By Mike DeVine, Legal Editor for The Minority Report and The HinzSight Report

If a President won’t defend America, it won’t be defended. I think this adage is driven home at a most opportune time before we choose Commanders in Chief.

Does anyone doubt that President Bush benefited from the third anniversary remembrance of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against John “international test” Kerry? And does anyone doubt the significance of the Saddleback contrast between John “defeat evil” McCain and Barack “evil on the streets of America” Obama with the images of Planes crashing into the WTC towers above those streets?

I think not.

Recently, Obama was again asked about evil, and again chose to wax not so eloquent on our need to be humble given that we have done evil in the name of fighting evil? Of course, the MSM in the tank for The One “reporter” failed to follow up on what Barack meant (maybe it is the evil of lipstick, Abu Ghraib?).

Obama, see if you can hear this above the din of your 20-year pew-parked in a Hate Whitey America church butt:

Humility hasn’t prevented more 911 attacks and if you, Terrorist William Ayers and Rev. Wright see any moral equivalence between evil attacks on America and humanity from Pearl Harbor thru Saddam’s attacks on Kuwait and our troops enforcing the cease-fire bought with American blood versus the sins of individual Americans in operations in response thereto, then I would suggest you sue Harvard for educational malpractice.

Don’t worry, we won’t question your patriotism. But we do need to define and distinguish it from those, like McCain-Palin, that love their Country, as is. You know, people that don’t make a production of ceasing to wear the flag post-911. People that don’t suggest displays of the flag are cheap patriotism as compared to the leftist “real” patriotism of criticizing our nation as it removes a megalomaniacal mass murderer of over 400,000 in the dead of night and over a million in wars; and helps millions of purple-fingered Iraqis vote for civilized freedom.

Michael Novak captures the problem of the “ideal” vs. the “real” here:

Now we know why Obama took the American flag off his lapel. On July 24, in Berlin, he told us. The American flag is too small to contain him. He is not comfortable being an American citizen, only fully comfortable as a citizen of the world.

But “citizen of the world” is a utopian, unreal, angelic, inhuman term, an abstraction of the sort that leads to immense bloodshed as human irregularities are hacked off and angularity is loudly planed away.

The Berlin speech…explains why Obama is more likely to praise an “ideal” America than the real America. He is bewitched by abstractions and lofty ideals. That is how he touches the secret chords of the heart of so many millions, the teenage romanticism of a world without different real interests, without the clashes of culture, the force of political arguments about who gets what, when, and how.

This conflict between global citizenship and pledging allegiance solely to the flag of the United States and the Republic for which it stands, suggests that we go back again to Senator Obama’s ambivalence about the flag in his lapel.

Obama himself said he wore a flag in his lapel after September 11, 2001, but then did not wear it for several years. Why? On reflection, he judged that wearing a flag in the lapel would be an inadequate symbol of patriotism (HT: Byron York, July 1). That Obama did not wear his flag in his lapel is true. Obama not only was not wearing it, but had a policy statement about why he was not wearing it.

Real patriotism, he clarified, is loving the ideals of a country and dissenting from policies not in line with those ideals.

Here Obama points to a huge divide between left-wingers and ordinary Americans. Ordinary Americans do not love a mere “ideal” out in never-never land. They love the land, the soil, the mountains, the plains, the history, the bloody battles, the mistakes, the rises and falls, the real human history of an altogether human people, the particular, imperfect people of the United States. Left-wingers, by contrast, are continually judging the real country harshly. They often judge it so harshly that their attitudes toward their leaders, their neighbors and the real country as a whole sometimes seem almost like hatred for the country itself.

But the United States is still, blessedly, largely a center-right country in this respect. Obama’s stated positions about why he took the flag out of his lapel, and what he means by patriotism, slightly incline a large number to vote against him. Therefore we can count on Obama showing up on more and more stages so thick with American flags you would think you were at a Ronald Reagan rally – and with the stars and stripes starkly visible on the left lapel of his neat, dark suit. That flag will certainly appear in his lapel a great many more times until the first Tuesday in November. A center-right country will demand it.

Our annual remembrances of 911 remind us of the all too real evil in the world seeking to destroy the real America. Rev. Wright can’t even understand that our necessary actions against the Empire of Japan were justified. Obama praises Real Red China, overlooking their gross sins and lack of any ideals (save Confucius and love for the elderly) over millennia, while denigrating the greatest nation in history, which United States is defined by increasing achievement and application of its ideals both at home and in self-sacrifice abroad so that all free people on Earth, including the one Barack sees in the mirror.

Thank you Providence (the real one), that if America had to suffer an attack from evil abroad, that it occurred in close proximity to the day when we choose the leader charged with defending us and waging war against those that harm America.

The Real America.

The America that disciples of Rev. Wright and Saul Alinsky would slight with stammering while in search of the Marxist Utopia.

The America that McCain and Palin would most assuredly defend.

[update]

As we remember the perpetrators, victims and heroes of 911, let us also remember those that have kept us safe since then, and also remember those (mostly all Bushlied Democrats) that have opposed the efforts at home and abroad that have kept us safe whether it be intelligence gathering via cell phone calls; interrogation of KSM and other terrorists; and/or our war against them in Afghanistan and in Iraq where UBL declared the main front, expended resources originally intended for the Lower Forty-Eight.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns
Legal Editor for The Minority and HinzSight Reports
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