Bill Kristol on Morning Joe says O is no patriot

Today on Morning Joe, Bill Kristol agreed with Rudy that the president is no patriot and does not love America.

Mika B was positively sputtering with outrage, but never mind that.

Think of this.

Rudy and others on the right have taken the opportunity to claim the whole left - meaning the children of Zinn, of course - is alienated and doesn't even like America.

There is truth to that, but it's not such important truth as this.

It's really the American right, conservative in name only but radical and almost revolutionary in fact, that can't stand today's America, our America, the progressive and modern America with a strong national government that insists both on regulating the economy and on taxing the plutocracy to support numerous ventures, all for the public good.

The FDA, the EPA, the DOA, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and Obamacare are just the most obvious cases.

Have you heard them lately bitching about Food Stamps?

Have you heard them bitching about disabled people receiving help?

The so-called conservatives are the ones who hate modern America, the America the progressives built over more than a century; they refuse loyalty to it, want to tear it down and destroy it, and constantly threaten violence against it.

Who does not know these faux conservatives lionize a man who made himself beloved among them by proposing to drown the US government in a bathtub?

And it is the progressives who fight an unending battle against these revolutionaries of the right, defending the progressive America, the America of today, against their hatred and their constant attacks.

As for the patriotism of the right, it is a fraud.

It is not America that they love but a romanticized, nostalgic, blurred, and selective picture of the American past when the ordinary people, if not slaves or indentured servants, were dirt poor, ignorant, and absolutely desperate all the same, all the time, and excluded from political power or cultural influence.

Not bad for the robber barons, the plutocrats, and the slavocrats, America was hellish for the ordinary folks working 12 and 14 hour days, six days a week, for just enough to pay the slumlord to pack a dozen people into a bare and unheated room.

Take a trip to your library, if it hasn't closed yet for the last time.

Browse a while in Jacob Riis.

Like the children of Zinn, no progressive loves or ever loved that America.

But the running dogs of the plutocracy do, and did then, as well.

And their nostalgia for the theocracies of colonial New England are just completely mad.

Nobody today but a fool kids himself he would want to live in such a nightmarish clerical dictatorship.

Update.

Yes, the CW has this exactly backwards.

Has done for years.

Charles Blow

Conservatism is rooted in preservation; progressivism advances alteration.

And this.

“All men are created equal” is an exquisite idea, but one that wasn’t fully embraced when the words were written. 

We, the American people, have pushed this country to consider that clause in the broadest possible interpretation for hundreds of years.

In fact, conservatives rejected that idea the day it was written into the Declaration, rejected it explicitly in defenses of slavery before the Civil War, and continue to reject it explicitly in defenses of massive and growing economic inequality and constitutional changes to further limit democracy and enhance political inequality in America.

They reject universal suffrage in principle.

Many of them flatly and publicly reject popular election of senators.

Some reject popular election of members of the Electoral College.

All seem to reject popular, direct election of the president.

Is there any part of the actual America that they do like?

Not a whole lot.