting an unusually high number of explicit death threats, that might be something of note; otherwise, it’s just another politician using his usual hate mail as a diversion from something idiotic they did.
I’d seen some familial FaceBook BS on this and that prompted some thinking that this isn’t anything new, the debate on patriotism and “My country wrong or right”.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/my_country,_right_or_wrong
What people don’t learn is that that saying has more nuance in it, thanks to one of the greatest unknown Americans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schurz
well, the stuff about his apparent pro-KKK tendencies is a new addition to the wikipedia page since I last read it, so I’ll have to retract the “great American” hashtag I guess.
People also like slamming Michelle for saying in Feb 2008 that this was the first time since being an adult that she’s really proud of her country.
It’s really easy to leave off the context or the qualifiers to make it sound worse than it was.
Thing is, Michelle turned 18 in 1982, so we’re talking a relative lack of pride in the USA for the Reagan-Bush years 1981-92 (including Bush running the Willy Horton ad against Dukakis in 1988), the Clinton-Gingrich years of 1995-2000, then the Bush Jr years of 2001-2008.
There’s a brief window there, 1993-1994 to be proud of the American people, but all that happened then was in 1994 a pissed-off electorated threw out the Democrats for raising their taxes. That and the insurance companies raising up the public opinion against “HillaryCare”, not a lot of American greatness to be found, 1982-2008, that’s for sure.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GINIALLRH
shows one measure of losing the fight.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=11u9
^ working America’s share of the pie they make
This is the event Giuliani was speaking at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/02/18/scott-walker-to-attend-private-dinner-with-supply-siders-in-new-york/
Kinda a Romney 47%er moment — buttering up big donors by telling them what they want to hear.
The surprising thing is probably not that Giuliani said something so outrageous, but rather that he took heat for it. Conservatives have been saying so many outrageously ridiculous things for so long and then pretending that they’re true, I wonder at their ability to disbelieve anything which serves their interests.
Take Mitch McConnell, who recently claimed that the reason for the good economic numbers recently was because Republicans won control of the Senate; since everyone is now just thrilled that Republicans have more power, and expect them to do so many fantastic things to stimulate the economy, businesses are now hiring right and left because they’re just quivering with expectation of rosy times ahead!
Of note is that the Walker event where Giuliani delivered his slur was co-hosted by Arthur Laffer, one of the early pioneers in making ridiculously stupid self-serving claims, i.e., the “Laffer Curve,” noted in the article you linked to as “an argument for increasing federal revenue by lowering taxes.” That Laffer’s theories could have ever been taken seriously remains an utter mystery to me. Large, non-targeted, no-strings tax cuts for wealthy people during an economic downturn will prompt them to create jobs and increase revenues beyond the costs of the lower tax rates? Based on a theory so vague that one could argue that almost any specific tax rate was optimum?
Palin isn’t the outlier. She’s just a lot less slick than others.
Kinda drowning in right-wing BS here, yes.
So many people have bought into the conservatives’ con tho, it’s scary.
Nobody here has the foggiest idea what’s really been going on apparently.
Corporate media is less than useless; Krugman was more of a hiring mistake by the NYT than an actual change in direction for them.
TPP is a rare and interesting intersection of Japanese and US politics, looking forward to seeing what happens with that
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership#US_responses
has the leading lights of what passes for the left in this country all against it.
But expat life in Japan might improve a lot should it go through.
I find it odd that the US’s future prospect this decade and next is so opaque to me now.
I wasn’t terribly optimistic when I left for Tokyo in August 1992, but by the same token I had zero idea of what sort of fukeiki Japan was barreling into for the 1990s, nor that the Clinton late 1990s boomer surge was going to turn things around so dramatically in the US.
Then I came back to the US — still rather clueless about how crazy US politics had become, even though I watched some of the Gingrich show from Japan, like how they shut down the government in 1995.
They were so set on getting a balanced budget agreement, then the minute they took over in 2001 they blew that all to hell.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=11Al
real (2009 dollars) per-capita (age 16+) federal spending
we bounced into recession in 2007 just 6 years after the dotcom crash . . . we’re already 6 years since the depth of the 2009 crash . . . of course, the immense housing bubble failure that killed the economy isn’t operating today so there’s no great reason to just crash now like we did over 2008 . . . I kinda think the economy should just continue puttering along as it has:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/PAYEMS/
shows that if the 2010s repeats the 1990s, we still have 4 more years of expansion.
boomers are going to start retiring now, hopefully opening up jobs for Gen Y and also adding to demand as they start getting and spending their retirement incomes.
So I see a lot more positive than negative wrt the economy, yet everybody is still not doing all that great and there’s 6 million full-time jobs that we’re short:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=11An
by that graph at least.
ISTM Japan’s labor shortage is going to be a good thing overall. Plus negative price pressures on housing will free up more money for consumers to spend in the service economy, instead of this major flow disappearing into the maws of the 1%.