The right wing media twits have been hammering THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES the last couple of days for identifying himself as a "citizen of the world" during his landmark speech in Cairo. Last night, the incomparable Keith Olbermann reminded the amnesiac dimwits who were blithering about all this that their patron saint, Ronald Reagan, has said pretty much the same thing. Olbermann had previously nailed these dingbats during the presidential campaign, but they must have forgotten that. On July 24, 2008, the following discussion between Olbermann and Richard Wolffe was featured on Countdown:
WOLFFE: Well, of course, the classic playbook here is to question Obama‘s commitment to America as, in fact, the Republicans did against John Kerry four years ago. In some ways, if you look at the response to this event, I think it‘s actually been fairly muted. Even the criticism of certain lines like saying he was a citizen of the world, hasn‘t prompted the kind of outcry you might have expected.
"OLBERMANN: Well, it did, it did to some degree, I don‘t want to disagree with you on that, but Rush Limbaugh went nuts over that today. And there‘s another e-mail out of the McCain campaign particularly criticizing that one line about the citizen of the world. Did anybody bother to do the elemental research that the man who went to the U.N. General Assembly and introduced himself began his speech by saying, “I speak today as both the citizen of the United States and of the world,” was Ronald Reagan?
WOLFFE: Well, Keith, that‘s a great point about Reagan. And actually, the Obama campaign points out that the words, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” are hardly the greatest expression of American patriotism and, by the way, they‘re in a foreign language. And, of course, people look back at JFK‘s speech and don‘t consider that some sort of betrayal of America."
So it's OK for Reagan to make that kind of claim but unpatriotic for Obama to assert the same thing? In fact, neither Reagan nor Obama did anything offensive or unpatriotic. The rightist screaming and ranting over the recent Obama remark just shows how biased and assymetrical they really are.
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