In 1775 it was trendy to tout the flag and be very patriotic. However, among the patriotic crowd at the time, Samuel Johnson noticed that numerous people otherwise known as scoundrels were the ones touting the flag and beating their puffing chests louder than any others.
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It was then he made his famous observation that patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels.
How times have not changed at all.
Today patriotism is sometimes measured by how large the flag is that flies from your mini-van, or your truck perhaps, but most especially by whether or not one wears the omnipresent American Flag Pin which can be purchased by the millions at thousands of on-line mail-order stores.
Some of these pins are even made in America, but most, I suspect, come from Red-China.
To craft a syllogism, if all American scoundrels profess to be patriots, and all American scoundrels wear the American Flag Pin, then Barack Obama cannot be a scoundrel, because does not wear one.
But, do all American Scoundrels really wear the American Flag pin? Probably not. But if Boswell’s maxim holds true, many of them do, and it is great refuge for those who doth profess too much.
Let’s try another syllogism: If all American Patriots wear the pin, but numerous dead and or mangled US Soldiers who died in Iraq or Afghanistan never did, were those dead or mangled soldiers really patriots?
Of course they were patriots of the highest order. But some would have us believe that the original assumption of this syllogism, i.e., that all American Patriots wear the pin, is true. Too bad that many dead heroes bear mute testimony to this false thinking.
Astoundingly, just such incredibly poor logic is pretty close to the argument some are making that Barack Obama is not a patriot. Why, well because just like some dead soldiers, who never thought it was important to wear such a pin, Obama claims that it is more important to do patriotic acts, rather than pin a symbol on his chest. The fact that he does (or does not) wear one does not make him a Patriot, or a non-patriot, but it does place him in a small crowd of people who, at a minimum are not acting like scoundrels.
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Time will tell if he really is a patriot, pin or no pin. Until then, it would be nice if the scoundrels would just exit left…or right…and without the pin.
Filed under: American Flag Pin, Boswell, Hannity, O'Reilly, Obama, Political Correctness, Savage, conservative, culture war, limbaugh, malkin, patriot, patriotism | Leave a Comment
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