On Friday, Democratic media darling Khizr Khan penned an op-ed at CNN.com titled “America is already great.” Khan is not the first figure on the Left to make that observation. As early as last October, the Democratic Party was selling hats that riffed mockingly on Donald Trump’s campaign slogan at its online store.
It’s encouraging to see liberals express admiration for the country they found beneath contempt (and in dire need of a fundamental transformation) just eight short years ago. My question for them is twofold: When did they rediscover their national pride? And what prompted the change?
Certainly they didn’t take their cue from Barack Obama, who has never liked the country much. As recently as May of this year, he apologized for America once again while standing on foreign soil. This time the place was Hiroshima, Japan, and the apology was for the U.S. atomic bombing of that city during World War II. “The memory of August 6, 1945 must never fade, he said, adding, “It fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change.”
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Reminding America of its need to change has been a constant throughout Obama’s presidency. He reprised that theme again in June, following the massacre in an Orlando, Fla. nightclub. Focusing away from the shooter’s radical Muslim ideology, he identified the causative agent in the crime as the “easy” access to guns in the U.S. and prayed to God that we would have the “strength and courage” to “change.”
But Obama’s is not the only voice on the Left clamoring for a more perfect Union. He is not even the only Obama. Speaking at the United State of Women Summit that same month, his wife (who became proud of America for the first time in her life in 2008) importuned American men to “be better. Just be better. I could go on, but I’m not. You get the point, fellas.”
Maybe some men could satisfy that demand by making themselves scarce. I am referring to the white ones, who of late have become persona non grata in Obama’s America. In the leftist view, white men are doubly privileged — once by being born male, the second time by being born Caucasian. And it is high time they changed … somehow. That goes double the ones pursuing careers in law enforcement, who, according to the Left, are uniformly violent, racist, and unjust.
I could go on, but I’m not, to borrow the First Lady’s phraseology. My general point is that the Left — contrary to their protestations — has never found the nation great, or even tolerable. They may dislike Donald Trump. But when they try to claim the upper hand in the love-of-country contest, they look just plain stupid.
