This is for you, “love it or leave it” types:

Workout notes Over lunch (slept in): 3100 yard swim (500 in 8:42, 1000 in 16:52 (sluggish), 500 drill/swim, 500 of free/back (10:20), 500 of 50 side, 100 paddle, then 4 x 25 fly. Then 2 miles on the AMT, 3 on Stairmaster (3.1 actually; 151 floors) in 25:30.

Comment

We’ve seen these bumper stickers:

Now what is meant by this sticker? Does someone who displays this mean: “hey America is a diverse, pluralistic, secular nation and you’d better get used to it”?

We’ve seen the tea parties: (note the crying woman 1:10 into it):

We’ve seen articles like this one:

From Washington Times editor emeritus Wesley Pruden’s November 17 column (emphasis added):

So far it’s a memorable trip. He established a new precedent for how American presidents should pay obeisance to kings, emperors, monarchs, sovereigns and assorted other authentic man-made masters of the universe. He stopped just this side of the full grovel to the emperor of Japan, risking a painful genuflection if his forehead had hit the floor with a nasty bump, which it almost did. No president before him so abused custom, traditions, protocol (and the country he represents). Several Internet sites published a rogue’s gallery showing how other national leaders – the prime ministers of Israel, India, Slovenia, South Korea, Russia and Dick Cheney among them – have greeted Emperor Akihito with a friendly handshake and an ever-so-slight but respectful nod (and sometimes not even that).

Now we know why Mr. Obama stunned everyone with an earlier similar bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, only the bow to the Japanese emperor was far more flamboyant, a sign of a really deep sense of inferiority. He was only practicing his bow in Riyadh. Sometimes rituals are learned with difficulty. It took Bill Clinton months to learn how to return a military salute worthy of a commander in chief; like any draft dodger, he kept poking a thumb in his eye until he finally got it. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, seems right at home now giving a wow of a bow. This is not the way an American president impresses evildoers that he’s strong, tough and decisive, that America is not to be trifled with.

[...]

But Mr. Obama, unlike his predecessors, likely knows no better, and many of those around him, true children of the grungy ’60s, are contemptuous of custom. Cutting America down to size is what attracts them to “hope” for “change.” It’s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of “the 57 states” is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.

Previously:

Pruden: Obama is “our first president without an instinctive appreciation of the culture… whence America sprang”

Do you see the assumption? That’s right: the right wing morons have a well defined vision of what America really is: it is just like them. In short, they can see no validity outside of their own narrow sphere. In short, they haven’t a clue as to what America is; they haven’t come to grips with the fact that they are only a very narrow slice of America; they are not the whole or even the majority.

Morons: from here.

That’s right: according to this preacher, America’s problem is that too many men don’t pee correctly.

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