International media world political news issues forum

The Rooted and the Rootless by Patrick J. Buchanan

Most Americans have grown to love America long before they read the Constitution, or the Federalist Papers. There are heroes in Arlington who never learned to read. A true nation is an extended family. If fathers or sons do not defend it, it is their conduct that is indefensible.

Does Barack Obama understand the people he leads? Do his aides?

These may seem cheeky questions to ask of a team that just won the presidency. But there is something in their cool, insouciant, blasé demeanor, in the face of insults to their country, that suggests there yet exists a chasm—between them and us.

Now, the change since the 1960s in the character of the nation has been great. The moral and social sappers spawned by that decade have done their work well. But Middle America yet remains a blood-and-soil, family-and-faith, God-and-country kind of nation.

We are not Europe—yet.

Most Americans remain visceral patriots. It’s in the DNA.

What almost cost Bill Clinton the presidency in 1992 was not that he had opposed the Vietnam War, but that, it was said, he marched against his country while in a foreign country.

When Barack confided to friends in San Francisco that he was having trouble in Pennsylvania because these folks “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them … as a way to explain their frustrations,” he revealed that he does not really understand a part of the nation he now leads.

It is this part of America that does not comprehend how the president could sit in Trinidad and listen to the scrub stock of the hemisphere trash our country—and say nothing.

http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/ ... -buchanan/