Ed Driscoll has a great post up today (HT HotAir) with a collections of thoughts for the 4th of July.  He starts off in California where after 9 years, someone deemed an American Flag to be "graffiti" that needed to be painted over.....

Like many states with large urban areas, California has a bit of a graffiti problem. Drive past a railroad yard, an industrial park, a bridge or an overpass, and the odds are very good that you’ll the spray-painted markings from a would-be artist’s latest quest for immortality. And given the slow rate that this stuff seems to get cleaned up, if ever, he may have stumbled over the perfect medium to achieve it.

Fortunately, California is getting serious about the issue:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is apologizing for a decision by state transportation officials to paint over a giant American flag mural on the side of a Northern California freeway.The 35-foot long flag was painted on a concrete slab near Interstate 680 in Sunol by three men about two weeks after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Even though the mural had been in clear view of commuters for nearly nine years, a Caltrans spokesman says it wasn’t until last month that someone in the agency asked if the flag was on state property.

and went on to the disappearance of American exceptionalism and idealism...

Sacramento have created the perfect metaphor for this Fourth of July weekend, which certainly feels a bit gloomier than some. (How bad is it? Even Canada’s feeling a bit sorry for us today!) Or as Minority Leader John Boehner said of the Democrats and the president, “They’re snuffing out the America that I grew up in,” causing Rick Moran to add:

The congressman is not referring to the grand plans of statesmen and social engineers, or the yardsticks of social progress that so enamor the left. Boehner was referring to a state of mind about America that is disappearing.What else is America except a place that has lived in the dreams of men since we organized ourselves into nation-states? Each of us alone defines our own America, imbuing it with our own hopes, animating it with our own definitions of liberty, consecrating it by our embrace of its traditions and values. It is this feeling about America that Boehner believes is threatened. But is he right? Is his implication that the growth of government under the current administration — the largest expansion in history — can destroy what we “grew up with” as a vision of America in our minds?

There are other things we grew up with in America — those of us of Boehner’s age and a little younger — and not all of them bring pleasant memories to the surface. In fact, a significant number of them we wanted “snuffed out.” Certainly, the casual kind of racism and intolerance that was not unfamiliar in the America of my own youth should have been snuffed out. The second-class citizenship accorded women (cemented in both tradition and the law) needed to be left behind, as did attitudes toward gays, the handicapped, the mentally ill, and others in society who lived on the margins, largely invisible to the majority of us, and who suffered in silence until their concerns were given voice a decade or two later.

Everyone's favorite "M" word from the '70's made an appearance...

First up, responding to today’s equivalent of “the casual kind of racism and intolerance” mandated, then and now by the state, Roger wishes the nation “Happy Unbirthday, America:”

But whatever we call our situation, the causes of our malaise are all too apparent — a depressed economy, out-of-control government spending with the largest deficits since World War II, an intractable ecological disaster with no plan how to end it, a continuing global war against an enemy we dare not even name, a mad theocracy on the verge of nuclear weapons, and so on.

Worst of all, however, may be the growing cancer inside our own house. Difficult as our problems may be, they can be resolved democratically in a society under the rule of law. But we have reason to believe that these days, that most basic of all our legal principles, that keystone of our system, one which was fought for by generations of Americans, equality before the law, is under attack at the center of our government.

That is why the most important story that Pajamas Media has covered since its inception in 2005 may be the emergence of whistleblower J. Christian Adams from the Department of Justice. Adams was an attorney in the voting rights division who resigned when the Department forbid him to testify on the New Black Panther case before the US Commission on Civil Rights. The Department had dismissed that case before sentencing, even though they had won it. According to Adams, the DOJ has a dreadful record when pursuing examples of black on white racism. Only racism towards people of color is countenanced.

As CEO of Pajamas Media, I am proud to have published Adams and will continue to do so. I am also a former sixties civil rights worker and what we were fighting for at the time was true racial equality, not an unbalanced system in which aggrieved interest groups, whatever their historical justification, can threaten and bully people of other races. I can’t say what Dr. King would think today (unlike others, I am not psychic) but I would like to think he would oppose racism from all quarters and toward all races. In fact, I am almost certain he would.

My friend Gary Gross has an excellent post up on the interview that Bill O'Reilly did on the subject with long time Civil Rights attorney Bartle Bull which included this haunting quote (to which Mr.Simon refers above)....

Intimidation is Section 11 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That act was the keystone of all the civil rights legislation fought for and passed by the Kennedy’s, Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King.

Voter intimidation of ANY kind is exactly what the civil rights movement was about.  PERIOD.  It was equal protection under the law - not protection for the President's favored few.....

He echo's John Podhoretz' question in the NYPost....

At the New York Post, Podhoretz asks, “How are those of us who stand in opposition to the domestic agenda and foreign-policy views of President Obama and his administration to think about this country in 2010 as we approach the nation’s birthday on Sunday?”

Or, to put it another way: How should a self-described patriot think, act and talk about the United States if that self-described patriot believes the elected leadership of the United States has led the country into a ditch that threatens to expand into a bottomless chasm?

Does the fault lie with the president and his party, or does it reside in the electorate that installed them? If it resides in the electorate, what does that say about the condition of the United States?

And then uses it to segue into a critique of the charge of "racism" that seems to be the lefts only defense against the President's critics.

Podhoretz’s article is titled,“Patriotic opposition: Loving a nation that elected O.” And while it ends on a hopeful note (help is coming in November), reading it after eight years of a culture war from the left against President Bush, followed by two years of a culture war from left against the Americans involved in the Tea Party, it’s a reminder that the Culture War itself, with roots dating back to the 1950s and earlier, has reached the quagmire stage. You can see it at work in Hollywood, where seemingly every recent product is trashed by some protest group as “racist,” when employees of a General Electric co-owned television network can refer to half their potential audience as racist, and when the journalists writing at an email list started by an employee of the Washington Post can refer to their former editor, today the publisher of one of the left’s flagship house organs as — you guessed it — racist.

Taken as a whole, what do all those charges say about the nation’s critics? As Victor Davis Hanson wrote last year:

The charge of racism has been leveled against critics of President Obama’s health-care reform by everyone from New York Times columnists, racial activists, and Democratic legislators to senior statesmen like Jimmy Carter (“It’s a racist attitude”), Bill Clinton (“some . . . are racially prejudiced”), and Walter Mondale (“I don’t want to pick a person [and] say, ‘He’s a racist,’ but I do think the way they’re piling on Obama . . . I think I see an edge in them that’s a little bit different”).

But are Obama’s critics really racists?

It is a serious charge. If true, it means the hope of a color-blind society is essentially over after a half-century of civil-rights progress. If false, it means that we have institutionalized vicious smears as legitimate political tactics — and, in the process, discredited the entire dialogue that surrounds racial prejudice.

And ends striking an optimistic note.

In a way, America has inverted the process: we didn’t have a “Start From Zero” revolution in the 20th century, nor in January of 2009; it was a slow, inexorable process on the left in academia and both the entertainment and journalism to snuff out of what made America great. It ultimately produced men like Barack Obama who seemingly display little or no pride in what makes this nation unique, despite its flaws, both real and punitively imagined. But perhaps the fortunate lack of a sudden “Start From Zero” moment means that the Great Relearning could occur faster than most.

Or as Podhoretz adds:

The American political system presents two choices to the American people — Republicans or Democrats. After preferring Republicans for a few election cycles in the early years of the first decade of this century and not liking the result, the electorate decided to go for Democrats for a few election cycles. It now appears they don’t like this result either — and will now go back to the Republicans and give them another chance.

The body politic is not panicking, even though the news is dire — because it knows, somehow, that this too shall pass. America has faced worse times and weathered them. Even within our memory, it has had other leaders who also misunderstood their mandates and offered solutions to the nation’s problems that only exacerbated them.

The body politic learns from its mistakes and uses its power to correct them. Taken as a whole, this bunch of rubes and dupes and boobs shows a remarkably commonsensical approach to these things by saying, in essence:

Nothing is irreversible. Change is possible.

The political message of July 4, 2010 that is looking increasingly like a harbinger of doom for the man who popularized it two years ago is simply this:

Yes, we can.

An optimism that I tend to share.  This country has survived worse that a President Bush OR a President Obama.  It will survive now.  We may be a little worse for the wear, but we will survive even thrive as a result.  I do not share the pessimism that many of my friends on the right currently suffer from because I understand the cycles that EVERYTHING runs through.  Those of us that do understand that are the ones working all the harder to find candidates and people who can restore balance to the system.  A swing to the FAR right is not what is needed to counter a swing to the far left, but neither is mushy middleism which stands for nothing.  We need people to remember where this country came from, what it stands for and are not ashamed to learn the lessons of it's past.  People who are willing to try NEW ideas (not ideas like socialism that have miserably failed in other countries).  THAT is why we will survive.