Barely one month after sealing his victory in the primaries and with four months to go before the general election, the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama has embarked on a campaign swing that has the declared aim of proving his patriotism.

Obama kicked off his patriotism tour—set to run through the July 4th holiday—with a speech entitled “The America We Love,” delivered in Independence, Missouri. The site was chosen not merely for the town’s name, but to establish Obama’s connection with its most famous son—Harry Truman, the Democratic president who ordered atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Obama’s speech, ostensibly a reflection upon patriotism and “American values” in the run-up to July 4th, was a thoroughly reactionary address, in which words were carefully chosen to identify with themes generally associated with the Republican right and, at key points, to deliver a kick in the teeth to sections of left-liberal Democrats who have deluded themselves and sought to generate illusions in others about the real political character of his campaign.

Obama began his speech with a ritualistic reference to the “men of Lexington and Concord … our first patriots,” without a word to acknowledge that the democratic ideals embodied in the American Revolution and the guarantees of democratic rights written into the US Constitution have been subjected to a wholesale repudiation in practice by the current Republican administration in Washington.

Of course, the Democrats and Obama himself are fully complicit in this process. “How do we keep ourselves safe and secure while preserving our liberties?” the Democratic candidate asked rhetorically at one point in the speech. Obama offered no answer, but just the week before he announced his support for a bill legalizing the Bush administration’s domestic spying program, while offering blanket immunity to telecommunications companies that collaborated in the massive illegal warrantless wiretapping operation.

To me it is a little silly for anyone to have to prove their patriotism to anyone.  I guess this makes good copy for the 24 hour news stations.  It is either this or some car chase in Peoria.