Michele: new faith in America

i know the difference!

 

Michelle Obama implied she had never before been proud of her country.

I hate Bachmann, but I'm just sayin...

 

Give me a break. Not everything in this world is black and white.

Spoiler

But this sure as hell is.

 

Oops, I missed the "adult" part.

 

Literally.

 

Restoring something does not mean it had previously been lost. She could simply have been using the term to mean that her faith in America was refreshed, renewed, reconfirmed, etc. Even if she had lost faith in America, that would not be the same as NEVER having had faith in or been proud of the United States. Maybe she lost faith in America when they elected a Democrat majority to congress, or elected Obama president, or failed to return the senate to a Republican majority in 2010. To be on the level of what the first lady said, Bachmann would have need to say something along the lines of, "For the first time in my adult life, I have faith in America!" Of course I'm sure it can't be any of that, and instead it must be a vast right-wing/racist media conspiracy.

 

Restoring either means it was lost or in a damaged condition.

Michelle Obama didn't say she was never proud of her country. She said in her adult life.

I can twist Michelle Obama's statement less than you have to Bachmann and come up with something far less Anti-American. Saying that she was proud of her country for the first time in her adult life, doesn't mean she was ashamed. She could have been mostly neutral as far as pride in the nation went and the actions the nation had taken in her adult life. Maybe she was ashamed of things like the invasion of Grenada, or Panama, or Iraq, but was positive as far as things like the reducing welfare recipients, but that wasn't the nation as a whole. The event she was talking about was something new and a big step for the nation and made her proud. In her adult life she hadn't had the chance to be proud of the nation as a whole doing something like that.

If you listen to Michelle Obama's whole statement that's what she's talking about.

The fact that news media made a big stink about Obama's statement and does nothing at all about Bachmann's statement is definitely worth noting. I agree with pgabs. Melissa Harris Perry does a great job of analyzing the situation.

I was going to post this later today, if I hadn't been beaten to the punch.

 

What does "faith in America" even mean?

 

I didn't take it is truth, I pointed out one of a number of explanations that would be more likely than a right wing or racist media conspiracy. The media (outside of Fox News) has not been largely more supportive of Michelle Bachmann than of Michelle Obama (or her husband). The theory that any bias against Obama or in favor of Bachmann is responsible for the different treatment of their statements is thus unlikely.

I can restore the system on my computer. It simply means to return it to an earlier state, not that it's current state is lost or damaged. That would certainly be one usage of the word, but not the only possible usage.

If you read the post you quoted, you would notice that I included the adult life caveat.

Why is the election of a black person as president (the major factor differentiating that election from previous Democratic electoral victories) by a minority of the population (roughly 25%) either worthy of pride or an action of the nation as a whole, while something like the liberation of Kuwait is not worthy of pride or not an action collectively attributable to the nation. If anything, a large government operation supported by taxes involves more Americans than the election of any president and the liberation of a country from an invading force is more praiseworthy than the election of a person of any particular skin pigmentation. Hell, that even assumes the future election of Obama. At the time the statement was made (February of 2008) Obama was merely the frontrunner for the still contested Dem Primary. That hardly seems either something more worthy of having pride in or more collectively American than any number of other things that occurred in Michelle Obama's adult life.

I thought her analysis was hokum myself. Obama's statement was castigated because she is viewed as not truly American and because it was seen through a lens that stereotyped her as some sort of archetypical "angry black woman". You think that makes more sense as the reason behind the completely different statements than the fact that reasonable people interpret their statements differently? Rewatch the video. Notice how she recharacterizes the statements to make them equivalent. After first assuming that Bachmann's statement means she had lost faith in America (which we will allow for the sake of argument) she acknowledged that the timeframe of the statement was unknown. She then generalized that to being a criticism of America. She referenced Obama's statement and then generalized it to being a criticism of America, glossing over the fact that the timeframe was rather explicit, that Obama had not been proud of America in her adult life. That is of course open to some interpretation, as we do not know when Michelle Obama considered her adult life to begin, but it has nowhere near the uncertainty of Bachmann's statement. Bachmann's faith could have been restored to the level of 1 femtosecond prior, up to a time dating back to the founding. Obama's statement meant that she had never felt pride in America from whatever point she considered herself an adult until her husband was doing well in a primary election campaign. The statements are much different, which is a far more likely cause of their differential treatment than racism.

 

Because it is a milestone in a society that had up until 43 years earlier denied Blacks the right to vote, enslaved blacks, still has issues of discrimination against them etc. The fact that younger voters like never before(or at least in recent elections) became engaged, people who were often not part of the political system got engaged, and became active, and they all did it to elect someone who was from a race that had never been elected before. That's why she would be proud. Other things in our nation's history like the civil rights movement and stuff like that she could have been proud of didn't take place in her adult life.

The talk about of liberating a nation isn't something that people throughout the country are actively involved in. The same isn't true of Obama's election. The fact is people on a huge grass roots level were campaigning and contributing towards an African American in an effort to get him elected as a President of the United States.

I can only disagree with your take on the analysis. We don't know when Bachmann lost her faith in America, that's true, but it also doesn't really matter.

Again I think you are overlooking that going through time not being proud of a nation, is different than being ashamed. Being on a neutral stance for the adult life until the nation does something that Michelle Obama sees as a great step forward makes sense.

Having lost faith and then having it restored seems pretty on par with that.

 

Threads on Michele Bachmann are simply not worthy of the bandwidth until she becomes the GOP candidate for POTUS or VP, and I consider either to be impossible. The good Lord wouldn't even waste an extra "L" on her name.

 

A racist conspiracy was the implication of the video you posted (or every single one of the individual media outlets are individually racist). The presenter argued that there was an uproar when Obama made her statement, and silence when Bachmann made hers and the only explanation she allowed was racism. I threw in right wing conspiracy as a bonus explanation, because it was popular during the Clinton administration, and because the right is often conflated with racism here and elsewhere. So yes, you didn't call it a right wing conspiracy, you repeated someone else calling it a racist conspiracy. It is no less absurd a contention. Honestly, a right wing conspiracy is a less absurd than a racist one.

I suppose people can feel whatever they want. Being proud of people for picking one's spouse over someone else in a number of primary elections seems odd to me, but to each his own.

I (and many other Americans) contributed more to the liberation of Kuwait than I did to getting Obama elected. At the time she made that statement, a very small percentage of Americans had done anything to change that. About 20 million Americans or so had participated in Obama's primary campaign to that point. Was there no activity participated in by 20 million Americans in her lifetime that was laudable? I think yours is the only argument I have ever seen in support of Michelle Obama's statement. The fact that her husband's campaign manager walked it back immediately indicates to me that even they thought it was an indefensible statement.

It doesn't matter. There should be no difference in coverage between someone saying their faith in America was shaken for 2 seconds and someone saying the success of her husband in a political primary was the first time she was proud of her country in ~25 years (starting with the beginning of her adult life)? I sort of agree, insofar as I don't think there should be that much coverage of either of them (not particularly caring if people are proud of or have faith in America, or other generally meaningless platitudes), but I think one is clearly more inflammatory than the other.

I don't think I am ignoring that at all. I never said she was ashamed. I used only their own words and my understanding of typical human responses to them. In my experience, I don't see the same reaction to Bachmann's statement as Obama's, so I don't expect the same reaction from the media, nor would I attribute a difference to racism. None of that implies a belief that lack of pride = shame.

I don't see the statements as rhetorically equal, and thus I don't see a need for equal media coverage.

 

*chuckle*

Always entertaining, that's for sure.

 

Did you read what you quoted? That IS a big conspiracy. To have every media outlet agree to not cover Bachmann's comment even though they believe that it had the same character as Obama's is a vast conspiracy. Either that, or you believe the even more improbable proposition that the person in charge of every outlet is racist to the point where they don't think Michelle Obama is an American as was postulated in the video.

To recap, the three explanations are:
1. There is a vast conspiracy among the media and it has stifled any voice that would have made the same complaints about Bachmann that were made about Obama.
2. Every media outlet has either all racist reporters or at least a racist editor or publisher and thus either the reporters generate no outcry against Bachmann or the higher ups don't publish the story.
3. What Obama said is clearly "worse" than what Bachmann said, and thus while the media reported the outcry against someone who was proud of America for the first time in their whole adult life, there just really wasn't much of a story when a woman's faith in America was restored.
Since you take umbrage at the word conspiracy, you clearly believe #2, which to me seems the least likely of the three.