Rudy Giuliani: 'Barack Obama does not love America'

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/19/rudy-giuliani-barack-obama-does-not-love-america

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Democratic leaders have condemned comments from Rudy Giuliani, who accused the president of failing to love America, saying Republicans should distance themselves from the former New York City mayor.

Giuliani confessed he does not believe Barack Obama loves America to about 60 prominent conservatives, including possible 2016 contender Scott Walker, at a dinner first reported on by Politico on Wednesday night.

Although most politicians and adults who care about the opinions of their peers generally avoid the phrase “I know this is a horrible thing to say, but ...” – by definition knowing that whatever follows is unpleasant – Giuliani reached the conjunction and pressed bravely ahead.

“I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” he said. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me.”

Giuliani supported the assertion that Obama does not care about him by describing the president’s childhood, which the former mayor did not witness: “He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up, and I was brought up, through love of this country.”

The leader of the Democratic National Committee, Florida representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, asked the group in Washington:“Is this what it’s really come to? Really?”

“I don’t often agree with my Republican colleagues,” she said, “but I know they love America. I would challenge my Republican colleagues and anyone in the Republican party to say ‘enough’. They need to start leading.”

She also derided the likely Republican candidates, who include Walker, former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Kentucky senator Rand Paul: “These guys are going to make the 2012 GOP field look downright presidential.”

Giuliani also criticized Obama on religious and foreign policy grounds, saying the president fundamentally misunderstood America’s place in the world.

“What country has left so many young men and women dead abroad to save other countries without taking land?” he asked. “This is not the colonial empire that somehow he has in his hand. I’ve never felt that from him.”

He then alluded to the president’s comments during this year’s National Prayer Breakfast, in which Obama noted how faith could be “twisted and distorted, used as a wedge, or worse sometimes as a weapon”. Obama used the Crusades as an example alongside religious justifications for slavery and the actions of Islamic State militants, which the president called a “death cult” that was “betraying” Islam.

Giuliani felt Obama did injustice to Christianity, however, saying he was “incapable” of appropriately condemning “a part of Islam that’s sick”.

He then said he felt the crusades many not have been “wrong”.

“You criticize Christianity for the part of Christianity that is wrong. I’m not sure how wrong the Crusades are. The Crusades were kind of an equal battle between two groups of barbarians. The Muslims and the crusading barbarians. What the hell? What’s wrong with this man that he can’t stand up and say there’s a part of Islam that’s sick?”

Giuliani has recently blamed Obama for “four months of propaganda” against the police, and last week said that Obama is not “a man who fights for his people”. During his brief 2008 presidential campaign, Giuliani himself was criticized for not serving in the Vietnam war.

A few seats away from Walker, the Wisconsin governor who recently visited London in an effort to raise money and boost his foreign policy credentials, Giuliani said he would endorse whomever his Republican party nominated in 2016.

“If it’s you, Scott, I’ll endorse you,” he said. “And if it’s somebody else, I’ll support somebody else.”

Walker, for his part, attacked Obama’s Republican opponent in 2012. “What we never heard, or at least never heard very clearly, was why Mitt Romney would be a better alternative” than Obama, he said.