First the wrong way.  This kind of thinking honestly flabbergasts me.

Chris Satullo: A not-so-glorious Fourth: 

U.S.  atrocities are unworthy of our heritage

Tuck the soaring speeches in a drawer for another time.

This year, America doesn’t deserve to celebrate its birthday. This Fourth of July should be a day of quiet and atonement.

For we have sinned.

We have failed to pay attention. We’ve settled for lame excuses. We’ve spit on the memory of those who did that brave, brave thing in Philadelphia 232 years ago.

The America those men founded should never torture a prisoner.

The America they founded should never imprison people for years without charge or hearing.

The America they founded should never ship prisoners to foreign lands, knowing their new jailers might torture them.

Such abuses once were committed by the arrogant crowns of Europe, spawning rebellion.

Today, our nation does such things in the name of our safety. Petrified, unwilling to take the risks that love of liberty demands, we close our eyes.

We have done such things, on orders from the Oval Office. We have done them, without general outrage or shame.

…

Our silence is complicit. In our name, innocents were jailed, humans tortured, our Constitution mangled. And we said so little.

…

The world sees this, even if we are too dim to grasp it. We’ve lost respect. We’ve shamed the memory of Jefferson, Adams and Franklin.

…

So put out no flags.

Sing no patriotic hymns.

We deserve no Fourth this year.

Let us atone, in quiet and humility. Let us spend the day truly studying the example of our Founders. May we earn a new birth of courage before our nation’s birthday next rolls around.

Ah, liberal self loathing.  I have never understood it. 

Sister Toldjah weighs in:

Things like this just don’t compute with me.  Even when I was a leftie, I was never ashamed to fly my flag on any day, especially on days like Independence Day, nor was I hestitant to say how much I loved this country, even during the times when I felt it was veering off course.  That continued even through the Clinton years after I saw the light and became a conservative.  There were many, many things Bill Clinton did during his tenure that made me ashamed of him, but I sure as hell was never ashamed of my country. 

That’s where (or one of the places) where Satullo veers wildly off track.  Ignoring for a minute his exaggerations, misrepresentations and lies about the direction this country’s gone since GWB was elected president, he makes the mistake so many other self-loathing far lefites make when expressing their disgust over a president’s policies: he implicates our country itself.  “America sucks!” they whine because “the President sucks!!”

Show of hands how many of you hated this country when Bill Clinton was president?  I bet there aren’t very many.  That’s because in spite of the many disagreements and outright disgust that many conservatives had for President Clinton, one thing they never forgot was how fortunate they were to live in this country, to be able to fly (not burn) the flag, a right that hundreds of thousands of American troops died to protect and uphold.   Most conservatives flew the flag during the Clinton years in spite of their dislike of both him and his liberal policies, because they knew he wasn’t always going to be president and that one would come along and right some of his wrongs. 

And he did.

Deep-in-the-gut love for this country keeps conservatives in it even though the candidates they want to win an election sometimes in the end turn out not to be the victor(s) on election night.  You won’t find many conservatives threatening to leave this country and move to countries like our neighbors to the north Canada if their candidate doesn’t win.  They stay on and fight.  You don’t find many conservatives who have to “seek therapy” if their candidate loses an election.  They man-up, and prepare for the coming battles.   They realize that, after all, this country is indeed worth building up and fighting for, no matter who is sitting in the big chair.

None of this is to say that liberals aren’t patriotic.  I know many who are, and I’m sure most of you do, too.  But there are, I think, a not so insignificant number of far left self-haters like Chris Satullo just itching to find a reason to drag the country down to their level.  The old saying “misery loves company” applies here, methinks.

Another interesting rebuttal can be found at Newsbusters.org.

We’ve “spit on the memory” of the Founders? Does he mean when the Democratic Party helped us lose Vietnam? How about when liberals somehow divined in the Founder’s name a “right to privacy” in the Constitution? Were either of those times when we spit in their faces? How about when the American left destroyed religion in America, or when they invented a “right” to abortion, or when they turned our various systems of education into places where fringe, wackos reign supreme and American history, civics and… well, anything actually educational… is banished into the mists of the past? Does Our pal Chris Satullo mean those times when the Founders saw the spittle fly?

You can guess that no is the answer to my questions.

No, to Chris Satullo, the only time we’ve “spit on the memory” of the founders is when we reacted to the time when 3,000 of our own were killed in New York City by Islamic terrorists. He is all upset that we’ve tortured prisoners, illegally imprisoned people “for years,” and practiced “rendition.”

…

9/11 must have been an illusion. The War on Terror is merely a Bush lie, apparently.

And Satullo’s idiocy isn’t close to being expended. He also has to misappropriate the history of the Founders for his socialist inspired, Peace-in-our-times, blather.

…

Apparently, Satullo doesn’t think the nation had anything to fear on the afternoon of 9/11? And as to the real history of the Revolution, need I remind Satullo that the British neither intended, nor had the capability of killing 3,000 Americans with one incident? Might we have had a right to take measures against a foe that killed many thousands with a single strike?

Then Satullo goes on and on about “human rights” as if WE are the guilty party on that level, as if the U.S. can be compared to Islamofascists who send children to blow themselves up, who cut off the heads of live prisoners, who have manuals on torture, and who have no respect at all for human life on any level?

I might also want to direct this historically illiterate columnist to the real historical record of the American Revolution where tax men were covered in boiling tar and sent screaming back to their tax houses that were burnt down around them by colonists showing their ire against the crown. I might show Satullo where General George Washington summarily hanged spies and shot deserters and traitors. I might alert him to the vicious internecine fighting between Colonists loyal to the Crown and those Patriots that were rising up against them.

I could show this man where Revolutionary history — the REAL history, not the sanitized, fake one he is selling in order to beat up George W. Bush — was quite vicious and mean. It WAS war, after all, and at a time when people still knew how to fight a war to actually kill the enemy.

Anyway, this simple minded claptrap is all full of laments and moaning, but no where is there any real logic and no deeper discussion of the real historical record is offered. Neither is there any introspection that his fellow travelers are the ones responsible in the first place for casting us in the very situations he bemoans.

Satullo ends with his most earnest attempt at piety.

Let us atone, in quiet and humility. Let us spend the day truly studying the example of our Founders. May we earn a new birth of courage before our nation’s birthday next rolls around.

Humility? He doesn’t know the definition of the word. For a man who so obviously has no clue about history and who so blatantly wants to steal the luster of the Founding Fathers to burnish his cracker jack prize of a crown is certainly an outrage. For him to wag his America hating finger in all our faces on the day we are to celebrate our freedom from tyranny is the height of hubris.

Still, I know that Satullo is quite sincere in his hatred of the United States. In fact, I’m sure he feels this low at every July Fourth celebration. July Fourth is probably a black day for him no matter who is president. I feel bad for his heartburn, but that he spews his bile for the rest of us to be bothered with is downright unneighborly.

Happy July Fourth, folks. Be proud of this great nation, Satullo’s nonsense aside. The U.S.A. is still the shining light on a hill shining the light of freedom on all the world. Anti-Americans like Satullo might have blinders on, but for those willing to see, we stand like a rock.

Unfurl those flags and let freedom wave.

Trackposted to Pet’s Garden Blog, Woman Honor Thyself, Maggie’s Notebook, Shadowscope, Rosemary’s News and Ideas, The Pink Flamingo, Dumb Ox Daily News, Democrat=Socialist, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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