Political liberalism refers to the respective political traditions of the liberal parties around the world. The same phrase is also used to refer to the later political philosophy of John Rawls.

Liberal traditions vary but are usually a blend of aspects of social democracy, though of a moderate reformist kind as opposed to revolutionary socialism, and selected aspects of classical liberalism, especially an attachment to a sphere of individual liberties, though without any strong principle in circumscribing government intervention. Liberals usually think of themselves as progressive rather than conservative, and as moderate and reformist rather than radical or revolutionary. They will defend a democratic constitution that guarantees civil rights, as opposed to monarchies, aristocracies, or otherwise non-democratic systems.

The specifics of liberal agendas vary considerably from country to country and over time, as social standards, and cultural attitudes deal directly with some issues regarding personal freedom.

As in all political battles, what is apparent does not resemble the underlying political mechanics, and all political issues should be taken with a grain of salt. Thus, many attempts by liberals and conservatives to characterize each other, are more akin to a public stage-play based on symbolic idealisms than on the real workings of compromise in government. Compromises and the personal interest of politicians mean that political discourse are taylored to pander to expected voters and fit their common prejudice, whereas promises are forgotten once the party holds power.

This distinction of political liberalism carries a caveat, which is that in the absence of strong principles characteristic of successful power-seeking endeavours, there is no possible strong definition liberty, and liberalism will refer to the vague common prejudices of the day. The countries where liberals have stronger principles are those where they are farther removed from any contention of holding power.

Great Britain

Originally known as Whigs, from the Seventeenth Century up to the mid Nineteenth Century, the British liberals were reformists who would stand against the privileges of the King and the landed aristocracy. They alternated with the conservative Tories between government and opposition, up to World War I. After the War, their influence was undermined by the social democrat Labour Party, who took over as the main reformist/popular party as opposed to the Conservatives. The doctrine of the party evolved a lot throughout history, matching concerns of the day. For historical details, see the article about Whiggism.

Nowadays, the party is generally regarded as being on the centre-left, combining support for free trade and civil liberties with an endorsement of the Welfare State and social democracy. Officially, they are known today as Liberal Democrats.

United States

In recent decades the most common use of the term liberal in the USA is greatly at variance from the use of the term in the rest of the world, and with the historical meaning of the word in the USA through the mid 20th century.

Some think that conservatives have been successful in undermining progressives as ‘liberals’, by deliberate public relations campaigns, through repeated use of the word, ‘liberal’, in ways that associate it with irresponsibility.

Some independent leftists and libertarians who dislike the USA’s two leading parties allege that since liberal means being in favor of liberty, both parties are telling the truth when they deny that they are liberals.

In the United States, the label of liberal is sometimes used as derogatory or politically undermining label. It can imply a overly free-spirited, unaccountable, and compromised character, or someone in favor of vast and needless government intrusion into peoples lives.

USA Conservatives in recent years, often those of the Republican Party, sometimes use liberal as an subversive adjective for anyone who is a member of or supports any policy of the Democratic Party.

Consequently, while far right wing politics often are debated and voiced in the political world, liberalism has been associated with far-left politics, whose agendas are often voided.

Twentieth century American political liberalism traditionally held many of the following views:

* Support for the rights of women and minorities, particularly racial and religious minorities, the disabled, and homosexuals. Some further support such programs as affirmative action and multi-lingual education.

* Support for abortion rights.

* Support for government social programs such as welfare, medical care, unemployment benefits, and retirement programs.

* Support for strong environmental regulations.

* Support for trade unions and strong regulation of business.

* Support for animal rights.

* Support for gun control.

* Opposition to the death penalty.

This resembled what in other countries was sometimes referred to as social democracy. However, unlike European social democrats, American liberals never widely endorsed nationalization of industry. In addition, in recent years the term has become somewhat confused,as the term has been applied to a broad spectrum of viewpoints.As the United States Democratic Party, the standard bearer of American liberals, adopted of the more centrist outlook of the Democratic Leadership Council,the term “liberal” has become associated with more centrist candidates and issues who, for example, support the death penalty or take pro-business positions. For this reason, many Americans on the left of the political spectrum prefer to use the term progressive to describe their views, disassociating themselves from contemporary mainstream liberalism.

Some people define liberals as those who support the use of government power to promote equality, but generally not to promote order. They also support more government intervention than conservatives. For example, liberals are more likely to promote affirmative action than to ban homosexual marriage. This definition is generally true, especially considering the main supporting points given above. However, this definition can be incorrect in some cases; for example, most liberals support gun control.

Liberalism

Liberalism may be used to describe one of several ideologies that claims individual liberty to dissent from orthodox tenets or established authorities in political or religious matters, in contrast to conservatism.

1. One usage of the term is for a tradition of thought, that tries to circumscribe the limits of political power, and to define inalienable individual rights. This usage is more common in continental Europe.

See: classical liberalism or libertarianism.

2. Another, less common usage, is to denote the tradition of various liberal parties. However, though said liberal parties were originally founded on the tradition above, they significantly diverged from it since they came to power in the 19th century, and liberal parties around the world are now based on a variety of unrelated ideologies, so the ideological content of the word depends on the geographical context.

See: political liberalism.

3. Another, common usage, denotes the ideology of social-democracy, as defended by the liberal party in UK since the early 20th century, under the influence of Fabianism. It is with this background that Keynes claimed to be liberal in the 1930s, and that many American leftists claimed to be liberal. This usage is very popular in the United States.

See: new liberalism.

4. A limited usage is to denote the tradition shared by authors like John Locke or John Stuart Mill, up to the mid 19th century.

5. Some commentators try to distinguish in the “liberal philosophy” (which meaning between 1, 3, or 4 remaining unspecified) a “political liberalism” from an “economical liberalism”. These dichotomies reflect more about the ideology of those who make such a dichotomy, than about the ideology of anyone else.

6. In addition to the political usages above, the term “liberal” is also used in theology to refer to people who hold to views which depart from their religion’s traditional beliefs.

See: liberal theology.

The common meaning of terms evolve: whereas the word “liberal” was clearly associated to meaning 1 (classical liberalism) in the 19th century, it has come to commonly have meaning 3 (new liberalism) in the US after World-War II, and particularly as McCarthyism made the word socialism difficult to bear, and left-wingers massively adopted the name “liberal”. For this reason, US classical liberals adopted the name “libertarian”, which leads to other confusion with European connotations of the term. Recently, the word “liberal” has been so much used as a derogatory term by US conservatives that many US liberals (meaning 3) prefer to shun the word “liberal” and call themselves “progressive”. In the UK, meanings 1, 2, 3 coexist, since liberalism as an ideology will be understood by scholars as classical liberalism, whereas there is an active political party named the Liberal Democrat Party, and meaning 3 is imported from the US, including the derogatory usage by conservatives. However, the derogatory connotation is weak, and social liberals from both the left- and right-wing continue to use “liberal” and “illiberal” to describe themselves and their opponents.

Progressivism

Progressive is a term often used by those on the political left to describe their beliefs. This term is preferred by many over the more traditional label in American politics, liberal, because of the association of ‘liberal’ with the centrist politics of many Democratic Party politicians (such as Al Gore) in recent years. The term “progressive” is thus used to avoid confusion between the politicized term “liberal” and genuine philosophical views focused on social change.

“Progressive” is used in place of liberal to best describe philosophical ideals that are opposite and contrasted to those held by conservatives. Political ideas that advocate rapid social change, are likely to be progressive, while conservative ideas tend to reflect an adherence to established norms and support for (or furtherance of) status quo interests. Continuing logically, by this spectrum, a philosophy that advocated reversing course to previous standards would be regressive, though this term is rarely used. Instead, the term reactionary is more frequently used to describe those who wish to adhere to established convention.

This is particularly useful when dealing with philosophical positions, since the liberal tradition has very particular and fixed Enlightenment connotations that may not necessarily have any useful meaning in the Left political scene.

The term has its origin in American politics in the early part of the twentieth century. During this period, known as the Progressive Era, many reforms were enacted. Some third-party presidential candidates ran for office during this time under the Progressive Party label, notably Robert M. La Follette, Sr.. The Progressive Party of Canada also briefly rose to prominence in the 1920s.

This term is also used in Canada, since many liberals are not Liberals, i.e. do not support the centrist Liberal Party of Canada. Not to be confused with the Progressive Conservatives.

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Jihad on Campus: The controversy over a Harvard commencement speaker (NRO, 020606)

Over the past year, Harvard University has been strongly criticized for several questionable decisions relating to the war on terror. Specifically, the school continues to ban ROTC, has allowed terrorist front groups to raise funds on campus, and has named as its undergraduate-commencement speaker a supporter of a Hamas front group who refuses to categorically condemn terrorism.

All of these decisions have one thing in common: They are all highly unrepresentative of the broader Harvard community. All three decisions were made by only one Harvard constituency — sometimes by only a single committee or individual. Having this many scandalous actions taken in a single year indicates a governance problem at the university.

In general, Harvard has given its faculty and individual administrators so much power that other voices, particularly those of students and alumni, are shut out. Worse, those that are empowered have often pursued aggressive political agendas that would be considered fairly extreme in mainstream American society.

For example, most Americans unconditionally support the military, but Harvard continues to ban ROTC. Harvard’s faculty alone is empowered to decide whether and how the university supports this program. The faculty voted to remove ROTC from campus in 1969 to protest the Vietnam War, and to defund the exiled program in 1994 to protest the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

In 1999, however, Harvard’s Undergraduate Council voted to ask the school to bring the program back. This year, after September 11, the Council passed another resolution supporting ROTC in an effort to make their voices heard. There is also widespread alumni support for the program. And now, even Harvard’s president, Lawrence Summers, is believed to desire a significant change in ROTC policy. Nonetheless, Harvard’s anti-military faculty is able to impose its views on the rest of the Harvard community.

Similarly, a committee of only five professors and one administrator was responsible for selecting Zayed Yasin as the school’s undergraduate-commencement speaker. Unlike at other universities, students had no input. Mr. Yasin vocally supports and raised funds for the Holy Land Foundation, a Hamas front group whose assets have been frozen by the Treasury Department. He also publicly supports sending funds to the families of suicide bombers — which the U.S. government considers tantamount to encouraging and supporting terrorism itself.

Not surprisingly, some committee members harbor fairly extreme political views similar to those of Mr. Yasin. The chair of the committee, Richard Thomas, is an active supporter of the effort to divest Harvard’s assets from Israel, such as the school’s equity holdings in IBM, General Electric, and McDonald’s. Another committee member, Dean Michael Shinagel, has said that “it is not a black and white issue that Hamas is a terrorist organization. Hamas has done more good for the people of Palestine than their own government.” Moreover, committee member and university marshal Richard Hunt took the unusual step of encouraging Mr. Yasin to submit his speech — which calls into question the fairness of the process by which Mr. Yasin was chosen over 65 other applicants.

The pattern continues with Harvard’s decision to allow terror-linked groups, which have not had their assets frozen, to fundraise on campus. The dean of extracurricular life, David Illingworth, is empowered to make this decision on his own. In November 2000, the Harvard Islamic Society and the Society of Arab Students sponsored a well-publicized fundraising dinner on campus to support the Holy Land Foundation and the Palestinian Red Crescent. While both groups are linked to terrorism, the Holy Land Foundation — which at that time had not had its assets frozen — was known as a particularly onerous Hamas front group. Though funds were eventually only given to the Red Crescent, after a public outcry, the fundraiser was held for both groups with the acquiescence of the university.

Clearly, Harvard needs to reform how important decisions such as these are made. President Summers should seek ways to implement more inclusive and representative means for deciding issues that affect the whole Harvard community. He should also work to rehabilitate Harvard’s image and distance the school from extremism. We cannot afford to have our most prestigious and visible educational institution appear to be anti-military, or to be accommodating Islamic extremists, in this time of war. This image is not representative of the broader Harvard community and unfairly taints all those in that community. And, given Harvard’s importance in American society and visibility throughout the world, it also sends a damaging mixed signal to our enemies by calling into question our commitment to the war on terror.

For this reason, it is also essential that the media cover these events at Harvard honestly. Unfortunately, they have not been up to the task. Two days ago, for instance, Nightline devoted an entire show to the controversy over the selection of Mr. Yasin as Harvard’s undergraduate-commencement speaker. They made no reference to Mr. Yasin’s ties to and continued support for extremist groups — despite indications to opponents of Mr. Yasin’s selection that they would. Nightline also failed to mention the problems with the process by which he was chosen.

Similarly, the Washington Post, in its coverage of the commencement controversy, noted only that students have criticized Mr. Yasin’s defense of the “humanitarian efforts” of the Holy Land Foundation. This is a shameful whitewashing of the students’ primary complaint: Yasin supports the foundation’s policy of sending funds to the families of suicide bombers. Both Nightline and the Washington Post — along with the New York Times, CNN, and just about every other “mainstream” media outlet — have brazenly ignored the true objections of Mr. Yasin’s opponents, claiming that their objections were based primarily on an emotional response to the word “jihad” rather than on his ties to extremist groups.

As a nation, we need to honestly address and confront the threat of terrorism. We are told by our government that future attacks, on a scale dwarfing Sept. 11, are inevitable. But, in fact, these attacks are being made from within our borders by those living among us. They are only inevitable if we, as a society, fail to understand, condemn, and confront those that — tacitly or explicitly — support terror and violence. The failure of our schools and media institutions to do this will only make the task of defending against terrorism all the more difficult.

— Pat Collins is a second-year student at the Harvard Business School and co-head of the student petition drive protesting the selection of Zayed Yasin as Harvard’s undergraduate-commencement speaker. You can sign the petition at www.harvardpetition.com.

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Welcome Voice? Harvard invites academic who wants Jews “shot dead.” (NRO, 021012)

Harvard University’s English department has invited Tom Paulin — the Oxford poet who has called for the slaughter of U.S. Jews on the West Bank — to deliver “The Morris Gray Lecture” this Thursday (November 14). The invitation was sent to other faculty heads last week, encouraging them to have their students attend, and an announcement was made on the English department’s web page.

Earlier this year Paulin, who lectures in 19th- and 20th-century English literature at Oxford University, told the influential Egyptian paper al-Ahram Weekly that what he described as “Brooklyn-born” Jewish settlers should be “shot dead.” He said: “They should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them.” He added: “I can understand how suicide bombers feel. . . . I think attacks on civilians in fact boost morale.”

Paulin, who has regularly declared that Israel has no right to exist, and recently resigned from Britain’s ruling Labour party on the grounds that Tony Blair was heading a “Zionist government,” is no doubt entitled to his opinion. But that Harvard University’s English department, whose faculty members include such luminaries as Nobel-prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, has decided to single Paulin out for honor and provide him with a platform from which to influence the young, is another matter altogether. While in general, formal boycotts (even of those who espouse hatred and murder) are undesirable, this invitation is not appropriate. As one dissenting faculty member told me yesterday “We don’t have to invite the Ku Klux Klan to tea either.”

THE ZIONIST SS?

However, this is not just the equivalent of, for example, Harvard inviting a mathematician who happens to belong to the Ku Klux Klan, to give a lecture on mathematics. In Paulin’s case his political and racial views are integral to his work. He has written poems demonizing Jews, such as “Killed in Crossfire,” which was published by The Observer, the highly regarded British Sunday sister paper of the Guardian as their poem of the week in February 2001. (In the poem, Paulin suggested that the Israeli army, whom he refers to as the “Zionist SS,” deliberately gunned down “little Palestinian boys.”)

Like many bigots, if we take Paulin at face value, he seems to genuinely be in denial about his own prejudice. “I am a philo-semite,” he declared in an interview with the Daily Telegraph earlier this year.

Yet even the Guardian — certainly no friend of Israel — has run editorials accusing Paulin of anti-Semitism. In a piece titled “Can Tom Paulin be serious?” (Guardian, April 17, 2002) Rod Liddle implies he is referring to Paulin when he uses the Arabic description for a “naive, deluded, self-righteous, egregious bigot.”

Liddle adds: “The Paulin business shook me out of my Wasp-ish complacency. I’d been inclined to dismiss as paranoid repeated complaints from British Jews that there was a new mood of anti-Semitism abroad: I was wrong. Paulin will undoubtedly claim that his remarks are not anti-Semitic, but merely anti-Zionist. He may even believe that himself. So might the others, generally from the left, who, when cross-examined about their opposition to what they call Zionism, reveal a dark and visceral loathing of Jews.”

In fact Liddle is almost alone on the left in denouncing this form of anti-Semitism, and only a few brave commentators from the right and center, such as Michael Gove at the Times of London (“Darkness encroaches,” May 3, 2002) have spoken out in a similar vein.

SILENT WHEN HEBREW UNIVERSITY WAS BOMBED

British and other academics have been conspicuous by their lack of criticism of Paulin, just as they were conspicuous by their lack of condemnation when the cafeteria at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University — the leading institute of higher education in the Middle East — was blown up in July, and several students and academics killed.

As the Daily Telegraph reported “Several Oxford fellows said yesterday that they had received emails from an American academic urging the English Faculty to replace Mr. Paulin, but they said they had deleted the message seconds later.”

It is highly unlikely that Paulin’s colleagues would have remained so silent had he incited people to murder blacks, homosexuals, or anybody else other than Americans and Jews. Now Oxford will no doubt welcome Harvard’s stamp of endorsement of him.

But whereas a number of academics (including some Jewish ones) have jumped to Paulin’s defense, some non-Jewish students at Oxford have criticized their own university authorities. For example, Sarah Monroe, president of the student union at Balliol College, Oxford, explained to the Guardian on May 7, 2002, that on behalf of Balliol students she had written to the vice chancellor of Oxford, the master of Hertford College (Paulin’s college at Oxford), and to the faculty of English and urged them to “rethink Oxford University’s response.”

“Such public advocation of violence against particular ethnic or political groups is not acceptable and the university should not pussy-foot around saying so,” wrote Monroe.

Oxford University has taken no action against Paulin, however, not even a reprimand, even though Paulin is actually in violation of British law. The Terrorism Act 2000, section 59, states: “A person commits an offence if he incites another person to commit an act of terrorism wholly or partly outside the United Kingdom.” The first such “act of terrorism” cited is murder. Moreover, the act states that “it is immaterial whether or not the person incited is in the United Kingdom at the time of the incitement.”

STAR BILLING

Indeed, despite Paulin’s views, his “star billing” continues to rise. So enamored of the “trendy” British poet and academic are the members of one reasonably successful British rock band (from the northern town of Blackburn), that they have called themselves “Tompaulin.”

BBC television continues to invite Paulin as one of its regular commentators on the arts. (One can only guess at the BBC’s reaction if his remarks had been directed at British Pakistanis rather than at American Jews.)

To al-Ahram, Paulin is that “rare thing in contemporary British culture, ‘the writer as conscience.’” Some Europeans apparently agree. A. N. Wilson, a novelist and columnist for the Daily Telegraph and (London) Evening Standard, has leaped to Paulin’s defense, and noted that “many in this country and throughout the world would echo his views on the tragic events in the Middle East.”

Wilson, who also recently said he had “reluctantly” concluded Israel no longer had a right to exist, argued that Jews escaping Hitler (who Wilson says were lucky to have been allowed into a free country like Britain) should not be so “un-British” as to suppress Paulin’s views or to “pretend that they are criminal merely because some people find them offensive.”

The president of Harvard, Larry Summers, who less than two months ago denounced the spread of anti-Semitism in the guise of anti-Zionism at American universities, is said in private to be “horrified” by the invitation to Paulin, but has made no public comment. But a minority of members of the English faculty is preparing a statement distancing themselves from the invitation to Paulin, which they hope to publish today or tomorrow.

A STRANGE CHOICE BY HARVARD

The Harvard English Department’s choice of Paulin — at a time when Israeli Jews, men, women, and children, American-born or otherwise, are being shot dead almost daily — is truly remarkable. Can they have been completely unaware, for instance, of the well-publicized criticism of Paulin earlier this year by a British judge, who accused him of “lamentable” behavior in bringing an unfounded racial harassment case against another academic?

Judge Playford, QC, ruled that Paulin had made baseless claims of racism against a fellow don, Fred Zimmermann. In a scandal involving Nadeem Ahmed, a Muslim student at Oxford who failed a qualifying exam and then alleged racial discrimination against the university, Paulin’s claim that Zimmerman, one of the examiners, had been “bunged off to Israel to get out of the way” was completely untrue.

The judge found that Paulin and Ahmed had been “mischievous” in their groundless claims of racism. It was “lamentable,” he said, that Paulin had left “cryptic phone messages” with the university authorities and made many insinuations about Zimmermann, who, as it turned out, is neither Jewish nor Israeli, but German.

The previous president of Harvard, Neil Rudenstine, introduced what have come to be known as the Rudenstine rules, whereby students are entitled to study in an environment free of racism and hostility. On Monday some students at Harvard were letting it be known to those academics who invited Paulin how deeply hurtful Paulin’s brand of hatred is to them.

— Tom Gross is former Middle East reporter for the London Sunday Telegraph and New York Daily News. He recently wrote for NRO on the media and “Jeningrad.”

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Student Senate ‘Diversity Seats’ Exclude Conservatives (Foxnews, 021122)

BOSTON — These days, defining diversity seems to be the big issue on campus.

But at Amherst College in Massachusetts, they’re doing more than talking about it. They’re adding “diversity seats” to the 32-member Student Senate for groups that have been “historically silenced.”

Five candidates representing different minority groups applied for the seats, including an international student, a homosexual, a conservative, a Latino and an Asian. All except one were chosen — the conservative candidate.

Ted Hertzberg, the conservative student, says he deserved the seat for the same reasons the others did.

“Conservative students on the Amherst campus are a minority,” he said. “Their views are suppressed. They’re the subject of ridicule and sometimes violence.”

Amherst, which has 1,600 students, has repeatedly been voted the top liberal arts college in the country by U.S. News and World Report, beating out both Harvard and Yale. It’s considered one of the most liberal of the liberal arts schools in the country.

Hertzberg said he never thought he could actually win on a campus where only two out of 160 professors are registered Republicans.

“What the Student Senate has done is symptomatic of the way diversity is defined on campus,” he said. “People see diversity as a matter of race, as a matter of sexual preference, as a matter of origin. Students need to be recognized as individual people and judged on their merit.”

Chris Sorrentino won the seat representing gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students. He doesn’t see the need for a conservative seat.

“I know conservative students on campus and they talk politically with me and other people,” said Sorrentino. “And I’ve never sensed tension or anything that would be considered a silencing of that voice.”

But Hertzberg has won some allies like Student Senator Ali Hassan, who calls diversity seats undemocratic.

“I also find it kind of offensive because it assumes that here at Amherst people will not vote for someone if they’re part of a minority,” Hassan said.

He’s started a petition and collected enough signatures to force a referendum in January on whether to do away with the seats entirely.

Regardless of the outcome, Amherst students say the debate has been good for campus. It’s become a lesson in the definition of diversity and whether it’s more than just skin deep.

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No More Idealism on the Left (Weekly Standard, 021205)

One of the stranger phenomena of today’s politics: The Left wallows in cynicism, while the Right is full of starry-eyed dreamers.

RECENT EVENTS—September 11, the war in Afghanistan, and the coming war in Iraq—have rigorously tested one of the perennial cliches of politics: that the Left is for idealists. Dreamers. People longing to change the world—and make it better. It’s no longer true. Idealism has become a property of the Right, while the Left has been taken over by low partisan enmity.

Last week, Britain’s Foreign Office released a brief report on human rights in Iraq. Drawing heavily on Amnesty International research, the report told of the estimated 100,000 Kurds Saddam Hussein killed in 1987-88; the estimated 5,000 killed and 10,000 injured by chemical weapons used against the Kurd town of Halabja; the systematic torture and mass killings of many thousands of prisoners; and the widespread torture and rape of women in government custody. Saddam’s regime, the report said, shows a “cruel and callous regard for human life and suffering.” One would think such a report would receive standing ovations from human rights groups. Wrong. Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International, called the report “a cold and calculated manipulation of the work of human rights activists.”

Given a choice between Saddam Hussein and his enemies, why in the world wouldn’t Amnesty International prefer Saddam’s enemies? Amnesty is, after all, a human rights organization. It is not a question of the honesty of the Foreign Office’s report. Khan alleged no misreporting of Amnesty’s research. The British government didn’t make up the stories of torture, rape, and execution. What is it then? Well, to be of the Left is to be anti-American and to oppose America’s allies. So it appears that Amnesty International cherishes its leftist credentials more than it does human rights.

One need only surf the antiwar websites to find example after example of such moral absenteeism (definition: vigilance when it comes to the alleged misdeeds of George Bush, but for some reason not in class the day Saddam’s crimes against humanity are described). In its Bush-bashing “statement of conscience,” the antiwar organization Not in Our Name says it opposes war against Iraq because “We believe that peoples and nations have the right to determine their own destiny, free from military coercion by great powers.” Yet apparently they don’t believe in the Iraqi people’s right to determine their own destiny free from the endless repression of Saddam Hussein.

Clearly, the Left has given up principled opposition for the sake of mere opposition—or something that amounts to the same. “Let us find a way to resist fundamentalism that leads to violence,” Hollywood actor Tim Robbins told an antiwar crowd in Central Park at a recent rally, “fundamentalism of all kinds, in al Qaeda and within our government .” Yes, you heard him right. Robbins equated the Islamist terrorists responsible for the deaths of thousands to (need it even be said?) democratically elected officials of the freest country in history.

This moral absenteeism apparently slows rational processes. For example, the Left seems to be unaware that to oppose terrorist violence is to generally support efforts to stop terrorist organizations. (Maybe you don’t have to sign off on every last action taken under the banner of a war on terror, but one can hardly subscribe to the principle of anti-terrorism while opposing the actions to which it necessarily leads.) Similarly, to support the principle of self-determination is to support the administration’s efforts in Iraq. And memo to Amnesty International: To support human rights is to oppose Saddam. To attempt otherwise is to abandon the ideals of anti-terrorism, self-determination, and human rights. Thus has the Left adopted conservatism’s most debilitating and cynical inhibitions against trying to make things better for our fellow man. The formerly internationalist Left has thus become morally constipated and isolationist.

It’s no wonder several ideal-bearing liberals have chosen to flee the movement in recent months. Christopher Hitchens departed The Nation in despair over the absence of principled opposition to the Iraqi regime. In the Washington Post, he then nailed the problem: “Some peaceniks clear their throats by saying that, of course, they oppose Saddam Hussein as much as anybody, though not enough to support doing anything about him.” The always dazzling Ron Rosenbaum of the New York Observer also recently said goodbye to all that, furious over the marked stupidity of a Left that offers cheap, snide remarks on George W. Bush when it should be reexamining the moral blind spot that allowed it to apologize for Stalin, and which now makes it possible for leftists to believe, in Hitchens’s words, “that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.”

Indeed, why can’t a Left that built its domestic agenda on equal rights for women and minorities oppose a dictator who licenses the procedural rape of dissident females and kills minorities? Why can’t a Left that supports an absolute separation of church and state find the strength to oppose religious dictatorships abroad? Ditto for economic opportunity, the freedom of speech, and the right to vote. Why can’t the Left be passionate about these ideals when it comes to the most pressing political events of the day?

The accompanying cliche to the idealist liberal was the cynical conservative. Conservatives were cautious and suspicious of action. But the Right today is alive with hopes and energized by a sense of possibility: Reaganites, neo-Wilsonians, realists, all of them taking part in a war against the world’s most despicable aggressors. Unlike leftists, they can claim they are doing quite a lot to achieve that most cherished of ideals, peace.

David Skinner is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.

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Affirmative Action Insults Immigrant Contributions (Foxnews, 021210)

The crossfire of commentary about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to review affirmative action makes one thing clear: The Left thinks it owns the concepts of “justice,” “equality” and “freedom.”

Those who oppose affirmative action are dismissed as “just not getting it.” The truth is, we understand these concepts too well.

The case concerns the University of Michigan’s policy of giving bonus admission points to black, Hispanic and Native American applicants solely because they are minorities. Whites, because of their skin color, must meet a higher standard. (The case has immediate implications for gender.)

This is discrimination. The question becomes “is it proper discrimination?” Or, more broadly, is it ever proper for a tax-funded institution to systematically privilege one class of people at the expense of another?

Martin Luther King, leader of the ‘60s civil rights movement, didn’t think so. In his justly renowned speech “I Have a Dream” King declared, “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Contemporary “civil rights” leaders are demanding King’s grandchildren be judged on the basis of skin color. More than this: They advocate lowering the bar for minorities, presumably because they believe minorities cannot compete on an equal footing with whites (or white males), despite decades of leveling policies such as affirmative action.

Advocates of affirmative action use skin color or gender to create class privileges by harking back to historical inequities. Because some classes were once legally oppressed, it is argued that they must be privileged today. Class privilege becomes good or bad depending on who receives it.

Just one of the problems with this position is the fact that the individuals being privileged today were not the ones oppressed in the past. Moreover, the individuals being legally oppressed today have committed no offense.

My Irish ancestors are an example of the latter. In the 19th century, Americans viewed the half-starved Irish immigrant as less than human. Indeed, plantation owners used the Irish to do perilous work, like clearing swamps, because they were considered less valuable than slaves. The push behind public school and juvenile delinquent legislation was largely a desire to “Christianize the Catholics” — the Irish immigrants.

Such immigrants had nothing to do with slavery, the theft of land from Indians or any of the historical inequities being wielded like invoices by a bill-collector. The European immigrants of the 19th century fled from societies that legally oppressed them and privileged others. They fled to a place where backbreaking work could offer a better life to their children. And they prospered despite a system that brutally discriminated against them. They prospered because, for most practical purposes, they were equal under the law.

North America was seen as a classless society. It did not live up to that description, but it came closer than anywhere else in the world. For many immigrants, even an approximation of the ideal gleamed like a beacon: A society in which all people — especially their children — were equal under the law. And, through the 19th and 20th centuries, America moved closer toward this ideal by recognizing the equal rights of minorities and women.

Affirmative action ignores the immigrants’ dreams and sacrifices for their children. Instead, it asks the state to become a remedial historian who searches through centuries of injustices picking and choosing which race and what events are to be placed as burdens on the backs of today’s taxpayers and children. The descendants of European immigrants are to be legally disadvantaged because they are white or, even worse, white males.

And, if anyone objects, the first counter-arguments hurled are ad hominems such as “racist” or “sexist.”

A system that says the bar must be lowered for me, because I’m a woman, or for my husband, because he’s Hispanic, is an insult to us both. I don’t need Big Brother or Big Sister to protect me from being judged on my merits. Be my guest and call these beliefs racist and sexist.

They will also be called “elitist.”

The Left has accomplished a political sleight-of-hand par excellence . Arguing for a legal system and tax-supported institutions that are color and gender blind is now called elitist. Equality is now defined as privileges based on color and gender.

Throughout history, freedom has grown by collapsing legal privileges that exalt some and leave others in servitude. In England, the Magna Carta deprived the king of exclusive rights and extended them to nobles; the breakdown of feudalism extended property rights from nobles to peasants. In the United States, the demise of slavery extended “property in one’s own person” from whites to blacks; the woman’s movement extended full legal recognition from men to women.

Freedom means recognizing that every human being possesses every human right in equal measure.

The travesties of the past occurred precisely because this principle was ignored. The solution then was to remove privileges from the law. The solution remains the same.

Those who argue against affirmative action “get” the concepts of “justice,” “equality” and “freedom.” That is precisely why we say: eliminate affirmative action.

Wendy McElroy is the editor of ifeminists.com and a research fellow for The Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. She is the author and editor of many books and articles, including the new book, Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the 21st Century (Ivan R. Dee/Independent Institute, 2002). She lives with her husband in Canada.

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Don’t call Christmas Christmas: Gap (Ottawa Citizen, 021211)

It’s just one more sign that a Merry Christmas is turning into a happy holiday.

Gap Inc., the global clothing retailer with annual sales of nearly $14 billion from its Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy stores, is encouraging its workers to wish customers “happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”

Jane Shaw, a spokeswoman for Gap stores in Canada, said the company encourages its employees to be inclusive and sensitive in dealing with customers at this time of year.

“It’s not a written policy, and I think the important thing to note is we simply suggest and encourage our sales associates and all our employees to recognize that not everyone celebrates Christmas,” she said.

“So being sensitive to that, wishing people a happy holiday season, or happy holidays, is more inclusive.”

Leigh Bridger, a teacher at Hillcrest High School, is concerned that overly sensitive merchants are smothering the spirit of Christmas — and the true meaning of tolerance.

Some students who work part-time at the Gap told her about the policy.

“I think tolerance is a two-way street. If the policy was like, ‘Use sensitivity, guys,’ that’s fine.”

Ms. Bridger added, “If there’s someone who’s obviously Muslim — and there’s certain indicators in terms of dress for women — you’re not necessarily going to say Merry Christmas. But if somebody comes with a list and they say they’re buying Christmas gifts, why shouldn’t that student be allowed to say, ‘Well, have a Merry Christmas?’ “ she said.

“I don’t see how avoiding or not saying Merry Christmas is going to take anything away from another culture, or another religion. If you choose to live in this country, and you accept that the majority of Canadians celebrate Christian holidays — we even have Christmas lights on Parliament Hill — then you accept that.”

Are retailers being Grinches or smart marketers? If political correctness wipes out “Merry Christmas,” the argument goes, soon malls will be blaring songs such as “I’m dreaming of a white Season’s Greetings” and “It’s beginning to look a lot like Happy Holidays.”

Just two weeks ago, the Royal Canadian Mint stood firm in its decision to replace the word “Christmas” with “giving” in a television jingle based on the song The Twelve Days of Christmas.

At the same time, Toronto council passed a unanimous resolution officially renaming Toronto City Hall’s fir tree a Christmas tree after city staff referred to it as a “holiday tree.”

Mayor Mel Lastman, who is Jewish, described the “holiday tree” name as political correctness gone too far.

Many nominal Christians would argue that “Merry Christmas” is not solely a religious greeting, just because it contains “Christ.” More significantly, they say, it contains Christ’s message of peace and goodwill and, implicitly, his exhortation to love one another.

Though Mrs. Bridger is not Jewish, people often assume she is because her husband’s first name is Ira.

“People are constantly saying Happy Hanukkah to me. I’m not offended.”

But in his book Please Don’t Wish Me A Merry Christmas, law professor Stephen M. Feldman argues that Christians, as the dominant religious group in North America, subvert the constitutional principle of the separation of church and state.

Mr. Feldman says he wrote the book in part because of “a growing sense of alienation as an American Jew” particularly living in Oklahoma over the past decade.

The title comes from the last line of the book.

“I had settled on this phrase as an apt concluding line when I first started working on the manuscript. It captures how I often feel during the Holiday season (which Holiday is that?) after I had been wished a Merry Christmas for the 500th time (and it’s still November!).”

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Call Christmas what it is (Ottawa Citizen, 021212)

(Example: how Christians knowingly give up their rights and help atheists in kicking God out of our society!!)

There’s nothing wrong with wishing someone a “Merry Christmas” — even if they are not Christian, several religious leaders said yesterday.

“When someone is having a birthday, you don’t say Happy Anniversary,” said Rabbi Reuven Bulka. “It’s about elementary respect. You respect their holiday on their turf, not on your turf.”

Rabbi Bulka said holiday correctness has become an issue because “in our penchant to being sensitive to the minorities, we have become insensitive to majorities.”

How to phrase holiday greetings became a hot topic after Toronto dubbed its giant evergreen a “holiday tree” and the Gap urged salespeople to wish customers a “happy holiday” instead of “merry Christmas.”

Gamal Solaiman, imam of the majority of Muslims in Ottawa, said the spirit of Christmas is what matters most, not the name of the holiday.

“People take that day to mark His birth, I don’t argue with that,” he said. “If the people just try to manifest and reflect what Jesus put forth in their life, that is what’s important.”

“But to my Christian friends, I will just say Happy Christmas,” said Imam Solaiman.

“Jesus is the reason for the season,” added Rector Desiree Stedman, an Anglican.

However, the view is not held unanimously.

“What’s wrong with being politically correct?” asked Ray Blessin, former publisher of the Canadian Atheist Newsletter.

Mr. Blessin says the current state of affairs is discriminatory. “Muslims shop at the Gap, and they don’t celebrate Christmas, so why not wish them a Happy Holiday? It’s just an idea that’s trying to include everyone, what’s wrong with that?”

Not much, agrees Guy Levac, the spokesman for Marcel Gervais, the archbishop of Ottawa’s Roman Catholic diocese. He said yesterday the archbishop has made it a matter of public record that he has no problems with the “Happy Holidays logic.”

“As long as it doesn’t interfere with freedom of religion or freedom to worship for Christians.”

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When Is Terrorism Justified? When the intellectual elite tell you it is, stupid! (NRO, 030225)

Our message … is clear,” Attorney General Ashcroft said last Thursday. “We make no distinction between those who carry out terror attacks and those who finance and manage [them].”

Eight days earlier, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet delivered a similar message: “The days when we made distinctions between terrorist groups are over,” he said.

Based on poll results, it appears that the lessons of 9/11 are continuing to sink in also with the general public: An increasing number of Americans have come to the conclusion that terrorism — intentional acts of violence directed at non-combatants for political purposes — is wrong, always wrong, no matter the grievance, no matter the complaint.

There are, however, those who reject this principle, who are fighting tooth-and-nail to preserve the idea that murdering other people’s children may be no crime, or may be at most only a misdemeanor — if it’s in the name of a cause they approve, or if it’s against a national or ethnic group they disfavor.

Last week, Sami Al-Arian and seven other men were arrested on charges of conspiracy, extortion, perjury, fraud, obstruction of justice, and other acts in support of terrorism carried out by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

On his Washington radio program less than 24 hours later, commentator Bill Press defended Al-Arian — not on the basis that he has been wrongly accused, but on the basis that the murders that Al-Arian has been charged with abetting were on behalf of the Palestinian cause (which he approves) and that those murdered were Israelis (whom he generally disfavors).

Explaining his thinking, Press reverted to the old saw: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Somewhat defensively, he noted that this view is shared by such commentators as Bob Novak and Pat Buchanan, men not of the Left but rather of the Isolationist Right.

A caller with a Middle Eastern accent phoned in to voice his support of Press’s position. “We shouldn’t be doing Israel’s dirty work,” he said. In other words, it is “dirty work” to arrest those who murder women and children — if those women and children are merely Israelis, and those who associate with Israelis, for example, American Jews, American Christians and Israeli Arabs.

Consider this: If Mr. Press is consistent in his beliefs, he also will have to say that he would endorse the same hands-off-it’s-none-of-our-business position regarding, say, Corsican terrorists/freedom fighters who use the U.S. as a base only to murder French people, or Basque terrorists/freedom fighters who use the U.S. as a base only to murder Spanish people, or Pakistani terrorists/freedom fighters who use the U.S. as a base only to kill Indians.

And if France or Germany were to say: “We’re not going to arrest terrorists — or freedom fighters, who are we to judge? — if they only target Americans,” Mr. Press would have to say that’s fine with him, too.

I strongly doubt he would say any of that.

So the question arises: Why the exception when the target is Israelis — or, let’s not euphemize, when the victims are mainly Jews? I know Bill Press, not well but well enough to say that I don’t think the answer is that he harbors any ethnic-specific hatred or phobia.

The late Balint Vazsonyi, a Hungarian immigrant who established himself as a great champion of America’s founding principles (and a long-time friend and mentor to me) might have suggested this answer: Somewhere along the line, people like Mr. Press — and Messrs Buchanan and Novak, as well — discarded the Anglo-American principle of the rule of law in favor of the Franco-German concept of “social justice.”

That is to say, Press & Co. believe there should be no hard-and-fast rules — rather it should be left to intellectual elites to decide which causes justify which actions against which groups.

Michael Kinsley, one of the leading lights of the Left intellectual elite, has stated this principle fairly explicitly: “An illegitimate tactic used in a legitimate cause, as part of a conflict with legitimate and illegitimate tactics and aspirations on both sides, is different from an illegitimate tactic used for purposes that are utterly crazed and malevolent.”

As noted, Left intellectuals like Mr. Kinsley believe they should be entrusted to instruct us — the benighted masses — regarding which purposes are “legitimate” and which are “utterly crazed and malevolent.”

For various reasons, both the Left and the Isolationist Right view “the Palestinian cause” as legitimate, more legitimate than the “Kashmiri cause,” or the “Corsican cause,” or the “Basque cause” — or the “Kurdish cause” for that matter.

So murdering men, women and children on behalf of the “Palestinian cause” (though a breach of the rule of law) does not offend their sense of justice. It is on that basis, I believe, that they arrive at the troubling conclusion that Jew-killers should not be too harshly judged, that they should perhaps be left alone when they fund and manage Jew-killing from their offices on American campuses.

(The fact that some non-Jewish Americans and Israeli Arabs are also killed in these terrorists incidents, they view as regrettable but unavoidable. The fact that PLO leader Yasser Arafat turned down the Israeli offer of statehood at Camp David, they ignore. The fact that groups like the ones Mr. Al-Arian supports seek the extermination of Israel, they dismiss as merely a negotiating posture.)

By contrast, the Left/Right Isolationist coalition would decree that it is “utterly crazed and malevolent” to murder American civilians in reprisal for U.S. sanctions on Iraq — sanctions which, Osama bin Laden charges, have resulted in the deaths of Iraqi children. (Never mind that Press, Buchanan et al. agree with bin Laden about the lethal impact of U.S. sanctions.)

If I’m misrepresenting Mr. Press’s views, if Mr. Press actually does subscribe to the principle of the rule of law, he could prove that by publishing a list of the grievances that, in his view, do justify the intentional slaughter of civilians. For example, like many on the Left, he might want to say that people who believe their land is “occupied” have a right to murder those they view as “occupiers.”

Of course, that view might be of interest to American Indians, some of whom may harbor “legitimate grievances” over what they regard as “occupation” of their lands by European Americans — Mr. Press among them.

— Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign and Washington correspondent, is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a think tank on terrorism created just after Sept. 11, 2001.

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Bitter Taste of Academia: Citrus College incident acidic, but not vicious (NRO, 030311)

The setting, Glendora, California, in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains, is picturesque, the name of the school, Citrus College, is downright cheerful, and the title of the course, Speech 106, seems innocuous enough, but Rosalyn Kahn, the professor, found herself at the center of a political firestorm last week after she told her students that they could earn extra credit by writing letters to President Bush protesting the war with Iraq; when several students requested they be allowed to write letters to Bush supporting the war, Kahn informed them that such letters wouldn’t be acceptable for extra credit.

One of the dissenting students, Chris Stevens, contacted the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a campus watchdog group, which brought the matter to the attention of the college’s president, Louis Zellers; President Zellers immediately ordered Professor Kahn to cancel the assignment, apologized on behalf of the school to the students and then dashed off a personal letter of apology to President Bush.

The intriguing question, especially in light of the quick and honorable response of Citrus College to the episode, is whether disciplinary action will now be taken against Kahn. She is, to be sure, an intellectual fascist. But if that were the criterion for punishing humanities professors, half the membership of the Modern Language Association would currently be on suspension. What the issue boils down to is this: Did Kahn know she was doing something wrong?

Since I’ve never met the woman, I cannot be certain, but — as counterintuitive as this will sound to non-academics — I suspect the answer is no. In coercing letters of protest against Bush’s Iraqi policy, Kahn likely believed she was enlisting her students not in the cause of left-wing politics but in the cause of Enlightenment. Tragically, this is the dominant mindset at campuses nationwide . . . as a casual stroll down the corridors of virtually any liberal-arts college will confirm, with their walls lined with antiwar posters, rally announcements and activist petitions.

I’ve taught college English for two decades, and I’ve known many Professor Kahns; I teach with several of them now. They are fine people, generous with their time, solicitous of their students needs; their failures, in other words, are not moral but conceptual. In the case of Professor Kahn, she could not conceive that an educated person might favor the Bush’s policies, and since her job was to educate, she had no qualms about ruling out letters of support; crediting a letter that supported Bush, in her mind, would be like crediting an ungrammatical essay, or a math problem with the wrong answer.

The Kahns of the world are not thinkers; they are true believers.

Or, as a colleague said to me recently, “I consider myself a good judge of character. So I know you’re not stupid. And I like you. Yet you actually support Bush. It makes no sense.”

That’s the problem in a nutshell. It’s not that a majority of humanities professors oppose Bush’s policies. It’s that, in their minds, the possibility that an intelligent, well-meaning person might judge his policies sound doesn’t compute. At colleges across the country, support of Bush’s policies equates directly with evil, with right wing extremism. You might just as well wear a swastika to class.

On the one hand, it’s tempting to shrug at the situation: Who really cares what a bunch of academics think? Bush, to his credit, clearly does not. (It’s yet another mark that distinguishes him from his predecessor.) Even students will soon outgrow their teachers’ influence; once they leave college, they’ll encounter opposing points of view and recognize their former mentors for the narrow-minded ideologues they were.

On the other hand, and this returns us to Professor Kahn’s case, it’s easy enough for such ideologues, given the intellectual imprimatur of a college faculty position, to recruit students into activities — like letter writing campaigns — designed to inflate the numbers for their cause-of-the-moment. Credited courses and school-sponsored clubs provide a steady stream of bodies for professors who see indoctrination into leftist thought as a natural function of a good education — and thus don’t see that they’re doing anything wrong.

If you doubt this is happening, take a good look at the crowd at the next peace rally on C-SPAN.

— Mark Goldblatt is author of the novel, Africa Speaks, now available in paperback.

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The War for Liberalism (Weekly Standard, 030407)

From the April 7, 2003 issue: American liberalism is in a dangerous predicament.

by William Kristol

WE’VE LEARNED at least two things in the first nine days of the Second Gulf War. The American people are fine. American liberalism is not.

Here’s the good news about the American people: They’re not affected by the silly mood swings of much of the media. Americans outside newsrooms and TV studios understand that wars are often difficult and usually unpredictable. They know that totalitarian regimes do not fall easily. They grasp the fact that lots of military decisions are judgment calls, and that there’s not much point paying attention to instant second-guessing. And they believe that the events of the war so far—the Baathist war crimes, the care in the use of force by the American military—confirm the depravity of Saddam’s regime, and the justice of America’s cause.

Our pro-war friends who are concerned about the mainstream media’s idiocy can relax. It’s not really doing any damage—except to the media. Every poll shows the American people are resolute, convinced the war is necessary and just, and determined to see it through to the end. As long as the Bush administration continues to focus all its attention on winning the war, it will have the support of the American people.

What of American liberalism? It is in the process of undergoing one of its once-in-a-generation splits. In 1948, the American left divided between Harry Truman’s anti-Communists and Henry Wallace’s fellow travelers. Luckily, the split turned out to be overwhelmingly one-sided, and American liberalism more or less ejected the Henry Wallace faction from its ranks.

Twenty-four years later, a Wallace supporter, George McGovern, captured the Democratic nomination for president. Now, the hawkish Scoop Jackson faction found itself on the losing side. Cold War liberals became an ever smaller minority through the 1970s, eventually departing the Democratic party and the ranks of modern liberalism.

Today, three decades later, after a Clintonian interregnum which papered over ideological differences, American liberalism is in the process of dividing again, into the Dick Gephardt liberals and the Dominique de Villepin left.

The Gephardt liberals are patriots. They supported the president in the run-up to this war, and strongly support the war now that it has begun. It would be misleading to call this group the Joe Lieberman liberals, because he was already too much of a hawk to be representative, but the group certainly includes Lieberman. It also includes Hillary Rodham Clinton, probably a majority of Senate Democrats, less than half of the House Democrats, Democratic foreign policy experts at places like the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, and a smaller number of liberal commentators and opinion leaders—most notably the Washington Post editorial page.

The other group includes the Teddy Kennedy wing of the Senate Democrats, the Nancy Pelosi faction of the House Democrats, a large majority of Democratic grass-roots activists, the bulk of liberal columnists, the New York Times editorial page, and Hollywood. These liberals—better, leftists—hate George W. Bush so much they can barely bring themselves to hope America wins the war to which, in their view, the president has illegitimately committed the nation. They hate Don Rumsfeld so much they can’t bear to see his military strategy vindicated. They hate John Ashcroft so much they relish the thought of his Justice Department flubbing the war on terrorism. They hate conservatives with a passion that seems to burn brighter than their love of America, and so, like M. de Villepin, they can barely bring themselves to call for an American victory.

It would be bad for America if this wing of American liberalism were to prevail. Parts of the Republican party, and of the conservative movement, fell into a similar trap in the late 1990s, hating Bill Clinton more than Slobodan Milosevic. But this wing of the GOP and conservatism lost in an intra-party and intra-movement struggle, and has now been marginalized—Pat Buchanan is no longer a Republican, and his magazine these days makes common cause with Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. The fight over the future of liberalism is not one conservatives can really join. But we can wholeheartedly cheer from the sidelines for the Gephardt liberals against their anti-American leftist rivals, hoping that they succeed in saving the (mostly) good name of liberalism.

—William Kristol

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The former National Organization for Women president takes over the Young Women’s Christian Association (Weekly Standard, 030509)

ON APRIL 30, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) of the United States of America announced that former NOW president Patricia Ireland would be its new chief executive officer. And just this past weekend, the 145-year-old YWCA moved its headquarters from New York City to Washington, D.C. Ireland is expected to assume her new post by May 15—an event that has many people asking, “Why?”

Why would the YWCA select Ireland for the job? In a YWCA press release issued on April 30, Audrey Peeples, chair of the YWCA’s National Coordinating Board, said, “There is no better person than Patricia Ireland to help re-ignite our advocacy positions. At a time when local YWCAs struggle with cutbacks in government support for services we have long provided to women and girls, Ms. Ireland will partner with local YWCA leaders to strengthen our voices in the nation’s capital and across the country.”

To be sure, Ireland, 57, has decades of political activism under her belt. She was the longest-serving president of the National Organization for Women (1991-2001). She has fought to preserve abortion rights, led the opposition to Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination, practiced law, and lobbied for equal employment opportunities. And her professional accomplishments aren’t the only things that have gained the spotlight in recent years. An admitted bisexual, Ireland disclosed in a 1991 interview that she has a husband living in Florida, as well as a “female companion” in—you guessed it—Washington, D.C.

Outside of the YWCA’s cheery press release, there are some dark clouds over Ireland’s new gig.

In a May 5 op-ed piece in the Boston Globe, Cathy Young wrote: “Regardless of gender, if Ireland’s ‘companion’ was her lover, she was committing adultery, though apparently with her husband’s knowledge. Should this disqualify someone from a post that entails moral authority? One thing is near-certain: A married man who unrepentantly admitted to having a mistress would not have much of a future in public life. So much for complaints that women are still judged more harshly than men for their sexual behavior.”

And there are troubling ideological ramifications for the YWCA in Ireland’s appointment. The YWCA’s original goal was, according to one women’s history book, “the salvation of young women’s souls.” It started as a prayer society and blossomed into clubs, boardinghouses, and classes for working women. Since its inception in 1858, it has, of course, come to provide much more—child-care services, educational programs, employment training, job placement, and shelter for women and families. The YWCA-USA website states that its programs and locations (which now number 313) have changed many times over the years, “but the basic purpose of the YWCA has not.”

So what is the basic purpose of the YWCA? According to its mission statement, “The Young Women’s Christian Association of the United States of America is a women’s membership movement nourished by its roots in the Christian faith and sustained by the richness of many beliefs and values.”

Whatever richness Ireland brings to the group, she is an odd choice to represent its Christian roots.

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‘Tis a Far, Far Liberal Thing That I Do Now (Foxnews, 030522)

Several months ago, I wrote a column in this space drawing out what I thought were libertarian themes in the terrific HBO series The Sopranos. In it, however, I suggested that the writers of the show instilled plotlines that both ridiculed the excesses of government, but that also reinforced the “classical liberal” traits of rugged individualism and personal responsibility. That phrase — “classical liberal” — ignited a firestorm of angry email. “Rugged individualism” and “personal responsibility” are...liberal?

“Liberalism,” you see, wasn’t always a dirty word. In fact, most all of the political thinkers who laid the foundation for the American experiment were, in their day, proud liberals. The thinkers who influenced the founders — Adam Smith, John Locke, John Stuart Mill — and the founders themselves — Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington — all bore the liberal label with honor.

In fact, in most of the world, “liberalism” still connotes the values and principles all of those men espoused. In Europe, Latin America and Asia, “liberalism” still means belief in political pluralism, freedom of expression, property rights, the rule of law — basically all of the ideas and principles free thinkers here in America hold dear.

So what happened? Why is “liberal” such a bad word here in America that even the liberals don’t want it? Why, today, do political economists offer two definitions of liberalism, one for the likes of Locke and Jefferson, and another for our more modern impression of the word — people like Hillary and Kennedy?

As the Cato Institute’s David Boaz writes in his book Libertarianism: A Primer , “around 1900 the term liberal underwent a change. People who supported big government and wanted to limit and control the free market started calling themselves liberals. The economist Joseph Schumpeter noted, “As a supreme, if unintended, compliment, the enemies of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label.”

So what Smith and Mill called “liberalism” we today call “classical liberalism” or “libertarianism.” Conservatives too sometimes lay claim to old-school liberalism, though I think that in doing so, they underestimate just how much distrust the original liberals had for the state. There are lots of policy proposals put up by conservatives today that would have made the original liberals cringe.

“Conservatism” also implies a reluctance to change, no matter what it is that change is changing from, which is why hard-line communists in the former Soviet Union, religious zealots in Iran and apartheid proponents in South Africa have all been called “conservatives,” and their opponents, generally, “liberals.” In the strictest sense of each word’s meaning, a conservative wants things to stay the same, no matter how things are in their current form, while a liberal advocates liberty, regardless of who’s in charge.

The problem is that “liberal” has been so defiled here in America, true liberals may never be able to reclaim it. In America, “liberalism” has been attached to such miserable public debacles as the welfare system, ever-expanding (and ever-failing) government and Michael Dukakis. Dukakis, you might remember, wore the “liberal” label George H.W. Bush tagged him with proudly — and was promptly trounced in the 1988 election.

It was after that election, in fact, that “liberal” became so tainted; the leftists who stole the word no longer wanted it. They’ve been running from it ever since. Rare (and dumb) is the modern politician who allows his own position to be labeled the “liberal” one.

“Liberal” today sits alone in the pantheon of political ideologies — used, abused and soiled.

Modern leftists still hold the same positions, mind you — massive, socially benevolent government, mistrust of markets, etc. — but they today prefer the term “progressive,” a label every bit as loaded as “liberal.”

I guess the aim here is to associate themselves with the early 20th century progressives, who are often credited with such admirable accomplishments as winning the women’s vote and ending the practice of child labor. But the analogy isn’t perfect. The early progressives were evangelists, and drew inspiration for their public policy goals from faith — not a practice modern leftists look fondly upon. Early progressives were also far from social libertines — most were pro-life, for example, and the movement has largely been credited/blamed for prohibition.

It’s easy to see why the left likes “progressive.” “Progressive,” of course, connotes “progress,” and by calling themselves “progressive,” leftists can then point to their opponents as “regressive” or “opponents of progress.”

But if your measure of “progress” is similar to most people’s — rising standards of living, longer lives, a happier citizenry, general prosperity — the policies embraced by self-described “progressives” haven’t done much to push us in that direction. The welfare state has wrought mass poverty, perverse incentives and a generation of fatherless children. Big government and excessive regulation have put unnecessary restraints on economic growth, innovation and the free market. And there are a growing number of environmentalists who now take the position that “progress” actually means moving backward, that we’ve put too much emphasis on human welfare at the expense of what was here before us.

As someone who subscribes to the limited government, laissez-faire capitalist, live-and-let-live philosophy of Locke, Jefferson and Smith, I say it’s time to pick “liberal” up off the ground, dust her off and reclaim her as our own. It’ll take a while, I realize. But it’s the only word that works, the only word that fits.

I suppose the first step in that process is to stop flattering the modern left with the label. Ralph Nader is not a liberal. He never was. He’s a leftist. Or a collectivist. Even an egalitarian. But he isn’t a liberal. And neither was Michael Dukakis.

So I encourage my fellow free marketers, libertarians and even some of you conservatives to join me in my crusade. Yes, it’ll definitely sting the first few times. But you’ll get used to it. And we owe it to our philosophical forbears.

Say it with me now:

“I’m a liberal.”

Radley Balko is a writer living in Arlington, VA. He also maintains a Weblog at www.theagitator.com.

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Democratic Candidates Court Liberal Activists (Foxnews, 030605)

WASHINGTON — The Democratic presidential candidates courted liberal activists by disowning Republican-leaning policies espoused by others in their party and assailing President Bush’s record on health care, the economy and terrorism.

“I think the Democratic Party has made a fundamental mistake in the last few years thinking we are going to win by being like the Republicans,” former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean said. “The way to get elected in this country is not to be like the Republicans, it’s to stand up against them and fight.”

Several of the Democratic candidates appeared at the “Take Back America” conference sponsored by two progressive groups, the Campaign for America’s Future and the Institute for America’s Future, a gathering where booths promoted environmentalism, feminism, vegetarianism, birth control and an end to the drug war.

A bit disconcerting for the many of the Democratic candidates was the first booth many of them saw — one manned by volunteers promoting an effort to draft Al Gore, the 2000 presidential candidate who has said he won’t run in 2004.

Former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun got some of the loudest applause by tapping into the crowd’s lingering anger over the U.S.-led war against Iraq. She criticized the Bush administration for failing to capture terrorist leader Usama bin Laden “all the while pandering to fear to keep us at war until the elections are over.”

“This administration is using our pain out of 9-11 as a smoke screen for an extreme political agenda,” she said.

North Carolina Sen. John Edwards used his speech to announce his proposal to lower the cost of prescription drugs. He assailed Bush for not adequately addressing health care costs, corporate fraud or civil and equal rights.

“The president keeps telling us he wants a debate about values in 2004 — we are going to give him a debate about values,” Edwards said. “Because this president’s values are not the values of the American family.”

Republican National Committee spokesman Jim Dyke dismissed the criticism.

“The best that the Democrats have to put forward to Americans is to hope for the worst for America,” he said. “As an election strategy, we’re not sure that people will appreciate that.”

Among those liberal voters attending the conference was actor-director Peter Horton, best known for his role on thirtysomething, who said he’s been galvanized to get more involved in politics because he’s so opposed to Bush’s foreign policy, among other issues. He said he is considering whether to support Dean, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry or Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt.

“It’s a balancing act between responding to a candidate’s platform or whether they can beat President Bush in the election,” he said. “I still don’t feel like I know which can beat Bush yet.”

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Faculty Tilt: Our Teachers Lean Left By A Sizeable Majority (NRO, 030915)

This is the time of year when millions of parents send their children off to universities. Unfortunately, one price of getting one’s children into a top school these days is that they may be subjected to four years of liberal propaganda.

Those in academia like to call the liberal orientation of most college faculty a red herring. But objective research continually shows that it is not. The latest data appear in the Aug. 29 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. A solid majority of those teaching at both public and private universities described themselves as being either liberal or far left. Less than a third considered themselves middle of the road and just 15% said they were conservative. Not surprisingly, 50% of the general public considers college professors to be more liberal than they are.

Interestingly, this puts most faculty members well to the left of their students. According to the same source, less than 28% of them would be classified as liberal or far left. More than half consider themselves to be middle of the road, and 21% say they are conservative. A new Gallup poll suggests that this may even understate the case. It found that 29% of those age 18 to 24 consider themselves to be conservatives, with just 30% saying they are liberals.

The Chronicle is not the first to document the leftist orientation of most university faculty. A survey by pollster Frank Luntz last year found that just 3% of Ivy League professors called themselves Republicans, with 57% belonging to the Democratic party. Among those voting in the 2000 election, Al Gore captured 84% of their votes. Just 9% voted for George W. Bush, barely more than the 6% who voted for Ralph Nader. Among the population as a whole, the vote for president was almost evenly split between Bush and Gore.

The irony here is that unlike almost all other workers in society, university professors are granted tenure — a lifetime job from which it is almost impossible to be fired — precisely in order to guarantee freedom of expression. But in practice, the tenure process has become the means by which the Left rigorously weeds out conservatives. In many university departments, opposition from a single faculty member is all that is necessary to deny tenure. These days, such a blackball is most likely to be used against a conservative, especially in disciplines such as sociology, history, English, and government.

Prof. Robert Maranto of Villanova discussed this insidious practice in the Baltimore Sun on July 31. “While colleges strive for ethnic diversity,” he wrote, “they actively oppose ideological diversity.” The result is a lack of meaningful debate on campuses that makes corporate boardrooms a model of give-and-take. The reason is that in business, those who keep out new ideas lose market share to competitors. “But within the ivory tower, professors can hold dumb ideas for decades with no accountability,” Maranto notes.

Recently, there has been an effort in Colorado to bring some accountability to the state’s public universities and break the left-wing stranglehold over them. Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, has publicly complained about the lack of political diversity on state campuses: “I think that if you’re in a political science department, we ought to strive to make sure that there are people who understand and who can explain political philosophy from the left as well as from the right.”

According to the Denver Post, of the 78 political science professors at state colleges in Colorado, 45 are registered Democrats and just 9 are Republicans. This means that it is very unlikely that a political science student will ever hear the subject taught by a Republican. In math, science, and many other subjects, this doesn’t matter. But in political science it does. Students are simply not getting a complete education in the field if they only hear one side to every political issue.

Predictably, the universities scream bloody murder at any suggestion of adding conservatives to their faculties in order to improve diversity of opinion. They are all for quotas when it means admitting unqualified minority students, but allowing students to be taught by a conservative would somehow be a violation of everything the university stands for, it seems.

Of course, universities are right when they say that quotas are no answer to the problem of liberal bias on campus — just as they are not the answer to improving minority enrollment. On the other hand, the taxpayers of Colorado are within their rights to demand accountability for the $817 million they will generously give the state’s public universities this year. It is reasonable for them to ask that they be more than subsidiaries of the Democratic National Committee.

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The Liberal Game Made Obvious: Straight to the heart (NRO, 030930)

In his debate with Jonathan Chait, who calls it rational for liberals to express hatred for George W. Bush, Ramesh Ponnuru flushes out into the open the hidden passional life of liberals.

It isn’t pretty.

Chait tries to say Bush is a “phony,” but as compared to Al Gore this claim can’t persuade rational people. Chait tries to say Bush is more “radical” than he let show during his campaign. But as compared with the euphemisms and evasions of the Left — who admit to only “moderates” in their ranks — this rings hollow. The Left always hides its leftward aims. The Left hides behind Sunday-school teachers, southerners, and generals as its national candidates.

Chait tries to say that Bush is an easterner pretending to be a Texan. But the truth is that one of the most admirable things about both Presidents Bush is that, early in their lives, when they could have sheltered back East under their blue-ribbon family trees, both chose the most difficult environment in America for easterners — the Texas oil fields. Texas oilmen love to taunt Yankees. Nonetheless, Bush the elder ended up in Houston, but Bush the younger went back to Midland, Texas. There are no travel agencies in Europe that have brochures on Midland.

Chait says that the younger Bush was handed everything, did nothing meritocratically. Yet no one handed young Bush his thorough drubbing of Ann Richards in the Texas gubernatorial debate. The same with his crushing of Al Gore, supposedly the debater par excellence, in three presidential debates.

Sensing desperation, Chait’s comments about the younger Bush’s accent, posture, and mannerisms come down to ethnic prejudice and intellectual bigotry. None of this is remotely rational.

So then Chait is forced to reveal that the party of hate has one truly important, even sacred, agenda, that Bush has frustrated: high taxes on the rich. Bush has cut the taxes of millions of taxpayers at a proportionate rate, which of course benefits more those who pay more taxes, and benefits most those who pay most taxes, the hated rich. For Chait, that makes Bush worthy of hate.

Now this reason, too, is a little odd. From President Jefferson to President Theodore Roosevelt there was no income tax in America, and it never entered into the heads of the Democratic or any other party that a limited government should confiscate money from some Americans on the pretext of giving it to others. Nor that in so doing government should pry relentlessly into every item of income. (Where are today’s civil libertarians on this massive invasion of privacy? What reasons could possibly justify this massive governmental intrusion into the most basic liberties?)

Chait explains it this way: Only if the “affluent” (his word) pay a lot more in taxes, can government have enough resources to “help the poor.” If Bush does away with progressive taxation, then the middle class will have to pay more taxes, and that will doom government programs. The middle class will rebel. As Chait puts it:

Shifting the federal tax burden downward makes middle-class taxpayers less likely to support future government programs, since they will have to pay for it themselves, rather than having a disproportionate burden picked up by the affluent.

There is the liberal agenda in essence. The liberal secret. The liberal passion.

The rich should be the indispensable heroes of liberals, because the rich are the linchpin of the liberal agenda, the one true hope for liberal success. Liberals need the rich. Take away high taxes from the rich, and the liberal program flounders, Chait suggests. Why, then, do liberals hate the rich? It’s easier to understand why sheep hate to be shorn, than why liberals hate those they shear.

Personally, I like liberals, and am grateful for their contributions to national discourse. A monologue in which only neoconservatives talked (i.e., reformed liberals) would be comparatively boring.

Chait, however, reveals three annoying pretenses of the liberal heart.

(1) The first pretense is that most of all liberals want to help the poor. For self-critical people, this fails the laugh test. It is true that for the elderly, liberal programs have worked very well, and improved the condition of millions — except that these programs (Social Security, Medicare) are so badly designed that they are exorbitantly wasteful, and are now on a course to bankrupt the country, as the numbers of the recipient elderly grow, and those of the paying young shrink.

And consider the state of the young poor, ages 18-34, after our 40-year “war on poverty.” In many ways their condition is worse than it was in 1966. Violent crime batters them three or four times harder than before. Their families are less often fully formed, and many, many more of them are growing up in single parent families than in 1966. The liberal-run public schools are sliding downwards in several dimension — good order, academic seriousness, and knowledge of our country’s history and philosophy.

If the money spent on the war on poverty had been distributed directly to the poor it would have given every poor family (there are about seven million of them) something like $30,000 per year. That would have ended “poverty” as an income category, though perhaps not in its behavioral dimensions.

Do liberal programs help the poor, as Chait assumes? For the young, the evidence runs in the opposite direction.

(2) The second pretense is that the Left consists mainly of intellectuals, activists, and others who are not particularly rich, so that when liberals speak of “the rich” they may speak of them as “others,” as in (with venom in the voice) “tax cuts for the rich!” As it happens, the political campaigns of the Left depend far more on high earners and big givers than the campaigns of the right. Being on the left has deeper cultural than economic roots.

Meanwhile, middle-class liberals disproportionately control the administration of government programs and private philanthropies, again spending the money of others, and not infrequently adding to the increased dependency of those they mean to be helping.

(3) The third pretense is that liberals possess a superior degree of virtue. Assuming this pretense, liberals hold conservatives to be “mean-spirited,” and attribute to GWB the most contemptible vices of “any president in this century.” As Democrats say, “The Road to Hell is Paved with Republicans.”

There is plenty of reason for strong differences in public-policy judgments. The law of unintended consequences sets up even the most rational of plans for pratfalls. A sense for “how things work” is therefore of more practical value than mere verbal fluency. Meanwhile, in matters of judgment, good people differ. So, why exactly does the Left always have to claim superior virtue?

And in what exactly does liberal virtue consist? In taxing other people, not oneself, people for whom one has contempt, in order to transfer their money to “the poor and needy.” (Or, rather, only a portion of that money; don’t forget the heavy administrative costs.) Liberal programs, Thomas Sowell has written, are oddly designed, feeding the horses as a way to feed the swallows.

And in what exactly does Bush’s vice consist? In exposing this racket, and in putting an end to it.

Bush has provided a compelling alternative vision: personal and familial independence (through school vouchers, personal Social Security accounts, personal medical accounts, and the like), under which the condition of the poor and the needy is far more likely to improve than under the current ill-designed system, “the liberal plantation,” which keeps as many as possible in dependency.

No wonder some liberals hate Bush. Their hypocrisy is being exposed.

That really hurts.

And renders them almost speechless with fury.

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Democrats Open New Liberal Think Tank (Foxnews, 031029)

WASHINGTON — A new left-wing think tank — the Center for American Progress — unveiled itself Tuesday as the Democratic vaccine to what center supporters say is a plague of conservatism now dominating America.

“We think the debate has been unbalanced in the country,” center president John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Clinton, told Fox News.

“The conservative movement has really built up an infrastructure of not just ideas, but the ability to kind of get out there and do the kind of hard communications work to sell to the American public,” he added.

The center made its debut sponsoring a conference along with the Century Foundation, which has been around since 1919. Among the headliners was Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark.

Clark, who is almost as new to the presidential trail as the center is to Washington, explained why both decided they had to get into the act.

“Going forward, we will need new labels and new ideas. Many of them will be created right here at the Center for American Progress,” Clark said from New Hampshire in a speech beamed into the conference via satellite.

But conservatives say labels won’t stick when they have nothing on which to back themselves up.

Think tanks earn their credibility by being able “to deliver accurate timely information” to policy and lawmakers that will help them “understand where they may be going wrong and hopefully allow them to go in the right directions on a whole range of very important policies,” said Michael Franc of the Heritage Foundation.

“[Credibility] is something that this think tank can’t just assume is going to come its way by some kind of virtue of entitlement. You have to earn that,” Franc said.

Podesta said his group is in the business of “thinking through those new ideas, doing the long-term policy analysis,” but it also plans to focus its attention on explaining to the public through direct communications “where we think conservative policies are taking the country off in the wrong direction.”

Podesta insists that conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation don’t have better ideas, but are merely better at marketing. He said he is confident his center can take over the marketplace of ideas with notable innovations such as a big media staff that will push the center’s thoughts onto the Internet, television and radio.

“We don’t have a war room, but we do have a communications platform. We’ve got a lot of terrific talented people who’s job it is in the end to get that product, that analysis, that critique — get it out there to the American public,” Podesta said.

But Franc said so far the center has proven to be “all war room and no think tank.

“You don’t start off a think tank with focus groups and a spin team before you figure out what you stand for. You have to. Think tanks begin with an idea, or a set of ideas, with a mission to advance coherent ideas in Washington,” he said.

Many Americans say they believe the media are already skewing left of center, and Washington doesn’t suffer a shortage of liberal-leaning thinkers perched inside established halls of research.

The real challenge for liberals and Democrats, then, may not be getting their voices heard, but getting control of the White House and Congress, which most frequently frame the discussions.

As long as Republicans control both, Democrats say, few places exist in Washington for their ideas or marketing strategy to take hold.

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Walk of Shame: Bill Clinton’s party (NRO, 031030)

“There is nothing this man won’t do. He is immune to shame. Move past all the nice posturing and get really down in there in him, you find absolutely nothing . . . nothing but an appetite.” — Jesse Jackson on Bill Clinton, 1992

Rarely has the intellectual rot of liberalism been more evident. Both at home and abroad, the honorable tradition of liberalism — and there is one — has been hollowed out by its own appetite for power and vengeance. Indeed, it is exceedingly difficult to see how liberalism, at the national level, stands for anything but appetite — undirected, inarticulate, unprincipled, ravenous appetite. Truly it has become Bill Clinton’s party.

Consider two stories of demonstrably unequal importance, which nonetheless have fascinated the chattering classes: The $20 billion request for Iraqi reconstruction, and the effort underway to create a successful liberal think tank.

Let’s start with the more important story. Today the “principled” position of the Democratic party’s leaders is to cavil and equivocate about the “need” to rebuild Iraq. I use quotation marks around “need” not because the necessity to get the job done isn’t there, but because America’s leading political liberals treat the very idea that we have to fix Iraq with winks and smirks.

Whether the war was necessary or not, reasonable people of all political persuasions outside the arena of partisan politics understand that the task of reconstructing Iraq is immensely necessary.

If the United States were to “bring the boys home” now, Iraq would implode, America would be seen as not merely a bully (which is not always bad, but rarely good) but also a bully with a glass jaw — which, as every thinking person must understand, would be an invitation to disaster of precisely the sort that left the World Trade Center in ruins.

Of course, except for the odd character actors at the left end of the screen in the Democratic presidential debates, the leading candidates do not say they are in favor of immediate withdrawal. Rather, they spew clouds of verbiage about why we need to have a “plan” and insist that until we have a “plan” we should not spend money on Iraq. Senators John Kerry and John Edwards, both of whom voted for the war, voted against spending any money on Iraq’s reconstruction because “we don’t have a plan” or because we “need a real plan.” Wesley Clark and Howard Dean — the Democratic frontrunners — also say that they would have voted against the reconstruction funds. Dean is consistent — and consistently wrong — in that his position has always been “if Bush is for it, I’m against it.” Clark, on the other hand, is not only inconsistent on the question whether he supports Bush, but it seems that this inconsistency is his only reliable trait. .

Even the noble exceptions of Gephardt and Lieberman — who voted for the reconstruction funds — often couch their answers in terms that show they want to be seen as close allies of the naysayers.

Of course, the administration does have a plan. And central to that plan is, well, spending money to rebuild Iraq. The Democrats make it sound like all the U.S. Army is doing in Iraq is having one giant-sized Chinese fire drill every day. One can just imagine John Kerry going to the local garage:

Kerry: I won’t pay you to fix my car until you have a plan.

Mechanic: Um, I do have a plan: You pay me. I replace the engine I just took out. Your car works. That’s the plan.

Kerry:How can you say you have a plan? Look at the terrible shape my car is in. It’s worse than before; there isn’t even an engine.

Mechanic: You’re an idiot.

In the current New Republic, Peter Beinart brilliantly excoriates Kerry and others for such arrogant and willful fecklessness, which, he argues, is the byproduct of mindless partisanship as well as the rising influence of political consultants. All of the top Democratic consultants have run polls, convened focus groups, disemboweled goats — and done whatever else constitutes the science of political augury these days — and concluded that Democratic candidates must draw “clear distinctions” between them and Bush. So, since Bush favors the reconstruction of Iraq — which means, as a practical matter, reluctantly favoring the expenditure of blood and treasure — the Democrats must be against it. By this logic, John Edwards should embrace Satan and start drinking heavily, since Bush is a born-again Christian and a teetotaler.

I’m only marginally kidding. For years, or decades, or even a century, we’ve been hearing a host of propositions from liberals. Crime and violence are symptoms of poverty. The United States must do more than simply drop bombs; it must alleviate the “root causes” of terrorism, hopelessness, etc. America must be internationally oriented, looking to engage the world and help the unfortunate. It is in America’s vital interests to come to the aid of the downtrodden. And, most recently and relevantly, America must get into the business of nation building.

All of these principles have been defenestrated by a party leadership who no longer believe what, during the Clinton years, it constantly claimed to believe: that partisanship should end at the water’s edge. Instead, even as we are fighting a guerilla war where the enemy defines victory not in military terms but in its ability to weaken American resolve at home, Democrats are crassly undermining the safety of our troops, the credibility of our nation, and the integrity of their own political philosophy. Every single good thing about liberalism in foreign policy would have the Democrats seeking more money for Iraq. Liberals should be the ones demanding that we send more teachers, more doctors, more librarians, and more troops to protect them. They should be standing on the tarmac helping to load another shipment of soft-ice-cream machines and ping-pong tables bound for Fallujah, Tikrit, and Basra.

And Democratic support for reconstruction isn’t required by liberal altruism alone; the good of the both the country and the liberal cause demand it as well. The only place where I think Beinart is wrong in his column is in his overzealous effort to be bipartisan in his criticisms. He asserts that Republicans opposed nation building in Haiti simply out of anti-Clinton pique. No doubt such animus played a role. But many conservatives simply did not believe that nation building in Haiti was anything more than what Charles Krauthammer calls “foreign policy as social work.” You simply cannot say the same thing about nation building (or state building) in Iraq. There are vital American interests at stake in the effort to make Iraq a stable, peaceful, and prosperous democracy. Offsetting our reliance on Saudi Arabia, advancing the spread of democracy and prosperity in a historically dangerous region, and — of course — quashing the threat of fanatical Islamic terrorism are all on the line here. Obviously these goals have altruistic components, but they can all be justified through hardheaded realism as well (which simply was not the case with Haiti).

But these Democrats want none of it. They see each setback in Iraq as a political opportunity to question whether we should be there at all. Not only do they send a message of weakening American resolve at precisely the wrong moment, not only do they abandon their historical principles, but they underscore their most enduring political handicap — the impression that Democrats are unserious on foreign policy. They are left with no principle to stand on, no plan of their own to promulgate, and no credibility to trade with. In short, they have ritualistically shorn themselves of everything but animus and appetite. Shame on them.

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The War Room, Continued: This time, the Democrats are calling it a ‘think tank’ (NR, 031124)

Byron York

Al Franken was becoming agitated. The comedian and conservative-basher was at a Washington party for the new liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress, when he was asked to say a few words to the crowd. As he often does, Franken began riffing on the subject of the Fox News Channel, and in no time at all had worked himself into a fit of anger.

“Basically, what there is, is there’s a right-wing media in this country,” Franken told the group. He recounted the story of Fox’s lawsuit against him — “a f***ing complaint against me, thank you very F***ING much,” he said, as the audience roared with laughter — and then moved on to the network’s coverage of the war in Iraq, which he said showed “how shameless, how shameless, how SHAMELESS these people on the right can be.”

The crowd, made up mostly of left-leaning activist, political, and media types, loved it. “We have to fight back,” Franken exhorted them. Looking at John Podesta, the former Clinton White House chief of staff who is heading the new think tank, Franken said, “Thank God you’re doing this. We have to fight back.”

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, standing nearby with former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger, applauded and nodded her head in approval. Earlier, she too had lamented the “great void of positive energy” on the left and urged the crowd to fight back in the “idea game and war that we’re engaged in with the other side.”

Fighting back could well be the theme of the Center for American Progress. Supporters of the project seem to sincerely believe that they are up against a pervasive conservative bias in the nation’s media that can only be answered by an aggressive public-relations counter-offensive, which they call “pushback.” And although it bills itself as a traditional think tank — scholarship and all — for now, at least, the Center appears to be all about pushback.

At the opening-night party, Podesta premiered a new movie by Hollywood filmmaker Robert Greenwald, a founder of Artists United to Win Without War. The picture, Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War, was funded by the Center and the left-wing Internet activist group MoveOn.org. It features high-profile critics of the Bush administration, like former ambassador Joseph Wilson, former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, and former Nixon White House counsel John Dean, accusing the administration of lying about weapons of mass destruction.

A week earlier, the Center made another splash when it held a well-publicized conference on U.S. foreign policy that featured speeches from Mrs. Clinton, Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark, and sometime maverick Republican senator Chuck Hagel. Clinton and Clark, of course, denounced Bush policy, while Hagel greatly pleased the crowd by mocking conservatives who had criticized his decision to speak before the liberal group; he told the audience that his fellow Republicans worried that the “dreaded John Podesta, that tricky, wily fellow that he is, had hoodwinked the flat-footed senator from Nebraska into speaking before you Communists.”

But perhaps the biggest buzz coming from the new Center for American Progress has nothing to do with a party, a conference, or a movie premiere. Recently the Center began sending out a daily e-mail commentary on events known as “Progress Report.” An exhaustive collection of news bits wrapped in stridently anti-Bush rhetoric, the report, which Podesta calls “one of our flagship products,” resembles nothing so much as a collection of the most aggressive, most energetic opposition research in politics.

Some examples: On October 31, after the government announced that the U.S. economy had grown by an impressive 7.2% in the third quarter of this year, “Progress Report” provided talking points for Democrats unwilling to concede that the economy seems to be improving. Headlines included “The Jobs Problem,” “The Wage Problem,” “The Tax Cut Problem,” “The Long Term Problem,” “The Competitiveness Problem,” and ended with “The Credibility Problem,” accusing the president of misleading the nation about the economy.

That day’s report also featured “Condi’s Believe It or Not,” which was a set of talking points to counter national security adviser Condoleezza Rice’s criticism of previous administrations’ responses to terrorism. The report accused the Bush White House of cutting counterterrorism programs prior to September 11, ignoring pre-9/11 intelligence, and underfunding homeland security.

It almost goes without saying that the Center has been regularly blasting the White House over the CIA leak investigation. “Progress Report” calls the matter “Intimigate,” the name given it by David Sirota, the former staffer for Vermont socialist representative Bernie Sanders and Wisconsin Democratic representative David Obey who writes each day’s report. In one instance, Center staffers studied columns by Robert Novak going back to the 1970s, looking for clues to who might have leaked information in the Niger/uranium controversy. Without finding any answers, the Center suggested it was most likely a neoconservative.

In all, “Progress Report” differs little from the material that comes out of the Democratic National Committee on any given day (although it is more polished and professional). Perhaps the most striking thing about that is that the Center bills itself as a “nonpartisan research and educational institute.” Podesta recently told reporters that “we’re not operating on behalf of any party. We’re not engaged in political activities.”

Podesta was undoubtedly speaking in a legal sense. The Center for American Progress is a so-called 501(c)(3) charitable organization and, as such, is allowed to accept tax-deductible contributions but forbidden from engaging in overtly partisan activity. It cannot, for example, advocate passage of a particular bill or the election of a particular candidate.

But by any common-sense standard, Podesta’s group is as partisan as they come. “I’m not sure they are so much a think tank as a spin tank,” says Michael Franc of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative organization that is sometimes cited as a model for the Center. Even a Democratic ally of Podesta’s recently called the Center “a think tank with oppo research.” “The initial buzz about the Podesta group was that it would be basically high-level talking points,” the Democrat says. Despite Podesta’s claims otherwise, that’s what it seems to be.

The Center’s funding also suggests its deeply political orientation. One of the organization’s top donors is the financier George Soros, who this year has devoted his enormous financial resources to defeating George W. Bush in 2004. So far, Soros has contributed $10 million to the new anti-Bush group America Coming Together, which will coordinate voter turnout efforts in key states. [Ed.: See Mr. York’s article “By George” in our last issue.] The Center appears to be another part of Soros’s campaign.

Although Podesta maintains that Soros’s support for the Center is “a kind of separate matter, a separate enterprise” from the billionaire’s support of anti-Bush political groups, he does concede that Soros is highly focused on changing administrations. “I think he [Soros] saw a drift in the country in a radical direction,” Podesta explains, “especially in international affairs, but also in domestic affairs, and I think it troubled him.”

Podesta says the Center’s other major funders include Herb and Marion Sandler, who are co-CEOs of Golden West Financial Corporation, a savings and loan based in Oakland, Calif. Podesta says the Sandlers, who are prominent contributors to Democratic causes, “have a commitment to changing the debate in this country.” Other than the Sandlers and Soros, Podesta will not name any other funders of the Center. All he will say is that “we will provide the information that is required by law.”

The support of the Democratic party’s most anti-Bush donors, combined with all the emphasis on war-rooming and talking points, tends to obscure the idea that the Center for American Progress is supposed to be a think tank. Indeed, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that thinking, at least the hard kind of thinking that goes on in scholarly research, just isn’t on the Center’s agenda.

Podesta seems to see himself less as a facilitator of scholarship than as a salesman for the liberal point of view. As such, he’s looking for the perfect pitch. He likes to tell audiences that conservatives have simple ideas, which are easy to communicate, while liberals have complex, nuanced ideas, which are difficult to communicate. In October, he told the New York Times that “conservatives have their eight words in a bumper sticker: ‘Less government. Lower taxes. Less welfare.’ And so on. Where’s our eight-word bumper sticker? Well, it’s harder for us because we believe in a lot more things.”

The emphasis on salesmanship bothers some Democrats who believe the party faces more fundamental questions over its future direction. “Podesta keeps saying ‘What’s our bumper sticker?’” one Democratic policy expert says. “The problem is not the bumper sticker. The problem is the car.”

Don’t say that too loudly at a Center for American Progress event. Yes, organizers say they are searching for new ideas. They’re just not searching too hard. “We respect the need for debate,” Podesta said at the Center’s coming-out party. “But our goal is to win.”

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The Liberal Hangover: Why they hate Bush so (NRO, 031201)

At a recent news conference in London a reporter asked President Bush, “Why do they hate you, Mr. President? Why do they hate you in such numbers?” It’s a rather embarrassing question to ask anyone, never mind the leader of the free world, and Bush in his reply shed no new light on this peculiar political phenomenon. Every president has his detractors, of course. If he did not there would be reason to wonder whether he was doing his job. But Bush hatred does seem to be sui generis.

Bill Clinton was surely disliked by many conservatives, but even taking into consideration his impeachment, their dislike for him was, in certain respects, restrained. No anti-Clinton political movement or candidate ever emerged, only Dole’s ironic detachment of the 1996 election. Hillary Clinton is certainly despised by the Right for her far-left sensibilities, but that’s largely not the case with her husband, whose policies were relatively moderate and whose rhetoric was nearly always middle of the road. It is true that Ronald Reagan was greatly disliked by the Left, even hated. But it was an antipathy dripping with condescension, and condescension does not easily work itself into the white-hot lather of a Howard Dean — only the patronizing sneer of a Walter Mondale.

So what is it about George W. Bush that drives the Left utterly mad? Liberals have given many justifications for their righteous anger: He “stole” the 2000 election; he’s too Texan, too Christian, just too dumb; he struts and talks like a yokel. Others complain bitterly of his “far-right” policies: His support for a ban on partial-birth abortion, his opposition to human cloning and gay marriage, and his tax cuts and faith-based initiatives. And, of course, there’s the war in Iraq — always the war in Iraq.

These explanations no doubt have something to do with why the Left despises Bush. But there is more to their hatred than is generally understood — something more fundamental is at work. Almost all modern liberal thought begins with the bedrock assumption that humans are basically good. Within this moral horizon something such as terrorism cannot really exist, except as a manifestation of injustice, or unfairness, or lack of decent social services. Whether knowingly or not Bush has directly challenged this core liberal belief — and for this he is not easily forgiven.

The president has in fact acknowledged liberals’ desire “to put that day [of September 11] behind us, as if waking from a dark dream.” But if “the hope that danger has passed is comforting,” it is also, Bush has admonished, “false.” September 11 was no dream; it was, in his view, a portent of what may come. And so Bush has repeatedly urged his audiences to see that “the evil is in plain sight,” and that the democracies must learn to “face these threats with open eyes.”

But what should be clear and obvious is made obscure by liberal ideology. If we are to face the evil in plain sight, we must first properly fit words to facts. Bush calls the terrorists “killers” and “evildoers,” and speaks of an “axis of evil.” He affirms the need for the “violent restraint of violent men,” and argues that military strength is necessary to keep at bay “a chaotic world ruled by force.” He describes life under Hussein’s rule in Iraq as a “Baathist hell.” We live, the president warns, in “a time of danger.”

These are not mere words to Bush, but have given shape to his singular foreign policy. The president went to war in Iraq rather than trust the good faith of Hussein or the diligence of U.N. arms inspectors; he refuses to recognize Arafat as a legitimate leader of the Palestinian people; he has made clear that a lasting peace can come to the Middle East only through democratic reform. The very touchstone of his thinking is the moral and political distinction between democracy and tyranny.

Such analysis does not go down well with liberals. The utopian Left believes that the wolf can be made to dwell with the lamb. Their preferred method of dealing with wolfish dictators is to “dialogue” with them. Surely, they say, dictators want (well, more or less,) what we want: peace and good will towards all men. It is this sort of blindness that allowed Arafat to win the Nobel Peace prize. It is this sort of wishful thinking that led liberals to believe that Hussein could be contained by U.N. resolutions alone. The Left almost as a matter of ideology shuns all such unpleasant realities. The Clinton administration, after all, proposed calling rogue states — nations who starve and torture their own citizens and threaten their neighbors — “states of concern.” Bush simply calls them “evil.”

The Left vilifies Bush because he insists on calling a spade a spade, and in so doing threatens to bring down their entire intellectual edifice. Even after the horrors of the 20th century, the Left has yet to recover from its Rousseau-induced hangover. Liberals still insist on seeing human nature as basically good. Nothing is more offensive to such a mentality, not Hussein’s torture chambers, not al Qaeda’s wanton killing of innocent life, than one who dares to speak so plainly of “evildoers.”

Adam Wolfson is editor of The Public Interest.

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Liberalism And Terrorism: Different Stages Of Same Disease (Ann Coulter, 020703)

THE NEW YORK TIMES editorial page was in a snit with the Supreme Court this week for its first ruling on the Bush administration’s wartime security procedures. Despite the hysteria at the Times for the assault on “constitutional rights” by Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Supreme Court ruled for Ashcroft.

For now, at least, deportation hearings of suspected terrorists will not be open to the public. This, the Times said, was “troubling.” Sadly, the Constitution does not require that national security be compromised.

Like everything liberals oppose but don’t have a good argument for, all reasonable national security measures are called “unconstitutional.” Whenever liberals are losing on substance, they pretend to be upset about process.

Through their enervating dialogues and endless concerns with constitutional process, liberals have made themselves incapable of feeling hate for the enemy. Refusing to take sides in this war, they busy themselves wailing about every security precaution taken by the Bush administration.

Ashcroft has been incessantly attacked on the op-ed page of The New York Times by the same columnists who are now angrily demanding to know why the Bush administration didn’t imprison all Arabs before Sept. 11. He has been compared to the Taliban. (And you’re not a patriot in this war until a liberal has compared you to the Taliban.)

Bill Goodman of the Center for Constitutional Rights called Attorney General John Ashcroft the Constitution’s “main enemy.” (As Andrew Ferguson said, evidently Osama Bin Laden comes in a close second.)

Sen. Patrick Do-Nothing Leahy has complained about Ashcroft’s “disappointing” failure to run all internal guideline changes past the Senate Judiciary Committee. Instead, Sen. Do-Nothing said, “we’re presented with a fait accompli reflecting no congressional input whatsoever.”

Ashcroft was probably worried Leahy would take as long with procedures for investigating terrorism as he is with Bush’s judicial nominees. If Speedy Gonzalez Leahy were required to review Justice Department guidelines, America would be an Islamic regime before Leahy got around to it.

No matter what defeatist tack liberals take, real Americans are behind our troops 100%, behind John Ashcroft 100%, behind locking up suspected terrorists 100%, behind surveillance of Arabs 100%. Liberals become indignant when you question their patriotism, but simultaneously work overtime to give terrorists a cushion for the next attack and laugh at dumb Americans who love their country and hate the enemy.

The New York Times ran a Tom Tomorrow cartoon sneering about Americans who believe with “unwavering faith in an invisible omniscient deity who favors those born in the middle of the North American land mass.” This is how liberals conceive of America: an undifferentiated land mass in the middle of North America. Like all cartoons specially featured in the Times, there was nothing remotely funny about the cartoon. Its point was simply to convey all the proper prejudices of elitist liberals against ordinary Americans.

While hooting with laughter at patriotic Americans, liberals prattle on and on about the right to dissent as the true mark of patriotism and claim their unrelenting kvetching is a needed corrective to jingoism. (It’s not jingoism, and the only people who use that word are fifth columnists.)

After Sept. 11, liberals are appalled by patriotism with an edge of anger because that might lead America to defend itself. True patriotism, they believe, should consist of redoubled efforts at attacking George Bush.

Movie director Robert Altman (who won the Golden Globe for best director for “Gosford Park”) said, “When I see an American flag flying, it’s a joke. This present government in America I just find disgusting.”

Columbia professor Eric Foner said: “I’m not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.” I think I know the answer! Thousands of our fellow countrymen dying in a fiery inferno, I’m pretty sure, is “more frightening” than the rhetoric emanating from the White House.

Liberals are angrier at John Ashcroft for questioning angry Arab immigrants applying for crop duster permits than they are about the terrorists. These people simply do not have an implacable desire to kill those who cheered the slaughter of thousands of American citizens. If you can rise above that, if you can move on from that, you weren’t angry in the first place.

During World War II, George Orwell said of England’s pacifists: “Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively, the pacifist is pro-Nazi.”

To paraphrase Orwell, in this war, those who cannot stay focused on fighting the enemy are objectively pro-terrorist.

==============================

More Slander (Ann Coulter, 020711)

ON THE BASIS of the logic on the New York Times editorial page, maybe Bill Clinton did kill Vince Foster. Evidently President Bush is responsible for Enron because he is from Texas and – it is insinuatingly noted – so is Enron! If the left’s physical proximity argument constitutes evidence, I take it back: There are boatloads of evidence that Clinton killed Foster.

Indeed, the entire Republican Party is evidently responsible for various rich liberal “Friends of Bill” who now stand accused of insider trading, such as Martha Stewart and ImClone chief Sam Waksal. Republicans are responsible on the basis of the fact that liberals have spent 20 years calling Republicans “the party of the rich.”

Liberals are like the monkeys in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” who explain: “We all say so, and so it must be true.” Republicans are responsible for Clinton’s pal Martha Stewart because liberals say so. Again, I note: If hysterical partisan insinuation constitutes proof, then we need to reopen the Vince Foster files.

Liberals have no real arguments – none that the American people would find palatable, anyway. So in lieu of actual argument, they accuse conservatives of every vice that pops into their heads, including their own mind-boggling elitism.

The Democratic Party has basically remade itself into a party of left-wing academics and Park Avenue matrons. And then they attack Republicans for being elitist snobs protecting “corporate interests.” It’s bad enough that these rich snobs want to raise our taxes all the time. Having to endure Malibu Marie Antoinettes calling Republicans “the rich” is more than working Americans should have to bear.

Howell Raines, the former editorial page editor of The New York Times, described Ronald Reagan as “making life harder for citizens who were not born rich, white and healthy.” Striking a manly tone, Raines woefully noted that this “saddened” him.

The idea that Reagan was a privileged overlord swatting down working-class wretches with his polo mallet is more delusional than some of Barbra Streisand’s wackier ideas. This was the same Reagan who cut taxes, bombed Libya, stood up to the left’s beloved Soviet Union, built up the military and restored pride in America. (Yes, that Reagan.) Who were these initiatives supposed to appeal to? Martha Stewart? I think not. Average, middle-class Americans voted Reagan back into office for a second term in the largest electoral landslide in history.

But 20 years of propaganda about Republicans being the party of “the rich” has created pre-programmed reflexes. The fact that propaganda works is demonstrated by the fact that people don’t laugh out loud when Democrats try to pin corporate malfeasance on the Republican Party.

Liberals also have many important and substantive backup arguments such as they hate Republicans.

In December 1998, the New York Post described talk-show host Phil Donahue exploding with rage at a Four Seasons party (where the Party of the People mingles) screaming about how he hated Republicans. His wife, Marlo Thomas, apologetically explained: “I don’t know why he’s saying that. He doesn’t really hate all Republicans.” (He probably likes Jim Jeffords, for example.)

In the alternative, liberals thoughtfully explain that Republicans are bigots. In a 1995 interview, Clinton’s Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders called Sen. Jesse Helms a “typical white, Southern male bigot.” It’s a little difficult to imagine a Republican presidential appointee referring to any congressman as being a “typical” member of his race without inciting a blizzard of protest.

But this is standard political debate for the left. It is simply not possible to disagree with liberals about constitutional interpretation, guns, abortion, immigration, racial quotas – or really, anything. Serious political dialogue becomes the exception when political discourse is littered with ad hominem land mines.

By contrast, when Republicans directly quote their opponents, all hell breaks loose. A Republican actually quoting a Democrat verbatim constitutes a McCarthyite witch hunt.

Thus, for example, in 1988, George Bush (41) pulled the old quote-your-opponent trick on Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. During the primaries, Dukakis had said: “I am a strong liberal Democrat. I am a card-carrying member of ACLU.” Those were Dukakis’ precise words. Bush quoted him during one of the debates.

Ten years later, liberals were still fuming about Bush’s dirty rat trick of quoting Dukakis. On July 4, 1999, CNN reporter Bruce Morton cited Bush’s low blow, saying it was a “echo of the late Joseph McCarthy’s card-carrying member of the Communist Party, but it seemed to help Bush.” They’ll stoop to anything to win, those Republicans, even quote their opponents.

Serious political debate evidently consists of randomly accusing your opponent of being a hateful bigot or having some vague ephemeral association with corporate crooks. Those are good arguments.

==============================

Make Liberals Safe, Legal and Rare (Ann Coulter, 020814)

WHENEVER A LIBERAL begins a peevish complaint with “of course, we all agree ...” your antennae should go up. This is how liberals couch statements they assume all Americans would demand they make, but which they secretly chafe at.

Liberal sophistry requires pretending they support, for example, sexual abstinence (for teenagers) and marriage (between heterosexuals); making abortion and drug use “rare”; America’s winning the war on terrorism — and before that, winning the Cold War. Fascinatingly, their proposals for achieving these goals are invariably the opposite of what any normal person might think would work.

Instead of punishing bad behavior and rewarding good behavior, liberals often feel it is the better part of valor to reward bad behavior and punish good behavior. Of course, we all agree that Fidel Castro is a bad man. That’s why we need to lift travel restrictions and trade with Cuba! Of course, we all agree that abortion should be “rare.” That’s why all reasonable regulations of abortion must be fought against like wild banshees! (One proven method of making something “rare” is to make it illegal.)

Their comically counterintuitive positions are inevitably backed up with long, complicated explanations about the dire risk of encouraging “hard-liners,” the enemy’s “paranoia,” or clever points such as “teenagers will have sex anyway.” The arguments not only make no sense ab initio, but openly contradict one another.

While pretending to oppose drug use, The New York Times has supported programs to give addicts needles, referring in a 1998 editorial to “some interesting new ideas” such as “needle exchanges.” In the case of cigarettes, however, liberals enthusiastically embrace the otherwise mystifying concept of punishing bad behavior.

Thus, the Times has cheered on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s obsessive desire to outlaw smoking, referring to his proposed ban on smoking in bars as an attempt to close “a major loophole in the city’s anti-smoking law.” Aren’t people going to smoke anyway? Why not make smoking “safe, legal and rare” — just like abortion?

The liberal clergy at the Times has criticized sex education programs that purport to discourage sexual activity among teenagers, while unaccountably neglecting to hand out condoms and scented candles.

Times theater critic Frank Rich has rhapsodically supported Joycelyn Elders’ genius idea of teaching children to masturbate: “The more people talk about masturbation, the more fears can be dispelled among those young people.” (Thirteen-year-old boys could probably teach him a few tricks.)

So it was striking that a recent op-ed piece in the Times opposed a Bush administration’s plan to encourage marriage. Needless to say, it included the ritualistic disclaimer: “Of course, none of this is to say that marriage is not a wonderful institution.” It seems that, in this one case, “we don’t need government programs to convince people ... that marriage is good for them.”

We do, however, urgently need government programs to teach them that dying of AIDS is bad for them. (At least we finally have the left on record opposing some federal government program other than national defense and an independent counsel investigating a Democrat.)

Currently, liberals pretend to be rooting for America in the war on terrorism. To show their support, they oppose America doing anything. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said: “We are all prepared to give the men and women in law enforcement the latitude necessary to protect our nation.” Despite what “we all” support, Durbin said using appearance to sort potential terrorists from non-terrorists “reflects not only poor judgment, but poor law enforcement.”

Really? Which law enforcement experts concluded that surveilling angry Middle Eastern men with smoke pouring out of their trousers would be “poor law enforcement”? Seems unlikely. For some reason, liberals think it’s fun to give Arab terrorists a chance.

Democrats claim to support invading Iraq — just not yet! As the AP recently reported, “the Democrats always preface comments on Iraq with a general statement that Saddam must go.” Of course we all agree that Saddam must go. But first — there are many worthless objections to be raised.

Sore loser Al Gore has said that before invading Iraq we need to establish peace in the Mideast, create a perfect Jeffersonian democracy in Afghanistan, and get the American-hating French and Germans on board. Also invent cold fusion and put a man on Mars. Then will the time be ripe for a pre-emptive attack!

Liberals also carped pointlessly about the war in Afghanistan last fall. Their principal complaint was that we were going to lose. Among many, many other liberals, columnist Maureen Dowd raised the specter of Vietnam and called Afghanistan “another quagmire.” She said that Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem “may be the last to know that Afghanistan is a stubborn and durable place.”

After we routed the Taliban approximately five minutes later, Dowd said, “The liberation of Afghanistan is a wonderful thing, of course.” Of course. And something you said we couldn’t do.

“Of course we all agree” always means liberals don’t agree, but are under no illusions about the popularity of what they really believe.

==============================

Spirit isn’t moving religion’s left wing (Orlando Sentinel, 031231)

Without the old emotional issues, liberals are losing their punch.

Heading into a presidential election year, the Republican Party faithful are already rolling up their sleeves — and passing the collection plate. In church social halls, they are raising money for voter registration, “issue” advertising and “Christian scorecards,” which rate candidates on their positions on key cultural issues such as abortion and homosexuality.

By contrast, there is little activity at the other end of the ideological spectrum. Left-wing religious efforts at political mobilization — where they exist — seem puny, aged and marginalized.

After decades of riding popular social movements such as civil rights, the left splintered and now seems unable to regroup. Conversely, the GOP has co-opted the support of religious voters by focusing their attention on cultural and lifestyle issues — such as gay marriage.

On economic issues, another mainstay of the left, the outlook is no brighter.

Unless they are directly affected, people in the pews seem unwilling to grapple with economic disparity and job losses, which defy simple solutions. Despite the loss of 3 million jobs since 2001 and falling retirement and investment portfolios, they are more likely to object to teaching Darwin in the classroom than to struggling in an economy increasingly based on survival of the fittest.

The poll numbers are ominous for Democratic candidates, who seem to have written off voters with strong religious convictions. A survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that nearly two-thirds of Americans who attend religious services at least once a week vote Republican. For those who say they seldom attend a house of worship, that figure is reversed: Two-thirds vote Democratic.

A tradition of activism

Though preachers don’t pick presidents in America, for at least 150 years they have helped set the political agenda.

Thundering from pulpits, mobilizing congregants, religious activists in the 19th and early 20th century helped end slavery; supported women’s suffrage; brought about Prohibition; and supported the rights of workers to organize into trade unions.

More modern inheritors of this social gospel were also vigorous agents of change and resistance, propelling the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. As recently as the 1960s and 1970s, left-wing religion was a force to be reckoned with.

“We had the feeling that we were getting somewhere,” recalls the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, former chaplain at Yale University and one of the patron saints of mainline religious activism. “We criticized American practice in the name of American ideals.”

But today liberal religion is seen as a spent force, says Mark Tooley, a researcher for the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a conservative Washington, D.C., think tank.

The religious left comprised denominational leaders and tended to be elite, as opposed to grass roots, he says. Today’s religious right is younger and more vigorous, drawing its support from growing charismatic and nondenominational churches.

“The religious left was mobilized and excited by the civil- rights movement and by the anti-Vietnam War movement, and has had difficulty finding equally passionate causes to replace those,” he says. “The religious right has abortion, homosexuality and church-state issues that have energized them over the past 25 years. There’s no sign that any of these issues are going to go away anytime soon.”

Evangelicals who previously voted Democratic because of economic issues are trending Republican because of cultural issues, Tooley says. “But at the same time, most of those people are still, by and large, not activists by nature. They are largely middle-class, suburban people who are not drawn to the same kind of economic wedge issues that would excite the religious left or liberal evangelicals.”

Nor are they willing to follow their spiritual leaders on other issues. For instance, opposition to the death penalty, globalization and the Iraq war by Roman Catholic bishops and mainline Protestant leaders has failed to generate grass-roots support.

The Rev. Thomas Wenski, coadjutor bishop for the Catholic Diocese of Orlando, admits to some frustration.

“There are Catholics that don’t pay attention” to the pope and the U.S. bishops on these issues, he acknowledges.

“Our culture is very individualistic,” he says. “That virtue of solidarity for the poor and the powerless that the pope often speaks about needs to be emphasized.”

How the left was lost

There are a variety of explanations for the virtual collapse of the religious left in America.

Some believe its members never recovered from the divisive period of the 1970s, when the movement split into “identity politics.” After working together to break down old barriers, the unified movement headed in diffuse directions: affirmative action, feminism, gay rights and multiculturalism.

Others think the left was simply outmaneuvered and outorganized by the right. Savvy religious conservatives decided it was a mistake to see political involvement as something “unclean” for so many years, conceding the field to liberals by default. And the perceived excesses of the 1960s galvanized conservative Christians into action.

Access to religious television enabled leaders such as the Rev. Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell to build the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority political movements. The religious left had no comparable figures.

Religious conservatives “plugged into the issues of personal morality as the touchstone for Christian faithfulness,” says the Rev. Fred Morris, executive director of the Florida Council of Churches. That got a good response from Middle America, “who were by that time scared by what they saw as a shifting of values.”

This shift climaxed in the presidential election of 1980. In a show of political sophistication and pragmatism, evangelicals chose Ronald Reagan — who was divorced and rarely attended church — over Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian and Sunday school teacher.

Experts say the eclipse of the religious left by the religious right also may reflect the decline of mainline denominations and the rise of evangelicals in the 1980s — both politically and theologically.

The power failure

For many old activists, this is the winter of their discontent. Skeptics say the cold reality is that you can’t build a mass political movement on nostalgia.

Americans today live in a high-stress, fiercely competitive work environment, which tends to reinforce a certain degree of self-centeredness. No Democratic candidate or liberal religious leader has offered a credible plan for reversing globalization or even ameliorating its impact. Much of the social safety net was eliminated during the boom years of the 1990s. With no simple answers to big problems, there is a pervasive feeling of powerlessness — and frustration.

In November, a group of liberal and moderate religious leaders from mainline denominations announced the formation of a new organization that is trying to fill the gap, calling itself the Clergy Leadership Network.

The group’s goal is to become what some called a Christian Coalition of the left. Founders include Coffin and the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, former general secretary of the National Council of Churches. They are a Who’s Who of veterans of the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.

The Rev. Albert Pennybacker, a Disciples of Christ minister, heads the new organization. Backers say they want to offer an alternative to the “partisan God” embraced by the GOP, and to turn their loose-knit group into a “coalition of conscience.”

The odds against the new group are long.

“I don’t think it’s going to go very far,” says Tooley. “Its leaders are largely retired, mainline Protestant leaders. It would have better prospects if it had enlisted pastors of large black churches, or a few liberal evangelical pastors or more Catholic clergy and bishops. It just doesn’t seem to have plugged into the more dynamic and growing parts of American religion.”

The long road back

Still, there are faint signs of life — and youth — in the religious left, according to Jim Wallis, of the Washington, D.C.-based Sojourners community. Founded in 1971, the group is a Christian ministry whose mission is “to proclaim and practice the biblical call to integrate spiritual renewal and social justice.”

Wallis considers himself a theological conservative, pro-life evangelical — and a radical social activist. Unlike many evangelicals, he believes that religious concern for the poor and the powerless should be motivated by justice, not by charity.

Wallis says he has many requests from young evangelicals to join his community, which focuses on economic and social justice. When he and others like him, including Tony Campolo, another radical evangelical, carry their message to heartland churches, the response is positive, he says.

It may be the case that the baton of social justice has passed from liberal, mainline Christianity to evangelicals.

“I agree that liberal religion is in decline, but I don’t agree that social justice is in decline in the church,” says Wallis. The problem with most mainline denominations, he says, is more theological than ideological.

“If you don’t have a real Bible-based, Jesus-centered faith, then all you have is upper-middle-class, affluent Americans who are not going to be your primary constituency for social justice,” he says.

In battles around the country for a “living wage,” mainline ministers make a political mistake when they frame the debate in secular terms, talking about “fairness.” A more effective strategy, Wallis says, is to rally evangelicals with verse from the Bible, especially prophets such as Isaiah, who spoke out forcefully for fair payment for those who labor.

However, there is little evidence so far that even that strategy moves believers.

Earlier this year, Alabama Gov. Bob Riley enlisted the support of the state’s ministers to realign the tax structure to bring it in line with Christian principles. The measure was defeated — decisively.

Nevertheless, Wallis is optimistic about the future of liberal religious activism. The call to social justice, Wallis says, “will — and is — attracting a whole new generation of evangelicals and lots of Catholics, along with mainline Protestants who again want a more vibrant, personal faith.”

William Sloane Coffin, whose collection of speeches and sermons, Credo, has just been published, says he is impressed with Wallis’ brand of evangelical Christianity.

“That’s exactly where it should be,” he says. “The more orthodox the theology, the more radical the politics. There are two great biblical imperatives: to pursue justice and to seek peace.”

Mark I. Pinsky can be reached at mpinsky@orlandosentinel.com

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The War Room, Continued (NR, 031124)

This time, the Democrats are calling it a ‘think tank’

BYRON YORK

The Center’s funding also suggests its deeply political orientation. One of the organization’s top donors is the financier George Soros, who this year has devoted his enormous financial resources to defeating George W. Bush in 2004. So far, Soros has contributed $10 million to the new anti-Bush group America Coming Together, which will coordinate voter turnout efforts in key states. The Center appears to be another part of Soros’s campaign.

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George Crowder’s Liberalism and Value Pluralism (Ethics, 030700)

New York: Continuum Books, 2002. Pp. xii+276. $125.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

George Crowder has had a change of heart. In an influential 1994 article, Crowder advanced two important and interrelated claims (“Pluralism and Liberalism,” Political Studies 42 [1994]: 293-305). First, in contrast to then-prevailing scholarship, Crowder denied that the recognition of value pluralism issued necessarily in a liberal politics. Although the idea of irreducible and conflicting values was thought to support liberal commitments to toleration, choice, diversity, or autonomy, Crowder showed those interconnections to be more tenuous than we might suppose. Liberalism might be compatible with value pluralism, he argued, but there was nothing natural or inevitable about the relationship between them.

Crowder’s second claim was yet more provocative. “Not only does pluralism provide no support for liberalism,” he insisted, “it positively undermines the liberal case” (p. 304). Although often misunderstood in subsequent commentaries, Crowder’s basic point was sound. The truth of value pluralism, he suggested, would seem deeply at odds with the universalist frameworks in which liberal values are ordinarily defended. First, not all of the values we recognize can be instantiated within liberal polities. Worse, some of those values are differently and intrinsically valuable, with no “common measure or ranking” to settle conflicts when they arise (p. 295). This idea of “incommensurability” implies that our choices cannot have the authoritative rational warrant that universalist liberals expect. Should we find someone disinclined to accept our politics, it was then unclear whether rational argument could bridge our differences. Starting from the same recognition of value pluralism, that person might reasonably arrive at a very different political solution.

Crowder concluded that piece with the regretful recognition that a “partly historicist defence of liberalism” may be our only way out. In the face of value pluralism, we choose liberal values (if at all) for reasons that have more to do with experience and local context than universal principles or foundations (p. 305).

Crowder’s argument received a stern admonition from Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams, which for all its criticisms implicitly affirmed the historicist defense that Crowder acknowledged (Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams, “Pluralism and Liberalism: A Reply,” Political Studies 42 [1994]: 306-9). More importantly, neither critic took issue with the central question that Crowder raised:

“Why should we accept that the plurality of values available to us is, on the whole, a plurality of liberal values?” (Crowder, “Pluralism and Liberalism,” p. 304). That question, along with the rhetorical answer it enjoins, has always seemed to me both incisive and correct. The moral goods of this world are simply too diverse and conflicting to be contained within anyone political framework.

Unfortunately, Crowder’s most recent book moves in precisely the opposite direction. I say “unfortunately” only because I think Crowder was genuinely on to something in his earlier work. In ways similar to John Gray, Crowder had shown how deeply unsettling and provocative value pluralism can be. But unlike Gray, with his emphasis on radical or “agonistic” choices (John Gray, Isaiah Bcrlin [Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1996], pp. 8-9), Crowder had pointed to just the kind of “partly historicist defence” that might rescue liberal arguments from the shoals of (a historically false and myopic) universalism and (a politically dangerous and unpersuasive) relativism. Crowder could, in other words, have gone the way of David Hume, grounding liberal arguments in the appeal to context and experience. Instead, he has gone the way of Immanuel Kant. Reason is to be our lodestar, and we must understand the workings of the noumenal world in order to live properly in this one. Despite the tremendous accomplishment that this book represents-and it is an accomplishment, for reasons I will explain in a moment-one can’t help wishing that Crowder had stuck to his guns.

Libcralifm and Value Pluralifm aims to show how deeply compatible liberalism and pluralism really are. In fact, Crowder now insists that pluralism, properly understood, positively “generates” a case for liberalism (p. 259). Or as Crowder puts it, “if value pluralism is true, then we ought, so far as practicable or prudent, to endorse a liberal form of politics universally” (p. 1).

The truth of value pluralism proves more demanding than we might suspect. Not only does it stipulate a liberal politics, Crowder argues, but a particular kind of liberalism-one that is perfectionist, redistributive, and “moderately multicultural” in character (pp. 12-13).

Crowder draws five important connections between pluralism and liberalism: First, no matter what politics we adopt, we know that “universal values must be respected in all cases” (p. 12).

Second, the fact that some values are incommensurable encourages compromise and moderation-what Crowder, following Isaiah Berlin, calls “antiutopianism” in politics (pp. 84-100). Third, the truth of value pluralism means that we should promote a diversity of values and ways of life (p. 12). It is here, Crowder insists, that the argument begins to move in a distinctly liberal direction-away from conservative pluralists like John Kekes (pp. 104-15), or pragmatic “modus vivendi” pluralists like John Gray (pp. 115-22).

Fourth, like the political liberals, Crowder believes that “reasonable disagreement” is an ineliminable feature of political and moral life. Unlike Rawls and Larmore, however, he insists that the fact of reasonable disagreement (manifested in Rawls’s “burdens of judgment”) importantly presupposes the truth of value pluralism (pp. 165-71). Thus, whether political liberals realize it or not, they have already accepted Berlin’s thesis. (For Rawls’s rejoinder, see his Political Libcralifm [New York: Columbia University Press, 1996], p. 57, n. 10.) Finally, Crowder argues that we need distinctly liberal virtues in order to choose well under conditions of value pluralism (p. 201). Our moral world demands that we engage in practical reasoning, for which even traditional understandings of au tonomy are ordinarily insufficient (p. 209). We must be “strong evaluators,” capable of engaging in second-order reflections on the evaluative criteria we employ, while fashioning particular lives from a multiplicity of possible goods (pp. 207-11). Here again, Crowder argues, the virtues associated with pluralism (generosity, realism, attentiveness, flexibility) and the virtues associated with liberalism (broad-mindedness, moderation, respect for persons, autonomy) are both consistent and “mutually reinforcing” (pp. 188-201).

Crowder’s argument is elegantly presented. An immediate suspicion, however, is that he has found just the foundations he was looking for. Strangely, for all his sophisticated engagements with political liberals and value pluralists, Crowder spends very little time establishing the truth of value pluralism itself (pp. 64-73). When a particular kind of liberalism is written right into the fabric of our moral world, it seems odd that skeptical utilitarians, Christians, Kantians, and other monists are left out in the cold. When a liberal like Ronald Dworkin will find your liberalism excessively controversial-to say nothing of Rawls or Larmore-yours must be a peculiar liberalism indeed.

Still, a great virtue of this book lies in its careful and patient criticisms of objectors and fellow travelers alike. Despite some reservations, Crowder makes the best case yet for how liberalism and pluralism might in fact be combined. To shore up that connection, Crowder has had to reinterpret value pluralism in distinctly liberal ways. In particular, Crowder’s plurality of values no longer has recognizably liberal and illiberal elements. On the contrary, the values Crowder describes are “universal” in nature. They make our lives “go better,” no matter the particular contexts in which we happen to live (pp. 45-46). It is this idea of “universality” that makes value pluralism a comfortable fit for a liberal politics. For liberal polities are able to capture more of these universal values than other regimes, and in a coherent and deliberate way (pp. 138-39). But this argument, if successful, would seem to reduce the threat of value pluralism chiefly by diminishing its interest. For surely the warmth and humanity of Berlin’s view lay in its encouragement that we consider the values of others with imagination and empathy. Some of those values will seem strange and unfamiliar. Some we would never embrace for ourselves. But until we do the hard work of understanding why other persons have held the values they have, we risk blinding ourselves to the very different ways in which authentically flourishing lives are lived.

I am suspicious, in other words, whether these “universal values” truly exist. Crowder adds any number of caveats, from the different ways these values are understood, to the different ways they are applied in particular contexts (pp. 45-46). Still, what do the virtues of medieval monks have to do with those of pagan warriors? What kind of society captures both the humility of Christ and the glory of Achilles? How do we compromise between them?

More worryingly, what of universal values that make illiberal lives go better? In a characteristic passage, Berlin writes, “I am not blind to what the [ancient] Greeks valued-their values may not be mine, but I can grasp what it would be like to live by their light, I can admire and respect them, and even imagine myself as pursuing them, although I do not-and do not wish to, and perhaps could not if I wished” (Isaiah Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer [New York: Farrar, Su-aus, & Giroux, 1998], pp. 9-10).

For Crowder, the presumed universality of values makes one wonder why such imaginative empathy would be necessary. If the most important values have been valued throughout the ages, why even bother looking to past cultures or civilizations?

One wonders, finally, about the motivating question at the heart of this book. At several points, Crowder is keen to insist that liberalism stands in need of justification. History suggests it, contemporary opposition demands it, and liberalism’s own normative principles require it (pp. 25-26). No doubt Crowder is correct. But the real question, it seems to me, is what kind of justification we will offer, and to whom it should be offered. Should our arguments be grounded in reason or experience? Will we appeal to our principles or our practices? Are we trying to stiffen the backbone of our fellow liberals, or find arguments that reasonable nonliberals can accept?

Of course, these criticisms in no way detract from the real merits of Crowder’s argument. Liberalism and Value Pluralism is surely the most sophisticated of recent attempts to marry the two camps. Crowder writes with clarity and generosity. The rigor and care of his analysis, the remarkably systematic presentation, the charity with which he interprets opposing viewpoints-all of these make the book an enjoyable and deeply sympathetic read. Crowder has written a book that many will find compelling and persuasive. It is also, indisputably, an impressive contribution to the literature.

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Democrats’ Doublespeak: Kerry is the perfect spokesman for his party (NRO, 040521)

by Jonah Goldberg

John Kerry is a flip-flopping, U-turning, yes-and-no kind of guy. No serious person I’ve met who follows politics disagrees with this, so let’s save the long list of flip-flops for another column.

Kerry’s defenders describe this trait as an asset. He’s “comfortable with nuance” and “at ease with complexity.” Even others who are less enamored of Kerry’s ability to come to a fork in the road and take it (apologies to Yogi Berra) think that Bush is a flip-flopper, too, and that there are more important issues than the tendency of all politicians to trim their sails to the political currents.

Some say Kerry’s ambiguities are signs of courage. He went to war to fight for his country. And when Kerry came home, they say, he fought the war in support of what he thought was best for his country. Needless to say, many people disagree with this interpretation.

This will all be hashed out repeatedly between now and November. What I find more interesting is how familiar these complaints about Kerry seem to be.

Didn’t we hear the same things about Bill Clinton, the original Democrat Who Wanted to Have it Both Ways?

When asked how he would have voted on the first Gulf War, Clinton said he agreed with minority against the war but would have voted with the majority. He smoked, but didn’t inhale. He boasted about how he “compartmentalized” disparate and often conflicting actions and ideas. He even conjured a whole “New Democrat” philosophy in which anybody who said you had to choose between eating your cake and having it too was presenting America with a “false choice.”

And of course there was Al Gore. Now, Gore wasn’t really accused of holding conflicting ideas simultaneously, so much as constantly “reinventing himself.” He’d been a pro-lifer, a pro-choicer, a social liberal, a social conservative, a hawk, a dove, a wonk, a quasi-hippie, a populist, an elitist, a New Democrat, and an Old Democrat. Even CNN’s middle-of-the-road Bill Schneider wrote a column for National Journal titled, “OK, Al, Who Are You Today?”

Clinton, Gore, and Kerry are all very different men, with different histories. But I’m beginning to wonder if there’s something about the Democratic party or liberalism in general that results in picking these sorts of men as standard-bearers.

By nature, politicians waffle, hem, haw, equivocate, and pander. Even the straight-talkers talk in circles. But when you compare Republican and Democratic candidates over the last 25 years, it’s hard not to notice a major difference.

The pressure within the Republican party has been to promote politicians willing to take strong conservative positions, even if they turn some people off. The pressure in the Democratic party has been to promote candidates who can be all things to all people.

Ronald Reagan, love him or hate him, was a man of strong conviction who stuck to his guns as much as politics allowed. And the current President Bush won the support of Republicans largely because he was the anti-Clinton. He talked poorly, but his meaning was clear. With Clinton — who could talk circles around the meaning of “is” — it was the other way around.

Historically, the Democratic party rarely wins with a majority of the vote, notes the website RasmussenReports.com. “Thirteen of the last 14 Republican Presidential victories before 2000 were won with a majority of the popular vote” — the current president was the exception.

Meanwhile, if you take out FDR (a master at cobbling together coalitions through saying opposite things to different constituencies), only one Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, has won with a significant majority of the popular vote since 1860 (Carter got a spare 50.1% in 1976).

One reason is that the Democrats were the outsider party after the Civil War, picking up electoral scraps where they could. Another closely linked reason is that liberalism these days is by nature coalitional. Why should a blue-collar Catholic Teamster in Ohio be in the same party as a software-designing gay-rights activist in San Francisco? Because Democrats value agreement less than cooperation and loyalty.

Republicans have their coalitions, too. But the party tends to be ideational. Conservatives say, “If you agree with us on, say, seven issues out of ten, you should vote with us.”

Liberals say, “We’ll fight for your cause — abortion, affirmative action, whatever — if you fight for ours.” The Democrats’ problem becomes even more acute because — thanks to its successes and failures — it has no unifying ideas or goals other than holding political power. What unites Democrats today other than defenestrating Bush?

Seen this way, is it so surprising the flip-floppers rise to the top of the Democratic party? If you need to please working-class traditionalists, single-issue feminists, angry parents, and angrier teachers’ unions, you have to speak out of both sides of your mouth. So, in this sense, isn’t Kerry the perfect spokesman for his party?

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Supremely Modern Liberals (Touchstone, 040500)

The Unhappy & Abusive Marriage of Liberalism & Modernism

by James Hitchcock

American politics is now as acrimonious as it has perhaps ever been. This may be puzzling to some as there are seemingly no longer any deep divisions within the polity. Most Americans, after all, are internationalists and free marketers of some kind, who disagree only within those parameters.

But there are deep and growing divisions. What is being played out now, acrimoniously, are the final implications of the agenda of the modernist movement, and of the liberalism it transformed in the 1960s, the final working out of ideas that were present from the beginning in the late 1700s but for a long time remained only half-recognized. This movement has made every political disagreement a dispute over fundamental beliefs, and indeed over the nature of reality: matters over which people will fight with particular ferocity.

Modernism in this sense is not the historical reality of modernization. It is an almost religious commitment to radical change, a fevered sense of the past as oppressive, a determination to move ruthlessly into the future no matter what the cost, an urge to shock traditional sensibilities. (Like all movements, I should note, modernism can be defined in a variety of ways, and not all self-conscious modernists espouse its entire agenda.)

It is inherently nihilistic, at its core nothing less than the systematic negation of every established belief and institution, the denial that any ultimate truth underlies culture, the often demonic conviction that destruction is the necessary preliminary to creation. It has touched deep and sinister springs in the human psyche: the love of negation and annihilation for their own sakes. Gratuitous, anarchical terrorism is in a sense modernism’s ultimate expression.

A Maniacal Urge

Modernism began with the French Revolution, whose maniacal urge to destroy the past even went to the point of abolishing the calendar and attempting to begin history entirely anew. Artists now became conscious of themselves as an “avant-garde” (previously a military term) and defined creativity as requiring a radical break with the art of the past. The new “bohemian” social type carried this ideal into society, defining free and authentic human existence as necessarily at odds with accepted beliefs and behavior. With Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, atheism for the first time became intellectually respectable, even as “theologians” like Bruno Bauer and David Strauss reinterpreted Christianity so as to require an outright denial of what Christians had believed for 1,800 years.

As Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw, the desire to destroy the past and begin history anew would require, as modernism’s final stage, the “transvaluation of values,” in which everything once thought to be virtuous—piety, family loyalty, personal uprightness, patriotism, self-reliance—would be turned into vices. Throughout history, human values have primarily been centered in family, religion, and country, and those institutions had to be destroyed if a “new humanity” were to be created.

Thus modernism extols every kind of sexual “liberation,” which nullifies the family; a skeptical, “value free,” and “scientific” spirit, which nullifies religion; and universalism, which nullifies loyalty to one’s country. Thus, it portrays the family as the source of pathology and abuse, and condemns both religion and patriotism as either hypocritical or dangerously fanatical. The ideal modernist is a militant religious skeptic who renounces both family ties and loyalty to country and submits instead to an abstract ideal of modernism’s new world.

Modernism sometimes proceeds by frontal attacks on traditional beliefs and institutions, but it can also achieve its goals by appearing to respect them while radically redefining them. Thus, “marriage” can be dissolved at will and can be undertaken by homosexuals; “God” becomes an emanation from the self, and “Scripture” is understood as recording man’s religious aspirations; and “true patriots” condemn their own country as a force for evil in the world. Traditional beliefs and institutions do not have to be annihilated; it is sufficient to drain them of their ancient meanings and fill them with others—particularly if they are reduced to the realm of the subjective and therefore private, of “values” that cannot be “imposed” on others.

At various stages of its development, modernism appeared to create new systems of meaning to supersede the old, but its internal dynamic required that in time the new consensus also be rejected, as merely a new kind of tyranny. Insofar as modernists profess stable values, those values originate outside modernism itself, which of its very nature cannot affirm anything permanent.

For a long time, devotees of Marxism or Freudianism (or both) claimed that they provided new certitudes to replace those modernism had rejected, but both ideologies are now the principal exhibits in modernism’s bankruptcy proceedings. Both were of their very natures destructive of fundamental values, Marxism by its cynical materialism, its reduction of even the most sublime realities to the level of economic interests, and Freudianism by its undermining of the classical Western definition of man as a rational animal and its claim that human action is governed primarily by the unrecognized irrational dynamics of the psyche.

Freudianism ultimately failed both as an understanding of life and as a therapy, even though for many decades it was treated as an unquestionable truth, its critics accused of resisting it precisely because it was true. Simultaneously, Marxism not only failed to achieve its promised utopia, but proved to provide the grossest of tyrannies.

Liberalism Transformed

Liberalism—the experiment of continually increasing the limits of personal freedom—developed almost simultaneously with modernism, but for a long time it balanced openness to change with respect for tradition, and promised an ordered liberty based on transcendent morality. For most of the two centuries since their birth, modernism was hostile to liberalism, insofar as the latter held to an objective moral order and could be dismissed as merely the rationalization of bourgeois privilege. Modernists claimed liberal freedoms for themselves even as they rejected the underlying principles behind those freedoms.

Nevertheless, liberalism contained within itself tendencies that could transform it into an ally or even a form of modernism. For one thing, the spirit of self-criticism is an essential component of liberalism, and at some point that ingrained habit went beyond casting an honest eye on one’s own beliefs and institutions and became a reflexive negativity towards them—as with spouses who find their marriages oppressive by nature, church members who deny the basic doctrines of their faith, and citizens who assume that their country is wrong in every situation.

For another, from the beginning liberalism also harbored certain nihilistic potentialities. The dogma of progress implied that repudiating the past would bring only good to humanity, and (once belief in transcendent morality was lost) liberalism could only affirm the value of freedom without being able to offer substantial guidance as to what it was for and how it was to be used. Liberals insisted that freedom be exercised responsibly, but their sense of what was responsible had to be brought in from sources outside liberalism itself, usually from the moral inheritance from the past, about which they felt deep and steadily increasing ambivalence.

At various stages of its development, liberalism has drawn lines beyond which the exercise of freedom was said to be irresponsible. But inevitably those lines have proven to be unstable, because of an ingrained suspicion of whatever comes down from the past, whatever is “imposed” on the free individual by society. As recently as 1960 it would have seemed preposterous (and gravely unfair) to accuse liberals of failing to honor the duties that men owe to God, family, and nation. By the end of that decade, those obligations had been defined as the obsessions of a benighted conservatism that was the enemy of freedom.

Like modernism, liberalism increasingly defines its task as that of expanding the scope of freedom without limit. Despite whatever misgivings they may have, liberals find it intellectually and emotionally difficult to oppose anything that presents itself as progress.

Liberalism had in its beginning held to the free market, and that idea also conceals a certain nihilism, since the market treats all commodities equally, distinctions among them deriving solely from the law of supply and demand. Any moral restraint imposed on the market—in particular, on what one can make and what one must pay workers—must be imported from the outside.

But since the 1930s, liberalism has nourished an animus against the free market, allegedly on the grounds that it rewards greed. This charge is almost always made against businessmen, seldom against wealthy athletes, entertainers, or authors, and the aspect of the free market that arouses the greatest liberal indignation is the claim that self-reliance and hard work bring deserved rewards. What many liberals detest in that claim is not the injustice it allegedly conceals but the fact that it affirms values that for 175 years modernists have despised as “bourgeois.”

Revolutionary Nihilism

Such were the two movements as they had developed since the late 1800s, at best uncomfortable allies. After their coming together in the period imprecisely called “the sixties,” the two have been so synthesized that the word liberal means in all essentials modernist.

The crucial coming together of modernism and liberalism occurred when a seemingly solid middle-class liberal culture proved to be vulnerable, primarily through its young, who combined a real or feigned liberal guilt over social injustice—particularly in the American South and in Vietnam—with a determination to test the limits of liberal tolerance for a variety of “alternative lifestyles.” The counterculture of the sixties was not new in the sense that it offered ideas never heard before. It had ample pedigree in various artistic and intellectual sources, and modernist ideas had long been propagated in the universities, at least as academic studies.

What was revolutionary was that the nihilism of socially marginal modernists finally spread to the great middle class, primarily through the actions of the privileged children of that class, who had grasped the implications of modernism and now demanded to enjoy the unrestrained “freedom” that it placed at the center of existence. Ironically, in view of its traditional contempt for the free market, modernism achieved this new mass base partly by becoming commercialized, with magazines like Rolling Stone sold on small-town newsstands and carrying expensive ads for rock groups whose music appeared on major commercial labels.

The youth culture effected a transvaluation of values in numerous ways, not least by forbidding learning from the past (“Don’t trust anyone over thirty”) and declaring rebellion against social norms to be true authenticity (“It is forbidden to forbid”). The counterculture was in essence a sometimes violent assertion of the “imperial self”: the claim that the free individual alone is the final arbiter of truth and righteousness, that self-expression is the highest good, that everything external to the self is tyranny. The counterculture talked compulsively of “community,” precisely because its ideologies undermined all existing communities, destroying even the possibility of such a thing.

The status of marginalization was now taken as a condemnatory judgment on society itself, the behavior of the marginalized (drug use and promiscuous sex most notably) turned into the new normality. This was most revealingly manifest with respect to pornography and crime. Traditionally, liberals had defended the civil rights of those whose views they despised, so that they opposed the suppression of pornography as a violation of due process and insisted that the rights even of criminals be respected, while they condemned the transgressions themselves.

But during the sixties, under the influence of modernism, they began to validate pornography as psychologically liberating and artistically significant, while defining criminals as victims of oppression and even as martyrs for liberty. Liberals who could not accept this, nonetheless could not easily oppose it, since the liberal idea of freedom had merged almost seamlessly with the modernist claim that every assertion of personal autonomy, every assault on established values, is truly liberating. (Those who, in the name of traditional liberalism, did oppose this movement found themselves denounced as “conservatives” and cast out from the major institutions of liberal culture.)

The modernist identity derives almost entirely from self-assertion, and it must search compulsively for restraints to throw off. Its continuous demand, which liberals were willing to meet, is, at a minimum, to “understand” behavior that is plainly evil, such as gratuitous killings and acts of terrorism, and as far as possible to lay it at the door of “society,” thereby reversing the roles of transgressors and responsible citizens.

Modernity’s Acids

Inevitably, modernism undermined the authority even of the institution that had sheltered it for so long: the university. Rigorous cultural and intellectual standards are among the chief victims of the modernist culture of nihilism, and here as elsewhere, liberals who struggled to maintain objective standards in the face of radical assaults were necessarily fighting a rear-guard action and condemned as reactionaries.

The intellectual vogue of “deconstructionism”—the claim that no text has a fixed and authoritative meaning, that all texts should be understood as willed efforts to exercise power—is usually considered “postmodern,” a term coined to acknowledge that the acids of modernism, once they had penetrated deeply enough, undermined modernism itself, discrediting all its certitudes, including those of liberalism. But “postmodernism” is a misleading term if it is taken to imply the repudiation of modernist ideas. It is simply modernism’s inevitable and logical next stage.

According to deconstructionism, a group’s beliefs are merely the values it has adopted to advance its own interests and to suppress every other group. The characteristic beliefs of Western civilization—which most liberals themselves held until the sixties—are merely those of “dead white (heterosexual) males” and an effective mechanism for oppressing women and racial and sexual minorities. What had been considered the Great Works, the works by which the civilized mind and character should be formed, must now be read so as to reveal this.

The related movement of multiculturalism tends to define society in terms of “oppressors” and “victims,” another manifestation of the nihilistic impulse, which reduces reality to group conflicts in which “truth” is on the side of those who most effectively claim victimhood for themselves and who put forward their demands in such a way as to silence even the possibility of discussion. For example, terrorism is “explained” on the grounds that terrorists feel oppressed, without regard for the legitimacy of those feelings.

Until only a few decades ago most liberals would have been resistant to deconstructionism and multiculturalism, to the extent that both denied the truth of Western liberal values, including individual freedom and tolerance for diversity. But belief in the moral superiority of the non-Western world has become almost a staple of the Western educational system at all levels, and exalting other cultures at the expense of one’s own is taken as a sign of enlightenment, a test of political and personal authenticity.

It is a fundamentally incoherent position, since the imperative of systematic self-criticism itself seems to be a product of Western civilization. It is also a fundamentally illiberal position, since it requires, in the name of liberalism, the support of societies that deny the liberal values of freedom and tolerance. Liberals compulsively turn the weapons of self-criticism against their own culture, even as they extol other cultures that deny that imperative, and those liberals who defend their own culture often do so with troubled consciences, with many qualifying caveats.

Anti-Humanists

To the extent that modernism could be said to have escaped the trap of nihilism throughout its earlier history, it escaped by affirming a vague kind of humanism, particularly by claiming that the destruction of old beliefs and institutions and the expansion of freedom were pursued for the sake of human dignity and “human flourishing.” (Liberalism had escaped by holding to an objective moral order, which it held with decreasing commitment until, in coming together with modernism, it abandoned that belief entirely.)

But humanism, in its exaltation of the human species and its pride in civilization, was always problematical for modernism, and now the movement’s cutting edge is precisely a repudiation of humanism. With modernism having undermined traditional beliefs, including the belief in truths securely inherited from the past, post-modernism now acknowledges that there is also no philosophical basis for modernism itself, no compelling way in which human dignity can be affirmed. Deconstruction possesses the power to deconstruct anything, precluding even the possibility of an authoritative text, including those texts (the Declaration of Independence) by whose authority liberalism traditionally justified itself.

The “animal rights” movement is the overt denial of humanism, thereby reducing liberalism to nothing beyond an unlimited acceptance of change, the anti-humanistic theories of Peter Singer currently serving as the principal test of liberal “open-mindedness.” (Singer has suggested that unborn children have less of a right to life than some of the higher primates.) On the other side, having dealt humanism a fatal blow, liberalism is also unable to mount a strong defense against a technological utopianism in which the role of man in the universe is steadily surrendered to machines.

According to current modernist-liberal dogma, man’s proclaimed superiority over other animals is the ultimate arrogance, while on the other hand there is nothing distinctively human that cannot be ceded to technology. The fact that some liberals condemn technology as the rape of nature and at the same time favor human cloning and other advanced technologies is another manifestation of the blind openness to change that modernism enforces. Familiar kinds of technology are condemned; radical new kinds are endorsed.

Issues of sexual behavior are now foremost in the liberal program because, no longer able to affirm an exalted view of human dignity, liberals are reduced to defining freedom in terms of personal desires.

Liberalism Modernized

With the coming together of modernism and liberalism, the meaning of the latter has undergone a significant change. Properly understood, the New Left of the 1960s was not a political movement at all but a cultural one, asserting claims to “freedom” that no ordered society could accommodate. Thus, as liberalism assimilated the modernist outlook, primarily through the agency of the New Left, it also ceased to be primarily political.

Although battles are still fought over familiar issues—war and peace, economic policies—those battles are increasingly cultural in nature, calling into play passions that often seem disproportionate to the issues themselves and demanding symbolic victories that extend well beyond any measurable political effects. (For example, critics of earlier American wars would never have thought that the “right” to burn the flag was a properly liberal issue.) There are no liberals who resist the liberal-modernist synthesis for the simple reason that those who do are excommunicated from the movement and redefined as conservatives. For that reason, I will hereafter refer to that synthesis as “liberalism” by itself.

This liberalism explains much of the animosity in contemporary politics, because it transforms every political disagreement into a dispute over fundamental beliefs and attempts to put the coercive power and economic force of the state behind its policies. The sexual behavior of President Clinton became the bitterest of political battles because both sides understood that the battle was, in effect, a national referendum over the very possibility of sexual morality. Some people detested Clinton as the embodiment of irresponsible hedonism, while others detested Kenneth Starr as the embodiment of an outmoded and oppressive notion of moral objectivity. President Bush is hated by liberals not primarily because he promotes specific policies but because of who he is: a symbol of virtues that modernism long ago rejected.

For much of the twentieth century, conventional enlightened opinion predicted that traditional beliefs, especially (in the West) orthodox Christianity, would dissipate under the irresistible pressures of modernity. Instead, those pressures have inspired a strong revival of religion in the United States, a resurgence frightening and incomprehensible to liberals, who (therefore?) denounce religious movements with particular ferocity. It might even be said that now the primary agenda of liberalism is to deny moral traditionalism every kind of public respectability.

Allegedly, this alarm stems from the fear that religious believers aim to establish some kind of theocracy, but strong religion is mainly detested because it constitutes the ultimate public affirmation of objective meaning, a continuous counterfoil to modernist nihilism. Liberals take particular alarm at the religious claim that there are sources of value beyond the liberal society itself, and some liberals now insist that full rights of citizenship can be granted only to those who accept modernist agnosticism. The worst condemnation liberals can hurl at religious believers is, “They claim to possess the truth!”

Thus, some liberals identify the “religious right” as the greatest single danger facing the country, not merely because of its specific political program (particularly its opposition to abortion and the sexual revolution) but because religion ought not even to have a program. Some would exclude religious believers from any meaningful participation in public life. (For a survey of this liberal hostility, see my “The Enemies of Religious Liberty,” in the February 2004 issue of First Things.)

Debatable Issues

In principle, the “social issues” should not be matters of political debate at all, since the political expression of those issues ought to manifest the values of the citizenry, values that originate from independent, indeed superior, sources. The reason liberals can make matters of fundamental meaning matters of public debate is that the welfare state, in its claim of responsibility for people’s lives in the fullest sense, inevitably turns questions of value into political issues.

If, for example, through the public schools and other agencies, the state undertakes to foster people’s “welfare” in ways that go beyond mere economic need, should it not also change “repressive” attitudes towards sexual behavior, relations between men and women, or respect for authority? If healthy family life is shown to be the best protection against poverty, should the state encourage stable marriages between any two people willing to enter into that state?

In an only half-conscious way, political battles are now often conflicts over fundamental meaning or, more precisely, conflicts between those who believe that there are such meanings and those who deny them. Thus, the advance guard of liberalism does not seek concrete political achievements so much as symbolic victories, the use of the public forum to undermine existing certitudes. Debates over particular issues—abortion, homosexuality, pornography—are only secondarily about the specific practices themselves. Instead, they represent the liberal demand that all such questions be kept perpetually open, that no one be permitted to affirm objective moral standards, that each self-defined “oppressed” group be permitted to throw off its shackles in the terms it chooses. Remember, for example, General Wesley Clark’s remarkable claim, during his failed bid for the presidency, that the child becomes a human being only “when the mother chooses.”

Similarly, the push for homosexual “marriage” is really a demand for the deconstruction of marriage, a denial of its real existence, its demotion to the status of an arbitrary legal category. Despite all the publicity about American homosexuals now attempting to “marry,” experience in the Scandinavian countries shows that relatively few homosexuals took advantage of this opportunity when it was offered to them. Many homosexuals regard the institution of marriage as itself the root of all repression and claim to offer society a better model of sexual relationships.

At first unnoticed by the general public, various American elites—educators, clergy, journalists, attorneys, government officials, even some businessmen, the very people whom modernists had always despised as philistines—over time became deeply infected with liberalism. The same process of liberalism being transformed by modernism that occurred in the universities also occurred in the mainline Protestant and the Catholic churches, in social agencies, and in the major media. As a result, never before in history has there been a society in which the institutions that embody its values—schools, social agencies, many of the churches—now work to undermine those values.

In contemporary America most elites appear to be at least complacent towards nihilistic currents—few are heard to object to the misogynist and racist lyrics of rappers, for example, presumably because the rappers are considered “marginalized” and are protesting “society”—and it is primarily the masses who retain some tenuous commitment to traditional beliefs. The famous division between “red” and “blue” on the electoral map of 2000 roughly corresponds to the division within the country between those who believe in traditional values and those who do not. According to liberal dogma, the tradition-minded masses are by definition incapable of embracing necessary changes and must be prodded or coerced into doing so.

Soft Totalitarians

This popular resistance has led modernism to adopt a kind of “soft totalitarianism” implicit in its philosophy. This is seen in the philosophy of existentialism following World War II, which held that existence was “absurd,” and in doing so announced that the final negation had at last been reached, that the modern quest had exhausted itself.

Logically, it should have led to political quiescence. But its most famous spokesman, Jean-Paul Sartre, was a dogmatic Marxist who placed his ideology beyond the reach of rational criticism by making an uncritical commitment to the “progressive” forces of history. He offered a confirmation of the fact that nihilism ends in totalitarian politics, because the denial of intellectual objectivity unleashes (and justifies) Nietzsche’s “will to power,” which leaves people free to assert their wills in whatever ways they are able.

Both communism and fascism were modernist movements that mounted lawless radical assaults on traditional beliefs and institutions and proclaimed that civilization was at bottom merely the fruit of the imposition of power. Some modernists were attracted to fascism, but many more chose communism. (And many, George Bernard Shaw for example, chose both, till the Nazis discredited fascism.) Although a concern for the oppressed was the alleged reason for this, communism’s fanatical hatred of bourgeois values made it attractive, along with its claim to command the future.

Communism had little appeal for the working classes, who were its supposed beneficiaries. Its most passionate devotees were educated people, often from privileged backgrounds, who showed little real sympathy for the poor. As George Orwell, Lionel Trilling, and others recognized at the time, sympathy for communism was finally a mere intellectual fashion. Some Western liberals made a special effort to overcome their squeamishness about communism because it was for them the very embodiment of the modernist imperative.

Liberalism now moves towards a soft totalitarianism, a view of political authority in which citizens are conceded less and less ability to govern their own lives. The omnicompetent welfare state is already in place as the vehicle for this totalitarianism, and the imperial judiciary now decides questions of meaning, an inevitable development once religion was defined as an “intrusion” into the public sphere. Moral questions (such as whether homosexuals should be allowed to marry) sometimes require political decisions, and the courts are the only available agencies to resolve them. It is only one of the many ironies of the situation that judges thus must function as repositories of transcendent wisdom, even as liberalism denies that such wisdom is even possible.

Despite this skepticism, liberalism now moves relentlessly to impose its dogmas on a reluctant citizenry. Education is used as an instrument for changing young people’s fundamental beliefs, even to the point of weaning children away from the beliefs of their “reactionary” parents. In other liberal Western countries (Canada among them) freedom of expression has been significantly curtailed to forbid any public criticism of favored groups, especially homosexuals, and in the United States liberals have tried, with varying degrees of success, to enforce “speech codes” on college campuses.

Zeno’s Paradox

Abortion still stands as the premier liberal issue, since it involves the ultimate assertion of the untrammeled will of the individual. But the rhetoric of “choice” is only invoked in support of women who choose to abort. Liberals have been reluctant to condemn the policy of forced abortions in China, since they regard a woman’s decision to bear a child as often irresponsible, demonstrating that the mother is insufficiently enlightened to make a correct choice.

Beyond abortion, environmentalism will, for the indefinite future, be the crucial issue. In the name of the good of the earth, some liberals have already announced their willingness to use coercive measures, even to the point of restricting people’s right to bring children into the world.

This soft totalitarianism is nihilistic in that it systematically nullifies traditional beliefs and customs and replaces them with rules that are purely external, without any deep roots in the culture. They are imposed from without in the name of progress, an imposition of precisely the kind of soulless conformity that liberals claim to be characteristic of traditional societies. A thoroughly “modern” society leaves people with a sense of emptiness, because they cannot relate its imposed forms to family, religion, and other perennial organic realities.

“Speech codes” and other measures restrictive of civil liberties are now part of the liberal agenda because liberalism defines traditional beliefs, and those who hold them, as inherent threats to freedom. In Canada and parts of Western Europe, civil liberties have moved from being the very essence of liberalism to being severely curtailed under the rubric of preventing “hate crimes” by preventing “hate speech,” and the attempts to impose this censorship in American universities serve notice that liberals intend the same for the whole society.

Beginning with the French Revolution, modernism has also required authoritarian government as the only antidote to the anarchy it spawns. As traditional laws and customs are discarded, whatever order exists must be imposed. The nihilism now spreading through bourgeois culture can still be concealed in various ways, prosperity often serving as a kind of anesthetic against nihilism’s depredations. But the culture of poverty in its most extreme manifestations displays the results of liberal negation in their starkest forms: naked lust, greed, hatred, and violence, a war of all against all without even a pretext of redeeming features, a condition in which poor people trying to live ordered lives are the principal victims.

Liberal orthodoxy requires that such pathologies be explained as the effects of an unjust society, caused solely by material deprivation. Few liberals can acknowledge the depth of those pathologies or the extent to which they have been exacerbated by decades of liberal ideology and policies. In reducing the problem entirely to one of poverty, liberals effectively deny the moral nature of poor people, who are treated merely as economic beings. Liberal opposition to “faith-based initiatives” is a denial of the claim that religion can or should play a central role in overcoming social pathologies.

Modernism is an exemplar of Zeno’s Paradox, whereby it is impossible to arrive at a goal because it is necessary repeatedly to traverse half the remaining distance to the goal. The angry hysteria now characteristic of so much liberal politics is perhaps partly triggered by a panicky awareness that the point of ultimate denial is fast being approached. How many more “breakthroughs” can society celebrate, how many more obstacles to freedom can be assaulted and toppled, before there is nothing left?

But if liberals sometimes have an inkling that the process of “liberation” has gone too far, they have no way of turning back. Thus, as the goal of absolutely untrammeled freedom is approached, liberals proclaim all the more loudly that society is oppressive and demand a redoubled push towards liberation.

Weakened Egos

Ironically, the very assault on established values that modernism mounted in the name of personal freedom, its reduction of social reality essentially to an emanation from the self, actually weakens the ego, which is thereby made to experience its own fragility, the fact that it is bereft of substantial support and is thrown back on its own resources. Much of liberal politics is therefore a demand for public affirmations of worth—for women, racial minorities, homosexuals—made necessary in part by the liberal negation of the traditional communities that once clothed the naked self.

The concept of “affirmative action” follows from this and is itself nihilistic, because the categories into which it places people are empty ones—sex, race, ethnicity—which have no necessary connection to the moral identity of the individuals placed in them. “Conservative” women and blacks represent a threat because they affirm meanings that are more than mere expressions of group identity.

The politics of meaning is not conveniently reduced to partisan divisions. Some Republicans are modernist liberals, or at least can see nothing radically wrong with the modernist-liberal agenda. Many others are uncomfortable with issues they think do not belong in politics at all, and still others seem largely oblivious to those issues. But after 1968, the Democratic party made itself increasingly hospitable to the ideologies of modernistic liberalism. Symbolically, abortion, far more than any strictly political or economic question, is the one issue on which, at the highest levels of the party, there can be no compromise.

It is not coincidental that, while self-proclaimed religious skeptics are a small minority of the citizenry, they are overwhelmingly Democratic in their politics. While the party still includes many sincere believers, nonbelievers correctly sense that they have there a comfortable home. It is primarily Democrats, beginning with John F. Kennedy, who have banished religious principles from public life, on the grounds that those principles are purely “private,” hence, purely subjective.

It is also not coincidental that a large majority of those who profess some kind of “New Age” religiosity (reincarnation, goddess worship) also announce themselves as Democrats, since New Age religiosity is a purely self-created form of belief, validated solely by the subjective demands of the self.

James Hitchcock is a senior editor of Touchstone.

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A New Attack on Rush: David Brock doesn’t want American soldiers to hear Limbaugh (NRO, 040528)

by Byron York

David Brock, the former self-described “right-wing hit man” turned “progressive” activist, is escalating his campaign against conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh.

Brock runs a new organization called Media Matters for America, which, according to Brock, was created to fight “conservative misinformation” in the media (see “David Brock is Buzzing Again,” NR, June 14, 2004). Earlier this month, Brock and Media Matters produced a television commercial attacking Limbaugh for comments about the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal. Brock, who has raised more than $2 million for his new venture, spent $100,000 to air the spot on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Fox, and ESPN.

Now, Brock has written a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asking that the Pentagon remove Limbaugh’s program from the American Forces Radio and Television Service, formerly known as Armed Forces Radio. Arguing that Limbaugh has condoned the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Brock wrote, “It is abhorrent that the American taxpayer is paying to broadcast what is in effect pro-torture propaganda to American troops.” Brock asked Rumsfeld to consider removing the Limbaugh program to “protect” American troops from Limbaugh’s “reckless and dangerous messages.” Brock also expressed concern that Limbaugh “continually uses prejudiced rhetoric that divides rather than unites Americans.”

Brock based his letter in large part on a story that appeared Wednesday in the anti-Bush online magazine Salon. That article, “Rush’s Forced Conscripts,” in turn relied on Brock and other critics, like Limbaugh competitor Al Franken of the new liberal talk-radio network Air America, to accuse American Forces Radio of a “rightward tilt” and of airing a generous portion of Limbaugh while not allowing liberal voices to be heard. Limbaugh, according to Franken, provides “a bad message for troops to be hearing.”

Salon editor David Talbot followed up, in “Turn Off Rush, Turn On Salon,” by denouncing military broadcasters who, he said, give soldiers “a daily dose of poison from Rush Limbaugh.” Talbot wrote that American Forces Radio “bombard[s]” military men and women with “Limbaugh’s incendiary tirades, to the exclusion of all other voices.”

“Rush’s Forced Conscripts” discounted the argument of American Forces Radio chief Melvin Russell, who told Salon that his service included Limbaugh on the basis of Limbaugh’s popularity, and that American Forces also provides programming from National Public Radio. That’s not the same thing, Franken explained: “Rush’s message is that liberals hate America, while NPR is straight-ahead reporting and journalism.”

But American Forces Radio provides not only NPR programs like Morning Edition and All Things Considered but NPR commentary, as well. American military men and women abroad have access, for example, to the talk show of liberal host Diane Rehm. Indeed, Rehm’s biographical sketch on the NPR website says her program is “heard on U.S. military instillations around the world via Armed Forces Radio.” (For a schedule of NPR programs provided to American Forces Radio, click here.)

Military listeners can also hear NPR’s Tavis Smiley Show, Talk of the Nation, and Fresh Air programs. Beyond NPR, listeners can also hear brief commentaries by former talk-show host Jim Hightower and CBS News anchorman Dan Rather. Viewed as a whole, the list of names suggests that military listeners, if they want to hear a variety of views, can do so on American Forces Radio.

But according to those who design its programming, the point of American Forces Radio is not to provide some sort of perfect ideological balance but rather to give military men and women a representative sample of the programming they could hear at home. To that end, American Forces Radio provides about 1,200 different programs to military radio stations around the world, which then make up their own schedules. “We try to provide a cross-section of programming that they would have available to [soldiers] were they stateside,” says Melvin Russell. “We feel that the variety, the 1,200 programs that we offer each week, gives us that balance that we’re looking for.”

Most of those programs are music shows, but there is a significant news and talk lineup as well. If you liked to listen to Dr. Laura Schlessinger at home, and you’re stationed in South Korea, you can listen to her there, too (the first hour of her program is included in American Forces Radio, just as the first hour of Limbaugh’s program is provided). If you liked NPR’s Car Talk at home, you can listen overseas, too. If you preferred Dan Patrick’s ESPN Radio show, that’s there, too.

Given that, it would be odd if American Forces Radio attempted to replicate the menu of radio choices available in the United States and decided not to include Limbaugh, who produces one of the most popular programs in America.

The reality is that the talk-radio market in the United States is not balanced; conservatives have been far more successful than liberals in making a product that people want to hear. That fact is the premise for the creation of the Air America network. Maybe that network will grow into a significant force, but for now, there is no dominant, single liberal voice on national radio today whose inclusion would be mandatory if one were making up a representative sample of American radio programming. Liberals have said as much many times as they (unsuccessfully) searched for that very thing.

As for Air America itself, it has been on the air less than two months, is heard on only a handful of stations, and faces an uncertain financial future. If it succeeds, portions of its programming might well be included in the American Forces lineup. For now, people on military bases with access to the Internet can listen to Air America on the web — just like they would at home.

The critics’ real argument, it seems, is not so much with American Forces Radio, and the way it makes its programming decisions, as it is with Limbaugh himself. And that is nothing new.

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Michael Moore, MoveOn, and Fahrenheit 9/11: A political campaign disguised as a movie (NRO, 040629)

The left-wing activist group MoveOn.org, which last week launched a campaign to encourage members to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 during its premiere weekend, is now taking partial credit for the early success of the anti-Bush documentary.

“Due in part to your efforts, Fahrenheit 9/11 was the number one movie in the nation this weekend,” Eli Pariser, head of the MoveOn Political Action Committee, told supporters during a nationwide conference call Monday night. “Now we’re going to talk about how to turn that enormous momentum into action to beat Bush.”

Last week, MoveOn asked members to sign a pledge to see Fahrenheit 9/11 during its first showings Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. Announcing the plan, Pariser praised the movie, but said the real reason MoveOn wanted members to turn out during the film’s first days in theaters was to create the impression that a wave of anti-Bush anger was sweeping the country. “We launched this campaign around Fahrenheit 9/11 because to the media, the pundits, and the politicians in power, the movie’s success will be seen as a cultural referendum on the Bush administration and the Iraq war,” Pariser told MoveOn members. “Together, we have an opportunity to knock this ball out of the park.”

Fahrenheit 9/11 took in $21.8 million at the box office during its first few days in theaters, making it the most popular movie of the weekend.

Moore himself joined the MoveOn conference call Monday night, which organizers say included 55,000 listeners. The filmmaker thanked MoveOn members for helping make Fahrenheit 9/11 a quick success. But more than success, Moore told MoveOn, he wanted the movie to help defeat President George W. Bush in November. “None of us want this just to be a movie, where people just eat some popcorn and go home,” Moore said. Instead, Moore explained, he wanted the movie to become the inspiration for thousands of new anti-Bush voters.

“I’ve actually put up a little pledge sheet on my website,” Moore said, referring to a list of get-out-the-vote strategies he is endorsing for the presidential election. The first thing Moore is asking people to do is to take off work on November 2, so they can spend part of the day helping others get to the polls. The second thing is “to take one weekend in October and drive to a swing state” to work for Democratic candidate John Kerry. Finally, Moore is “asking everyone to identify five non-voters that they know and adopt them,” to convince them to vote.

The MoveOn meetings underscored the overtly political nature of Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 promotional campaign.

Last week, MoveOn set a goal of persuading 100,000 members to take the pledge to see Fahrenheit 9/11 as early as possible. In fact, according to MoveOn, 116,649 MoveOn members signed up. While that number seems like a relatively small part of the movie’s total audience, Pariser says MoveOn’s influence is far larger than the official number suggests. “When I went to Waterville, Maine and asked how many people from MoveOn were there, probably three-quarters of the people there said yes,” Pariser told Variety on Monday.

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Weapons of Mass Distortion: The coming meltdown of the liberal media (NRO, 040708)

By L. Brent Bozell III

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an excerpt from the introduction of L. Brent Bozell III’s new book, Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media, released today. Bozell is founder and president of the Media Research Center.

In an April 10, 2002, appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live, ABC News anchor Peter Jennings gave a remarkable answer when he was asked about media bias.

“Historically in the media, it has been more of a liberal persuasion for many years,” Jennings said. “It has taken us a long time, too long in my view, to have vigorous conservative voices heard as widely in the media as they now are. And so I think, yes, on occasion there is a liberal instinct in the media which we need to keep our eye on, if you will.”

It was an astonishing statement. For years, media analysts had been pointing out the pervasive liberal bias found in mainstream news coverage. In fact, in 1987 I founded an organization called the Media Research Center specifically to bring balance and responsibility to the news media, and for some fifteen years the center had been carefully and systematically documenting the extent of media bias. But despite all those efforts, news leaders had vigorously denied any charge of bias, no matter how thoroughly documented. Actually, for the most part the Jenningses, Brokaws, and Rathers refused even to acknowledge the charges, which they could get away with at a time when the American public was less attuned to the leftward slant in the press.

But that time had passed. Now, here was Peter Jennings, one of the most important journalists in the country, acknowledging on national television that, yes, the charge of liberal bias was true.

Then again, was the statement really all that astonishing? Well, yes, simply because no one of his stature had ever come close to admitting that liberal bias existed. (Though Walter Cronkite had acknowledged the leftist bias permeating the airwaves, he did so long after he had retired from CBS News.) But if one looks closely at Jennings’s answer, it becomes clear that, to the distinguished anchor of ABC News, media bias really isn’t much of a problem at all. It’s just an “instinct” that is evidenced only “on occasion.” Like a slow leak in a tire, it’s not something that demands an immediate repair. It’s just something “we need to keep our eye on.”

Jennings also betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of why media bias is a problem. For “too long,” he said, “conservative voices” were not “heard as widely in the media as they now are.” Quite true, but that statement is slippery on two counts. First, who does Jennings mean by “conservative voices” — journalists or their guests? There is no empirical evidence I’ve seen that there has been any marked increase of conservatives in the newsrooms — note that we’re talking about newsrooms, not the pundits’ roundtables — of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and PBS. Second, if by “conservative voices” Jennings is referencing the opinions of conservatives within news stories, even if journalists are giving more airtime to conservatives, it doesn’t follow that the coverage of those “conservative voices” is any more positive. The implication of his statement is that conservatives now are getting a fair shot in the media, which, as we’ll see in this book, is patently untrue. Even more important, having more conservative voices heard in the mainstream media is just one small step toward balanced news coverage. Liberal bias affects much more than simply how certain political figures are covered and how certain news stories are reported. The media’s pervasive bias determines precisely which stories are (and are not) covered, and in how much detail. Indeed, the media elite deliberately attempt to set the national agenda through their coverage of the news.

I have learned this firsthand in a career spent closely analyzing the news media, but the point was driven home to me several years ago at a meeting with a Los Angeles newspaper. The Media Research Center had just released an exhaustive study regarding liberal bias in the news media, and I was scheduled to meet with the editorial board of the (now-defunct) Los Angeles Herald-Examiner to discuss the report’s findings. When I arrived, however, I was ushered into the conference room and met by a solitary figure, a member of the editorial board obviously pegged with the unsavory assignment of listening to this pesky conservative. The ponytailed hair and the cold body language — he silently pointed me to a chair — hinted that this would be anything but a productive meeting. I made an opening statement, then passed him the voluminous report we were to discuss. Without bothering to open it, the editor shoved it back at me and unleashed a vitriolic harangue against conservatives. Niceties flew out the window as he snarled, “All you conservatives care about is making money!” Clearly we weren’t going to discuss the report, so I asked him what liberals like him cared about. Without bothering to deny my description of his ideological persuasion, he quickly shot back, “You just don’t get it: We are the social conscience of this country and we have an obligation to use the media.”

At least this editor had the decency to admit what so many others steadfastly deny. Yes, the mainstream news media’s view of conservatives is less than flattering — the liberal media see conservatives as “the great unwashed,” as Republican congressman Henry Hyde aptly put it — and that is a big problem. But just as important, and too often overlooked, is the problem of how the media view themselves. The media elites feel they must be the “social conscience of this country”; they seem to have a higher calling beyond objectively reporting what happens on a day-to-day basis. Reporters, editors, and producers routinely display an arrogance driven by an inflated sense of self-worth. They are the enlightened, the elite. This attitude cannot help but distort the way the news is covered.

Media bias is more than just something “we need to keep our eye on.” It is an endemic problem, and even now, when the media have actually come under some scrutiny, the problem is not being seriously addressed. Although media bias has become the subject of debate in this country, the terms of that debate are far too narrow. Usually it is focused on a small subtopic, like the number of conservative commentators on television, when news commentary isn’t even the issue — it is in news reporting that the journalist must strive for objectivity. Or it is focused on a particular statement that galls — say, CNN boss Ted Turner’s insulting Christians — but examining such a statement, while instructive, doesn’t begin to plumb the depths of the problem of liberal media bias.

Peter Jennings might think that the problem of media bias is pretty much solved, but as this book will show, liberal media bias is alive and well. The evidence of such bias is simply staggering.

The Liberal Counterattack

Although overwhelming evidence indicates that liberal bias in the mainstream news media continues unchecked, something important has changed in recent years. It is not just that news leaders like Peter Jennings have been forced for the first time to answer questions about media bias. No, the Left has come to believe that a battle is on and has begun to attack those dreaded conservatives who dare to challenge the authority and legitimacy of the “mainstream” news media. But the liberal counterattack has been bizarre. Some on the Left, refusing to admit to the longtime liberal dominance over the mainstream news media, go so far as to claim that there is actually a conservative media bias. According to a series of books released in 2002 and 2003, the vast right-wing conspiracy has somehow managed to conquer the news media as well. It is important, and won’t take long, to demolish this mythology.

First out of the gate was The Nation’s Eric Alterman with the book What Liberal Media?: The Truth About Bias and the News, a response to the number one bestseller from former CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. (In his book Alterman condemns me for praising the media’s powerful, if short-lived, patriotism in the days following the September 11 horror.) The New York Observer’s Joe Conason followed with Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth, in which he tries to “debunk conservative mythology,” devoting a whole chapter to the “palpably ridiculous argument” that “liberals control the media.” (It’s instructive that Conason says of this writer that the “belligerent, red-bearded Bozell, a nephew of William F. Buckley Jr., scarcely pretends to be anything more than an instrument of the Republican Party’s conservative leadership,” an extraordinary accomplishment given that I’m not even a Republican.) Finally we got comedian Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. A quick review of Franken’s book begs the question: Is this man serious? And a related question: Just how serious is a movement that relies on this man as its spokesman? We will spend more time with Mr. Franken later in the book.

The Conason/Alterman/Franken argument that the media are conservative revolves around four major points, all of them fallacious:

1. Liberal bias? Just look at all those conservatives in the media! By far the most common trick of the Left is to focus on the “media,” not the “news media.” How many times do we hear liberals cite Rush Limbaugh, William F. Buckley, Robert Novak, Cal Thomas, Sean Hannity, and so on, as evidence of the conservative “dominance” of the media? What these liberals know full well is that all of these conservatives are commentators, not reporters; their work appears in opinion columns and on TV or radio talk shows — not in news stories in our newspapers or on radio or television news programs. None reports news, but rather they all react to it analytically and, by necessity, with prejudice. More: No conservative on talk radio denies his conservative stance, which puts every one of them in almost perfect juxtaposition with the liberals in the news media, almost all of whom deny their own bias. It is impossible to contend that conservatives dominate the news media — which is why liberals play with the terminology.

2. Who cares about liberal reporters? It’s all about those dastardly conservative media owners. Alterman has a chapter titled “You’re Only As Liberal As the Man Who Owns You.” This is the stuff of Berkeley coffee klatches. Contrary to the Marxist stick-figure caricature, corporate CEOs cannot be automatically stereotyped as supply-side right-wingers dressed in three-piece Armani suits smoking oversized stogies and swigging martinis at the Knickerbocker Club. And if you don’t believe me, ask Michael Eisner or Ted Turner.

Even if we suspend our disbelief for a moment and go along with Alterman that the owners of media corporations are all right-wingers, what does that really tell us? Nothing, as CNN’s Tucker Carlson rightly pointed out when Alterman tried to claim that right-wing media owners control “what gets on the news.” On the February 5, 2003, edition of Crossfire, Carlson swiftly rebutted Alterman’s argument: “Actually, having worked in media corporations all my adult life, I can tell you, as I think you already know, most reporters don’t take orders from the owners of their companies. Most reporters don’t know who the owners of their companies are and have zero contact with them. So that’s not a plausible claim.”

The corporate ownership argument is closely linked to point #1. Liberals like to point out that a majority of newspaper editorial pages normally endorse Republicans in presidential campaigns, as if somehow this validates their theory that the owners are calling the shots. But these are editorial writers — not owners, and not reporters — making this call. Moreover, theirs is a one-day story in the editorial page; this tells us nothing about a paper’s slant 365 days per year in the news section, which is all that matters.

3. Don’t believe us liberals; just listen to what some conservatives say about this silly “liberal media” accusation. Conason quotes former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed mouthing this analysis of the press: “My sense is that it’s probably never as good as you think and it’s never as bad as you think.” But what does that mean? It is not content analysis; it’s conjecture. And yet Conason believes that in saying this, Reed “acknowledged” that “the media have turned to the right.”

Alterman misuses Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol in the same way. Kristol once told The New Yorker that “the liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures,” a point with which most conservatives would disagree, but also a point focusing on the impact of liberal media bias, not its existence, which Alterman seems not to realize is a given for Kristol. Alterman also quotes Pat Buchanan suggesting that the media had been fair to him on the presidential campaign trail, but in no way was Buchanan denying the existence of a liberal media bias. In fact, over the years Buchanan has denounced the liberal media probably hundreds of times, but Alterman has somehow missed all of these quotes. I wonder if he also missed Buchanan’s dismissal of What Liberal Media? In a column in June 2003, Buchanan called Alterman a poor judge of bias and averred that there is indeed a “liberal press,” which includes “all three major networks, PBS, NPR and virtually all major U.S. papers — Boston Globe, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Washington Post, Atlanta Constitution, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Los Angeles Times. . . . Not only are the editorial pages of most major papers liberal, the news staffs are overwhelmingly so.” Buchanan concluded that “Big Media remains a fortress of liberalism,” which is not exactly a ringing endorsement of Alterman’s thesis.

Franken, meanwhile, relies on an ex-conservative to guide him through the world of conspiratorial conservative media politics. But the ex-conservative in question, David Brock, is a highly suspect source, to say the least, for he is an accomplished liar. (Incidentally, Franken, he who condemns “liars” in his book, was forced to confess that he lied in writing the book. In July 2003 he wrote a letter of apology to Attorney General John Ashcroft, admitting that he had not been truthful when he had earlier asked for Ashcroft’s views on abstinence for what he had claimed, falsely, was a book on the subject.)

4. Gore had the election stolen from him and this proves the media’s conservative bias. Conason finds a conspiracy here: “For eight years, the nation’s largest mainstream news organizations devoted substantial resources to bringing down a Democratic administration. Investigative units at ABC News and NBC News chased scandal stories so zealously that they became virtual adjuncts of the prosecutors and conservative groups attacking the White House. . . . That same enmity infected the coverage of Democratic nominee Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election. False stories designed to ruin Gore’s reputation, including phony and distorted quotes, found their way from the Republican National Committee to the conservative media and seeped into the mainstream press.”

That accusation packs quite a wallop — except Conason doesn’t offer a single example to support his case.

Franken devotes an entire chapter to the 2000 presidential election, claiming that it “disproved” the argument that the media display a liberal bias. This thirteen-page study in incoherent ramblings offers no serious content analysis and beats to death one or two utterly irrelevant anecdotes (the media’s handling of Al Gore and the Love Canal issue — stop the presses!).

Alterman devotes a chapter to the 2000 election and another entire chapter to the postelection standoff in Florida. Most of it is a rather hysterical tirade against George W. Bush’s camp for being evil and Al Gore’s camp for not being as clever as the evil Bush camp. Here and there, however, he slips in a quote or factoid as “evidence” of this conservative, anti-Gore bias. For example, he cites The Press Effect, a study by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman which found that “in the five Sunday shows aired by the three networks [on December 3], the word ‘concede’ appeared in twenty-three questions.” In twenty of them, Alterman points out, “the hypothetical conceder was Al Gore.” Somehow he finds this to be rather damning evidence, but he does not consider that perhaps this was so because recount after recount continued to validate Bush’s victory while Gore’s attempts to overturn the election results were rebuffed time and again.

Since all three of these authors seize on the 2000 presidential election as “evidence” of their wacky claims, this book will address the topic in depth, in Chapter 11.

Strangely, even when denying a liberal bias in the media, these writers don’t deny that most reporters are liberal. Alterman admits, “I concur that the overall flavor of the elite media reporting favors gun control, campaign finance reform, gay rights, and the environmental movement” — and he could have easily added abortion, tax hikes, big government, and a host of other liberal policies — though he does feebly submit, “I do not find this bias as overwhelming as some conservatives do.” Franken spends a chapter ridiculing Bernard Goldberg and Bias but also writes, “I think Goldberg’s most valid point is that reporters tend to have more liberal views than the public on social issues.” His argument is reduced to this: Okay, so the media are liberal on social issues, but they’re conservative on economic issues, which are what really matter. But even that is not true. To prove his point that “journalists are economically conservative,” Franken cites a 1998 survey of Washington-area reporters by Virginia Commonwealth University professor David Croteau, who often performs studies for the Far Left (and misnamed) group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). Yet Franken omits the most important numbers from Croteau’s survey — because these numbers contradict his conclusion: When asked to characterize their political orientation on social issues, only 9% of the journalists said “right” while 87% said “left” or “center”; on economic issues, only 19% said “right” while 75% said “left” or “center.” Despite what Al Franken would have us believe, few reporters are conservative on either social or economic issues. Interestingly, Joe Conason cites the same Croteau survey, but even he does not try to make the bogus Franken claim that it reveals journalists to be economically conservative.

The Coming Meltdown

The liberal argument about a conservative media bias is so flimsy as to be amusing. But the Left’s counterattack is serious, and calculated.

Several times during the Clinton years, when some in the media threatened to depart from liberal orthodoxy by focusing on Clinton scandals — Gennifer Flowers, Troopergate, and Monica Lewinsky come to mind — Team Clinton lashed out at the media for being mouthpieces of the vast right-wing conspiracy. The charge was always preposterous, and deliberately so: It was a preemptive strike designed to intimidate the press into compliance. And it worked every time, as the mainstream media responded by either turning their guns on Republicans (the Lewinsky scandal) or dropping the story altogether (Flowers, Troopergate) to prove their liberal bona fides.

No serious liberal believes that a conservative bias dominates the news media. Liberals know what this book will prove: Like the old Outer Limits television series, the Left still controls the transmission, still controls “all that you see and hear.” Television is not the only domain of the liberal news media: The Left still dominates with the printing presses, and yes, still dominates the “news” programming on radio.

So why the hysterical claims of conservative domination of the media? Because liberals fear that their monopoly on news coverage is in jeopardy. For decades, the liberal hegemony over the news media has provided the political Left with the ability not only to slant news coverage portside but actually to control the public conversation, both political and cultural, in America. Being the “social conscience” of the nation — having the ability to direct the national agenda — is quite a power. Liberals don’t want to lose that.

In fact, they are right to be scared. The liberal news media are headed for a meltdown. To be sure, even today the vast power of the liberal media cannot be underestimated. But the days of liberal spin always prevailing are coming to an end. This has nothing to do with some sinister right-wing conspiracy. Rather, the problem lies with those in the liberal news media themselves. So dismissive are they of any claim of liberal bias, no matter how well documented, that they regularly allow this bias to seep into news stories. Even when poll after poll reveals that Americans have lost confidence in the news media, the liberal media elites do not deign to cleanse their industry of the bias that plagues it.

Something else is changing that will speed the collapse of the liberal media’s monopoly on news coverage in this country. Conservatives have traditionally accepted liberal bias in the mainstream news media as a fact of life; it has been a given that the Left controls the news industry just as it holds sway over academia and the arts. But this has bred a certain complacency toward the press that has spelled disaster for one conservative initiative after another. Remember the Contract with America?

But conservatives are learning. No longer do we merely have to accept the liberal agenda of the so-called objective news media. Nothing made this point more clearly than a startling statement by President George W. Bush in October 2003. Fed up with the way the national media were covering the rebuilding efforts in Iraq, Bush stated in a Hearst-Argyle interview that he was going to bypass them. “I’m mindful of the filter through which some news travels,” the president said, “and sometimes you just have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people and that’s what we will continue to do.” The liberal press, predictably, fainted in disbelief. As John Roberts of CBS News put it, “It was the public relations equivalent of a declaration of war aimed at the national media.” Many who read this book will have an altogether different perspective. They’ll wonder why it took the Bush administration so long.

==============================

Newly Formed Faith-Based Groups Lean Left (FN, 040713)

NEW YORK — Concerned over the growing influence of the religious right in the political realm, several groups have recently formed to cast a different light on the faithful’s ability to mix religion with politics.

Some of these newly established organizations claim to be non-partisan while others stake out territory on the political left. But they all say they share a desire to offer a more progressive view about the role of faith in politics than the conservative voice of the religious right.

Among their latest efforts — last month, the left-leaning Center for American Progress hosted its inaugural conference of the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative in Washington, D.C., aiming to join together clergy and scholars of several faiths with political leaders and policymakers. That followed the first national meeting of the Clergy Leadership Network in Cleveland, Ohio, in May.

Additionally, the online advocacy group FaithfulAmerica.org has entered the political front line by addressing social justice issues. It began airing advertisements on June 15 on Arabic television stations apologizing for the Abu Ghraib prison abuses.

“What we’ve seen is a resurgence of a social justice ethic, a desire to match faith with action,” said Tom Perriello, co-director of FaithfulAmerica.org, which raised about $175,000 through the Internet to pay for the ads that they say were needed after the “moral failure” of the United States on the prison abuse scandal.

Perriello said the group is not concerned with partisan politics, but rather intends to act in the “prophetic tradition” to “unite faith communities across the divide on issues of global justice that are receiving insufficient attention.”

The Center for American Progress’ Faith and Policy conference included more than 350 political and religious leaders who reflected on the progressive spirit of the civil rights movement to come up with its vision of social justice. Melody Barnes, a senior fellow at the center, said the conference agenda aimed to “give voice to people who are religious and spiritual and also progressive who feel their views are neglected in the public dialogue.

“We wanted to remind the public and the press of the spirit of a more progressive time. This is not something new,” Barnes said.

Officials at the Clergy Leadership Network said the group was formed in November 2003 as a non-profit, political advocacy organization to counter the influence of “religious right” groups like the Christian Coalition, the Traditional Values Coalition and the Family Research Council.

CLN claims it does not take specific issue stances, but under the leadership of the Rev. Albert M. Pennybacker, a Disciples of Christ minister from Lexington, Ky., and the group’s president and CEO, CLN is promoting a national change in leadership.

“Having new leadership is at a critical stage for the U.S. Without an administration change, the country will continue to digress on domestic issues and internationally with our relationship to other countries,” the Rev. Nathan Wilson, a CLN founder, told FOXNews.com.

Wilson said CLN hopes to appeal to those who value the common good, things like equality, fairness and concern about neighbors. Those qualities, he argues, are lacking in the current administration.

“No one questions the personal faith of the president, but the problem I see is how the faith is being translated into policy,” Wilson said.

Religious groups in recent years have rarely taken on a partisan, left-leaning political role, but instead have formed as conservative, evangelical missions with greater visibility and influence on the right. Exit polls have confirmed that those who attend church frequently vote Republican by a 2-to-1 ratio.

Representatives of those right-leaning religious groups say they don’t believe groups that appeal to the left will have much of an impact.

“The liberal religious group calling for action doesn’t work because it doesn’t have a broad appeal. Unlike the religious right whose political involvement is born out of the scripture, it’s the reverse process for the left,” said Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.

Perkins said he believes groups like CLN are motivated more by politics than faith.

“It doesn’t concern me that they’ve formed a group,” he said.

Dr. Charles Kimball, (liberal) professor and chairman of Wake Forest University’s Department of Religion, said he believes a great religious divide exists in America today.

“What I observe going on is a deeply divided religious group both theologically and politically,” he said.

Kimball, the author of “When Religion Becomes Evil,” explained that the rise of the influential political right mirrors the changes in religion in America.

“What we’ve seen is decline in the membership of mainline churches and a rise in the evangelical churches,” he said. What’s more, “this segment of the American Christian community is very politically active.”

Despite the prominence of the religious right, Kimball said he believes groups like CLN “will have a widespread appeal.”

CLN has already appealed to the Rev. Dr. George Hunter, professor of Evangelism at Asbury Theological Seminary in Lexington, Ky. Hunter calls himself an evangelist and conservative theologically, but said he feels he is progressive on social issues. In a recent essay, Hunter made the case for evangelicals to not remain in the “pocket” of one party.

“For too long, the Republican Party has been able to take the support of Evangelical Christians for granted, and has advanced little of our agenda in return,” Hunter wrote in the essay entitled: “Why Evangelical Leaders Should Be Involved With Both Major Parties.”

He added that both major parties need more people who are “ambassadors for Christ” first and who “know better” than to be co-opted by the ideological wing of either party.

While the two religious sides continue to differ in their beliefs, they do have one thing in common, Kimball said.

“What both sides have in common is that it’s appropriate to bring faith into the public policy arena,” he said.

==============================

Shoot to Sell: Knopf’s tangos with presidential assassination (nro, 040715)

When I was eight years old, school was let out early. The teachers were inexplicably upset, several were crying. But we students weren’t. We were happy to be suddenly released. I didn’t begin to be troubled until I got home and saw that my mother was crying too.

“Honey, I have to tell you something,” she said. “The president’s been shot.”

“Dead?”

She nodded.

An hour later, my father came home, looking terrible. This I did not quite understand. My father loved to laugh at mean things he would read about the president in columns written by someone named Buckley. My father often said that Kennedy was too busy being a “playboy” (whatever that was) to stand up to Khrushchev. Oddly enough, though, my busy father had come home early too, just as upset as my mother.

He fixed himself a Scotch and downed it all just before the phone rang in late afternoon. My mother answered it and told my father who it was, a family friend. I couldn’t hear what my father was told, but I witnessed his reaction. He got all red in the face, and starting barking harsh, angry words. He hung up on his friend, slamming the phone down. A long time would go by before he ever talked to that man again.

When I was older, I learned what the family friend had said to my father. The man, a Republican Kennedy-hater, had said, “Well, they finally got the son of a bitch.”

Forty-one years later, something terrible has reemerged in the soul of America, something immoral. A major publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf, which once published H.L Mencken, D.H. Lawrence, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka — and, most recently, former president Bill Clinton’s My Life — has decided that it is now acceptable to sell, as edgy entertainment, Checkpoint, a novella by Nicholson Baker that explores explicit fantasies about killing President George W. Bush. With saws. With boulders. With bullets. A British newspaper reveals that a main character runs through various outrages over Iraq and concludes, “I’m going to kill that bastard.”

The author and publisher, no doubt, will argue that they are expressing an emotion, not an intention (which would be illegal). The problem is, intentions emerge out of emotions. A powerful enough emotion, validated and popularized by a prominent book by a seemingly respectable publisher, can be taken as an incitement. Checkpoint, whatever its literary conceits, will be an act of linguistic terrorism. “He is beyond the beyond,” the Washington Post reports the main character saying of Bush. “What he’s done with this war. The murder of the innocent. And now the prisons. It makes me so angry. And it’s a new kind of anger, too.”

It is, indeed, a new kind of anger. It is one that takes me aback, even though I am no stranger to partisan rancor. Like many conservatives, I have been willing to risk being considered outré for questioning the Clintons’ ethics, motives, and how they explain their personal life. I have written unkind things about them, as people often do about their leaders in a democracy. There are times when I see Bill Clinton on TV that I want to throw something at the screen.

But I never would throw anything at him. I’d rather break my TV. Nor would I nod in agreement with lunatics who believe that Hillary murdered Vince Foster and dumped his body in a park. I am frightened of people who hate so much, because hate rests on fanatical certitude — an inability to grasp the idea that they might actually be wrong. I could well be wrong about the Clintons. Maybe there is something great about them that I just cannot see. Millions of Americans do.

There was a time when most partisans had such an internalized reality check, and a larger concern for the well-being of the country. On the day President Reagan was shot, I saw reporters and editors — almost all liberal Democrats — with tears welling up in their eyes. They were crying because they realized that a hole had been shot through our Constitution.

Today’s Left has lost its way. The season’s most-talked-about film portrays President Bush as willing to send Americans soldiers to their deaths in order, somehow, to enrich himself and his buddies. Entertainment figures turn fundraisers turn into hate rallies. And such events are embraced by the Democratic establishment as acceptable.

Now I have to wonder — God forbid — what the reaction would be if someone called a senior editor at Knopf and said, “Well, they finally got the son of a bitch.” Would he hang up?

— Mark W. Davis was a White House speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush.

==============================

Al Franken and Air America: Who’s Listening? (NRO, 040719)

New ratings show a small audience for liberal talk radio.

Just six weeks ago, Al Franken boasted that the new liberal radio network, Air America, was beating conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh in the ratings in the nation’s largest media market, New York City. “We beat him,” the host of The Al Franken Show told CNBC’s Tina Brown in early June. “The period we’re opposite Rush, we — we beat WABC, so we think we beat Rush.”

Franken based his statement on calculations done by Air America executives analyzing early and incomplete ratings for the demographic group of listeners between the ages of 25 and 54. Now, however, Arbitron, the audience-research firm, has released final ratings for Spring 2004 — the April/May/June time period that coincides precisely with Air America’s first months on the air. And the news is not nearly as good for Air America as Franken and others had led the public to believe.

In New York, Air America’s programming is heard on WLIB, a station which until the end of March provided listeners with Caribbean-oriented music and talk. In January, February, and March, the quarter before WLIB switched to Air America, the old format earned a 1.3-percent share of the New York audience in the period from 10 A.M. until 3 P.M. That placed WLIB 25th among New York radio stations.

During that same time, WABC, which broadcasts Limbaugh, earned a 4.4-percent share of the audience, putting it in fourth place in the New York market. (The ratings figures, provided by Arbitron, are for all listeners over 12 years old; the company does not release its detailed demographic breakdowns of audiences in each market.)

According to new figures released Friday by Arbitron, Air America has slightly improved WLIB’s ratings in the 10 A.M. to 3 P.M. period but has not managed to gain ground on Limbaugh and WABC. In the April/May/June period, WLIB earned a 1.7-percent share of the New York audience in the late morning and early afternoon, putting it in 23rd place in the overall market. For its part, WABC earned a 4.8 share of the audience, making it tied for second place in the market.

It is possible that the ratings might be somewhat different for specific demographic groups, but it seems reasonable to conclude that, Air America’s early claims aside, Limbaugh’s dominance is safe for now.

In addition, Air America claimed victory, however fleeting, only in the New York City market. Arbitron has not yet released ratings for most other cities. But much of that will be irrelevant for Air America. Even after the extensive publicity that accompanied its launch, the network’s programming is still heard in just 17 of the nation’s 287 radio markets. It is available on the air in just one of the nation’s top-ten markets — New York. Miami, where Air America programming was only recently made available, and Minneapolis, where only part of the network’s programs are available, are the only other cities in the top 20 markets where Air America is heard on the air.

None of that would be terribly newsworthy if Air America had billed itself as a modest startup venture. But Franken and others at the network openly challenged Limbaugh and the entire conservative talk-radio establishment. They even said they were winning. But the new numbers show they have a long, long way to go.

==============================

The Dead Zone: Krugman is squashed in a debate with O’Reilly (National Review Online, 040809)

There could only have been two possible outcomes when the arch-shockpundits of the Left and Right, Paul Krugman and Bill O’Reilly, met on Tim Russert’s CNBC show for a televised showdown. It was either going to be The Beatles, or Quentin Tarantino — “Paul is dead,” or “Kill Bill.”

I’m happy to report it was the former. Bill O’Reilly didn’t just win the debate. He cut out Paul Krugman’s heart and stomped on it. Welcome, Bill O’Reilly, to the Krugman Truth Squad.

This marks the first time that anyone has really stood up to America’s most dangerous liberal pundit on television. And Krugman simply didn’t know how to handle it. At several points in the show Krugman was practically in shock, with hands visibly trembling.

O’Reilly was masterful. He didn’t for one moment grant Krugman the undeserved respect that everyone else grants him, thanks to the prestigious aura of his Princeton professorship and his New York Times column. And O’Reilly didn’t let Krugman get away with any of his usual stunts.

O’Reilly uncompromisingly held Krugman to account for some of the outrageous (and outrageously wrong) things Krugman’s written in his Times columns. In one case, when Krugman denied what O’Reilly accused him of having said, O’Reilly jabbed his index finger toward Krugman’s face and shouted, “Don’t call me a liar, pal. That’s what you do all the time, and I’m not going to sit here and take it.”

O’Reilly had reminded Krugman of his repeated predictions of economic catastrophe as the result of President Bush’s tax cuts — a catastrophe that, obviously, hasn’t materialized, and which Krugman now denies having predicted. Here’s part of the exchange:

O’Reilly: ... Mr. Krugman was dead 100% wrong in his columns, uh, two years ago when he said the Bush tax cuts would lead to a deeper recession. You can read his book and see how wrong he was.

Krugman: Actually, you can read it. I never said that. I said it would lead to lousy job creation.

O’Reilly: Column after column after column. You made the point, in your book, okay, that these cuts, these tax cuts were going to be disastrous for the economy.

Krugman: Nope ...

O’Reilly: They haven’t been.

Krugman: Uh, uh, I’m sorry. That’s a lie. Let me just say, that’s a lie.

O’Reilly: It’s not a lie.

Krugman: It’s a lie.

Krugman’s the liar, not O’Reilly. It’s just too bad O’Reilly didn’t have a quotation at hand to prove it. Among dozens of possible examples, Krugman wrote in his April 22, 2003, New York Times column that

Aside from their cruelty and their adverse effect on the quality of life, these cuts will be a major drag on the national economy. … it’s clear that the administration’s tax-cut obsession isn’t just busting the budget; it’s also indirectly destroying jobs by preventing any rational response to a weak economy.

O’Reilly followed up by cleverly asking Krugman — since Krugman was claiming not to have predicted a deeper recession after the tax cuts — whether he instead predicted the economic growth of the last year? Krugman was so flustered — no doubt knowing he was checkmated — that he stammered out this remarkable confession:

Compare me … compare me, uh, with anyone else, and I think you’ll see that my forecasting record is not great.

You can be sure we’ll be quoting that one again and again! On this one matter, we most heartily agree.

What was most impressive about O’Reilly’s performance in the debate is that he was genuinely not partisan. In fact, he often took positions that were conciliatory to Krugman with respect to heated partisan issues. As but one example among several, he offered freely that “the Iraq war was a big screw-up.” But over and over, he shamed Krugman by rubbing his face in the exaggerated and partisan way that he and others in the liberal press handle these issues.

Faced with an opponent who was on the one hand so conciliatory, and on the other hand so aggressive, Krugman could do little more than throw out feeble ripostes or roll over and change the subject. At one point O’Reilly faulted Krugman for appearing in public with the likes of Al Franken:

O’Reilly: The war on terror may not have been best served by the Iraq adventure. That’s a legitimate debate. What I object to is the lying charges, the slander and defamation that comes out of the Krugman wing — if you want to call it — of the social landscape. [Krugman shakes his head and smiles.] Don’t give me that! Who are you appearing with today, in your book signing? You’re appearing with Stewart Smalley [the Saturday Night Live role played by Franken], the biggest character assassinator in the country.

Krugman: The guy you compared to Goebbels?

O’Reilly: You are in with the most vile form of defamation in this country. You are pandering to it. And I resent it, sir.

Krugman: We resent you, too.

O’Reilly: Yeah, I know you do. And you know what you’ll do about the resentment? You’ll lie about me and attack me personally. That’s what you’ll do.

Krugman: Let’s watch that, okay?

When O’Reilly blasted Krugman for the New York Times’s excessive and repetitious coverage of the horrors of Abu Ghraib — and the absence of stories on the United Nations oil-for-food scandal — Krugman couldn’t even manage to mouth his usual brown-nosing platitudes about how bend-over-backwards even-handed the Times is:

I think if you look, well … I’m, I’m not gonna, you know … I’m not here to, to defend the New York Times, which has nothing to do with what I write in the column. Alright? So I don’t want to get into this one.

Starting the last segment of the show, Krugman tried to take the offensive what was clearly a prepared “gotcha,” relying on written notes he’d held in front of him during the whole program. Having discussed Michael Moore and his film, Fahrenheit 9-11, in the previous segment, Krugman looked furtively at Russert like a little boy about to play a nasty prank, and said,

Actually I just want to say a word about Fahrenheit 9-11, uh, just to talk a little bit about Bill O’Reilly’s credibility on this. Uh, uh, Bill has said on-air that, uh, Michael Moore believes we are an evil country, and if you saw the film you know that’s not true. And, uh, actually, he denied in the same program that you said what you just said, but anyways … I just think that’s a little something to look at in terms of the credibility.

If the sheer feebleness and inarticulateness of that attack leaves you wondering what Krugman was trying to accomplish, let me explain. As hard as it is to believe, apparently Krugman’s admiration for Moore and his film is so deep that, in his mind, O’Reilly’s saying Moore called America “evil” is enough to impugn O’Reilly’s credibility. Krugman says, “I think there were a lot of things in that film that showed that this is a guy who really does love his country. And he loves the working people of America.”

Whatever you may think of the film, all O’Reilly had done on his radio show was accurately quote Moore speaking of “this country of mine, which is known for bringing sadness and misery to places around the globe.” That statement was first reported in a fawningly pro-Moore article in The New Yorker last February, and was repeated two days before O’Reilly’s show by conservative New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks.

Not exactly Watergate, is it? But it was the best the flustered Krugman could do, though it ended up leading him into an O’Reilly trap. The trap revealed what I consider to be Krugman’s worst vice — the way he recycles propaganda and rumors from leftist gossip sites, giving them the imprimatur of the New York Times. In this case, it was Media Matters, the website run by confessed liar David Brock (and backed by millionaire George Soros).

O’Reilly: And where did you get that little “evil” quote, by the way. You don’t listen to The Radio Factor [O’Reilly’s radio show.]

Krugman: No, but they have video clips. They have, they have the clips.

O’Reilly: Well who gave it to you?

Krugman: Yeah, it was Media Matters.

O’Reilly: [Booming] Media Matters! Oh, I see! A real objective website.

Krugman: Hey, wait a second, sir …

O’Reilly: Hey, Mr. Propaganda, you ought to take and do your own research, pal, and stop taking that left-wing garbage, throwing it out there for the folks.

Krugman: What have I said that was false?

O’Reilly: Do your own research!

Krugman: It helps me …

Looks to me like America’s most dangerous liberal pundit learned a couple valuable lessons this past Saturday. For one thing, he learned that it’s a lot easier to call people liars, lie about your own past statements, and spread partisan innuendo from the secure redoubt of the op-ed page of the New York Times, where the only feedback you get is the hand-picked atta-boys published on the Times’s letters page. Maybe he learned that you can’t get away with that stuff when there’s a living, breathing opponent across the table from you — someone like Bill O’Reilly, who’s not afraid to fight back.

And could it be, just possibly, that Krugman has finally learned a little something about humility?

— Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an independent economics and investment-research firm. He welcomes your comments at don@trendmacro.com.

==============================

The Fall: A bankrupt generation is fading away (National Review Online, 040924)

Dan Rather’s initial, furious street-side defense of an amateurish forgery — smug, huffy, self-righteous — brings to mind one of those bad movies about the Paris barricades, especially the grainy, black-and-white shots of powdered and wigged aristocrats on their way to the Guillotine, yelling out of their carriages at pitchfork-carrying peasants.

Worse than being duped, worse than cobbling together a highly politicized hit-piece during a war and in the waning days of an election, worse than the shady nature of the “unimpeachable” sources and the likely sordid origins of the story, and worse even than the pathetic nature of CBS’s “expert” witnesses — worse than all that was Rather’s ten-day denial of reality, culminating in the surreal half-admission that the phony documents could not be verified as accurate. That’s the equivalent of saying that a corpse cannot be proven to be alive.

Commentators have envisioned Rather’s fall as symbolic of a “paradigm shift” and the “end of the era” — an event that has crystallized the much larger and ongoing demise of the old establishment media. Allegories from the French Revolution and the emperor without any clothes to the curtain scene in The Wizard of Oz have been evoked to illustrate Rather’s dilemma and the hypocrisy of all that went before. We have come a long way since the 1960s: The once-revolutionary pigs taking over the manor are now bloated and strutting on two legs as they feast on silver inside the farmhouse.

First CBS went into denial; then it tried to smear its critics; next it emulated the Nixonian two-step; and finally it stonewalled altogether, hoping that the 24-hour news buzz would fade before it ultimately did. Meanwhile, more and more Americans yawn and have already switched the channel to cable news. We keep waiting for Mike Wallace on Sunday’s 60 Minutes to stare down Dan Rather on the set of Tuesday’s 60 Minutes, sticking his mike in Dan’s face, springing on him a long list of his previously unknown sins, capped off with the zoom shot on a fidgety, sweating Rather, as the tick, tick, tick fades into a primetime commercial.

The Big Three may deride the newsreaders at Fox as blond bimbos, but millions of Americans learned long ago that there are probably more liberals on Fox than conservatives on PBS, NPR, CBS, ABC, and NBC combined — and the former are honest about politics in a way the latter are not.

The New York Times talks about standards and “journalistic integrity,” but given its recent public record no one was surprised by the existence of a Jayson Blair, or by the fact that under Howell Raines a once-grand paper became a caricature of 19th-century yellow journalism, with possibly fewer daily readers than Matt Drudge. Elites may lament that someone who did not go to the Columbia School of Journalism can affect more readers than the Times, but instead of the usual aristocratic snarls they should ask themselves how and why that came about — and why, for example, watching a PBS documentary by Bill Moyers or listening to Garrison Keillor on NPR is now to endure a publicly subsidized extension of their silly rants at lectures and in op-eds.

It has taken a lot to end the credibility of the liberal dynasty, inasmuch as there were many prior provocations — Peter Arnett airing a blatantly dishonest 1998 mythodrama on CNN about Americans using Sarin gas in Laos; Dan Rather giving a flawed 1988 account of American grotesqueries in Vietnam (The Wall Within), replete with phony veterans spinning lies about horrific war crimes. But then we have not quite seen anything like the shamelessness of airing forged documents backed by unhinged witnesses and verified by suspect “experts” — all in a time of war and with the intent of smearing a sitting conservative president.

True, given his history and influence, Dan Rather was the most logical person to pull all that off — and so now he is the right person to take the collective fall for the sins of his brethren. How strange that bloggers are far more representative of democratic culture than Rather; that dittoheads are grassroots in a way that NPR is not; and that cable news is more honest in its politicking than Peter Jennings. No wonder CBS has gone from being controversial to annoying, and soon irrelevant — the ultimate sin given the corporate bottom line.

Hypocrisy and aristocratic smugness are drawing the ancient regime to its death. Rather’s now-ossified generation came of age in the heady Vietnam era, on the apparent premise that Main Street, USA, and the Kiwanis had given us Vietnam, Watergate, racism, and the other isms and phobias — and that only hip, swashbuckling 60s-types could tell the American people the “truth” about what the “establishment” was up to.

Ever so incrementally along this inevitable road to Rathergate, John Kerry’s searing Cambodia-patrol story, and Kitty Kelley’s Reagan and Bush pseudographies, many Americans began to worry about the ends-justifying-the-means culture of the sanctimonious Left. The counterculture was defended on the dubious premise that the activists needed to fight fire with fire as they exposed everything from Nixon’s lies to the embarrassing Pentagon Papers.

But in the process there also began a professional devolution, as questionable legal and ethical methods were excused in the name of the greater good. We got the Ellsberg pilfered documents, the blank check of “unnamed sources,” trips to Hanoi and Paris to meet the enemy, Peter Arnett broadcasting gloom and doom live from Baghdad — all culminating in the two-bit forgeries used for the “higher” cause of unseating George Bush. Daniel Ellsberg, Jane Fonda, and CBS may have done things that were legally wrong (like the latter’s promulgating fraudulent government documents to defame a government official), but in postmodern logic they were morally “right” given their superior knowledge, character, and progressive intentions.

We do not expect any more citations of sources in Bob Woodward’s “inside” history, even when he uncovers thought processes buried deep inside someone’s brain; after all, he discovered Deep Throat and broke Watergate. The list of plagiarist historians is long and growing, yet mitigating circumstances are advanced since such mendacity is useful in exposing the bad gun and bomb lobbies or praising the good Kennedys.

Wasn’t it wrong that Jimmy Carter campaigned for a Peace Prize by venomous criticism of his country on the eve of war — and was praised for it by the Nobel committee, which gave him the medal at that precise time? No problem, he builds houses for the poor and loves the U.N. Who cares that Teresa Heinz-Kerry and John Edwards rant on about those who are “un-American”? They, of all people, can’t be employing McCarthyesque invective, can they?

But the regime is crumbling on campuses as well. Too many university professors in the humanities dropped long ago their allegiance to the disinterested search for truth, or to teaching students facts and methods. How could one be so constrained and parochial when a war was raging on, and millions of youth needed to be prepared as ideological warriors in the struggle to remake our culture? Meanwhile, teaching loads decreased, annual tuition soared higher than the rate of inflation, and the baccalaureate no longer reflected much erudition. Surely, progressive academics, of all people, would not stand by while their curriculum was politicized, free speech suppressed, their part-time lecturers systematically exploited, their working-class students priced out of the market, and their research tainted with bias?

The U.N. also seems to be going the way of CBS. Only a little over a quarter of our citizenry feels that the organization reflects American values. Kofi Annan was blind to the greatest financial scandal of our time, one that contributed to the deaths of thousands in Iraq and enriched cronies, including perhaps his own son. He survives only because a biased media has judged that his progressivism warrants shielding him from the type of scrutiny afforded Halliburton.

Under Mr. Annan, the U.N. won’t say a word about Tibet or do anything about the thousands butchered in Africa — how can it when murdering states such as Cuba, Algeria, and Iran are on its committees overseeing human rights? Kofi Annan’s U.N. has lost its ideals, become counterfeit, and thus is now mostly irrelevant.

Those who profess to be Democrats are reaching historically low numbers. Many prominent Democrats are hypocrites: Feminists Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton were uncouth womanizers; the principled war critic Senator Byrd cut his teeth in the Klan; and the self-proclaimed moralists Senators Harkin and Kennedy have both been caught in postmodern problems with the truth. Being rich and a lawyer helps too. Most prominent Democrats and their enablers are either lawyers or multimillionaires, and now often both. Running a hardware store may explain your Republicanism; inheriting the profits from a chain of 1,000 hardware franchises will likely make you a new Democrat.

If we wonder why CBS is in trouble, why no one trusts the universities or the U.N., or why the Democrats may soon lose the Senate, the House, the presidency, and the Supreme Court, the answer has a lot to do with arrogant hypocrisy — the idea that how one lives need have nothing to do with what one professes, that idealistic rhetoric can provide psychological cover for privilege and preference, and that rules need not apply for those self-proclaimed as smarter and nicer than the rest of us. But none of us — none — get a pass simply because we claim that we are more moral, educated, or sophisticated than most.

In the meantime, as this unclean tale slowly reaches it end — and it will — CBS soon may have to decide between having Dan Rather and having an audience. Dan Rather, in his abject non-professionalism and in his overweening arrogance, has become the symbol of all that has gone so terribly wrong with our once-romantic but now confused, compromised, and aging generation of change. Such are the wages for those who destroy timeless rules and proven protocols for short-term expediency and thus find no sanctuary in their own hour of need.

Mr. Rather would do well to remember Leo Amery’s famous evocation of Cromwell, when he once bade Neville Chamberlain to get out:

“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”

So, Dan, go, and let us have done with you — in the name of God, go now.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a visiting professor for the month of September and a fellow of Hillsdale College.

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The Bumper Sticker Proof (Washington Dispatch, 040920)

Commentary by Patrick Rooney

Have you ever noticed as you drive the roads and highways how many “Kerry for President” bumper stickers there are in comparison to “Bush for President” stickers?

I have. And we all know why that is.

Let’s face it, everyone—liberal and conservative alike—understands the reason why. It’s the same reason that conservative newspapers on college campuses are much more likely to be stolen than are liberal papers.

It’s the same reason conservative yard signs are more likely to be uprooted from the ground than are liberal signs. A young girl can have a conservative placard ripped out of her hands and torn to shreds, where I doubt if we’d see the same happen to a young girl carrying a liberal sign.

It’s also the same reason conservatives are more likely to be vilified, castigated, ridiculed, and even have their lives threatened much more often than are liberals.

The reason we see all these “Kerry for President” stickers in far greater numbers is obvious—liberals know, that for all their “conservatives want to poison the water and kill grandma” rhetoric, they actually feel quite safe around conservatives.

On the other hand, conservatives complain how dangerous many liberals are, and they’re right. Conservatives know that when they make the decision to slap that bumper sticker on their car, there’s a reasonable chance they may be the victim of some good old-fashioned vandalism or worse.

And what about actually speaking out? Conservatives have long been aware of the physical danger often associated with speaking out to “peace and love” liberals.

You see, it’s not that we never speak about this elephant—or donkey as the case may be—in the middle of the room. It’s just that we accept his behavior as normal. And the perpetrator accepts the behavior as normal too.

But here’s the kicker—many liberals then go out and call conservatives “mean spirited”, “Hitler”, and “racist”, knowing it’s all a lie. But amazingly in some people’s minds the lie sticks!

Communists are known for a “means justifies the ends” mentality. In other words, their ends are so “glorious” that the means—which we know includes torture and mass murder—are considered acceptable and often necessary.

We are seeing that Islamic terrorists think the same way.

Unfortunately, too many liberals have adopted a “means justifies the ends” mentality too. While the vast majority don’t go to the limits of Communists and Islamo-Fascists, it is clear that going beyond the constraints of conscience is often considered no problem in their quest for the ends they seek.

The religion of these liberals is hatred. Their glorious vision is really not some kind of utopia; instead their highest happiness is to see the downfall of those who remind them of their own lack of character.

The current president is a man of character. His very presence reminds his enemies of their moral ugliness and weakness. He has become the focal point of their fury, and as we know, fury unleashed knows no bounds.

There is a misnomer bandied about, often by well meaning conservatives, that liberals are “good people”; that in the words of singer Dave Mason, “There ain’t no good guys, there ain’t no bad guys, there’s only you and me and we just disagree.”

Nice try, Dave. The real truth is that while there are decent, well-meaning liberals, the average liberal is not a good person. Liberals are typically angry people underneath their peace and love and “anything goes” exterior. “Anything goes except truth” should be their motto.

Don’t get me wrong—not all conservatives are angels—far from it. But there’s nowhere near the level of hate in the conservative movement as there is in the world of liberalism.

Conservatives must resist the temptation to allow the threats of liberals—overt or implied—to intimidate them into silence of word or deed. We all must stand, using wisdom and courage as our guide.

And the bumper sticker proof should be used to quickly end future liberal attempts to portray conservatives as neo-Hitlers. The American people are beginning to figure out just who the real haters are. And that gives me hope for our future.

Patrick Rooney is the Director of Development at BOND, the Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny, a nonprofit organization dedicated to “Rebuilding the Family By Rebuilding the Man.” (a black person)

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Back to Nature: We shouldn’t forget about the natural basis of national security (National Review Online, 041013)

The most important recent articulation of what distinguishes the Republican party today has been offered by one of our most brilliant and astute political scientists, James Ceaser of the University of Virginia. In the lead article of the fall issue of neoconservative journal The Public Interest, Ceaser writes (with Daniel DiSalvo) that there is at least one sense in which the upcoming election “presents us with a choice, not an echo.” The Republican party is a “‘radical’ or ‘revolutionary’ party, with a political project grounded on a clear foundation,” and it “is perhaps the last remaining party in a major democratic country with such an underpinning.” This revolutionary project is seen, in practice, in the assertiveness of President Bush’s foreign policy of “preventive war and regime transformation,” which was “not simply a minimal response to events, but represented a new and highly controversial strategy.”

The policy’s theoretical radicalism is seen in the president’s justification of that policy through “appealing to the universality of democracy and human rights.” The president’s view that “there is a structure or order to human things and their affairs, and standards can be both known and used to guide political action” is not properly termed “neoconservative,” according to Ceaser and DiSalvo, but rather “neo-natural right.” The Democrats, in opposing both this practical and this theoretical innovation, are now the true conservatives. They want to return to our old caution about using American principles to change the world, and they see Bush’s theoretical and practical go-it-alone American assertiveness as dangerous chauvinism. They, Ceaser and DiSalvo observe, oppose natural-rights foundationalism with global consensualism. While the Democrats see no alternative than looking to our allies for guidance, President Bush looks to nature itself.

Ceaser and DiSalvo make the troubling observation that there is now no other way to justify the Iraq war. Its “justification...on primary defensive grounds has evaporated with the failure to find weapons of mass destruction.” That fact, together with the very messy and fairly bloody reconstruction, has, in fact, eroded public support for the war. Most Americans, the authors imply, think that as a merely defensive measure the war was misconceived and more trouble than it was worth. Thought about in that way, the war could easily lead to the president’s defeat. So it can only be justified now “as a first step in a strategic plan to change the political culture of the Middle East and reduce the terrorist threat.” The election should be viewed as a referendum on the Iraq war, conceived as part of the president’s larger “neo-natural-right” policy vision. If the president wins, he would have “the sanction of the majority” for that “vision for the Republican party.”

My first objection to this sharp and provocative line of analysis is that there is no evidence that, however the election turns out, the majority would be sanctioning any such thing. How many Americans really believe that we are now going to end up doing all that much to change the political culture of Iraq, much less any other Middle Eastern country? A majority of Americans may well still be with the president in his resolve to stay the course in Iraq — I know I am — but our expectations have been chastened somewhat by harsh experience.

Polls show that Americans have some genuine reservations — fair or unfair — about the president’s prudence concerning Iraq, and if the election turned on the outcome of that war alone — however conceived — he might not be reelected. But the voters still give him very high marks — especially in comparison to Kerry — on the war on terror. They understand that broader war more in terms of national defense than in terms of regime change. What they mean, primarily, is that Americans will be safer led by Bush than by Kerry; like Zell Miller, they wouldn’t put the safety of their families in the Democrats’ hands. People accept that some preventive military action might be necessary to defend this country effectively, and that we should of course promote regimes friendly to our principles and interests. But I see little evidence of a popular desire for more wars based on natural-right transformationalism.

I also think that Ceaser and DiSalvo exaggerate when they say Bush’s foreign policy is “the decisive issue of the 2004 election.” If Bush wins, I tend to think his margin will come from his ability to animate the enthusiasm of cultural or religious conservatives, even as he has aroused the unprecedented hatred of sophisticated American secularists around cultural issues that have little to do with Iraq. Here, too, we can see that the division between our two parties might be evaluated according to natural-right standards.

A nation lives contrary to nature, surely, if it is unable to perpetuate itself by bringing new citizens into the world. So the European nations, everyone knows, are endangered by their strangely unnatural dearth of births. We Americans still replace ourselves in sufficient numbers. But a closer look at the data, Phillip Longman explains in the September 2 Washington Post, makes clear that even our fertility rate is dropping or just remaining low among all our ethnic groups. Immigrant groups, it seems, can’t be relied upon to have lots of kids for more than a generation or two.

“Fertility rates,” Longman goes on, “correlate strongly with religious conviction. In the United States, fully 47% of people who attend church weekly say that their ideal family size is three or more children. By contrast, only 27% of those who seldom attend church want that many kids.” If Americans weren’t more religious — especially more evangelical and more Mormon — than the Europeans, our demographic facts would also be dangerously contrary to nature.

“High fertility rates,” Longman continues, “correlate strongly with support for George W. Bush.” Looking back to 2000, “if the Gore states seceded from the Bush states and formed a new nation, it would have the same fertility rate, and the same rapidly aging population, as France.” Our religious conservatives are the reason we are not fading away like France. That fact is as important as any other for our national security. Surely there is some deep connection between our nation’s singular acceptance of its global military responsibilities, our singular acceptance of our familial responsibilities, and our singularly strong religious belief. The nation that can, for good reason, argue for the natural superiority of its principles and practices in the world today understands itself, at its best, as seeing no conflict between its natural duties and its duties to its Creator. The conservative view of the complex distinctiveness of the American idea of liberty is that it allows for the flourishing of all the goods that constitute lives that are free, rational, familial, social, political, and religious by nature. Liberals, conservatives believe, endanger those goods by understanding liberty too readily as freedom from the responsibilities that we are given with our natural purposes.

In this important respect, the Republican party remains genuinely conservative. It wants to preserve lives oriented around home, family, God, country, and personal achievement from the abstract, theoretical innovations associated with Democratic elitism. Those innovations, as Ceaser and DiSalvo say, are characteristically imposed upon us by the courts, and our judiciary now “serves as the de facto legislative branch of the Democratic party.” So maybe the key issue for most Republicans is — or should be — democratic opposition to what amounts to radical, revolutionary judicial activism. Such activism is a threat to the natural goods that make most American lives worth living.

— Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Government at Berry College. He is author of Aliens in America: The Strange Truth About Our Souls.

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An Army of One (Weekly Standard, 041025)

From the October 25, 2004 issue: What it’s like to be the only Republican in your high school.

I GO TO AMITY SR. HIGH SCHOOL in Woodbridge, Connecticut—a liberal public school in a liberal state. Conservatives are scarce around here and outspoken ones are scarcer. I am so “unusual” that people (friends and even some I don’t know) call me “Dan, Dan, Republican,” which is a good-natured joke, sort of.

These days, I never go to school without my Election 2004 battle kit—a hefty red folder that I carry in my backpack titled (on account of my infinite humility) “Proving People Wrong.” This folder holds everything from IRS tax return figures to a comparison of Bush versus Gore in terms of college grades (Bush wins). I always have my folder with me, so that when I get into a political discussion (which might happen a dozen times a day and is likely to happen even more often as Election Day approaches), I can confront my opponents with the facts. They hate facts. They prefer to take refuge behind a slogan: Bush is Dumb.

The teachers are predictable liberals; the students are more worrying. In the white-painted low-ceilinged cafeteria with noise echoing off the brick and cinderblock walls, I eat lunch at a table of eight friends among 400 noisy kids. Politics is usually on the menu. Most lunch-table liberals say that they do not love America, and would not defend it. One boy says he’d just as soon live in Canada. They can’t understand why I should be so enthusiastic about our country. Isn’t it more or less interchangeable with a few dozen other rich western democracies?

As I was writing this article, I chatted online with one of my best friends, a liberal who spent part of his summer working in Washington as a page in the House of Representatives. He asked what my article was about. To put it briefly, I said, “It’s about kids who don’t love their country.” He answered: “Do they have to love their country? Is that a requirement?”

The most striking feature of my political debates is the utter ignorance of traditional values—whether American or Christian or Jewish—shown even by intelligent students. The typical student thinks that morality is a simple matter of doing what is “good for people,” and that the way to do this is to vote for Democrats, since the Democratic party stands for “making things better.”

Why do students talk and think this way? As computer geeks used to say, garbage in, garbage out.

We are taught U.S. history out of politically correct textbooks. The books are boring and tedious and, what’s worse, extremely misleading. The pages are carefully measured to spend equal time on the accomplishments of men and women, whites and nonwhites. They take care not to offend America’s past enemies, but don’t seem to worry about offending Americans.

My textbook last year, for example, was the 12th edition of The American Pageant by David Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and the late Thomas Bailey. Its chapter on World War II has more than a page on the relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor and one sentence on the Bataan Death March. (What does one infer from this about the value of an American life?) It spends no time at all on the American GI, but gives a comprehensive discussion of the number of women who served, and where. (It carefully refers to “the 15 million men and women in uniform.”) The discussion, in short, is warped, incompetent, anachronistic.

Worst of all are The American Pageant’s blatantly biased discussions of modern politics. Compare the chapters on Carter and Reagan. Carter’s actions are often described as “courageous.” For instance: Carter’s “popularity remained exceptionally high during his first few months in office, even when he courted public disfavor by courageously keeping his campaign promise to pardon some ten thousand draft evaders of the Vietnam War era.” Or: “Carter courageously risked humiliating failure by inviting President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel to a summit conference at Camp David.”

The book dramatically describes how Carter, in the summer of 1979, “like a royal potentate of old, summoning the wise men of the realm for their counsel in a time of crisis,” went up to Camp David (“the mountaintop”) while his people awaited “the results of these extraordinary deliberations.” Then he made a “remarkable television address” in which he “chided his fellow citizens for falling into a ‘moral and spiritual crisis’ and for being too concerned with ‘material goods.’” (Everyone else remembers this event as Carter’s pathetic “malaise” speech.) The authors sum Carter up as “an unusually intelligent, articulate, and well-meaning president,” but one who was “badly buffeted by events beyond his control, such as the soaring price of oil, runaway inflation, and the galling insult of the continuing hostage crisis in Iran.” In other words: He did a great job, and the awful things that happened during his administration weren’t his fault.

The Reagan chapter starts by describing Reagan’s high hopes and goals, but quickly deteriorates: “At first, ‘supply-side’ economics seemed to be a beautiful theory mugged by a gang of brutal facts” as the economy went downhill. Then there was a “healthy” recovery. But “for the first time in the twentieth century, income gaps widened between the richest and poorest Americans. The poor got poorer and the very rich grew fabulously richer, while middle-class incomes largely stagnated.”

This is how the authors describe the largest peacetime economic boom of the 20th century, a period in which the average income of all quintiles from poorest to richest increased. The book then quickly moves on to discuss the deficit: “The staggering deficits of the Reagan administration constituted a great economic failure. . . . The deficits virtually guaranteed that future generations of Americans would either have to work harder than their parents, lower their standard of living, or both, to pay their foreign creditors when the bills came due.”

Reagan’s most important achievement, ending the Cold War, is never mentioned in the Reagan section. The authors imply that the credit for ending the Cold War goes to none other than Mikhail Gorbachev. My classmates swallow it all. They believe that Gorbachev suddenly decided one day that it was time for his country to lose the Cold War. My history teacher thought it incredible that I refused to credit Gorbachev with “allowing us to win.”

Perhaps needless to add, there are no lessons on the virtue of patriotism. Like the textbooks, my teachers are extremely charitable when discussing American enemies; from the Soviet Union to the Vietnamese Communists, they all get the benefit of the doubt. I would like to believe that this is only a temporary situation, perhaps one that a few well-placed educational reformers could begin to correct. But my fear is that it will take a long time to repair our public schools. Meanwhile, what will become of a country whose youngest citizens have been taught to have so little affection for it?

Daniel Gelernter publishes the Republican Dan blog at republicandan.blogspot.com.

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The End of the Left’s History: The world has moved on (National Review Online, 041202)

The hysterical reaction of the Western Left to the reelection of President George W. Bush is not just a primal scream from politicians and intellectuals deprived of political power. The violent language, numerous acts of violence, and demonization of Bush and his electorate — the same as that directed against Tony Blair in Britain, Jose Maria Aznar in Spain, and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy — portend a more fundamental event: the death rattle of the traditional Left, both as a dominant political force and as an intellectual vision.

For the most part, the Left only wins elections nowadays when their candidates run on their opponents’ platform (Clinton and Blair) or when panic overwhelms the political process (Zapatero and Schroeder). Under normal circumstances, leftists running as leftists rarely win, proving that their ideology — the ideology that dominated political and intellectual debate for most of the last century — is spent. When their ideas were in vogue, leftist advocates took electoral defeat in stride, as they were confident that their vision was far more popular — because far more accurate — than their opponents’ view of the world. History and logic were on their side. But no more. Incoherent rage and unbridled personal attacks on the winners are sure signs of a failed vision.

Ironically, the Left’s view of history provides us with part of the explanation for its death. Marx and Hegel both understood that the world constantly changes, and ideas change along with it. The world they knew — and successfully transformed — was a class-bound society dominated by royalty and aristocracy. They hurled themselves into class struggle, believing it to be the engine of human history, and they fought for liberty for all. Successive generations of leftists preached and organized democratic revolution at home and abroad, from the overthrow of tyrants to the abolition of class privileges and the redistribution of both political power and material wealth.

In true dialectical fashion, they were doomed by their own success. As once-impoverished workers became wealthier, the concept of the proletariat became outdated, along with the very idea of class struggle. Then the manifest failure and odious tyranny of the 20th-century leftist revolutions carried out in the name of the working class — notably in Russia, China, and Cuba — undermined the appeal of the old revolutionary doctrines, no matter how desperately the Left argued that Communist tyrannies were an aberration, or a distortion of their vision.

Thus the ideology of the Left became anachronistic, even in western Europe, its birthplace and the source of its historical model. But the biggest change was the emergence of the United States as the most powerful, productive, and creative country in the world. It was always very hard for the Left to understand America, whose history, ideology, and sociology never fit the Left’s schemas. Even those who argued that there were class divisions in America had to admit that the “American proletariat” had no class consciousness. The political corollary was that there was never a Marxist mass movement in the United States. Every European country had big socialist parties and some had substantial Communist parties; the United States had neither. Indeed, most American trade unions were anti-Communist. As Seymour Martin Lipset and others have demonstrated, the central ideals of European socialism — which inspired many American leftist intellectuals — were contained in and moderated by the American Dream. America had very little of the class hatred that dominated Europe for so long; American workers wanted to get rich, and believed they could. Leftist Europeans — and the bulk of the American intellectual elite — believed that only state control by a radical party could set their societies on the road to equality.

The success of America was thus a devastating blow to the Left. It wasn’t supposed to happen. And American success was particularly galling because it came at the expense of Europe itself, and of the embodiment of the Left’s most utopian dream: the Soviet Union. Even those Leftists who had been outspokenly critical of Stalin’s “excesses” could not forgive America for bringing down the Soviet Empire, and becoming the world’s hyperpower. As Marx and Hegel would have understood, the first signs of hysterical anti-Americanism on the Left accompanied the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The resurgence of American economic power and the defeat of the Soviets exposed the failure of the Left to keep pace with the transformation of the world. The New York intellectual who proclaimed her astonishment at Reagan’s election by saying, “I don’t know a single person who voted for him,” well described the dialectical process by which an entire set of ideas was passing into history.

The slow death of the Left was not limited to its failure to comprehend how profoundly the world had changed, but included elements that had been there all along, outside the purview of leftist thought. Marx was famously unable to comprehend the importance of religion, which he dismissively characterized as the “opiate of the masses,” and the Left had long fought against organized religion. But America had remained a religious society, which both baffled and enraged the leftists. On the eve of the 2004 elections, some 40% of the electorate consisted of born-again Christians, and the world at large was in the grips of a massive religious revival, yet the increasingly isolated politicians and intellectuals of the Left had little contact and even less understanding of people of faith.

Unable to either understand or transform the world, the Left predictably lost its bearings. It was entirely predictable that they would seek to explain their repeated defeats by claiming fraud, or dissing their own candidates, or blaming the stupidity of the electorate. Their cries of pain and rage echo those of past elites who looked forward and saw the abyss. There is no more dramatic proof of the death of the Left than the passage of its central vision — global democratic revolution — into the hands of those who call themselves conservatives.

History has certainly not ended, but it has added a new layer to its rich compost heap.

— Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. He is resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Deal with it, Hollywood (Washington Times, 041108)

When I titled my book “Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco,” I could just as easily have pointed out that liberals are from Hollywood. It really is a different planet from the one most of us live on.

To begin with, it is populated with high school drop-outs and drama majors making millions of dollars a year, convinced they should decide how the rest of us think, live and vote. What you must never forget about these pampered pets is that the first lesson they learned in acting class was to get in touch with their feelings. Those self-absorbing exercises only served to diminish whatever thought processes they might have possessed. The end result is that, at their best, they can mimic emotions and action, but have an impossible time trying to suggest they are thinking about anything at all serious.

Never forget that the things we see on the screen are shadows. The real articles are people who spend their lives wearing other people’s clothes, mouthing other people’s lines, and being told how to walk and talk by directors. They should come with warning labels stating that, for all their fame and fortune, they are as bright as department store mannequins.

This past election was the most bitterly fought in memory, but nowhere was it waged more vituperatively than in Hollywood. In recent months, lifelong friendships have been torn asunder. Just this morning, I heard about a poker game involving writers and producers that had weathered 20 years of trials and tribulations but could not survive George W. Bush’s re-election.

One thing you have to give Hollywood celebrities credit for is their monumental gall. I mean, Barbra Streisand insults conservatives more often than she bathes, knowing full well it won’t harm her CD sales. Julia Roberts announces that if you look up Republican in the dictionary, you’ll find it right after reptiles, and yet she continues selling movie tickets, even though 52% of the electorate recently cast their ballots for Mr. Bush.

You’ll notice that show biz liberals are very outspoken, just so long as they’re addressing the choir. But you rarely see them placing themselves in a situation where they have to debate the issues. Have you ever once seen Michael Moore addressing any groups that didn’t consist of either American college students or French film snobs? No, neither have I.

Some years ago, long before Alzheimers set in, Charlton Heston offered to debate Miss Streisand on the subject of gun ownership, all the money collected to go to the charity of her choice. Naturally, the debate never took place.

If you do not live in L.A., you cannot imagine the grief that descended upon this community on Nov. 3. How could Hollywood’s glitterati not take Mr. Kerry’s defeat personally? After all, for the past year, people like Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and the rest of the usual suspects, had taken time out of their busy, privileged lives to help elect Mr. Kerry. Like children anticipating a white Christmas, they were imaging themselves speed-dialing the White House for the next four, maybe eight, years, inviting John and Teresa to movie premieres and weekends at the Springs. How dare those “folks we fly over” spoil their plans?

These people live in such a cocoon that they, quite literally, do not have dealings with people who are not in lockstep with them. A few years ago, a friend of mine and his wife were invited to a cocktail party. Several other guests had already arrived before they got there. As they entered a fairly crowded den, a very successful TV producer was telling the group that he, personally, did not know anyone who had voted for Mr. Bush. My friend, with perfect timing, said, “Well, you do now.”

These Hollywood people are more likely to question the deaths of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley than they are to question a single plank of the Democratic platform. And, being the self-righteous ignoramuses they are, they never see any contradiction between the populist pap they parrot and the way they actually live their lives.

For my part, the election results provided me with a euphoria the Hollywood crowd only gets to experience when one of their movies cracks the $100 million barrier at the box office, when someone else’s movie doesn’t, or when they get their hands on — and their noses into — some really primo cocaine. And when the high threatens to wear off, I merely have to think of yet another Hollywood pinhead who must really be in the dumps these days. Just the other day, I thought about Bill Maher and chuckled for the next half-hour.

Before this last election, as with every election for at least the past 40 years, we all had to listen to the liberals vow that if the Republicans won, they were moving en masse to New Zealand. Well, I’m taking this occasion to announce that I stand ready to shuttle them, one and all, to LAX for the next flight to Wellington.

Burt Prelutsky is the author of “Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco” and an award-winning TV writer.

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Bigotry and its defenders (Washington Times, 041120)

In modern memory, there are few prominent figures in American government who have been relentessly caricatured in a more vulgar way than Condoleezza Rice. Apparently, when it comes to President Bush’s national security adviser — a conservative who would become the first black female secretary of state if confirmed by the Senate — no racist stereotype is out of bounds for such syndicated cartoonists as Garry Trudeau, Pat Oliphant or Jeff Danziger.

Mr. Trudeau published a cartoon that showed Mr. Bush referring to Miss Rice as “Brown Sugar.” Mr. Oliphant published two cartoons this week depicting Miss Rice as a parrot with extremely large lips. In July, Ted Rall (whose comic strip was dropped by The Washington Post earlier this month), ran a cartoon depicting Miss Rice boasting about her role as “Bush’s Beard” and his “House N—. Another character demands that she “hand over your hair straightener,” and Mr. Rall adds that Miss Rice is being sent to an “inner-city racial re-education camp.”

Last month, Mr. Danziger, whose work is syndicated by the New York Times, drew Miss Rice as a barefoot woman sitting in a rocking chair holding a baby bottle. In one Danziger cartoon, she is depicted as the mindless Prissy in “Gone With The Wind.”

What is particularly disturbing is the length to which some liberals are willing to go in order to defend the use of such crude, condescending racial stereotypes when the target is a political conservative. Yesterday, when we asked Richard Prince of the National Association of Black Journalists about his views of the cartoons, he referred us to an Oct. 25 column he wrote, in which he appears to minimize the ugly nature of the Danziger cartoon. Although Mr. Prince quotes Mr. Danziger as acknowledging that the cartoon was “stupid,” the overall thrust of his column was that conservatives are making a mountain out of a molehill because: 1) the cartoon appears in less than 50 newspapers; and 2) the Iraq war is becoming another Vietnam, anyway, so administration spokesmen presumably have rude treatment coming. And, as Mr. Danziger indelicately put it to Mr. Prince in explaining his use of racist stereotying of Miss Rice: “Whenever this administration is in trouble they send out Condi Rice because the press, which is mostly white and male, gives her far easier treatment than it would a white male.”

As the savaging of Miss Rice shows, the political left has no reluctance whatsoever in going after black conservatives when it deems this necessary to put them in their political place.

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Illiterates and Intellectuals (American Spectator, 041130)

Democrats, according to pollsters, receive votes from the least educated and the most educated, from grade school dropouts to college presidents. This suggests parallels between the undereducated and the overeducated that most professors don’t wish to entertain. Illiterates and intellectuals form the odd couple of the Democratic Party. How did it happen? One explanation is that both groups are drawn to the party’s emotional demagoguery. Having lost contact with common sense through a skeptical distrust of reason, postmodernist professors more or less decide their politics on raw emotion — the same passions that stir their uneducated fellow Democrats.

In a mid-November piece titled “Republicans Outnumbered in Academia” that attracted the attention of George Will and others, the New York Times’s John Tierney asked a U.C. Berkeley professor why Democrats predominate at universities. “Unlike conservatives,” he replied, “they believe in working for the public good and social justice...” In other words, professors care more and so naturally vote for the Democrats. Apart from its comic presumption, the comment reveals the unintellectual character of modern intellectuals: they speak more loudly about their hearts than their minds even as their compassionate conceits do harm to the people they purport to help.

Tierney collected another revealing quote, but this one from a professor exhausted with academia’s resemblance to a base camp for the Democratic Party. “Our colleges have become less marketplaces of ideas than churches in which you have to be a true believer to get a seat in the pews,” said Stephen Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars. “We’ve drifted to a secular version of 19th-century denominational colleges, in which the university’s mission is to crusade against sin and make the country a morally better place.”

The moral relativism professors teach in the classroom doesn’t shake their confidence in the morality of the Democratic Party. Why isn’t the morality of the Democrats subject to the usual academic contention that morality is unknowable? Because academics are practicing a kind of secular fideism, the idea that reason is irrelevant to faith and even if it contradicts faith, so what? The secular fideists on campus faculties can’t square their customary skepticism and relativism with their fervent faith in the Democratic Party’s policies, but no matter. If reason is irrelevant to academic life — read academic reviews and most professors hesitate to say that man’s reason can give a certain account of anything and more or less say academic life consists of opining and spinning unverifiable theories — why shouldn’t it be irrelevant to political life as well? A feeling for “social justice” is enough for them.

What then appears contradictory — that Kerry commanded support from the least educated and the most educated — isn’t. Academics chose Kerry on the same nonrational criteria Michael Moore’s rabble did — on mere feelings and unreasoning hatred of Bush. Not scholars but activists, professors got so emotionally carried away they gave money to Kerry in embarrassing abundance, according to Tierney.

“Professors at Berkeley and other universities provided unprecedented financial support for the Democratic Party this election. For the first time, universities were at the top of the list of organizations ranked by their employees’ contributions to a presidential candidate, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group,” he writes. “In first and second place, ahead of Time Warner, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft, were the University of California system and Harvard, whose employees contributed $602,000 and $340,000 respectively, to Senator John Kerry. At both universities, employees gave about $19 to the Kerry campaign for every dollar for the Bush campaign.”

But unlike Socrates who generated in his students a lively interest in the political order by teaching truths to them, American academics, judging by the anemic youth turnout for Kerry, went to the polls for the Democrats largely alone, apparently unable to inspire their students with the wan and absurd theories they substitute for classical political philosophy. And when the election didn’t turn out as they had hoped, Garry Wills and other intellectuals blamed the uneducated mob for the results, even though the polls indicated that professors hewed to the same voting patterns as the subliterate. “The ratio of Democratic to Republican professors ranged,” writes Tierney, “30 to 1 among anthropologists.” The proponents of unintelligent design voted for Kerry en masse, which may explain Garry Wills’ random pout that Bush’s victory raises the question, “Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened Nation?” The question Wills won’t ask is: Can academics who turn their minds, hearts, and pocketbooks over to the Democratic Party be considered enlightened?

George Neumayr is executive editor of The American Spectator.

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Comparing Christians to Terrorists (Foxnews, 041217)

Conservative Christians scare the hell out of Gary Wills.

The columnist and historian wrote a piece for the New York Times after the election comparing conservative Christians to Al Qaeda terrorists. “Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity?” Mr. Wills fears that conservative Christians are on a “jihad” — his word — to lock everything other than Christian beliefs out of the town square.

So why is it that this year we’re hearing one story after another about how town squares are being forced to remove all symbols of Christmas and Christianity?

The most recent example comes from Toledo, Ohio, where Rossford High School officials pulled the plug on a Christian rock band that was due to play during an anti-drug assembly. Students would have had the option of whether or not to attend the band’s performance. Students who chose not to attend the performance would either go to a study hall or view an anti-drug movie in the school auditorium.

Rossford Superintendent Luci Gernot explained why she’s canceling the concert: “We are just shutting the whole thing down. There is some controversy, and I’d rather err on this side.” Ms. Gernot made her decision after consulting with the school’s lawyers, who know all about the ACLU’s campaign against Christian symbols around the country.

There may be a jihad going on in this country, as Gary Wills claims. But it appears to be a jihad against Christian symbols not for them.

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Disrespecting the Office of the Presidency (Foxnews, 041217)

By Bill O’Reilly

Disrespecting the office of the presidency — that is a subject of this evening’s “Talking Points Memo.”

Last Tuesday night, actor Chevy Chase hosted an awards ceremony for a group called People for the American Way. That’s a left-wing outfit funded by Hollywood producer Norman Lear. The event took place at the Kennedy Center here in Washington and honored actors Susan Sarandon and Alec Baldwin, among others.

Now everything was going along according to plan when Mr. Chase decided to throw a few bombs, saying, “President Bush is a dumb F—, and I’m no F’—ing clown but this guy, Bush, started a jihad,” and that’s an unquote.

Chase went on to say, “This guy in office is an uneducated, real lying schmuck. And we still couldn’t beat him with a bore like Kerry.”

Apparently, many in the audience were shocked by these crude comments and organizer Norman Lear quickly distanced himself from Chase.

But there is a bigger story here, and that is that the nutty left continues to alienate everyday Americans, independents as well as conservatives.

There is no question that Whoopi Goldberg’s foolish comments at a John Kerry fundraiser hurt Kerry—who had no idea how to handle the situation. Chevy Chase should have learned from that. Even he has to know that calling the president of the United States an “F” is not going to be accepted by most Americans.

Now you don’t see this kind of thing on the Right. You don’t see prominent conservatives cursing out Democratic members of Congress, for example. Now I know talk radio can get rough but nothing like what these Hollywood nitwits are throwing out there.

The People for the American Way obviously want liberal politicians in power. That’s why the organization exists. But the left will never succeed if it continues to embrace people like Chevy Chase and Whoopi Goldberg.

Chase not only embarrassed himself, but he hurt his own cause, both professionally and politically. “Talking Points” believes the far Left is self-destructing in America.

It knows it can’t win in the voting booth. It knows most Americans want a traditional country, not a progressive situation. There’s no question the far Left has lost the respect of everyday folks, and now it’s acting out.

Most sane Americans respect honest dissent, and we need two strong parties in this country, but we don’t need foolish, demeaning attacks on any president, no matter what party he or she is in.

Chevy Chase should apologize, and the far Left should rethink its bitterness because the way things are going, soon there won’t be much left.

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Liberal bigotry, NYT-style (Washington Times, 041212)

On Friday, the New York Times took Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid to task for comments he made last Sunday about future Supreme Court nominations on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press.” Trouble is, the NYT gave Mr. Reid a pass over his patronizing treatment of Justice Clarence Thomas. The Nevada Democrat belittled Justice Thomas’ record on the court as an “embarrassment,” without providing a single substantive example of his supposed malfeasance. Moderator Tim Russert uncharacteristically let him get away with it.

The NYT had nothing negative to say about Mr. Reid’s demeaning treatment of Justice Thomas, so we presume that it doesn’t bother their editorial-page staff very much. But the newspaper complained that he didn’t try to caricature Justice Antonin Scalia as well. Mr. Reid described Justice Scalia as “one smart guy” that he might be able to support. This was unacceptable to the liberal party-line apparatchiks who run the NYT editorial page, so Mr. Reid needed to be put in his place. By failing to denounce Justice Scalia’s “ultraextreme record,” the paper solemnly intoned, Mr. Reid has “stepped on his first hornet’s nest as leader.” The paper expressed hope that Mr. Reid has been re-educated by orthodox Senate liberals, and that he now realizes “that flashes of brilliance hardly justify Mr. Scalia’s retrogressive record on constitutional law.”

But hope reigns eternal, the NYT opined, because Sen. Charles Schumer is there to save the day and make sure that Mr. Reid sticks to the approved propaganda line, and promises not to support judicial nominees who “are out of the mainstream” like Justice Scalia.

What is most striking about the comments Mr. Reid made about Justice Thomas and the NYT made about Justice Scalia is how glibly they describe their targets as an “embarassment,” or “retrogressive” or “ultraextreme” without providing any evidence to substantiate their attacks. Their attitude is one of supreme arrogance: Mr. Reid and the NYT are liberals, they are smarter than the rest of us, they are morally superior to the rest of us, and they don’t have to lower themselves to explain why conservatives are inferior and backward. Is it any wonder that people who behave this way lose election after election?

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Ailing party diagnosis (Washington Times, 041226)

A centrist-leaning cadre of Democratic intellectual foot soldiers has declared all-out war on its liberal base, saying it needs to be transformed, if not pulled out by the roots, before the party can win again.

In a bitter soul-searching debate over their party’s future, and what needs to be done to halt its decline, no postelection self-analysis has triggered more political buzz among Democrats than a New Republic magazine critique that calls for ending the influence wielded the party’s leftist, antiwar wing in its presidential-selection process.

“[John] Kerry was a flawed candidate, but he was not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem was the party’s liberal base,” said New Republic editor Peter Beinart in a scathing attack on left-wing activists who oppose President Bush’s war on terror. “The challenge for Democrats today is not to find a different kind of presidential candidate. It is to transform the party at its grass roots so that a different kind of presidential candidate can emerge,” Mr. Beinart wrote in the Dec. 13 New Republic.

In a sobering diagnosis of the overriding influence of the radical left in the party’s 2004 campaign, he singled out two as the most powerful of all: “Fahrenheit 9/11” filmmaker Michael Moore and the Internet activist group MoveOn.org, whom he compared with the party’s Henry Wallace wing in the late 1940s “who saw communists as allies in the fight for domestic and international progress.”

But most disturbing of all to establishment party leaders was Mr. Beinart’s proposed cure for the leftist illness that afflicts his party. Its problems cannot be fixed by polite, unifying dialogue and a public relations campaign. The enemy was the antiwar, pacifist left and it would to take a divisive civil war to effectively excommunicate them from the party, he said.

A viable Democratic majority requires “abandoning the unity-at-all-costs ethos that governed American liberalism in 2004. And it requires a sustained battle to wrest the Democratic Party from the heirs of Henry Wallace,” he said.

Mr. Beinart’s blistering broadside urged rank-and-file Democrats to embrace a military call to arms against terrorism and “Islamist totalitarianism” that he said “threatens the United States and the aspirations of millions across the world. And, as long as that threat remains, defeating it must be liberalism’s north star.”

It hasn’t received much media attention, but many Democratic foreign-policy analysts are just as disturbed by the party’s increasingly leftward turn on national-security issues. They are starting to speak out much more forcefully than in the past.

“I agree with Beinart as far as he went. He’s a politics guy and he’s smart. A lot of Democrats know that we are getting our clocks cleaned on national security,” said Michael O’Hanlon, senior defense analyst at the Brookings Institution and a Democratic adviser. “Some Democrats are allergic to the use of force. They still have a powerful influence on the party. That’s certainly a problem,” Mr. O’Hanlon told me.

The Democratic Leadership Council, formed in the 1980s to pull the party away from its leftist orthodoxy, also heavily weighed in on Mr. Beinart’s side in an article in its Blueprint magazine by founder Al From and president Bruce Reed.

“First and foremost, we need to bridge the trust gap on national security by spelling out our own offense against terrorism and clearly rejecting our antiwar wing, so that Republicans can no longer portray us as the antiwar party in the war on terrorism,” they wrote. “We must leave no doubt that Michael Moore neither represents, nor defines our party.”

But if you think the party’s liberal leadership has learned anything from its last defeat, or was persuaded by Mr. Beinart’s cogent analysis, think again.

On the contrary, his critique led to an outpouring of angry counterattacks from liberal antiwar Democrats, some of whom — incredibly — argued he had not proven his point that al Qaeda and other terrorist groups were a serious danger to the United States.

Kevin Drum, writing in the Political Animal blog on washingtonmonthly.com,said “compared to fascism and communism, Islamic totalitarianism seems like pretty thin beer to many. It’s not fundamentally expansionist, and its power to kill people isn’t even remotely in the same league.”

Texas Rep. Martin Frost, who lost his House seat and is now campaigning for the Democratic National Committee chairmanship, flatly rejects Mr. Beinart’s argument that Democrats came across as weak on terrorism, insisting, “The Republican [pre-emptive war] approach is not only irresponsible, it is dangerous.”

Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, also belittled Mr. Beinart’s call for his party’s liberals to be just as tough against terrorism as the liberal Americans for Democratic Action were against communism in the late 1940s, saying “2004 is not 1947.”

But Democrats who reject Mr. Beinart’s plea to his party to embrace and lead “a fighting faith” against the newly resurgent terrorist threat do so at their own peril.

“You don’t have to believe al Qaeda is as grave a threat as the U.S.S.R. to believe it is the greatest threat to U.S. security” today, he said last week in answer to his leftist critics. If the Democrats’ grass-roots base refuses to make this the axiom of their national security beliefs, they are destined to suffer many more election losses to come.

Donald Lambro, chief political correspondent of The Washington Times, is a nationally syndicated columnist.

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While They’re Waiting . . .Thoughts for the Democrats after their recent losses (National Review, 041231)

RAMESH PONNURU

Ever since the election, Democrats have been consoling themselves with the thought that they lost by only 2.5 points nationally, and by only 119,000 votes in Ohio. Forty-eight percent of voters picked John Kerry. It would take only a little bit more support, they tell themselves, to regain power. And this is true. But there’s another way of looking at the same facts: It means that the Democrats still have a long way to fall.

It is understandable that Democrats would concentrate on which bits of red territory they could raid: on how they could win over voters in Colorado or Nevada, in the exurbs or the churches. But it’s not as though Republicans are going to stand in place while the Democrats maneuver. Republicans could gain votes in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, among Catholics and Hispanics. And maybe the most hopeful sign for the Republicans since the election has been the parade of dubious Democratic theories about how to make a comeback.

Leading this parade is the view that the Democrats simply nominated a weak, uncharismatic candidate this time around, and will succeed if they choose better next time. No reasonable observer would deny that there is an element of truth to this explanation. But what were the alternatives? Howard Dean would hardly have improved the Democrats’ standing on national-security or cultural issues. Dick Gephardt looked like a strong candidate on paper, but was unable to ride the labor unions to victory even in the caucuses of his nextdoor neighbor Iowa. Joe Lieberman, if nominated, would have generated a 10% vote for Ralph Nader. A realistic Democrat has to look behind Kerry to ask why his party was unable to come up with strong candidates for 2004.

Another theory, popular just after the election, held that the Democrats had to reach out to “voters of faith.” This way of putting things is probably self-defeating: For many Christians — and nobody is under the impression that Democrats have a pressing need to reach out to Jews, Muslims, or Hindus — the phrase “people of faith” is a tip-off that the speaker is approaching them as an anthropologist rather than as a fellow citizen.

But terminology is the least of it. The base of the Democratic party does not allow its politicians much room to appeal to religious and social conservatives. Kerry tried just about everything that could be done rhetorically to do so. He downplayed his views on abortion — neither Edwards nor he mentioned it at the Democratic convention, a departure from the practice of the previous three elections. Kerry came out against same-sex marriage, even endorsing state initiatives to block it. Nor did he eschew the use of Biblical allusions in his speeches. (He suggested that Bush was a Pharisee.) If rhetoric alone were going to change the impression that traditionally minded Christians have of the Democrats, it would have happened.

Taking different positions, on the other hand, might change that impression. Democrats could nominate for president someone like Evan Bayh, who opposes partial-birth abortion. But feminists (and the Supreme Court) regard partial-birth abortion as part and parcel of Roe, and have blocked Bayh from getting even a vice-presidential nomination. Social-issue liberalism is central to the identity of large numbers of Democratic voters. They are not likely to tolerate any serious turn to the right on social issues.

Some liberals argue that instead of moving right on social issues, the Democrats should move left on economics. On this theory, white working-class voters would not be attracted to the Republicans on cultural issues if Democrats were offering them tangible benefits. These voters have suffered from years of economic decline. If Democrats do not give them hope, they will lash out at gays, blacks, and Hollywood. Howard Dean took up this analysis during the primaries, arguing that national health insurance would trump “guns, God, and gays” among southerners with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.

The flaw in this theory is the possibility that when voters say that their top concern is the country’s moral decline, they may not be expressing a submerged rage at their economic circumstances. It may be that their top concern is moral decline.

Moving left on economics also carries real costs. Hardening Democratic opposition to free trade is already risking a reduction in the party’s support from Wall Street and some business lobbies. If the party loses its reputation for sobriety and respectability on economic issues, it could start losing voters in the suburbs as well as campaign donations.

Those Democrats who want their party to embrace a more muscular foreign policy have a stronger case than the factions considered so far. If they prevail, on-the-fence voters will worry less about the Democrats’ impact on national security. And it is possible to imagine enough liberal voters’ reconciling themselves to hawkishness over the next four years to make this idea practicable. It is, at least, more possible than it is to imagine liberal voters’ moving right on social issues.

Unless, that is, controversial foreign-policy initiatives have become inseparable from the culture wars. During the last nine presidential elections, Democrats have run hawkish candidates three times — in 1992, 1996, and 2000. It cannot be a coincidence that these were the three elections of those nine in which foreign-policy issues were least important, and in which people felt least threatened by foreigners.

This pattern suggests a very dispiriting possibility for Democrats. It may be that when national-security issues become prominent, two things happen. A majority of the public becomes hawkish. And most liberals have an equal and opposite reaction. If that is true, it is bad news for the hawkish Democrats who want their party to commit itself to winning the War on Terror just as Harry Truman committed it to the Cold War. It is bad news because it means that the political reflexes of modern Democrats are those of the second half of the Cold War, during which a relatively dovish party lost four of five presidential elections.

The hawkish Democrats’ best chance of winning, then, is if foreign-policy issues recede in importance. A makeover of the party, in other words, is most likely when it is least needed. The interests of the hawkish Democrats thus turn out to be the same as the wish of the majority of their party: that the war and the terrorists would just go away on their own. Then we could return to a politics in which the top issue is keeping the price of medicine down.

The Democrats’ other great wish is that Republicans will commit some massive political blunder that will allow them to regain power without adjusting their views on anything. It is certainly possible that Republicans will oblige by overreaching on Social Security or tax reform, or fighting one another about immigration, or allowing power to corrupt them. Some Democrats, and even more journalists, have pointed out that second terms are often plagued by damaging scandals.

That is a false comfort for Democrats. The data points used to bolster that theory — Watergate, Iran-contra, impeachment — all unfolded when the president faced a Congress of the other party. That situation does not obtain today. Nor is it likely to obtain after the midterm elections of 2006. Democrats have 18 Senate seats up to the Republicans’ 15. To regain power, they would have to hold all of their seats while winning two-fifths of the Republicans’. It is possible, but it is not the way to bet.

There is a sliver of truth lurking in here, however, that could prove important. With Republicans holding the White House and Congress, the time would appear to be ripe for Democrats to indulge in some anti-Washington populism. Thus far, Democrats have been curiously unwilling to present their complaints about deficits, health care, and other issues as part of “the mess in D.C.” It may be that many of them still see attacking the Beltway as fouling their own nest. Surely by 2008, that will have changed.

On the other hand, the Democrats did not learn much from the last electoral drubbing, in 2002. The polls that November were not ambiguous: Democrats trailed Republicans by 30 points on national security. Yet the Democrats somehow decided that their mistake had been not being sufficiently opposed, or loud in their opposition, to Bush’s foreign policy. House Democrats chose Nancy Pelosi as their leader. Howard Dean set the tone for their presidential field.

In recent months, Democrats have become fond of calling themselves members of “the reality-based community.” The reference is to a comment by an anonymous White House aide in a Bush-bashing New York Times Magazine story. But the liberal bloggers who have adopted this motto have missed the point of the comment. The aide was saying, inartfully, that liberals merely analyzed the world while conservatives were changing it — and liberals would be left simply adjusting to new realities.

Watching the Democrats try out their various theories as to how they will return to power, one is struck above all by the sheer passivity of it all. Democrats are waiting for a charismatic leader to emerge, for Republicans to stumble, for the dollar’s decline to cause an economic crisis, for demographic trends to carry them to victory. Patience, it turns out, is one of the liberal virtues. And the art of losing isn’t hard to master.

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Zell Was Right: Problematic party (National Review Online, 050114)

Last year, then-Sen. Zell Miller, a Georgia Democrat, wrote a scathing critique of the Democratic Party called A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat. A quick quiz — in the book, Miller said which of the following things:

a) “We have to be more aware that issues like abortion, like guns, like gay rights, have two sides, and that we need to address people who feel deeply about those issues and show a willingness to compromise”;

b) “We gave up on the South. And as Churchill said, ‘Wars are not won by evacuation; they are won by blood and sweat and toil and tears.’ We can make this the majority party of America in the future, but we must talk about our values. We must embrace people of faith in this party”;

c) “We are too coastal. We are too urban. We are too secular. And, most of all, we are too dovish. The public simply doesn’t trust us to keep them safe”;

d) all of the above;

e) none of the above.

The answer is “e.” These statements were made by Democratic consultant Lanny Davis, candidate for Democratic National Committee chairman Tim Roemer and former John Kerry campaign manager Jim Jordan, respectively. Many of the things that Miller said in his book have now become nearly conventional wisdom among Democratic loyalists. All the Democrats who now say that the party has foolishly given up on the South, that it is unable to connect with religious voters, that it is too beholden to liberal orthodoxy on social issues, that Americans don’t trust it on national defense, and that it doesn’t speak the language of most Americans should take a deep breath and repeat after me: “Zell Miller was right.”

This turnabout is extraordinary given the kind of criticisms that were lodged at Miller last year, especially after he amplified the arguments in his book in a humdinger of a speech at the Republican National Convention. An AFL-CIO official said Miller had “lost his damn mind.” James Carville said Miller was being “cynically manipulated by people who are greedy to hold on to power at any cost.” Well, Miller appears, in light of events, to have been the shrewdest cynically manipulated lunatic in all of human history.

“In the eyes of Middle America,” Miller wrote of the Democratic party, “it has become a value-neutral party.” That is almost mild compared with what other Democrats are now saying. Even Miller’s battering of the party for being too extreme on abortion has gained a measure of acceptance. Howard Dean of all people — another candidate to lead the DNC — now says, “I have long believed that we ought to make a home for pro-life Democrats.”

It’s not just practical politicians who are sounding Zell-like. On national security, Miller worried how Democrats were getting tarred by their association with the most fervent anti-war elements of their party. The editor of the liberal New Republic has argued since the election for a “purge” — yes, a purge — of those antiwar zealots. Miller complained in his book about the influence of ham-handed consultants on the party. The liberal Washington Monthly just ran an article excoriating “a clique of Washington consultants who, through their insider ties, continue to get rewarded with business after losing continually.” Miller defended gun rights and explained how gun-controllers were out of step with the American public. Liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently declared, “Nothing kills Democratic candidates’ prospects more than guns.”

“What I was telling them was right and correct, if only they had listened to it,” says Miller, who recently retired from the Senate. Democrats are essentially saying these days that they want a party in which someone like Zell Miller can feel comfortable. Alas, they used to have one. But, as someone once put it, today’s Democrats are a national party no more.

— Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.

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The Democratic Dialectic, the Democratic Problem: The future of a once-great party (National Review Online, 050103)

The Democratic dialectic since Nov. 3, 2004, goes something like this: (a) Moral values mattered a lot to Americans, and they said so. Nancy Pelosi, for example, was heard quoting from the Book of Matthew on national television after the Democratic defeat of 2004. (b) Then, we find out moral values really meant a takeover of the country by the far right or evangelical right or fill-in-the epithet. Maureen Dowd, for example, wrote the president “ran a jihad in America.” (c) Then, as some time passed, other journalists weighed in, writing that moral values were not in play in the election because either the polling on the question was not solid (Dick Meyer in the Dec. 5 Washington Post) or because Americans always cared about the issue (Christopher Muste, one week later in the Washington Post). Nice work if you can get it.

Let’s try this novel interpretation of what moral values meant in the 2004 elections: They were important not because one poll said so but because, by my count, at least three polls have said so. Moreover, what the American people meant by moral values was — lo and behold — “moral values.”

With war at a boil in the Middle East, corporate scandals rocking Fortune 500 companies, and the home-state of the Democratic nominee for president declaring gay “marriage” a legal right, it is hard to imagine that so many have tried to claim moral values were not important to voters last November.

The Democrats — and those who have tried to discount the role of moral values in the November election — tried to emphasize two things in this past election: the bad economy and the badly run war. Well, the economy, an honest look demands, was not as bad as the Democrats made it sound; and the war was not being run as badly as the Democrats characterized it. People knew this, which is why the state that lost the most jobs since 2000, Ohio, delivered President Bush his victory and saw black voters turn out for the President in twice the proportion they turned out for him nationwide. It is also why over 50,000 voters registered for the first time there on the issue of gay marriage, and why an amendment to bar gay marriage there passed so overwhelmingly — as it did everywhere it was on the ballot.

People did care about moral values in the November election — whether they always do or not does not change that fact. The war, and the character of the commander-in-chief people want to fight that war, are part of the moral values equation too. And, it is worth keeping in mind that the war — which the Democrats opposed — was a moral issue that goes to the heart of our defense of liberty and the support of our soldiers. War is always a moral issue, and the Democrats got it wrong this time. So are the use of rhetoric and the character of a campaign matters of morality. When the Democrats trotted out labels against the White House and the president with analogies to Lenin or Nazism, and when John Kerry said that the Radio City Music Hall fundraiser that used gutter language spoke to the soul of America, or when Michael Moore was given a seat in a presidential box at the Democratic convention, people took note of those values as well — and voted on them.

In the end, it is not really debatable what happened in this election. Values mattered. And as President Clinton realized long ago, when it comes to national elections, values very well may matter most. He may not have governed by the values we agree on, but he understood how to run a campaign and, at least, speak to values (even if he could not live by them). President Bush knew how to do both, John Kerry did not even know how to speak to them.

In the end, then, if the Democrats and pundits want to discount moral values as a major reason for Bush’s reelection, they are free to do so; people are always free to be wrong in our country. But it will not aid in the understanding of what the Democrats need to do to overcome permanent minority status in this country. Their selection of their next Democratic National Committee chairman will tell the country a great deal: Do they truly believe in the greatness of a once-great party led by people of high honor and character who did not shrink from our nation’s defense, or do they believe that John Kerry’s campaign was thematically correct on the essentials, just not loud or well-financed enough? If the Democrats choose their leader based on the latter choice, we may very well see a new party emerge that puts the current Democratic party out of business. It would be a sad end to a once-great party, but it may be a deserved end.

— William J. Bennett is the host of the nationally syndicated radio show, Bill Bennett’s Morning in America, and the Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute.

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Iraqi ballots and bombs (townhall.com, 050126)

Tony Blankley

It’s a little odd that the most vehement support for President Bush’s proposition that democracy is the best cure for terrorism came from the curling lips of Mr. Abu Musab Zarqawi.

The infidel-beheading terrorist butcher of Baghdad announced, in a post-Inaugural Web site broadcast (not to be confused with American network television’s post-speech commentary and analysis) that “We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy and those who follow this wrong ideology. Anyone who tries to help set up this system is part of it ... [Iraqi candidates] are demi-idols, and [voters] are infidels.”

With such a hard-hitting critique of the president’s speech, he might well be in line for a political analyst slot at CBS.

Obviously Mr. Zarqawi, recently anointed by bin Laden himself, feels toward democracy much the way the Wicked Witch of the East felt toward water. It seems pretty clear from Zarqawi’s analysis of the Iraqi political scene that he is every bit as opposed to President Bush’s policy as is Barbara Boxer and the rest of Mr. Bush’s political opponents.

His effort at defeating President Bush’s democracy project for Iraq brings a whole new meaning to the phrase negative campaigning. Instead of rude or false charges hurled at a candidate, Zarqawi hurls suicide bombs at both candidates and voters.

His actions, bloody though they are, constitute eloquent testimony to his and President Bush’s shared understanding of Iraq’s future. Zarqawi is fighting democracy for his dear life because he understands, as does President Bush, that an established democracy in Iraq will be the death of terrorism in Iraq — and possibly beyond.

If Barbara Boxer and her fellow deprecators of Iraqi democracy won’t accept President Bush’s insights on the efficacy of democracy, perhaps she might reconsider in light of Zarqawi’s comments. After all, when the leading terrorist and President Bush agree on something, the light of that shared vision might even penetrate the, until now, impenetrable darkness of the anti-Bush mind.

Something better jog the liberal mind from its obsessive Bush-hatred. The liberals, on both sides of the Atlantic, are in imminent danger of repeating the great shame of many of their ideological grandparents in the middle of the last century, who became unthinking apologists for Stalin’s terror and tyranny.

This coming Sunday, the Iraqi people are holding an election — the first real election in the 5,000-year history of this ancient people. But the cynicism and indifference of liberals to this extraordinary event should shock the conscience of decent people, because the Iraqi people are marching through shot and shell to gain this first chance at self-government.

Despite the worst that Zarqawi and his fellow terrorists can do, there are 7,500 candidates from 111 political parties running for 275 National Assembly seats. Six thousand polling stations have been set up to count the votes. According to the most reliable surveys, 12 of 14 million eligible voters have registered. Turnout could be as high as 80%.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. When given half a chance, people will risk their lives to vote for freedom. They did it in El Salvador in 1984, in the midst of civil war and terrorism. They did it in Cambodia in 1993, under threat from the genocidal Khmer Rouge. They did it in Algeria in 1995, under constant terrorist threat. They did it in Afghanistan last year under the Taliban gun.

There, the story is told by our ambassador, the night before the election, a woman went through her religion’s death rituals. She expected to die trying to vote the next day and wanted to be prepared to meet her god — but she wasn’t going to miss the vote.

And, of course, we Americans fought a long hard revolutionary war so that we might gain the right to govern ourselves through the ballot box.

But the heartless, mindless Bush-haters from Paris to San Francisco to the chamber of the United States Senate would rather see Bush embarrassed than Iraq free.

Of course one election does not constitute a functioning democracy. After the best that the Iraqi people can do this Sunday, years of hard, careful work is ahead of them. (Henry Kissinger and George Shultz published a must-read article in Tuesday’s Washington Post, that shrewdly lays out the risks and challenges that must be surmounted before a functioning, decent government can form.)

But it is not too late for the Bush haters to put that bitter chalice from which they constantly drink to one side and lend a hand to a noble project.

They don’t have to take George Bush’s word for the necessity of democracy in Iraq. They could ask Mr. Zarqawi.

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Self-indulgence (Townhall.com, 050127)

Thomas Sowell

The enraged speeches and street disorders across the country that accompanied the inauguration of President Bush may tell us more than we want to know about what is happening to this country.

The media dignify these outbursts by calling them “protests” but what are they protesting?

That they lost the election? Doesn’t somebody always lose an election? Did the Republicans take to the streets when Bill Clinton was elected?

Are the shouters and the rioters protesting that they disagree with President Bush’s policies? Isn’t that why we hold elections in the first place — because people disagree?

Elections are supposed to be an alternative to other ways of settling political differences, including riots, military coups and dictatorships. But riots have been re-christened “demonstrations” by the mealy-mouth media.

What are these “demonstrations” demonstrating — other than adolescent self-indulgence and contempt for the rights of other people to go about their lives without finding their streets clogged with hooligans and the air filled with obscenities?

The irony is that many of those who are indulging themselves in these strident orgies are the same people who were telling us to “get over it” and “move on” during President Clinton’s scandals. Today the liberal MoveOn.org is the last place where people are willing to move on.

While this is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of the political left, the increasing acceptance of irresponsible behavior — including vandalism and violence — as a normal part of our public discourse says something about what is happening to this country as a whole.

Not only is there a growing class of people for whom indignation is a way of life, their sophomoric slogans are taken seriously by people who should know better. Moreover, their disruptions of the lives of ordinary people are accepted as if such things were nothing more than free speech.

The media even give rioters free air time in exchange for providing them with a spectacle to broadcast and liven up their news programs. The taxpayers who foot the bill for mob control seldom rate a mention. Neither do the police who get injured trying to keep hoodlums in check.

This may be some people’s idea of a healthy democracy but it is more of a sign of a spreading sickness in a society too wimpish to insist that law and order matter and too mushy-minded to see that self-indulgence at other people’s expense is not idealism.

If we were a little more clear-headed, these organized disruptions could be a valuable lesson in what the political left really believes in and what kind of world they would create if they ever get the kind of power they are seeking.

First of all, the left does not accept the proposition that other people have just as many rights as they do. This is obvious not only in the disorder and vandalism they inflict in the streets but also their intolerance on academic campuses across the country, where students who question the party line are hemmed in by speech codes and ridiculed and intimidated by professors who do not hesitate to punish them with low grades.

Ask any environmental extremist if people who don’t care about preserving swamps (“wetlands”) have the same rights under the Constitution that the people in the green movement have. Gay activists who demand tolerance and sensitivity from others do not hesitate to include in their parades insulting skits mocking nuns and others in the Catholic Church.

When pro-life demonstrators tried to hold a peaceful march in San Francisco on January 22, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a pro-abortion crowd not only followed them, shouting to drown them out and hurling insults at them, some sat down in their path to block the march and force them to detour.

We are seeing the ugly face of intolerance under the idealistic pretense of protest. We need to recognize it for what it is, even if the media refuse to do so. Above all, we need to see it as a warning of where our society is headed. Whether at home or abroad, if political conflicts are reduced to contests between the wimps and the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

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Prof praising 9-11 terrorists on school’s chopping block (WorldNetDaily, 050201)

Compared Trade Center victims with Nazis, commended jihadists for ‘gallant sacrifices’

The fate of a tenured University of Colorado professor – who compared victims of the 9-11 World Trade Center terror attacks to Nazis, while praising the suicide hijackers for their “gallant sacrifices” – will be decided at a special meeting of the school’s board of regents Thursday night.

In the meantime, Ward Churchill, who yesterday preemptively stepped down as chairman of the Ethnic Studies Department, remains a professor of Ethnic Studies and Coordinator of American Indian Studies at the Colorado school.

The controversy stems from an essay Churchill wrote titled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” written shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. In it, he describes the thousands of American victims who died in the World Trade Center inferno as “little Eichmanns” (a reference to notorious Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann) who were perpetuating America’s “mighty engine of profit.” They were destroyed, he added, thanks to the “gallant sacrifices” of “combat teams” that successfully targeted the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.

The 2001 essay emerged from obscurity onto center stage when Churchill was invited recently to speak at Hamilton College, in Clinton, N.Y., near Syracuse. Hundreds of relatives of Sept. 11 victims are protesting Churchill’s appearance at Hamilton, which is scheduled for Thursday. However, the college’s president, Joan Hinde Stewart, assured the Associated Press that “however repugnant one might find Mr. Churchill’s remarks,” the college would honor his right to free speech and the show would go on.

To accommodate the large audience Hamilton anticipates due to the uproar, Churchill’s appearance has been re-located from the 300-seat-capacity room originally planned to a facility that will seat 2,000.

On Hamilton College’s website, one page is dedicated to the furor over Churchill’s appearance, and features hundreds of e-mailed comments, most of which express outrage. The first letter (out of 327 as of this report), starts like this:

MS. STEWART, I AM THE MOTHER OF A FIREFIGHTER WHO WAS KILLED ON SEPT. 11, 2001 WHILE TRYING TO SAVE THE LIVES OF THE INNOCENT PEOPLE WHO WERE ATTACKED BY THE BARBARIANS THAT INVADED OUR COUNTRY. I HAVE BEEN GIVEN THE INFORMATION OF YOUR COLLEGE ALLOWING PROF. WARD CHURCHILL TO CONDUCT A TALK OF HIS VIEWS ON THE ATTACKS. HOWEVER, HIS VIEWS SEEM TO BE SO OUTRAGEOUS AND FILLED WITH DERANGED VIEWPOINTS, I WONDER HOW YOU COULD ALLOW SUCH AN ILL-ADVISED PERSON ON CAMPUS! ... AS A FAMILY MEMBER I CAN TELL YOU, YOU ARE ALL POURING SALT IN A FESTERING WOUND …

Stewart, in response to the controversy, notes on the college’s website that Hamilton invited Churchill to speak long before becoming aware of his comments about Sept. 11: “However repugnant one may find Mr. Churchill’s remarks, were the College to withdraw the invitation simply on the grounds that he has said offensive things, we would be abandoning a principle on which this College and indeed this republic are founded.”

Meanwhile, in a statement released Sunday, the CU board of regents announced it’s “taking this unusual action” of convening a special meeting of the regents’ board specifically to consider what to do with Churchill.

“Mr. Churchill’s comments regarding the events of Sept. 11, 2001 have resulted in substantial controversy and the Board of Regents intends to consider the concerns of members of the public and the university community at the special meeting,” the statement said.

“While Professor Churchill has the constitutional right to express his political views, his essay on 9/11 has outraged and appalled us and the general public,” interim CU-Boulder Chancellor Phil DiStefano said, according to AP.

Some students on Hamilton’s campus last week protested Churchill’s scheduled appearance. According to the Colorado Daily, Regent Michael Carrigan said he and his fellow regents have been “deluged” with e-mails and messages over the Churchill controversy.

“We are hearing a lot of concern from the public and we share the public’s concern,” Carrigan told the Colorado paper Sunday. “That’s why we called this special meeting; to discuss our options.”

Regent Cindy Carlisle said she is “appalled” by Churchill’s essay and insisted “something needs to be done,” according to the local paper’s report.

Last Friday, Isaiah Lechowit, chairman of CU’s College Republicans, urged his student colleagues to protest Churchill in an e-mail titled “Oust the Auschwitz Lunatic.”

The Republican student organization is holding a protest rally this afternoon, urging students to sign petitions demanding Churchill’s removal.

“Churchill said what he did with confidence because he thinks he can hide under his security blanket of tenure,” Lechowit told the Colorado Daily, “but even tenure has its limits.” While Lechowit said Churchill deserves to be ousted from the university altogether, some students are defending the controversial professor.

Ethnic studies senior Dustin Craun and other students, many from Churchill’s ethnic studies department, liken the controversy to a “witch hunt,” said the paper. “White men trying to get an Indian out of Boulder? That’s nothing new,” said Craun. “That’s how this city was started.” Churchill is reportedly a Cherokee Indian by birth.

In an interview Sunday with the Colorado Daily, Craun said: “I see it as an academic freedom issue.” Describing Churchill’s “Roosting Chickens” essay as a revolutionary scholarly discourse by an expert on genocide, Craun added: “It’s a theory; it shouldn’t have anything to do with fact.”

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Colorado Professor’s Future on the Line (Foxnews, 050201)

DENVER — A panel discussion at Hamilton College in New York featuring a Colorado professor was canceled after hundreds of death threats poured in because of an inflammatory essay he wrote comparing some of the Sept. 11 victims to Nazis and calling President Bush a terrorist.

Hamilton has been on heightened security since the paper by Ward Churchill, published more than two-and-a-half years ago in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, resurfaced.

College spokesman Michael DeBraggio said multiple death threats were made against both school officials and Churchill, who was to be a guest speaker at the panel discussion.

Churchill resigned Monday as chairman of the ethnic studies department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the Board of Regents there is holding an emergency meeting Thursday to discuss his future.

In the scathing essay, Churchill called the traders and other businesspeople who worked at the World Trade Center in New York “Eichmanns” — a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who organized Nazi plans to exterminate Europe’s Jews.

That’s because he believes American foreign policy and the spread of capitalism around the world for U.S. profit are acts of genocide against Iraqi civilians and others in the same way as the Nazi movement was against the Jews during World War II.

“As to those in the World Trade Center ... true enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire,” Churchill wrote.

In an interview with FOX News, Churchill admitted that his 20-page paper was “a harsh piece” and his views are unpopular. But he stands by his opinion that the attacks were retribution for harmful U.S. foreign policy.

“Bush, at least in symbolic terms, is the world’s leading terrorist,” Churchill told FOX News in an interview. “He absolutely thumbs his nose at the rule of law. He’s the head of a rogue state by definition, and it’s a rogue state which dispenses carnage on people presumed to be inferior in some set of terms.”

The essay attracted little attention until Churchill was invited to speak Thursday at Hamilton College, about 40 miles east of Syracuse, N.Y. Since then, he has gotten several hundred threatening e-mails and some hostile reactions from Sept. 11 victims’ families.

He’s also gotten hundreds of supportive e-mails and said that some of those in his corner are soldiers on the front lines of the war in Iraq.

“There is a substantial sector of the population, including GIs that I’m corresponding with as a result of this in the Gulf right now, who say, your points are very solid and this is not right what we’re doing here,” Churchill told FOX.

Though it’s difficult for tenured professors to lose their jobs, a number of people — including Colorado Gov. Bill Owens and some student Republicans — are up in arms over Churchill and his views and want him fired.

“This guy has to go,” said Isaiah Lechowit, president of the University of Colorado Student Republicans. “He’s been out here just raving about this nonsense and the mindless drones over here are clapping and hooting and hollering for him.

“What sickens me is the people out there clapping for this raving lunatic who applauds these terrorists for killing people on Sept. 11.”

Churchill says he has no intention of quitting, and his students don’t want to see him go. Many are among his staunchest supporters.

“He changes people’s minds,” said Albe Zakes, a University of Colorado junior who is a student of Churchill’s. “He says controversial things. That is not a bad thing.

“If you express your opinion and you have a strong opinion — an opinion that differs from the norm — people are going to try to cut you down and take you out of power. If you don’t exercise your constitutional right and you don’t challenge authority, I think that is being un-American.”

Some of Churchill’s colleagues in the ethnic studies department held a brief press conference at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday to rally around the scholar. They praised Churchill, mentioned numerous writing awards he’s won and chastised the press for twisting his words. Churchill himself wasn’t present at the event.

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Chilling for thee, but not for me (townhall.com, 050211)

Jonah Goldberg

If you’re a liberal who’s still moping like a dog whose food bowl has been moved, thanks to all the conservative victories of late, I have some words of encouragement for you: You guys are still way, way smarter than us about some things.

Consider the current flap about Ward Churchill and the recent one about Harvard President Larry Summers.

Ward Churchill, as you’ve probably heard, is a tenured professor of “ethnic studies” at the University of Colorado. Until recently he was the chairman of the department. When invited to another school to give a talk, it came out that he had written an essay comparing the civilian victims of 9/11 to “little Eichmanns.” This was a reference to Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the Holocaust.

Known for making factually unencumbered statements about the evils of America, Churchill recently gave an interview in which he said he wanted the “U.S. off the planet. Out of existence altogether.” He thinks “more 9/11s” are necessary. He holds no Ph.D., and his scholarship - for want of a better word - is under relentless attack. Before the current kerfuffle, he’d attained whatever prominence he had by pretending he was an American Indian radical. He likes to pose with assault rifles. The Rocky Mountain News did a genealogical search of Churchill’s past and found that he’s basically a vanilla white guy playing Indian and enriching himself in the process. The American Indian Movement called Churchill a fraud years ago.

OK, flash back to the hysteria over Larry Summers. By now his auto da fé is old news. But let’s recap. One of the most respected economists in America, president of Harvard University, and the former Secretary of the Treasury, Summers was invited to a closed-door, off-the-record academic conference at which everyone was encouraged to think unconventionally. Warning his audience several times that he was going to be deliberately “provocative,” he suggested that there might be some innate cognitive differences between men and women.

This is not a controversial hypothesis in macroeconomics, and it is losing its taboo status in psychology, genetics and neuroscience. Thousands of peer-reviewed academic papers have been written on the differences between men and woman when it comes to various cognitive functions. Note I said “differences.” Superiority and inferiority don’t play into it, and Summers never said otherwise. Indeed, he ventured this hypothesis, after showing his obeisance to the more politically correct explanations: discrimination, not enough effort to recruit women, etc., etc.

So what was the reaction?

An MIT feminist biologist - who moonlights as a feminist activist - quickly got the vapors and stormed out of the room for fear of fainting. If she stayed any longer, she explained, she’d vomit. Derrick Jackson of the Boston Globe compared Summers to people who cavalierly bandy about the N-word or who thoughtlessly wear swastikas. One hundred members of the Harvard faculty drafted a letter demanding that he apologize. The National Organization for Women demanded that he resign.

The dean of engineering at the University of Washington called his comments “an intellectual tsunami.” Since the Asian catastrophe had only just transpired, the tastelessness of the metaphor may not be as apparent now as it was then. Regardless, if his comments were a tsunami, Summers’ critics have certainly cashed in on disaster relief effort.

Forced to apologize over and over, Summers was then bullied into appointing not one but two new “task forces” on gender equity. Staffed with 22 women and five men, the task forces will no doubt discover that much more work needs to be done and that Summers should apologize more.

In the Summers affair, free speech and academic freedom barely came up, except among a few conservative commentators and one or two academics who were already known for their political incorrectness. Instead, Summers was a pinata to be bashed for material rewards and to send the message that some subjects are simply taboo even among serious scholars, no matter what the evidence, in closed-door, off-the-record meetings.

Meanwhile, Ward Churchill, whose scholarship is a joke, whose evidence is tendentious at best, and who called the victims of 9/11 the moral equivalent of a man who sent babies to the gas chambers, is a hero of free speech. He has refused to apologize. Many conservatives are forced to defend free speech and “diversity” in academia while liberals let the NOWers feed on Summers’ flesh.

Liberals may despise what Churchill said, but it’s a matter of principle now. The normally insightful and fair Mort Kondracke declared on Fox News, “I really think it’s useful for universities to have people like this around, to show students and the rest of us just how odious some of the ideas of the far left are.” Would Kondracke punt on a professor who endorsed slavery? I somehow doubt it.

Hopefully - and, I think, probably - someone will find enough academic fraud to fire Churchill for cause. No doubt, we’ll hear from many on the left about the “chilling effect” such a move would have on “academic freedom,” and many conservatives will clear their throats in embarrassment. You really have to marvel how the other side has mastered this game.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online, a Townhall.com member group.

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Is prof under fire really an Indian? (WorldNetDaily, 050203)

Churchill kicked out of AIM 12 years ago as ‘treacherous,’ ‘masquerading’ white man

Following what it described as a 25-year internal investigation of Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor now in the center of a storm of national controversy, the American Indian Movement kicked out the activist the group called “deceitful” and “treacherous” and who it condemned as a white man masquerading as an Indian.

Churchill, a tenured professor of ethnic studies and coordinator of American Indian studies at the Colorado school, came under fire in recent days for an essay he wrote following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in which he condemned the 3,000 victims and praised the al-Qaida hijackers.

After years of activism within AIM, Churchill was a ringleader of a breakaway “self-styled radical” faction that associated with extremists such as Noam Chomsky and Winona LaDuke, according to AIM records.

“They use publications like Houghton-Mifflin, Random House Publishers, South End Press and Speak Out Speakers Bureau, who allow Ward Churchill and others to perpetuate their literary, academic and Indian fraud on the unknowing public,” said a 1999 AIM report.

Churchill was first expelled from the International Indian Treaty Council Sept. 23, 1986. Seven years later, on Nov. 24, 1993, he was expelled from AIM. Later, on Nov. 3, 1999, AIM leaders officially called for educators to remove his books from their curricula and libraries.

But AIM didn’t stop there. Even more relevant, perhaps, to the current controversy was this recommendation from the group: “We request that organizations such as the National Indian Education Association and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium create a watchdog-type agency to review what books are being published by these literary, academic, and Indian frauds so that their revisionist writings are not finding their way into our education curriculum. This problem is of epidemic proportions, and must be stopped.”

“If only someone had listened to the Indian folks back then,” wrote blogger Yael (Anne) Lieberman.

Tuesday, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens urged the university to fire Churchill. And the state House passed a non-binding resolution yesterday calling his comments “evil and inflammatory.” A similar measure was awaiting action in the Senate.

The CU regents plan to discuss Churchill’s future at a special meeting today.

As WorldNetDaily reported, the controversy stems from an essay Churchill wrote titled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” written shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. In it, he describes the thousands of American victims who died in the World Trade Center inferno as “little Eichmanns” (a reference to notorious Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann) who were perpetuating America’s “mighty engine of profit.” They were destroyed, he added, thanks to the “gallant sacrifices” of “combat teams” that successfully targeted the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.

Churchill was scheduled to speak at Hamilton College, in Clinton, N.Y., near Syracuse today, but officials at the school canceled the appearance, citing security concerns and death threats they had received.

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SITTING BULL-S*** (Ann Coulter, 050209)

If Ward Churchill loses his job teaching at the University of Colorado, he could end up giving Howard Dean a real run for his money to head the Democratic National Committee.

Churchill already has a phony lineage and phony war record — just like John Kerry! (Someone should also check out Churchill’s claim that he spent Christmas 1968 at Wounded Knee.) In 1983, Churchill met with Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and later felt it necessary to announce that his group, the American Indian Movement, “has not requested arms from the Libyan government.” In 1997, he was one of the “witnesses” who spoke at a “Free Mumia” event in Philadelphia on behalf of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Come to think of it, Churchill could give Hillary a run for her money. All that’s left for Churchill to do now is meet with Al Sharpton and kiss Suha Arafat.

Churchill’s claim that he is an Indian isn’t an incidental boast, like John Kerry pretending to be Irish. It is central to his career, his writing, his political activism. Churchill has been the co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, the vice chairperson of the American Indian “Anti-Defamation” Council, and an associate professor and coordinator of American Indian Studies at the University of Colorado.

By Churchill’s own account, a crucial factor in his political development was “being an American Indian referred to as ‘chief’ in a combat unit” in Vietnam, which made him sad. This is known to con men everywhere as a “two-fer.”

In addition to an absence of evidence about his Indian heritage, there is an absence of evidence that he was in combat in Vietnam. After the POW Network revealed that Churchill had never seen combat, he countered with this powerful argument: “They can say whatever the hell they want. That’s confidential information, and I’ve never ordered its release from the Department of Defense. End of story.” Maybe we should ask John Kerry to help Churchill fill out a form 180.

In one of his books, “Struggle for the Land,” Churchill advances the argument that one-third of America is the legal property of Indians. And if you believe Churchill is a real Indian, he also happens to be part owner of the Brooklyn Bridge.

In his most famous oeuvre, the famed 9/11 essay calling the 9/11 World Trade Center victims “little Eichmanns,” he said “Arab terrorists” — his quotes — had simply “responded to the massive and sustained American terror bombing of Iraq” by giving Americans “a tiny dose of their own medicine.”

Having blurted out “Iraq” in connection with 9/11 in a moment of pique, Churchill had to backpedal when the anti-war movement needed to argue that Iraq had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Arab terrorism. He later attached an “Addendum” to the essay saying that the 9/11 attack was not only payback for Iraq, but also for various other of this country’s depredations especially against “real Indians” (of which he is not one).

In light of the fact that Churchill’s entire persona, political activism, curriculum vitae, writings and university positions are based on his claim that he’s an Indian, it’s rather churlish of him to complain when people ask if he really is one. But whenever he is questioned about his heritage, Churchill rails that inquiries into his ancestry are “absolutely indefensible.”

Churchill has gone from claiming he is one-eighth Indian “on a good day” to claiming he is “three-sixteenths Cherokee,” to claiming he is one-sixty-fourth Cherokee through a Revolutionary War era ancestor named Joshua Tyner. (At least he’s not posing as a phony Indian math professor.) A recent investigation by The Denver Post revealed that Tyner’s father was indeed married to a Cherokee. But that was only after Joshua’s mother –- and Churchill’s relative -– was scalped by Indians.

By now, all that’s left of Churchill’s claim to Indian ancestry is his assertion: “It is just something that was common knowledge in my family.” (That, and his souvenir foam-rubber “tommyhawk” he bought at Turner Field in Atlanta.)

Over the years, there were other subtle clues the university might have noticed.

Churchill is not in the tribal registries kept since the 1800s by the federal government.

No tribe will enroll him –- a verification process Churchill dismisses as “poodle papers” for Indians.

In 1990, Churchill was forced to stop selling his art as “Indian art” under federal legislation sponsored by then-representative — and actual Indian! — Ben Nighthorse Campbell, that required Indian artists to establish that they are accepted members of a federally recognized tribe. Churchill responded by denouncing the Indian artist who had exposed him. (Hey, does anybody need 200 velvet paintings of Elvis playing poker with Crazy Horse?)

In the early ‘90s, he hoodwinked an impecunious Cherokee tribe into granting him an “associate membership” by telling them he “wrote some books and was a big-time author.” A tribal spokeswoman explained: He “convinced us he could help our people.” They never heard from him again — yet another treaty with the Indians broken by the white man. Soon thereafter, the tribe stopped offering “associate memberships.”

A decade ago, Churchill was written up in an article in News From Indian Country, titled, “Sovereignty and Its Spokesmen: The Making of an Indian.” The article noted that Churchill had claimed membership in a scrolling series of Indian tribes, but over “the course of two years, NFIC hasn’t been able to confirm a single living Indian relative, let alone one real relative that can vouch for his tribal descent claim.”

When real Indians complained to Colorado University in 1994 that a fake Indian was running their Indian Studies program, a spokeswoman for the CU president said the university needed “to determine if the position was designated for a Native American. And I can’t answer that right now.” Apparently it was answered in Churchill’s favor since he’s still teaching.

If he’s not an Indian, it’s not clear what Churchill does have to offer a university. In his book, “A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present,” Churchill denounces Jews for presuming to imagine the Holocaust was unique. In the chapter titled “Lie for Lie: Linkages between Holocaust Deniers and Proponents of the Uniqueness of the Jewish Experience in World War II,” Churchill calls the Third Reich merely “a crystallization” of Christopher Columbus’ ravages of his people (if he were an Indian).

His research apparently consisted of watching the Disney movie “Pocahontas,” which showed that the Indians meant the European settlers no harm. (That’s if you don’t count the frequent scalpings.)

Even the credulous Nation magazine -– always on red alert for tales of government oppression –- dismissed Churchill’s 1988 book “Agents of Repression” about Cointelpro-type operations against the American Indian Movement, saying the book “does not give much new information” and “even a reader who is inclined to believe their allegations will want more evidence than they provide.” If The Nation won’t buy your anti-U.S. government conspiracy theories, Kemosabe, it’s probably time to pack up the old teepee and hit the trail of tears.

In response to the repeated complaints from Indians that a phony Indian was running CU’s Indian Studies program, Churchill imperiously responded: “Guess what that means, guys? I’m not taking anyone’s job, there wouldn’t be an Indian Studies program if I wasn’t coordinating it. ... They won’t give you a job just because you have the paper.” This white man of English and Swiss-German descent apparently believes there are no actual Indians deserving of his position at CU. (No wonder the Indians aren’t crazy about him.)

As long as we’re all agreed that there are some people who don’t deserve jobs at universities, why isn’t Churchill one of them?

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Not Crazy Horse, just crazy (townhall.com, 050217)

Ann Coulter

University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill has written that “unquestionably, America has earned” the attack of 9-11. He calls the attack itself a result of “gallant sacrifices of the combat teams.” That the “combat teams” killed only 3,000 Americans, he says, shows they were not “unreasonable or vindictive.” He says that in order to even the score with America, Muslim terrorists “would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people.”

To grasp the current state of higher education in America, consider that if Churchill is at any risk at all of being fired, it is only because he smokes.

Churchill poses as a radical living on the edge, supremely confident that he is protected by tenure from being fired. College professors are the only people in America who assume they can’t be fired for what they say.

Tenure was supposed to create an atmosphere of open debate and inquiry, but instead has created havens for talentless cowards who want to be insulated from life. Rather than fostering a climate of open inquiry, college campuses have become fascist colonies of anti-American hate speech, hypersensitivity, speech codes, banned words and prohibited scientific inquiry.

Even liberals don’t try to defend Churchill on grounds that he is Galileo pursuing an abstract search for the truth. They simply invoke “free speech,” like a deus ex machina to end all discussion. Like the words “diverse” and “tolerance,” “free speech” means nothing but: “Shut up, we win.” It’s free speech (for liberals), diversity (of liberals) and tolerance (toward liberals).

Ironically, it is precisely because Churchill is paid by the taxpayers that “free speech” is implicated at all. The Constitution has nothing to say about the private sector firing employees for their speech. That’s why you don’t see Bill Maher on ABC anymore. Other well-known people who have been punished by their employers for their “free speech” include Al Campanis, Jimmy Breslin, Rush Limbaugh, Jimmy the Greek and Andy Rooney.

In fact, the Constitution says nothing about state governments firing employees for their speech: The First Amendment clearly says, “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.” Firing Ward Churchill is a pseudo-problem caused by modern constitutional law, which willy-nilly applies the Bill of Rights to the states – including the one amendment that clearly refers only to “Congress.” (Liberals love to go around blustering “‘no law’ means ‘no law’!” But apparently “Congress” doesn’t mean “Congress.”)

Even accepting the modern notion that the First Amendment applies to state governments, the Supreme Court has distinguished between the government as sovereign and the government as employer. The government is extremely limited in its ability to regulate the speech of private citizens, but not so limited in regulating the speech of its own employees.

So the First Amendment and “free speech” are really red herrings when it comes to whether Ward Churchill can be fired. Even state universities will not run afoul of the Constitution for firing a professor who is incapable of doing his job because he is a lunatic, an incompetent or an idiot – and those determinations would obviously turn on the professor’s “speech.”

If a math professor’s “speech” consisted of insisting that 2 plus 2 equals 5, or an astrophysicist’s “speech” was to claim that the moon is made of Swiss cheese, or a history professor’s “speech” consisted of rants about the racial inferiority of the n——s, each one of them could be fired by a state university without running afoul of the Constitution.

Just because we don’t have bright lines for determining what speech can constitute a firing offense, doesn’t mean there are no lines at all. If Churchill hasn’t crossed them, we are admitting that almost nothing will debase and disgrace the office of professor (except, you know, suggesting that there might be innate differences in the mathematical abilities of men and women).

In addition to calling Americans murdered on 9-11 “little Eichmanns,” Churchill has said:

* The U.S. Army gave blankets infected with smallpox to the Indians specifically intending to spread the disease.

Not only are the diseased-blanket stories cited by Churchill denied by his alleged sources, but the very idea is contradicted by the facts of scientific discovery. The settlers didn’t understand the mechanism of how disease was transmitted. Until Louis Pasteur’s experiments in the second half of the 19th century, the idea that disease could be caused by living organisms was as scientifically accepted as crystal reading is today. Even after Pasteur, many scientists continued to believe disease was spontaneously generated from within. Churchill is imbuing the settlers with knowledge that in most cases wouldn’t be accepted for another hundred years.

* Indian reservations are the equivalent of Nazi concentration camps.

I forgot Auschwitz had a casino.

If Ward Churchill can be a college professor, what’s David Duke waiting for?

The whole idea behind free speech is that in a marketplace of ideas, the truth will prevail. But liberals believe there is no such thing as truth and no idea can ever be false (unless it makes feminists cry, such as the idea that there are innate differences between men and women). Liberals are so enamored with the process of free speech that they have forgotten about the goal.

Faced with a professor who is a screaming lunatic, they retreat to, “Yes, but academic freedom, tenure, free speech, blah, blah,” and their little liberal minds go into autopilot with all the slogans.

Why is it, again, that we are so committed to never, ever firing professors for their speech? Because we can’t trust state officials to draw any lines at all here? Because ... because ... because they might start with crackpots like Ward Churchill – but soon liberals would be endangered? Liberals don’t think there is any conceivable line between them and Churchill? Ipse dixit.

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‘Academic freedom’? (Townhall.com, 050215)

Thomas Sowell

Professor Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado seems to be enjoying his 15 minutes of infamy for his childish rants against people who were killed in the 9/11 attacks. Others of course resent his cheap shots at the dead, and some are trying to get him fired.

The resulting controversy has wider implications for the understanding — and misunderstanding — of what is meant by “academic freedom.”

However symptomatic Professor Churchill may be of what is wrong with academia today, his situation has nothing to do with academic freedom. His remarks that provoked so much controversy were not made in a classroom or even on campus.

There are no real grounds for firing him under current rules and practices — which tells you what is wrong with those rules and practices. Professor Churchill is protected by tenure rules that are a much bigger problem than this one man or this one episode.

In this era of dumbed-down education, when rhetoric has replaced both logic and evidence for many people, some think the issue is “freedom of speech.” Indeed, some critics of Professor Churchill have been shouted down by his supporters, in the name of freedom of speech.

Too many people — some of them judges — seem to think that freedom of speech means freedom from consequences for what you have said. If you believe that, try insulting your boss when you go to work tomorrow. Better yet, try insulting your spouse before going to bed tonight.

While this column is protected by freedom of speech, that does not stop any editor from getting rid of it if he doesn’t like what I say. But, even if every editor across the length and breadth of the country refused to carry this column, that would be no violation of my freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech does not imply a right to an audience. Otherwise the audience would have no right to its own freedom. Editors, movie producers, speakers’ bureaus and other intermediaries have every right to decide what they will and will not present to their audiences.

Unfortunately, many of those who talk the loudest and longest about “freedom of speech” and “academic freedom” are in fact trying to justify the imposition of propaganda on a captive audience in our schools and colleges.

At one college, some gutsy students start chanting “OT” — for “off topic” — when one of their professors starts making political comments that have nothing to do with the subject of his course.

Should a professor of accounting or chemistry be fired for using up class time to sound off about homelessness or the war in Iraq? Yes!

There is no high moral principle that prevents it. What prevents it are tenure rules that have saddled so many colleges with so many self-indulgent prima donnas who seem to think that they are philosopher kings, when in fact they are often grossly ignorant or misinformed outside the narrow confines of their particular specialty.

Over the years, the notion of academic freedom has expanded beyond autonomy within one’s academic field to faculty governance of colleges and universities in general. Thus professors decide whether the institution’s endowment can be invested in companies or countries that are out of favor among the anointed, or whether students will be allowed to join fraternities or the Reserve Officers Training Corps.

There is nothing in specialized academic expertise which makes professors’ opinions on issues outside their specialty any better than anyone else’s opinions. In no other institution — religious or secular, military or civilian — are people who make decisions that shape the institution unable to be fired when those decisions lead to bad results.

The combination of tenure and academic self-governance is unique — and explains much of the atmosphere of self-indulgence and irresponsibility on campus, of which Professor Ward Churchill is just one extreme example. Re-thinking confused notions of “academic freedom” is far more important than firing Professor Churchill and thereby turning a jackass into a martyr.

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The left is worth nothing (Townhall.com, 050201)

Dennis Prager

“Someone who does not know the difference between good and evil is worth nothing.” — Miecyslaw Kasprzyk, Polish rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust, New York Times, Jan. 30, 2005

It took a Polish rescuer of Jews in the Holocaust, cited this week 60 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration and death camp, to best describe those people who cannot or refuse to know the difference between good and evil. They are “worth nothing.”

Since I was an adolescent, I have been preoccupied with evil: specifically, why people engage in it and why other people refuse to acknowledge its existence. As I have gotten older, I often find the latter group more infuriating. Somehow, as much as I don’t want to, I can understand why a Muslim raised in a world permeated with hate-filled lies about America and Israel, and taught from childhood that God loves death, will blow himself up and joyfully maim and murder children. As evil as the Muslim terrorist is, given the Islamic world in which he was raised, he has some excuse.

But the non-Muslims who fail to acknowledge and confront the evil of Muslim terror and the evil of those monsters who cut innocent people’s throats and murder those trying to make a democracy — these people are truly worth nothing. Unlike the Muslims raised in a religious totalitarian society, they have no excuse. And in my lifetime, these people have overwhelmingly congregated on the political Left.

Since the 1960s, with few exceptions, on the greatest questions of good and evil, the Left has either been neutral toward or actively supported evil. The Left could not identify communism as evil; has been neutral toward or actually supported the anti-democratic pro-terrorist Palestinians against the liberal democracy called Israel; and has found it impossible to support the war for democracy and against an Arab/Muslim enemy in Iraq as evil as any fascist the Left ever claimed to hate.

There were intellectually and morally honest arguments against going to war in Iraq. But once the war began, a moral person could not oppose it. No moral person could hope for, let alone act on behalf of, a victory for the Arab/Islamic fascists. Just ask yourself but two questions: If America wins, will there be an increase or decrease in goodness in Iraq and in the world? And then ask what would happen if the Al Qaeda/Zarqawi/Baathists win.

It brings me no pleasure to describe opponents of the Iraqi war as “worth nothing.” I know otherwise fine, decent people who oppose the war. So I sincerely apologize for the insult.

But to the Left in general, as opposed to individually good people who side with the Left, I have no apologies. It is the Left — in America, in Europe and around the world — that should do all the apologizing: to the men, women and children of Iraq and elsewhere for not coming to their support against those who would crush them.

That most Democratic Party leaders, union leaders, gay leaders, feminists, professors, editorial writers and news reporters have called for an American withdrawal and labeled this most moral of wars “immoral” is a permanent stain on their reputations.

About 60% of the Iraqi people went to vote despite the fact that every Iraqi voter risked his or her life and the lives of their children, whose throats the Islamic fascists threatened to slit. Yet, the Left continues to label the war for Iraqi democracy “immoral” while praising the tyrant of Cuba.

Leftists do so for the same reason they admired Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-tung and condemned American arms as the greatest threat to world peace during and after the Cold War. The Left “does not know the difference between good and evil.” And that is why it is worth nothing.

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Your Right to Say What? (American Spectator, 050208)

By James Bowman

Richard Cohen had a Voltairean moment the other day. Or rather a pseudo-Voltairean movement, since the well-known saying: “I don’t agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” seems not to have been said by the French sage after all. He is one of those people, like Lincoln and Mark Twain, who seem to attract credit for witty or pithy sayings the way the remotest corner under the bed attracts dust-bunnies. From his own remote corner of the op-ed page of the Washington Post, Cohen noted the following undisputed facts:

(1) that Hamilton College in upstate New York had invited as a speaker someone who described the victims of the September 11 terror attacks as “little Eichmanns” who deserved what they got;

(2) that there had been a predictable outcry of protest at the invitation from many both inside Hamilton College and outside it, notably including Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel whom Cohen describes as having, “in effect, organized an Internet lynch mob, a collection of cyber- goons — one of whom threatened to bring a gun” and

(3) that, after hanging tough for a while, Hamilton College had caved and rescinded the invitation.

Cohen’s point was that the college should not have done so. Not, of course, that he agrees with that description of those who died. On the contrary, he describes this person, whose name is Ward Churchill, as an “idiot” and his words making the comparison mentioned above, which he quotes at length, “repellent, idiotic” — not surprising, I guess, coming from an idiot — “and badly written.” But still he should have been allowed to have his say, thinks R. Cohen. Here’s his argument, such as it is:

Hamilton should not have invited Churchill in the first place. His ideas are trash, clichés to boot, and the school could have…changed its mind once it found out more about him. But once he had accepted, and once Hamilton had insisted by all that is holy that it would stick to its guns, it could not then collapse because those ideas, as loathsome as they are, might have real consequences. Hire some guards. Frisk the audience. But don’t cave to the mob.

The mob? Was it only a mob because Bill O’Reilly was leading it? Is any large group of people protesting at the granting of a forum to some “idiot” spouting offensive nonsense then a mob? And is it then only necessary for such a person to have acquired such a forum under false pretenses or the cover of his hosts’ ignorance for him to be granted a privilege that many people who might have interesting or profitable things to say are denied?

Yet the popularity of the pseudo-Voltairean quotation suggests that some such idea of what true liberalism involves enjoys a perverse popularity. Carried to its logical conclusion, it could only encourage those who hold stupid and offensive views to make them still more stupid and offensive — enough at least to get the liberals on their side in defending their right to a forum. And the freedom to be stupid and offensive, though an undoubted corollary of liberal principles, carries with it no right to a hearing from those who resent stupidity and offensiveness. There is a limit to what any of us can attend to in a short lifetime, and true liberalism must also afford us the freedom so to organize our lives as to limit the amount of stupid and offensive things we are forced to listen to. God knows enough of them get through in any case, no matter how good our screening system.

Even if no one at Hamilton College would have been forced to listen to Mr. Churchill’s words, the College itself has a responsibility in its putative role as an upholder of civilized discourse not to offer such an incentive to speakers to be even more stupid and offensive than they already are. Responsible scholarship depends on the upholding of intellectual standards, and the abdication of such responsibility in the name of freedom of speech is a bit of sophistry of which I doubt even Voltaire would approve.

And anyway, it’s not as if poor Mr. Churchill, who is a self-described “Indian activist” and a tenured professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has no forum without the Hamilton College gig. In fact, according to a report in the Post of a couple of days later, back in Boulder he was able to deploy his own rent-a-mob shock troops to shout down a disciplinary hearing of which he was the subject. If the forces of liberalism ever allow those deliberations to resume, and they reach the illiberal conclusion that Mr. Churchill should no longer be allowed to impose his stupid and offensive views upon the students of the University of Colorado, he will always have the Internet to fall back on. Out there, you can be as stupid and offensive as you like and somebody will be listening.

James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, media essayist for the New Criterion, and The American Spectator’s movie critic.

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Right Read: Michael Medved engages and explains (National Review Online, 050209)

Every week, more than two million Americans tune in to The Michael Medved Show to hear Medved’s thoughts on politics and entertainment. On the show, Medved taps his varied experiences as a liberal political operative, advertising executive, screenwriter, movie critic, synagogue president, and nine-time author to entertain and educate his radio listeners. Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life tells Medved’s story of his political and religious journeys from left to right, as well as his quest for authenticity and his growing appreciation for America’s core traditional values of family, prayer, and self-reliance.

Right Turns is divided into simple lessons, with each chapter mirroring a lesson from a specific moment in Medved’s life that went on to shape his current philosophical outlook. Each chapter’s lesson is summarized in the chapter title, and then repeated in the chapter’s closing paragraph for good measure.

The story begins with “America Isn’t Normal,” in which Medved describes how his family came to understand that poverty and disease were not the endemic problems in America that they were in early 20th-century Europe. For the Medved family, America was a beacon of promise and opportunity in a bitter world. Medved’s grandparents, Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine, had struggled for ten years to unite in America. During that time of separation, the couple lost five of their six children.

Medved went to Yale in 1965, and after graduation continued on at the law school, although he never finished his degree. While at Yale, he met future political stars like Hillary and Bill Clinton, and John Kerry. Medved’s tale of his one meeting with the young John Kerry paints a devastating portrait of the perils of ambition: “[Kerry] droned on in portentous tones and at appalling length about the way the Liberal Party and the [Yale Political Union] would enrich our lives and the possibility — nay, the virtual certainty — that if we worked with single-minded intensity we might one day rise to the unspeakably glorious heights of party chairmanship and union-wide office that he, the Great Kerry, had achieved.” Afterwards, Medved and a classmate would recite a mantra of authenticity that echoed in the background of future life decisions: “We can’t turn out like John Kerry.”

Medved’s staunch opposition to the Vietnam War led him to pour heart and soul into Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. After Kennedy’s assassination, Medved continued to sweat and toil for liberal candidates, but his quest for authenticity exposed a growing gap between rhetoric and reality, ideology and integrity.

The Kennedy campaign may have been a labor of love for Medved, but he was a reluctant warrior for the McGovern campaign. Medved was uncomfortable with McGovern’s neo-isolationism and lukewarm support for Israel, but he joined because of his personal associations with the McGovernites, as well as McGovern’s opposition to the Vietnam War. Like millions of Americans, Vietnam was the issue that linked Medved to the left. Once that issue receded, Medved became receptive to conservative ideas as he became increasingly uncomfortable with what he saw as the excesses of radical liberalism.

For Medved, the first conscious breaking point was the realization that “Liberal Heroes Aren’t All Heroes.” In 1972, he signed on as campaign manager for Ron Dellums, the fiery African-American congressman from Berkeley California. Medved quickly soured on Dellums and his associates, who acted as though the rule of law, personal ethics, and high standards did not apply to them. Dellums’s people, in turn, viewed Medved as a token Jew — a gambit to attract suburban Jewish voters. The Dellums staff, Medved claims, also used drugs excessively and flamboyantly, and suspiciously ran the campaign as an all-cash operation. Medved felt that the Dellums operation abused white sympathy for African Americans both to obtain power and to avoid responsibility.

As he lost interest in liberal politics, Medved went into book writing, and found he had a knack not just for writing books, but for selling them as well. Medved’s Whatever Happened to the Class of ‘65, a review of his high-school classmates ten years later, became a bestseller, as did his The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. The film book turned out to be the key development in Medved’s career, ultimately leading to his becoming a film critic.

When The Tonight Show invited the Sabbath-observant Medved to discuss his awful movies, he had to beg off because it was scheduled for the night of the second Passover Seder. The producer suggested an alternate date, but that date was on the last days of Passover, which also precluded participation. At this point, the disbelieving producer said that there would be no more alternative dates.

Desperate, Medved read the producer the biblical passage forbidding work at the end of Passover, and the producer relented. Medved’s eventual appearance was viewed by another producer, of Sneak Previews, who offered Medved a spot on the show. Of course, the episode on which Medved appeared was the only time that year the Sneak Previews producer had watched The Tonight Show, making this the 20th-century equivalent of a Hasidic tale, where strict observance begets material success.

Medved’s work on “The Tonight Show,” among other places, led to his becoming a television film critic. In that capacity, he both gained exposure and also became known as a conservative analyst of films, both of which led to his current incarnation as a conservative radio host.

Medved’s description of his travels from the Left to the Right is one that many people can identify with — and which may describe his radio and book-selling popularity. As Medved describes it, his transformation was based on “a belated awakening to economic realities, the embrace of the traditional family, and America’s ongoing and underreported religious revival.” Or, more concisely and alliteratively, “our experiences with paychecks, parenthood, and prayer.” On its own, Right Turns is an engaging memoir and a moving tribute to America. But it is also a very accessible road map for explaining the practical reasons old radicals often become older conservatives.

— Tevi Troy is a former special assistant to President George W. Bush and the author of Intellectuals and the American Presidency.

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The values quagmire (Townhall.com, 050215)

David Limbaugh

The Democratic leadership has a funny way of showing its commitment to “values.” Perhaps it should first decide whether it wants to adopt Christian values, redefine them or just cynically mock them.

When liberals were cockier about their political fortunes, they were quick to demean certain Christians as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command” or the “American Taliban.”

Don’t get me wrong. The Left is still making fun of Christians, but they’ve gotten a little cagier. Now they’re claiming a slice of the pie for themselves, saying they are the true Christians and decrying Republicans for trying to assert a monopoly on Christianity. Well, I guess we’re making some progress.

Ever since the mostly bizarre presidential exit polls signaled the importance of “values” among voters, Democrats have been scrambling to devise a way to work themselves seamlessly into that “demographic.” So far, it doesn’t appear they’ve even convinced themselves, but they’re still working on it. Several recent news items illustrate the point.

Howard Dean has been making a lot of noise since his triumphal ascension to the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). But when it comes to values — at least traditional ones — the poor guy, like the party he represents, is painfully ambivalent at best.

During the DNC meeting on Friday, a lady from the Women’s Caucus asked the irascible governor (don’t call him “Chairman”) why those Republicans keep prattling on about “moral values.” The Dean of Scream responded, “When they don’t have any, is that what you mean?

Mad Howard didn’t stop there. He likened Republicans to “Pharisees and Sadducees” whose hypocrisy Jesus denounced. He also said Jesus’ teachings about the difficulty of a rich man entering the kingdom of God weren’t “part of the Republican platform.”

Apparently wanting to demonstrate he was conversant with the Old Testament as well, Howard snuck in an allusion to Moses’ wilderness wanderings in describing the Republicans’ recently ended minority status. He said, “Republicans wandered around in the political wilderness for 40 years before they took back Congress.” Are we to assume — fittingly — that the new DNC “governor” equates Congress to the Promised Land?

Howard is not the only Democrat protesting the Republicans’ supposed identification with scripture. Alabama state Rep. Alvin Holmes defiantly promised to give $700 (now it’s up to $5,000 I hear) to any person who could show him a biblical passage expressing that marriage is between man and woman. When someone took him up on it, Holmes said, “Anybody could have any interpretation they want of the Bible, and that’s not my interpretation.” I suppose it should not surprise us that in this postmodern era with its full frontal assault on truth, people — even some who call themselves Christians — will say that scripture says anything we want it to say.

Riding to the rescue of these gentlemen is Rev. Jim Wallis, who has written a book, “God’s Politics,” in which he reportedly provides ammunition to the political Left to reclaim the evangelical voter.

I haven’t yet read the book, but according to a Chicago Tribune story on it, Wallis takes conservatives to task for their inattention to poverty and other issues. “How did the faith of Jesus come to be known as pro-rich, pro-war, and only pro-American?” asks Wallis.

Such mischaracterizations, reveal, at the very least the naivete of the politically liberal Christian. Conservative Christians advocate free market and constitutional principles they believe (and history has proven) will do more to eradicate poverty than any other system. That they don’t subscribe to the failed strategies of socialism doesn’t mean they are less compassionate toward the poor.

No conservative Christian I know is pro-war or “only pro-American.” But most of them support “just wars” and wars to protect our national security, which they don’t believe require the permission of other nations. They also reject the liberals’ definition of “unilateral” military actions as those unsupported by the French, Germans and Russians.

The Democratic leadership should understand that it won’t endear itself to many Christian voters by rewriting scripture, embracing relativism, facilitating a culture of death, endorsing homosexuality as a civil right, portraying government-coerced redistributions of other people’s money as acts of compassion toward the poor and preaching class warfare notwithstanding the Commandment against “coveting.”

Far be it from me to assert, on behalf of political conservatives, a monopoly on Christianity. But I would humbly suggest that if Democrats want to avoid digging themselves into a deeper values quagmire, they would be well advised to pursue a different approach, one that doesn’t involve recasting Christian values and rewriting scripture.

David Limbaugh is a syndicated columnist who blogs at DavidLimbaugh.com

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The rise of the bike path left (townhall.com, 050216)

Jonah Goldberg

When Howard Dean was still on top of the world looking down on the Democratic presidential nomination, the indispensable columnist Mark Steyn, writing in the Wall Street Journal, dubbed the good doctor the figurehead of the “bike path left.”

This was a reference to Dean’s decision to leave the Episcopalian Church because his parish had opposed his plan to build a local bike path. As Steyn noted, what made this controversy remarkable, considering the recent dust-ups within the Anglican community, was that this was not in fact a gay bike path, nor a path one biked on the way to a gay marriage. No, this was just an ordinary bike path, and, for all the theological issues involved in the controversy, Dean’s church might just as well have been a McDonald’s or a Jiffy Lube. It was just, in Dean’s words, a “big fight.” “I was fighting to have public access to the waterfront, and we were fighting very hard..”

Steyn contrasted Dean’s readiness to rumble about a bike path with his more leisurely attitude toward war. When Saddam was captured, Dean had said, “I suppose that’s a good thing.” When the butchers Uday and Qusay were killed in a raid, Dean said, “The ends don’t justify the means.” About Osama bin Laden, Dean explained in 2003, “I don’t think it makes a lot of difference” if he’s tried in the Hague or in the place where he orchestrated the murder of thousands of Americans. Asked if the Hague would be good for Saddam, too, Dean airily replied, “Suits me fine.”

In short, about the war on terror Dean was dismissively blase. About bike paths he was a pit bull.

This is all relevant because Howard Dean has emerged from the ashes of John Kerry’s immolation to run the Democratic party.

Interestingly, many elected Democrats insist he will not lead the party. Sen. Joseph Biden, for example, explained: “No party chairman has ever made a bit of difference in the public perception. . He’s not going to have a policy role.”

So, apparently, Dean will be little more than the guy who calls the repairman when the DNC’s Xerox machine is out of toner. So why did the party’s nominal leaders oppose his campaign to be DNC chair? That Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid failed to stop Dean suggests that the base marches to his drum, not theirs.

Perhaps Pelosi and Reid recognized that the party’s best hopes do not reside in rallying left-wingers who use “summer” as a verb. The essential characteristic of the Bike Path Left is its passion for lifestyle issues. Dean was famously the governor of Vermont, where lifestyle has become a religion for its urbane yet fashionably rustic citizenry. The flinty old Vermont of yore has given way to the Vermont of Architectural Digest and wealthy transplants from New York and Boston. Dean represented this transformation perfectly. In the Vermont statehouse, Calvin Coolidge’s sober, thrifty visage gazes from his official portrait to Dean’s. While all the other governors dress like bankers, Dean chose to pose as if for the cover of an L.L. Bean catalog, studiously relaxed on the shore of a pond in an open-collared flannel shirt, khakis and racy hiking boots. Previous governors probably liked the great outdoors, too, but they didn’t think their job was about validating lifestyles.

Simply because the BPL cherishes lifestyle politics doesn’t mean it is always laid-back. Dean is, famously, a man of considerable rage. Just this week he remarked that he “hates Republicans.” (Presumably all of those bumper stickers in Burlington proclaiming that “Hate is not a family value” will have to be scraped off.) And as the original bike path fight demonstrates, his passion about the importance of lifestyle trumps his faith in more traditional arrangements. Dean signed the first same-sex partnership law and is now a vocal advocate for gay marriage. This isn’t a petty issue like a bike path. It’s a very important one to voters on both sides. Indeed, gay marriage might well have won the election for George W. Bush.

Which is why some Democrats fear that Dean will remake their party as the champion of the Burlington state of mind. Defenders call him a “pragmatist” who governed as a “centrist.” They always leave out that a Vermont centrist is someone who cares about the property values of limousine liberals. Nonetheless, Dean and his supporters say they’re serious about reaching out to more traditional voters.

But his bike path passion appears to be elsewhere. In a fascinating report from the DNC’s recent meeting, Tony Carnes of Christianity Today recounts how Dean sees his party’s failings as nothing but a “language” problem. “We learned in the last election that language makes an enormous difference,” he explained dispassionately.

Later, at another gathering, Gloria Nieto, vice chair of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Caucus, broke into sobs, wondering aloud whether the Democrats would remain a welcoming home for lesbians. Dean immediately “leaped off the stage into the audience to hug her,” writes Carnes. “With a sob of his own catching his voice, he brought the audience to standing ovation” when he declared, “That’s why I am a Democrat.”

Well, that and bike paths.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online, a Townhall.com member group.

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Piss Off (Weekly Standard, 050222)

A Belgian novelty shows what the good people of Brussels really think about George W. Bush.

Brussels

WHEN JOHAN VANDE LANOTTE, Belgium’s Vice Prime Minister, goes to the toilets today, he finds the urinals in the offices of his ministry decorated with stickers. They show an American flag and the head of George W. Bush. “Go ahead. Piss on me,” the caption says. Vande Lanotte is one of Bush’s hosts in Brussels. Is peeing on your guest’s head appropriate? In Belgium it is. After all, Brussels’ best known statue is that of “Manneken Pis,” a peeing boy.

The piss stickers, specially made to be used in urinals, can be seen these days in the public toilets of Belgian schools, youth clubs, and pubs. They were designed by Laurent Winnock, president of the Young Socialists, the youth branch of Vande Lanotte’s Socialist party. Winnock did his creative work during his office hours, which would not be worth mentioning if Winnock did not work in the offices of Vice Prime Minister Vande Lanotte, as one of his press spokesmen.

Last Friday, Belgian television asked Robert “Steve” Stevaert, the Socialist party leader, what he thought of the stickers. It had not been his idea, he stressed, but he refused to distance himself from it. He hardly could, seeing as the stickers can be ordered for free through the party’s official website. For Belgian television viewers the message was clear: Bush may be our government’s guest, the ministers will greet him, smile and tell him that he is most welcome, but we all know what they think of the bastard.

For those who missed the “subtlety” of the urinal stickers, Laurette Onkelinx, the Belgian minister of Justice and one of the Socialist party’s most powerful figures, let go during prime time on Sunday evening, as Air Force One was about to land in Brussels. “I would rather have had John Kerry visiting us,” she said on television. When the interviewer asked whether it was not undiplomatic to say so, she answered: “No. That is how I feel about it.”

Meanwhile, however, a citizen of Ghent, where the stickers had also been distributed, has filed a complaint with the Belgian judiciary headed by Onkelinx. “This sticker has nothing to do with freedom of speech,” he says. “If I go to the gents in the pub nowadays, I am forced to pee on Bush and the American flag because it is impossible to miss this sticker.”

I do not know whether the president is aware of the real feelings of his Belgian hosts. Has the American Embassy in Brussels informed him? This question crossed my mind, as he was delivering his speech to a crowd of politicians, journalists, and businessmen in the prestigious halls of Brussels’ Concert Noble on Monday afternoon. There, under a huge painting of Leopold II, Belgium’s late-19th-century king (and the tyrant of the Congo), Bush addressed a few hundred people invited by the U.S. Embassy. I know some of them. They used to be my colleagues.

Fifteen years ago, I was sacked by a Belgian newspaper because I had written an article in the Wall Street Journal which the Belgian politicians did not like. Being a somewhat conservative and pro-American journalist, I was a regular contributor to the Journal in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These articles were not liked by my liberal colleagues, nor by the Belgian regime. On April 6, 1990, I was fired after writing a Journal op-ed piece about how a major story had been ignored by the Belgian media under political pressure from the top political parties.

That day ended my career as a newspaper journalist. None of the Belgian papers has been willing to employ me since. Fifteen years later I am still known by my former colleagues as “that fascist from the Wall Street Journal.” And now I could see those same editors sitting in the audience, listening to a man whom they despise.

Indeed, they think that the world will be saved if America becomes more like Europe, whereas I think that Europe will be saved only if it becomes more like America. But that is an opinion which no one in Europe is allowed to have. Those who do, get peed upon.

Dr. Paul Belien is the author of the forthcoming book A Throne in Brussels on the “Belgianisation” of Europe (Imprint Academic, May 2005).

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End of story for Hunter Thompson (Washington Times, 050222)

Outlaw, druggie, Dunhill-smoking, Chivas Regal-drinking, anti-establishment literary icon Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide after becoming depressed about the United States’ shift toward conservatism, said one longtime friend who spent the weekend at the Aspen, Colo., home of the late “gonzo” journalist.

“He was depressed about the state of society,” said Loren Jenkins, foreign editor for National Public Radio in Washington.

A vehement opponent of President Bush, Mr. Thompson, 67, “was feeling maudlin about the current conservatism sweeping the country,” Mr. Jenkins said. “He felt he’d had a long run, trying to create a freer society in the ‘60s and ‘70s and he felt it had all been closed down.”

Mr. Thompson’s body was discovered Sunday by Juan Thompson, his son by his first wife, Sandra Dawn Thompson. His second wife, Anita, was not home at the time. The family issued a statement asking for privacy.

In recent months, Mr. Thompson had suffered injuries and other health problems. While others expressed shock at Mr. Thompson’s death, close friends “ including Mr. Jenkins “ did not.

“Everyone who knew Hunter knew that he lived by his own rules and that he would end his life by his own rules,” Mr. Jenkins said.

But other friends said yesterday that Mr. Thompson seemed to be in good spirits during the past week.

“I was there Friday evening at his home and left him at midnight,” said longtime friend and neighbor Michael Cleverly.

“We had a lovely evening. He was very upbeat. I’d have been less shocked if he had shot me rather than himself,” said Mr. Cleverly. “He is the last person on the planet Earth I would expect of that.”

Mr. Cleverly, who knew Mr. Thompson for 25 years, said the writer “ who lived at a compound called Owl Farm “ had several assignments in the works, including a book of his photography. “He was in the midst of a productive life. My only speculation was that [the suicide] had to be an impulse, not something he’d been dwelling on.”

Mr. Cleverly also attended Mr. Thompson’s annual Super Bowl party, and said friends were not aware of anything troubling the writer, except he had suffered “a terrible year physically.”

According to Mr. Cleverly, the writer fell in Hawaii and broke his leg. He also had back surgery and pain from an artificial hip.

Yesterday at his favorite haunt, Woody Creek Tavern, patrons and writers gathered to remember Mr. Thompson, perhaps best known for his drug-fueled 1971 narrative “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which was made into a 1998 movie starring Johnny Depp.

Recently, Mr. Thompson had been a regular columnist for ESPN.com Web site, and his columns had been collected into a book. Passionate about sports, Mr. Thompson gained a loyal following of younger readers who were not yet born when his name, along with Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote, became synonymous with a new style of observational, stream-of-consciousness magazine writing.

He rode with the Hell’s Angels “ the subject of a 1966 book that established him as a leading practitioner of so-called “New Journalism” “ and wrote a widely praised account of the 1972 presidential campaign and, like George Plimpton, became adept at participatory journalism.

“There was an undercurrent of madness to his work,” fellow writer Gay Talese said yesterday. “The story was always inside his head. It wasn’t necessarily what he saw. His power was his disenchantment by just about everything in front of him.”

His last column recounted a 3 a.m. phone call to actor and friend Bill Murray, who portrayed Mr. Thompson in a 1980 movie, “Where the Buffalo Roam.” Mr. Thompson had invented a new, “truly violent leisure sport” he called “shotgun golf,” in which each player attempts to shoot his opponent’s golf ball with a 12-gauge shotgun.

“He was so vital and had endless number of friends,” said Gaylord Guerin, owner of the Woody Creek Tavern. “He was an absolute genius.”

With his aviator sunglasses, cigarette holder and broad-brimmed hat, Mr. Thompson was the inspiration for the “Uncle Duke” character in cartoonist Gary Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” strip.

Known to magazine editors as a prima donna who turned in outlandish expense accounts and demanded high fees, he nevertheless earned respect for his entertaining rants. Mr. Jenkins said Rolling Stone once sent Mr. Thompson on assignment to Vietnam. Rather than cover the war, he spent his entire stay in a Saigon bar getting drunk and arguing on the telephone with editor Jann Wenner, who had canceled the writer’s health insurance.

He inspired a generation of future writers with his vivid first-person accounts of adventures fueled by alcohol and illegal drugs. “I hate to advocate weird chemicals, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone ... but they’ve always worked for me,” Mr. Thompson once said.

He later admitted exaggerating his drug consumption, but truth never seemed to get in the way of a good story. Mr. Jenkins described his late friend as “who Mark Twain might have been if Twain had discovered acid.”

Flipped out and freaked out on everything from psilocybin mushrooms to peyote, Mr. Thompson wrote in the same vein as William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski. He especially admired the works of “beat” writer Jack Kerouac and Irish novelist J.P. Donleavy.

But Ernest Hemingway was always an influence, and Mr. Jenkins said Mr. Thompson’s death by self-inflicted gunshot reflected that influence.

“There is a bit of the Hemingway thing,” said Mr. Jenkins. “Both writers had their greatest success very early in their careers, and both created a persona built on that.”

While politically an enemy of all things Republican, Mr. Thompson proudly proclaimed himself a life member of the National Rifle Association and was known to keep a small arsenal of firearms at his home.

Born in Louisville, Ky., on July 18, 1937, Hunter Stockton Thompson was a self-described “wild boy.” After high school, he served two years in the Air Force during which he edited the base newsletter and wrote sports stories for a local newspaper. He then worked as a freelance correspondent for several newspapers and magazines before joining Rolling Stone, where he coined the term “gonzo journalism.”

Always worried about finances, Mr. Thompson churned out a series of books, including “The Great Shark Hunt” (1975), “Generation of Swine” (1988) and “Better Than Sex” (1994). A novel he wrote in the early 1960s, “The Rum Diary,” was published in 1998, and he published a collection of short stories in 1991.

“He kept everything,” said Mr. Jenkins, referring to a cache of material “ letters, faxes, memos and old articles “ Mr. Thompson stored in his basement.

One of Mr. Thompson’s more colorful antics occurred in 1970, when he ran unsuccessfully for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo., on the “Freak Power” ticket. The gonzo candidate “ whose platform included changing the name of Aspen to “Fat City” and decriminalizing drugs “ decided to shave his head, so he could denounce his crew-cut Republican rival as “my long-haired opponent.”

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A PC postscript (Washington Times, 050223)

In the meekest of ways, Harvard President Lawrence Summers has become something of a cause celebre among conservatives for challenging the ultra-liberal orthodoxy dominating American universities. It was meek because that wasn’t what Mr. Summers had in mind when he suggested that genetic differences might help explain why more men pursue careers in the hard sciences and mathematics than women. But that’s also the point: By daring to question the conventional thinking of his profession, however it happened, Mr. Summers committed the ultimate sin.

Click to Visit

For his crimes, Mr. Summers has had to apologize profusely, meet with feminist student and faculty groups, and attend two faculty meetings — the latest one just yesterday — which can more accurately be described as re-education seminars. And yet he still faces termination. To those of us who aren’t part of the Ivory Tower, this all seems both silly and a dangerous assault on free speech, free thought and dissent.

At the same time, it’s educational for the American people to see for themselves every once in a while how degraded our institutions of higher learning have become. Mr. Summers’ critics have chosen to splash their witch hunt on the front pages for all to see. Organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and activists like David Horowitz, who are waging an important struggle against repressive universities, couldn’t have asked for a better marketing tool. Their case has always been “it’s worse than you think.” Now, millions of Americans are beginning to understand that they’re right.

With that in mind, allow us to throw out a suggestion of our own: Should Mr. Summers retain his position as president — and he should — the entire fiasco may have represented the high-water mark of liberal-dominated political correctness. Even if Mr. Summers is forced out, people who had never given a second thought to academia will immediately wonder why their child’s professor or university defended Ward Churchill, but attacked Mr. Summers. The liberal academic’s mind has been revealed to be closed. The end of such a mentality will be a long time in coming, but perhaps we have just witnessed the beginning of the end.

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Ward Churchill, Lawrence Summers, and the hypocrisy of the academics (Townhall.com, 050223)

Ben Shapiro

Quick quiz: which of these two statements do you find more offensive?

(A) About under-representation of women in hard sciences: “In the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong...”

(B) About the victims of September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center: “True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire . . . . To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.”

Statement (A) was made by Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University. Statement (B) was written by Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at University of Colorado. Believe it or not, the university academics are calling Churchill’s statements a textbook case of free speech, and are calling for Summers’ head. That’s the sick state of academia today.

Many Harvard professors are leading an academic insurrection against Summers, lobbying for a vote of no-confidence. On February 15, professors ripped into Summers at a one-sided meeting to discuss his comments. Summers has been forced to largely back down from his statements, writing a letter to the Harvard faculty in which he explains, “if I could turn back the clock, I would have spoken differently on matters so complex . . . . I should have left such speculation to those more expert in the relevant fields.”

Meanwhile, Ward Churchill, who should not only be fired for his statements but expelled from the country, has found the hearts of many in liberal academia. Deans and professors from all over the country have pledged their support. Ignorant college students who cite the First Amendment without ever having read it back Churchill all the way.

So why the difference in treatment? It would be difficult to claim that University of Colorado professors are more open-minded about academic freedom than are professors at Harvard University. No, this question comes down to politics, pure and simple. Ward Churchill said something professors believe should be said; even if they don’t agree with his statements, they feel that his radical, treasonous anti-Americanism belongs in the classroom. Larry Summers said something professors believe should not be given any forum; he challenged the prevailing P.C. notion that women and men are the same in all respects.

Leftist academia is willing to eat its own to prevent the conservative barbarians from entering the gates. To many of these professors, Lawrence Summers looks like Kane from Alien: a good, solid, center-left guy – until that conservative alien pops out of his chest and lands on the table. Much of the professorial anger at Summers has been building up over time. A couple of years ago, Summers offended nutty professor Cornel West, who found time in between making rap CDs and ignoring intellectual pursuits to hop over to Princeton in retaliation. In 2002, Summers made an unpopular speech in which he lambasted rising anti-Semitism in the academic community. Summers has also been active in fighting grade inflation.

Everyone knew who Churchill was from the start. He was hired and promoted because he’s virulently unpatriotic and wishes to see the United States government overthrown. So why should we be surprised when those who hand-picked him defend him from his attackers?

Academic freedom means nothing to Churchill’s defenders and Summers’ attackers. It’s a buzzword they can use or discard at will. Ruth Wisse, one of the few honest professors at Harvard summed up the situation nicely: “These are people frustrated that they can’t unseat President Bush, and [Summers] is the closest thing that they can depose. Since he appears to be somewhat to the right of them, he will suffice as a surrogate . . . I would hope these forces would be exposed: This is a place that wants to deny people free speech.”

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The Ward Churchill money trail (Christian Post, 050224)

Joel Mowbray

To the casual observer, now-infamous University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill—who labeled 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns”—would seem little more than an unfortunate speck on the fringe of the far left.

An investigestion by this journalist, however, uncovered substantial evidence suggesting otherwise.

The media was quick to describe Ward Churchill’s 2002 essay—where he also wrote of the “gallant sacrifices” of the “combat teams” that killed almost 3,000 Americans—as “little noticed.” (USA Today, February 9) It was, however, noticed—and honored—by a liberal organization last year.

Churchill adapted his essay into a book, “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” which earned honorable mention for a human rights award from the Gustavus Myers Center in Boston—the third time the group had so honored the embattled professor.

At first blush, the Gustavus Myers Center could seem like a wacky, far-left ivory tower creation. Receiving honorable mention for its 2003 award, for example, was a picture book of “classic” gay erotica. Witness the group’s own description of the book: “Pencil, ink and chalk drawings claiming an erotic past as extremely important for notions of identity and community.”

Careful examination, however, reveals that the Myers Center is anything but fringe. Listed on its website as “sponsors” (a term that is not defined) are mainstream liberal organizations such as the NAACP, the Urban League, the Center for Democratic Renewal, and the United Church of Christ.

And the foundations that fund the Myers Center’s sponsors are key financial backers of the American left, such as George Soros’ Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the Public Welfare Foundation (which contributed to the anti-Bush America’s Coming Together).

The top funders of the Myers Center’s sponsors, and the amounts they gave in total since 2000, are:

· $650,000 from the Public Welfare Foundation, which has given over $5 million to “reproductive” causes and nearly $1.7 million to various gun control groups. It even gave $100,000 directly to the Blue Mountain abortion clinic in Montana, which has also received $50,000 from the (Ted) Turner Foundation.

· $1.3 million from the Open Society Institute

· almost $5 million from Lilly Endowments, which was founded by heirs of the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune. Though not typically known as a left-wing foundation, it has given, for example, more than $700,000 to Planned Parenthood.

· over $12.1 million from the Ford Foundation, most of which came in the form of $10.4 million in grants to the NAACP

Despite being sponsored by prominent, mainstream liberal organizations, the Myers Center’s honoring of Ward Churchill’s screed does not appear to be out the group’s character.

Taking top honors for 2004, for example, is “Civil Rights in Peril: The Targeting of Arabs and Muslims,” which, according to the Myers Center web site, is about the “relationship between accelerated repression of Muslims and Arabs domestically... and U.S. empire building abroad.” Rants from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) aside, there is scant evidence to suggest “accelerated repression of Muslims and Arabs” in America.

The center itself is led by a woman who seems to share a worldview similar to Prof. Churchill’s. The Myers Center’s director, Loretta Williams, wrote in the magazine Response (published by United Methodist Women) in June 2002 that President Bush’s rhetoric on the war on terror was “bloodthirsty and vengeful” and that it “dehumanizes... Muslims, immigrants, and those with darker skin.”

Williams hinted later in the same piece that the United States also perpetrates terrorism: “Terrorism can be used by the weak against the powerful or by the powerful against the weak.” She also opposed military action in Afghanistan after 9/11, praising “the courage” of communist sympathizer Barbara Lee (D-CA), the sole Congressional vote against that war.

Though the statements of Williams and Churchill would likely be patently offensive to most in the American electorate, they don’t seem that outside of a Democratic Party that embraces Michael Moore, the man who compared Iraqi terrorists to the “Minutemen” who helped win America’s independence.

Since news broke that Churchill’s “little Eichmanns” essay was honored by the Gustavus Myers Center, the group does not appear to have lost any of its sponsors. Still listed are all 12 sponsors listed previously, including, oddly enough, B’Nai Brith International. (B’Nai Brith did not immediately return a call seeking comment.)

It is not clear what role “sponsors” play in, or how much they donate to, the Myers Center, and calls seeking comment from the center were not returned. The Myers Center does not appear to file independent tax returns under its name, making it difficult to determine the group’s overall budget or the total amount of grants it has received.

Worth noting is that most of the uproar over Prof. Churchill’s venomous essay has come from family members of 9/11 victims, conservatives, and GOP politicians such as New York Gov. George Pataki and Colorado Gov. Bill Owens.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the party of moveon.org and Michael Moore does not condemn loudly Prof. Churchill’s equating 9/11 victims to Nazis. But why haven’t the groups that sponsor the center that honored him for making that very comparison? And what about the funders who indirectly helped make such an honor possible?

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What’s next for liberalism? (townhall.com, 050228)

John Leo

Question for the day: if liberalism isn’t dead, then why are autopsies performed so regularly? In the latest examination of the much-probed cadaver, the New Republic’s editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz, recalls that John Kenneth Galbraith, in the early 1960s, pronounced American conservatism dead, citing as heavy evidence that conservatism was “bookless” or bereft of new ideas. Peretz writes, “It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying.” Liberals, he says, are not inspired by any vision of the good society; the liberal agenda consists of wanting to spend more, while conservatives want to spend less. And the lack of new ideas and the absence of influential liberal thinkers, he says, are obvious.

Galbraith’s comment contains some comfort for liberals: Conservatism revived with great intellectual ferment and a long burst of new ideas, and liberalism presumably can do the same. But there is no sign that this is happening. No real breakthrough in liberal thought and programs has occurred since the New Deal, giving liberalism its nostalgic, reactionary cast.

Worse, the cultural liberalism that emerged from the convulsions of the 1960s drove the liberal faith out of the mainstream. Its fundamental value is that society should have no fundamental values, except for a pervasive relativism that sees all values as equal. Part of the package was a militant secularism, pitched against religion, the chief source of fundamental values. Complaints about “imposing” values were also popular then, aimed at teachers and parents who worked to socialize children, instead of leaving them alone to construct their own values and celebrate their own autonomy.

Modern liberalism, says Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, has emptied the national narrative of its civic resources, putting religion outside the public square and creating a value-neutral “procedural republic.” One of the old heroes of liberalism, John Dewey, said in 1897 that the practical problem of modern society is the maintenance of the spiritual values of civilization. Not much room in liberal thought for that now, or for what another liberal icon, Walter Lippmann, called the “public philosophy.” The failure to perceive the importance of community has seriously wounded liberalism and undermined its core principles. So has the strong tendency to convert moral and social questions into issues of individual rights, usually constructed and then massaged by judges to place them beyond the reach of majorities and the normal democratic process.

Liberals have been slow to grasp the mainstream reaction to the no-values culture, usually chalking it up to Karl Rove, sinister fundamentalists, racism, or the stupidity of the American voter. Since November 2, the withering contempt of liberals for ordinary Americans has been astonishing. Voting for Bush gave “quite average Americans a chance to feel superior,” said Andrew Hacker, a prominent liberal professor at Queens College. We are seeing the bitterness of elites who wish to lead, confronted by multitudes who do not wish to follow.

Liberals might one day conclude that while most Americans value autonomy, they do not want a procedural republic in which patriotism, religion, socialization, and traditional values are politically declared out of bounds. Many Americans notice that liberalism nowadays lacks a vocabulary of right and wrong, declines to discuss virtue except in snickering terms, and seems increasingly hostile to prevailing moral sentiments. For a stark vision of what cultural liberalism has come to, consider the breakdown of the universities, the fortresses of the 1960s cultural liberals and their progeny.

Students are taught that objective judgments are impossible. All knowledge is compromised by issues of power and bias. Therefore, there is no way to come to judgment about anything, since judgment itself rests on quicksand. This principle, however, is suspended when the United States and western culture are discussed, because the West is essentially evil and guilty of endless crimes. Better to declare a vague transnational identity and admiration for the U.N. The campuses indulge in heavy coercion and indoctrination. A sign of the times: The University of California’s academic assembly eliminated the distinction between “interested” and “disinterested” scholarship by a 45-to-3 vote. The campuses are politicized, and they don’t care who knows it. Harvard is all atwitter because its president ran afoul of local orthodoxy, suggesting, ever so tentatively, that sexual differences might be a factor in careers in science.

In their current bafflement over rejection of their product, liberals have been lacing their speeches with religious phrases and asking mainstream Americans to vote their economic interests by rejecting Republican fat cats. It will take a bit more than that.

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Students slam pro-Israel speaker But welcome professor with ‘terror ties’ (WorldNetDaily, 050121)

Students at the Rochester Institute of Technology have been protesting an upcoming lecture, mandatory for some seniors, by pro-Israel Middle East expert Daniel Pipes, while public concerns have not been voiced over another speech, part of the same series, by Ali Mazrui, a professor accused of ties to organizations supporting terrorism.

RIT is featuring the Caroline Gerner Gannett Lecture Series, a seminar for seniors open to all students on “Globalization, Human Rights and Citizenship,” that brings to the campus over a dozen guest speakers as well as in-house professors to discuss topics ranging from regional conflict to the conservation of water.

Even though his speech is three months away, students have already written letters to lecture coordinators and the university president demanding Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, a think tank that defines and promotes American interests in the Middle East, be disinvited or appear with a counterpoising speaker, although other Gannett lecturers appear without opposing speakers. An antiwar group has plastered the RIT undergraduate campus with posters protesting Pipes’ speech.

Pipes has in the past drawn some fire from Islamic groups for his support of Israel and for exposing several Islamic extremist organizations operating in the U.S.

In one letter to RIT president Dr. Albert Simone, a student writes Pipes is “an individual who makes broad stereotypical generalizations about people of the Muslim faith, such as ‘15% of Muslims are terrorists,’ as well as supporting the concept that the only road to Middle East peace is ‘Total Israeli victory’ ... How can the Gannett Lecture Series purport to be promoting the academic principles of debate and discussion when it allows his ideas to go without criticism by his peers? If Daniel Pipes does not want to appear with another speaker, then as I see it he doesn’t have to come and get paid.”

Pipes, who once estimated 15% of Muslims are “Islamists” not “terrorists,” has said he would not be interested in speaking with an opposing professor.

“My major purpose in going to universities like RIT is to offer a different point of view from what students usually hear. I dislike the idea of balance because it cuts into my time and it implies that my views need to be wrapped and controlled,” said Pipes.

Dr. Paul Grebinger, professor of Anthropology and coordinator of the Gannett series, agreed.

“It is often valuable to hear from individuals whose ideas we may oppose and whom we may not even like. I expect that Pipes will draw representatives from the Islamic community here on campus and from Rochester. They will no doubt be asking very pointed questions. So, I don’t expect any lack of debate.”

Last week, a poster distributed throughout the campus sponsored by the RIT Antiwar Group headlined “Islam is not the problem” called Pipes a “racist” and declared, “The real problem is the occupation of Iraq and the U.S. support of oppressive regimes in the Middle East. Stop the scapegoating of Arabs and Muslims!”

The group justified their “racist” label by quoting an article in which Pipes wrote, “The outside world should focus not on showering money or other benefits on the Palestinian Arabs, but on pushing them relentlessly to accept Israel’s existence.”

One RIT professor who asked that his name be withheld for fear that he “may lose his job” called the posters “idiotic. There is nothing remotely close to being racist about that statement. Pipes is the only thing approaching a non-leftist perspective on this campus, it wouldn’t kill these students to hear an opposing view. None of the liberal speakers need balancing counterparts.”

Dr. A.J. Cashetta, a professor of language at RIT told WorldNetDaily “I have never heard anyone here complain before that a speaker needed a counterbalanced idea, and now suddenly we have Pipes and people are complaining?”

Meanwhile, another Gannett lecturer, Dr. Ali Mazrui, who has repeatedly made anti-Israel comments, spoke at an Islamic extremist institution and is accused of ties to groups supporting terrorism, has escaped student criticism.

Mazrui, director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University, is on the board of the Association of Muslim Social Services, whose sister organization, the International Institute of Islamic Thought, a Saudi-funded Islamic group, was raided by the FBI in 2003. The executive secretary for the AMSS, Kamran Bokhari, was the North American spokesman for Al-Muhajiroun, a UK-based fundamentalist organization that disbanded in October under intense pressure by the authorities because of the group’s suspected ties to al-Qaida. Al-Muhajiroun members have become suicide bombers for Hamas, fought U.S. troops in Aghanistan, held rallies calling for the “death of America,” and publicly supported the charge of Osama bin Laden.

Mazrui lectured last year at the International Center for the Propagation of Islam in Durban South Africa. According to Militant Islam Monitor, the Center is funded by the bin Laden family and organizations linked to al-Qaida, and its founder and director, Ahmed Deedat, has publicly boasted of meeting bin Laden personally several times.

Mazrui recently wrote a paper, “The State of Israel as Cause for Anti-Semitism,” and presented a lecture at Binghamton that a student called “a 45-minute diatribe against Israel” equating Zionism with fascism, Israel with apartheid South Africa and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with Hitler. Mazrui also expressed support for Sami Al-Arian, a South Florida professor indicted for raising money for the Islamic Jihad terror group, calling him “a victim of prejudice and of popular ill will.”

In an IslamOnline.com Question and Answer series, Mazrui implied Muslims are being isolated from American politics by pro-Israel Jews. “In the case of Hillary Clinton for example she was under pressure from pro-Israeli anti-Muslim New Yorkers. It was vital that American Muslims should not let those forces prevail and should keep on trying to enter the system ...” wrote Mazrui.

Beila Rabinowitz, director of Militant Islam Monitor, told WorldNetDaily, “It is a travesty of the war on terror that we are hearing calls for halting the lecture of Dr. Daniel Pipes, the distinguished Middle East expert, while no one is demanding that the RIT administration scrutinize the scheduled lecturer Ali Mazrui, who plays leading roles in radical Islamist organizations.”

Mazrui, in an interview with WND, countered, “I’m not spying on the AMSS to find out who else is involved with them and whether they are kosher. Also, about the university in South Africa, I have to find out who funded it. But I don’t agree with this guilt by association policy.”

American universities hosting speakers connected to terrorism is nothing new. In December, WND exposed Nova Southeastern University was hosting a fundraising concert for the Islamic Relief, a charity connected to several organizations that support terrorism, is under investigation for accepting a contribution from a front group for al-Qaida, and was founded by the principle fundraiser for Muslim Aid, which according to Spanish police used funds to send mujahadeen to fight U.S. troops overseas and has held events at which speakers have boasted of supporting al-Qaida terror activities.

And in October, Duke University hosted a Palestinian solidarity conference  cleared by the FBI and Homeland Security  in which students were recruited to join the International Solidarity Movement, a terror-supporting group that has harbored terrorists in their Middle East offices and is outlawed in Israel.

David Horowitz, author and editor-in-chief of FrontPage Magazine, told WorldNetDaily the groups protesting Pipes and similar groups at universities throughout the country “are left-wing groups – often self-styled Marxist-Leninist vanguards – who regard the United States as the Great Satan, view the terrorists as ‘liberators’ and want us to lose the war on terror.”

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Last ride of the thought police? (Washington Times, 050121)

The acrimonious controversy Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard University, finds himself in reminds me of something I have suspected for years. The First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech is a reactionary blight inimical to all true progressives and certain to be formally eliminated from the Constitution as soon as progressives regain ascendancy.

There have been times when progressives, or liberals as they are often called, championed free speech, for instance, in the early days of the Cold War and during youthful protests in the 1960s. In the early days of the Cold War, progressives favored the right of communists to denounce America as they often did, particularly on college campuses. In the 1960s, progressives favored the right of youthful idealists to use the F-word. At the University of California at Berkeley, something called the Free Speech Movement rose, dedicated to the freest possible use of the F-word. So successful were these idealists that I am told today on college campuses the F-word is employed by professors in their lectures, often as a punctuation mark. I think I learned that from Tom Wolfe’s new book, “I Am Charlotte Simmons.”

Now times have changed and progressives are the most prominent opponents of free speech, especially on campus. This has got Mr. Summers in his present predicament. He is not keeping up with intellectual fashion. Some years ago he created an enormous furor by denouncing anti-Semitism as practiced on campus. Then he made bold to state a Harvard faculty member’s scholarly writing was not very scholarly. Now he has said there are “innate” differences between men and women. He said this at a scholarly meeting. There were progressives there. They were furious.

At a meeting of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., where the condition of women in academia was the topic, Mr. Summers said the comparative lack of women in the sciences might be explained by a number of things — social practices and genetics were two. It is a fact that though girls score about the same as boys in the median range of standardized math and science tests, girls are less likely to score in the highest ranges. It is also a fact that women scientists are infrequently responsible for major scientific discoveries. Possibly, said Mr. Summers, this is because of their childbearing responsibilities or other cultural norms, but he had to add the possibility the difference in achievement might arise because men and women do not have the same chromosomes. That did it. Mr. Summers moved from being a free-thinker to being a health threat.

Said a biology professor in attendance, Professor Nancy Hopkins, “I felt I was going to be sick.” And she offered grisly details: “My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow. ... I was extremely upset.” As for the issue Mr. Summers raised, Ms. Hopkins said: “That’s the kind of insidious, destructive, unthought-through [?] attitude that causes a lot of harm. ... It’s one thing for an ordinary person to shoot his [not his/her?] mouth like that, but quite another for a top educational leader.”

Well, Mr. Summers probably will not make that mistake again, if he wants to remain a “top educational leader.” From the reports I read of the meeting only about half the women professors were offended by Mr. Summers. One, an economist named Claudia Goldin, actually told The Washington Post, “I left with a sense of elation at his ideas.” She is proud Mr. Summers “retains an inquisitive mind.” How very old-fashioned.

For years now there have been things one simply cannot say in the presence of progressives. The possibility men and women have different aptitudes is one of them. There are others. This means, of course, there are things progressives are unlikely to hear. When they do hear them, they are astonished and, as Professor Hopkins demonstrates, physically convulsed.

That progressives rarely hear ideas displeasing to them I think explains their present dazed condition regarding the drift of American society. It also explains their anger.

What is to be their fate? Allow me a suggestion, unwelcome though it may be. They will go to their graves dazed and angry and thinking they are right. They will cause a great deal of unpleasantness, but they are going to disappear. The First Amendment will outlast them all. They have seen their last ascendancy.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is the founder and editor in chief of the American Spectator, a contributing editor to the New York Sun, and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute.

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The Dems’ Week from Hell (Weekly Standard, 050214)

From the February 14 / February 21, 2005 issue:They’re in a hole, and they keep digging.

THE DEMOCRATS’ WORST WEEK AND a half since Black Tuesday (November 2, 2004, when the U.S. election returns came in) began on January 18, when Barbara Boxer took on Condi Rice in the Senate, and ended on Black Sunday (January 30, 2005, when Iraq held its first free election). In one comparatively short window of time, the Democrats managed to exhibit all of the class, grace, wisdom, presence, good sense, and strategic and tactical brilliance that had allowed them to move from absolute parity after the 2000 election to the loss of the House, Senate, and White House in the 2004 election, and left them apparently poised to lose even more. You too can turn yourself into a loser if you study and follow their recent behavior, and the cases to look at are these:

(1) Barbara Boxer and allies assault Condi Rice.

For mysterious reasons best known to themselves, a small diehard clique of old-line insurgents hiding out in the depths of the U.S. Senate decided to make confirmation hearings for Condoleezza Rice the venue of a bomb-throwing session, on the basis of two cherished liberal theories: one, that the war in Iraq is an utter catastrophe; and two, that while criticism of liberal nonwhites and women is always racist and sexist in nature, nonwhites and women who are right-wing or centrist are less than “authentic,” and therefore deserve what they get. Thus, Margaret Carlson in the Los Angeles Times found nothing amiss in Boxer’s calling Rice a liar and a lackey, but insisted Boxer’s critics were somehow attacking all women.

This followed by weeks an unprecedented onslaught from liberal cartoonists and columnists, who compared Rice to a parrot, a house slave, Aunt Jemima (with one hell of a weight loss), and Prissy in Gone With the Wind. It did not help that one of Boxer’s main allies was Robert A. Byrd of West Virginia, who in a prior life had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. As a method of expanding the vote of an ever-shrinking minority party, this tactic stunned some observers, who concluded the scheme had been cooked up by Karl Rove.

“I wouldn’t think having a former kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan lead a futile floor fight against the nomination of the first black woman to be secretary of state is a good way to enhance the appeal of the Democratic party to swing voters, but maybe that’s just me,” opined Jack Kelly. No, Jack, it’s not just you. It’s you and Andrew Young, a partisan Democrat and genuine civil rights leader; it’s you and Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women; you and C. DeLores Tucker, former chair of the Black Caucus of the Democratic National Committee; you and Ron Lester, a Democratic pollster quoted by the New York Post’s Deborah Orin as saying, “A lot of African Americans are watching this and they’re wondering why [Democrats] are going after her so hard.”

It’s you and Colbert King, the liberal columnist for the Washington Post, who has little use for Bush but even less for the Boxer-Byrd style. King asks us to ponder a key Boxer statement: “I personally believe—this is my personal view—that your loyalty to the mission you were given, to sell the war, overwhelmed your respect for the truth.” Writes King, “It’s hard to imagine a more demeaning and offensive caricature of a prospective secretary of state.” What a great tactic! What a keen way to appeal to white moderates, as well as to stop the leakage to Bush of black social conservatives, which at the moment has the left in a panic.

A former kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan berating a cultured black woman, one of whose childhood friends was blown up in Birmingham: This is the image you want to create for your party? Call it strike one.

(2) Ted Kennedy calls Iraq Vietnam.

“Defeat is an orphan,” Ted’s big brother the president once famously said, but this fails to apply when Ted is in the neighborhood. He preemptively embraced failure in Iraq, declaring defeat three days before the election, just in time to demoralize American troops and Iraqi voters (and calling to mind another JFK comment, that his youngest brother was not “terribly quick”). But it wasn’t the first time Ted had stumbled over his feet in his rush to proclaim a defeat for the United States. In 1990, he wanted to leave Kuwait and its oil fields in Saddam’s possession, proclaiming a war would kill 50,000 Americans and become a new Vietnam. But things lately have been confusing for Teddy, what with George W. Bush morphing into JFK, while he himself turns into something rather more like his father, famous in 1940 for saying democracy was finished in England and attempts to save it would lead us into a quagmire—call it FDR’s Vietnam.

Apparently, there are pro-and anti-democracy wings not only in the Democratic party but in the Kennedy family, though those on the pro side are sadly no longer with us. Unlike his late brothers, Ted Kennedy has negative moral authority, and is not the man you put out there to win hearts and minds, abroad or at home. A moral exemplar such as Edward M. Kennedy selling defeat is hardly what you want when you’re trying to grow a political party that’s been shrinking like a wool sweater in a tub of hot water largely because of its shortfalls in moral authority and its weakness in foreign affairs. He is the ideal spokesman to make the argument—from the point of view of the Republican party. Mark this down as strike number two.

(3) Evan Bayh joins the jihad.

On the morning of Thursday, January 27, the Washington Times ran across the top of page one pictures of Democrats Boxer, Byrd, Kerry, Kennedy, and the 9 others who voted against confirming Rice. What was wrong with this string of pictures? It was made up of 12 hacks, has-beens, never-weres, and certified losers—and Evan Bayh, one of the four main sponsors of the Iraq war resolution and until Wednesday a real star in his party, one of the few with a shot at being president, because of the trust he had amassed on the right and in the center, and the chance he could have had to peel off some red states. As of Thursday morning, that trust was gone.

“Say it ain’t so, Evan,” wrote Andrea Neal in the Indianapolis Star a week later. “After six years of building your centrist credentials . . . causing even hard-core skeptics like me to brand you the genuine article, you turn around and vote against a distinguished, conservative nominee for Secretary of State. After backing President Bush in the Iraq war, and presenting persuasive arguments for ousting Saddam Hussein, you take a stand against the only administration official who can seamlessly pick up [President Bush’s] foreign policy. . . . After boasting on your web site to be someone who cares more about doing the right thing than the expedient thing, you become one of 13 senators to vote against President Bush’s nominee.”

Neal quotes a former Bayh backer who calls the senator “self-serving” and says further, “I am appalled.” So are the many who formerly saw Bayh as the one Democrat they could possibly vote for, and right now are changing their minds. This is a vote that will not be forgotten: As we speak, some Republican doubtless is running up spots morphing Bayh into Boxer and Teddy. “In 1991, defense-hawk Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga) caught the presidential bug, abandoned his record, and opposed the first Persian Gulf War—a big mistake,” writes Morton Kondracke in Roll Call. “Has the same thing happened to Sen. Evan Bayh?” Nunn lost his chance for a place on the national ticket when the Gulf War succeeded; just as Bayh may have lost his gamble when the Iraqi election went well. Would he have done this had he known what would happen? The answer is probably “no.”

Bayh tried to recoup on This Week by claiming that he was for war, but not this war, a smart war, a sensitive war, a war backed by both France and Belgium that lasted three days at the outside, and in which no one got hurt.

But Kerry tried that line in 2004, to no effect whatsoever, telling Rolling Stone that when he voted for the war (before, of course, voting against it) he had no idea Bush would f—it up as he did. Bayh should have looked hard at both Nunn and Kerry, and, failing that, he should have bided his time. It is now three years to the Iowa caucus, plenty of time to find other ways to make nice with the base. And time, too, to see if Rice—and Iraq—are a failure. If you vote against someone as the architect of a failed foreign policy, it helps if the policy first fails. Bayh better hope now Iraq becomes a disaster: If it succeeds, he will look worse than ever, having thrown away his name and his future to protest a success. Paris may be worth a mass, and the White House may be worth a boot-licking gesture, but a boot-licking gesture that costs you the White House is something quite different. The only thing worse than an obvious opportunist is an inept opportunist with a bad sense of timing. Say good night, Evan. And mark this down as strike three.

(4) John Kerry goes on Meet the Press.

If Evan Bayh has learned nothing from Kerry and Edwards, it seems clear enough that Kerry has learned nothing either. He isn’t a statesman, but he plays one on TV, and so there he was on Meet the Press the Sunday morning of Iraq’s election, looking properly somber and careworn, saying a great many words to no purpose, and displaying too much of the cluelessness that went far toward helping him lose. In fact, as to losing, he seemed in a state of denial, talking up the (fairly) close race in the state of Ohio, and claiming he came so near to winning that it hardly was losing at all. He won the popular vote in the battleground states, he said proudly. A mere switch of 60,000 votes in Ohio, and he would have been writing the State of the Union. (Never mind that Kerry lost the national popular vote by nearly four million, while Bush was gaining four seats in the Senate; and that if he had managed to pull out Ohio, people now would be saying what a fluke it had been, and wondering how he would govern with a Republican Congress and a public that had so clearly voted for Bush.)

But Kerry was much more enthused about his campaign than about the Iraqi elections, which he grudgingly referred to as barely legitimate, while implying the worst was ahead. He declared us less safe than when the war started, although Saddam’s capture had made us much safer: a perfect example of the kind of coherence he had brought to last year’s campaign. And of his tone-deafness. “Whoever is advising him politically made a terrible mistake,” Democratic strategist Bob Beckel said later on Fox News. “He should have said . . . this is a magnificent outcome, and now that we’ve had this . . . let’s begin the process of getting our troops back home. . . . I don’t get why any Democrat would want to dump on this election when in fact it’s the beginning of the end.” But Kerry seemed perfectly content with himself and his comments, and eager for more in the 2008 cycle. “Bring it on,” doubtless reply the Republicans. Put it down as strike four—this is politics, not baseball.

EVERYTHING THAT HAS BEEN WRONG with the Democrats in the past several years was on vivid display during Hell Week: the teeth-grinding shrillness; the race card, misplayed with such gusto; the self-interest so blatant it defeats its own purpose; the crippling dearth of ideas. With a few brave exceptions (a faction of one named Joe Lieberman), the Democrats split into two major camps: the wingnuts—Dean, Boxer, and Kennedy—who know what they think, which alas sets them at odds with the rest of the country; and the caucus of cowards—Bayh, Edwards, and Kerry—who believe in nothing so much as their own career prospects, and change their minds on the gravest of war and peace issues on the basis of what serves their ends.

For the Democrats, this is not a new problem, and has been with them since the war in Iraq first emerged as an issue. “More than a dozen Democrats, who requested anonymity, have told the Post that many members who oppose the president’s strategy . . . are going to nonetheless support it because they fear a backlash from voters,” the Washington Post reported on September 26, 2002, in the run-up to that year’s midterm elections, which made history when the Democrats lost. Five weeks later, “The Note,” the widely read blog of ABC News, reported: “Voters may not know this explicitly, but if there were a secret ballot vote, Democrats in the House and Senate would vote overwhelmingly to repeal the Bush-Baucus tax cuts, and to stop the president from going to war in Iraq.” From here, it is a straight line to Bayh, Kerry, and Edwards, surfing their way around public opinion, and getting upended by shifts in the wind.

And there you have the real vision gap between the two parties: Republicans want to win wars and spread freedom; Democrats want to save their rear ends. Bush thinks freedom is better than terror and tyranny; Democrats think they themselves are better than Bush. In 2004, Bush made it clear he was willing to lose on the basis of his convictions—and won in spite or more likely because of this. Democrats had no convictions beyond the end goal of winning, and therefore quite properly lost. No party deserved to lose more than the Democrats did in these past two elections, and unless they make changes, they stand to lose many more.

Since Black Tuesday last November, Democrats have spent hours of airtime, gallons of newsprint, and billions of words trying to find out why wonderful people such as they keep on losing. They’d be better off taking a hard look at Hell Week. All of the answers are there.

Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

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How To Be a Hero of Liberty: You may have to gild the lily . . . (National Review Online, 050225)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article appears in the March 14, 2005, issue of National Review.

When historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was accused of plagiarism, Laurence Tribe rushed to her defense. The Harvard Crimson had published an editorial demanding that Goodwin resign from Harvard’s board. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, wrote a letter to the Crimson criticizing its editorial as “utter nonsense.” His friend Goodwin was guilty of some “sloppy” and “inadequate” footnoting — but of nothing worse. “[U]nlike any number of historians and others who have been caught falsifying as fact what was, in truth, fantasy — either about their own lives or about the events they were chronicling — Goodwin has not been accused, and could not plausibly be accused, of ever purveying false or misleading information, the cardinal sin for any scholar.”

Tribe wrote that letter in March 2002. A more recent plagiarism scandal has hit closer to home. In the fall of 2004, Joseph Bottum made the case, in The Weekly Standard, that Tribe had himself ripped off the words of another scholar. Many passages in his 1985 book God Save This Honorable Court bear strong resemblance to passages in Henry Abraham’s 1974 Justices and Presidents. After Bottum’s article appeared, Tribe admitted his “failure to attribute some . . . material” to Abraham and said, “I personally take full responsibility.” Harvard said it would investigate the matter.

Embarrassing, certainly. But if Tribe’s defense of Goodwin makes sense, then perhaps it could applied to this lapse too: At least Tribe didn’t present “fantasy” as “fact.” Tribe’s colleague Alan Dershowitz came to his defense, just as Tribe himself had defended Goodwin and another colleague charged with plagiarism, law professor Charles Ogletree. (They’re quite a band of brothers there in Cambridge.) “If the Standard were to do the same minuscule analysis of every word in the books written by the paragons of the right, they would find much the same thing,” said Dershowitz.

But in another recent incident, Tribe appears to have committed precisely the offense that he identified as “the cardinal sin for any scholar” — and it’s an incident too weird for anyone to maintain with any plausibility that every scholar does the same.

A “PRIVATE STORY”

In the spring of 2003, The Green Bag, a legal journal, published an essay by Tribe called “Public Rights, Private Rites: Reliving Richmond Newspapers For My Father.” It is a memoir of Tribe’s first argument before the Supreme Court, in 1980. The case grew out of a Virginia murder trial. The judge had closed the trial to the public, including both the victim’s family and reporters. Tribe represented the newspapers for which those reporters worked.

Tribe argued the case just two weeks after his father died. That fact, his essay explains, emboldened him to do something daring: to invoke the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution.

The Ninth Amendment is the one that reads, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” In other words: Just because the Constitution lists a bunch of rights doesn’t mean that we don’t have other rights that aren’t listed. Even people who think that’s a fine principle have been a bit puzzled about how the amendment should affect government in practice, and in particular about what judges should do with it.

There are people who think that the courts should strike down a lot of laws restricting people’s conduct because those laws violate “unenumerated rights.” That idea horrifies others, who think that judges would then have a license to invent any right they like and nullify any law they don’t. For much of American history, the courts have in practice sided with the latter camp. They have not used the Ninth Amendment to overthrow laws and vindicate liberties.

Tribe’s essay casts himself as a kind of hero for breathing life into the amendment — and overcoming a lot of resistance to his doing so. His client had decided not to ask the Supreme Court to take the case. Tribe had to get the client to reverse its decision. He did, and then got the Court to review the case. He thought that a First Amendment freedom-of-the-press argument would not suffice to win: He would have to turn to the Ninth Amendment.

“But the Ninth Amendment, I learned as I briefed Richmond Newspapers and as I found myself being lobbied hard by the pillars of the media bar, was barely to be mentioned in polite society, much less was it ready for prime time,” Tribe writes. “Who was I, an utter novice at Supreme Court advocacy, to buck the conventional wisdom on something so basic?”

Tribe then answers his own question:

Well, I was a lawyer who’d taken a case because he believed in it, who’d been teaching and would teach generations more of law students about the kinds of questions the case raised, who’d gone on record a couple of years earlier in a treatise, American Constitutional Law (1st ed. Foundation Press, N.Y. 1978) (now in its third edition as of 2000), on most of the issues the case touched, and who cared a lot more about keeping faith with what he’d feel bound to write and teach in years to come, and with how he thought the Court should be approached, than with what the Pooh-Bahs of the establishment thought of him. That’s who I was. And am. So the Ninth Amendment argument stayed in. And, I’m happy to report, in the end it hit its target.

By early February 1980, Tribe had received the State of Virginia’s brief defending its power to impose secrecy and started working on his reply brief. At his wife’s suggestion, he called his parents a day before their wedding anniversary. The next day he felt “a peculiar numbness,” as though he were “dying” (emphasis Tribe’s). He then heard that his father “had collapsed” and “was in critical condition.” He flew home, and thought he saw a shooting star through the airplane window. “Somehow I knew it was my father. I cried all the way across the country. My father had died before the plane landed in San Francisco.”

Tribe kept working on the case even though he had an “unfocused, disoriented frame of mind.” There was nobody else, he writes, who could have stood in for him. He received “urgent phone calls imploring me, above all else, to forget that ‘crazy Ninth Amendment argument’” — but he soldiered on.

Literally all I recall about writing the reply brief — which ended (I’ve just reread it) with a call upon the Court to vindicate “a tradition . . . demonstrably central to the public awareness and institutional accountability that define our form of government” — is that I refused to use that brief as a vehicle for backing away from the Ninth Amendment, whose affirmation of rights unwritten and unseen I think I was almost beginning to identify, in some then still unconscious way, with the mystery of why I’d fortunately agreed to call my father the night before his anniversary; of why I’d felt the knock of doom before our phone had rung; and, above all, of what I’d seen streaking across the predawn sky out of the airplane window.

Tribe continues, “Reflecting now on my resolute commitment to arguing the case in Ninth Amendment terms . . . I think my grief may have permitted me to see a bit more clearly through the fog of superficial arguments and objections and may have steeled me against the kinds of eleventh-hour distractions and importunings that co-counsel, meaning to be helpful, are prone to inject as a Supreme Court argument nears.”

Tribe’s private loss also helped him to see the importance of the case for murder victims’ families: Just as seeing his father in an open casket had helped him process his grief, so would seeing a trial help them. When he spoke to the Court, Tribe “felt emboldened by the circumstances not to pull my punches.”

When Tribe’s allotted speaking time was over, he recounts in his Green Bag essay, Chief Justice Warren Burger kept him at the podium to ask him about other possible unenumerated rights (“he had quite a litany” of rights “to ask about”). “I imagine — this is pure supposition, not actual memory — that I must have worked at suppressing a huge grin, realizing, as I must have realized by then, that the Chief, not someone I’d tentatively counted in my corner when the day began, was seemingly asking for help in sketching what was to become the analysis in his plurality opinion. . . . Our back-and-forth must have gone on for a couple of minutes.”

Tribe won the case. Chief Justice Burger’s plurality opinion for the Court referred to the Ninth Amendment as one of the reasons to side with Tribe’s client. Tribe notes that the Supreme Court has rarely cited the Ninth Amendment in this fashion. The next time a plurality or majority would do so was in the 1992 Casey decision, when the Court mentioned the Ninth Amendment among several others as reasons to reaffirm its holding that abortion must be legal. Tribe does not quite say that his work in Richmond Newspapers paved the way for Casey. The reason for his essay was to explain how his “private story . . . affected what I had dared to say on that February day” in 1980. “[M]y main reason for deciding to tell the story here was just that it’s too large a part of who I am to leave it permanently submerged.”

WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS

And if that story casts Tribe as a forgotten hero of the Ninth Amendment — and thus, to some people, as a hero of the story of American liberty . . . Well, the essay leaves the impression that Tribe doesn’t mind that too much. The Richmond Newspapers decision, he writes, was a “landmark.”

But the record in front of the Supreme Court does not corroborate important parts of Tribe’s story. He didn’t argue his case in Ninth Amendment terms. Other parties in the case did, but not Tribe.

The Ninth Amendment did not appear in the statement Tribe filed asking the Supreme Court to review the case. There, Tribe said that Virginia had violated the First, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments. At this stage of the litigation, it was the lawyers for the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the American Newspaper Publishers Association who made the Ninth Amendment argument, in their friend-of-the-court brief.

Tribe’s brief on the merits of the case did refer to the Ninth Amendment — but the references hardly justify the billing Tribe gave them two decades later. Tribe opened and closed a seven-page section of his 72-page brief with references to the amendment. But in between he mostly discussed Fourteenth Amendment precedents. There was no discussion of the history of the Ninth Amendment — nothing about how James Madison viewed it, nothing about the Court’s prior treatment of it. The previous case in which the Ninth Amendment had figured most prominently was Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), in which the Court had struck down a law against contraception. Tribe didn’t mention it. The Ninth Amendment was a mere rhetorical flourish in this brief. The State of Virginia felt no need to include any Ninth Amendment analysis in its own brief, since there was nothing much to respond to.

It was outside parties who emphasized the Ninth Amendment arguments at the merits stage. The newspaper editors and publishers weighed in with another friend-of-the-court brief. Their brief discussed Madison and Griswold. Chief Justice Burger’s opinion would later make the same points about Madison’s role in enacting the amendment that this brief made. E. Barrett Prettyman Jr. — certainly a heavyweight establishment lawyer of the era — filed another friend-of-the-court brief favorably mentioning the Ninth Amendment claims of the editors and publishers. Prettyman filed it on behalf of interests including the National Association of Broadcasters, the Associated Press, and the National Press Club. The State of New Jersey filed a brief, too. It had a short discussion of the Ninth Amendment that cited Griswold and a law-review article on how the amendment pertained to the openness of trials.

Tribe, you will recall, says that he refused to use his reply brief to back away from the Ninth Amendment — even though, he says, he was under great pressure to do so. But, again, there wasn’t much to back away from, so it’s hard to see why anyone would have thus importuned him. The reply brief said almost nothing about the Ninth Amendment (perhaps because Virginia had ignored it). Tribe’s reply brief contained only one stray reference to the earlier brief’s comments about it.

When he argued the case in front of the Supreme Court, Tribe didn’t mention the Ninth Amendment even once. (An audio transcript of the case is available online.) Fifteen minutes into it, a justice asked Tribe “just what provision of the Constitution [the Virginia statute] violates as applied in this case.” Tribe replied, “I think that it violates the Sixth Amendment, and the First, and the Fourteenth.” He spent the rest of his opening argument on the First and Sixth Amendments. Virginia’s lawyer, unsurprisingly, didn’t mention the Ninth either. Tribe got to make a rebuttal, in which the words “Ninth Amendment” again did not pass his lips.

The exchange with Chief Justice Burger did not go as Tribe lays it out. Burger asked Tribe, “What provision of the Constitution did the Court draw on to make a presumption of innocence part of our fabric?” Tribe answered that the presumption is implicit in the Constitution because it is central to the legitimacy of the justice system. Burger then asked whether there were any “hints” that this view “was the tradition in 1787 and ‘89 and ‘90 and ‘91.” Tribe said that there were. That was the whole exchange. Burger asked about no “litany” of rights. (Tribe’s Green Bag essay attributes some other comments to Burger, but judging from the audio transcript he appears to be mistaken about who said what.) The idea that Burger was asking for “help” appears to be the professor’s self-serving fantasy. Based on my analysis of the public record, so does the related contention that Tribe is responsible for the Ninth Amendment comments in Burger’s opinion.

If we believed that “the Pooh-Bahs of the establishment” had lobbied Tribe to abandon the Ninth Amendment, we would have to conclude that they had succeeded in their aim. But it certainly looks as though establishment figures were more willing to press forward with Ninth Amendment claims than was Tribe himself. Whether or not Richmond Newspapers really is a Ninth Amendment landmark, it is not one because of Tribe.

Contacted by NR about the discrepancies, Tribe said that he did not remember various details about the case or the essay. He did not recall whether he had reviewed the audiotape before writing his essay or had gone from memory. He said that his essay never stated that his briefs or his oral argument had made an extensive Ninth Amendment pitch — which is true: He didn’t say it in those exact words, but very strongly implied it. Pressed on that point, Tribe said that the essay only implied it “maybe [to] someone who wants to find in [the] essay something that isn’t true.”

Tribe continued, “I certainly wasn’t intending to suggest that I [had] made any argument that I didn’t make. What I was discussing in the essay was my own thinking about why the case was important. If you read anything more into it, that’s your problem.” There were good reasons for not pushing the Ninth Amendment too hard, he said. There was “a pervasive allergy to the Ninth Amendment” that made it “not polite to mention.” But “I do remember very much that it figured very much in my sense of the importance of the case and it figured very much in my arguments with other lawyers.”

There’s a problem with Tribe’s explanation. The Green Bag essay did not say that Tribe thought the case important for Ninth Amendment reasons but considered it imprudent to make that argument to the justices. It said that he had “dared to say” things, with the strong implication that those things concerned the Ninth Amendment, to the Supreme Court. It said that he had resisted the counsel of more timid souls. If he didn’t mean to imply that the amendment played an important role in his briefs and oral argument, then what’s the point of saying that people had told him to back off? Nobody would have warned him to back off from a private thought that he had no intention of expressing to the Court. Nor does it make sense for the professor to congratulate himself for resisting the pressure to back off from this private thought.

Tribe suggested that my article would be an “ambush.” He said, “It’s about my father’s death. I would take that rather personally. . . . I can’t say I look forward to reading [the article] but I look forward to refuting it — in my father’s memory, you can say. I have to say that this [conversation] hasn’t been a pleasure.”

Tribe called back a few hours later. He remembered something. “By the time of the oral argument, I had figured out a way . . . to argue the case orally without invoking the Ninth Amendment, which I knew some people were allergic to.” He again denied that the Green Bag essay had said that he had invoked the amendment. In other words, he stuck to (and elaborated on) the same explanation as in our first conversation.

In the Goodwin controversy, Tribe suggested that presenting fantasy as fact was a terrible offense for an academic — worse, indeed, than plagiarism. In the Green Bag essay, published a year after his defense of Goodwin, he appears to have committed precisely that offense while also taking credit for the achievements of others (Chief Justice Burger and anyone who actually influenced him). It is a sad and curious thing. Laurence Tribe has had an extraordinarily successful career. He has won many cases in the Supreme Court. His influence on the legal academy is deep. No one could reasonably ask for more in the way of fame or honors. Yet he can’t seem to resist gilding the lily.

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“When Good News Strikes”: Glum liberals’ try coping with a changing world (National Review Online, 050308)

If the world that Democrats have been living in lately were made into a reality disaster show, it would be called “When Good News Strikes.”

One of the inconveniences of political debate is that occasionally reality intrudes to invalidate a given position no matter how much its partisans want to believe it. This is what has been happening recently to the argument that the invasion of Iraq produced an irrecoverable mess. Although surely setbacks still await us in Iraq and the Middle East, stunning headlines from the region have left many liberals perversely glum about upbeat news.

Schadenfreude has faded into its happiness-hating opposite, gluckschmerz. Liberal journalist Kurt Andersen has written in New York magazine of the guilty “pleasure liberals took in bad news from Iraq, which seemed sure to hurt the administration.” According to Andersen, the successful Iraqi elections changed the mood. For Bush critics, this inspiring event was “unexpectedly unsettling,” since they so “hat[ed] the idea of a victory presided over by the Bush team.”

The legendary liberal editor Charlie Peters confessed to his own attack of gluckschmerz: “New York Post columnist John Podhoretz asked liberals: ‘Did you momentarily feel a rush of disappointment [at the news of the Jan. 30 Iraq election] because you knew, you just knew, that this was going to redound to the credit of George W. Bush?’ I plead guilty …”

On his show the other night, comedian Jon Stewart — half-jokingly — expressed a feeling of dread at the changes in the Middle East and the credit President Bush will get for them. “Oh my God!” he said. “He’s gonna be a great — pretty soon, Republicans are gonna be like, ‘Reagan was nothing compared to this guy.’ Like, my kid’s gonna go to a high school named after him, I just know it.” Stewart is badly in need of the consolation of a yet-to-be-written pop theological tract, “When Good Things Happen to Bad Presidents.”

The Democratic foreign-policy expert who was Stewart’s guest that night, Nancy Soderberg, tried to comfort him, pointing out that the budding democratic revolution in the Middle East still might fail: “There’s always hope that this might not work.” There is historical precedent for that, of course. Liberal revolutions failed in Europe in 1848 and Eastern Europe in 1968. What is an entirely new phenomenon is liberals calling such reverses for human freedom — half-jokingly or not — occasions for “hope.”

Soderberg added: “There’s still Iran and North Korea, don’t forget. There’s hope.” The way Bogart and Bergman “will always have Paris,” liberals now tell themselves they “will always have Iran and North Korea.” No matter the good news anywhere else, these nuke-hungry rogue states will provide grounds for bad-mouthing Bush foreign policy. But these two intractable problems won’t seriously detract from Bush’s world-changing accomplishment should he succeed in transforming the Middle East.

Some liberals are reluctantly giving him his due. The New York Times surveyed the fresh air sweeping the region and concluded, “The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit.” Liberal commentator Daniel Schorr remarked: “During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush said that ‘a liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region.’ He may have had it right.”

Has the administration gotten a few fortunate breaks in the Middle East lately? Well, yes. Asked how he seemed to make so many lucky saves, the great Montreal Canadien goalie Ken Dryden explained that it was his job to be in the right position to get lucky. By toppling Saddam Hussein and insisting on elections in Iraq, while emphasizing the power of freedom, Bush has put the United States in the right position to encourage and take advantage of democratic irruptions in the region.

And so we have created the conditions for being pleasantly surprised by the positive drift of events in the Middle East, or unpleasantly surprised — depending on your politics.

— Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.

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Come back, liberals! (townhall.com, 050310)

Ann Coulter

Liberals have been completely intellectually vanquished. Actually, they lost the war of ideas long ago. It’s just that now their defeat is so obvious, even they’ve noticed. As new DNC Chairman Howard Dean might say, it’s all over but the screaming.

In an editorial last week, the New York Times gave President Bush credit for democracy sweeping through the Middle East or, as the Times put it, “a year of heartening surprises.” Yes, the Middle East’s current democratization would come as quite a surprise to anyone who puts his hands over his ears and hums during the president’s speeches.

Rolling Stone magazine is making fun of “moveon.org” for having no contact with normal Americans. Their Bush-hating cause has become so hopeless that moveon.org is on the verge of actually moving on.

Marking the first time Walter Cronkite and I have agreed on anything, Cronkite is ridiculing Dan Rather, saying he should have retired a long time ago.

No one, not even Chris Matthews, is defending the Italian communist who claims American forces intentionally shot at her in Iraq. (But to be fair, Keith Oberman has been on vacation this week.) She may have lost some credibility when she backed her claim that Americans were targeting her by quoting her kidnappers. She said her kidnappers had warned her to stay away from the Americans because they would only hurt her. And then my rapist said, “Whatever you do, don’t cry out for the police! They won’t help you!”

Consider that less than 20 years ago, ABC’s Peter Jennings and CBS’ Mike Wallace announced at an “Ethics in America” panel that they would not intervene to prevent the slaughter of American troops while on duty as journalists – especially during sweeps. As Wallace said: “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!” It almost makes you wonder if U.S. troops have ever targeted American journalists in the field during wartime. Maybe Eason Jordan would know something about that.

Now liberal journalists are pretending to support the troops. They hardly ever call them “baby killers” anymore, at least to their faces.

Democrats are even pretending to believe in God – you know, as they understand Her.

The only people liberals can find to put up a fight these days are ex-Klanners and other assorted nuts.

There’s former KKK “Kleagle” and Democratic Sen. Bob Byrd, who compared the Republicans to Hitler last week. Byrd having been a charter member of a fascist organization himself, no one was sure if this was intended as a critique or a compliment.

Aspiring first lady Teresa Heinz claims the election was stolen through the machinations of a vast conspiracy involving Republican polling machine manufacturers. We eagerly await a Michael Moore documentary to flesh out the details. It’s only a matter of time before Heinz announces that anti-Bush insurgents control most of the Red States, and that the sooner the U.S. pulls out of those quagmires, the better.

Howard Dean – chairman of the party that supports murder, adultery, lying about adultery, coveting other people’s money, stealing other people’s money, mass-producing human embryos for spare parts like an automotive chop shop and banning God – has called the Republican Party “evil.” One Democrat in the audience, a preschool teacher no less, complained that Dean was soft-pedaling his message.

Teddy Kennedy’s big new idea is to wheel out his 18th proposal to raise the minimum wage. He’s been doing this since wages were paid in Spanish doubloons (which coincidentally are now mostly found underwater). Kennedy refuses to countenance any risky schemes like trying to grow the economy so people making minimum wage get raises because they’ve been promoted. Kennedy’s going down and he’s taking the party with him! (Recognize the pattern?)

I keep expecting the real Democrats to appear and drag these nuts out of the room, saying, Oh sorry, he’s escaped again – don’t worry, he does this all the time, and then Howard Dean will stand up and have no pants on.

So now, the entire country is ignoring liberals. I’m the canary in the coal mine. Twenty-six congressmen have signed a letter denouncing me for a column I wrote two weeks ago; for the past two weeks, I’ve been attacked on MSNBC and CNN, in the Detroit Free-Press and on every known liberal blog and radio show. (I especially want to thank Pacifica Radio in this regard.) I personally have shouted their complaints from the rooftops. Liberals had fallen into my trap!

But there was no point in responding because no one had heard about the liberal denunciations in the first place. It was like explaining a joke: OK, and then they said, “Call me a cab,” and then I said, “You’re a cab! Are you following this? ... Sorry, let me start over again.”

This is like beating Dennis Kucinich in an untelevised presidential debate. That and $8.50 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbuck’s. I’m tired of helping liberals publicize their attacks on me. Liberals are going to have to do better than that if they want a response from me.

It’s not just that we’re a divided nation, with liberals watching only CNN and conservatives watching only Fox News. I’m pretty sure liberals are aware of me, and I haven’t appeared on CNN for months. It’s liberals the country is ignoring. No one knows or cares what they’re carrying on about in their media outlets. Liberals can’t get arrested. They’re even letting Martin Sheen off with a warning now.

I hate to sound selfish at such a great moment for the country, but this is nothing short of calamitous for completely innocent right-wing polemicists. Liberals are too pathetic to write about. I have nothing to do; my life is over. Where have all the flowers gone?

I’m confident they’ll stage a comeback someday. In lieu of common sense, liberals have boundless energy. But I’m getting bored waiting. In the interest of good sportsmanship, I have some proposals for liberals. I think Democrats might want to drop the contract all Democrats apparently have to sign pledging to pretend to believe insane things. Also, if you could just get the base of your party to not participate anymore and maybe be a little less crazy, people might listen to you. Barring that, you’re just going to have to scream a little louder.

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Democrats are out of gas (Townhall.com, 050314)

Michael Barone

What do Democrats want? Many answers, or partial answers, can be found in the 90th anniversary issue of the New Republic, in the post-election issue of the American Prospect and in various other writings by smart Democrats unhappy with the defeat their party suffered in 2004.

These writers avoid the left blogosphere’s wacky claims that the election was stolen. They understand that both parties played to win and tried really hard to win, and both parties made massive efforts to turn out their vote. John Kerry got 16% more votes than Al Gore. George W. Bush got 23% more votes in 2004 than in 2000.

Most of these Democrats focus on domestic policy. New Republic editor Peter Beinart has called for purging those Democrats unwilling to robustly fight the war on terrorism. But that position has not elicited much response, except for calls to show more respect for the military and a certain quietness among vitriolic Bush critics after the Iraqi election.

On domestic policy, the Democrats’ thrust is to expand government to help ordinary people. But few get specific. In the American Prospect, historian Alan Brinkley says Democrats should re-engage “with issues of class and power.” But exactly how, he doesn’t say. In the New Republic, Jonathan Chait argues that, while conservatives are guided by ideology, liberals are guided by facts. Expanding government is a matter of examining facts and doing the sensible, compassionate thing. But he doesn’t have the space to get very specific. Nor does he address David Stockman’s argument that in policymaking, powerful interests tend to trump powerful arguments — a criticism Democrats make, sometimes cogently, of Republican practices.

The New Republic’s Martin Peretz takes a bleak view: Liberalism is “bookless,” without serious intellectual underpinnings, as conservatism was 40 years ago. Back then, the liberal professoriate was churning out new policies, some of which became law. Today, the campuses provide liberals less guidance. The economics departments have become more respectful of markets and more dubious about government intervention. The social sciences have followed the humanities into the swamp of deconstruction. Peretz notices that liberals have no useful ideas about education. That overstates the case, but most reform ideas have come from the right, while most Democrats have focused on throwing more money at the teacher unions.

The bleakest picture of Democrats’ prospects comes from two usually optimistic analysts, Stanley Greenberg and James Carville. In their latest Democracy Corps memo, they lament that, despite what they see as Republican stumbling on Social Security, voters don’t think Democrats have new ideas for addressing the country’s problems. By denying that Social Security has problems, “Democrats seem stuck in concrete.”

In the New Republic, John Judis takes a longer view. Since the 1970s, he notes, Democrats have had little success expanding government. He blames this on international competition, the decline of private-sector unions and stronger business lobbyists. A revival of liberalism, he writes, “would probably require a national upheaval similar to what happened in the ‘30s and ‘60s. That could happen, but doesn’t appear imminent.”

The Democrats’ problem is that they have proceeded for years with a goal of moving America some distance toward a Western European welfare state. Just how far, they have not had to decide. But Judis looks at Europe and sees a failing model: high unemployment, stalled economies and the welfare state in retreat. Nor is raising taxes on the rich a sound strategy: Democrats did that in 1993, and Republicans won control of Congress in 1994.

Democrats in power can make small, quiet moves toward redistribution, like the expansion of the earned income tax credit in the Clinton administration. Out of power, they can focus on policies for which arguments can be made by vivid anecdotes, like prescription drugs for seniors. Or they can obstruct change and wait for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to gobble up larger shares of the economy. But that will take time.

For now, Democrats are facing the fact that general arguments for a larger welfare state just doesn’t seem attractive to most voters.

Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics.

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Moonbats on parade (townhall.com, 050316)

[Kwing Hung: see who those anti-war radicals are!]

Michelle Malkin

With freedom on the move across the Middle East and beyond, aggrieved anti-war protesters here in the United States have nothing better to do this weekend than what they have always done: stand in the way.

The most unhinged of left-wing activists, from breast-exposing pacifists to the conspiracy-mongers of MoveOn.org, will descend on New York, Washington and other major media markets to “mark the two-year anniversary of the U.S. bombing and invasion of Iraq.” They will do so by clogging the streets, tying up police resources and leaving behind a trail of anti-Bush propaganda litter.

Who says the Left doesn’t know how to create jobs?

In New York, the “Troops Out Now Coalition” plans to march on Saturday from Harlem to Central Park to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s home to demonstrate against the “occupation.” Their solution for helping the Iraqi people and demonstrating American leadership: Cut and run. Now!

You can guarantee there will not be a single sign of purple ink solidarity in sight, but the dictator-luvin’ ladies of Code Pink who prance around in pastel underwear will be out in full force.

Along the way, the marchers will stop to harass workers at a local military recruiting station. Yes, these are the supposed peaceniks who derive pleasure from ripping yellow ribbon magnets off of minivans and throwing rocks through ROTC campus offices. These are the acolytes of Michael Moore, who compares Iraqi head-choppers to American Revolutionary war heroes.

“Oppose the war, support the troops”? Bull.

By lunchtime, the protest mob will convene at Central Park to take in stirring sermons from New York City councilman Charles (“You know, some days I get so frustrated I just want to go up to the closest white person and say, ‘You can’t understand this, it’s a black thing,’ and then slap him, just for my mental health.”) Barron; convicted terrorist conspirator Lynne Stewart; and Saddam Hussein sympathizer and pro bono legal counsel to thugs worldwide, Ramsey Clark.

Organizers will also broadcast a taped message from convicted cop-killer and America-basher, Mumia Abu-Jamal. Death row diatribes are de rigueur.

In New Paltz, N.Y., the weekend anti-war festivities will be capped by a speech from Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y. — the unhinged tin-foil hat wearer who continues to assert that White House adviser Karl Rove planted the bogus National Guard memos that Dan Rather wrapped himself in at CBS News.

In San Diego and Fayetteville, N.C., Code Pink — co-founded by Medea Benjamin, a self-confessed fan of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez — will target military communities at Camp Pendleton and Fort Bragg. The Code Pink web site informs its minions that “Beyond Fort Bragg, North Carolina hosts four other of the nation’s largest military bases, making the state one of the friendliest to the military-industrial complex.”

Code Pink is the same group that champions military deserters and traipsed around the Jordan-Iraq border last year condemning America, praying for the “people of Fallujah,” and doling out $600,000 in aid to what they called “the other side.”

“Oppose the war, support the troops”? Bull.

The Bush-bashers, as always, have impeccable timing. Nothing highlights the bankrupt obstructionism of the anti-war movement more than the inspiring photos of the renaissance of freedom taking place in Lebanon. Contrast the faces of hope and defiance against terrorism pictured at the massive rallies in Beirut’s Martyrs Square this week with the faces of Bush hatred and capitulation to terrorism that you’ll see this weekend. Any question about who’s winning?

Seasoned observers who cover the War on Terror in the “blogosphere” (the increasingly influential world of Internet weblogs) have a useful term for the American Left’s protesters against progress: moonbats. Perry de Havilland of the blog Samizdata (samizdata.net) defined a moonbat as “someone on the extreme edge of whatever their -ism happens to be.”

Surveying this bizarre array of grim-faced parade organizers on the extreme edge of anti-Americanism, it’s clear: The barking Left has been left behind. And it’s driving them batty.

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In praise of honest liberals (townhall.com, 050316)

Paul Greenberg

I almost drove off the road when I heard it, the shock was so great. I really should have known better than to be listening to the “news” on National Propaganda Radio instead of the classical music station. But it’s kind of a duty. Know Your Enemy and all that.

At first nothing seemed amiss. There was the ageless Daniel Schorr going on and on in that soporific way of his that can make five minutes seem an eternity, when suddenly he said something about George W. Bush perhaps having been right. I had to pull over and get my bearings. Too much coffee, I figured. It had to be my caffeinated imagination working overtime, an aural hallucination, a hoax, an April Fool’s joke a little early.

Whatever it was, it couldn’t be real. I resolved to stick to Mozart. But later that day, an e-mail arrived from an equally astonished friend, who not only confirmed what I’d heard but sent along a copy of a piece by Mr. Schorr in the not all that good but very gray Christian Science Monitor, in which he said, well, read it for yourself, in undeniable black and white:

WASHINGTON (CSM) - Something remarkable is happening in the Middle East - a grass-roots movement against autocracy without any significant ‘Great Satan’ anti-American component. . . . The movements for democratic change in Egypt and Lebanon have happened since the successful Iraqi election on Jan. 30. And one can speculate on whether Iraq has served as a beacon for democratic change in the Middle East. During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush said that ‘a liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region.’ He may have had it right.

Wow.

The moral of this story: Keep the faith. Even in American liberals. They may be the last to get it, but they’re starting to.

First The New York Times acknowledges the courage and vision of this much-bashed president, and now comes praise from . . . Daniel Schorr! On NPR!

And that wasn’t all. The miracles kept coming.

Here was Kurt Andersen in, of all blue-state publications, New York magazine:

Our heroic and tragic liberal-intellectual capaciousness is facing its sharpest test since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back then, most of us were forced, against our wills, to give Ronald Reagan a large share of credit for winning the Cold War. Now the people of this Bush-hating city are being forced to grant the merest possibility that Bush, despite his annoying manner and his administration’s awful hubris and dissembling and incompetence concerning Iraq, just might - might, possibly - have been correct to invade, to occupy, and to try to enable a democratically elected government in Iraq. . . .

It won’t do simply to default to our easy predispositions - against Bush, even against war. If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones saying or doing it, we become mere political short-sellers, hoping for bad news because it’s good for our ideological investment.

Wow. Talk about intellectual honesty. And intellectual courage.

Kurt Andersen has to know that, by saying such things, he risks disappointing his natural audience, the Bush-bashers who look to commentators like him for the strength to shake off any sign of good news out of the Middle East. The guy deserves a salute or, if that is too military a gesture for his tastes, then a respectful nod of the head. At this rate, that over-worked epithet “knee-jerk liberal” is going to lose all meaning.

Kurt Andersen now has contributed the best, shortest description around for those betting against American policy in this war on terror: political short-sellers. Perfect. As perfect as Jeane Kirkpatrick’s phrase back in the Reagan Years for those who saw this country, not our adversaries, as the chief source of danger to the world: the Blame America First crowd.

Speaking of short-sellers, there will always be those who never lose faith in the bright, shining possibility of American defeat. Here is Nancy Soderberg, who served on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration and long sleep, as she tried to keep up her spirits during an appearance on the Jon Stewart show:

“It’s scary for Democrats,” she began, “I have to say.” But refusing to give up, she added: “Well, there’s still Iran and North Korea, don’t forget. There’s still hope for the rest of us . . . . There’s always hope that this might not work.”

Later, after her words embarrassed her, Ms. Soderberg said she was just kidding. She could have fooled me. Only after being hard-pressed would she give this Republican administration any credit for these hopeful developments in the Middle East.

But you have to forgive her. It can’t be easy rooting for tyranny these days.

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“Right On, MoveOn!” Senate Democrats join MoveOn to defend the filibuster (National Review Online, 050317)

At times during MoveOn.org’s “Rally for Fair Judges,” held yesterday at the Washington Court Hotel near the Capitol, it was hard to tell if the left-wing organizing group had planned a political rally or a revival meeting.

The purpose of the gathering, attended by several hundred MoveOn supporters, was to denounce Republicans who are considering the “nuclear option” to end the Democratic filibusters of several of President Bush’s nominees to the federal courts of appeals. Several Democratic hardliners, including Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, California Sen. Barbara Boxer, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin, and New York Sen. Charles Schumer, addressed the crowd. But the star of the show was the 87-year-old senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd, who had been an advocate of the “nuclear option” back in the 1970s, when his party was in the majority. Now, he opposes it with every fiber in his body, and he portrayed stopping the GOP as a religious crusade.

“Praise God!” Byrd yelled as he waved the copy of the Constitution he famously keeps in his coat pocket. “Hallelujah!”

The crowd erupted into hearty cheers. Byrd denounced what he called a Republican plan to “pack the courts” and said that “our Constitution is under attack.” He exhorted everyone to take action.

“Speak out!”

“Tell the people!”

“We can’t let them do it!”

When other speakers came to the podium, Byrd sat in a front-row seat, thrusting a shaking fist in the air and engaging in a church-style call-and-response. As Durbin spoke, for example, Byrd called out during nearly every sentence.

“You started a movement,” Durbin told the crowd.

“Yes!” shouted Byrd.

“When I look at the people assembled here, I’m looking at democracy.”

“Tell it!” shouted Byrd.

“It’s about freedom,” Durbin said.

“Yes!” shouted Byrd.

When Byrd began his performance, some in the audience didn’t quite know what was going on — they were far back in the crowd and couldn’t see who was calling out up front. The speakers didn’t seem to get it, either. When MoveOn organizer Ben Brandzel warmed up the crowd by vowing that he would not surrender to a president trying to “sell out our democracy for right-wing corporate hack judges,” Byrd yelled out, “No!”

“That’s right, Senator Byrd,” Brandzel said, looking a bit surprised.

Other speakers — Byrd’s fellow senators — seemed comfortable with the interruptions of their colleague, but still managed to occasionally mangle the message.

Kennedy, for example, referred to Barbara Boxer as Barbara Mikulski. He referred to William Myers, the Bush judicial nominee, as William Morris. And he kept telling the crowd to “speak truth to justice,” apparently confusing that with the more common liberal exhortation to “speak truth to power.”

Schumer, normally one of the more forceful advocates against the president’s judicial nominees, suffered a terrible case of mixed metaphors when he brought up the Founders’ hope that the Senate would be the “cooling saucer” for political passions. Not anymore, Schumer said, now that Republicans want to turn the saucer into “the rubber stamp of dictatorship” and the country into a “banana republic.”

Even Mrs. Clinton seemed slightly off balance, managing to commingle Marx, the filibuster, and Jimmy Stewart when she charged that Republicans planned “to consign ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ to the dustbin of history.”

The most substantive comments of the rally came from Boxer, who made a number of notable statements in her brief time at the microphone. First, she appeared to endorse the idea of the Senate creating a super-majority of 60 votes for judicial confirmations. Since federal judges enjoy a lifetime appointment, Boxer told the crowd, their confirmation is simply too important to be decided by a mere majority vote. “For such a super-important position, there ought to be a super vote,” Boxer said.

Next, Boxer expressed a certain fundamental lack of respect for the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter. Referring to Leahy, who is the ranking Democrat on the committee, Boxer said, “I call him my chairman of the Judiciary Committee, because I don’t recognize anyone else” — a remark that seemed to speak volumes about the effectiveness of Specter’s efforts to reach out to Democrats.

Finally, Boxer made a strong effort to address the uncomfortable fact that she once, in 1994, opposed the filibuster, back when Democrats controlled the Senate and were less concerned about minority power. Now, like Byrd — whom she called “the love of my life” — she has had a change of heart and believes the filibuster is vitally important. “I thought I knew everything,” Boxer confessed. “I didn’t get it.”

“I’m here to say I was wrong,” she continued. “I’m here to say I was totally wrong.”

“We forgive you!” someone yelled from the crowd.

The rally might not have presented an entirely coherent message, but it did send the signal that MoveOn has achieved a new level of prominence and influence in Washington, and that the group intends to be closely involved in the battle over judicial nominations. MoveOn officials say the gathering came about after Byrd’s office contacted MoveOn with a proposal to hold a rally; a lunch meeting was held, plans made, and the idea turned into action. And now, it has brought MoveOn new recognition on Capitol Hill.

During the rally, a number of senators paid tribute to MoveOn, none more enthusiastically then Durbin, who began and ended his remarks with a spirited “Right on, MoveOn!” The message — coming after some Democratic moderates had urged the party to separate itself from MoveOn — was clear: from now on, Senate Democrats and MoveOn are a team, no matter what anyone says.

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Liberal Myopia: Getting my groove back (National Review Online, 050310)

Jonah Goldberg

This is a very strange moment, as I am sure liberals and conservatives will agree. Democracy seems to be spreading in the Middle East, albeit pregnant with the possibility of disappointing failure. The Independent, Le Monde and the New York Times — not to mention the likes of Jon Stewart and Daniel Schorr — have been forced to at least ponder whether, in the words of Schorr, “Bush may have had it right.”

The willingness of many of Bush’s — and the war’s — biggest detractors to allow for the possibility that Bush and his “neocon” advisers were correct about the ability of democracy to take root in the Middle East is admirable and should be congratulated. Truth be told, before anyone can call the Bush Doctrine an empirical success there will be a lot more bad news which the same voices will — fairly or not — seize on to say that Bush was wrong all along. That’s simply because such momentous events almost never move in a straight line.

Take the situation in Lebanon. It’s entirely possible to imagine a situation where Hezbollah becomes even more powerful in Lebanon than it is now, if the Syrians leave. No doubt Bush’s detractors — and many of his friends — won’t see the elevation of Hezbollah in Lebanon as a good thing in and of itself. But sometimes a step back is necessary when you take many steps forward. Think of Poland during the Solidarity days. Gen. Jaruzelski’s declaration of martial law was a major setback for the cause of freedom, but in the larger context it was a huge leap in the right direction. Should Syria get out of Lebanon, there might be negative consequences for the Lebanese — though that’s not the way I would bet — but the concepts of national sovereignty and what the Lebanese call “people power” will have been ratified throughout the region.

Or maybe not. This really isn’t a column about foreign policy. Rather, it’s an attempt to back into a gripe I’ve had with liberals for the last few months.

Reality-Based Myopia

Last year anti-Bush reporter Ron Suskind wrote a much-discussed article for the New York Times magazine in which he quoted an unnamed aide who introduced a new phrase which quickly became a term of derision for conservatives: “reality-based community.”

This is the relevant passage:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore, “ he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Since then liberals have adopted their residence in the “reality-based community” as a badge of honor. Left-wing bloggers prominently affirm that they are a “proud member of the reality-based community” or that theirs is a “reality-based weblog.” Suskind himself continues to proclaim himself a prophet-with-honor(arium) for calling attention to the administration’s “kill-or-be-killed desire to undermine public debate based on fact.” Paul Krugman, Molly Ivins, and the rest of the usual suspects have a grand time bebopping over the Right for its supposed faith in fantasy over facts as if this phrase is a cross every conservative everywhere must bear.

To a certain extent this is all fair game. Whoever the aide was — assuming the quote was accurately and faithfully reported — was at best clumsy in explaining what he was getting at. But there are a couple problems with the ongoing liberal glee over this whole RBC thing. 1) Liberals are not particularly fastidious in their attachment to facts themselves and 2) The Bush aide was largely right.

Take the second point first. Imagine that what the aide really meant by “reality-based community” was in fact “the status-quo community.” The promising developments toward peace and liberalization throughout the Middle East were considered unimaginable to the status-quo community not very long ago. But Bush found them quite imaginable and he acted to make what his opponents considered to be a fantasy into a reality. Well — fingers crossed! — it looks like Bush is finding considerable success in his efforts to, in the words of that aide, “create a new reality.” For good or for ill, who can doubt that Bush is one of “history’s actors” at this point?

I’m hardly the only one to notice this new reality aborning. What got me thinking about it was this comment from blogger Michael Totten in response to the “Was Bush Right?” headline of the Independent: “What I find interesting here is that this shows the foresight of historians like Victor Davis Hanson. He has long argued that we should stop worrying about anti-American and anti-war jackassery and just win the damn war. If things work out in Iraq and the Middle East, he’s been saying, opposition to the U.S. and the war will largely evaporate. I have had my doubts about that since the opposition is often so reactionary and toxic. But this definitely belongs in his evidence column.”

This dynamic is actually something I’ve been interested in for a very long time. I first wrote about it here and here). As you can tell, the first place I read about it was in a phenomenal essay by George Orwell in which he derided the tendency of Western intellectuals and journalists to worship the status quo because that’s where the power was. “Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue,” he wrote in 1946. The power-worship — i.e. status-quo based — community suffers from a failure of imagination to see how fragile contemporary arrangements can be, particularly if they are fond of those arrangements for ideological, political or financial reasons. The idea that Iraq could have a democratic “teaching effect” on the region was most vociferously pooh-poohed by the Islamist voluptuaries in academia and by various journalists who either subscribe to anti-American or, more often, anti-Bush views. Maureen Dowd time and again has referred to the “discredited domino theory” as if all she needs to do is say something is discredited in order for it to be so. She’s really got to stop believing her own press releases.

Recall how Ronald Reagan was at times an amiable dunce and other times a horrific monster to liberals and some “realists” because he refused to accept that we were slaves to the “impersonal forces” of history. Now, of course, we are told that the fall of the Berlin Wall was the inevitable consequence of the Soviet Union’s internal contradictions just as the spin is just starting that Bush really didn’t have much to do with the new buds of democracy growing in Arab sand.

“Act boldly and unseen forces will come to your aid,” proclaimed the writer Dorothea Brande (though the movie Almost Famous attributes the line to Goethe). In the Middle East there had long been unseen forces that are now suddenly visible because the president acted boldly. That doesn’t mean he deserves all of the credit, of course. But it’s impossible to imagine that we’d be seeing this bloom if Bush had not tilled the soil.

As for the first point — that liberals aren’t particularly or especially interested in empirical reality.... Stay tuned for the next Goldberg File.

Meanwhile, Announcements

My apologies for not G-Filing as regularly as I should (those columns you’ve been reading in this space have been my syndicated column — you can tell because they tend to always be under 850 words). As readers of The Corner would know, I’ve been sick, the baby was sick, the wife was sick, and then we all traded sicknesses. Good times.

Another reason is that on Monday I sent 143 pages of my book to my editor. (You mean 30 usable pages, right? — The Couch.) People keep asking when I’m going to be done. After I yank the ballpoint pen from their foreheads, I explain: “When it’s done.”

Corner readers would also know about my Starbucks interview (which is not to be confused with my still pending interview with Dirk Benedict). Some time, starting next month, over one million Starbucks cups will have a quote from me on them.

Corner readers also know that Kathryn Lopez has signed a deal to become a syndicated columnist. She has also worked out a deal with the Timelords so that she can now work 37 hours a day. I figured that out when I heard her humming this. Congrats to Kathryn.

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Their Non-Reality Reality: Understanding the Democrats (National Review Online, 050317)

Jonah Goldberg

The most popular political guru among Democrats today is a guy named George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at Berkeley. Marc Cooper, a contributing editor to The Nation, describes Lakoff’s book, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, as a “feel-good self-help book for a stratum of despairing liberals who just can’t believe how their commonsense message has been misunderstood by the eternally deceived masses.”

Apparently this stratum includes Howard Dean, the new head of the Democratic party, who calls Lakoff “one of the most influential political thinkers of the progressive movement.” His book was distributed to hundreds of Democratic congressmen.

Lakoff’s argument boils down to this: Facts do not matter. “People think in frames,” he writes. “If the facts do not fit a frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce off.”

By frames, he means ideological blinders or emotional categories or familial roles. Or something. Whatever they are, Lakoff believes that Democrats need to change their language to appeal by exploiting “frames,” not dealing with facts. Much of his analysis stems from his belief that pretty much all conservatives act in bad faith. Conservatives, for example, “are not really pro-life.” No, conservatives see things through the “strict father” frame. Hence, “Pregnant teenagers have violated the commandments of the strict father. Career women challenge the power and authority of the strict father,” and therefore, he writes, “Both should be punished by bearing the child.”

Liberals can succeed not by changing their views, but by changing their words. This should be obvious, since reality doesn’t really matter anyway. All Democrats have to do is successfully change the name for trial lawyers to “public-protection attorneys” and re-label “environmental protection,” as an effort to maintain “poison-free communities.”

FDR, GANNON & LIBERAL MYTHOLOGY

Meanwhile, Democrats have taken the position that Social Security needs no reform whatsoever. Now, before the good-government liberal types scream at me that I’m being unfair, let me add that I understand this is mostly a tactical posture on the Democrats’ part. But in politics, tactics and principles are often confused for each other and for good reason. And that Democrats are acting like they think Social Security is just plain hunky-dory. That’s not my interpretation but James Carville’s, Stanley Greenberg’s, and Harold Ickes’s.

No remotely serious observer of reality believes that Social Security is just fine.

But what concerns liberals more is the supposedly outrageous contention that FDR might have supported private accounts. A quote from FDR offered by Brit Hume and others suggested that this might be the case, and the bloggers as well as Ellen Goodman, Jonathan Alter, and countless others went batty at the very idea.

Now, it’s fair game to object to what you consider misleading quotations read out of context. But the passion of these objections — even after you discount the rabid and irrational Brit Hume hatred — reveals how stuck in the past many liberals are. Conservatives were wrong about the quote, but they were right for thinking respect for FDR’s spirit is what motivates many liberals. But the thing is, who cares if FDR would have supported privatization or not? FDR was a brilliant politician, but very few historians believe he was a particularly brilliant policy maven. He liked to play with his stamp collection in his free time, not master actuarial arcana. The only thing we know for sure that FDR really favored was “bold experimentation,” which is the one thing these same Democrats adamantly oppose.

Meanwhile, Teresa Heinz Kerry thinks the election was “hacked.” Expanding on that theme, Juliet Schor of Boston College wrote in The Nation that Kerry lost the election because of strategic “software breakdowns” and selectively missing voting machines in Democratic precincts. “No amount of cultural repositioning will cure this problem,” she writes and which Cooper, in his excellent Atlantic essay, translates as liberals saying there’s “no need for us to change. The blame is all external.”

Another writer for the same issue of The Nation, a sociologist from NYU argues that liberals can only choose between living “two nightmares.” Nightmare #1: Sixty million Americans “knowingly” ratified Bush’s “right-wing ideology.” Or, nightmare #2: “We have just witnessed a second successive nonviolent coup d’état — a massive voter fraud that produced, among other anomalies, a gap between exit polls and paperless electronic voting tallies.” Oh, and this guy also thinks we shouldn’t discount the possibility we’re in analogous situation to 1930s Germany.

In (slightly) swampier waters, we hear that Jeff Gannon is the second gunman from every painful reality the Left has had a hard time accepting, including the Florida recount and Dan Rather’s downfall. One fellow took the time to pretend he was Gannon in order to send me an e-mail from Annoy.com. When you go to the site, you find a picture of Karl Rove’s head on a buff nude dude’s body with some even more pornographic text about the perfidy of various right-wing “whores.”

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO CHAIT

And at organs that pride themselves on their immunity to feverish impulses, we find instead a haughtiness not often seen outside 17th-century Versailles. Jonathan Chait of The New Republic imagines a hypothetical in which God descends to Earth for the purpose of “settling, once and for all, our disputes over economic policy.” If the Almighty declared conservative empirical claims were correct, the liberals, he writes, would respond:

[no] doubt by rethinking and abandoning nearly all their long-held positions. Liberalism, after all, claims to produce certain outcomes: more prosperity and security, especially for the poor and middle classes; a cleaner environment; safer foods and drugs; and so on. If it were proved beyond a doubt that liberal policies fail to produce those outcomes — or even, as conservatives often claim, that such policies hurt their intended beneficiaries — then their rationale would disappear.

But how would conservatives react if God affirmed liberal economic precepts?

Well, most of us would tell the Big Guy Upstairs to butt out, we know what we’re talking about and He doesn’t. Why, because “Economic conservatism, unlike liberalism, would survive having all its empirical underpinnings knocked out from beneath it,” since liberals are — get this — “fact finders.”

Forgetting all of the profound theological and psychological insults packed into this bizarre hypothetical, what on earth is Chait talking about? He goes on and on about how conservative economists are lacking in respect for empirical data and fact-finding while liberals are the Joe Fridays of economics. I worked in and around the American Enterprise Institute for quite a while. AEI remains the central hive of the sorts of economists Chait despises. I can tell you here and now that most of these guys spent their time talking endlessly about data, “random walks” in the data, the need for more data, the problems with data, and the reliability of that data. You’d think in the comfort of AEI, a few would have dropped the act and I would have heard a few of them say, “Who cares what the data says?” You’d think fewer free-market economists would receive Nobel Prizes since they don’t hand such things out for ideological polemic writing.

Chait’s theory boils down to a very shabby accusation of bad faith. When conservatives are right about reality, it’s by accident. It’s not that “conservatives don’t believe their own empirical arguments,” Chait concedes. And it’s not “that ideologically driven thinking can’t lead to empirically sound outcomes. In many cases — conservative opposition to tariffs, price controls, and farm subsidies — it does.” But the simple fact is that when it comes to conservatives, “empirical reasoning simply does not drive their thinking. What appears to be conservative economic reasoning is actually a kind of backward reasoning. It begins with the conclusion and marches back through the premises.”

“Liberalism,” Chait lectures, “is a more deeply pragmatic governing philosophy — more open to change, more receptive to empiricism, and ultimately better at producing policies that improve the human condition — than conservatism.”

And this is true not just of economics but everything. For example, Clinton was a great Pragmatist who “recognized the failure of welfare, previously a cherished liberal goal, to accomplish its stated purpose, and he enacted a sweeping overhaul.”

And here we can see the great flaw in Chait’s wishful thinking about liberal realism. Clinton agreed to welfare reform — over the objections of most liberals, including his own wife — because the Republicans forced him to and he’d have lost the 1996 election if he didn’t. That was the beginning and the ending of Bill Clinton’s fact-finding. The New York Times’s editorial page — a better representative of elite liberalism’s worldview than The New Republic, alas — called welfare reform “atrocious” and an outrage. “This is not reform, it is punishment” they declared.

Last summer, the Times reported that welfare reform was one of the “acclaimed successes of the past decade” and its renewal is a “no-brainer.” Chait would no doubt salute the newspaper for its empiricism. But how would we have known they were empiricists in 1996? Real empiricists express skepticism toward their own predictions, not moral outrage and — often — charges of racism at those who doubt them.

Indeed, that’s the story writ small of liberalism’s alleged acceptance of “new realities.” It’s not that liberals have maturely adapted to new data, it’s that they’ve been proven wrong so often — either empirically or at the polls — that they’ve had to change, and each time they do it, it’s not with the empiricist’s joy of learning new things, it’s with grumbling through gnashed teeth and amidst much caterwauling about liberal “sellouts” and political opportunism. For more than three decades, liberals swore there was no evidence that there was anything wrong with welfare reform until even the public knew they were lying.

Chait’s version of liberals cheerfully accepting that they were wrong after decades of white-knuckled denial reminds me of that scene from Fletch where Chevy Chase is chatting up the doctor about an alleged mutual friend who died:

Doctor: You know, it’s a shame about Ed.

Fletch: Oh, it was. Yeah, it was really a shame. To go so suddenly like that.

Doctor: He was dying for years.

Fletch: Sure, but... the end was very…very sudden.

Doctor: He was in intensive care for eight weeks.

Fletch: Yeah, but I mean the very end, when he died. That was extremely sudden.

Lastly there’s Chait’s solipsism. His version of reality cannot explain liberals who disagree with him. Are liberals who oppose free trade simply morons who can’t do the math? Was Hillary Clinton less of a liberal because she opposed welfare reform? What about Marian Wright Edelman? Are the Europeans who’ve refused to recognize that the economic rot of their welfare states really conservatives because they can’t face facts? Are liberals in America who envy Europe’s economic model incapable of recognizing its flaws? How does Chait explain anybody to his left — either ideologically or simply in the next office over from him — who disagrees with him? If liberals always go where the facts take them — you in the back, stop laughing — how is it that liberals ever disagree? He might say that only conservatives operate in ideologically blinkered bad faith and God-defying false-consciousness. But I think the real answer is that in Chait’s formulation the facts can only be what he finds them to be. And one senses that he really thinks God should come down and tell everyone that’s the case.

Now, I like Chait and I think he’s a smart guy. But I can only read all of this as the sort of defensive crouch one finds among the smarter campus activists who decide to hide underneath the cafeteria table while the sophomoric would-be revolutionaries tear the place apart. One can almost see Chait, Rain Man-like in a fetal position muttering, “The facts are on my side, the facts are on my side.”

On almost every significant area of public policy the Democrats are atrophied, rusty, and calcified. They’re dependent upon old (condescending) notions about blacks, the patronage of teacher’s unions which care very little for the facts, and feminists who define liberation almost exclusively as the freedom to abort pregnancies despite all of the new, inconvenient facts science is bringing to bear. Liberals are not the “reality-based community,” they are the status-quo based community. They wish to stand athwart history yelling “Stop” — in some rare cases, even when history is advancing liberalism in tyrannical lands. The Buckleyite formulation of standing athwart history yelling “Stop” was aimed at a world where the rise of Communism abroad and soft-liberalism at home were seen as linked trends. Today, liberals yell “Stop” almost entirely because they don’t enjoy being in the backseat. If they cannot drive, no one can.

And — where was I going with this again? Oh yeah — I think this petulance explains the liberal obsession with the phrase “reality-based community.” It’s a form of transference or projection or whatever they call it. We can’t stand the new reality, so we’re going to insist that those who recognize it are the ones in denial.

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Liberals vs. liberals (Washington Times, 050317)

Out here, in Los Angeles, we have recently been treated to a colossal hissy fit that had liberals gunning for other liberals. One would think that any right-thinking conservative would happily sit back and watch the blood run in the gutters. But even in a battle royal that pits lefties against their own kind, a fair-minded person can’t help taking sides.

On one side, you have the knee-jerk liberal editors at the L.A. Times wearing the white trunks or, in this case, at least the white hats. On the other side, you have the idly rich women of the Westside — most of them the wives or ex-wives of multimillionaires like Michael Huffington, Bud Yorkin and Larry David. They’re the sort of ladies who, because they might have undocumented maids, nannies and gardeners from Mexico and Guatemala working for them, not only favor open borders, but believe they’re in line for canonization. These are the knuckleheads who support NOW and the ACLU, and who yammer about fossil fuels and the ozone layer while they gad about in SUVs and private jets.

Perhaps not as wealthy as some of her cohorts, but equally self-deluded is Susan Estrich. Today, she’s a law professor at the University of Southern California; in the past, she was the campaign manager for Michael Dukakis. Somehow, Miss Estrich has turned an annoyingly nasal voice, a painted-on smirk and a ton of attitude into a secondary career as one of TV’s talking heads.

Recently, she declared a jihad against the L.A. Times because she had decided that they don’t publish nearly enough female columnists. She even had the chutzpah to assign her college students to keep track. Apparently — assuming that her law students are able to count — the L.A. Times was publishing men four times as often as they were publishing women.

The editors, fools that they are, took the charge to heart. In their lame defense, they countered the accusation by pointing out that they published women more frequently than did such liberal citadels as the New York Times and The Washington Post. Miss Estrich and her cohorts replied that what other papers do or don’t do is no defense for what the L.A. Times does or doesn’t do.

Then, when she realized that the L.A. Times wasn’t about to knuckle under to the ladies who lunch, she stooped to suggesting that perhaps editor Michael Kinsley’s brain had been adversely affected by his illness. The man suffers from Parkinson’s.

At one fell swoop, Miss Estrich not only struck a new low in debating tactics, but by trying to score points off the man’s illness, proved that in her case at least, it’s compassionate liberal that’s the oxymoron.

The fact is, if anybody should be complaining about being underrepresented on the paper’s op-ed page, it’s not women; it’s conservatives. By way of tokenism, once a week they run something by Max Boot. The rest of the week, they run letters to the editor from readers berating Mr. Boot.

If women get to sound off 20% of the time in the Times, I’d say that’s roughly 10 times as much space as writers from the right receive. Of course I’m only guessing.

Unlike Miss Estrich, I don’t have a cadre of eager coeds to do my counting for me.

The worst thing about Miss Estrich and the other members of her overly pampered platoon is that they’re hypocrites. It’s not really female writers they want to see in the L.A. Times, it’s female left-wing writers. I guarantee that if Ann Coulter, Tammy Bruce and Michelle Malkin started showing up on a regular basis, these wealthy, self-important elitists would be descending on the L.A. Times armed with tar and feathers.

The truth is, with this gaggle of geese, agenda always trumps gender.

Burt Prelutsky, author of “Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco,” is an award-winning TV writer.

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Liberals — wrong, wrong and wrong again (townhall.com, 050317)

Larry Elder

Thirty-five percent of Americans, according to a 2004 Pew Research survey, call themselves conservative, while only 22% call themselves liberal (43% call themselves moderate) — a 3% increase in conservatives since 1992. There is a reason for this — liberals keep getting it wrong.

The war in Iraq: “Week after week after week after week,” said Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., in October 2003, “we were told lie after lie after lie after lie.” Kennedy called Iraq a “quagmire,” predicting it will turn into “Bush’s Vietnam.” Now what?

Eight million Iraqis voted in their election over seven weeks ago. Protesters in Lebanon demanded the withdrawal of Syrian troops and agents. Egypt committed to, and Saudi Arabia conducted, elections, however flawed. Elections in the Palestinian territories produced a new leader who — at least for now — speaks of a peaceful two-state solution. So what does Sen. Kennedy say now?

“This Week’s” George Stephanopoulos asked Kennedy whether President Bush deserves credit for democratic developments in the Middle East. Kennedy replied, “Absolutely, absolutely, and I think . . . what’s taken place in a number of those countries is enormously constructive. It’s a reflection the president has been involved.” Well, well. Oh, sure, Kennedy talked about the number of Americans killed every day in Iraq, and that we need to figure out a way of withdrawing U.S. troops, but nothing about “quagmire.”

Add another notch to the belt of discredited liberal policies. Let’s go to the videotape.

Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts: Critics claimed the Reagan tax cuts would stunt economic growth, while triggering inflation and higher interest rates. Inflation fell from 12.5% in 1980 to 3.9% in 1984, interest rates declined, and economic growth went from minus 0.2% in 1980 to plus 7.3% in 1984.

Race-based preferences: The Detroit News examined seven Michigan colleges and universities. They found that — within six years — blacks graduate at a rate of 40% compared to 61% for whites and 74% for Asians. Lowering admission standards indeed boosted racial diversity, at the expense of a greater possibility of minority students dropping out. “The state’s universities have special programs aimed at helping black students meet financial, social and academic challenges,” wrote the Detroit News, “but graduation rates for blacks haven’t improved consistently. . . . Universities knowingly admit students who have a high chance of failing. . . . The 10 years’ worth of data analyzed by The News shows that the more selective a university is in choosing its students, the more likely its students are to graduate.”

Strategic Defense Initiative: When President Reagan first proposed SDI, the media called it fanciful, dismissing it as “Star Wars.” According to Accuracy in Media, “During one six-month period commencing in December 1991, the [New York] Times ran 17 anti-SDI articles, op-ed pieces and editorials denouncing SDI as, among other things, a ‘bizarre, costly concoction . . . science fiction . . . lunacy . . . sheer fantasy . . . ‘ The Times gave front-page space to Teddy Kennedy’s Senate speech deriding SDI as ‘Star Wars,’ likening the idea to a science fiction movie or a video arcade game, and providing SDI foes their slogan-of-choice.” Yet, of the last six Interceptor Missile tests, five successfully intercepted another missile. Parts of SDI have already been employed in Japan, in a cooperative U.S.-Japan Theater Missile Defense program.

Welfare reform: In 1996, President Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act, after twice vetoing similarly worded bills. Presidential adviser Dick Morris warned Clinton that his 1996 re-election turned on signing this bill. Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, castigated welfare reform, calling it, “the biggest betrayal of children and the poor since the CDF began.” Congressman John Lewis, D-Ga., said it is “mean, it is base, it is low-down.” In the following years, welfare rolls fell by 50%

Charity: In “The Tragedy of American Compassion,” author Marvin Olasky writes that charity works best when done by people rather than by government, and that government programs foster dependency rather than self-reliance. Olasky writes that unemployed workers often tried seven alternatives, sequentially, before applying for government aid, including private benefits, credit, savings, loans or gifts from friends and family, and so on. As far back as 1766, Ben Franklin said, “I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it . . . the more public provisions were made for the poor the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”

Minimum wage: These laws destroy jobs. Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman says about the minimum wage, “Minimum wage laws cost jobs. Employers cut out, or mechanize, jobs that are not worth the minimum rate to them. Worst affected are the inexperienced young people, those with poor skills, and minorities.”

Of the major domestic and national security issues of the last several decades, liberals consistently got it wrong, wrong and wrong again!

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Double-dealers (Townhall.com, 050321)

John Leo

I spend some of my time brooding about people who seem addicted to double standards - those who take an allegedly principled stand on a Monday, then switch firmly to the opposite principle on Tuesday if it is to their advantage. A lot of this is considered normal today: free-speech hard-liners who support the severe speech limitations of the campaign reform law, people who were outraged by the campaign that bumped CBS’s anti-Reagan made-for-TV movie off the network but not upset by a similar campaign that forced the cancellation of Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s planned television show.

Some Supreme Court justices have become fond of taking guidance from international standards, as in Roper v. Simmons, the recent decision to bar the death penalty for those under age 18. But do not look for the court to condemn cloning, as the United Nations did by a vote of 84 to 34, or to modify abortion policies to bring them into line with the much more restrictive ones of most developed countries. What the justices mean is that we should look to world standards when those standards support their political preferences.

Justice Antonin Scalia, in his Roper dissent, tossed a grenade at the American Psychological Association on grounds of double standards. In an abortion case before the Supreme Court in 1990, the APA said a “rich body of research” showed that by age 14 or 15 people are mature enough to choose abortion because they have “abilities similar to adults in reasoning about moral dilemmas.” But the APA’s certitude of the strong moral grasp of young teens apparently evaporated just in time for Roper, where they told the court that minors just aren’t mature enough to be eligible for the maximum penalty faced by adult killers.

Planned Parenthood adopted a more comic double stance on abortion: Young girls are fully capable of choosing to abort without informing their parents, but they could not enter a Planned Parenthood pro-abortion poster contest without parental approval. The fine print on the contest said, “Children under age 18 must have a parent or legal guardian’s permission to submit designs.” No, you wouldn’t want young teens making drastic poster decisions without input from Mom or Dad.

The Republican threat to invoke “the nuclear option” to break the Democratic filibuster over judicial nominations has brought a mother lode of double standards. For example, law Prof. Erwin Chemerinsky of Duke coauthored a strong antifilibuster law article in 1997 when Republicans were obstructing Democratic court nominees but a strong pro-filibuster argument to meet the current debate.

Many newspapers thundered against the males-only membership policy of Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, which is private, but remained silent about recent discriminatory policies at public institutions, such as a New York City public high school for gays and bisexuals, “Third World” student centers for nonwhites, and women-only lounges like the one at Boalt Hall, the law school of the University of California-Berkeley.

Liberals aren’t the only double-dealers. Conservatives criticize liberals for “playing the race card” and reducing broad issues to narrow ones about race and gender. But conservatives do it too. Liberals opposed appeals-court nominee Miguel Estrada on philosophical grounds and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on grounds that he favored mistreatment of suspected terrorists. But some Republicans tried to sell that opposition as anti-Hispanic bias. Opposing Estrada, said Sen. Charles Grassley, “would be to shut the door on the American dream of Hispanic Americans everywhere.” Not really.

Both left and right play games on federalism and states’ rights. Liberals, generally contemptuous of states’ rights, want to retain state tort and environmental laws, which they think are better than national laws under Republican dominance. Conservatives consider the states “laboratories of democracy,” except when they want to trump a liberal state program. John Ashcroft’s argument that Oregon’s right-to-die law violated federal drug legislation comes under this heading.

Liberals have been severely critical of the Patriot Act and Ashcroft for the policy of seeking library records of suspected terrorists. Librarians were particularly incensed. However, the American Library Association declines to protest the serious mistreatment of librarians in Cuba. Some 75 dissidents, including 10 librarians, are subject to beatings, denied medical help, and kept in “medieval cages,” according to human-rights advocates. The librarians’ silence has to do with the lingering romantic attachment of the American left to communism in general and Fidel Castro in particular. The Motorcycle Diaries, the glowing movie about the young Che Guevara, is the current horrible example. The romantic left would never do a similar film about a young Nazi. Guevara killed a lot of people and dreamed of slaughtering more. How about On the Road With Adolf? Let’s not dwell too much on what came after.

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The Decline of the Liberal Faith (American Spectator, 050323)

LIBERALISM, AMERICAN-STYLE, is dying on the vine. I refer to the faith of liberalism — the belief in “the redemptive transformation of human society through political means,” as William Pfaff puts it in his new book, The Bullet’s Song. Programmatic liberalism — Social Security, Medicare, government schooling, government science, and the like — will continue, and on an expansionist path. But as a faith, liberalism is set to decline in the years ahead. It is already doing so, perhaps more swiftly than we know. What is left of it is filled with darkness and pessimism: sex, abortion, euthanasia, and death.

Like Communism, liberalism was put into practice. Better for the idealists if it had remained a dream. But as anyone who has lived within a mile of a government-housing project will know, real-life liberalism is a menacing thing — anti-utopia. Neighborhoods menaced by young men without fathers, their mothers financed by the state, should by now have disillusioned even the most progressive minded. So should inner-city state schools, where parents play little or no role, and perhaps don’t even know where the school is.

Although its adherents don’t like to discuss the point, the liberal faith has much in common with Communism, including shared roots in the Enlightenment. Human nature, philosophers once believed, could be remade in the classroom. People could be improved by “legislation alone,” to quote the 18th-century philosophe Claude Helvetius. Influenced by John Locke, he was in turn studied by the founder of Russian Marxism, G.V. Plekhanov, who befriended Lenin in Zurich.

Liberalism and Communism both regarded egalitarianism as an ideal and both were godless; Communism openly so, liberalism more obscurely. Democracy admittedly distinguished between them, but the liberal admiration for an ideological judiciary shows that they, too, would like nothing more than a government that is free to impose its will by fiat (provided it is run by the right people).

The liberal faith fell with Communism. Both were based on extravagant optimism — admittedly an unwarranted optimism. Human nature was on the verge of transformation. Nineteenth-century thinkers really believed that people would soon be so good that the boundaries of property would no longer be required. The reversal of attitude today is most conspicuous in the environmentalists, whose rise coincided with the fall of the Soviet Union. Man now is widely perceived as a despoiler and menace to the planet.

AN UNWRITTEN PRINCIPLE OF THE LIBERAL FAITH has been that government must expand to whatever extent is needed to get the job done. No liberal has ever been heard to say that the government has grown too large, or should be reduced. But reality imposes its own discipline. At all levels, federal, state, and local, government now disposes of at least one-third of GDP. In European countries it is closer to half, and even some liberal journalists are beginning to accept that therein lies the explanation for the slow or non-existent growth in countries like Germany.

The costs of further government expansion are slowly sinking in. You might say that we are all capitalists now. More and more voters have retirement accounts that rise and fall with the stock market and the details of public finance are of growing concern to the middle class, not just to actuaries and budget analysts.

The hazard of government overreaching was recognized by President Clinton (“The era of big government is over”), and to give him his due, Clinton took more care to control federal spending than President Bush has done. The great re-education of liberals began early in President Reagan’s first term, when supply-siders publicized the idea that the “price” of government could not be raised indefinitely; in fact, marginal tax rates were already way too high. I will never forget the rage of the liberals at that moment. They had blithely assumed that government finances were immune from the laws of supply and demand, and taxes, no matter how high, would have no effect on behavior.

Today, the freedom to launch new social-engineering schemes — being “generous” with other people’s money — is severely constrained by these realities and will remain so indefinitely.

THE LIBERALS WILL FIGHT to keep their “gains,” of course, and with the major programs they won’t have to fight very hard. The logic of representative government ensures that transfer programs to the elderly will keep right on expanding. FDR boasted in the 1930s that “no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program,” and he was right about that. Current and future beneficiaries have the power to decide not merely who their representatives are but how they are expected to vote. This is the great and largely unforeseen toll that a transfer society exacts. Those who receive benefits from the state have more influence with their representatives than the taxpayers themselves.

In fact, the massive transfer programs of the federal government have become millstones for liberals, too, because they are squeezing out every last drop of tax revenue that might otherwise have been available for new programs. With his prescription drug benefit, Bush only intensified the problem.

Those who seek an expanded government in the future will more and more depend on finding or contriving emergencies. Such crises will be said to require an immediate response, with fiscal prudence sacrificed to humanitarianism. Think tsunami-anthrax-AIDS-in-Africa. September 11, although a genuine tragedy, was treated as just such an opportunity by our big-government conservatives, or neoconservatives (ex-liberals, in many cases).

The contrivance of crisis has of course been a speciality of the environmentalists. The air is toxic, the water filled with lead, the globe cooling (or warming), species becoming extinct (even as subspecies multiply). New agencies must be set up without delay. It took the rest of us a generation to figure out that these scares, which continue in a steady stream, were not to be trusted: generated by activists, publicized by journalists with the same agenda, and quickly adopted and made permanent by government.

LIBERALISM IS DYING OF OLD AGE. It has gone on for too long and the world is changing. At its core, it was based on the idea that religious belief would give way to Enlightenment values. Faith would succumb to reason. Shorn of superstition, the human race would make its stately progress toward a brighter future. Well, that hasn’t worked out. (Go back and take a look at one of those inner-city schools or housing projects if you don’t believe me.) Christianity has indeed declined, especially in its self-confidence. Journalists have lost count of the times the Pope has apologized for the history of the Catholic Church. And in see-saw response to the Christian decline, Islam has risen up after a long dormancy.

Islam has been around for a long time, and it is not going to retreat into the Arabian sukhs any time soon. Meanwhile the American goal in Iraq would seem to be nothing less than the introduction of Enlightenment values into the Arab world. Not just elections but freedom of speech and toleration and a reformed education system and a role for women and equality before the law must be transferred to Mesopotamia and beyond. And the result will be?

The world would certainly be a nicer, safer, and more comfortable place if this mission were to succeed. Who knows, maybe it will. There is one thing that can be safely predicted, however. Success, if it is to come, will take a long time. Just guessing, but doesn’t it seem likely that our own domestic politics will drive us out of the neighborhood before those good things can happen?

If it does not succeed, then we will face an energized and inflamed Islam. Enlightenment ideas have not taken root in the Arab world over the last 250 years — a period when the West was more self-confident than it is now. So it may be that we will end up absorbing a lesson or two from them. I recall a line from one of C. Northcote Parkinson’s books, this one about the Muslim world: “The onset of one religion can be resisted only by another.” Perhaps a revival of Christianity is in the cards.

Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator. This article appears in the March issue of The American Spectator.

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Watch the VLWC: Byron York warns against underestimating the Left’s new machinery (National Review Online, 050405)

Today the book — literally — on the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy is unveiled. National Review’s Byron York is author of The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down the President — and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time. As you can imagine, he’s got a lot of George Soros, some Al Franken and Michael Moore, but even more so, the strategic planners behind MoveOn, America Coming Together, and that oh-so-riveting Air America. Don’t let the ZZZZ Factor of Air America fool you. As Byron writes, “Today’s Left is bigger and better funded than conservatives were decades ago, and though Democrats did not win in 2004, this left-wing movement — and the foundation of new institutions on which it rests — seems poised to exert even more influence in coming campaigns.” “[B]y 2008,” he writes, “they will be even better organized — and far stronger.”

NRO Editor Kathryn Lopez asked her colleague a few Matt Lauer-style hard-hitting questions about his new book. Byron York notes, though, that no reading of this Q&A is complete without buying the book.

National Review Online: Byron, are you trying to distract the American people from your husband’s impending impeachment or laying the fundraising groundwork for your run for Senate? Why do you need to demonize the Left with a conspiracy label?

Byron York: While conservatives were perhaps paying too little attention, the phrase “Vast Left Wing Conspiracy” has become a kind of shorthand on the Left for the biggest, richest, and most focused political movement in generations. MoveOn.org, George Soros, the 527 groups, Michael Moore, Al Franken and Air America, John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, and other individuals and organizations are self-consciously building a new political infrastructure — a well-funded message machine which they plan to use to inject new ideas into the national conversation, attack enemies, and spark political action. Unlike the conservative movement, which grew up over decades, they are trying to do it all virtually instantly — and in many ways, they have succeeded. The book is their story.

As for the specific phrase — a variation on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s famous charge that there was a “vast right wing conspiracy” against Bill Clinton — here’s what Franken said last month about his work with Air America radio: “I think it’s a counterpoint to [the Right] and to the administration and to just the whole right-wing echo machine. We’re trying to just be part of this vast left wing conspiracy...” As another example, at last year’s Democratic convention in Boston, a group of young activists put on a program called “Building the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.” And as far back as 2001, the liberal online magazine Slate published an article entitled, “Wanted: A Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.” There are plenty of other examples to show that the Left actually kind of likes the phrase.

That’s not really surprising. Remember back in 1998, when Mrs. Clinton first used “vast right wing conspiracy”? Conservatives loved it. You couldn’t go to a party without someone saying, “Well, it looks like the whole conspiracy is here.” Well, the left-wing variation is being heard more and more these days.

NRO: Is it a problem for the Left that MoveOn basically had no purpose, as you tell their tale, pre-9/11? That so much of the Left’s new organization is based on being antiwar? And some of it, specifically against the war in Afghanistan, which Americans were generally united behind?

York: MoveOn’s problem was that it was founded for a very specific purpose — to oppose the Clinton impeachment — and then it could not move on itself. After Clinton was impeached, MoveOn tried to punish the impeachers, and they hung on to that mission so long that, after the 2000 election, they seemed like the last Japanese soldiers on the island. But then they learned how to transform themselves. After September 11, they suddenly found a new purpose, becoming in essence an antiwar organization. First they opposed the war in Afghanistan, which, as you say, had nearly universal American support, and then they opposed the war in Iraq when they helped create the group Win Without War. Later, they became an anti-Bush campaign ad organization. Now, they’re transforming themselves again, joining the fight to filibuster Bush judicial nominees and oppose Social Security reform. When that no longer works, they’ll do something else.

The thing to remember about MoveOn is that even though it has at times had a large membership — sometimes topping 2.5 million — its essentially radical nature makes it unlikely to expand its appeal beyond the hard-core Democratic base. Remember that nearly 60 million people voted for John Kerry. Some part of that group, perhaps 25%, could be called the truest, bluest, anti-Bush faction. That’s nearly 15 million people. And inside that 15 million people, there was MoveOn. For all the attention it received, and all its claims to represent the “true majority” of the American people, MoveOn simply never expanded beyond the confines of the true believers.

NRO: A related question: America Coming Together and the like were sorta overconfident — their attitude seemed to be, if you said you were the majority, the majority would come. They were speaking to other left-wing activists’ e-mail lists and the like, not reaching out to new people. Are these groups too out there to really drive electoral victories to the Democrats?

York: In the book, I make a distinction between the emotional wing of the movement — MoveOn, Michael Moore, and others — and the professional wing, which includes America Coming Together and the Center for American Progress. The emotional wing is given to outbursts — like MoveOn’s antiwar ads or Moore’s statement that he couldn’t understand why the September 11 terrorists attacked New York City, since so many New Yorkers had voted for Al Gore — that confine them to the margins. But the professionals are more disciplined, and in the future they will be working hard to make their message seem more mainstream. They are smart and extremely well-funded, and, depending on the mistakes made by Republicans in the future, they could well win in years to come — because, as the book shows, the extraordinary infrastructure they have built makes them a political force to be reckoned with.

NRO: What do you expect the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy to look like come 2008? How key is it that the likes of Barack Obama are lending them their creds?

York: What is perhaps most remarkable about the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy is how quickly the activists built their new organizations — in about 18 months. Given more time, they will build more. In the conclusion of the book I discuss a scenario in which the war on terror declines in public urgency, Republicans make mistakes borne of overconfidence and being too long in power, and circumstances begin to favor Democrats. It could certainly happen, and Hillary Rodham Clinton is positioning herself for just such a situation. On the other hand, in the book I also identify a number of problems that kept the Left from winning in 2004 and could haunt them against next time. Any group that counts among its core constituents MoveOn (with whom Obama teamed up recently in the drive to support Democratic filibuster leader Sen. Robert Byrd) and Michael Moore will always be capable of defeating itself, no matter what Republicans do.

NRO: You’ve described the Left’s organizations as angry and desperate during the last election — is that why they lost? If so, can they come to grips with that or do they remain too angry?

York: In the book, I write that the emotional wing of the movement was angry — at the Clinton impeachment, at the Florida recount, and at virtually everything George W. Bush did. The professional wing, on the other hand, became desperate — they found themselves totally out of power after the 2002 elections and facing a post-McCain Feingold world in which their zillionaire donors could no longer give to the Democratic party. Groups like America Coming Together — founded to allow contributors like Soros and a few of his associates to give millions of dollars — were the direct response to that.

But the real reason the new activists on the Left lost in 2004 was that their organizations were essentially closed loops — self-contained groups that spoke mostly to each other. My book details instances in which the activists seemed to believe they were reaching out far beyond their own group — to a new American majority — when in fact they were not. Worse for them, their closed loops overlapped: people who belonged to MoveOn listened to Air America and watched Fahrenheit 9/11 and contributed to America Coming Together. They weren’t really reaching out to anybody.

NRO: Michael Moore’s movie bombed in the heartland? How did he get away with claiming otherwise, basically writing false headlines in news accounts?

York: He got away with it because the press did not question what he was saying. When Fahrenheit 9/11 premiered, Moore said it was “the number-one movie in every single red state in America” and went on, for weeks afterward, to claim that the movie represented a wave of anti-Bush feelings all across the country. His claims went mostly unchallenged in the press. What I found in researching my book — I came across a source in Hollywood with access to the movie industry’s sophisticated audience measurement statistics — was that Moore’s claims were simply not true. Using previously unpublished statistical evidence, I show that in fact, Fahrenheit 9/11 did very well only in a few deep-blue areas — and also in Canada, where ticket sales counted toward the film’s North American gross. Virtually everywhere else, the movie underperformed significantly.

NRO: Does the VLWC consider campaign-finance laws a joke? Will that come back to haunt people like Eliot Spitzer who, as you note, has pretty publicly laughed at them?

York: I think they felt that the laws were really designed to curb the excesses of rich Republicans, and thus really didn’t apply to them. At one point in the 2003-2004 election cycle, George Soros wrote that, even after McCain-Feingold, when the Bush campaign was collecting only legal, limited contributions, corporations continued to “[buy] the same level of access and influence for their corporate interests that they previously obtained” before campaign finance reform. Soros continued: “I don’t seek such influence. My contributions are made in what I believe to be the common interest.” That was what it boiled down to: Soros — who before 2004 was one of the biggest champions of campaign-finance reform — believed his mega-contributions were good because he had good motives, and even legal, limited contributions to Bush were bad because corporations had selfish motives. With that kind of worldview, why would one take the spirit of the campaign-finance laws too seriously?

NRO: How does the Right’s well-oiled machinery components compare to the Left’s now?

York: When it comes to assessing each other’s power and influence, the Right and Left seem to live in parallel universes. The Left points to Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio in general, to Fox News, to the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, to the Scaife Foundation, and other conservative institutions, and sees an all-powerful machine. The Right, on the other hand, is baffled that a group of people with ready access to the New York Times, parts of the big broadcast television networks, the Pew Foundations, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, the Brookings Institution, and virtually all of academia could feel so outgunned. And yet they do. In fact, in creating the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, liberal activists have been quite consciously trying to create their own version of what they see as the right-wing “noise machine” or “attack machine.”

Right now, I would say that while, in some of the big media, conservative ideas are sometimes ignored, or more often treated as phenomenon to be studied like an anthropologist might study the habits of a newly discovered tribe, conservatives are better able to express and explain their ideas than they have ever been. It is hard for conservatives to argue, as they could at times in the past, that they cannot get their ideas before the public. But when it comes to political machinery, the Right needs to pay attention to what the Left is doing. It was the Left, for example, that revolutionized campaigning with 527 groups; Democratic-supporting 527s spent an astonishing $230 million on the last presidential race, which was two-and-a-half times what Republican-supporting 527s spent.

NRO: Were you surprised so many key organizers of the VLWC talked with you as much as they did?

York: No, I wasn’t surprised. Even though the book is quite critical of their work, the one thing I tried to do throughout was to take them and their organizations seriously. I didn’t write the book to trash them or call them names. I wrote it to figure out what they are doing. One of the themes I hope readers will draw from the book is that, whatever the excesses of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, conservatives and Republicans should take it seriously.

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Liberal attitudes (townhall.com, 050405)

Thomas Sowell

Liberals may think of themselves as people who believe in certain principles but, if you observe their actual behavior, you are likely to discover that most liberals have a certain set of attitudes, rather than principles.

Liberals may denounce “greed,” for example, but in practice it all depends on whose greed. Nothing the government does is ever likely to be called “greed” by liberals.

Even when the government confiscated more than half the income of some people in taxes, that was not greed, as far as the left was concerned. Nor is it greed in their eyes when local politicians across the country bulldoze whole working class neighborhoods, destroying homes that people spent a lifetime sacrificing to buy, and paying them less than the market value of those homes through legal chicanery.

Even when the land seized under “eminent domain” laws are turned over to casinos, hotels, or shopping malls — places that will pay more taxes than working class homeowners — liberals can never seem to work up the outrage that they display when denouncing “greed” on the part of businesses whose prices are higher than liberals think they should be.

It is not the principle of sacrificing other people’s economic interests to your own that causes liberals to denounce greed. It is a question of who does it and what the liberals’ attitudes are to those segments of the population.

Politicians who ruin local homeowners, in order to get hold of more tax money to finance programs that will increase the politicians’ chances of being re-elected, are just meeting the “needs” of the community, as far as many liberals are concerned.

Whatever the issue, it is usually not the principle but the attitude which determines where liberals stand. Just rattle off a list of social groups — the police, blacks, environmentalists, multinational corporations — and you will have a pretty good idea of which way liberals are likely to lean, even if you have no idea what particular issue may arise.

Recent liberal denunciations of federal intervention to over-ride Florida law in the Terri Schiavo case were made by the same people who supported recent federal intervention to over-ride the laws of more than a dozen states when the Supreme Court banned the execution of murderers who were not yet 18 years old.

You can count on the same liberals to cheer if the federal courts over-ride both state laws and referenda opposing gay marriage. It is not the principle. It is the attitude.

“Diversity” has become one of the crusades of liberals, especially academic liberals. But, in a country that is pretty closely divided politically, it is not at all uncommon to find a whole academic department — sociology, for example — without a single Republican today or for the past three decades.

Academia is virtually a liberal monopoly but they show no misgivings about the lack of diversity of ideas on campus. It is only physical diversity that arouses the passions of liberals because that engages their attitudes toward particular social groups.

Liberals have often been critical of college fraternities for being exclusive but have seldom been critical of all-black student organizations or even all-black dormitories. Liberals have succeeded in virtually eliminating all-male colleges but applaud the role of women’s colleges.

Again, it is not principles but attitudes.

Among liberals’ most cherished views of themselves is that they are in favor of promoting the well-being of minorities in general and blacks in particular. But here again, it all depends on which segments of the minority community are involved.

Black welfare recipients or even black criminals have received great amounts of liberal political and journalistic support over the years. However, the great majority of blacks, who are neither criminals nor welfare recipients but are in fact their main victims, have their interests subordinated to the interests of their unsavory neighbors who are more in vogue in liberal circles.

Whatever the merits or demerits of liberal principles, those principles are often far less important than the attitudes which have become the hallmarks of contemporary liberalism.

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Going Viral: MoveOn and the Peacenik Crusade (National Review Online, 050407)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece is excerpted from NR White House Correspondent Byron York’s new book, The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy. York’s new book details how MoveOn.org, George Soros, Michael Moore, 527 groups, Al Franken, and other Democratic activists built the biggest, richest, and best organized political movement in generations. Among other things, the book discusses MoveOn’s origins and how, in the summer of 2004, the group used its Internet organizing power in an attempt to create the impression in the media that there was a wave of anti-Bush anger sweeping the country.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a young man named David Pickering was at his parents’ home in Brooklyn — he had graduated from the University of Chicago a few months earlier and was looking for a job — when he heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center. He went outside to see what was happening across the East River. Astonished by the sight, Pickering, an aspiring filmmaker, grabbed his video camera and hopped on the subway; unlike the thousands of people struggling to flee Manhattan, he was actually trying to make his way closer to Ground Zero. He got as far as an elevated train platform with a view of the burning towers. And there he stood as the buildings fell.

All day and night, Pickering shot interviews with people on the street, trying to get a sense of what they were feeling. They were stunned, horrified, angry, and confused. Of course, Pickering felt some of the same things himself, but as he reflected on what happened, an idea came to him: September 11 was an opportunity, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, for peace, if only the U.S. government could be persuaded not to defend itself militarily. “It was this incredible moment in which all doors were opened and the world was seeming to come together,” he told me from Paris, where he was attending La Fémis, the French national film school. “I had this feeling that it would be a shame if that were spoiled by a spirit of vengeance.”

The next day, Pickering put his thoughts into writing. He drafted a petition imploring President George W. Bush and other world leaders to show “moderation and restraint” in responding to the attacks. He asked Bush “to use, wherever possible, international judicial institutions and international human rights law to bring to justice those responsible for the attacks, rather than the instruments of war, violence or destruction.”

That evening, September 12, Pickering sent the petition to about thirty friends, asking that they “sign” the document — electronically, of course — and send it on to others. By the next morning, he told me, there were between 3,000 and 4,000 signatures. Then a friend from the University of Chicago posted the petition on the school’s student server. A couple of days later, there were nearly 30,000 signatures.

One of the people who saw the petition was a young liberal activist named Eli Pariser. A 2000 graduate of Simon’s Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Pariser was working for More Than Money, a left-leaning Cambridge-based nonprofit educational organization. He, too, opposed military retaliation for the terrorist attacks, and he had set up his own website on September 12 — he called it 9-11peace.org — with a message similar to Pickering’s. Looking for a way to attract attention, Pariser e-mailed Pickering to suggest they combine their efforts. Pickering quickly agreed.

That’s when the project took off. Within a month, about 500,000 people, perhaps half of them in the United States and the rest around the world, had signed the petition. Nearly every day, Pariser came up with new statements, and new petitions, to send out, and each of them managed to attract thousands of signatures. A born political rabble-rouser — the child of Vietnam War protesters, he is said to have started his picketing-and-demonstrating career at the age of seven — Pariser aggressively promoted the cause in ways that hadn’t occurred to the introspective Pickering.

Soon it paid off. Thousands of miles away, in Berkeley, California, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, the husband-and-wife founders of the left-wing activist website MoveOn.org, were reading 9-11peace.org, and they were impressed by what they saw. A few years later, in September 2004, I asked Blades what it was that had caught her eye. She told me the whole phenomenon reminded her of some of MoveOn’s own petitions, including the calling for restraint after the September 11 attacks. “It was similar in results to the one we had,” Blades said. “It went viral on an international scale.”

MoveOn got in touch with Pariser, offering advice and technical assistance. Pariser was happy to accept, and soon he and MoveOn started working together, not only on the petition but on other issues as well. Not long after, Boyd and Blades offered him a job. For Pariser, it was an opportunity to join the world of big-time Internet organizing. For Boyd and Blades, it was a chance to recruit someone with lots of enthusiasm about both politics and the Internet. And one more thing: Pariser brought with him the e-mail addresses of the thousands of people who had signed the antiwar petition. For MoveOn, the list provided a healthy infusion of new contacts — people who could be asked to send contributions and sign petitions — which are the lifeblood of Internet activism.

Meanwhile, the swirl of events passed David Pickering by. During the Christmas holiday in 2001, he told me, Pariser broke the news that he had decided to join Boyd and Blades. With that, 9-11peace.org was over. Pickering wasn’t really upset; although he had strong political feelings, he wanted to make statements through films, not petitions. I asked whether he had any hard feelings about Pariser getting all the credit for their work. Not at all, Pickering told me. That kind of politics just wasn’t for him: “MoveOn was always Democrat in a way that I wasn’t necessarily interested in.” Not long afterward, he headed to France.

That brief period — the last few months of 2001 — was a critical time not just for Pickering and Pariser but also for MoveOn. In the months before September 11, MoveOn was an organization searching for a purpose. Boyd and Blades had been trying to stir opposition to the policies of the Bush administration — tax cuts, energy, education, just about everything else — but on the eve of the terrorist attacks, MoveOn had no urgent, overarching cause, as it had in 1998, when it opposed the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. The attacks, and the petition, changed that.

After September 11, MoveOn became, in effect, a peace organization — and a radical one at that. In doing so, it threw off the façade of left-leaning moderation that it had carefully maintained during the Clinton years, when a large number of Americans essentially agreed with its views on impeachment. Opposing military retaliation for the terrorist attacks — a position supported by only a tiny portion of the public — shifted MoveOn to the left fringe of American politics. Animated by a new cause, it pioneered new ways of raising money through the Internet, of organizing its members through nationwide meetings, and of attracting attention in the press. But even though MoveOn would recruit a group of dedicated followers and receive much admiring coverage, its pacifist core and strident anti-Bushism — its leaders were peace advocates who loved to produce smashmouth political ads — ensured that MoveOn would remain on the political margins. To this day, Boyd and Blades insist that they represent the views of the “real majority” of Americans. But events proved otherwise.

THE APPEARANCE OF A MAJORITY

[The Vast Wing Conspiracy traces MoveOn’s history from the Clinton years through its work during the race for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. And then MoveOn jumped on the bandwagon for Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.]

As the presidential campaign progressed, the most prominent of MoveOn’s projects came in June, when the group joined the promotional effort for Michael Moore’s new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11. The week before the film premiered, Pariser asked members to sign a pledge to see it during its first weekend. The point, he explained, was not simply to show support for Moore’s picture. The point was to create the impression in the press that Fahrenheit 9/11 was the leading edge of a wave of anti-Bush anger sweeping the country. “We launched this campaign around Fahrenheit 9/11 because to the media, the pundits, and the politicians in power, the movie’s success will be seen as a cultural referendum on the Bush administration and the Iraq war,” Pariser told MoveOn members. “Together, we have an opportunity to knock this ball out of the park.”

A few days later, on June 28, MoveOn organized “virtual house parties,” featuring a live Internet link with Moore, in homes, coffee shops, and theaters around the country. Before wildly enthusiastic crowds — I attended one such gathering, filled with true believers, at a movie theater in Washington’s Dupont Circle neighborhood — Pariser extolled the success of the new movie. “Due in part to your efforts, Fahrenheit 9/11 was the number-one movie in the nation this weekend,” Pariser told his “virtual” audience. “Now we’re going to talk about how to turn that enormous momentum into action to beat Bush.” Moore then delivered what was pretty much a monologue — the technology of supporters posing questions via the Web didn’t seem to work all that well — and the evening ended with a please-register-to-vote appeal. “None of us want this just to be a movie where people just eat popcorn and go home,” Moore said.

When Fahrenheit 9/11 came under scrutiny from critics, MoveOn rushed to Moore’s defense. Pariser encouraged members to write their local newspapers to praise the movie. And they didn’t even have to write — all they had to do was click on MoveOn’s “easy-to-use letter to the editor tool,” enter a ZIP code, choose from a list of local papers, and then select a “pre-written” letter. “I am shocked that many critics have denounced Michael Moore’s new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, as unpatriotic and anti-soldier,” said one such letter. “I find it interesting that the most fervent critics of the movie Fahrenheit 9/11 seem more obsessed with attacking Michael Moore than in taking on the points he makes in his film,” said another. “Moore’s movie raises extremely difficult questions that deserve our attention as we move towards the November elections,” said a third.

The strategy worked. Scores of newspapers around the country printed the letters as if they had been written by the people who sent them. The “I am shocked” letter, for example, found its way into the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Arizona Republic, the Fresno Bee, and about a dozen other papers. Much the same was true for the other letters. As they had during the movie’s premiere weekend, Pariser and MoveOn had taken another step forward in the effort to create the image of an energized majority.

As the campaign dragged on, MoveOn spent most of its money and energy on television ads, which had brought it so much publicity in the “Daisy” and “Bush in 30 Seconds” campaigns. The group released a commercial titled “He Knew,” which — shades of 1998 — called on Congress to censure the president for misleading the country on Iraq. Another ad suggested that Bush had deserted — “simply left” — his post with the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s. And “Quagmire” showed an American soldier sinking in quicksand in Iraq, his rifle raised above his head in a signal of surrender.

Each attracted some attention — the goal was always to have them played for free on news broadcasts — but there’s no evidence that the ads had any actual effect on the campaign. And some Democrats wondered whether the spots were really intended to help the party in the first place. “I don’t feel it’s been effective impacting the race at all,” one respected Democratic strategist — a former Howard Dean advisor — told me a few weeks before the November election. “I feel like it’s been effective in getting attention and generating hits for their website and generating contributions to MoveOn.”While that was not necessarily a bad thing, the strategist told me, it also was not terribly useful in a tough election. “The campaigns are trying to talk to swing voters,” he said, “who are far more rational and less emotional than the histrionics of MoveOn’s advertising would suggest.”

But the ads — and the money that paid for them — were moving MoveOn back into the center of Democratic activism. And perhaps the surest sign that MoveOn’s fringe politics had merged with the Democratic mainstream came in April 2004, when staffer Zack Exley left MoveOn to join the Kerry campaign as its director of Internet organizing. “As a master of online organizing, he’ll equip the most important presidential campaign in decades with an understanding of the powerful new techniques we’ve helped to pioneer,” Boyd and Blades said in a statement. Republicans protested that Exley’s move represented illegal “coordination” between MoveOn and the Kerry camp — the law forbade campaigns from working with outside groups like MoveOn. But the charge went nowhere, mostly because Exley really didn’t need to coordinate with his old colleagues. They were all doing pretty much the same thing, and he simply switched from one part of the team to another.

That is not to say the people at MoveOn took the anticoordination laws all that seriously. In June 2004, the entire MoveOn crew appeared at a Washington hotel to accept an award given by Campaign for America’s Future. It was a big dinner — George Soros was there, along with lots of movers and shakers in the Democratic 527 world, all mingling with one another. When Pariser — wearing a black T-shirt that said simply NOVEMBER 2 — spoke, he praised the recently departed Exley as someone who was “not on stage with us but who deserves some of the credit. Because of the campaign finance laws, we’re not in touch with Zack personally, so I wanted to use this opportunity to give him a very important message. So Zack, we’re very proud of you, and the important message is: Please win.”

The audience applauded, and the camera for the big-screen TV at the front of the stage zoomed in on none other than...Zack Exley. Sitting in the audience, hanging out with the people he was not supposed to be coordinating with, Exley seemed to be having a fine time.When his image went up on the screen, a person sitting nearby playfully put up his hand to shield Exley’s face from the camera in a gesture that said, “We know he’s not really supposed to be here.” Everyone had a laugh.

As the campaign ran its course, MoveOn’s last, biggest project was the Vote for Change Tour, a series of concerts featuring Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews, REM, the Dixie Chicks, James Taylor, and other musicians. Held to benefit the voter turnout group America Coming Together, the tour was advertised as “20 Artists. 28 Cities. 9 Battleground States.” As that suggested, the purpose was not just to raise money; surely that could have been done in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, or San Francisco. But those cities were in safely Democratic states. For that matter, a lot of money could have been raised in Houston and Atlanta, but they were in safely Republican states. Rather, the point was to raise money while attracting lots of local news coverage in places like Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; Clearwater, Florida; and Columbus, Ohio. That way, it was hoped, the stars’ message would reach the maximum number of undecided voters.

The final concert of the tour was held on October 11 at the MCI Center in Washington, D.C. As it usually did with big events,MoveOn asked its members to mark the occasion with a nationwide series of house parties. The concert would air live on the Sundance Channel, and MoveOn members were to gather in homes to watch it unfold.

I attended a party in a modest home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. The group, about twenty in all, was all white and mostly middle-aged; the boomer-friendly roster of performers seemed perfectly designed to appeal to them. One man wore an Air America Radio T-shirt, another a shirt that advertised the ticket of “Bush-Satan ‘04,” and yet another a shirt that said “Send Bush to Mars.” They were there to do more than just listen to music; their job, as assigned by Eli Pariser, was to write five letters each to undecided voters in Ohio.

They undertook the task with great earnestness. Yes, there were the occasional cracks — no one in the group could really understand how anyone could be undecided at that point, and one man said he wanted to begin his letter with “Dear idiots who can’t decide” — but overall, the partygoers tried their best to finish Pariser’s assignment. Some of the letters relied on clichés, mentioning, for example, how the 2004 election was “the most important of our lifetime.” One woman tried out a line on the group, saying, “How about, ‘It is time to turn this country in the right direction’?” That was a bit much; someone called out, “That’s a little trite, Elaine.”

By the time the concert was over, the letters were finished and duly sent off to MoveOn, and then on to Ohio. Did they persuade any undecided voters? Certainly not enough to put John Kerry over the top. In the end, the project seemed to resemble nothing so much as the campaign by a British newspaper, the Guardian, to encourage its leftist readers to write letters to voters in Clark County, Ohio, urging them to vote against George W. Bush. People in Clark County didn’t at all welcome such advice from outside. Their reaction to the letters from MoveOn in Washington, D.C., might well have been the same.

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Take Back the Word: Liberalism isn’t what it used to be (Weekly Standard, 050412)

IN EDWARD ALBEE’S PLAY The American Dream, Mommy proudly delights in her new beige hat until the moment someone refers to it as wheat colored, at which point she hurries back to the store in a fit of pique. Albee, of course, was being ironical, ridiculing his character’s weak-mindedness before an audience who would surely agree that roses smell good no matter what they’re named, and that insisting the sky is green can’t really change what the eye sees.

So what are we to make of the word “liberal,” whose current meaning is likely beyond the ken of both Albee and Shakespeare? In the not-so-distant past, liberal FDR believed that the enemies of other democracies were, by extension, America’s enemies—and liberals eagerly joined him in taking on the America Firsters here before fighting fascism over there. In his footsteps followed liberal Harry Truman, whose doctrine reflected the view that Soviet expansionism was insidiously anti-democratic and therefore innately illiberal. Then came JFK, the presidential avatar of modern liberalism, which he defined on his first day in office when he announced that America would “pay any price, bear any burden . . . in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” His statement seemed interwoven into the fabric of the burgeoning civil rights movement that was to become liberalism’s high-water mark at home—the one issue that ipso facto determined whether you were indeed a liberal. And it was ennobling to be one, sharing Martin Luther King’s dream that “all of God’s children” would someday be free.

BUT ALAS, somewhere over the last two decades or so, liberalism lost its root as the word liberal was perverted to the point of Orwellian inversion—and therefore rendered meaningless.

For example, rooting against the United States and for “insurgents” who delight in slaughtering innocents is many things (stupid, for one, also sad, evil, and short-sighted), but it is assuredly not liberal.

Decrying the American “religious right” for advocating a “culture of life” while simultaneously praising the neck-slicing Islamofascists is many things (start with pathetic), but it is not liberal.

Calling 3,000 workers who died when the buildings fell “little Eichmanns” is many things (vile, as well as repulsive and morally repugnant), but it is not liberal.

Protesting the painless execution of a sadistic murderer while cheering the removal of a feeding tube from a brain-damaged woman whose parents very much want her alive even if her estranged husband doesn’t, is many things (incomprehensible, indefensible, and unforgivably cruel), but it is not liberal.

Marching against war every time the United States is involved—in fact only when the United States is involved—regardless of the war’s purpose, is many things (reactionary for sure), but it is not liberal.

Crying that you’re being persecuted for exercising your right of free speech, when what happened was that other people less famous than you reacted to your ill-considered and offensive comments by exercising their own First Amendment rights, is many things (solipsistic comes to mind), but it is not liberal.

Pretending that the abuses committed by Americans at Abu Ghraib prison were on a par with the wholesale torture, rape, and murder committed there over decades is many things (overwrought, unenlightened, an insult to intelligence), but it is not liberal.

Depicting Condoleezza Rice in editorial cartoons as a big-lipped mammy who speaks Ebonics to her massa is many things (offensive, sickening), but it is not liberal.

Marching if you’re gay in support of “Palestine”—from which gay Palestinians try to escape to Israel before they’re tortured and murdered for their sexual orientation—is many things (nuts, as well as hilariously ill-informed), but it is far from liberal.

Advocating for murderous regimes such as Syria, Libya, and Saddam’s Iraq to sit on the United Nations Human Right Commission is many things (start with annoyingly ironic), but it is not liberal.

Decrying the human-rights abuses of regimes like Saddam’s Iraq and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, and then protesting against the wars that actually rid these countries of their murdering leaders, is many things (childish and willfully blind), but it is not liberal.

Equating Israeli self-defense measures against bombers who hide among civilians to the murders committed by the bombers who intentionally target civilians is many things (foolish, and probably anti-Semitic), but it is not liberal.

Believing that ethnicity determines identity—and accusing anyone of being “a disgrace to his race” because his views fall outside what’s considered orthodoxy—is many things (primarily racist), but it is definitely not liberal.

Invoking Nazis and/or the Taliban to describe duly-elected officeholders of another party is many things (tiresome, ridiculous), but it is not liberal.

Referring to illegals as “undocumented workers,” and to those who’d like to enforce immigration laws as evil and racist, is many things (self-destructive, short-sighted), but it is not liberal.

Joking about Charlton Heston’s Alzheimer’s because you

don’t abide his politics is many things (cold-hearted, intolerant, sophomoric), but it is far from liberal.

Calling the then-recently departed Yasser Arafat a “wily” and “enigmatic” “statesman”, as the New York Times did, is many things (nauseatingly PC, for one), but it is not liberal.

Regulating what children can and cannot eat at home so that they don’t become obese, as Hawaiian legislators recently tried to do; or trying to pass legislation which would require that every home be retrofitted for wheelchair access, as Santa Monica legislators did, is many things (repressive, despotic), but it is not liberal.

Shouting down speakers in the name of free speech is many things (fascistic, tyrannical, churlish), but it is not liberal.

Excusing Kofi Annan and the United Nations for the worst palm-greasing scandal in history—one that lengthened the reign of a tyrant and led to the deaths of countless thousands—is many things (inexcusable, also shameful), but it is not liberal.

Sadly, the list goes on (and on and on and on). Which is why those of us who consider ourselves classical liberals—and believe that language has power—ought to take back the word “liberal” from those on the left who debase its meaning. Many of them, I suspect, are like the body surfer who’s surprised to find that the ocean current has carried him half a mile from his towel on the beach. They would do well to get their bearings and gauge how far the political tide has removed them from their core beliefs.

Me, I know where my towel is—in the same place it’s been for 40 years. If that makes me “conservative,” well, a liberal by any other name . . .

Joel Engel is an author and journalist in Southern California. His latest book, By Duty Bound: Survival and Redemption in a Time of War, was just published by Dutton.

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Pie in the Sky Liberals (American Spectator, 050414)

By George Neumayr

In the 1960s, radicals began their march through the institutions of American society. They marched through them, stayed long enough to find the exits, and now end up right back where they started: on the outside, in a state of powerless, clawing anger, hurling pies at “establishment’ figures and wishing death upon congressmen and presidents.

The left’s feelings of impotent 1960s-style rage can be measured in Drudge Report headlines, such as: “Website sells ‘Kill Bush’ T-Shirts,” and in Drudge’s now weekly links to stories about pundits pied by liberals who clearly regard their victims as members of a new establishment. Like children who hurl their baby food as a form of protest, liberals in a state of infantile, frustrated rationality are reduced to tossing sugary and oily products at Bill Kristol and Pat Buchanan and stomping their feet at Ann Coulter.

Underneath the robes, vestments, and suits they collected during their march through the institutions remained the grubby attire of radicalism only now visible as they return to their posture of primitive protesting — a wild, speechless style of protest that throws light on liberalism’s essential hostility to reason and morality. Why do liberals who regard themselves as apostles of Enlightenment reason resort so quickly to intimidation and primitive exertion of will? Because fundamentally liberalism is based not on reason but on force. It is a willfulness writ large that becomes more vivid as liberals lose power and fail to control a people unpersuaded by claims that find no basis in reality and thus cannot be calmly demonstrated by reason.

When ancient radical Anthony Lewis says that liberals “need a new people,” he’s not joking: they need a different people with a different human nature, because the heart, mind, and soul God created will never find lasting satisfaction in their liberalism.

The only part of human nature that liberalism can appeal to is the part God didn’t create — man’s inherited tendency toward irrationality that Western philosophers used to call original sin or concupiscence.

Liberalism is concupiscence intellectualized — think about how often it ends up telling people to take the low road, feel good about being bad, renames raw selfishness and greed “justice,” encourages nihilism and cruelty in one form or another and then calls it self-expression. Because of its basic appeal to an irrational love of self, liberalism can always find an audience eager to hear a justification for letting wayward desires trump reason, but most people know that this will produce too much chaos to sustain a civilization, and so they rush back to conservatism once the yoke of liberalism grows too heavy and they return to their senses.

Liberalism’s revolutions are not brought about by reason — systematically presenting its philosophy to the people over time (that’s the last thing liberals want to do, as it gives the people too much of an opportunity to see its holes) — but by fraud or force. Liberalism can fool the people through sophistry and demagoguery, dressing up falsehoods in rhetoric and crassly appealing to people’s weaknesses, or it can use state power to engineer them. When fraud fails, force follows.

Because liberalism is a sustained violation of human nature, violence as a tool of change is never far from it. Its radicals use violence to get state power, then use state power to commit more of it. As the Enlightenment philosophes noted with pride, the most ruthless revolutions are carried out not against state power but with it.

In possession of state power, liberals can behave more decorously. There is no need to throw pies at conservatives when you can unleash bureaucrats and judges on them. But deprive liberals of that power and they regress rapidly, justifying any animalistic protest in the name of revolution. When Hillary Clinton spoke to feminists at the March for Women’s Lives last year, the feminists, sensing that power was ebbing away from them in Red State America, held aloft signs wishing that George Bush’s mother had aborted him (as well as signs wishing Pope John Paul II’s mom had “choice”).

The pie-throwing and death-to-Delay-and-Bush T-shirts are just the beginning. That and much worse will spread in proportion to liberalism’s loss of state power as the march through America’s institutions begins anew.

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Right Warrior: David Horowitz infuriates the Left (National Review Online, 050415)

“Sometimes I think I’ve been sent as an ex-radical to teach conservatives bad manners,” author and conservative activist David Horowitz likes to say. “Republicans are too polite.” If the tacit message here is that the Left is naturally rude, that was underscored last week when Horowitz was hit with a pie in the face while beginning a speech at Indiana’s Butler University.

Pie-throwing seems to have become almost standard practice now when conservative pundits visit college campuses: Just a week before Horowitz was chocolate-creamed, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol got hit with an ice-cream pie while speaking to students at Earlham College, as it happens also in Indiana.

But Horowitz has a particular talent for sending the opposition into paroxysms of rage, even when he’s being attacked and not on the attack himself. Daily Kos, for instance, called Horowitz a “sissyboy racist” in commenting on the pie-in-the-face incident. Kristol’s incident, by contrast, got the relatively bland Kos description: “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”

I once wondered, during an interview at Horowitz’s home in Los Angeles, whether our psychotherapized culture means that people find his typically blunt way of making his points shocking.

“No, no, no,” he responded. “If you’re a conservative and say something blunt, people are shocked. If you’re on the left, people take no notice. Jesse Jackson says racist things every other speech he makes. The idea that black people are locked out in our society — give me a break. One of my notorious Salon columns was called ‘Guns Don’t Kill Blacks, Other Blacks Do.’ Well, it’s true: Ninety percent of black murder victims are killed by blacks, and I wrote the article because the NAACP had announced that it was launching a suit against gun manufacturers because so many young blacks were dying of gun wounds.”

“I think if I say it enough times,” he continued, “hone the edges of my words until they’re razor sharp, it will cut through this nonsense and maybe restore us to some kind of common sense.”

Horowitz’s L.A.-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture is the umbrella organization for his Front Page Magazine, the Individual Rights Foundation, and the Wednesday Morning Club (originally started by screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd), a group of Hollywood conservatives that meets every month or so, and to which I often go to hear speakers. Probably no right-winger can discuss the Left more knowledgably than Horowitz, who’s now in his mid-60s and was an antiwar demonstrator before today’s college students (and even some of their parents) were alive.

He was born the red-diaper baby of two Communist schoolteachers (the old-fashioned card-carrying kind) in New York. The family were such true believers, in fact, that Horowitz remembers his father remarking gloomily, “you’ve broken the mold” at the news he was about to have a third grandchild.

“In the ‘20s, U.S. Communist Party members considered it reactionary to have any children, since they would be obstacles to the revolutionary mission,” Horowitz explains in his autobiography Radical Son. “More than two indicated a lack of political focus.”

Horowitz had helped found the New Left movement that emerged during the late-’50s in Berkeley, and after spending a few years traveling around Europe lecturing about Marxism, he returned in 1968 as an editor of the radical magazine Ramparts. He also became an advisor and confidant to Huey Newton and the Black Panthers, an involvement that led to the first station of his journey from left to right.

In 1974, Horowitz recommended a friend, Betty Van Patter, to the Panthers as a bookkeeper. After Van Patter told Horowitz she was upset about what she’d seen in the Panthers’ records, she disappeared. Two weeks later her body was found, head bashed in, floating in San Francisco Bay. (The case was never solved.)

Horowitz had been aware of the Panthers’ thuggish habits — Newton had already killed a police officer and a young prostitute and beaten up fellow Panther Bobby Seale, who went into hiding — but had avoided facing them. Van Patter’s death sent him into a spiral of guilt, depression, and self-examination that destroyed his marriage, most of his friendships, and eventually his entire worldview.

He took a hard look at the Left’s hypocrisy and anti-Semitism, at its willingness to condemn repression in right-wing regimes like Chile and Nicaragua but never in Communist Cambodia or the Arab world, which the Soviets supported against Israel. He remembered Marx’s reference to the Devil’s motto in Goethe’s Faust — “Everything that lives deserves to perish” — and began to see his former comrades as violent nihilists in dangerous pursuit of an impossible, utopian dream.

“When the left called for ‘liberation,’” he observes in Radical Son, “what it really wanted was to erase the human slate and begin again.” By 1979, Horowitz had burned the last of his bridges with a piece called “A Radical’s Disenchantment” for The Nation.

But old friends have been replaced by new ones. George W. Bush has been a Horowitz fan since happening across his autobiography. “There was just a lot of history I remember from my early 20s come to life,” the president said. “And here was somebody who blew the whistle.” Since Sept. 11, however, Horowitz’s special focus has been defeatist pacifism, particularly that emanating from academia. He sees the contemporary Left as much more dangerous than the one he grew up with.

Horowitz has been attacking the rhetoric of Noam Chomsky et al. by placing ads in student papers advising demonstrators to “Think Twice Before You Bring the War Home” and by distributing brochures to colleges picturing the M.I.T. linguistics professor as “The Ayatollah of Anti-American Hate.” The two are old enemies — Horowitz has been tilting at Chomskyisms like the professor’s claim that the U.S. press is “the mirror image” of the Soviet press for a quarter-century — and Chomsky gets his own chapter, “The Nihilist Left,” in Horowitz’s latest book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, a typically impolite polemic about what former CIA director James Woolsey has described as “the Hitler-Stalin pact of our time.”

Horowitz has been coming out with at least one new book a year since his 1998 autobiography. He’s now working on an encyclopedia of the Left. “We’ve already identified 82 left-wing foundations, beginning with Pew, Carnegie, and Ford,” he said. “There’s 57 times as much money on the left as on the right. Fortunately, these people are living in cloud cuckooland and don’t always spend their money well.”

This is the sort of extra dig that makes Horowitz particularly infuriating to those whose patriotism he questions. “I have made it my business to call the Left out on its anti-American agenda,” he said with a shrug, when I asked about this. “I refer to it as the Hate-America Left, and they don’t like that because the American Communist party proclaimed that Communism is 20th-century Americanism.”

“My parents, who were Communists, always pretended to be American patriots,” he continued. “You can always convince yourself you are: I love America, I just want it to be perfect, which it will be when it becomes a Soviet Communist state. Like everybody else, I see things that need to be improved. I just am mindful of the fact that they can be made a lot worse.”

— Catherine Seipp is a writer in California who publishes the weblog Cathy’s World. She is an NRO contributor.

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Why the Liberals Can’t Keep Air America From Spiraling In (WorldNetDaily, 050419)

The liberal Air America Radio, just past its first birthday, has probably enjoyed more free publicity than any enterprise in recent history. But don’t believe the hype: Air America’s left-wing answer to conservative talk radio is failing, just as previous efforts to find liberal Rush Limbaughs have failed.

Wait a second, you say, didn’t I read that Air America has expanded to more than 50 markets? That’s true, but let’s put things in perspective: Conservative pundit and former Reagan official William J. Bennett’s morning talk show, launched at the same time as Air America, reaches nearly 124 markets, including 18 of the top 20, joining the growing ranks of successful right-of-center talk programs (Limbaugh is still the ratings leader, drawing more than 15 million listeners a week).

And look at Air America’s ratings: They’re pitifully weak, even in places where you would think they’d be strong. WLIB, its flagship in New York City, has sunk to 24th in the metro area Arbitron ratings — worse than the all-Caribbean format it replaced, notes the Radio Blogger. In the liberal meccas of San Francisco and Los Angeles, Air America is doing lousier still.

So why do liberals fare so poorly on air? Some on the left say it’s because liberals are, well, smarter and can’t convey their sophisticated ideas to the rubes who listen to talk radio. Former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, whose own stint as a talk-show host was a ratings disaster, gave canonical expression to this self-serving view. Conservatives “write their messages with crayons,” he maintained. “We use fine-point quills.”

Yet even if we were to grant the premise that conservative talk radio can sometimes be crudely simplistic — a tough charge to make stick against, say, one-time philosophy professor Bennett or Clarence Thomas’ former law clerk Laura Ingraham — how can anyone plausibly believe the right has a monopoly on misleading argument? Moreover, talk-show fans aren’t dummies. Industry surveys show that talk-radio fans vote in greater percentages than the general public, tend to be college-educated and read more magazines and newspapers than the average American.

Successful talk radio is conservative for three reasons:

• Entertainment value. The top conservative hosts put on snazzy, frequently humorous shows. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, observes: “The parody, the asides, the self-effacing humor, the bluster are all part of the packaging that makes the political message palatable.” Besides, the triumph of political correctness on the left makes it hard for on-air liberals to lighten things up without offending anyone.

• Fragmentation of the potential audience. Political consultant Dick Morris explains: “Large percentages of liberals are black and Hispanic, and they now have their own specialized entertainment radio outlets, which they aren’t likely to leave for liberal talk radio.” The potential audience for Air America or similar ventures is thus pretty small — white liberals, basically. And they’ve already got NPR.

• Liberal bias in the old media. That’s what birthed talk radio in the first place. People turn to it to help right the imbalance. Political scientist William Mayer, writing in the Public Interest, recently observed that liberals don’t need talk radio because they’ve got the big three networks, most national and local daily newspapers and NPR.

Unable to prosper in the medium, liberals have taken to denouncing talk radio as a threat to democracy. Liberal political columnist Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in the New Yorker, is typically venomous. Conservative talk radio represents “vicious, untreated political sewage” and “niche entertainment for the spiritually unattractive,” Hertzberg sneers.

If some liberals had their way, Congress would regulate political talk radio out of existence. Their logic is that scrapping Air America would be no loss if it also meant getting Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Bennett off the air.

To accomplish this, New York Democratic Rep. Maurice D. Hinchey has proposed reviving the Fairness Doctrine to protect “diversity of view,” and John Kerry recently sent out some signals that he too thought that might be a good idea.

Under the old Fairness Doctrine, phased out by Ronald Reagan’s FCC in the late ‘80s, any station that broadcast a political opinion had to give equal time to opposing views. A station running, say, Hannity’s show, would also have to broadcast a left-wing competitor, even if it had no listeners.

Pre-Reagan, talk radio in today’s sense simply didn’t exist. What station could risk it? But people listen to conservative talk because they want to, not because the post-Fairness Doctrine regulatory regime forces them to. To claim that “diversity of view” is lacking in the era of blogs and cable news, moreover, is downright silly. Complaints about fairness are really about driving out conservative viewpoints.

Sure, talk radio is partisan, sometimes overheated. But it’s also a source of argument and information. Together with Fox News and the blogosphere, it has given the right a chance to break through the liberal monoculture and be heard. For that, anyone who supports spirited public debate should be grateful.

Brian C. Anderson is senior editor of City Journal and author of “South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias,” newly released from Regnery.

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Scary Stuff: There’s a real venom on the Left against conservative Christians. (National Review Online, 050428)

Stanley Kurtz

Harper’s Magazine’s May cover stories about “The Christian Right’s War On America,” frightened me, although not the way Harper’s meant them to. I fear these stories could mark the beginning of a systematic campaign of hatred directed at traditional Christians. Whether this is what Harper’s intends, I cannot say. But regardless of the intention, the effect seems clear.

The phrase “campaign of hatred” is a strong one, and I worry about amplifying an already dangerous dynamic of recrimination on both sides of the culture wars. I don’t doubt that conservatives, Christian and otherwise, are sometimes guilty of rhetorical excess. Yet despite what we’ve been told, the most extreme political rhetoric of our day is being directed against traditional Christians by the left.

It’s been said that James Dobson overstepped legitimate bounds when he compared activist judges to the Ku Klux Klan. Yes, that was an ill-considered remark. I hope and expect it will not be repeated. But Dobson made that comparison extemporaneously and in passing. If that misstep was such a problem, what are we to make of a cover story in Harper’s that systematically identifies conservative Christianity with fascism? According to Harper’s, conservative Christians are making “war on America.” Can you imagine the reaction to a cover story about a “war on America” by blacks, gays, Hispanics, or Jews? Then there’s Frank Rich’s April 24 New York Times op-ed comparing conservative Christians to George Wallace, segregationists, and lynch mobs.

These comparisons are both inflammatory and mistaken. Made in the name of opposing hatred, they license hatred. It was disturbing enough during the election when even the most respectable spokesmen on the left proudly proclaimed their hatred of president Bush. Out of that hatred flowed pervasive, if low-level, violence. I fear that Bush hatred is now being channeled into hatred of Christian conservatives. The process began after the election and is steadily growing worse. This hatred of conservative Christians isn’t new, but it is being fanned to a fever pitch.

Chris Hedges, who wrote one of the Harper’s cover pieces, is a former reporter for the New York Times and a popular author among those who oppose the Iraq war. Hedges’s article will be noticed on the Left. I fear it will set the tone for a powerful new anti-Christian rhetoric. The article’s entitled “Feeling the Hate with the National Religious Broadcasters.” If you still don’t get it, notice the picture juxtaposing a cross with an attack dog. Of course, reducing America’s most popular Christian broadcasters to a hate group is itself a way of inviting hatred.

Hedges is worried about extreme Christian theocrats called “Dominionists.” He’s got little to say about who these Dominionists are, and he qualifies his vague characterizations by noting in passing that not all Dominionists would accept the label or admit their views publicly. That little move allows Hedges to paint a highly questionable picture of a virtually faceless and nameless “Dominionist” Christian mass. Hedges seems to be worried that the United States is just a few short steps away from having apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft declared capital crimes. Compare this liberal fantasy of imminent theocracy to the reality of Lawrence v. Texas and Roper v. Simmons (the Supreme Court decision that appealed to European precedents to overturn capital punishment for juveniles).

Both of these decisions relied on the existence of a supposed national consensus on behalf of social liberalism. In conjuring up that false consensus, the Court treated conservative Christians as effectively nonexistent. That is the reality of where the law is, and where it is headed. It is completely unsurprising that after a long train of such decisions, conservative Christians have decided they’re tired of being trampled on by the courts. The reality we face is judicially imposed same-sex marriage in opposition to the clearly expressed wishes of the American people. Yet to cover its imperial judicial agenda, the Left is now concocting nonsensical fantasies of theocratically imposed capital punishment for witchcraft. Yes, witchcraft is back. Only now traditional Christians have been cast in the role of devious enemies who need to be ferreted out by society’s defenders.

Hedges invokes the warnings of his old Harvard professor against “Christian fascists.” Supposedly, Christians carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance are the new Hitlers. The Left is loathe to treat Islamic terrorists as moral reprobates, but when it comes to conservative Christians, Hedges calls on his fellow liberals to renounce their relativist scruples and acknowledge “the power and allure of evil.”

Hedges needn’t worry. For a very long time now, secular liberals have treated conservative Christians as the modern embodiment of evil, the one group you’re allowed to openly hate. Although barely noticed by the rest of us, this poison has been floating through our political system for decades. Traditional Christians are tired of it, and I don’t blame them. That doesn’t justify rhetorical excess from either side. But the fact of the matter is that the Left’s rhetorical attacks on conservative Christians have long been more extreme, more widely disseminated, and more politically effective than whatever the Christians have been hurling back. And now that their long ostracism by the media has finally forced conservative Christians to demand redress, the Left has abandoned all rhetorical restraint.

Of course, Harper’s has every right to accuse conservative Christians of making war on America, to treat them as a hate group, to warn us that conservative Christians are the new fascists, and to invite us to battle their supposedly Hitler-like evil. Certainly it would be folly to try to control this kind of anti-religious rhetoric legislatively. But I do believe the Harper’s attack on traditional Christians is dangerous, unfair, and extreme — far more so than Dobson’s rhetorical slip. The way to handle the Harper’s matter is to expose it and condemn it. Or is that sort of public complaint reserved for Dobson alone?

Meanwhile, as Harper’s levels vicious attacks on conservative Christians, the California assembly has passed a bill designed to prevent politicians from using “anti-gay rhetoric” in their political campaigns. Opposition to same-sex marriage itself is considered by many to be “anti-gay.” So has public opposition to same-sex marriage been legislatively banned? As a secular American, I don’t personally see homosexuality as sinful. Like many Americans, I welcome the increased social tolerance for homosexuality we’ve seen since the 1950s. Yet it’s outrageous to ban political speech by Christians who do sincerely understand homosexuality to be a sin.

Along with the move toward same-sex marriage in Scandinavia and Canada, we’ve seen systematic efforts to criminalize and silence expressions of the traditional Christian understanding of homosexuality. We’ve been told that the American tradition of free speech will prevent that sort of abuse here. Yet now, California’s battle for same-sex marriage is calling forth legislation that takes us way too far down the path toward banning the expression of traditional Christian views. While Harper’s is spinning out fantasies of a Christian theocracy, the California state legislature gives us the reality of a secular autocracy.

The companion piece to the Hedges article in Harper’s is a long report by Jeffrey Sharlet on Christian conservatives in Colorado. Sharlet notes the conviction of these Christians that they’re being turned into “outcasts in their own land.” He treats the notion that traditional Christians need to flee the urban centers of Blue America as a paranoid fantasy. Well, California’s latest attempt to control political speech shows the fears are real. And what happens to traditional Christians who refuse to flee the cities? King’s College, a quality Christian school that’s decided to move from the countryside to the heart of New York City, is about to be destroyed by the New York State Board of Regents. It’s hard to see in this move anything other than anti-Christian bias.

Conservative Christians have good reason to fear cultural ostracism. The mere expression of their core religious views is being legislated against. The courts have banned traditional morality as a basis for law and have turned instead to secular Europe for guidance. Traditional Christians can’t even set up a college in New York City. And now Harper’s is calling them evil fascists. Yes, conservative Christians have the ear of the president and of the Republican leadership — you bet they do. Given the way they’re being treated in the culture at large, they’d be fools not to protect themselves by turning to politics.

Yet traditional Christians are playing defense, not offense. Harper’s speaks of a “new militant Christianity.” But if Christians are increasingly bold and political, they’ve been forced into that mode by 40 years of revolutionary social reforms. David Brooks has already explained how Roe v. Wade unnecessarily polarized the country, making it impossible for religious conservatives to have a voice in ordinary political give and take. We’re still paying the price for that liberal judicial arrogance.

Now judicial imposition of same-sex marriage has poured fuel on the fire. When Frank Rich compares conservative Christians to segregationist bigots, when Chris Hedges compares conservative Christians to evil fascist supporters of Hitler, its the Christian understanding of homosexuality that’s driving the wild rhetoric. None of the American Founders would have approved of same-sex marriage, yet suddenly we’re expected to equate opposition to gay marriage with Hitler’s genocidal persecutions.

Last Sunday’s New York Times gave us a clear explanation of the Catholic Church’s understanding of sexuality. The Catholic position rests on the idea that there is a special tie between marriage, motherhood, and sexuality. Now there’s room to differ on the nature and extent of the links between parenthood, marriage, and sexuality. Traditional Catholics will see the matter differently from traditional Protestants, who in turn will see things differently from secular social conservatives. Whatever your view on how marriage, sexuality, and parenthood ought to be related, there can be little doubt that important social consequences will follow — and have followed — from how we handle these issues. We can argue about whether same-sex marriage will strengthen or weaken the family, but the debate itself is, or ought to be, necessary and legitimate.

Yet to much of the mainstream media, the complicated question of how society should structure the relationship between sexuality and the family has been reduced to an all-or-nothing choice between bigotry and freedom. The overreach of this sort of intolerant secular liberalism is the real source of our cultural battles. The drive for same-sex marriage has been every bit as much of a political disaster for this country as the ill-conceived conflict over abortion. The mistake was to frame the debate as a fight against bigotry instead of as a tough decision about how to structure our most fundamental social institution. On same-sex marriage, the Left took the easy way out — not only using the courts to make an end-run around the public, but deliberately framing the issue in a way designed to silence and stigmatize all opposition.

Now we see the results of this terrible decision. Traditional Christians are openly excoriated in the mainstream press as evil, fascist, segregationist bigots. Their political speech is placed under legislative threat. Their institutions of higher education are attacked and destroyed. Naturally, America’s traditional Christians are fighting back. They’ve turned to the political process in hopes of securing for themselves a space in which to exist. Weary of being the butt of hatred by those who proclaim tolerance, conservative Christians are complaining, with justice, about the all-too-successful attempts to exclude them from society.

If “Dominionists” try to force all Americans to pay church tithes, or call for the execution of blasphemers and witches, I will oppose them. But that is not the danger we face. The real danger is that a growing campaign of hatred against traditional Christians by secular liberals will deepen an already dangerous conflict. The solution is to continue our debates, but to change their framing. Conservative Christians cannot stop complaining of exclusion and prejudice until cultural liberals pare back their own excesses. Let’s stop treating honest differences on same-sex marriage as simple bigotry. Let’s stop using the courts as a way around democratic decision-making. Let’s stop trying to criminalize religious expression. Let’s allow Christians to establish their own institutions of higher learning. And let’s stop calling traditional Christians fascists. It would be nice if the folks complaining about “Justice Sunday” addressed these issues as well.

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Supping at the children’s table (townhall.com, 050428)

Suzanne Fields

It’s a cliche of punditry that Republicans are the Daddy Party and the Democrats are the Mommy Party. The metaphors are out of date. We must look at the Republicans as the Adult Party and the Democrats as naughty children sent to sup at the children’s table.

Republicans lead, Democrats rebel. George W. nominates serious judges and the Democrats throw tantrums. Conservatives, dominant in the Adult Party, who try to conserve traditional ideals are, ironically, in the vanguard. Conservatives have come to the majority by expressing new ideas with passion and the liberals at the children’s table throw tantrums: “Look at me, look at me.” The betting here is that the new liberal radio and television talk shows and celebrity blogs won’t catch Rush Limbaugh, Fox News or Matt Drudge any time soon.

Matt Drudge, who celebrates ten years of blogging, is about to be challenged by Arianna Huffington, who was a liberal who became a conservative who lately has been a liberal, was last seen in public knocking over the microphones in her panic to get a little attention at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s announcement for governor. She’s gathered a coterie of celebrities for her blog, mostly cut from Hollywood and Manhattan, the likes of Norman Mailer, Warren Beatty and Walter Cronkite.

“In the Fox era,” Nora Ephron, the novelist and screenwriter, told the New York Times, “everything we can do on our side to even things out, now that the media is either controlled by Rupert Murdoch or is so afraid of Rupert Murdoch that they behave as if they were controlled by him, is great. But sometimes, I may merely have a cake recipe.” (She’s unlikely to give Drudge heartburn.)

Nothing reflects the adult-children’s table phenomenon like the campus. Liberal students, egged on by aging counterculture professors, throw pies in the faces of Pat Buchanan, Bill Kristol and David Horowitz to stop any talk about tolerance and academic freedom. Pies in the face suggest the throwers have nothing to say. Nora Ephron might blog one of her pie recipes.

Conservatives were in the embattled minority for a long time; it was only yesterday that National Review was the only conservative magazine on the racks, and anyone looking for a conservative radio or television commentator would have to drive deep into the boonies to find one on a lonely 250-watt station. Conservatives are still a small minority in the faculty lounges of the universities, and as lonely as this was for conservatives, the experience taught them to sharpen their arguments. Defending themselves was a full-time job, and on many campuses it still is.

It’s the liberals, not the conservatives, who reveal sloppy and cliched thinking now. They hang out with like-minded politically correct dogmatists, rarely bumping against anyone who doesn’t look and sound just like themselves. Politically incorrect professors and students can’t indulge the luxury of glibness. Throwing lemon-custard pies may be more fun but throwing out ideas is more persuasive. Food nourishes bodies and food for thought nourishes minds.

George W. beat John Kerry by almost 20%age points among married adults with children. These are the adults who insist on ethical standards for their children, who yearn for a culture that appeals to values derived from faith and morality. They’re fed up with Hollywood and the entertainment industry that pushes a prurient pop culture.

Some adult Democrats, fed up with the fare at the children’s table, understand this. A new study by the Progressive Policy Institute, the policy arm of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, describes a “parents gap.” Many Democrats who might have voted for a Democrat didn’t vote for John Kerry because they liked what George W. was saying about the way the entertainment culture makes it difficult for parents “to protect their kids from morally corrosive images and messages.” Many of these parents were liberal when they were younger, but have discovered “lifestage conservatism.” They’re impatient with Democrats who refuse to put away childish things.

As parents, they connect with the adult community, develop religious affiliations and are more likely to vote for candidates who show respect for right and wrong. “Parenthood is a life-transforming experience,” writes Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, author of the report. “Democrats cannot be a party of the future if they lose their connection to the very people who are creating the future by rearing the next generation.”

What these Democrats want is a grown-up meal that sticks to the ribs. They’re tired of Cap’n Crunch and the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at the children’s table.

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Dominionist Domination: The Left runs with a wild theory. (National Review Online, 050502)

What is the real agenda of the religious far Right? I’ll tell you what it is. These nuts want to take over the federal government and suppress other religions through genocide and mass murder, rather than through proselytizing. They want to reestablish slavery. They want to reduce women to near-slavery by making them property, first of their fathers, and then of their husbands. They want to execute anyone found guilty of pre-martial, extramaritial, or homosexual sex. They want to bring back the death penalty for witchcraft.

But aren’t extremists like this far from political power? On the contrary, the political and religious movement called “Dominionism” has gained control of the Republican party, and taken over Congress and the White House as well. Once they take over the judiciary, the conversion of America to a theocracy will be sealed. The Dominionists are very close to achieving their goal. Once they have the courts in their hands, a willing Dominionist Republican-controlled Congress can simply extend the death penalty to witchcraft, adultery, homosexuality, and heresy. The courts will uphold all this once conservatives are in control, since Scalia himself appears to be a Dominionist.

Shocking as it seems, Dominionists have gained extensive control of the Republican party, and the apparatus of government throughout the United States. Yet Dominionists continue to operate in secrecy. It is estimated that 35 million Americans who call themselves Christian adhere to Dominionism, although most of them are unaware of the true nature of their own beliefs and goals. Dominionism has met its timetable for the complete takeover of the American government. It would be a mistake, by the way, to think of Dominionists as fundamentalist Protestants alone. Dominionism has stealthily swept over America, incorporating conservative Roman Catholics and Episcopalians within its ranks. And of course, Dominionists are allied with the neoconservative followers of the political philosopher, Leo Strauss. The quest of these neoconservatives for power and world domination is a self-conscious program of pure, unmitigated evil.

You don’t believe me? Well, consider the fact that on December 24, 2001, Pat Robertson resigned his position as president of the Christian Coalition. Religious conservatives understood very well that Robertson had stepped aside to allow the new president of the United States to take his rightful place as the head of the true American Holy Christian Church. Robertson openly revealed at least a portion of his Dominionist plans on The 700 Club on May 13, 1986, when he clearly stated: “We can change the government, we can change the court systems, we can change the poverty problem, we can change education...We can make a difference.”

For Dominionists, possibly the single-most-important event of the last half of the 20th century occurred when Jim Jones proved that religious people would follow a leader, even to their deaths. Lest we all end up like the followers of Jim Jones, it’s time for Americans to take a leaf from those rare, brave souls, like George Soros. Following Soros, we’ve got to stand up to the Dominionist menace. There is an infection, a religious and political pathology that has corrupted our churches. Those we have trusted have embraced evil. Let us pray that Americans will go to the voting booth and finally free this country from the Republican Dominionist menace.

But They’re Serious

O.K., it’s me again. I’m back from the fever swamps of the Left, which I’ve been exploring ever since I discovered a wild conspiracy theory about conservative Christians in the latest cover story of Harper’s Magazine. You want political paranoia? You want guilt by association? You want flat-out looniness? Well, Joe McCarthy’s got nothing on the good liberal folks who are warning us about a takeover by “Dominionist” Christians. What you’ve just read is a composite I’ve created (often word for word) by drawing on a couple of web-sites I’ll link you to in a moment. The disturbing thing is that this sort of conspiratorial nonsense is being taken seriously by real media and political players.

There is, in fact, a fringe Christian group of “Dominionists” or “Reconstructionists,” who really would like to see an American theocracy, and a return to the death penalty for blasphemy, adultery, sodomy, and witchcraft. The dystopian political program of this utterly marginal, extremist sect has absolutely no traction with anyone of significance. But that hasn’t stopped conspiracy mongers on the Left from imagining a murderous Christian plot to destroy America. I’ve found a number of Lefty sites that link to the following description of Dominionism at religioustolerance.org. This description includes the claim that Dominionists “advocate genocide for followers of minority groups and non-conforming members of their own religion.” I’m not sure this is accurate, even for the minuscule number of actual Dominionists. But the disturbing thing is the way this and other Left-leaning sites use logical sleight-of-hand to tar ordinary evangelicals with the madcap musings of a few fevered “Dominionists.”

You can see the basic technique of the conspiracy mongers in this 1994 report on the Dominionists for Public Eye Magazine. All you have to do is quote a fringe Dominionist desperate to prove that his radical ideas are catching on. Dominionists have a long-term political strategy to establish a full-blown American theocracy based on Old Testament law. And look! Some other Christians want to participate in the political process, too. They even believe in developing a long-term political strategy! Ah ha! That must mean that, even though they are “unaware of the original source of their ideas,” conservative Christians are in fact under the influence of authentic Dominionists. Voila. By quoting a pathetic Dominionist extremist’s desperate efforts to prove his own influence, clever liberals can now argue that the ultimate goal of all conservative Christians is the re-institution of slavery, and execution for blasphemers and witches.

This theory reminds me of the poor kid who thought he’d caused the great New York City blackout of 1965 because he happened to throw a rock at a transformer the moment the lights went out. Conservative Christians didn’t turn to politics because they were egged on by wild-eyed Dominionists. They were goaded into defensive action by the post-sixties secularist challenge to their way of life. Christians would have taken up politics whether a silly Dominionist fringe existed or not. In fact, Dominionism itself is nothing but a hapless and hopeless response to the secular social changes of the past forty years. But the Left has decided that it’s in their interest to buy into the Dominionists’ own bogus and pathetic claims of influence — and to exaggerate even those bogus claims beyond recognition.

The champion of this approach appears to be Kathryn Yurica, whose piece, “The Despoiling of America,” was the source for much of the account at the beginning of this piece. (Unlike religoustolerance.org, Yurica does not use the word “genocide” and does not talk about re-instituting slavery. She speaks only of extending the death penalty to things like adultery, rebelliousness, homosexuality, witchcraft, effeminateness, and heresy.) Yurica’s article is so wild-eyed and strange that it would barely be worth mentioning, were Yurica not a featured speaker at a recent conference called, “Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right.” That conference, held this past weekend, was supported by the National Council of Churches, People for the American Way, The Nation, The Village Voice, and United Americans for Separation of Church and State. (You can read a Washington Times report on the conference here.) [Kwing Hung: all liberal organization; and not amazingly include NCC.]

I noted last week that Dominionist conspiracy theory broke into the mainstream with the latest cover story of Harper’s Magazine. (Yurica herself now supplements her own account of the Dominionist conspiracy with a link to one of those Harper’s articles.)

The notion that conservative Christians want to reinstitute slavery and rule by genocide is not just crazy, it’s downright dangerous. The most disturbing part of the Harper’s cover story (the one by Chris Hedges) was the attempt to link Christian conservatives with Hitler and fascism. Once we acknowledge the similarity between conservative Christians and fascists, Hedges appears to suggest, we can confront Christian evil by setting aside “the old polite rules of democracy.” So wild conspiracy theories and visions of genocide are really excuses for the Left to disregard the rules of democracy and defeat conservative Christians — by any means necessary.

In the wake of their big New York City conference, we’ll see what, if anything, The Nation, The Village Voice, and People for the American Way actually do with this newly fashionable Dominionist conspiracy theory. I hope a little sunlight suffices to put a stop to these ill-advised attack on conservative Christians. I guess we’ll soon enough learn what the real agenda of the irreligious far Left actually is.

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Exposing liberal pieties (Washington Times, 050503)

Russell Kirk once famously predicted that liberalism would collapse because of its failure of imagination, that is, its inability to create a world that inspired affection and loyalty. Instead, liberalism relied on a merely utilitarian calculus or the endless assertion of limitless rights. But Mr. Kirk likely would not have anticipated the messengers of liberalism’s end: the South Park conservatives, who have entered the picture as a growing political and social force.

Who are the South Park conservatives? They are devotees of “South Park,” a wildly successful cartoon TV series revolving around a group of schoolchildren and their dysfunctional elders. The show is crass, filthy and most definitely a cartoon for adults only. But as Brian Anderson shows in this provocative new book, “South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias” is in some respects also a deeply conservative program. It also may be a harbinger of a major rightward shift in the popular culture in America.

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Mr. Anderson, an editor of the prestigious City Journal published by the Manhattan Institute, uses the South Park conservatives as a wedge to introduce a host of new cultural indicators that show that the hegemony of liberalism in the nation’s cultural life may be ending. In a series of short, pointed chapters, he analyzes the rise of conservative talk radio, the Internet, mainstream media and, of course, “South Park” itself.

As he notes, “Almost overnight, conservatives have mastered the proliferating new media of talk radio, cable television and the Internet, and they have benefited from a big shift in book publishing.” This shift has had significant repercussions already. Recognizing the explosion of a right-leaning audiences, mainstream publishers have established imprints to find and sell conservative books, and mainstream networks (such as MSNBC) have hired right-wing hosts.

More importantly, the new conservative media has scored some effective points against the old establishment. In particular, Mr. Anderson notes that the controversy over CBS News’ use of forged documents in an anti-Bush piece was spurred at first almost entirely by conservative Internet sites. Mr. Anderson even credits President Bush’s 2004 election to the rise of conservative media; right-wing talk shows and Web sites plugged books critical of John Kerry and forced the media — and the Kerry campaign — to belatedly respond to charges that in a different era would have been ignored.

“South Park” itself, as the author explains in a chapter on the show, mercilessly exposes liberal pieties about politics and society with an intensity and wit that has perhaps never before been seen on television. Mr. Anderson ties its humor to a long tradition of anti-elitist humor and sarcasm, which has been a staple of American social criticism but which seemed out of place in the liberal consensus.

Mr. Anderson concludes that while it is too early to dismiss liberalism’s still-dominant presence in media, entertainment and education, he is hopeful that the tide has turned. Interviewing college students, for example, showed him how impatient they were with liberal pieties.

The author identifies several reasons for the change, including the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the “Left’s broader intellectual and political failure.” College students, who grew up after Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War, and for whom segregation and the economic stagnation of the 1970s are just a dim memory, simply do not accept the liberal worldview, and they have equal impatience with the permissive individual values that students of a previous generation believed were “liberating.”

It is perhaps a slight exaggeration to call the groups Mr. Anderson profiles all conservative. They are more precisely anti-liberal. Whether these rejections of liberal groupthink will blossom into a more substantive conservatism remains to be seen. Nevertheless, the cultural trends Mr. Anderson has discovered are only likely to increase over the next decade or so. “South Park Conservatives” is an important guide to the first major cultural shift of the 21st century.

Gerald J. Russello is working on a book on the ideas of Russell Kirk.

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A bankruptcy of values and ideas (townhall.com, 050503)

David Limbaugh

Two recent news items, both involving Democrat senators, underscore the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the modern Democratic Party.

CNS News focuses on Senator Hillary Clinton’s lurch to the right in anticipation of her imminent presidential run. Of course, this is nothing new; Hillary has been plotting and implementing her move for some time.

Despite being a feminist icon and a favorite of the antiwar, anti-Christian Left, Hillary has been laying the groundwork for what would appear to be a complete break with those constituencies.

She has pretended to be of the Michelle Malkin school on illegal immigration, has begun wearing religion on her sleeve, has been General Patton on national defense, and has seemed to vacillate on abortion — a blasphemy that by rights should earn her enduring enmity from Liberaldom.

During a speech to the New York State Family Planning Providers (NYSFPP) in January, Hillary said, “I, for one, respect those who believe with all their hearts and conscience that that there are no circumstances under which any abortion should ever be available.”

I, for one, seriously doubt Hillary’s sincerity, based on her past position on abortion, other statements she made during her speech and her present incentive to transform her image. Even if Hillary has cultivated a new tolerance for pro-lifers (dream on), it’s highly unlikely her position has changed on abortion, no matter what rhetorical bones she throws to the right.

As CNS reminds us, it was Hillary, in 1994, while in Beijing, who coined the phrase “Women’s rights are human rights.” Janice Crouse, a Christian activist, observed that Hillary wasn’t referring merely to the right of women “to earn the same salary, the right to have opportunity and so forth.” She was talking about “the whole women’s rights agenda, which includes abortion, acknowledgment and mainstreaming lesbianism and the whole range of gender issues.” Exactly.

Even during her speech to the NYSFPP, Hillary said that Roe v. Wade (the infamous 1973 Supreme Court abortion case) was “a landmark decision that struck a blow for freedom and equality for women.” She told the audience she looked forward “to working with all of you as we fight to defend it in the coming years.”

While Hillary said she hoped those on opposite sides of the abortion issue could find “common ground,” it’s obvious that what she is really looking for is common ground between herself and a sufficient number of voters.

Do you honestly think it’s conceivable that Hillary would appear before a militantly pro-abortion group and say nice things about pro-lifers were she not running for the presidency?

Regardless of what Hillary’s purportedly changed attitudes show about her, they speak greater volumes about the political party she seeks to lead. The fact is that Hillary remains a darling of the Left and all its fringe constituency groups despite her increasingly heretical declarations.

Just as when John Kerry masqueraded as a hawk on national defense and the Michael Moore/Howard Dean wing of the party stayed right on board with him, Hillary has virtual immunity for any such apostasies. Why? Because they know she’ll always be a card-carrying, hardcore liberal no matter how much she pretends otherwise.

Democrats tell us the American people share their vision, yet many of their leaders won’t be honest about who they are and what they believe. Please tell me how it’s possible that Hillary Clinton could be the odds-on favorite among committed liberals if she truly believes in the center-to-right positions she’s been mouthing lately? She doesn’t, and her base knows it. It’s a conspiratorial deceit of staggering proportions. The party is morally bankrupt, lacking the integrity to be square with the people about its core principles.

But moral bankruptcy is only half the story. The party is also intellectually bankrupt, standing for little more than obstructing the Republican majority. For a seminar on the party’s intellectual vacuousness, read the transcript of Chris Wallace’s interview of Sen. Patrick Leahy on “Fox News Sunday” concerning the Democrats’ ideas on Social Security. Wallace repeatedly implored Leahy to provide just one idea the Democrats had on Social Security, and all he could say is that President Bush is unwilling to negotiate — which is both patently false and annoyingly nonresponsive.

Democrat leaders are counting on the American people to be too dense to see through their games, such as pretending to be something they’re not (Hillary), and pretending to be part of the solution instead of the problem (Leahy).

Given this poverty of values and character in the Democratic hierarchy, it’s all the more frustrating that Republicans can’t seem to get their act together.

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Democratic Suicide: When will the Dems start winning again? When they start living and speaking like normal folks. (National Review Online, 050506)

We are in unsure times amid a controversial war. Yet the American people are not swayed by the universities, the major networks, the New York Times, Hollywood, the major foundations, and NPR. All these bastions of doctrinaire liberal thinking have done their best to convince America that George W. Bush, captive to right-wing nuts and Christian fanatics, is leading the country into an abyss. In fact, a close look at a map of red/blue counties nationwide suggests that the Democrats are in deepening trouble.

Why? In a word, Democratic ideology and rhetoric have not evolved from the 1960s, although the vast majority of Americans has — and an astute Republican leadership knows it.

Class

The old class warfare was effective for two reasons: Americans did not have unemployment insurance, disability protection, minimum wages, social security, or health coverage. Much less were they awash in cheap material goods from China that offer the less well off the semblance of consumer parity with those far wealthier. Second, the advocates of such rights looked authentic, like they came off the docks, the union hall, the farm, or the shop, primed to battle those in pin-stripes and coiffed hair.

Today entitlement is far more complicated. Poverty is not so much absolute as relative: “I have a nice Kia, but he has a Mercedes,” or “I have a student loan to go to Stanislaus State, but her parents sent her to Yale.” Unfortunately for the Democrats, Kias and going to Stanislaus State aren’t too bad, especially compared to the alternatives in the 1950s.

A Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, John Edwards, Howard Dean, George Soros, or Al Gore looks — no, acts — like he either came out of a hairstylist’s salon or got off a Gulfstream. Those who show up at a Moveon.org rally and belong to ANSWER don’t seem to have spent much time in Bakersfield or Logan, but lots in Seattle and Westwood. When most Americans have the semblance of wealth — televisions, cell phones, cars, laptops, and iPods as well as benefits on the job — it is hard to keep saying that “children are starving.” Obesity not emaciation is the great plague of the poorer.

So the Democrats need a little more humility, a notion that the country is not so much an us/them dichotomy, but rather all of us together under siege to maintain our privileges in a tough global world — and at least one spokesman who either didn’t go to prep school or isn’t a lawyer.

Race

The Democrats, at least in the north, were right on the great civil-rights debate of 1960s. Yet ever since, they have lost credibility as they turned to the harder task of trying to legislate an equality of result — something that transcends government prejudice and guarantying a fair playing field, and hinges on contemporary culture, behavior, values, and disciple.

The country is also no longer white and black, but brown, yellow, black, white, and mixed. When a liberal UC Berkeley chancellor remonstrates about “diversity” and “multiculturalism,” lamenting that his merit-based entrance requirements have sadly resulted in too few “Hispanics” and “African-Americans” (he ignores that whites at Berkeley also enroll in numbers less than their percentages in the state population), what he really means — but won’t say — is that there are apparently too many Asians, about 45% enrolled in Berkeley versus about 12% in the state population.

What will he do? Praise a hard-working minority that overcame historic prejudice against them? Hardly. We suspect instead the typical liberal solution is on the horizon: some clever, but secretive administrative fix that contravenes Proposition 209, and then denies that compensatory action is aimed against the Asians it is aimed at.

In short, race-based thinking beyond protection of equal opportunity is fraught with public suspicion, especially when so many loud spokesmen for minorities — Jesse Jackson or Kweisi Mfume — either are elites themselves or do not practice the morality they preach. An Alberto Gonzales or Condoleezza Rice comes across as proud, competent, and an expert rather than a tribalist, while those in the Black Caucus or La Raza industry appear often the opposite. Would you want a sober Colin Powell or an often unhinged Harry Belafonte and surly Julian Bond in your party? Did Condoleezza Rice, answering acerbic senators without notes, or Barbara Boxer, droning off a prepared script, appear the more impressive in recent confirmation hearings? A Democratic “minority” appointment to a cabinet post at education or housing is one thing; a Republican belief that the best candidates for secretary of state, national security advisor, and attorney general are incidentally minorities is quite another.

Age

The Democrats won on the Social Security issue years ago. Annual cost-of-living increases and vast expansions to the program helped to ensure that we no longer witness — as I did in rural California in the early 1960s — elderly with outhouses and without teeth and proper glasses. In fact, despite the rhetoric of Washington lobbying groups, those over 65 are now the most affluent and secure in our society, and are on the verge of appearing grasping rather than indigent. They bought homes before the great leap in prices; they went to college when it was cheap; and they often have generous pensions in addition to fat social security checks. So ossified rhetoric about the “aged” in the social security debate — increasingly now not so much the Greatest Generation of WWII and the Depression as the first cohort of the self-absorbed baby boomers — is self-defeating.

George Bush is appealing to a new group that really is threatened — the under-35’s who cannot afford a house, have student loans, high car and health insurance, and are concerned that their poor therapeutic education will leave them impoverished as China and the rest of Asia race ahead.

Defense

The problem with Democrats is that Americans are not convinced that they will ever act in any consistent manner. We can argue about Afghanistan, but if one were to go back and read accounts in October 2001 about hitting back, the news reflected liberals’ doubt about both the wisdom and efficacy of taking out the Taliban.

Would Al Gore have invaded Afghanistan less than a month after 9/11? If John Kerry were President and China invaded Taiwan, what would he do?

What would an administration advised by Madeline Albright, Barbara Boxer, Joe Biden, Jamie Rubin, Nancy Pelosi, or Jimmy Carter do if Iran sent a nuke into Israel, or North Korea fired a series of missiles over the top of Japan?

Or, if al Qaeda, operating from a sanctuary in Iran or Syria, took out the Sears Tower, how would a Kennedy, Kerry, or Gore respond? Six cruise missiles? A police matter? Proper work for the DA? Better “intelligence”? Let’s work with our allies? Get the U.N. involved?

Whatever we think of George Bush, we know he would do something real — and just what that something might be frightens into hesitation — and yes, fear — many of those who would otherwise like to try something pretty awful.

Will they ever learn?

Until Democrats promote someone who barks out something like, “We can and will win in Iraq,” or, “Let the word go out: An attack on the United States originating from a rogue state is synonymous with its own destruction,” or some such unguarded and perhaps slightly over-the-top statement, I don’t think that the American people will entrust their safety to the party. John Kerry, to be frank, is no Harry Truman, and time is running out for Hillary Clinton to morph into Scoop Jackson.

Philosophically, two grand themes explain the Democratic dilemma. One, the United States does not suffer from the sort of oppression, poverty, or Vietnam nightmares of the 1950s and 1960s that created the present Democratic ideology. Thus calcified solutions of big government entitlements, race-based largess, and knee-jerk suspicion of U.S. power abroad come off as either impractical or hysterical.

Second, there is the widening gulf between word and deed — and Americans hate hypocrites most of all. When you meet a guy from the Chamber of Commerce or insurance association, you pretty much know that what you see is what you get: comfort with American culture and values, an upscale lifestyle that reflects his ideology and work, and no apologies for success or excuses for lack of same.

But if you listen to Dr. Dean and his class venom, it hardly seems comparable with how he lives or how he was brought up. John Kerry’s super power boat, Teresa Kerry’s numerous mansions, Arianna Huffington’s gated estate, George Soros’s jet, Ted Turner’s ranches, Sean Penn’s digs — all this and more, whether fairly or unfairly, suggest hypocrisy and insincerity: Something like, “High taxes, government regulation, racial quotas, and more entitlements won’t hurt me since I have so much money at my own disposal anyway, but will at least make me feel good that we are transferring capital to the less fortunate.”

Worse yet, such easy largess and the cost of caring often translate into contempt for the small businessman, entrepreneur, and salesperson who is supposedly illiberal because he worries that he has less disposable income and is less secure. And when you add in cracks about Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, and the “Christian Right” — all the things the more cultured avoid — then the architects of a supposedly populist party seem to be ignorant of their own constituencies.

When will Democrats return to power? Three of the most influential legislators in the Democrat party — Diane Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Nancy Pelosi — reside in and came out of the San Francisco Bay area, which for all its undeniable beauty has created a culture still at odds with most of America. John and Teresa Kerry would have been the nation’s first billionaire presidential couple. The head of the Democratic party is a New England condescending liberal, with a vicious tongue, who ran and lost on a platform far to the left of an unsuccessful liberal.

In contrast the only two men elected president from the Democratic party in 30 years were southerners, hammed up their rural and common-man roots — the son of a single mother in Arkansas and a peanut farmer in Plains, Georgia — and were narrowly elected largely due to national scandals like Watergate or third-party conservative populists like Ross Perot. The aristocratic media — CSB News, the New York Times, NPR — is often liberal and yet talks of its degrees and pedigree; the firebrand populist bloggers, cable news pros, and talk-radio pundits are mostly conservative and survive on proven merit rather than image.

When we see Democrats speaking and living like normal folks — expressing worry that the United States must return to basic education and values to ensure its shaky preeminence in a cutthroat world, talking of one multiracial society united by a rare exceptional culture of the West rather than a salad bowl of competing races and tribes, and apprising the world that we are principled abroad in our support of democratic nations and quite dangerous when attacked — they will be competitive again.

Since they will not do that, they will keep losing — no matter how much the economy worries, the war frightens, and the elite media scares the American people.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

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Liberals and class (Townhall.com, 050607)

Thomas Sowell

The new trinity among liberal intellectuals is race, class and gender. Defining any of these terms is not easy, but it is also not difficult for liberals, because they seldom bother to define them at all.

The oldest, and perhaps still the most compelling, of these concerns is class. In the vision of the left, we are born, live, and die in a particular class — unless, of course, we give power to the left to change all that.

The latest statistics seized upon to support this class-ridden view of America and other Western societies show that most people in a given part of the income distribution are the children of other people born into that same part of the income distribution.

Among men born in families in the bottom 25% of income earners only 32% end up in the top half of the income distribution. And among men born to families in the top 25% in income earners, only 34% end up down in the bottom half.

How startling is that?

More to the point, does this show that people are trapped in poverty or can coast through life on their parents’ wealth? Does it show that “society” denies “access” to the poor?

Could it just possibly show that the kind of values and behavior which lead a family to succeed or fail are also likely to be passed on to their children and lead them to succeed or fail as well? If so, how much can government policy — liberal or conservative — change that in any fundamental way?

One recent story attempting to show that upward mobility is a “myth” in America today nevertheless noted in passing that many recent immigrants and their children have had “extraordinary upward mobility.”

If this is a class-ridden society denying “access” to upward mobility to those at the bottom, why is it that immigrants can come here at the bottom and then rise to the top?

One obvious reason is that many poor immigrants come here with very different ambitions and values from that of poor Americans born into our welfare state and imbued with notions growing out of attitudes of dependency and resentments of other people’s success.

The fundamental reason that many people do not rise is not that class barriers prevent it but that they do not develop the skills, values and attitudes which cause people to rise.

The liberal welfare state means they don’t have to and liberal multiculturalism says they don’t need to change their values because one culture is just as good as another. In other words, liberalism is not part of the solution, but part of the problem.

Racism is supposed to put insuperable barriers in the path of non-whites anyway, so why knock yourself out trying? This is another deadly message, especially for the young.

But if immigrants from Korea or India, Vietnamese refugees, and others can come here and move right on up the ladder, despite not being white, why are black and white Americans at the bottom more likely to stay at the bottom?

The same counterproductive and self-destructive attitudes toward education, work and ordinary civility found in many of America’s ghettos can also be found in lower-class British communities. Anyone who doubts it should read British doctor Theodore Dalrymple’s book “Life at the Bottom,” about the white lower class communities in which he has worked.

These chaotic and violence-prone communities in Britain do not have the excuse of racism or a legacy of slavery. What they do have in common with similar communities in the United States is a similar reliance on the welfare state and a similar set of intellectuals making excuses for their behavior and denouncing anyone who wants them to change their ways.

The latest round of statistics emboldens more intellectuals to blame “society” for the failure of many people at the bottom to rise to the top. Realistically, if nearly a third of people born to families in the bottom quarter of income earners rise into the top half, that is not a bad record.

If more were doing so in the past, that does not necessarily mean that “society” is holding them down more today. It may easily mean that the welfare state and liberal ideology both make it less necessary today for them to change their own behavior.

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Liberals and class: Part II (Townhall.com, 050609)

Thomas Sowell

Someone once defined a social problem as a situation in which the real world differs from the theories of intellectuals. To the intelligentsia, it follows, as the night follows the day, that it is the real world that is wrong and which needs to change.

Having imagined a world in which each individual has the same probability of success as anyone else, intellectuals have been shocked and outraged that the real world is nowhere close to that ideal. Vast amounts of time and resources have been devoted to trying to figure out what is stopping this ideal from being realized — as if there was ever any reason to expect it to be.

Despite all the words and numbers thrown around when discussing this situation, the terms used are so sloppy that it is hard even to know what the issues are, much less how to resolve them.

Back in mid-May, both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal had front-page stories about class differences and class mobility. The Times’ article was the first in a long series that is still going on a month later. Both papers reached similar conclusions, based on a similar sloppy use of the word “mobility.”

The Times referred to “the chance of moving up from one class to another” and the Wall Street Journal referred to “the odds that a child born in poverty will climb to wealth.” But the odds or probabilities against something happening are no measure of whether opportunity exists.

Anyone who saw me play basketball and saw Michael Jordan play basketball when we were youngsters would have given odds of a zillion to one that he was more likely to make the NBA than I was. Does that mean I was denied opportunity or access, that there were barriers put up against me, that the playing field was not level?

Or did it mean that Michael Jordan — and virtually everyone else — played basketball a lot better than I did?

A huge literature on social mobility often pays little or no attention to the fact that different individuals and groups have different skills, desires, attitudes and numerous other factors, including luck. If mobility is defined as being free to move, then we can all have the same mobility, even if some end up moving faster than others and some of the others do not move at all.

A car capable of going 100 miles an hour can sit in a garage all year long without moving. But that does not mean that it has no mobility.

When each individual and each group trails the long shadow of their cultural history, they are unlikely even to want to do the same things, much less be willing to put out the same efforts and make the same sacrifices to achieve the same goals. Many are like the car that is sitting still in the garage, even though it is capable of going 100 mph.

So long as each generation raises its own children, people from different backgrounds are going to be raised with different values and habits. Even in a world with zero barriers to upward mobility, they would move at different speeds and in different directions.

If there is less upward movement today than in the past, that is by no means proof that external barriers are responsible. The welfare state and multiculturalism both reduce the incentives of the poor to adopt new ways of life that would help them rise up the economic ladder. The last thing the poor need is another dose of such counterproductive liberal medicine.

Many comparisons of “classes” are in fact comparisons of people in different income brackets — but most Americans move up from the lowest 20% to the highest 20% over time.

Yet those who are obsessed with classes treat people in different brackets as if they were classes permanently stuck in those brackets.

The New York Times series even makes a big deal about disparities in income and lifestyle between the rich and the super-rich. But it is hard to get worked up over the fact that some poor devil has to make do flying his old propeller-driven plane, while someone further up the income scale flies around a mile or two higher in his twin-engine luxury jet.

Only if you have overdosed on disparities are you likely to wax indignant over things like that.

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Liberals and class: part III (Townhall.com, 050612)

Thomas Sowell

Sometimes it seems as if liberals have a genius for producing an unending stream of ideas that are counterproductive for the poor, whom they claim to be helping. Few of these notions are more counterproductive than the idea of “menial work” or “dead-end jobs.”

Think about it: Why do employers pay people to do “menial” work? Because the work has to be done. What useful purpose is served by stigmatizing work that someone is going to have to do anyway?

Is emptying bed pans in a hospital menial work? What would happen if bed pans didn’t get emptied? Let people stop emptying bed pans for a month and there would be bigger problems than if sociologists stopped working for a year.

Having someone who can come into a home to clean and cook and do minor chores around the house can be a godsend to someone who is an invalid or who is suffering the infirmities of age — and who does not want to be put into an institution. Someone who can be trusted to take care of small children is likewise a treasure.

Many people who do these kinds of jobs do not have the education, skills or experience to do more complex kinds of work. Yet they can make a real contribution to society while earning money that keeps them off welfare.

Many low-level jobs are called “dead-end jobs” by liberal intellectuals because these jobs have no promotions ladder. But it is superficial beyond words to say that this means that people in such jobs have no prospect of rising economically.

Many people at all levels of society, including the richest, have at some point or other worked at jobs that had no promotions ladder, so-called “dead-end jobs.” The founder of the NBC network began work as a teenager hawking newspapers on the streets. Billionaire Ross Perot began with a paper route.

You don’t get promoted from such jobs. You use the experience, initiative, and discipline that you develop in such work to move on to something else that may be wholly different. People who start out flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s seldom stay there for a full year, much less for life.

Dead-end jobs are the kinds of jobs I have had all my life. But, even though I started out delivering groceries in Harlem, I don’t deliver groceries there any more. I moved on to other jobs — most of which have not had any promotions ladders.

My only official promotion in more than half a century of working was from associate professor to full professor at UCLA. But that was really just a pay increase, rather than a real promotion, because associate professors and full professors do the same work.

Notions of menial jobs and dead-end jobs may be just shallow misconceptions among the intelligentsia but they are a deadly counterproductive message to the poor. Refusing to get on the bottom rung of the ladder usually means losing your chance to move up the ladder.

Welfare can give you money but it cannot give you job experience that will move you ahead economically. Selling drugs on the streets can get you more money than welfare but it cannot give you experience that you can put on a job application. And if you decide to sell drugs all your life, that life can be very short.

Back around the time of the First World War, a young black man named Paul Williams studied architecture and then accepted a job as an office boy at an architectural firm. He agreed to work for no pay, though after he showed up the company decided to pay him something, after all.

What they paid him would probably be dismissed today as “chump change.” But what Paul Williams wanted from that company was knowledge and experience, more so than money.

He went on to create his own architectural company, designing everything from churches and banks to mansions for movie stars — and contributing to the design of the theme building at Los Angeles International Airport.

The real chumps are those who refuse to start at the bottom for “chump change.” Liberals who encourage such attitudes may think of themselves as friends of the poor but they do more harm than enemies.

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Benedict 1, Europe 0 (American Spectator, 050615)

The liberals of Europe — those champions of free-ranging Voltairean speech and scourges of fanatical religion — are dragging journalist and author Oriana Fallaci into court for writing a book critical of militant Islam. Fallaci, who now lives in Manhattan, has been ordered to stand trial in her native Italy for The Force of Reason, a 2004 book which a mau-mauing Muslim activist has managed to convince an Italian judge skates too close to a law prohibiting “outrages against religion.”

Can Catholic activists in Italy invoke this law too? If so, the critics of Fallaci would find themselves in court next to her, as they denounce the Catholic religion in the very abusive terms they scold her for using against Islam.

Pope Benedict XVI’s contribution this week to the defeat of an Italian referendum targeting embryos for research and destruction has Europe’s secularists in another anti-Catholic tizzy. Having grown accustomed to a feckless post-Vatican II Catholic Church, they were surprised and upset that Pope Benedict encouraged Italy’s bishops to torpedo the referendum by telling their flock to boycott it. What “unwarranted interference in Italian affairs,” they pouted. Monica Bellucci interrupted her theatrical career to blast the Church. “What do politicians and priests know about my ovaries?” she said.

The dominant American press, scenting a worrisome but perhaps defeatable challenge to European secularism, took a keen interest in the Italian referendum until it flopped. The Washington Post did an ambitious, A01, story on the referendum last weekend, full of Brave New World bias and secularist probing into the Church’s opposition to it. But on Tuesday after the referendum resoundingly failed (only 25.9% of Italians went to the polls, rendering a referendum requiring 50% turnout invalid) the Washington Post buried its story about the outcome on A18, and suddenly the Church’s influence wasn’t all that decisive in its analysis. “It remained unclear what effect the church’s [opposition] had on the turnout,” hedged the Post. Had the referendum succeeded, the Post’s tone would have been: secular Europe 1, Pope Benedict 0. (The Los Angeles Times’s interest in the referendum also flagged in its follow-up story.)

Italian secularists, busy opening their public squares to imams, now more than ever want it closed to priests. They fear, reported the European press after the referendum failed, a “victorious Vatican.” Stefania Prestigiacomo, Italy’s Minister for Equal Opportunities and a member of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party, sputtered in anger about the “fundamentalist and intolerant” opposition and said, “The Church has never intervened in such an overwhelming and determined way.”

Italy’s civilizational stirrings — the referendum failed in part because Italians are still put off by the “granny births” and other moral anomalies a 1990s culture of embryo tinkering produced in the country — are not going unnoticed by the political class. Massimo Cacciari, the Mayor of Venice, commented to the press that Italy’s “liberal secular culture” is decelerating.

As secularists regroup, what can be expected? One certainty is that the “outrages against religion” Europe’s liberals are not permitting Oriana Fallaci will multiply against the Church. Terms they can’t bring themselves to use against militant Islam — dangerous, fanatical, irrational — will fall easily from their mouths on Pope Benedict as they try desperately to consolidate secularist gains. Though the liberals of Europe would never dare call Islam illiberal, they speak of the religion that gave birth to civilized Europe in that language, and wouldn’t even permit a direct historical mention of it in the European Union Constitution (also failing to impress weary Europeans in referendums).

Fallaci is known as a liberal but of a vanishing species, one who sees that fellow liberals are playing dupes to the most alien and illiberal ideology in Europe. This rebuke cannot be abided, and so Europe’s liberals, who are far more wildly authoritarian than the conservative authorities they displaced, are putting her on trial, once again exposing their rhetoric of liberty as a sham. And they can even drum up another charge against her: she sided with the odious Catholic Church in Italy’s referendum fight.

“Behind this referendum is a project to reinvent man in the laboratory, to transform him into a product to sell like steak or a bomb. Here we return to Nazism,” she wrote. The children of Voltaire won’t fight to the death for her free speech. Under a death wish of another sort, now they prosecute it.

George Neumayr is executive editor of The American Spectator.

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The Ultimate End of Progressive Thought: Injustice (Christian Post, 050627)

Joseph Addison in The Guardian once said, “There is no virtue so truly great and godlike as justice.” But today the great question is: How is justice defined?

Progressives or liberals have essentially identified justice with material equality. Thus, a “just” society is one where wealth is equally distributed and everyone has access to life’s basic needs. This approach, however desirable it may be, cannot possibly be defined as justice. It is at best unrealistically utopian. Material equality can never be achieved, not even in the basics of life, and efforts to produce it only result in the worst forms of injustice, where eventually private property is seized and distributed through acts of tyranny.

This philosophical approach to a “just” culture is exactly what has produced a multi-trillion dollar debt and a crushing tax burden on our nation. Moreover, government assistance has an insatiable appetite for more that can never be satisfied. There’s always a call for stimulating the economy in order to generate a stronger tax base for providing health care, housing, education, etc.

Last week, in a sharply divided 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court demonstrated how a “progressive” understanding of “justice” currently prevails in American culture. In the case of Kelo v. the City of New London, four liberal justices (Bader-Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter, Breyer) and one moderate justice (Kennedy) ruled that state and local governments can seize private property to make room for development as long as it creates economic benefits and increases the government’s tax receipts.

Make no mistake about it: the High Court’s ruling was an act of tyranny — a form of legal plunder! Stephen Crampton, chief counsel for the American Family Association’s Center for Law & Policy said: “In effect, the Supreme Court has written over City Hall: ‘The government giveth, and the government taketh away.’” (See related story) What Cramption said was right, and without question, the ultimate end of “progressive” politics.

This must change! But it won’t unless Americans once again discover what the Bible says about the proper role of government. Does the Holy Scripture authorize the government to take by force private property in support of something it believes is good? Absolutely not! For example, the state has no more right to take money through taxes to give to those who are poor than I have to hold a gun to my neighbor’s head and demand he relieve that poverty. Does God ordain government with the sovereign right to target private property to give to those who will pay higher taxes for it? Quite the contrary, God commands governments as well as individuals, “Thou shalt not steal.”

According to the Bible, government has a limited responsibility. The apostle Paul says the state “is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath upon the one who practices evil. Wherefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of wrath, but also for conscience’ sake. For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing.” (Rom.13: 4-6) In other words, it is the government’s role, more than anything else, if not to the exclusion of everything else, to bear the sword in suppressing evil doers. Government is to secure justice by protecting the life, liberty and property of its citizenry. It may tax for these reasons, but when it goes beyond such parameters it has the potential to create more problems than it solves.

Today government has grown out of control. As we have given it responsibility for more and more, it has become huge and powerful, supplanting God-given rights with rights granted only by the state. No longer do the people or the Constitution rule, but an unelected “super-Congress” — the U.S. Supreme Court. Those with more “progressive” leanings dominate the Court, not conservatives who would interpret the Constitution according to the framer’s original intent, which was strictly Judeo-Christian. Moreover, addicted to the opiate of public assistance, we have become bond slaves of the state and unwilling to do anything about our plight.

Don’t think me to be too melodramatic, but we have not made real progress. Instead we have returned to the dark days when a lord took your land and gave it to someone he thought more deserving. The government can now take your castle for what it perceives to be an opportunity for economic development and to strengthen its hand. It can also confiscate churches, temples, synagogues and mosques, arguing “eminent domain” because they don’t generate tax revenues and it deems the property could be better used to that end. Nothing is safe anymore!

Justice? Whose justice?

Progressive thought ultimately ends with injustice.

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Rev. Mark H. Creech (calact@aol.com) is the executive director of the Christian Action League of North Carolina, Inc.

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Our Wars Over the War: “The fault is not in our stars.” (National Review Online, 050715)

Ever since September 11, there has been an alternative narrative about this war embraced by the Left. In this mythology, the attack on September 11 had in some vague way something to do with American culpability.

Either we were unfairly tilting toward Israel, or had been unkind to Muslims. Perhaps, as Sen. Patty Murray intoned, we needed to match the good works of bin Laden to capture the hearts and minds of Muslim peoples.

The fable continues that the United States itself was united after the attack even during its preparations to retaliate in Afghanistan. But then George Bush took his eye off the ball. He let bin Laden escape, and worst of all, unilaterally and preemptively, went into secular Iraq — an unnecessary war for oil, hegemony, Israel, or Halliburton, something in Ted Kennedy’s words “cooked up in Texas.”

In any case, there was no connection between al Qaeda and Saddam, and thus terrorists only arrived in Iraq after we did.

That tale goes on. The Iraqi fiasco is now a hopeless quagmire. The terrorists are paying us back for it in places like London and Madrid.

Still worse, here at home we have lost many of our civil liberties to the Patriot Act and forsaken our values at Guantanamo Bay under the pretext of war. Nancy Pelosi could not understand the continued detentions in Guantanamo since the war in Afghanistan is in her eyes completely finished.

In this fable, we are not safer as a nation. George Bush’s policies have increased the terror threat as we saw recently in the London bombing. We have now been at war longer than World War II. We still have no plan to defeat our enemies, and thus must set a timetable to withdraw from Iraq.

Islamic terrorism cannot be defeated militarily nor can democracy be “implanted by force.” So it is time to return to seeing the terrorist killing as a criminal justice matter — a tolerable nuisance addressed by writs and indictments, while we give more money to the Middle East and begin paying attention to the “root causes” of terror.

That is the dominant narrative of the Western Left and at times it finds its way into mainstream Democratic-party thinking. Yet every element of it is false.

Prior to 9/11, the United States had given an aggregate of over $50 billion to Egypt, and had allotted about the same amount of aid to Israel as to its frontline enemies. We had helped to save Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Kuwait, and Afghanistan, and received little if any thanks for bombing Christian Europeans to finish in a matter of weeks what all the crack-pot jihadists had not done by flocking to the Balkans in a decade.

Long before Afghanistan and Iraq, bin Laden declared war on America in 1998, citing the U.N. embargo of Iraq and troops in Saudi Arabia; when those were no longer issues, he did not cease, but continued his murdering. He harbored a deep-seated contempt for Western values, even though he was eaten within by uncontrolled envy and felt empowered by years of appeasement after a series of attacks on our embassies, bases, ships, and buildings, both here and abroad.

Iraqi intelligence was involved with the first World Trade Center bombing, and its operatives met on occasion with those who were involved in al Qaeda operations. Every terrorist from Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal to Abdul Yasin and Abu al-Zarqawi found Baghdad the most hospitable place in the Middle East, which explains why a plan to assassinate George Bush Sr. was hatched from such a miasma.

Neither bin Laden nor his lieutenants are poor, but like the Hamas suicide bombers, Mohammed Atta, or the murderer of Daniel Pearl they are usually middle class and educated — and are more likely to hate the West, it seems, the more they wanted to be part of it. The profile of the London bombers, when known, will prove the same.

The poor in South America or Africa are not murdering civilians in North America or Europe. The jihadists are not bombing Chinese for either their godless secularism or suppression of Muslim minorities. Indeed, bin Laden harbored more hatred for an America that stopped the Balkan holocaust of Muslims than for Slobodan Milosevic who started it.

There was only unity in this country between September 11 and October 6, when a large minority of Americans felt our victim status gave us for a golden moment the high ground. We forget now the furor over hitting back in Afghanistan — a quagmire in the words of New York Times columnists R. W. Apple and Maureen Dowd; a “terrorist campaign” against Muslims according to Representative Cynthia McKinney; “a silent genocide” in Noam Chomsky’s ranting.

Two thirds of al Qaeda’s command is now captured or dead; bases in Afghanistan are lost. Saddam’s intelligence will not be lending expertise to anyone and the Baghdad government won’t welcome in terrorist masterminds.

In fact, thousands of brave Iraqi Muslims are now in a shooting war with wahhabi jihadists who, despite their carnage, are dying in droves as they flock to the Iraq.

A constitution is in place in Iraq; reform is spreading to Lebanon, the Gulf, and Egypt; and autocracies in Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Pakistan are apprehensive over a strange new American democratic zeal. Petroleum was returned to control of the Iraqi people, and the price has skyrocketed to the chagrin of American corporations.

There has been no repeat of September 11 so far. Killing jihadists abroad while arresting their sympathizers here at home has made it hard to replicate another 9/11-like attack.

The Patriot Act was far less intrusive than what Abraham Lincoln (suspension of habeas corpus), Woodrow Wilson (cf. the Espionage and Sedition Acts), or Franklin Roosevelt (forced internment) resorted to during past wars. So far America has suffered in Iraq .006% of the combat dead it lost in World War II, while not facing a conventional enemy against which it might turn its traditional technological and logistical advantages.

Unlike Gulf War I and the decade-long Iraqi cold war of embargos, stand-off bombing, and no-fly-zones, the United States has a comprehensive strategy both in the war against terror and to end a decade and a half of Iraqi strife: Kill terrorists abroad, depose theocratic and autocratic regimes that have either warred with the United States or harbored terrorists, and promote democracy to take away grievances that can be manipulated and turned against us.

Why does this false narrative, then, persist — other than that it had a certain political utility in the 2002 and 2004 elections?

In a word, this version of events brings spiritual calm for millions of troubled though affluent and blessed Westerners. There are three sacraments to their postmodern thinking, besides the primordial fear that so often leads to appeasement.

Our first hindrance is moral equivalence. For the hard Left there is no absolute right and wrong since amorality is defined arbitrarily and only by those in power.

Taking back Fallujah from beheaders and terrorists is no different from bombing the London subway since civilians may die in either case. The deliberate rather than accidental targeting of noncombatants makes little difference, especially since the underdog in Fallujah is not to be judged by the same standard as the overdogs in London and New York. A half-dozen roughed up prisoners in Guantanamo are the same as the Nazi death camps or the Gulag.

Our second shackle is utopian pacifism — ‘war never solved anything’ and ‘violence only begets violence.’ Thus it makes no sense to resort to violence, since reason and conflict resolution can convince even a bin Laden to come to the table. That most evil has ended tragically and most good has resumed through armed struggle — whether in Germany, Japan, and Italy or Panama, Belgrade, and Kabul — is irrelevant. Apparently on some past day, sophisticated Westerners, in their infinite wisdom and morality, transcended age-old human nature, and as a reward were given a pass from the smelly, dirty old world of the past six millennia.

The third restraint is multiculturalism, or the idea that all social practices are of equal merit. Who are we to generalize that the regimes and fundamentalist sects of the Middle East result in economic backwardness, intolerance of religious and ethnic minorities, gender apartheid, racism, homophobia, and patriarchy? Being different from the West is never being worse.

These tenets in various forms are not merely found in the womb of the universities, but filter down into our popular culture, grade schools, and national political discourse — and make it hard to fight a war against stealthy enemies who proclaim constant and shifting grievances. If at times these doctrines are proven bankrupt by the evidence it matters little, because such beliefs are near religious in nature — a secular creed that will brook no empirical challenge.

These articles of faith apparently fill a deep psychological need for millions of Westerners, guilty over their privilege, free to do anything without constraints or repercussions, and convinced that their own culture has made them spectacularly rich and leisured only at the expense of others.

So it is not true to say that Western civilization is at war against Dark Age Islamism. Properly speaking, only about half of the West is involved, the shrinking segment that still sees human nature as unchanging and history as therefore replete with a rich heritage of tragic lessons.

This is nothing new.

The spectacular inroads of the Ottomans in the16th century to the gates of Vienna and the shores of the Adriatic were not explainable according to Istanbul’s vibrant economy, impressive universities, or widespread scientific dynamism and literacy, or even a technologically superior and richly equipped military. Instead, a beleaguered Europe was trisected by squabbling Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians — as a wealthy northwest, with Atlantic seaports, ignored the besieged Mediterranean and Balkans and turned its attention to getting rich in the New World.

So too we are divided over two antithetical views of the evolving West — Europe at odds with America, red and blue states in intellectual and spiritual divergence, the tragic view resisting the creeping therapeutic mindset.

These interior splits largely explain why creepy killers from the Dark Ages, parasitic on the West from their weapons to communications, are still plaguing us four years after their initial surprise attack.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

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Breeding Stupidity: Where does the insistence that the war in Iraq is creating terrorists come from? (Weekly Standard, 050715)

THERE IS A STRANGE PAIRING of positions on the left.

The first is that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were not connected. The work of Stephen F. Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, which is supported by other serious investigative reporters such as Claudia Rosett has already established beyond any reasonable doubt that there was a web of connections, but the combination of the left’s indifference to inconvenient facts and the international version of the soft bigotry of low expectations—an Arab dictator couldn’t have had a sophisticated intelligence service capable of hiding such matters—make it an article of faith among Bush haters that there was no connection.

Exactly the opposite approach to facts and evidence is emerging on the left’s claim that Iraq is a breeding ground for terrorists. “Breeding ground” means something quite different from “killing ground.” The term conveys the belief that had the United States and its allies not invaded Iraq, there would be fewer jihadists in the world today—that the transition of Iraq from brutal dictatorship to struggling democracy has somehow unleashed a terrorist-breeding virus.

The fact that foreign fighters are streaming across Syria into Iraq in the hopes of killing America is not evidence supporting the “breeding ground” theory. “Opportunity” to act is not the same thing as “motive” for acting. There is zero evidence for the proposition that Iraq is motive rather than opportunity, but the “motive” theory is nevertheless put forward again and again. As recently as Wednesday the Washington Post account of the aftermath of the London bombings included the incredible—and unsubstantiated in the article—claim that the “the profile of the suspects suggested by investigators fit long-standing warnings by security experts that the greatest potential threat to Britain could come from second-generation Muslims, born here but alienated from British society and perhaps from their own families, and inflamed by Britain’s participation in the Iraq war.”[emphasis added]

In an interview with the London Times, Prime Minister Tony Blair disputed the idea “that the London terrorist attacks were a direct result of British involvement in the Iraq war. He said Russia had suffered terrorism with the Beslan school massacre, despite its opposition to the war, and that terrorists were planning further attacks on Spain even after the pro-war government was voted out. “September 11 happened before Iraq, before Afghanistan, before any of these issues and that was the worst terrorist atrocity of all,” he said.

While it is theoretically possible that some jihadists were forged as a result of the invasion of Iraq, no specific instance of such a terrorist has yet been produced. Reports in the aftermath of the London bombings indicated that the British intelligence service estimates more than 3,000 residents of Great Britain had trained in the Afghanistan terrorist camps prior to the invasion of Afghanistan—which suggests that the probability is very high that most of the jihadists in England date their hatred of the West to some point prior to the invasion of Iraq. And though two of the London bombers appear to have traveled to Pakistan for religious instruction post-March 2003, there is not the slightest bit of evidence that it was Iraq which “turned” the cricket-loving young men into killers. In fact, it is transparently absurd for anyone to claim such a thing.

So why is the claim being made, and not just post-London, but in all of the contexts where the “breeding ground” rhetoric surfaces?

Of course it’s a convenient stick with which to beat the Bush administration. But it has a far more powerful lure than that.

As the bloody toll of the Islamist movement grows and its record of horrors lengthens from Bali to Beslan to Madrid to London, the incredible cost that can only be attributed to the Afghanistan metastasis that went unchecked from the time of bin Laden’s return there in 1996 until the American-led invasion of 2001 becomes ever more clear. That was the true “breeding ground” of the world’s menace, not the Sunni triangle, where jihadists are continually under pressure and increasingly desperate. The long years ahead in the global war on terrorism will be spent trying to undo the damage done by allowing the Islamist radicals a safe haven from which to export their ideology and to train and deploy their converts.

The realization of the price of inaction through the ‘90s has a huge political cost attached to it, one that the Democrats will bear if a full accounting is ever compiled. Thus the “breeding ground” rhetoric—empty and absurd as it is—is a convenient and even necessary bit of smoke. There’s no fire underneath that smoke. Just a desperate hope that noise will drown out voices pointing to the real history of the rise of the Islamist threat.

In an exchange with Ron Reagan on MSNBC this week, Christopher Hitchens sharply rebuked the “motive” school of terrorist psychologists: “I thought I heard you making just before we came on the air, of attributing rationality or a motive to this, and to say that it’s about anything but itself, you make a great mistake, and you end up where you ended up, saying that the cause of terrorism is fighting against it, the root cause, I mean.” [emphasis added]

Hitchens’s point, which must be made again and again, is Blair’s point: The killers are killers because they want to kill, not because the coalition invaded Iraq, or Afghanistan, or because there are bases in Saudi Arabia, or because Israel will not retreat to the 1967 borders.

Until and unless the left gets this point, and abandons the idea that “breeding” of terrorists is something the West triggers, they cannot be trusted with the conduct of the war.

Hugh Hewitt is the host of a nationally syndicated radio show, and author most recently of Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That is Changing Your World. His daily blog can be found at HughHewitt.com.

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Two Competing Religions—The Legacy of the 1960s (Christian Post, 050718)

Today’s culture wars can be directly traced to the cultural transformations of the 1960’s. As a matter of fact, that critical decade represented nothing less than a cultural revolution of sorts—a revolution Stanley Kurtz describes as “both a fulfillment and a repudiation of the vision of America’s founders.”

Kurtz makes his case in “Culture and Values in the 1960’s,” a fascinating essay published in Never a Matter of Indifference: Sustaining Virtue in a Free Republic, recently released by the Hoover Institution Press. Edited by Peter Berkowitz, Never a Matter of Indifference is a thought-provoking collection of essays on moral character and democratic responsibility. Kurtz’s essay adds historical context to the book’s central thesis—that moral virtue is an absolute necessity in order for political liberty to flourish.

When Kurtz argues that the 1960’s represented “both a fulfillment and a repudiation” of America’s founding vision, he offers an important corrective both to those who would celebrate the 1960’s as a time of unfettered liberation and to those who would curse the same decade as a time of absolute moral collapse. Kurtz, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, points to the Civil Rights Movement and the end of legal segregation as great gains for the society. The impetus toward racial equality was an example of what Kurtz labels “classic liberalism,” based in respect for both human dignity and moral structure.

Nevertheless, the legacy of the 1960’s is mixed precisely because “classic liberalism” devolved into something very different—an ideology that celebrates liberty without an accompanying respect for moral character. Kurtz wants to understand this exchange of classical liberalism for something far more radical. “If the movements that began in the 1960’s have in some significant measure departed from classic liberalism, how are we to understand their inner rationale?,” Kurtz asks. “What connects the ecology movement, for example, with movements for Civil Rights? And if classic liberalism suffices for many Americans, what has prompted them to set it aside?”

Very quickly, Kurtz moves to answer his own question. “I argue that the sixties ethos, and the transformation of liberalism it has produced, is best understood as a secular religion, and in many respects an illiberal religion.” An illiberal liberalism? Kurtz argues that this new liberalism is no longer based in the concern for ordered liberty that framed the nation’s founding.

The children of the 1960’s betrayed the American vision by “becoming an illiberal religion,” Kurtz asserts. This happened because “liberalism stopped being a mere political perspective for many people and turned into a religion.”

Is Kurtz using the word “religion” merely as a point of exaggerated argument? “I do not speak metaphorically,” Kurtz insists. “A certain form of liberalism now functions for substantial numbers of its adherents as a religion: an encompassing world-view that answers the big questions about life, dignifies daily exertions with higher significance, and provides a rationale for meaningful collective action.”

Classic liberalism was primarily concerned with individual liberty, understood to be both protected and limited by an ordered structure of moral obligation. This view of liberty produced the American concern for freedom of speech, freedom of association, and religious liberty that has stood at the heart of the American experiment. True liberalism is not intimidated by the presence of competing voices, public debate, and different perspectives. That no longer characterizes today’s illiberal liberalism, as best demonstrated in the ethos of political correctness.

As Kurtz explains, “The central mechanism of political correctness is the stigmatization of perspectives, many of them classically liberal, that run afoul of left-liberalism—a condemnation disproportionate to what might be expected in matters of mere policy disagreement.” As the worldview of left-liberalism is turned into a functional religion for so many people, they now treat any disagreement as heresy to be eradicated. “This shift to ostracism in place of intellectual engagement in so many of our cultural debates cannot be explained as a mere conscious tactical maneuver,” Kurtz explains. “The stigmatization of traditional perspectives can only be effective because so many are primed to respond to it in the first place.”

Why do today’s liberals respond to conservative arguments with condescension and a dismissal? Kurtz argues that the new liberalism has demonized conservatives and conservative arguments. As a religion, liberalism is “in need of demons,” Kurtz observes. “Traditional liberalism emphasized the ground rules for reasoned debate and the peaceful adjudication of political differences. One of the main reasons that politics in a liberal society could be peaceful was that people sought direction about life’s ultimate purpose outside of politics itself. Once traditional religion ceased to provide many moderns with either an ultimate life-purpose or a pattern of virtue, liberalism itself was the only belief system remaining that could supply these essential elements of life.”

In sum, support of left-liberal causes is now a religious passion for many Americans whose worldviews were shaped by the 1960’s. Every political debate becomes “a dire, almost revolutionary, struggle for the very principles of liberalism itself.”

Without commitment to a traditional faith, the children of the 1960’s sought ultimate meaning in the secular sphere. For many, the Holocaust became the “moral touchstone” for life, Kurtz argues. As such, the Holocaust becomes both a symbol and a moral anchor. Thus, “little Holocausts” are now seen everywhere. These exaggerated conflicts range from Betty Friedan’s description of the suburban home as a “comfortable concentration camp,” to the radical environmentalists’ outrage at “holocausts” such as commercial chicken farming and the lumber industry.

The children of the sixties were, in the main, children of privilege and material prosperity. As such, they had a hard time claiming to be oppressed or disadvantaged. They dealt with this by associating themselves with the real or perceived oppression of others.

As Kurtz explains, “Weighed down by a sense of the banality of their existence, the baby boomer stewards were given a life of material comfort but longed instead for a life of exertion in the service of some larger purpose, or at least for the appearance of such a life. The solution hit upon by many was to identify with struggling groups—however temporarily, however superficially, however counterproductively.”

Stripped of its moral context and obligations, this new form of liberalism functions as a political religion that sees oppression—real or imaginary—as the only important form of sin. In this contorted worldview, meaning is found in associating oneself with the oppressed—whether other human beings, or animals, or even inanimate objects. Kurtz points to the “Lawn Liberation Front,” which in 2001 distributed leaflets in Pittsburgh claiming that 12-inch spikes may have been driven into area lawns to prevent the cutting of grass. “Grass is a living entity that deserves as much respect as humans,” the group claimed. In so doing, the “LLF” was merely following the liturgy of the new secular religion.

All this is the inevitable result of a shared communal worldview. Beyond that, the very loss of a shared moral worldview can be directly traced to secularism and the eroding influence of the Christian worldview within the culture.

Where does this lead? For Kurtz, it means, “for the foreseeable future, we are in for a long and inconclusive culture war.” That much seems abundantly clear and irrefutable. The further value of Kurtz’s argument is his insistence that this war is “best understood as a conflict not only between religion and secularism, but between two competing religions.”

Those who know the Bible understand this reality all too well. The choice we face is not between religion and secularism, but between Biblical faith and the various paganisms. These are indeed two competing religions. As the Lord instructed Israel, “Choose ye this day whom ye shall serve.”

[Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on May 26, 2004.

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R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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The Drudgery Report: It’s the ideas, silly (National Review Online, 050525)

Democrats like to call themselves the party of ideas. But what they don’t usually tell you is that since taking their place on the Endangered Species List of political parties (how’s that for irony?) Democrats seem to be stealing an awful lot of their new ideas from…the Republicans! Take, for example, Arianna Huffington’s new Huffington Post, which started landing with a thud on our virtual front porches a couple of weeks ago bearing a striking resemblance to its conceptual father “The Drudge Report.” (And this wasn’t even the first idea Arianna has stolen from a Republican: On August 7, 2003, she became the second foreign-born California celebrity with an indecipherable accent to announce her candidacy for governor, and I think we all remember how that went.)

To be fair, Arianna deserves credit for making conservative scribes feel welcome at her new venture, and partner in crime Andrew Breitbart so far has done an admirable job of rounding up worthwhile columns from the likes of Danielle Crittenden, John Fund, David Frum, and Byron York. That said, like most Democrat efforts of late to get their message out “The Huffington Post” seems born of the resentment that the other side had the idea first combined with the hope that they could do it better. Well, good luck. In addition to laying the foundation for the blogosphere “The Drudge Report” receives over ten million hits a day, came this close to bringing down a corrupt U.S. president, and…oh yeah, regularly sets the agenda for the mainstream media. That is, when the mainstream media isn’t busy denouncing it as biased or inaccurate. I seem to recall Dan Rather of CBS News being particularly hard on “The Drudge Report.”

Liberal Hollywood’s favorite Greek’s forum offered few surprises during its first few weeks other than a resounding silence from no-shows like David Geffen and Warren Beatty, both of whom Arianna repeatedly claimed were “on board” while promoting her new liblog’s debut to potential readers and, more importantly, investors. Sadly, Larry Gelbart has participated, and the TV legend’s desperately unfunny, pun-laden offerings to date have incited at least one former admirer to declare, “This guy wrote M*A*S*H*?”

So how’s “The Huffington Post” doing so far? Reviews of Arianna’s Drudge homage have been decidedly mixed, ranging from, “Boy, does that thing stink”, to, “The what?” After weeks of earnest hype and bold predictions of a new direction in the national conversation “The Huffington Post”‘s debut was widely regarded, to put it mildly, as something of a let-down.

Which, given the Post’s genesis, isn’t particularly surprising. Arianna pitched this latest elaborate ploy to write off her cocktail parties as a business expense in terms of it being a “group blog,” which is another way of calling it a personal journal-by-committee with all the charm, originality and integrity that that implies. Others describe it as a virtual think tank, although judging from what “The Huffington Post” has trotted out so far it feels mostly like a groupthink tank.

Apart from its larcenous origins and hit-or-miss content the other glaring weakness of “The Huffington Post” is that it’s pretty much what sources like N.P.R., the A.P., and most TV networks already offer: a conventional left-of-center perspective with a few conservative voices tossed in for window dressing. Contributors of note so far include Walter Cronkite (who helpfully declared the Vietnam War un-winnable in 1969, thus spoiling the ending for millions who thought that still to be determined), Gary Hart (who’s been reduced to offering his written insights at no charge), and someone named Laurie David, who I gather is married to a famous person. We’re still waiting for that first, promised posting from Maggie Gyllenhaal, who recently became the latest Hollywood figure to blame the United States for the 9/11 attacks.

Let’s hope for their sake “The Huffington Post” works out better for Democrats than Air America Radio has so far. Launched with great fanfare a little over a year ago, Air America’s modest goal was to replicate the success (and political influence, naturally) of conservative talk radio. This would be a neat trick, as talk radio started out an essentially new medium and now attracts tens of millions of once disenfranchised listeners every single day while providing the play-by-play for a cultural revolution. Not the kind of Cultural Revolution where millions of Chinese people starve to death; the kind of cultural revolution where millions of Americans finally get a voice in the mainstream media.

As opposed to Air America, whose Al Franken-hosted morning show currently draws fewer listeners in New York City than its predecessor on the dial: a veritable ratings juggernaut of all-Caribbean music and chit-chat. As to Franken’s on-air appeal, remember what it was like to have to sit through a three-minute sketch on Saturday Night Live starring him? OK, now imagine three hours of that. Every morning. Before you’ve even had your coffee. Any questions? Meanwhile, Air America’s Los Angeles affiliate currently draws a whopping three-tenths of one percent of listeners in that bluest part of our bluest state, but at least they didn’t have to kick an all-black radio station off the air first like Al Franken did in New York.

In addition to Franken the Air America line-up includes Randi Rhodes, a conspiracy-theorist harpy from Brooklyn with the on-air demeanor of an involuntarily retired stripper. Rhodes is the sort of erudite commentator whose afternoon excursions into political nuance are punctuated by zany sound effects and songs about bouncing boobies. When she’s not telling listeners how smart and educated she is Rhodes is the sort of spellbinding broadcaster who gets words like “assert” and “insert” confused. Rhodes’ most recent contribution to civil discourse was a skit during which sound effects were used to graphically simulate the assassination of President Bush — funny, funny stuff. The good news for Randi was that this revolting segment has actually increased her average daily listening audience by about three Secret Service agents.

After Al Franken signed on most people assumed that Air America would be where washed-up Saturday Night Live stars go to die, which is terribly unfair: Janeanne Garofalo never achieved star status during her years at SNL. As a talk-radio host Janeanne’s grim, on-air personal unraveling is nothing less than a daily promo for the “How To Throw Away A Show Business Career” course she seems destined to teach at the Learning Annex. Anybody remember when Janeanne Garofalo was bright, engaging, and very funny? To my great sadness, I do.

Here’s how shallow the Air America talent pool is: Eighties retread Stephanie Miller has now been enlisted to repurpose her stale, cowbell-and-air-horn morning-zoo hackery as “political satire — with an edge!” After a full year plus on the air, and untold millions in free publicity, Air America is still “finding its voice” — and if I know anything about anatomy it might try looking up its own backside. And considering how much they love irony you’d think somebody at Air America would have noticed that a radio “network” with only 50 affiliates is in no position to belittle a wartime Coalition with 63 member states. Besides, I’m pretty sure that when your network boasts more wealthy patrons on its masthead than actual listeners, it’s not technically a network anymore. As of today Air America is on their second set of millionaire benefactors and their latest can’t-miss scheme to boost ratings was adding TV’s Jerry Springer to their line-up. Whose reputation stands to be more damaged by this latest development- Jerry Springer’s or Air America’s — is anybody’s guess.

Meanwhile in the television world Democrats are plenty steamed about all the viewers (and voters) they’re losing to FOX News. They’ve decided to start their own liberal cable TV news network and the man they want to run it is…Al Gore. Well, at least now he can be president of something. And it’s not like Al’s ever let them down before. Gore’s proposed cable-TV network (“Currents”) seems poised to revolutionize television the way his other invention — the Internet — revolutionized the dissemination of hardcore porn and unsolicited mortgage offers. Instead of conventional TV shows Currents will feature “pods”: programming snippets ranging from 15 seconds to about five minutes long. (Great, somebody is finally doing something to rein in the burgeoning attention spans of America’s youth.) Current’s “pods,” some of which will be provided by viewers (which I suppose would make them “pod people”) will cover issues ranging from spirituality and jobs to fashion and the environment.

And you thought Al Gore couldn’t get any more boring or irrelevant.

But why choose Al Gore to head up your new TV network? Maybe so that when the ratings come in and they’re really low you can demand a viewer recount. Like “The Huffington Report” and Air America Radio, Currents TV promises to offer as much cutting-edge alternative media as its wealthy leftist patrons can afford.

Imitation was once said to be the sincerest form of flattery, then of television. And with Democrats co-opting the power of the web, talk radio, and cable TV from their GOP counterparts, imitation may already have become the sincerest form of politics. But these ham-fisted Democratic attempts to hijack the new media share a common flaw: the false premise that what’s held Democrats back the last few Election Days was their inability to “get their message out.” Attention Democrats: the American people have heard your message loud and clear, and the more they hear of it the less they like it. You can launch all the feeble new media ventures you like (“Hey, how about a liberal ‘zine? That’ll turn this thing around!”). You can spend as much of George Soros’s fortune as he’s stupid enough to part with. You can even get Margaret Cho to come back out of the closet and denounce President Bush again — or did she do that already? Thing is, until you advance a political philosophy that has some sort of connection with mainstream America you might just as well get used to being the minority party no matter how many New Media outlets you horn in on. And as for “The Huffington Post,” I’m predicting it’ll be at least as successful as Arianna’s last campaign for governor and you can quote me on that.

— Ned Rice is a staff writer on the new and improved CBS talk show The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Rice is also an NRO contributor.

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Why the FBI watches the Left (Townhall.com, 050720)

Michelle Malkin

Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Civil liberties activists, anti-war organizers, eco-militants and animal rights operatives are in a fright over news that the nefarious FBI is watching them. Why on earth would the government be worried about harmless liberal grannies, innocent vegetarians, unassuming rainforest lovers and other “peaceful groups” simply exercising their First Amendment rights?

Let me remind you of some very good reasons.

In March 2003, I reported on a manifesto disseminated across the Internet by infamous eco-radical Craig Rosebraugh — former spokesman for the violent Earth Liberation Front — who called on fellow leftists to take “direct actions” against American military establishments, urban centers, corporations, government buildings and media outlets. His instructions included:

1) Attack the financial centers of the country. Using covert or black block techniques . . . physically shut down financial centers which regulate and assist the functioning of U.S. economy. This can be done in a variety of ways from massive property destruction, to online sabotage, to physical occupation of buildings.

2) Large scale urban rioting. With massive unrest and even state of emergencies declared in major cities across the country, the U.S. government will be forced to send U.S. troops into the domestic arena thereby taking resources and political focus away from the war.

3) Attack the media centers of the country. . . . Using any means necessary, shut down the national networks of NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, etc. . . .

4) Spread the battle to the individuals responsible for the war and destruction of life — the very heads of government and U.S. corporations. No longer should these people be able to hide behind their occupations, living their lives in peace while they simultaneously slaughter countless people. Hit them in their personal lives, visit their homes, and make them feel personally responsible for committing massive atrocities.

5) Make it known publicly that this movement DOES NOT support U.S. troops as long as they are serving an unjust and horrifying political regime. Create an atmosphere lacking of support to assist U.S. troops at home and abroad in losing their morale and will to fight . . .

6) Actively target U.S. military establishments within the United States . . . use any means necessary to slow down the functioning of the murdering body.

In April 2003, I reported on a mob of “peace” activists from an outfit called Direct Action to Stop the War that coordinated a seditious blockade of an Oakland port in shipping military supplies. The antiwar mob’s primary target at the Port of Oakland was American President Lines, a longtime carrier of military cargo. For Operation Iraqi Freedom, the carrier made nine of its vessels available to the Defense Department in order to move ammunition and sustainment cargo to support U.S. military forces.

The anti-war obstructionists weren’t simply exercising their “free speech.” They blocked trucks, employees, entryways and streets in order to stop the shipment of things like bullets, rations, lubricants, medical supplies, repair parts and chemical defense equipment to our troops. They also targeted Stevedoring Services of America, which handled some 3 million tons of humanitarian aid.

In August 2004, radical guerrilla activists from the “Black Bloc” group publicized plans to disrupt the GOP convention by attempting to distract police dogs, halt trains in New York City and spur the evacuation of Madison Square Garden.

In January 2005, the anti-war extremists of Code Pink traveled to the Jordan-Iraq border and doled out $600,000 in aid to “the other side.”

In February 2005, civil rights attorney and left-wing darling Lynne Stewart was convicted on five counts of conspiring to aid murderous Islamic terrorists and lying to the government about smuggling messages from her jailed client, terrorist mastermind Shiekh Omar Abdel Rahman, to his followers in Egypt.

In June 2005, moonbat celebrity professor Ward Churchill suggested to a Portland audience that killing military officers with explosive devices was a more effective anti-war tactic than conscientious objection. “Fragging an officer has a much more impactful effect,” Churchill advised.

The FBI’s job is to take threats to our domestic security seriously and act on them before catastrophe strikes. Given the suspect words and actions of left-wing groups over the last several years, “dissent is patriotic” is a bromide no responsible agent can swallow blindly. Tolerating the unfettered free speech of saboteurs has threatened enough lives already.

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Searching for the Definition of ‘Mainstream’ (Foxnews, 050620)

WASHINGTON — Political candidates hoping to get elected or judicial nominees vying for the federal bench would do well to be in the “mainstream” these days, though the media may try to distance themselves from the designation.

That’s because the “mainstream media” is a club increasingly loathed by the both the political right and left while “mainstream America” is regarded as the group that engenders today’s values.

But the determination of what is mainstream and where it is located has been so overplayed or misstated lately that several political experts agree the term “mainstream” has become the latest casualty of political language that was once sharp and appropriate but is now devoid of clear meaning for anyone.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and so is the meaning of ‘mainstream’ these days,” Chuck Muth, president of the Washington, D.C, think tank Citizen Outreach, said.

“I think years ago, [‘in the mainstream’] may have been a more substantive comment, but I think it’s evolved into a more trite comment today,” Republican pollster Dave Winston said, adding that the mainstream is as muddy as it is popular.

Entering the phrase “in the mainstream” into a Google Web search yields an estimated 811,000 results in the last three months, with 818 hits appearing in news reports during that time.

“If you could get 10 people together to try and agree on the definition of mainstream, I bet you would have considerable trouble doing it,” Terry Madonna, professor of public affairs at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, said.

On Capitol Hill, where it is important to be considered in the mainstream, most experts who spoke to FOXNews.com described it loosely — as being “moderate” or having views that appeal to both Republican and Democratic sensibilities. As a result, those in the mainstream are able to bring about bipartisan support on a given issue.

Mainstream is also used to describe a lawmakers’ appeal to a wide swath of voters. Mainstream America is the political equivalent of the socially and economically attractive “Main Street U.S.A.”

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia said the mainstream is a desirable place because it represents commonality or normalcy.

“Usually people are attracted to ‘mainstream.’ Virtually everyone wants to think they are within the mainstream,” Sabato said.

“It’s a way to try and center yourself in hopes that it will give you some appeal,” Bruce Gronbeck, professor of communications at the University of Iowa, said.

Gronbeck credits former President Clinton with making the mainstream popular political real estate in the 1990s.

“Bill Clinton: Here you had a social liberal and [an] economic conservative,” Gronbeck said. “He didn’t fit the political definitions and it drove both parties crazy. We began there to talk about the mainstream.”

Since the Clinton era, both parties are trying to claim the political mainstream for partisan advantage. Recently, Democrats accused President Bush’s nominees for federal judgeships of being outside the mainstream, which meant painting those at the center of the recent filibuster debate as too extreme in their beliefs to be effective on the bench.

The day the Senate voted to confirm Justice Janice Rogers Brown to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., called Brown “so far out of the mainstream that she makes [conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin] Scalia look like a liberal.”

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., also attempted to toss Brown out of the mainstream, saying he hoped the California Supreme Court judge wasn’t getting “a pass” because she is a black woman.

“I hope we’ve arrived at a point in our country’s history where black folks can be criticized when they hold views that are out of the mainstream,” Obama said.

Despite the outcry against the judicial nominees, in a deal arranged by the “Gang of 14,” made up mostly of moderate senators from both sides of the aisle, Brown, Justices Priscilla Owen and William Pryor were all deemed mainstream enough and were confirmed by the Senate for the federal bench. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., considered one of the more conservative members of the chamber, threw the Democrats’ words back at them, hailing the confirmation of Brown as a victory for the mainstream.

“If some in the minority were as insightful as they claim to be about ‘mainstream America’ they would not be in the minority. The fact is, many of these three nominees’ fiercest critics neither understand nor agree with mainstream America on many issues,” Coburn said in a release.

“Mainstream Americans are sick and tired of judicial activism, which is why President Bush will continue to nominate diverse judges who will interpret the law, not invent new laws and precedents from the bench,” he added.

Declaring ownership of the term mainstream will ultimately lead most voters to translate it in a way favorable to the owner, Winston said: “Obviously I’m right, they’re wrong and therefore they aren’t in the mainstream.”

But the dilution of the expression through overuse like other “in vogue” terms will only lessen the meaning with every usage, Madonna said.

“I tend to use ‘moderate’ rather than mainstream. ... To me, it has some meaning,” Madonna said. “It may be someone who is pro-choice on abortion, but against partial birth abortion.”

Unlike the political middle, being mainstream is an unpopular place when applied to the media. Originally coined by conservatives as MSM, the mainstream media is maligned by both ends of the political spectrum as biased, lazy and agenda-driven. The reference invariably includes major newspapers and broadcast media.

“The media has become an object of derision,” Sabato said. “MSM has become an acronym that is widely recognized. It would be difficult to change.”

With such a handy target, lawmakers in both parties have taken to kicking the mainstream media at frequent intervals.

In a May interview with the Washington Post, Eric Ueland, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., spoke of the senator’s efforts to try to do the right thing in the face of a “ferocious mainstream media onslaught.”

On Rep. John Conyers’ Web log, the Michigan Democrat said it was about time the “MSM finally is getting it” by focusing on the recently leaked British cabinet memos that suggest President’s Bush had his mind set on war as early as the summer of 2002.

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A tough year for the AFL-CIO (Townhall.com, 050720)

Linda Chavez

The AFL-CIO is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, but don’t expect any champagne to be flowing at the organization’s annual convention next week. It’s been a lousy year — indeed a miserable several decades — for Big Labor. With union membership falling to historic lows and the unions’ political clout on the wane, even while unions pour, literally, hundreds of millions of dollars into politics, the coup de grace for the AFL-CIO may come at the convention itself. Five unions, including the federation’s biggest, have announced they will pull out of the group unless the AFL-CIO changes its focus to organizing new members. But even these dissident unions seem clueless when it comes to what really ails the shrinking labor movement.

Less than 8% of private sector workers belonged to a union in 2004, and, overall, only 12.5% of American workers carry a union card — down from about one-third of workers in labor’s heydays in the 1950s. If it weren’t for compulsory union membership laws in 27 states, the number would no doubt be even lower.

The unions claim the deck is stacked against them when it comes to labor laws, but the truth is many private and public sector workers are forced to pay union dues as a condition of their employment, yet they have little say in how the unions spend their money. Despite court rulings that grant union members the right to withhold that portion of their dues that goes beyond negotiating and administering the union contract, most union members — 78% according to one poll — are in the dark about their rights, and the unions themselves want to keep it that way. Nor has the National Labor Relations Board, the federal government’s chief enforcement agency, done much to force unions to inform their workers of their rights.

So how did unions spend their members’ money last year? The 1.8 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the largest union in the AFL-CIO and the one spearheading the threats to pull out of the federation next week, spent $65 million not organizing new members but trying to defeat President Bush and Republicans in Congress. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees spent $48 million in the same, failing effort. The AFL-CIO spent $44 million trying to defeat Bush, and the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) spent another $8 million in the same quest.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. These unions also gave millions to so-called 527 organizations, which can collect and spend unlimited amounts trying to elect or defeat candidates. According to its own press releases, the SEIU alone gave $26 million to America Coming Together, an anti-Bush 527, while the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) gave $1 million to the Media Fund to run ads against the president and Republicans. All of this money came from union dues, not from the voluntary contributions unions collect through their Political Action Committees, which spent an additional $52 million in the 2004 election cycle, 86% of it going to Democrats.

Some 43% of voters in union households voted for President Bush in 2004, according to exit poll data. But these union members have virtually no say in how their unions spend their hard-earned money. Next week’s vote among AFL-CIO union leaders won’t change that one whit. The president of the SEIU, Andy Stern, claims he wants the AFL-CIO to spend more on organizing new members and brags that his own union spends half its budget on signing up new members, a boast that is impossible to verify given the arcane methods unions use to hide their finances. But the AFL-CIO dissidents are among the worst offenders when it comes to wasting their members’ dues on politics. Enforcing union members’ right to withhold that portion of their dues that goes to politics would do more to reform the labor movement than any phony bolt from the AFL-CIO.

Linda Chavez is President of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Townhall.com member organization.

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Your Turn (townhall.com, 050812)

Rich Tucker

Sometimes it’s unfair to be a columnist. I get all this space every week to share my views, and readers are limited in their ability to respond. That’s the only reason I can think of for a recent missive, whose entire text consisted of, “[expletive] idiot.”

So: Your turn. All comments are actual e-mails, recreated here with spelling, grammatical and typographical errors faithfully retained.

In a recent column I noted, “By the time you read this, the author may be out of a job. You see, I’m writing this while wearing an Atlanta Braves cap. And not just any cap. One with the smiling Indian logo.”

Several readers took exception.

“The Braves have never had a smiling Indian logo. So you must be lying about the supposed cap you were wearing while writing your column,” one wrote. “It is a small detail, I know. But facts are inportant (sic), and lies hurt the credibility of all your details, small or not. Once again you have exhibited the disturbingly common conservative tendency to simply make up facts to support the worldview you so desperately cling to. You shouldn’t lie.”

Strong words. Lying? Hardly. I think I know what’s on my lucky Braves hat. It features this logo. In my original piece, the hyperlink was removed. Yes, it’s not the hat the Braves wear on the field. But it is an Atlanta Braves hat.

This reader also attacks what he calls a conservative tendency to “make up facts.” However, it’s really liberals who tend to be guilty of making stuff up. These days, all the ideas are on the right and all the facts seem to support the conservative viewpoint. So liberals seldom bother to attempt to marshal arguments. Instead they resort to launching personal attacks and changing the subject. Sometimes both in the same e-mail.

One shining example is a liberal thinker who was angry about my column on liberal framing. That’s the hot new idea on the left: using words to block ideas. As I wrote recently, “On the left, the rhetoric actually creates the policy. And since the rhetoric is designed to do nothing, the policy is to do nothing. No wonder they have no solutions to offer.”

“Dick, I was just wondering,” one response began, “when you say that cons like yourself have a plan while liberals (or more acuratly (sic), 49% of the nation) can only offer empty framing, then how do you account for the utter lack of planing (sic) for Iraq? Or is that the fault of the 49 also?”

Just to make sure there wasn’t any understanding, I let the writer know I prefer not to be called Dick. It’s my Dad’s name. I also pointed out that the F7 key was a useful tool for catching spelling errors. “Interesting that you can’t seem to look past the unfortunate name your parents gave you or spelling errors,” he replied. “But this is typical bait and switch tactics that cons like yourself use to squirm out of answering uncomfortable questions.”

Ah, what a lovely little game. When a liberal is reminded that his side has no plan to reform Social Security, he launches insults and changes the subject. And then accuses the conservative of having done those exact things.

Of course, the conservative plan for Iraq was — and is — to export democracy. A free and democratic Iraq will help transform the Middle East. But this letter writer isn’t interested in the plan. He’s just interested in changing the subject. If one were to lay out the conservative plan for Iraq, he’d claim, “but you’ve got no plan for reforming the space program,” or “you’ve got no plan to eradicate ants in Texas,” until, eventually, he’d hit on something for which conservatives actually don’t have a plan. There must be something out there we haven’t thought of.

Finally, on July 8 I wrote that the previous day’s attacks on the London subway showed the weakness of Islamic terrorists, not their strength. “The West is winning, and will win. It’s merely a matter of time,” I wrote.

But one writer questioned which religion the attackers really followed. “I have a small suspicion that the recent bombings in London may have been done by Israel citizens (sic) or other Jews that may be doing what they consider ‘helping fellow Jews’ by blowing up what are normally Muslim dominated mass transit points,” he wrote.

When events proved him wrong, he wasn’t ready to back down. “I do not actually care to learn who did the bombings,” he later responded. “I have opened the minds of many people. Try to close them, you bigot.”

Will do. Oh, and please, keep those e-mails coming.

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New ideas? (townhall.com, 050815)

Star Parker

A group of wealthy Democratic Party partisans has announced a new partnership called the Democratic Alliance, through which millions of dollars will be funneled to a network of new and existing liberal think tanks to compete with conservative organizations. Reported commitments are $80 million over the next five years, with a goal of reaching $200 million.

According to press reports, these investors are frustrated at recent Democratic setbacks, most recently John Kerry’s loss to President Bush last November. Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg calls conservative think tanks that have emerged over recent years an “information-age Tammany Hall” with which Democrats have not been adequately equipped to compete.

Maybe liberal strategists have been reading my column. I wrote last February that Democratic leaders “seem to have little appreciation of the extent to which Sen. Kerry’s defeat in November reflected the total absence of ideas in the party.”

So I applaud any new initiative by Democrats to enter into the world of thought and ideas. However, from what I’m reading, it seems questionable that this is really what is happening.

Although the stated objective of this effort is generating “new ideas,” there is little hint what these ideas might be.

I surfed over to the Web site of one of these new think tanks, the Center for American Progress, set up a few years ago by Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, John Podesta, to get a sense of what this new agenda looks like. Here’s the stated mission: “developing a long-term vision of a progressive America; providing a forum to generate new progressive ideas and policy proposals; responding effectively and rapidly to conservative proposals and rhetoric ...”

This sounds less like a think tank than a new, politically motivated forum for delivering old liberal ideas. Maybe what is new is calling high taxes and intrusive big government “progressive” instead of “liberal.” A rose is a rose.

The great alleged insight on the left a few years ago was that conservative talk radio has been the conservative silver bullet to the hearts and minds of America. Again, not the conservative agenda, but conservative radio.

So Democratic deep-pocket types reached in to pull out the cash to create Air America to put Al Franken on the radio waves.

The most recent numbers that I’ve seen is that Air America ratings have done nothing but decline since it launched in 2004. National Review’s Byron York reports that in New York City, WABC, which carries Rush Limbaugh, has been consistently beating Franken and Air America.

Americans are not deprived of the liberal _ now called “progressive” _ point of view. It’s been with us since FDR. We are surrounded by it, from our public schools, to our universities (where 72% of faculty members identify themselves as liberals) to the media (where 7% of the national press identifies itself as conservative and 88% as moderate to liberal).

Certainly in the black community, support for the Democratic Party has been eroding because increasing numbers of blacks understand what “progressive ideas” have done to our community over the last 50 years.

The new Democratic strategists should take a close look at the results of a study just produced by Democratic pollsters Karl Agne and Stan Greenberg, based on focus groups done with rural voters in Wisconsin and Arkansas. The study concludes that cultural issues _ “gay marriage, abortion, the importance of the traditional family unit and the role of religion in public life” _ trump and swing these voters in favor of the Republican Party.

It is ironic that Democratic strategists cannot seem to grasp that the big-government themes and moral relativism that define their party disproportionately hurt lower-income groups. Reconciliation with the truth that traditional values and ownership are the best ticket into the American middle class will open the door to fresh thinking and new ideas in the Democratic Party and build new bridges to traditional Democratic constituencies.

From what I see, this new Democratic think tank initiative amounts to rich liberal elitists looking for new marketing techniques for their same old ideas.

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Democrat Disbelief (American Spectator, 050811)

The liberal polling firm Democracy Corps has released the results of its latest research project. Titled, “The Culture Divide & the Challenge of Winning Back Rural & Red State Voters,” the memo encapsulating the results of a series of focus groups paints a grim picture for Democrats. “Most [focus group participants] referred to Democrats as ‘liberal’ on issues of morality, but some even go so far as to label them ‘immoral,’ ‘morally bankrupt,’ or even ‘anti-religious,’” report Karl Agne and Stan Greenberg from Democracy Corps.

Go figure. The same day Democracy Corps released its study, NARAL Pro-Choice America began airing a television ad that implies Supreme Court nominee Judge John G. Roberts supports abortion clinic bombers. Whether you call it “the God gap,” “the values gap,” or “the culture gap,” it has never been wider than it is now.

It’s been almost ten months since Democrats promised to take “moral values” voters seriously after the drubbing this important voting bloc gave them in the 2004 election. Back then, it seemed every aspiring Democrat politician in America was ready to enroll in the Rites of Catholic Initiation for Adults or start attending an Evangelical Megachurch. “Our moral values are closer to the American people than the Republicans’ are,” Howard Dean preached in his campaign to become the new chairman of the Democrat National Committee. Dean’s opponent Don Fowler went a step further saying, “I am a Democrat because I am a Christian, not in spite of it.”

It all came off as a bit solicitous and, frankly, futile. It’s hard to imagine anyone uttering the word “values” more frequently than altar boy John Kerry did during the 2004 campaign. And it’s not as if Americans of faith were a swing group. President George W. Bush beat Kerry among both Protestants (59%-40%) and Catholics (52%-47%). He won among those who attend church monthly, weekly, and more than once a week, which is to say people who enter a church for reasons other than to ask for directions (though Kerry slaughtered Bush among voters who never attend church). White Evangelicals supported Bush over Kerry by a greater margin than gays, lesbians, and bisexuals favored Kerry.

But then came the backlash. Despite exit polls showing a plurality of voters said “moral values” was their number one issue of concern on Election Day, liberals, libertarians, and even neocons managed to cover their ears and chant “there’s no such thing as a ‘moral values’ voter” long enough to convince themselves they were right.

It got worse. When her estranged husband and Florida state courts decided it was time for Terri Schiavo to go, Christian conservatives and some Republican politicians protested. Loudly. Congress passed a measure to grant the Supreme Court review of her case. President Bush signed it. All involved were accused of placating the Religious Right. Republicans left, right, and center were accused of being “theocrats.” Some polls apparently said people had turned on the Religious Right as if the “moral values” movement was as dead as that poor girl in Florida.

It soon became so gauche to be a “moral values” American, Howard Dean called Republicans a “white, Christian party.” And he meant it as an epithet.

Except that someone forgot to tell Americans.

According to the Democracy Corps memo:

President Bush and Republicans in Congress were faulted for their lack of effective leadership on these issues and their failure to offer new ideas. Furthermore, there was strong support for some specific progressive initiatives and a belief among many that Democrats would be more willing to tackle these issues and to offer new ideas in the face of current policies that are clearly failing. However, as powerful as the concern over these issues is, the introduction of cultural themes — specifically gay marriage, abortion, the importance of the traditional family unit, and the role of religion in public life — quickly renders them almost irrelevant in terms of electoral politics at the national level.

In short, “moral values” issues still trump everything else. And what’s more, “moral value” voters still resent the Democrats’ derision of their worldview. In the memo’s words:

...these attitudes were most powerfully captured in symbolic issues such as display of the Ten Commandments in public buildings, removing God from the Pledge of Allegiance, or outlawing public manger displays at Christmastime. On each of these symbolic cases in point, there was a broad perception that Republicans would be on the side of American tradition, Judeo-Christian values, and the forgotten majority while Democrats would stand up and fight for a subversive minority seeking to erode the moral foundation of our country.

The voters are right, of course, just as they were in 2004. But Americans should expect another round of insincere Democrat yawps of piety and “our values are better than your values” talk. And then when the next “moral value” issue strikes (the entire John Roberts confirmation applies) liberals will blame those damn Christians for anything they can imagine. Then they’ll lose some more elections until they say, Okay this time, we’re really going to pay attention to Americans of faith.

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The Great Right Hope (townhall.com, 050819)

Rich Tucker

There’s little doubt today’s Democratic party is destroying itself. It seems unable to come up with any ideas or solutions, so it spends its time filibustering conservative judges and blocking Republican proposals. However, for a two-party system to work you need — well — two parties. So in the spirit of encouraging competition, here’s what the Democratic party needs to save itself: its own George W. Bush.

The left’s problems today oddly mirror the right’s problems 10 years ago.

Back then, conservatives thought their opposition to President Clinton would be enough. We didn’t like him, we didn’t trust him, and we expected the rest of the country would agree. “I think trust is a very important issue just from the response we have had from the people who show up at rallies,” Sen. Bob Dole told CNN in October of 1996.

During one of those rallies, Dole sounded almost like a car alarm: “Who do you trust, who do you trust, who do you trust?” he asked. The answer probably didn’t please him — enough people trusted Clinton to make him an easy winner.

At the same time, 94-year-old Strom Thurmond was running for re-election to the Senate from South Carolina. Republicans considered it an important seat, and Thurmond did manage to win and serve out his final six-year term. However, the fact that the GOP needed to depend on a nonagenarian didn’t portend well.

Today, though, the roles have reversed. Liberals hate George W. Bush, and assume that will be enough. “I don’t like the son of a bitch that lives in the White House,” Democratic congressional candidate Paul Hackett told USA Today.

Hate didn’t help. Hackett went on to lose to Jean Schmidt in a special election on Aug. 2.

But even though he won’t be coming to Washington, Hackett declared victory. “This was a success. We should all be proud,” he told supporters. Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois also drew the wrong lesson from the election. “There’s no safe Republican district. You can run, but you cannot hide,” he announced. But there’s no need for Schmidt to hide. You can find her in Congress.

Now that Hackett has failed, some liberals have latched on to Cindy Sheehan, a mother whose son died in Iraq. She wants a few choice words with President Bush. “You get that maniac out here to talk with me in person,” is how she put it.

James Moore, co-author of the book “Bush’s Brain” (hint — Moore doesn’t think the president has one, and instead suggests Karl Rove is the brains of the operation) says Sheehan “is becoming the symbol of our American Tiananmen.”

Sheehan is a mother who has lost her son. That’s a tragedy. But it’s nothing like Tiananmen. President Bush will probably ignore her, but he won’t send in a line of tanks to break up her protest. Besides, Sheehan is playing up her tragedy and turning it into comedy. “You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you’ll stop the terrorism,” she told Veterans For Peace this month.

Of course, terrorists were at work long before the U.S. invaded Iraq. Leaving before the job there is finished would only embolden them to strike again. And by bringing up the Palestinians, Sheehan is just roasting an old liberal chestnut.

Israel is voluntarily pulling settlers out of Gaza this week, but nobody (except, apparently, Sheehan) thinks that will stop Islamic terrorists from targeting the United States or Israel.

Meanwhile, 88-year-old Sen. Robert C. Byrd is already running campaign ads, which certainly suggests he’ll run for re-election next year in West Virginia. Maybe he’ll even win, as Thurmond once did. But if he’s the best man his party can field in a traditionally Democratic state, a Byrd victory would be a Pyrrhic one.

What the left needs is a George W. Bush — a candidate who will come out and be positive.

Recall that during 2000, Bush seldom mentioned Bill Clinton at all. He certainly never called the president a “liar” or a “loser,” as current Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid has called Bush this year. Instead, candidate Bush focused on what he would do differently as president, not on the perception that he was somehow a better person than Clinton.

That strategy was frustrating to some conservatives. We wanted more red meat. But it worked.

If Hackett, Byrd and Sheehan are the future of the Democratic party, it won’t be long before it completely disappears. To be successful, a Democratic candidate will need to be relentlessly positive. It may be frightening to conservatives — but that’s why if Hillary Clinton is as smart as she’s alleged to be, we’ll see a permanent smile etched on her face from now until 2008.

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The New Fertility Divide—What’s Happening in Canada? (Christian Post, 050831)

The nation of Canada is something of a mystery to most Americans. The U.S. and Canada share many dimensions of culture, language, heritage, and history. Nevertheless, the two cultures are also significantly different—as any visitor across the border will quickly notice.

In recent decades, Canada has moved in a generally more liberal direction, while American voters have elected a conservative candidate in five of the last seven presidential elections. In general terms, Canadian culture is more pervasively secularized than that of the U.S.—a factor that explains, at least in part, Canadian acceptance of gay marriage, marijuana, and other liberal causes. In addition to these observations, demographers now point to another significant distinction—a divide in fertility rates.

Writing in the August/September edition of Policy Review, Barbara Boyle Torrey and Nicholas Eberstadt argue that significant shifts within Canadian culture have produced a significant decline in fertility rates.

Torrey, visiting scholar at the Population Reference Bureau, and Eberstadt, who holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, note that the United States and Canada “are more similar to each other than any two other large countries on the planet today.” Nevertheless, the two nations remain “remarkably distinct from one other.” Torrey and Eberstadt argue that the political divide now separating Canada and the United States is eclipsed by demographic factors of even greater importance. The “steadily increasing differentiation of demographic trends” traced in Canada and the United States represent, they argue, a “largely unrecognized divergence” between the two neighboring countries.

“Twenty-five years ago the population profiles of Canada and the United States were similar,” the authors note. “Both were younger than their European allies, and their societies were more heterogeneous. In 1980 their populations had almost the same median age, fertility rates, and immigration rates. In the year since then, small changes in demographic variables have accumulated, ultimately creating two very different countries in North America by the end of the twentieth century.”

Significantly, Torrey and Eberstadt report that Canadians now have half a child fewer than Americans during their life spans. In other words, the Canadian fertility level is approximately 25% lower than that of Americans. Coupled with this is the fact that Canadians live two years longer on average. Thus, the divergence in fertility rates is likely to grow, and the resulting population changes are likely to be exaggerated in Canada—especially as the population ages.

“Changes in patterns of marriage and fertility are the accumulated outcomes of millions of personal decisions by men and women,” Torrey and Eberstadt acknowledge. “When couples, one at a time, make decisions that differ in aggregate from the couples in a neighboring country, it is a reflection of deliberate agency rather than mere chance. That’s why the still-widening demographic gap that has opened up between Canada and the U.S. says even more about the two societies and their futures than public or policy differences on any single issue.”

The facts speak for themselves. Canadians have 25% fewer children than Americans. This is all the more remarkable given the fact that Canadians have had more children than Americans in previous generations. As recently as 1945, Canadian women had a half child more than American women. In the years since, total fertility rates in both nations have gone down, but the two neighbors have switched places in terms of a fertility advantage.

Several related demographic factors are of interest. On average, Americans have babies earlier than Canadians and are more likely to marry. At the same time, Canadians are less likely to divorce. The marriage rate differential goes a long way towards explaining the divergence in fertility rates. At present, the Canadian marriage rate is only 60% of the U.S. rate. Canadians are also more likely to enter into “common law” marriages that are less likely to produce children.

What explains changes in fertility rates? Torrey and Eberstadt suggest three major hypotheses. First, some suggest a “Family Economics” hypothesis. Proponents of this theory argue that “the opportunity cost of having children increases directly with women’s education and income.” In other words, fertility rates are likely to fall as women become better educated and more employable. A “Relative Income” hypothesis suggests that “large birth cohorts will have more trouble reaching their expected income goals than smaller cohorts.” A smaller number of workers would presumably lead to higher income rates. Third, a “Role Incomparability” hypothesis posits that “the ability of women to combine childbirth and work is a strong determinant of how many children they will eventually have.”

As Torrey and Eberstadt observe, these hypotheses are not necessarily incompatible. Couples and individuals may combine or modify these factors in making their own decisions concerning reproduction.

The most interesting part of Torrey and Eberstadt’s article focuses on worldview issues rather than economics. Well into their analysis, the authors raise the role of values and religion in explaining the fertility divide.

“The role of values in explaining social trends such as fertility is harder to quantify than personal income or government services,” they affirm. “But changing values may still hold insights that the better-quantified variables cannot. A number of studies have documented differences in some core values between Canada and the United States.” Torrey and Eberstadt believe that these divergences in values go a long way toward explaining the differential in birth rates.

The role of the man in the family turns out to be an important predictor of fertility rates. Torrey and Eberstadt report that a recent survey asked people in Canada and the U.S. whether they agreed that, “The father of the family must be master in his own house.” Those who answered in the affirmative were more likely to report higher birth rates. The segment of the population that expressed agreement with a strong role of the father in the family “was highly correlated with total fertility rates across Canadian provinces and U.S. regions in 2000,” the authors document. Since Americans were more likely to respond with an affirmation of a strong male role in the family, they were also more likely to report higher rates of fertility.

Torrey and Eberstadt then focus on the importance of religion as a demographic variable. They note, “People who are actively religious tend to marry more and stay together longer. To the extent that time spent married during reproductive years increases fertility, then religion would be a positive factor in fertility rates.” In Canada, women who reported weekly church attendance were 46% more likely to have a third child than women who did not. Americans reported a higher level of church attendance and produced a higher level of fertility.

The process of secularization has been accelerated in Canada, especially over the last three decades. This factor seems to play a part in explaining the decrease in Canadian birth rates.

But Torrey and Eberstadt point to another related factor. “Religiosity, as defined by importance of God and church attendance, is also significant for fertility because it is the most powerful predictor of attitudes toward abortions,” they note. Since 1980, the Canadian abortion rate has been rising while the American rate has been falling.

In conclusion, the authors explain that “changing values in the U.S. and Canada may be contributing to the fertility divergence.” Since Americans are more likely to affirm a strong role of men in the family and more frequent church attendance, we can expect a higher level of fertility. At the same time, these same factors also serve to predict a lower level of abortion. On the other hand, Canada’s higher abortion rate “may be the result of changes in values,” which are now firmly established in Canadian culture.

In the end, worldview issues must surely play the determinative role in the reproductive decisions made by couples. A decline in national fertility rates must surely be fundamentally related to basic values and commitments.

One key insight from Torrey and Eberstadt’s study is crucial—when a society increasingly embraces a secularized worldview (and all that goes with it, including acceptance of abortion), fertility rates understandably fall. The Christian worldview—a worldview that understands children to be gifts from God and affirms parenthood—represents a cognitive counter-culture in the midst of an increasingly secularized society. We are indebted to Torrey and Eberstadt for documenting this truth.

________________________________________________

R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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Angry Left shamefully exploits race, Iraq, Kyoto against Bush on Katrina (townhall.com, 050903)

Mark Tapscott

Hurricane Katrina was barely beyond New Orleans and the Mississippi coast when the strident voices of the Angry Left began screaming that the death and destruction were the fault of President Bush, Gov. Haley Barbour and White America’s racism.

Disaster brings out the best and the worst in people and the former was vividly on display as helicopter crews bravely plucked desperate people from roofs, bus caravans ferried exhausted refugees to safe havens across the South and Americans everywhere began pouring out a veritable torrent of dollars to help the needy.

But that’s not what the Left wanted us to see.

For the editors of The Washington Post, for example, Katrina proved White America’s racism remains, creating in the storm’s aftermath “a mass of desperate-looking Black folk on the run in the Deep South. Some without shoes.” Such was the lead in a front-page story headlined “To Me, It Just Seems Like Black People Are Marked.”

Watching the stream of television images of refugees stranded in the Superdome and along stretches of Interstate 10, Post reporter Wil Haygood found “no escaping that race had become a subtext to the unfolding drama of the hurricane’s aftermath.”

No matter that the Black family Haygood profiled said they had been passed over by a helicopter from a “Black National Guard unit.” The incident demonstrated for Haygood that “in the South, the issue of race – black, white – always seems ready to come rolling off the tongue as a summer whistle.”

A similar obsession was evident in the Friday morning WTOP radio remarks of “Hardball” host Chris Matthews. The former flak for Jimmy Carter, Tip O’Neill and Ed Muskie said his weekend show would focus on Katrina and its aftermath: “It’s not a nice topic, it’s about race, you know, it’s about class, it’s about poverty, it’s about screw-ups, it’s not a happy topic.”

Other voices on the Angry Left pointed to opposition to the Kyoto Protocol and other anti-global warming measures by President Bush and Barbour when he was Republican National Committee Chairman.

“The hurricane that struck Louisiana and Mississippi on Monday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming,” said The Boston Globe’s Ross Gelspan in a column appearing in The International Herald Tribune, owned by The New York Times.

We have global warming because “in 2000, big oil and big coal scored their biggest electoral victory yet when George W. Bush was elected president - and subsequently took suggestions from the industry for his climate and energy policies,” said Gelspan.

On Ariana Huffington’s blog, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pointed to Barbour: “As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, it’s worth recalling the central role that [Barbour] played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol …Now we are all learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged.”

Then there was Swing State Project’s Bob Brigham who seemed to think Bush purposely left New Orleans vulnerable: “For most of Bush’s time as president, FEMA has been saying this could be the deadliest scenario facing America. And Bush cut the preparedness funding, sent our strategic reserve National Guard troops to fight an unnecessary war and then went on vacation. Not only is Bush the worst president ever, but he is a total a—hole for f—king over New Orleans.”

These are just a few and not even the worst examples compiled by blogger Arthur Chrenkoff of the Angry Left’s blind rage and hatred for Bush, Republican leaders like Barbour and White Americans in general. Call them the “Always Hate America” crowd.

Maybe the intensity of their hate and rage prevents these poor souls from seeing the facts about global warming and hurricanes. They tell us global warming is causing more and stronger hurricanes than ever before. The truth is, as TechCentralStation’s James Glassman points out, we have had fewer hurricanes in recent years than in previous decades and they are weaker. Just check out this table on the National Hurricane Center web site.

As for race, speaking as an Oklahoman living in Maryland and with ancestors from Texas, Tennessee and Virginia, I know only too well about the legacy of slavery. I also know that in my 55 years in this great nation I’ve seen in the America of 2005 the emergence of arguably the least prejudiced nation on earth. So why can the Angry Left only see the dead hand of the past?

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Systemic failure (townhall.com, 050903)

Rich Tucker

New Orleans is under water. Thousands of people are feared dead. The city may be unlivable for months. This may be the greatest disaster in American history.

Can this really be President Bush’s fault?

Even before we knew just how bad things were, the left began attacking. On Aug. 29, as Hurricane Katrina was still moving across the south, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped a line to HuffingtonPost.com. He attacked the Bush administration for deciding not to treat CO2 as a pollutant, a decision Kennedy says was influenced by Mississippi’s current governor, Haley Barbour.

“Now we are learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence, which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged,” Kennedy wrote. “Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and — now — Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing to our children.”

Okay, let’s call Kennedy’s bluff. Let’s imagine that, in 2001, President Bush had outlawed all automobiles, buses and trucks. And that he had shut down all coal-, oil- and natural gas-fired power plants. Doing so would have marginally trimmed carbon dioxide emissions over the last four-and-a-half years.

Does anyone think this would have done anything to slow down global warming (if indeed global warming is occurring)? Of course not. Even if we had done all that, we wouldn’t have seen any results for a decade at least.

Furthermore, is there anyone who thinks eliminating those emissions would have prevented Katrina, or made the storm less severe? That idea is simply outrageous. There were hurricanes before man started burning carbon, and there will be hurricanes after man has perished from the earth.

Actually, though, had we taken the hypothetical steps outlined above, the entire country would look like New Orleans does today: No power, no transportation, no fresh food, chaos.

Our automobiles and power plants make today’s suburban, air-conditioned, well-fed lifestyle possible. It’s because they’re absent from New Orleans that the city is in chaos.

What the federal government can and should do is make our lifestyle even easier to obtain.

For example, no new oil refineries have opened in the U.S. since 1976. According to Lon Anderson, director of government relations at AAA Mid-Atlantic, “with new environmental restrictions it would probably be impossible to get permits to build a new oil refinery in America.”

Here’s a classic case of the government interfering in the economy. If the market had been left to its own devices, oil companies would still be building new refineries, and we wouldn’t be so dependent on the existing refineries on the Gulf Coast — the refineries that had to be shut down during Hurricane Katrina.

Instead, in pursuit of the clean environment Kennedy and others profess to want, we’ve shut down hundreds of refineries in the last 20 years. Unless we open new ones, this won’t be the final time we face severe gasoline shortages and high prices.

This storm was predictable in more ways than one. Forecasters knew on Friday that it would hit the Gulf Coast on Monday. And it was also predictable that a storm would eventually hit New Orleans. In 2002 the New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote that a hurricane could eventually turn the city “into a lake as much as 30 feet deep, fouled with chemicals and waste from ruined septic systems, businesses and homes. Such a flood could trap hundreds of thousands of people in buildings and in vehicles.” But our bureaucrats failed us.

“Everyone thought there was a plan,” Sydney Barthelemy, mayor from 1986 until 1994, told CNN. “Everyone thought that we could handle most of the problems that would come due to a hurricane. No one ever dreamed that it would … be such devastation.” Well, in the 2002 newspaper report, a Red Cross official predicted between 25,000 and 100,000 people would die in a major storm.

When the tale of this storm is told, there will be plenty of blame to go around. New Orleans should have done more to evacuate everyone. Louisiana should have had more shelters and supplies ready. The federal government should have acted more swiftly to get troops into place and prevent looting. Those trapped in the city shouldn’t have fired weapons at hospitals and rescue helicopters.

President Bush could, and certainly should, have acted more swiftly. But we also need to remember the president, with all his power and influence, is only a man. He doesn’t have super powers. The bureaucrats he leads have failed him, and all of us.

A tragedy always brings out the best in Americans. We’ve already donated more than $21 million to the Red Cross, and in the coming days we’ll donate more. Houston has opened its arms to those flooded out, and people nationwide are volunteering to help. Sadly, in this case, we’re proving to be better than our bureaucracy, which didn’t perform as well as it needs to.

There will be a next time, and we can and must demand better.

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The left and hysteria (townhall.com, 050927)

Dennis Prager

If you want to understand the Left, the best place to start is with an understanding of hysteria. Leading leftists either use hysteria as a political tactic or are actually hysterics.

Take almost any subject the Left discusses and you will find hysteria.

The Patriot Act: According to leftist spokesmen and groups, the Patriot Act is a grave threat to liberty and democracy. It is frequently likened to the tactics of a fascist state. This is pure hysteria. The Los Angeles Times recently published statistics concerning the use of the Act. Through 2004, of the 7,136 complaints to the Justice Department’s inspector general, one was related to the Patriot Act. The number of “sneak and peek” warrants, allowing searches without telling a subject, totaled 155. The number of roving wiretaps was 49, and the number of personal records seizures under Section 215 of the Act was 35.

The war in Iraq: It is not enough for leftist opponents of the war to argue that the war is a mistake, was initiated due to faulty intelligence, or is being poorly prosecuted. Rather they charge that President Bush lied, that the war was waged for Halliburton, and that America is engaged in a criminal and imperialist enterprise. Each charge is a form of hysteria.

Risks to health: Not everyone who believes the hysterical claims of danger made about secondhand smoke, baby formula, dodgeball or Bextra is on the Left. But the Left leads the country in hysteria over dangers to health. That is why leftist organizations are generally incapable of merely saying that something is unhealthy. The danger must be described as the killer of hundreds of thousands and often be ascribed to some murderous corporate conspiracy.

Environment: More people may be attacked by aardvarks in any given year than visit the remote and frozen region of Alaska known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). It is the home, however, of vast oil reserves and many caribou. Good people can differ on whether or not to drill for oil there. But the rhetoric of the Left is hysterical. Listening to leftist organizations one would think that drilling would bring no benefit to America and would render the caribou virtually extinct. None of this is true. It is all drama.

Likewise there is largely hysteria over global warming and the charge that man — especially Homo Americanus — is the cause of it. The great number of scientists who claim that we are in a normal warming period or in no major weather change at all are ignored. Only the most hysterical scenarios are offered by the Left. Witness the reasons given for Hurricane Katrina. Yet even The New York Times reported that scientists are virtually unanimous in denying that the hurricane has anything to do with global warming.

Animal rights: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is the living embodiment of hysteria. Take their program “Holocaust on your plate,” which equates barbecuing chickens with the cremating of the Jews in the Holocaust. It is one thing to be concerned about chickens’ welfare, but only hysterics compare eating them with the slaughter of a people.

Racism: There is no worse charge than racism. Acting hatefully toward people because of their skin color is among the most vile acts a person can engage in. Yet the Left throws that charge around as if it were the essence of the American people (which, come to think of it, is what many on the Left believe). Most of the time, however, the charge of racism — such as when it is directed at opponents of race-based affirmative action — is just another example of hysteria.

Christianity: Most on the Left really believe that this country is on the verge of a theocracy because George W. Bush is an evangelical Christian, because the words “under God” are still in the Pledge of Allegiance, and because most Americans don’t think marriage ought to be redefined.

Other examples abound. America neglects its poor, beats up its gays, oppresses its women, fouls its environment, ignores its children’s educations, denies blacks their votes, and invades other countries for corporate profits: These are common accusations of the Left.

No event is free of leftist hysteria. On the third day after Katrina, civil rights activist Randall Robinson reported that blacks in New Orleans were resorting to cannibalism. Indeed, most of the news media coverage bordered on the hysterical. Not to mention the hysterical predictions of 10,000-plus dead in New Orleans.

None of this is to deny that the Right also gets hysterical. Some right-wing reactions to immigration and Terry Schiavo provide such examples.

But the irony in all of this is that the Left sees itself as the side that thinks intellectually and non-emotionally. And that is hysterical.

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Whose mainstream is it? (Washington Times, 051007)

Sen. Hillary Clinton, New York Democrat, addressing supporters at a recent fund-raiser in Quogue, said: “I deplore the radical left and the extremists on the religious right. I am in the ‘mainstream.’ “ This is indeed a curious comment from a woman who reflexively defended every position on the left throughout her political peregrination.

Surely there is a method to this ploy. Americans don’t like extremists, so the senator has veered to the center. But this is not a true center, “a vital center” as Arthur Schlesinger once defined it, but rather a center of her own creation.

Mrs. Clinton, of course, is not alone. The day the Senate voted confirmed John Roberts as chief justice, Sen. Chuck Schumer, New York Democrat, who voted against Roberts’ approval, said, “I hope he won’t impose his ideology on court decisions.”

What could this comment possibly mean coming from a man who is deeply committed to an ideology, notwithstanding his denials? If someone believes abortion is a right that must remain untrammeled or that special rights must be conferred to homosexuals, aren’t these positions ideological?

It seems the word ideological is used as a pejorative when an individual doesn’t share your views. Mr. Schumer has arrogated to himself the role of ideological litmus tester. When Chief Justice Roberts indicated his first and overarching responsibility is upholding the law, namely the U.S. Constitution, Mr. Schumer replied, “I would like to see a moderate interpretation of the law.” Paraphrasing Justice Scalia, a moderate interpretation of the Constitution is halfway between what the Constitution says and what Mr. Schumer might like it to say. That summarizes the senator’s view very well, I believe.

It is revealing Mr. Schumer, applying his self-designed liberal test, said Janice Rogers Brown, a talented pro-life judge, is unqualified for the Supreme Court because of her stance on abortion. She was deemed outside the mainstream. Whose mainstream should be patently obvious. Moreover, Mr. Schumer seems to have forgotten no one gave him presidential powers.

When faced with criticism of this kind, Mr. Schumer relies on stare decisis, established precedent, to make his case. But he must know that precedents from “slaves as chattel” to “separate but equal” have been overturned by the Supreme Court. I don’t think it is farfetched to consider a court decision that overturns the Kelo case and restores the sanctity of private property.

Yet the echo of “mainstream” fills the airwaves as propagandists like Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Schumer contend there will be a “fight” if President Bush tries to appoint someone to Justice O’Connor’s seat who is, heaven forfend, a conservative.

In this context, a conservative is someone who takes the words in the Constitution seriously. As a strict constructionist, the conservative believes the Founders knew what they were doing to preserve the republic. Creative interpretation or inventing rights only dilutes state authority and invites the delegitimation of government. Hence one can argue the strict constructionist is in the mainstream. It is the left-leaning Stephen Breyers and Ruth Bader Ginsburgs who are outside any political mainstream, despite the praise heaped on these judges by the New York senators and the New York press corps.

It is instructive that Justice Ginsburg, a former lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union appointed to the court by President Bill Clinton, is considered, in Mr. Schumer’s fevered imagination, a moderate. However, if one agrees with this bizarre assessment, then anyone to Justice Ginsburg’s right — an area in which there is enormous political space — would be considered an extremist.

In the political arena in which language evokes emotion, words such as “moderate,” “extremist” and “mainstream” should be put under a microscope of rational analysis. As I see it, these words have ceased to have meaning; they have been misshapen by the desire for political advantage.

The next time, a politician says he or she is in the mainstream but his or her opponent is not, ask what is meant by mainstream. I think you’ll be surprised by the response. Perhaps not, if you are addicted to the mindless recitation of empty cliches that now surround campaigns and political speeches.

Herbert London is president of the Hudson Institute. He also is author of “Decade of Denial” (Lexington Books).

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Back Down Memory Lane At Berkeley: Michael Lerner assembles the “Religious Left.” (Weekly Standard, 051011)

MICHAEL LERNER was back on campus at Berkeley. But this time he is a portly Jewish rabbi leading 1,200 mostly middle-aged “spiritual progressives,” and not the young Students for a Democratic Society agitator targeted by J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s.

The “Politics of Meaning,” Lerner’s label for his spiritual liberalism, peaked in the early 1990s, when his supposed fans, Bill and Hillary Clinton, ascended to power. But Hillary disavowed Lerner when his quirky views attracted fire, and the old Berkeley activist, though still publishing Tikkun, seemingly faded.

Now Lerner is back. And his “Conference on Spiritual Activism,” held at Berkeley this summer, tried to present a left-wing alternative to the dreaded Religious Right. Amid opening “visualizations” directed to Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, and the “goddess Divine Mother,” Lerner hosted a fairly prominent array of Religious Left luminaries.

Although professing to transcend political labels, Lerner seemed pretty un-transcendent: “In Europe they [the right] turned against the Jews,” he declared. “In the U.S. they demeaned African Americans and Native Americans. Increasingly that role [targets of the right] is played today by gays and lesbians, feminists, liberals, and secular humanists.”

Conservatives get away with this because liberals “don’t get it” about religion, Lerner explained. His message dovetailed with the bestselling Why the Right is Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get it, by evangelical left activist Jim Wallis, who shared the podium with Lerner. A former SDS himself, Wallis founded Sojourners, a journal of liberal Christian activism, over 30 years ago. Although ostensibly more moderate now, Wallis inevitably resorts

to nostalgic talk of arrests and demonstrations. “This is how you do interfaith work,” Wallis joked. “You all get arrested for your faith and talk theology in jail.”

Millions of evangelicals and Catholics don’t feel represented by Jerry Falwell or “right-wing bishops,” Wallis insisted, describing a battle in “all of our great traditions between fundamentalism and prophetic faith.” The trouble, Wallis and Lerner agreed, is that too many liberals don’t appreciate religion. Wallis recalled a young homosexual saying it was easier to “come out gay” than be “religious” in the Democratic party.

Central to Lerner’s and Wallis’s “spiritual activist platform” was opposing the war in Iraq. Berkeley professor Michael Nagler noted that the same U.S. Congress that tried to keep Terri Schiavo alive “cheerfully voted to kill 100,000 Iraqis without batting an eye.” David Robinson of Pax Christi said of the Bush administration: “They’re lying our kids to death in Iraq.” More succinctly, Rev Osagyefu Uhuru Sekou of Clergy and Laity Concerned opined that “Arabs have become the new niggers” and Iraq is the new “white man’s burden.”

After war, sex was a favorite theme. “My grandmother believes God has a penis,” Rev. Sekou reported, warning activists to sublimate their “feminist arrogance” and not attack traditional religious teachings directly. Unitarian minister and sexologist Debra Haffner complained, “Too many of us learned [as children] that some sexual acts are sinful.” But she told a supportive audience that she favors “sexual and relational justice for all.” Churches, synagogues, mosques, and ashrams need to be claimed in the name of sexual freedom, Haffner urged.

United Church of Christ pastor Ama Zenya thanked Hafner for her insights but then criticized liberal religious activists. “Is human life sacred only after birth?” she asked a surprised audience. “Can we expand our loving concern beyond our own lives?” Describing regret over her own abortion, Hafner complained, “The Left has bought the capitalist paradigm” and its “individualist materialism.”

SUCH SELF-CRITICISM of the left was rare. Almost all vitriol was aimed rightward. Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, a frequent advisor to religion-perplexed Democrats, explained that the left worships a “nurturing” God, while the right adores a “punitive” deity. Conservatives believe in a “strict” God who requires good behavior for getting into heaven, according to Lakoff, while progressives emphasize “unconditional love.” United Methodist lobbyist Jim Winkler was less analytical: “Angry white men [which describes almost all religious conservatives] are like a wounded bear striking out in desperation,” he observed.

Defrocked Catholic priest Matthew Fox, now an Episcopalian, blamed war and economic injustice on “those who want to worship a dominating punitive Father God which includes the put down of women, nature, [and] gays.” In soothing contrast, Fox offered a unisex, pantheistic “mother/father God who is embedded in nature, creativity, our bodies and all our art forms.” Fox lambasted the Pope for defeating liberation theology and faulted Protestants for succumbing to a “kooky Christianity” of “domination and not of justice.”

Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong lashed out at this “domination” religion. “It’s time to name evil as evil when sounded in pious accents of biblical

religion,” Spong declared. Conservative Catholicism and “evangelical fundamentalists” are growing because “hysterical people are seeking security,” Spong fretted. Referring to the rise of religious conservatives based in the South, Spong claimed, to the audience’s delight, “The old [segregationist] George Wallace vote simply applied perfume and call themselves the Religious Right.”

Not able to match Spong’s rhetoric, Congresswoman Lynne Woolsey of California still tried to talk about religion. “If you measure progressive goals against conservative goals there is no question which comes closer to meeting the tenets we associate with faith,” Woolsey stammered. “I don’t know about you, but I missed the part of the Sermon on the Mount that mentioned tax cuts and an ownership society.”

Mindful of such progressive spiritual goals, an opening “visualization” exercise summoned a wide range of spirits, including the archangels, Adam and Eve, Hindu deities, Socrates and Aristotle, Moses and Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Confucius, Leonardo Da Vinci, White Buffalo Woman (from Sioux mythology), anthropologist Jane Goodall, environmentalist Rachel Carson, Gandhi, Anne Frank, Mother Theresa, and the Dalai Lama.

“Breathe, remember to breathe,” the visualizer instructed the unusually quiet activists.

Such religion provides “existential weaponry” for fighting political injustice, Rev. Sekou stressed. “Not enough Democrats are willing to tell the truth,” he said. “So we’re depending on you.” Rabbi Lerner, seemingly no less enthusiastic than when agitating on Berkeley’s campus nearly four decades ago, smiled and smoothly moved back and forth from podium to audience. It was like old times again.

Mark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

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How the Left harmed America this week (townhall.com, 051011)

by Dennis Prager

Not a week goes by that some part of the Left does not hurt America. But in the past two weeks, three examples stood out for the degree of such harm.

The first example involved the ACLU, which has threatened Southwest Airlines with a lawsuit. Southwest ordered a passenger off a flight after she refused to cover her T-shirt on which was printed an expletive — “Fu—ers” — referring to President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The ACLU position is not surprising. That organization had once defended a high school student whose school had prohibited him from wearing to class a T-shirt that read “Big Pecker.”

I have previously noted in this column the widespread approval of foul language on the Left, such as the expletive-filled entertainment at a John Kerry fundraiser organized by MoveOn.org. Nor is it surprising that a high percentage of my e-mail from people on the Left contains obscenities. To most Americans, the huge increase in public cursing is a sign of a deteriorating civilization; to the Left it is a sign of a freer, less hypocritical one.

The second example was a federal judge appointed by former President Bill Clinton ordering the Defense Department to release all remaining photos of prisoner abuse by Americans at Abu Ghraib prison. Though it is certain that the only effect of the photos will be to further endanger Americans at home and abroad and increase the danger to American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and though there is absolutely no need for the public to see these photos, the judge ordered their release.

Thanks to this decision by one judge, we are in for another orgy of anti-Americanism in the foreign and domestic news media and another propaganda victory for those who murder people trying to vote, place bombs in tourist hotels and slaughter innocent human beings like sheep.

To understand the destructive nature of this decision, imagine what would have happened during World War II if photos of similar (or more serious) abuse of alleged Nazis were available. Would any judge in America have ordered that they be published? Would such a lawsuit have ever been brought?

Many on the Left regard the term “national security” as essentially a right-wing cover for conservatism, which they equate with a form of fascism. That explains the Left’s contempt for the Patriot Act, and it helps explain the decision of U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein. That Americans will be killed as a result of a judge’s decision to release photos is of no consequence to the Left. Indeed, for the ACLU, release of the photos is a victory precisely because it does weaken American ability to fight Islamic terrorists.

A third example is the Left’s libel of Bill Bennett. I covered this issue in detail in my last column. Suffice it to say here that a prominent liberal writer, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, sees the larger issue raised by the nearly universal left-wing smear of Bennett as a racist who advocates the abortion of all black babies. In a courageous column, Cohen wrote that “The GOP was the party of Joe McCarthy. . . . Now, though, it is the Democrats who . . . stifle debate and smother thought.”

From the pointless judicial weakening of American security, to the fight to force airlines to allow passengers to display obscenities, to the ongoing libel of Bill Bennett — a libel as far from truth as is the infamous “blood libel” that claims that Jews slaughter Gentile children to use their blood for baking matzo — this was just another week of harm to a great civilization by barbarians inside the gates.

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Criminalizing Conservatives: Fall of 2005 will be remembered as a time when it became clear that a strategy of criminalization had been implemented to inflict defeat on conservatives. (Weekly Standard, 051016)

THE MOST EFFECTIVE CONSERVATIVE LEGISLATOR of—oh—the last century or so, Congressman Tom DeLay, was indicted last month for allegedly violating Texas campaign finance laws, and has vacated his position as House majority leader. The Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, is under investigation by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission for his sale of stock in the medical company his family started.

White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove and vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby have been under investigation by a special federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, for more than two years. When appointed in 2003 by the Bush Justice Department, Fitzgerald’s mandate was to find out if the leaking to reporters of the identity of a CIA employee, Valerie Plame, was a violation of a 1982 statute known as the Philip Agee law, and if so, who violated it. It now seems clear that Rove and Libby are the main targets of the prosecutor, and that both are in imminent danger of indictment.

What do these four men have in common, other than their status as prosecutorial targets? Since 2001, they have been among the most prominent promoters of the conservative agenda of the Bush administration. For over four years, they have helped two strong conservatives, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, successfully advance an agenda for change in America. To the extent these four are sidelined, there is a real chance that the Bush-Cheney administration will become less successful.

A number of analysts have argued that all this fits a fairly predictable pattern of two-term presidents: a vigorous first term, followed by agenda fatigue and assorted scandals in the second term. Bill Clinton, after all, had his Monica Lewinsky, Ronald Reagan his Iran-contra, Nixon his Watergate. Even Dwight Eisenhower saw the resignation in disgrace of his powerful chief of staff, Sherman Adams, over the questionable gift of a vicuña coat.

The situation today, however, seems different. There was plenty of political polarization in those earlier presidencies, but today polarization divides more neatly along partisan lines. The earlier presidencies had plenty of internal ideological rifts, but the incidence of scandal and investigation was not exclusive to one side or the other.

In today’s Washington, as has been true for decades, classified information is leaked by many different players in any given policy fight in the government. The Bush administration has been replete with leaks of presumably classified information. Is the identity of Valerie Plame the most consequential leak of the last four years? Are Rove and Libby bigger leakers than, say, the CIA’s George Tenet or Richard Armitage at the State Department? Do no employees of the Central Intelligence Agency (almost universally anti-Bush and anti-conservative) ever leak anything? If so, have they been indicted, or investigated by a special prosecutor? Any prosecutor?

Much the same is true of DeLay’s alleged laundering of soft (corporate and/or unlimited) money in 2002 races for the Texas legislature, where only hard money (limited, individual contributions) is allowed. At the press conference called by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to comment on the DeLay indictment and the “culture of corruption” fostered in Washington by conservative Republicans, she was asked about her own high-dollar soft-money fundraising—supposedly banned for members of Congress by the 2002 McCain-Feingold law—to defeat a ballot initiative on congressional redistricting sponsored by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. She replied that her soft-money fundraising was utterly different from DeLay’s because it had been blessed by her campaign lawyers, and she never raises soft money while standing or sitting on government property. Without missing a beat, reporters at the Pelosi press conference dropped the awkward subject and returned the focus to DeLay and to the larger pattern of Republican corruption DeLay’s indictment supposedly signifies.

Bill Frist suddenly and unexpectedly became Senate Majority Leader in December 2002. In the 2004 campaign, Frist broke Senate precedent and visited the state of his Democratic counterpart, Minority Leader Tom Daschle, to campaign for Daschle’s Republican opponent.

Then, in 2005, Frist launched a campaign against Democratic judicial filibusters. Though he did not succeed in his goal of a Senate rules change, his efforts are widely believed to have greatly reduced the possibility that Democrats could successfully filibuster a Bush Supreme Court nominee. Having emerged in the last year as a conservative leader, Frist now finds himself under investigation. Just another coincidence?

Don’t try selling the idea of coincidence to Kenneth Tomlinson, until recently the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Last May, the New York Times published a lengthy account of Tomlinson’s efforts to bring increased balance to public television—i.e., giving a bit more of a hearing to conservatives. He commissioned a modest study to confirm what most everyone already knew, that the practice on shows produced or moderated by Bill Moyers is to interview conservatives and Republicans only when they are in disagreement with the predominant conservative or Republican position on a given issue.

Within days of the Times piece, Democratic congressmen David Obey and John Dingell, ranking minority members on two key committees, wrote a letter to the CPB inspector general, Kenneth Konz, demanding a detailed, elaborate investigation of Tomlinson. Not only did Konz comply, he asked Tomlinson to provide all his emails, which Tomlinson did, and conducted a search of Tomlinson’s office files without telling him. A few months later, in September, Konz gave an interview to Bloomberg News in which he confided, concerning an ongoing and incomplete investigation, “Clearly there are indications of possible violations.” Konz later said he had been misunderstood, and that it was much too early to come to any conclusions.

Tomlinson’s term as CPB chairman expired last month, though he remains a member of the board. But the inspector general’s investigation of Tomlinson’s conduct as chairman, designed by Obey and Dingell and their liberal staffers, continues with no end in sight.

Meanwhile, a kind of ideological criminalization of active, visible conservatives has become almost second nature to the left and the elite professions, including journalism and teaching, in which they predominate. Did Dick Cheney change his views on regime change in Iraq between 1991 and 2003? Don’t ask him why. It’s enough to give a one-word explanation of his views: “Halliburton.” The unspoken premise is that Cheney changed his position to line his pockets.

And what was the left’s central, most deeply felt image of the presidential campaign of 2004? Actively marketed by Dan Rather and CBS News, it was this: John Kerry was a war hero and George W. Bush went AWOL. AWOL is, of course, an acronym: “Absent Without Leave.” In the military, being AWOL is a crime subject to court martial, and to lengthy imprisonment. So saying Bush was AWOL was not just an attempt to compare his military service unfavorably with Kerry’s, which is fair enough. It was an attempt to criminalize Bush’s military career. Though the attempt backfired when it became clear CBS had accepted faked evidence, Democratic and liberal elites were sold on the idea that “war hero” vs. “AWOL” was the key to undermining the widespread respect Bush had achieved by his response to 9/11.

Why are conservative Republicans, who control the executive and legislative branches of government for the first time in living memory, so vulnerable to the phenomenon of criminalization? Is it simple payback for the impeachment of Bill Clinton? Or is it a reflection of some deep malady at the heart of American politics? If criminalization is seen to loom ahead for every conservative who begins successfully to act out his or her beliefs in government or politics, is the project of conservative reform sustainable?

We don’t pretend to have all the answers, or a solid answer even to one of these questions. But it’s a reasonable bet that the fall of 2005 will be remembered as a time when it became clear that a comprehensive strategy of criminalization had been implemented to inflict defeat on conservatives who seek to govern as conservatives. And it is clear that thinking through a response to this challenge is a task conservatives can no longer postpone.

-Jeffrey Bell and William Kristol

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Merlot Democrats to the Rescue! Keep talking, Dr. Dean. (National Review Online, 051019)

By Jonah Goldberg

Things seem fairly bleak for the Republicans. House Majority Leader Tom Delay has been hobbled, at least temporarily, by an indictment. Karl Rove may soon be indicted. The Senate Majority Leader faces an investigation of his stock sales. George W. Bush isn’t getting any credit for the successes in Iraq, and his nomination of a certain Supreme Court nominee has been troubled from the get-go. Rank-and-file Republicans and movement conservatives are bickering as never before.

Fittingly, many Righties are moping like the kids in those old commercials who are rescued from the doldrums by yelling, “Hey Kool Aid!”

One of the painful truths of growing up is that, alas, the Kool Aid Man isn’t coming through that brick wall, no matter how parched we are or how plaintively we call him.

The Merlot Man, however, is another story. You may know him as Howard Dean, chair of the Democratic National Committee. Whenever Republicans get depressed and start fingering their pearl-handled revolvers, they can count on Merlot Man to come metaphorically bursting in with a “Yeaaaaggghhh!” to cheer us up.

Why “Merlot Man”? Well, funny story. According to the Washington Post, as Dean has traveled around the country recently giving pep talks to members of his party, he has taken to describing its most loyal base as “Merlot Democrats.”

This is a little odd, given that for decades now, Democrats have complained that Republicans unfairly call them names, making them sound more liberal, sissified, and elitist than they really are. Years of GOP attacks on “limousine liberals,” “ACLU liberals,” “San Francisco Democrats” and so forth have finally paid off. That’s why you always hear prominent Democrats, when asked if they’re liberals, respond, “I don’t believe in labels.” If pressed, they might boldly say, “If it’s liberal to like ice cream, than I am a liberal!”

When Howard Dean took over the Democratic party, he embraced the work of a guy named George Lakoff, who describes himself as a “metaphor analyst.”

Lakoff’s first brush with publicity came in 2001 from his ill-considered analysis of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

“Towers are symbols of phallic power,” he wrote, “and their collapse reinforces the idea of loss of power.” Then Lakoff’s metaphor-analysis machine surely started to smoke. “The planes,” he continued “penetrating the towers with a plume of heat, and the Pentagon, a vaginal image from the air, penetrated by the plane as missile.”

I know what you’re thinking, because I’m thinking it, too: This is the perfect guy to advise the Democrats in the post-Clinton era!

Lakoff’s argument for the Democrats came largely from his book Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Framing is PhD-speak for “make bad things sound good.” Never mind that this “idea” has been around since the first caveman-politician who ran for Head Guy With Sharp Rock.

Lakoff’s tough-love diagnosis for the Democrats: You’ve been right about everything for 40 years! The only problem was that those mean Republicans kept twisting your words around with clever, poll-tested phrases.

Lakoff told Democrats to take those freeze-dried ideas they’ve had stored up in the DNC fallout shelter since the 1960s and put ‘em in shiny new packaging. Don’t call them “trial lawyers,” talk about “public protection attorneys.” Instead of the downbeat, eat-your-spinach phrase “environmental protection,” Democrats should say something spicier like “poison-free communities.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.

The Dems ate it up, bought the book by the ton, and paid Lakoff to work his magic. Dean called him “one of the most influential political thinkers of the progressive movement.”

Clearly, he and Lakoff holed up somewhere and worked tirelessly into the night, clipboards in hand, to come up with precisely the right words to describe Democrats. Now Dean’s taking it on the road, revving up Democratic audiences by explaining his Lakoff-influenced plan for taking back America.

“No longer will the Democratic party allow itself to be defined by the Republican party,” Dean thundered recently at a Nevada confab.

So, after years of denouncing the GOP for unfairly labeling Democrats as effete, coastal liberals out of touch with heartland America, what label does Dean think best describes the Democrats? What cuts to their core? One word: Merlot.

He described the contest as “Merlot Democrats” vs. “Reliable Republicans.”

Ah, yes, that’s a term that will rally the lunch-bucket crowd. That’ll put steel in Dean’s prediction that the “The south will rise again, and when it does, it will have a ‘D’ after its name!”

Now, in fairness, “Merlot Democrats” is an analytical label, not a rallying cry. But for those of us who believe in labels, it’s a telling one, demonstrating that Democrats remain right where they’ve been stuck for decades.

And that’s why the GOP has cause to cheer. It may have it’s problems, but they are the problems of success. The Democrats’ problems are the problems of failure. Of course, Dean might call them the “challenges of conviction” or some such — but that’s old wine in a new bottle.

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My dinner with a Bush-hater (townhall.com, 051020)

by Larry Elder

Rudeness plagues America.

Nearly 70% of Americans, according to a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll, consider people more rude than 20 or 30 years ago. Over the last 20 years, according to two prominent Democratic strategists, Americans engaged in a kind of “great sorting-out” — staking out hard, well-defined, even intolerant, ideological political camps.

Now it all makes sense — only one side seems a tad more intolerant than the other.

Take last Friday. After work, I drove to a local watering hole for my customary vodka and cran. A couple of anti-war Democrats and I began talking politics. While I disagreed with their positions, they made sensible, if unpersuasive, arguments. You know the drill: Bush built a case for war on bad intelligence; the cultural complexity of Iraq makes America’s “imposition” of a democracy unlikely; the Iraq War now serves as a breeding ground for terrorists; other enemies like Iran and North Korea pose even greater threats to America; etc. But then another man, eavesdropping, decided to join in. Within five seconds, he called the president “an idiot.” I let it go. Moments later, however, he changed it to “moron.” All right, enough.

“Sir, you don’t know me, and I don’t know you. You barged into a conversation, not a wrestling match. He gave his view,” I said, pointing to another man, “and gave reasons. Calling the president ‘an idiot’ is not a reason. It is childish and shows your lack of ability to make a sensible argument.”

He said, “Well, I’m entitled to my opinion.”

“That’s not an opinion. It’s an attack. And in any case, you’re not entitled to have me listen to it. So I suggest you move on and enlighten somebody else.”

He glared, but walked away.

Now on to the next day, Saturday. A friend, a decorated Vietnam vet, celebrated his 60th birthday with about 50 festive partygoers. I sat at a table of eight, and someone said something about the president’s recent defense of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, calling the battle for her confirmation “uphill.” To this, the 60-something woman sitting next to me, with whom, up until this point, I had exchanged pleasantries, suddenly blurted, “Well, I’m from Seattle, and we hate Bush up there — “

I let it go.

“ — and the thing that we hate the most about Bush is that he claims people shouldn’t pay taxes.”

All right, enough.

“Excuse me,” I said, “can you tell me when the president said, ‘People shouldn’t pay taxes’?”

“He says it all the time,” she replied.

“So then it should be fairly easy for you to tell me when, or perhaps where, he said it.”

“Well, it’s in his budget.”

“Do you mean the most recently passed budget,” I asked, “the one that calls for spending something like two-and-a-half trillion dollars?”

“Yes.”

“If the budget calls for that much in spending, where do you suppose the government gets the money?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Well, you say the president says ‘people ought not pay taxes.’ If people don’t pay taxes, how does the government get the two-and-a-half trillion?”

“Oh,” she said, “I see what you’re saying. Let me clarify. Bush says, ‘Rich people should not pay taxes.’”

“Oh, really? And when did he say that?”

“Well, he implies it — he’s always seeking to cut taxes on the rich.”

“Well,” I responded, “as a member of the so-called rich, I welcome you to take a look at my 1040. I pay a substantial amount in taxes. And if there’s some program or provision that allows ‘the rich’ to avoid taxes, perhaps I should consider firing my accountant.” At this, the others at the table laughed, but not, of course, my debating opponent.

“Well, it’s obvious,” she said. “We see things differently.”

“We most certainly do, and I think it’s pretty much fruitless for us to continue the conversation. But, if you don’t mind, I have a brief question for you.”

“OK,” she said.

“Of the top 1% of taxpayers, what percentage do they pay of federal income tax revenues?”

“What do you mean?”

“Assume this is a pie,” I said, cupping my hands in a circle. “The top 1% contributes what size slice — by percentage — of that pie?”

“Oh, I see,” she said. “Virtually nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Maybe 1%, maybe 2%.”

Later, during the party, several people told her that I hosted a nationally syndicated radio show, and informed her of my “conservative” politics.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to anger you.”

“No, I wasn’t angry. I was disappointed that someone could go through the world so incredibly ill-informed.”

She walked away.

For the record, since my table companion doesn’t know or doesn’t care, the top 1% — the taxpayers with an adjusted gross income (AGI) over $295,495 — paid, for 2003, 34.27% of federal income tax revenues. The top 10% (with an AGI over $94,891) paid 65.84%, the top half (AGI over $29,019) paid 96.54%. The bottom half? They paid 3.46%.

People should know this. Even if you live in Seattle.

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Air America has ‘no audience’ in D.C.: Rating service can’t detect measurable listenership for liberal network (WorldNetDaily, 051021)

If Al Franken speaks on the radio, and no one is tuned in to hear him, does he make a sound?

That could be the question being asked these days in the nation’s capital, where Franken’s liberal network, Air America, has no measurable audience according to the Arbitron rating service.

The Washington Post reports the dismal ratings are in for the summer seasonal book:

Air America, the liberal talk network carried on WWRC-AM (1260), went from bad to nonexistent. After WWRC recorded a mere fraction of a rating point in the spring with syndicated shows from the likes of lefty talkers Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo and Stephanie Miller, Arbitron couldn’t detect a measurable listenership for the station this time around.

Notes Chris Field of the conservative publication Human Events, “Static would fare about as well.”

The news comes on the heels of the network asking its listeners to send in money, a financial scandal involving money siphoned from a Boys & Girls Club in New York City, a California radio station pleading for advertisers to sponsor the programming claiming it could not get a single ad, and a host apologizing for what some thought were threats against President Bush’s life.

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The difficulty of intellectually engaging the Left (townhall.com, 051025)

by Dennis Prager

One of the more appealing aspects about being on the Left is that you do not necessarily have to engage your opponents in debates over the truth or falsehood of their positions. You can simply dismiss your opponent as “anti.”

Anti-worker: It all began with Marxism. If you opposed communism or socialism, you were not merely anti-communist or anti-socialist, you were anti-worker. This way of dismissing opponents of leftist ideas is now the norm. Anyone, including a Democrat, who raises objections to union control of state and local politics is labeled anti-worker: “anti-teacher,” “anti-firefighter,” “anti-nurse,” etc. This is how the unions are fighting California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s attempts to rein in unauthorized union spending of members’ dues to advance leftist political goals. He is depicted as an enemy of all these groups.

Anti-education: Those who object to the monopoly that teachers’ unions have on public education and to their politicization of the school curricula are labeled “anti-education.” Of course, the irony is that if you love education, you must oppose the teachers’ unions.

Anti-intellectual: If you object to the dwindling academic standards at universities, or to the lack of diversity in ideas there, you are dismissed as “anti-intellectual.” Given the universities’ speech codes, the intellectually stifling Political Correctness that pervades academia, and the emotionalism that characterizes most leftist views on campus (American “imperialism,” Israeli “apartheid,” “war for oil” are emotional outbursts, not serious positions), if any side seems to express anti-intellectualism, it would be the Left.

Anti-Semite: Leftists who attack Israel frequently claim that they are shut down by irresponsible charges of anti-Semitism. The claim is that people who criticize Israeli government policies are labeled anti-Semites. I have never come across a normative conservative or any other pro-Israel source that has labeled mere criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. It is those who single out Israel of all the nations of the world for intense criticism, those who argue that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state (that it is, by definition, a “racist” state) who are sometimes charged — and sometimes validly so — with anti-Semitism.

What is rarely noted is how often the Left will label anti-liberal comments as “veiled anti-Semitism.” A left-wing Jew at a Jewish seminary sent out an e-mail charging Ann Coulter with anti-Semitism. His grounds? All of her attacks on liberals were really attacks on Jews. That she herself never made such a connection and that the vast majority of liberals are not Jews mean nothing to those who believe that “anti-liberal” often means anti-Jew.

Anti-black (“racist”): Perhaps the most common of the Left’s “anti” epithets is “anti-black,” i.e., “racist.” If a person opposes race-based affirmative action, for example, he is likely to be called a racist. And, of course, the recent libeling of Bill Bennett as a racist was a classic example. Though he and his wife have done more for blacks than most people in public life, black or white, Bennett implied while making another point (about abortion) that blacks were disproportionately involved in violent crime. This is a statistical fact and a sociological tragedy. But because a conservative made the point, the charge of racism permeated the (liberal) media.

Anti-woman: If you oppose any aspect of feminism, you are likely to be called anti-woman or “misogynist.” If you oppose “equal pay for equal work” because you believe it undermines economic freedom, you’re anti-woman. If you oppose abortion on demand because you believe that the human fetus has a right to live, you are against women’s rights.

Anti-peace: The very fact that anti-war and “peace” activists have labeled themselves “pro-peace” and “anti-war” renders their opponents vulnerable to charges of opposing peace and even loving war. Again, no intellectual argument is needed. According to much left-wing rhetoric, those who support the war in Iraq do not love peace. Of course, there was no peace in Iraq prior to the American deposing of Saddam Hussein, and there would be far more bloodshed if America now left Iraq. But it is far harder to engage those arguments than to label those who make them “anti-peace.”

Anti-gay (homophobe): It is the rare proponent of same-sex marriage who acknowledges that it is possible to oppose this redefining of marriage yet affirm the equal humanity of gays. Overwhelmingly, the response to those who wish to maintain the normative way of forming a family — basing it on a married man and woman — is to simply declare them “homophobic.”

The same is true for conservative policies on the economy — “anti-poor” — and for opposition to any leftist policy on the environment — “anti-environment.”

The “anti” arguments are effective. Conservatives have to spend half their time explaining that they are not bad people before they can be heard. But the Left has paid a great price. Because they have come to rely so heavily on one-word dismissals of their opponents, they have few arguments.

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The Secret Files of the Anti-Hypocrite Squad: A mirror to the Left. (National Review Online, 051028)

Jonah Goldberg

“I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy,” declared a steel-jawed Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean not too long ago on Meet the Press.

This was the culmination of a mounting obsession on the Left with hypocrisy. Now, of course, objections to hypocrisy go back to the bible and a good bit further back than that. And the Left in particular has been upset about hypocrisy since the Freudian Marxists of the Frankfurt School convinced an entire generation of intellectuals that internal contradictions were a sign of bourgeois something-or-other.

But the fixation with hypocrisy has really intensified in recent years. The flap over Bill Bennett’s gambling, Rush Limbaugh’s drug hassles, and the prominence of the religious right — which most left-wingers consider to be a de facto hypocritical phenomenon — have all contributed to the trend.

Indeed, offense at hypocrisy has become a warrant to be a bit of a jerk. At a fundraiser, Dean even did an impersonation of Limbaugh snorting coke. When asked for a prediction by NBC’s Chris Matthews, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times snarked, “I’ll predict that the rapture is coming, and you and I, Chris, are going up, and all these hypocritical conservatives who tell people not to do stuff that then they get caught doing are not.”

Now, I’ve written thousands of words on why I don’t think hypocrisy is the worst sin imaginable. There’s not a good parent in the world who hasn’t felt like a hypocrite at one point or another with their kids. Telling your kids not to do certain bad or unwise things you did when you were a kid may feel hypocritical, but telling your children it’s O.K. to do wrong out of some craving to be hip or to assuage your own conscience is the most asinine form of vanity I can imagine. Similarly, it’s certainly wrong to do drugs, but does giving in to your addiction mean you should also advocate doing drugs for everybody? During the run-up to the Iraq war, how many times did we hear that it was hypocritical for the United States to topple Saddam since we’d worked with him in the 1980s? The upshot seemed to be that it is better to do wrong consistently than do right inconsistently.

All of that said, there’s something just plain fun in pointing out hypocrisy. Years ago, when William F. Buckley was asked by Playboy why he took such delight in liberal hypocrisy he responded (I’m quoting from memory), “Who doesn’t take delight in things that are delightful?”

Which finally brings me to the point of this column. There’s a delightful new book out called Do As I Say (Not As I Do), by Peter Schweizer. And what makes it particularly delightful is that it goes after the anti-hypocrisy jihadists. I may not be obsessed with “rooting out hypocrisy” from American life. But who among us can’t have some fun watching the leading anti-hypocrisy crusaders exposed for betraying their core values?

Michael Moore, the biggest mouthpiece of the anti-hypocrite Left, constantly denounces Republicans as racists for opposing affirmative action. Schweizer reports that Moore almost never hires black people. Moore insists, “I don’t own a single share of stock.” He denounces clever Enron style schemes to conceal wealth and rails against Haliburton as the Mother of All Evils. He told C-Span’s Brian Lamb in his best prolier-than-thou voice that he wanted nothing to do with the stock market. “That’s the rich man’s game.”

Well, it turns out Moore’s got another game going. As Schweizer reports, Moore told the IRS his home is the headquarters of his tax-free foundation, to which he contributes some of his millions for the write-off. The foundation, in turn, not only bought stock — its holdings are a Who’s Who of “greedy” corporations, including Halliburton.

Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, accepted the Cesar Chavez Award from the United Farm Workers Union in 2003. She constantly spouts about the imperative of hiring union labor. But she contracts out the grape-picking on her own vineyard to non-UFW firms. She’s also a part owner of some restaurants and a hotel. No union labor there, either.

MIT Professor Noam Chomsky, who regularly denounces the Pentagon as a “fascist institution” and has mounted a campaign to expel ROTC from his school, has garnered millions in grants from the Pentagon for his linguistics research.

And so on.

Now, none of this means that the lions of the Left are wrong when they say what they say. I grew up in a rent-controlled apartment, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong that rent-control is idiotic. If Howard Dean has really decided to root out hypocrisy anywhere he finds it, he should pick up this book and get to work putting his own house in order.

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Michael Moore, Role Model: The lefty propagandist is almost as hypocritical as he is inane (National Review, 051107)

PETER SCHWEIZER

Michael Moore is a one-man left-wing industry, churning out books, films, and speeches at an astonishing rate. Iraq, evil corporations, and racism all figure prominently in his message. But he is selling more than a few policy ideas. In fact, he advances an entire ethic: Reject capitalism, stay away from corporations, and thereby prove that you are neither racist nor an exploiter of the poor. Moore piously insists that we all measure ourselves by his yardstick. But what happens when we put that yardstick next to him?

One constant theme in Moore’s books and films is that racism is rampant in America. He is quick to pull the trigger on those he thinks are insufficiently “inclusive.” In Bowling for Columbine, he says that white Americans buy guns because of an irrational fear of black people — or, more precisely, because they hate integration, mixed relationships, and minorities in general. Supposedly, they also refuse to discuss racism and discrimination — which is why Moore, as America’s racial conscience, must contrive an endless series of attention-getting stunts to dramatize these issues. In one episode of his television program TV Nation, for example, Moore had a reporter go to the beaches of largely white Greenwich, Conn., and bring along some black friends. (Curiously, they were not lynched.)

Moore relentlessly attacks those who fail to meet his standards of racial fairness and equality. American journalists — only 5% of whom are black — are one target. “At work,” Moore proclaims, “we whites still get the plum jobs, double the pay, and a seat in the front of the bus to happiness and success.” Hollywood is another favorite target, for not having enough blacks in senior positions. “I now play a game with myself,” he writes in Stupid White Men, “trying to clock how long it will be before I spot a black man or woman who isn’t wearing a uniform or sitting at a receptionist’s desk. . . . During my last three trips to Los Angeles the clock never stopped: the black head count was zero.”

In 1998 Moore proposed what he called a “very strong affirmative action policy” involving mandatory quotas, and in Stupid White Men he encourages minorities to contact him about jobs on his projects. Pointing his finger at the rest of us, he sermonizes: “If you’re white and you really want to help change things why not start with yourself?” I decided to find out how well Moore has followed his own advice. How large is the “black head count” in his films?

First I checked the credits of his latest film, Fahrenheit 9/11, and researched the backgrounds of its crew members. Of Fahrenheit’s senior crew — fourteen producers, three editors, a production manager, and a production coordinator — all 19 were white. So were all three cameramen and the two composers of original music.

A Moore fan might suppose that this is some sort of anomaly. In fact, of the 134 producers, editors, cinematographers, composers, and production coordinators Moore has hired for his major television and film projects, only three were black. (He did hire one white producer who majored in African-American Studies. Perhaps that counts.) For those who care to keep track, Moore comes in well below the 5% figure in journalism that troubles him so.

When not denouncing Americans’ failure to hire more blacks, Moore points an accusatory finger at “white flight” and de facto segregation as evidence of our society’s racism. Americans might be “magnanimous enough to say, ‘Sure you can even live here in our neighborhood; your kids can go to our kids’ school. Why the hell not? We were just leaving anyway,’” he writes in Stupid White Men. Americans “gave black America a pat on the back — and then ran like the devil to the suburbs.” (He neglects to mention that middle-class blacks have done precisely the same thing.)

Moore wrote those words from the comfort of his beautiful home in Central Lake, Mich. — a community of some 2,300 people that, according to the 2000 census, does not have a single black resident.

LIVIN’ THE LIFE

Like his intellectual godfather Noam Chomsky, Moore finds few things more evil than American corporations. He has spent most of his life trashing them, starting with Roger and Me, a skewering of General Motors. In The Big One, he took on Hershey and Nike. Violent crime in America is a product of the gun industry, he claimed in Bowling for Columbine. Oil companies loom large in Fahrenheit 9/11. On his television programs TV Nation and The Awful Truth, he attacked HMOs and criticized defense contractors as part of the military-industrial complex. In his forthcoming film Sicko, he accuses pharmaceutical companies and HMOs of letting Americans die to boost their profits. “We need protection from our own multi-millionaire corporate terrorists, the ones who rip off our old-age pensions, destroy the environment, deplete irreplaceable fossil fuels in the name of profit, deny us our right to universal health care, take peoples’ jobs away whenever the mood hits them,” Moore warns in Dude, Where’s My Country? Halliburton is particularly vile, run as it is by a bunch of “thugs.” Moore once told an audience in Great Britain, “I would just like to make a modest proposal: From now on, for every Brit or American kid that’s killed in this war, I would like Halliburton to slay one mid-level executive.”

Because corporations are so evil, Moore would have us maintain our purity by keeping out of the stock market. Making money in the stock market means getting “rich by throwing people out of work, exploiting children and the poor in other countries,” he writes in Stupid White Men. “Ah, money. The sweet stench of success. A couple of years ago I was talking to a guy in a bar who happened to be a stockbroker. He asked me about my ‘investments.’ I told him I didn’t have any, that I don’t own a single share of stock. He was stunned. ‘You mean you don’t have a portfolio where you keep your money?’ ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep your money in portfolios,’ I replied, ‘or in a briefcase, or even under the futon. I save what little I can in a place called a ‘bank,’ where I have what the old-timers call a ‘savings account.’” Moore repeated this claim in a 1997 letter to the online magazine Salon, saying, “I don’t own any stock.” His advice to other Americans is to stay out of the market. “It’s Vegas,” he told Brian Lamb on C-SPAN’s Booknotes. “That’s the rich man’s game.”

Although Moore publicly claims that he doesn’t invest in the stock market, he privately tells the IRS something completely different. Moore and his wife, Kathleen Glynn, have a private foundation that they established shortly after he started making serious money from Roger and Me. They donate funds to the foundation tax free, decide how the funds are invested, and donate profits to any cause they see fit. Moore and his wife have complete control over the foundation’s assets; there is no outside manager or trustee. The foundation’s registered address is their home in Michigan, and Michael Moore signs the IRS forms himself.

The year Moore claimed in Stupid White Men that he didn’t own any stock, he reported to the IRS that his foundation held more than $280,000 in corporate stock and close to $100,000 in corporate bonds. The IRS forms should be interesting reading for anyone acquainted with Moore’s documentaries. Over the past five years, Moore’s portfolio included such evil pharmaceutical and medical companies as Pfizer, Merck, Genzyme, Elan, Eli Lilly, BD, and Boston Scientific. “Being screwed by your HMO and ill served by pharmaceutical companies is a shared American experience,” he recently told the Los Angeles Times. “The system, inferior to that of much poorer nations, benefits the few at the expense of the many.” Count Moore as one of the few.

Moore has also invested in energy giants like Noble Energy, Schlumberger, Williams Companies, Transocean Sedco Forex, and Anadarko, all firms that “deplete irreplaceable fossil fuels in the name of profit,” as Moore puts it in Dude, Where’s My Country?

Moore is loud in his support of labor unions and has attacked Nike for hiring “underpaid” Third World workers, but it’s striking how few of the companies in which he has invested have unions themselves. Most of them are high-tech firms that outsource production to China, or major oil conglomerates that do business in the developing world. I couldn’t find a single investment that involved a heavily unionized company.

Perhaps the ultimate irony is that Moore has owned shares in that symbol of evil incarnate, Halliburton — an investment on which he made a 15% profit, according to IRS filings.

THE PHILANTHROPIST

Moore also misrepresents the work his foundation does. In his Booknotes interview, he said, “We have a foundation that we’ve set up, where we help out a lot of first-time filmmakers. We also fund a lot of things in the Flint area and a lot of social-action groups and things like that.” He also told The New Yorker that his foundation funds “first-time filmmakers, battered women’s shelters, and soup kitchens, among other things.”

Once again, his filings with the IRS tell a different story. Yes, there were a few modest grants to programs helping the poor — but nothing on the scale he suggests. In fact, Moore usually donates just enough to maintain his foundation’s charitable status. A 2002 estimate put Moore’s net worth in the eight figures, yet his foundation gave away a meager $36,000 that year. In 2000, he gave away only $22,000.

Moore also has a knack for giving money to friends who do favors for him. In 2000, $4,500 went to that most proletarian of organizations, the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York, and another $1,000 went to the Ann Arbor Film Festival — both of which later held lavish events promoting Bowling for Columbine. The next year he gave $2,500 to Pamela Yates, who was a producer for his NBC program TV Nation; he also made a grant to his friend Jeff Gibbs, who provided the music for Bowling for Columbine and helped Moore write some of his books. Moore has given money to the New York Video Festival, which held events promoting TV Nation. And in 2002, $25,000 went to the American Library Association, whose members Moore credits with getting HarperCollins to reconsider its decision to cancel his anti-Bush screed Stupid White Men after 9/11.

That someone hires few black employees, or invests in corporations, or fails to donate large amounts of his income to charity is not in itself a reason to condemn him. Michael Moore is simply wrong when he claims that American society is characterized by pervasive discrimination or that corporations are innately evil. Yet Moore’s staggering hypocrisy makes it difficult to think that he even believes what he is saying. Publicly, Moore styles himself a populist crusader who champions the causes of workers, women, minorities, the environment — in short, all of capitalism’s supposed discontents. Privately, Moore embodies his own caricature of capitalism. In the words of Douglas Urbanski, his former manager: “He is more money-obsessed than anyone I have known. And that’s saying a lot.”

Mr. Schweizer, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of the just-released Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy (Doubleday), from which this article is adapted.

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‘Michael & Me’ (WorldNetDaily, 050707)

I have just seen the finest documentary ever made about the right to self-defense with firearms.

It was produced by my friend and colleague Larry Elder, a WorldNetDaily columnist and an outstanding Los Angeles radio talk-show host.

It’s called “Michael & Me,” and, as you might imagine, it emulates the style of Michael Moore’s documentaries and turns the tables on the filmmaker responsible for “Bowling for Columbine.”

This time it’s Moore who is hunted down for an ambush interview the way he famously stalked Roger Smith, the chief executive officer of General Motors, in “Roger & Me,” and an ailing Charlton Heston in “Columbine.”

This time it’s Elder scoring all the propaganda points – with the truth and facts, rather than distortions and cinematic gimmicks.

Heretofore, I have known Elder as an author, a columnist and a radio talker. I was simply not aware of his considerable skills as a documentary filmmaker. This DVD has it all – entertainment value, vital information, a distinctly American point of view.

I simply cannot recommend it highly enough.

This is a documentary that needs a wide audience. I implore you to buy it and share it with your friends and family members. I urge you to spread the word about this magical movie. It is one of those works of art that can change the culture on the gun issue.

Elder makes the compelling case that guns save lives. He doesn’t just do it with statistics that no one can deny. He does it with real stories of survivors. He does it with interviews from experts. He does it with the confused thinking of people like Moore, who is, ultimately, ambushed for an interview by Elder.

This documentary leaves no stone unturned in exploring the issue of firearms and self-defense. It covers all the bases. If this is your issue, you will love this movie. If it’s not, you will still love this movie and it will become your issue.

The gun-control crowd argues that the Second Amendment either doesn’t mean what it says or that it has become an anachronism in the modern age because we have the government to protect us from enemies and the police force to protect us from criminals.

As someone who trusts government about as much as I trust criminals, I never had much use for that argument. And while I generally think most local policemen are good people, the truth is, they just can’t be relied upon to protect you.

If you doubt what I’m saying, check out the case law in our nation’s capital.

In 1981, the court there held in Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. Dec. 21, 1981) that neither the city nor police officials could be held liable for failure of police to respond properly to a request from victims for protection from attackers.

Listen to the facts of this incredible case: A call came in to the police on the 911 emergency hotline reporting a burglary in progress. The police department employee who received the call assured the caller that assistance would be dispatched promptly. However, the dispatcher delayed assigning the call and gave it a lower priority than “crime in progress” calls were supposed to receive.

That was bad enough. But it gets worse. When police officers finally arrived at the scene of the burglary, they failed to make a thorough check of the building and left without discovering the two burglars, who by this time had raped a 4-year-old girl and forced her mother to commit sodomy.

The victims’ neighbors, two women who lived upstairs, made a second 911 call, again receiving assurance that help was on the way. No help ever arrived. For the next 14 hours, the intruders held all the occupants of the building captive, including the two women who lived upstairs – they were all raped, robbed, beaten and subjected to numerous sexual indignities.

Despite all this abuse and ineptitude, the court held that neither the assurance of assistance nor the fact that the police had begun to act gave rise to a special relationship between the police and the victims. “[T]he desire for condemnation cannot satisfy the need for a special relationship out of which a duty to specific persons arises.” Because the complaint did not allege a relationship “beyond that found in general police responses to crimes,” this court affirmed the dismissal of the complaint for failure to state a claim.

In other words, the police aren’t there to protect average citizens. It happens sometimes. There are brave police officers who put their lives on the line for strangers. They are to be applauded. But that is not the everyday occurrence you might imagine. Most police work occurs after the fact. Most responses are post-victimization. And, frankly, most of my contact with police these days occurs after I see red lights flashing in my rearview mirror.

I suspect that’s true for most people.

None of that matters to the gun-control crowd.

In their view, only important people like politicians, celebrities and the rich deserve armed protection. But as Robert Heinlein put it, “When only cops have guns, it’s called a ‘police state.’”

Do we really believe we are wiser than the great men who founded this country? Do we really believe they enshrined in the Second Amendment the right to bear arms because they wanted to protect the rights of hunters? Are we ready, in spite of all we know about the basic nature and character of government, to entrust our basic freedoms to the state and its armed agents?

For those who are, let me make a suggestion. Why don’t you set an example for the rest of us and print up signs for your homes that say: “This is a firearm-free zone.” This would represent a real service to the country. We can experiment to see if their thesis is correct. Does a reduction in firearms translate to a reduction in violence? This will be the test case.

I say, go for it. After all, what do you have to worry about? You’ve got the police and the government to protect you.

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College chiefs favored Kerry 2-to-1, poll finds (Washington Times, 051103)

Liberal leanings on campus may start at the very top. An unprecedented survey of 764 college and university presidents reveals they voted for Sen. John Kerry over President Bush by a 2-to-1 margin in 2004.

The survey released yesterday by the Chronicle of Higher Education found 56% of the college and university presidents said they voted for the Massachusetts Democrat, compared with 28% who said they voted for Mr. Bush. Thirteen percent of those surveyed preferred not to reveal their choice and 2% said they did not vote at all.

“The survey shows that presidents’ political identities make a significant difference in where they stand on admissions and several other college policies,” reported the Chronicle.

In this elite group of campus leaders, 41% are registered Democrats and 19% are Republicans, according to the Chronicle survey. Another 22% were independents, 9% were not registered and 10% would not reveal their party affiliation.

The imbalance worries David Horowitz of the California-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture. “The entire academic community structures itself so conservatives coming into it feel like aliens,” he said.

Republican deans are more concerned about intellectual diversity than their Democratic counterparts: The survey found that the 31% of the Republicans say American colleges are less open to diverse points of view; the figure was 19% among the Democrats.

Perceptions differ, however. After completing the survey, one female president of a public university complained that “insidious attacks from the far right are not being challenged on campus.”

College and university presidents are not a particularly diverse group: 81% are male, 89% white, 84% held doctorate degrees and 80% are between 50 and 65 years old. Fifty-five percent are Protestant, 26% are Catholic, 11% practice no religion and 5% are Jewish.

The survey also sampled the campus presidents’ views on several issues.

Overall, the survey found 68% believe the government should lift restrictions on federal financial support for human embryonic stem-cell research. But there’s a partisan divide: among the Democratic deans, 81% supported the stem-cell research; the figure was 42% among the Republicans.

Seventy-seven percent said affirmative action still has “an important place” in college admissions, while 66% said that colleges should make “emergency contraception” available to all students.

Overall, the presidents reported that 53% of their day was devoted to fundraising, and 44% to budget or finance issues. Fundraising, in fact, was cited as the biggest challenge to the job — above campus issues, enrollment and faculty concerns.

There’s also less of the old “rah-rah-rah” on campus. Six out of 10 of the presidents said that “big-time college athletics” were more of a liability than an asset to their schools.

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What PFAW means by ‘far right’ (townhall.com, 051102)

by Terence Jeffrey

During the confirmation battle over Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, whenever you hear a liberal calling the judge “far right,” think of the instant dossier published about him by People for the American Way (PFAW).

It is an excellent indicator of what this phrase means to the American left.

No sooner had President Bush nominated Alito than PFAW announced a “massive national effort” to defeat him, with PFAW President Ralph Neas labeling him a “far-right activist” who “would threaten Americans’ rights and legal protections.”

To support its argument, PFAW released its dossier, whose first topic, not surprisingly, is “Privacy Rights and Reproductive Freedom.” “Alito’s opinions on abortion and reproductive choice,” it concludes, “are very troubling.”

One decision cited by PFAW to back this claim is Alexander v. Whitman, a 1997 case in which Alito’s appeals court declared that Kaylyn Alexander was not a “person” under the U.S. Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, the 1973 opinion that made abortion a “right.” Alito concurred in the decision, expressing “almost complete agreement with the court’s opinion.” But his language evidently lacked the zeal PFAW demands in such cases. “Alito,” claimed PFAW’s dossier, “wrote a very brief concurrence which is ambiguous as to his views on Roe v. Wade.”

In reality, Alexander did not tip Alito’s hand on Roe. But it does say a lot about the pro-abortion cause.

In 1992, New Jersey resident Karen Alexander, eight-and-a-half months pregnant, went to a hospital to deliver her baby, Kaylyn. Fourteen minutes before Kaylyn was delivered by Caesarean section, all vital signs indicated she was “normal and healthy.” Yet, she died before the Caesarean was completed.

The mother sued New Jersey. The state’s law, her lawyers noted, allowed a wrongful death suit to be brought on behalf of a baby who was injured in the womb and then survived, but not on behalf of a baby who was injured in the womb and died there. They contended this law was unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection of the laws to all persons.

The lawyers cited a New Jersey Supreme Court case involving babies who survive prenatal injuries that said “(m)edical authorities have long recognized that a child is in existence from the moment of conception, and not merely a part of the mother’s body.”

In essence, they argued, all human beings are persons and entitled to the same rights under the 14th Amendment.

Judge Theodore McKee, writing for the appeals court, said this was not so. “Our inquiry is not a factual one,” he said. “It is a legal one. The question is not whether a stillborn child is a human being from the moment of conception, but whether that unborn ‘human being’ is included within the meaning of ‘person’ contained in the Fourteenth Amendment. That legal question was resolved over 24 years ago when the Supreme Court decided Roe.”

Clearly, legalized abortion is based not on fact, but fiction. The fiction is that little Kaylyn, 14 minutes before birth, was not endowed by God with the same rights she would enjoy after birth.

Under Roe, the determining factor in whether the government will defend a baby’s rights is not whether the baby is a human, but where the baby is located. In her mother’s womb, Kaylyn has no rights. Outside, she has the same rights as a PFAW lawyer.

This fiction has been perpetuated in our law because powerful interests — such as PFAW — want to perpetuate a monstrous injustice: the routine killing of innocent babies.

This injustice must not stand. One way to stop it is for Republicans to follow through on their 2004 platform, which endorses “legislation to make clear that the 14th Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.” Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, joined by 69 co-sponsors, has introduced the Right to Life Act to do just that.

Another way to stop it is for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe, and for state legislatures to protect unborn life.

Yet, a federal appeals court, unfortunately, cannot on it own authority stop abortion — and Judge Alito has never suggested his court could or even that he wanted it to.

What did he say in his two-paragraph concurrence in Alexander? “I agree with the essential point that the court is making; that the Supreme Court has held that a fetus is not a ‘person’ within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment,” he wrote. “However, the reference to constitutional non-persons, taken out of context, is capable of misuse.” The opinion, he added, could have been “informed by history,” noting specifically that it is “significant that at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment and for many years thereafter, the right to recover for injury to a stillborn was not recognized.”

How this reveals ambiguity about Roe is unclear. But that PFAW will not accept any Supreme Court nominee who is not an abortionist absolutist should be obvious.

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Jimmy Carter’s Endangered Values (Christian Post, 051107)

Former president Jimmy Carter has written yet another book -- his twentieth -- and he has hit the media circuit in order to promote his latest project. Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis represents the former president’s return to familiar themes, even as it will add new layers of confusion concerning his actual beliefs and values.

Jimmy Carter makes one central argument in this new book, and that is that America (indeed civilization itself) is under attack by a sinister force. In effect, he argues that a new specter now haunts civilization -- the specter of Christian fundamentalism.

After tracing a series of crises faced by the United States and the larger world, Mr. Carter places the blame squarely upon conservative Christians: “The most important factor is that fundamentalists have become increasingly influential in both religion and government, and have managed to change the nuances and subtleties of historic debate into black-and-white rigidities and the personal derogation of those who dare to disagree. At the same time, these religious and political conservatives have melded their efforts, bridging the formerly respected separation of church and state.” That’s quite an argument, but those familiar with Jimmy Carter’s mode of public engagement will understand that this is merely the expansion (and repetition) of what the former president has been saying ever since the American people denied him a second term in the Oval Office.

Those who would wish to take Jimmy Carter and his ideas seriously will find little assistance in this book. More than anything else, it represents a superficial complaint against conservative Christianity. He offers a caricature of conservative evangelicals, even as he redefines basic Christian doctrines in order to conform to his own worldview. He criticizes fundamentalists for simplistic and superficial convictions, while he offers superficial and simplistic assessments of urgent moral questions.

What exactly is Jimmy Carter against? The “fundamentalism” he so vehemently attacks is, according to his own definition, represented by movements that “almost invariably” are “led by authoritarian males who consider themselves to be superior to other and, within religious groups, have an overwhelming commitment to subjugate women and to dominate their fellow believers.” Furthermore, Mr. Carter argues that “fundamentalists usually believe that the past is better than the present,” even as they wish to retain “certain self-beneficial aspects of both their historic religious beliefs and of the modern world.”

Beyond all this, Mr. Carter argues that fundamentalists “are militant in fighting against any challenge to their beliefs.” Accordingly, fundamentalists are likely to be angry and abusive against those who oppose their goals.

Most interestingly, Mr. Carter argues that fundamentalists err when they “draw clear distinctions between themselves, as true believers, and others, convinced that they are right and anyone who contradicts them is ignorant and possibly evil.” The most amazing aspect of that assertion is Mr. Carter’s own moralism, both as president and as America’s globe-trotting ex-president. Even in Our Endangered Values, Mr. Carter continues the pattern of arguing that others are wrong when they assert that he is wrong. But, according to his own emphatic assertion and self-analysis, he is right and others are simply wrong. One gains the quick impression that they are mostly wrong because they consider Mr. Carter to be wrong.

As to his own worldview, Mr. Carter reveals: “In the religious realm, I shall depend on the Holy Scriptures, as interpreted by the words and actions of Jesus Christ. On political issues, I shall rely as much as possible on my own personal experiences and observations.”

What exactly are the “values” that Mr. Carter believes to be so endangered? For one thing, Mr. Carter argues that fundamentalists are primarily responsible for the raging controversies that now mark America’s public life. As he sees it, America is being ripped apart by the fundamentalists who push their concerns about abortion, marriage, homosexuality, and other issues in the public square. Since these conservative Christians are driven by their own Christian convictions, Mr. Carter argues that their favored positions represent a violation of one of his most cherished values -- the separation of church and state.

Once again, readers of Our Endangered Values will be frustrated if they are looking for Mr. Carter’s own understanding of how church and state should be related. He offers no serious or coherent theory, but merely affirms “what Thomas Jefferson espoused as ‘a wall of separation between church and state.’” As he would surely remind those he criticizes in his newest book, an assertion does not amount to an argument.

In actuality, Mr. Carter offers few examples of exactly what he finds to be an unacceptable mixing of church and state. He offers a glancing blow at President Bush’s “faith-based initiatives,” (an issue that truly requires serious evaluation), but he centers his most direct criticism on the fact that “right-wing Christians” have been criticizing the federal court system.

How, exactly, should an individual’s Christian convictions affect public service and public policy? Mr. Carter does not offer any substantial approach to deciding this matter. Furthermore, he admits: “Despite what I consider to be a constitutional and biblical requirement for the separation of church and state, I must acknowledge that my own religious beliefs have been inextricably entwined with the political principles I have adopted.” Readers of Mr. Carter’s new book must be forgiven for thinking that religious beliefs are fairly applied to public policy when the beliefs and policies are those favored by Mr. Carter, but not when the beliefs and policies are those favored by conservatives.

Tracing a series of moral controversies, Mr. Carter asserts that a majority of Americans believe that abortions should be legal “in all or most cases.” Of course, this is a serious misrepresentation of the data. One could just as easily argue that the vast majority of Americans reject abortion on demand. The polls are complicated and confusing, and the conclusions reached generally have everything to do with how the questions are asked. The former president also argues that Americans have grown increasingly accepting of same-sex behavior, but he offers few hints as to how he would settle the divisive issue of homosexuality. His one positive proposal is to deny homosexuals access to “marriage” while adopting civil unions as a matter of civil rights.

Mr. Carter also comes out swinging when it comes to the death penalty, noting that his years as governor of Georgia fell in the period between 1972 and 1976 when the Supreme Court had temporarily halted executions. “Some devout Christians are among the most fervent advocates of the death penalty, contradicting Jesus Christ and justifying their belief on an erroneous interpretation of Hebrew Scriptures,” he argues.

This is a fallacious argument. In the first place, Jesus Christ never condemned the death penalty. In forgiving the woman caught in adultery, Jesus offered no blanket prohibition against capital punishment. Furthermore, the biblical support for capital punishment is based on a multitude of passages in both the Old and New Testaments. The biblical interpretations Mr. Carter offers are facile, simplistic, and intellectually dishonest.

The former president raises one serious and legitimate concern about the death penalty -- the “extreme inequity in its employment” -- and he could have called for a responsible evangelical reevaluation of capital punishment in light of the biblical teaching and contemporary application. Nevertheless, his recklessness with the biblical text undermines his point.

This is all the more problematic when it comes to Mr. Carter’s treatment of abortion. He describes this issue as “the most divisive” facing the nation. But, once again, Mr. Carter offers more confusion than clarity when it comes to his own understanding of abortion.

Just last week, The Washington Times reported that President Carter had condemned America’s abortion culture. “I have never felt that any abortion should be committed -- I think that each abortion is the result of a series of errors,” Mr. Carter told reporters in Washington. “I’ve never been convinced, if you let me inject my Christianity into it, that Jesus Christ would approve abortion.”

Mr. Carter has made this argument before. In his book Living Faith, published in 1996, Mr. Carter stated: “I have never been able to believe that Jesus would have approved the taking of a human life, but the difficult question then remained: When does a fetus become a human being? My duty was to comply with the rulings of the Supreme Court, but I did everything possible to minimize the need for and attractiveness of abortions.”

In this new book, Mr. Carter offers a similar argument: “I am convinced that every abortion is an unplanned tragedy, brought on by a combination of human errors, and this has been one of the most difficult moral and political issues I’ve had to face. As president, I accepted my obligation to enforce the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling, and at the same time attempted in every way possible to minimize the number of abortions-through legal restrictions, prevention of unwanted pregnancies, the encouragement of expectant women to give birth, and the promotion of foster parenthood.”

This position would be sufficiently problematic in itself, but it doesn’t even represent an accurate analysis of Mr. Carter’s own public positions on the issue.

As Peter G. Bourne, a former White House Special Assistant to President Carter, explains in his book Jimmy Carter: “Early in his term as governor, Carter had strongly supported family planning programs including abortion. He had written the foreword to a book, Women in Need, that favored a woman’s right to abortion. He had given private encouragement to the plaintiffs in a lawsuit, Doe v. Bolton, filed against the state of Georgia to overturn its archaic abortion laws.” Beyond this, he hired Sarah Weddington, the lead attorney who argued for abortion in Roe v.Wade, as a White Hosue staffer. Clearly, this calls into question Mr. Carter’s assertion that he has always opposed abortion. Further, if he opposes abortion now, what is he willing to do about it? His new book certainly offers no hope that he would now call for a reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Some of the most vitriolic language in Our Endangered Values concerns Mr. Carter’s criticism of the Southern Baptist Convention and its leadership. Understandably, Mr. Carter blames conservative evangelicals in general -- and the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention in particular -- for his devastating loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. Indeed, the very evangelicals who had celebrated Mr. Carter’s election in 1976 abandoned him in 1980 -- and for what they saw as compelling reasons.

Over the last several years, Mr. Carter has repeatedly declared his departure from the Southern Baptist Convention (a departure made all the more eccentric by the fact that individuals are not members of the Southern Baptist Convention in the first place) and he continues his criticism of the convention’s leadership even now.

Most specifically, he condemns the Southern Baptist Convention for adopting a revised version of its confession of faith, arguing that the new version has substituted the authority of convention leaders for the authority of Christ. Clearly, here is a real debate that could have emerged out of his criticism. Nevertheless, Mr. Carter just misrepresents the convention’s action.

I was a member of the committee that proposed the revision, and I would be glad to clarify for Mr. Carter what exactly the revisions represent. Nevertheless, Mr. Carter’s chief complaint is that the confession of faith was “imposed as a mandatory creed on all convention officers, employees, deans and professors of colleges and seminaries, and even missionaries who were serving in foreign countries.” He insists that this was “unprecedented” as the convention sought to fulfill its responsibility to assure the churches of the doctrinal integrity of convention employees.

Of course, this action was anything but “unprecedented.” As a matter of fact, the convention had advised its agencies to establish personnel policies in accordance with the confession of faith as far back as 1969. If the moderate convention leaders Mr. Carter prefers had fulfilled the explicit directives of the convention, the conservative resurgence that Mr. Carter so laments would never have happened in the first place.

On the issue of women in the church, Mr. Carter has been a strong proponent of women as pastors. He dismisses the biblical concerns about this by admitting that, while the Apostle Paul clearly precluded this practice, this just indicates “his departure from Jesus’ example and a strong bias against women.” He insists that he does not mean to claim that biblical texts are in error or contradictory, but that some texts can be understood as dealing only with “local circumstances within a trouble early church congregation.” Nevertheless, Paul’s clearest instructions were not addressed to a specific congregation in conflict, but to Timothy on behalf of the whole church. “There is one incontrovertible fact concerning the relationship between Jesus Christ and women,” he asserts: “he treated them as equal to men.” This may sound like a self-evident truth, for Jesus did treat women with equal respect, equal concern, and equal standing before the gospel. Nevertheless, Jesus did not call a woman to serve as an apostle, nor as one of the Twelve. Equality is not contradicted by complementarity.

In an interesting comment, Mr. Carter recently offered a bit of self-analysis, observing: “I can’t deny that I’m a better ex-president than I was a president.” Without doubt, President Carter and his wife Rosalynn have done much good. The work of The Carter Center in leading the fight against diseases such as Guinea Worm and Trachoma has been exemplary. I will let others debate the former president’s post-term adventures in foreign policy, but I have no doubt that he means to do good and to do well. I also have no doubt that he is a thoughtful and intelligent man, and that he means to be a serious Christian.

Nevertheless, in this new book, Mr. Carter delivers a broadside attack on conservative Christians, the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention, and those who believe that abortion, homosexuality, secularism, and a host of other issues represent clear and present challenges to the witness of the church. He is surely right to argue that the Bible would broaden our range of concerns beyond these most controversial issues; but he is surely wrong to dismiss our responsibility to maintain a faithful biblical witness where controversy is inevitable.

Mr. Carter’s moderately liberal theology (more liberal than moderate or more moderate than liberal, depending on his various statements) puts him at odds with the conservative direction of the Southern Baptist Convention and with the biblical convictions held by millions of American evangelicals. Mr. Carter has chosen to make this a public issue by writing and releasing this book. This was his decision.

Our Endangered Values is not a call for discussion or dialogue. It is not an exercise in seeking understanding. Instead, this book is a political and theological call to arms. Nevertheless, it does serve to illustrate the chasm that now grows ever larger between conservative Christians and those who would offer a more “moderate” understanding of the Christian faith. President Carter and those he opposes in this book agree on one thing -- our values are endangered. We just disagree about what those values are and how they are endangered. That’s no small disagreement.

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R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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Political Paralysis: Democrats and demagogues. (National Review Online, 051107)

Ever wonder why one hears so little talk of right-wing demagoguery? Oh, now and then some particularly dyspeptic liberal will lodge such charges against Rush, or get in a snit over some other outspoken conservative stalwart. But the Right has no true counterparts to the likes of Jesse Jackson, Terry McAuliffe, Patricia Ireland, Al Sharpton, et al. There simply is no conservative whose stock in trade is the chronic spewing of grandiose pronouncements or pithy sound bites having no purpose other than to remind constituents of how much they need him in their corner.

And there’s a good reason why. Although people at all points of the political spectrum seek strong voices to articulate their respective interests, demagoguery, in its classic form, actively fans the fires of oppression, creating whole categories of needs, if not “rights,” that people never knew they had (and, in truth, probably don’t have). The demagogue gains his standing by cultivating victimhood. He inflates his power by reminding you of your impotence, your personal and political irrelevance. He tells you that society is responsible for elevating you, not the other way around. Collectively, those are not notions that fly very well among a conservative audience.

The culture of blame, though much-chronicled, seldom is traced back to its roots in pop psychology — specifically, the recovery movement and its twelve steps. Step one in traditional twelve-step lore consists of accepting that you’re powerless over your addiction. Step two is placing your fate in the hands of a higher power. To be fair, as conceived in 1935 by the mother of all twelve-steps, Alcoholics Anonymous, this powerlessness was problem-specific (i.e., booze) and the higher power was explicitly spiritual (i.e., God). Over the years, though, as recovery was bastardized to encompass any number of addictions, dysfunctions, conditions, syndromes, and so-called diseases, it inevitably bled over into the culture at large. Powerlessness, at least in some quarters, became an all-pervading mantra. The higher power, meanwhile, grew more secular and pragmatic: It was anything external to you that could help get you to where you needed to be (inasmuch as you couldn’t, in your weakened state, get there on your own).

This notion of looking outward, not inward, for advancement has always held special appeal for blocs of people who already felt disenfranchised in one way or another. A shrewd liberal political activist can readily see the potential in encouraging these blocs to regard him as their higher power: He plays to the paranoia of those who feel downtrodden and persecuted, and consolidates his franchise by encouraging them to go right on feeling that way.

And, having surrendered themselves to their favorite higher power, today’s self-styled victims follow blindly and unquestioningly. No matter how outré the platform a liberal demagogue promotes, no matter what hypocrisy he may be caught in, his followers — who, remember, no longer really think for themselves — swear continued allegiance, offering the most improbable of justifications for their loyalty. As Wendy Kaminer observed in her fine book I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional, this lemming mentality on the part of “people who feel victimized and out of control. . . hardly makes for responsible political leadership.” Ergo, Marion Barry. You will recall that Barry, always wildly popular among his African-American voter base, served as mayor of Washington, D.C., for a dozen years, until his videotaped crack-fest landed him in prison in 1990. Upon his release, Washingtonians made him a councilman and gave him another shot as mayor. This same principle helps explain why legions of women, including feminists, stood by Bill Clinton through his adulterous antics and his camp’s shameless, near-misogynist vilification of his paramours. Clinton was their higher power. That’s all they needed to know.

Of course, when we survey the landscape of victimization and demagoguery, we have more than just fuzzy logic to worry about. One of the sobering risks of a full-blown demagogic outreach is that it may end in maddeningly imprecise, surreally expensive legislation, like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). As the ADA took shape, it became clear that the law would ignore almost no one: The information sheet accompanying the bill noted that it would effect 43 million Americans, one sixth of the population. Subsequent challenges to the ADA’s “restrictions” have threatened to expand its purview to as many as 160 million people, nearly two thirds of the population. This is what happens when demagogues stumble upon a cause that enables them to make almost everyone feel helpless.

Worst of all, the rise of the modern demagogue has spawned a self-perpetuating class of forever-victims. Americans historically showed profound sympathy for the underdog, in large part because we assumed that underdog status was a temporary condition that people aspired to overcome. If our patience with some of our distressed neighbors has sometimes worn a bit thin, it is because the nature of the bargain changed: The longstanding dynamic between demagogue and constituent created a permanent underdog caste that keeps voting for the party that rewards its victimization. It’s a never-ending cycle, an infantilizing one, too.

There is no doubt that victimization’s founding vision, of a society comprising millions of unfortunates stymied by both nature and nurture, helped solidify the notion of government-as-surrogate-parent. In this dismal conception of American life, it falls to Washington — the ultimate higher power — to ameliorate any gross disparities between the “lucky” and “unlucky” children in the family of man.

— Steve Salerno is author of SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless.

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BOOK: ...Pants on Fire: How Al Franken Lies, Smears And Deceives by Alan Skorski (WorldNetDaily, 051124)

Al Franken was a “nobody” in the arena of political punditry before he wrote two best-selling books, “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot” and “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.” Now one of the most prominent figures on the liberal Air America radio network, formed to counter the mostly conservative voice of mainstream talk radio, he consistently boasts “I tell the truth” and “I hold myself to an impossibly high standard when it comes to telling the truth.”

Until now, says Alan Skorski, Franken’s continuous smears against his enemies while promoting himself as the “ultimate truth teller” have gone unchallenged by the mainstream media. Surprisingly, even conservative or right-leaning media have not challenged the falsity of much of what he says, although Franken does not define what he believes is a lie, except to say that conservatives “get away with it.” In contrast, Skorski defines a lie as “intentionally telling an untruth with the purpose of trying to cover up or get away with something,” which he then accuses Franken of doing with impunity.

Alan Skorski has researched the facts regarding the allegations in Franken’s last two books, monitored his daily radio show, spoken with people cited and referenced in Franken’s books, and exchanged approximately 30 e-mails with Franken in order to provide readers with an accurate insight into how Franken thinks and operates. What Skorski finds is something very different from what Franken claims, and he concludes that, unlike many of the petty “lies” Franken writes about in his books—whether Bill O’Reilly’s Inside Edition show won a Peabody or a Polk award or whether Ann Coulter said that she and Franken were “friendly”—”...Pants on Fire” reveals that Franken himself regularly lies, smears, and distorts what others say and do, ultimately discrediting himself as a “truth teller.”

Indeed, according to Skorski, while Franken has called many people—from Rush Limbaugh and Brit Hume to President Bush—a “liar,” “hypocrite,” “cheater,” “lazy,” “shameless,” and/or “dishonest,” “...Pants on Fire” amply illustrates not only that many of his claims are false but that Franken employs the very tactics he accuses the right of using.

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**A Democracy Jimmy Carter Cannot Support (Christian Post, 051115)

ON ABORTION:

At multiple annual meetings, the overwhelming majority of Southern Baptists who were present repeatedly expressed a belief in the biblical value of human life. Interestingly, this is a belief which Carter also professes.

“I am convinced that every abortion is an unplanned tragedy, brought on by a combination of human errors,” he has stated, adding, “I have never believed that Jesus Christ would approve ... abortions.”

However, his public record doesn’t match his private beliefs.

While governor of Georgia, Carter publicly supported family planning programs that included abortion. Writing the forward, he also endorsed a book titled “Women in Need” advocating a woman’s right to abortion. As president, he organized the White House Conference on Families in 1979, which stated the right to abortion as a national priority. Finally, he hired Sarah Weddington as a White House staffer -- the lead attorney who argued for abortion in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that made abortion legal.

Clearly, his stated beliefs don’t match with his public practice, and his de facto support of abortion rights certainly doesn’t reflect the values of most Southern Baptists.

ON HOMOSEXUALITY:

The overwhelming majority of Southern Baptists believe in the biblical guidelines for human sexuality, including those dealing with the sin of homosexuality. These beliefs have been expressed through resolutions, in our statement of faith and also in our national ministry efforts to promote chastity before marriage, encourage faithfulness in marriage, and to reach out to help homosexuals who desire to leave that lifestyle.

Carter, on the other hand, sends a mixed message on the issue -- having declared that he personally believes that marriage should be reserved for a man and a woman, while also publicly advocating civil unions for homosexuals.

In 1992, Carter served as the honorary co-chair of the Human Rights Campaign, a homosexual advocacy group. Not surprisingly, he believes that a marriage amendment to the U. S. Constitution is unnecessary. He has stated that homosexuality is a sin, but sees nothing wrong with a “Christian” homosexual being ordained. In fact, he compares the sin with adultery, but forgets that Jesus told the woman caught in adultery, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more” (John 8:11, NKJV).

Moreover, he stated to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s general assembly that homosexuality is one of several issues that “in God’s eyes fade into relative insignificance, as did circumcision in the first days of the early church.” If they could speak, I don’t think the former residents of Sodom and Gomorrah would agree.

His criticism of the SBC leadership on the issue of homosexuality is particularly harsh, lumping us in with groups that “have chosen gays and lesbians as the foremost targets of their denigration” as a result of our “increasingly narrow and rigid definition of the Christian faith.” His characterization is grossly unfair, but if Southern Baptists must suffer his wrath for adhering to a biblical position on the sin of homosexuality -- stating the necessity of turning from that sin, as with any sin -- then so be it.

ON OUR STATEMENT OF FAITH:

A consensus of Southern Baptists attending an annual convention endorsed a statement of faith called the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message. It is not a “creed” as Carter erroneously claims.

He also misrepresents one change to the wording as a “substitution of Southern Baptist leaders for Jesus as the interpreters of biblical Scripture.” He uses the general public’s lack of understanding about liberals’ misuse of the language defining Jesus Christ as “the criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted.” Carter and other liberals use this language as a means to deny the truthfulness of certain passages, by stating, “My Christ would never ...,” as if Christ was someone other than revealed in the Bible, or that Jesus could be someone different for each of us depending on how we choose to define Him.

ON THE WORD OF GOD:

“Our Endangered Values” is full of confusing commentary. To his credit, the former president admits “there were a few inconsistencies” between what he professed to believe privately and his public actions. Further, his claim to be guided by the “Holy Scriptures” conflicts with his cavalier treatment of the biblical text. At once he quotes “Saint Paul” as authoritative and then dismisses other portions of Paul’s writings as culturally conditioned. Therein lies the greatest difference between Jimmy Carter and the vast majority of Southern Baptists -- he believes that the Bible “contains” the Word of God, but we believe that it “is” the Word of God.

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“Unhinged” (townhall.com, 051124)

by David Limbaugh

I picked up my friend Michelle Malkin’s book, “Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild” to peruse it, thinking I would get around to reading it when I finished the other three books I’m currently reading on and off. After reading the first few pages, though, I was hooked and had to read the whole thing.

Michelle deliberately chose the title, “Unhinged,” purposely, to convey that the American Left, generally speaking, has long since come unglued, giving itself over to irrationality and extremism rather than reasoned discourse. “This book,” writes Michelle, “is not about liberals being liberal. It is about liberals who’ve lost their grip on sanity and reality.”

Today, you can cite myriad examples of liberal irrationality, conspiracy theory, flagrant dishonesty and even violence, and say, “Well, every political movement has its extremists, but they aren’t representative of the whole and therefore do not taint the movement itself.”

But Michelle amasses a book’s worth of evidence demonstrating that these bizarre thought and behavior patterns are far too voluminous to be dismissed as anecdotal. They are indicative of a mindset — an unhealthy one at that, which she documents meticulously in her first chapter, “Liberals on the Couch.”

There she cites example after painful example of liberals themselves admitting their unmitigated personal hatred for President Bush and how it colors their view of every issue and in many cases affects their psychological well being.

Even with the mountains of evidence and the liberals’ self-confessed anti-Bush obsession, it would still be difficult to paint the entirety of the American Left as a few bricks shy of a load. But, as Michelle points out, we’re not just talking about a couple hundred mouth-foaming radicals on the Internet. “The scariest part is, these Internet crazies aren’t just riding along in the Democrat bus — they’re driving it.”

Indeed. Mad Howard Dean was not only the failed Democrat presidential contender whose scary, defamatory and ludicrous rants ignited the equally scary base of the Democratic Party. Party leaders not only rarely distanced themselves from Dean’s outbursts, they elevated him to lead their party.

It wasn’t merely some Internet loons who compared America’s treatment of enemy detainees at Gitmo to that of the Nazi and Communist prison camps. It was prominent Democrat Senator Richard Durbin.

Nor was it just certain rabid Democratic Underground posters who said President Bush’s Iraq War was concocted in Texas for political reasons, Bush knew in advance about 9-11 and allowed it to happen and Karl Rove was behind Dan Rather’s forged documents scandal. It was Sen. Ted Kennedy, Democratic Congressman Cynthia McKinney, and former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, respectively.

And, it’s not just Democrat politicians who consider Karl Rove the personification of evil. No less a liberal icon than Walter Cronkite hinted to Larry King that Karl Rove might have been behind Osama bin Laden’s public threat in October 2004 — just before the presidential election — of further terrorist attacks.

After all, this idea was not that far-fetched when you believed, as many on the Left apparently did, that Bush and Rove staged Saddam’s capture for maximum political effect and similarly had Osama stashed away and prepared to announce it when it best suited their obscene political interests. This “unhinged” theory about Osama, by the way, was voiced by President Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright.

I challenge you to read this book cover to cover and emerge still believing — assuming you did before — that the modern Democratic Party is the party of tolerance and compassion. Especially read the chapter “When Angry Democrats Attack,” and tell us with a straight face, “Each party has an equal number of crazies with violent propensities.”

You simply can’t dismiss this rampant violence with meaningless platitudes designed to establish a false moral equivalence. There is no moral equivalence. Nor is there any way to casually write off the all-too-frequent calls for President Bush’s assassination from leftist loons, or the mainstream media’s utter lack of outrage by them.

On one level “Unhinged” is amusing, because it cites case after case of literally unbelievable episodes. But on a far more important level it is quite disturbing because these are not vignettes from Mad magazine, but real life reports of a movement that has delivered to the inmates the keys to the asylum.

Doubtlessly, this book will be viciously panned by those it exposes. They are certainly entitled to their point of view, but I would encourage you to be skeptical of rebuttals cloaked in generalities. Those generalities will fall under the overwhelming weight of specific data Michelle marshals in this valuable book.

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Why the Left Hates Sex (townhall.com, 051128)

Dennis Prager recently argued that the Left values equality more than it hates evil. He is absolutely right. But I can go Dennis Prager one better: the Left hates sex. Not sexual activity, mind you. No, the Left is hyper-active sexually. I mean something much deeper: the Left is war with the fact that we are sexual beings.

Let me explain. The Left can not accept that we are born as either male or female. You might expect me to say that the Left hates gender. But to say that is to accept their terms for the debate. Gender is for nouns. We come in two sexes: male and female.

The Left hates sex because men and women are so different that they can never be made equal in the way that the Left demands. Radical egalitarians regard sex as a cosmic injustice. The Left demands that we wipe out all sex differences from our social and legal lives. If we trace this imperative through the different policies advocated by the Left, we will see how truly destructive this mentality has been for relationships between men and women, for the protection of marriage, and for the protection of the family.

This assault on sex first emerged with the subject of income equality. This mind-set has never been at peace with the fact that child-bearing places distinct demands on both women and men. Men tend to work more steadily in the paid labor force throughout their lives, while women tend to cut back on their labor force participation during their child-bearing years. As long as men and women can cooperate throughout their lives in marriage, both men and women can be made better off by combining these different economic strategies. Men may have a larger amount written on their paychecks, but their wives get the benefit of their earning power.

“Gender Equality” has worked well as an issue for the Left. They were unsuccessful at building a mass political movement for income equality, even at the height of the Great Depression. Eliminating wage differences between men and women gave them the political entree into regulating wages and working conditions that they never could have achieved any other way.

But the Left’s war on sex differences transcends the merely political, and pops up in the most personal ways. For instance, most first-time parents slide into “stereo-typical gender roles.” Studies show that people who embrace gender equality are likely to be upset by the arrival of their first child. Because of their deep commitment to equality, they often become angry at their partners and ultimately at themselves. Unless they can surrender their rigid Leftist gender ideology, their marriage is headed for divorce and they are headed for misery.

The Left wants sex to be an irrelevant category. Now, if the question is who can be an astronaut or accountant, you might be able to make the case that sex is irrelevant. Most people can go along with the idea that we should not be overly rigid about gender roles. But the Left wants much more than that. They want sex to be irrelevant, period.

I was once debating same sex marriage, at a large state university. I was the only person on the panel who supported the definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman. I asked one of my opponents whether she thought gender were a relevant category for parenting. I expected that she would be too embarrassed to say no. But in that Leftist-dominated environment, she came right out and admitted that she thought men and women were completely interchangeable as parents.

The widespread support for opposite-sex marriage is founded on precisely on this point. Most Americans intuitively understand that mothers and fathers are different, and that kids need both. Claiming that same sex couples can be married is claiming that sex is irrelevant to parenting. No one outside of a university really believes that.

But an intuitive understanding is not good enough to sustain us through the arguments that are coming our way in the Culture Wars. We have to articulate what we believe and why. We have to understand that the very concept of gender and sex is under attack.

The Left believes that sex is irrelevant to parenting, to child-rearing and child-bearing, to marriage and even to sex itself. Judging by the rhetoric on college campuses, their goal is for each and every person to be indifferent as to whether they have sex with an opposite sex partner or with a same sex partner.

Since this kind of gender equality can never be achieved, the Left can position itself for unlimited regulation of virtually every kind of behavior. If you accept the premise that all differences between men and women are socially constructed and that we are morally obligated to deconstruct all these differences, you give the Left carte blanche for endless intervention into the most intimate details of people’s lives.

Our challenge is to reconnect with the timeless values that have allowed men and women to cooperate with each other through the ages. We can acknowledge that men and women are different, without succumbing to the urge to dominate or bully each other. Men and women can complement each other, rather than compete with each other. But we will never manage this feat, unless we first realize what we are up against. The Left’s demand for equality must be exposed for the power grab that it is.

Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D., is the founder and chief visionary of Your Coach for the Culture Wars, a business devoted to supporting organizations that want to preserve their core values and achieve prosperity by taking a stand in the Culture Wars.

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Debate Amongst Yourselves: Free advice for liberals. (National Review Online, 051208)

Jonah Goldberg

Liberals have been suffering from conservative envy for several years now. Oh, they don’t envy us our evil ways, our penchant for extreme cruelty or the fact that we smell like cabbage. They envy us our toys and success.

The liberal Center for American Progress was founded explicitly to be the Left’s answer to the conservative Heritage Foundation. The lefty radio network, “Air America,” was launched to copy the success of Rush Limbaugh & Co. Today, deep-pocketed liberals are scrambling to copy conservative foundations, even though liberal foundations have always had more money.

Most conservatives I know snicker at all this. It’s not that talk radio, think tanks, and foundations haven’t been essential to the rise of American conservatism in the last five decades. They have been (see my colleague John Miller’s excellent new book, A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America, for a window into that effort). But liberals are emphasizing hardware because they don’t want to question the validity of their very outdated software.

Look, conservatives would love to switch places with liberals. We’d get the universities, Hollywood, the Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie and Pew Foundations, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the New York Times, National Public Radio, Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, CBS, including 60 Minutes and Dan Rather’s thousand-fingers massage chair, and so forth. Liberals, meanwhile, would get the Washington Times and Fox News, along with a few conservative foundations. I guess National Review and The New Republic would switch offices, which is fine by me. It’d make my commute easier.

And that sort of makes the point: Not only does the Left have better stuff, but even if that weren’t the case, the Left’s problem isn’t a lack of mechanisms to “get their message out.” Megaphones matter, but not as much as what you say into them.

If liberals really want to emulate conservative successes, I have some advice for them: Get into some big, honking arguments — not with conservatives, but with each other. The history of the conservative movement’s successes has been the history of intellectual donnybrooks, between libertarians and traditionalists, hawks and isolationists, so-called neocons and so-called paleocons, less-filling versus tastes great. Liberals would be smart to copy that and stop worrying how to mimic our direct mail strategies.

Liberals have a tendency to mistake political tactics for political principles, and vice versa. Exhibit A is the Left’s fascination with “unity.” Unity is often useful in politics, but it’s often a handicap if you haven’t figured out what to be unified about. Just as the Socratic method leads to wisdom, big fights not only illuminate big ideas, but they force people to become invested in them. Unfortunately, liberals define diversity by skin color and sex, not by ideas, which makes it difficult to have really good arguments.

Of course there are arguments on the Left and there are individual liberals with deep-seated convictions and principles. But most of the arguments are about how to “build a movement” or how to win elections, not about what liberalism is. Even the “Get out of Iraq now!” demands from the base of the Democratic party aren’t grounded in anything like a coherent foreign policy. Ten years ago liberals championed nation-building. Now they call it imperialism because George W. Bush is doing it.

A good illustration of the fundamental difference between Left and Right can be found in two books edited by Peter Berkowitz for the Hoover Institution, Varieties of Conservatism in America and Varieties of Progressivism in America. Each contains thoughtful essays by leading conservatives and liberals. But while the conservatives defend different ideological philosophical schools — neoconservatism, traditionalism, etc. — the liberals argue almost exclusively about which tactics Democrats should embrace to win the White House.

Bill Clinton was the only Democratic president elected to two terms since Franklin Roosevelt. One of the reasons for his success was that he was willing to pick fights with his own party. One can argue about the sincerity of some of those fights. But we remember the Sista Souljah moment for a reason.

Right now Washington is marveling at how the Democratic party has simultaneously made the Iraq war the central and defining political issue of the decade while at the same time having no clue what it is they want to do about it. Worse, it’s looking increasingly like the Democrats’ position on the war is based largely on the polls, not principles.

One of the most important events in the rise of conservatism was the 1978 Firing Line debate over U.S. control of the Panama Canal. William F. Buckley favored giving it up. The governor of California, Ronald Reagan, favored keeping it. Reagan’s side lost the argument, in Congress at least, but conservatives once again demonstrated our willingness to duke it out on such issues. And Reagan’s career hardly suffered. If liberals were smart, they’d do something similar. Have Joe Lieberman debate Nancy Pelosi, or John Murtha. Make liberals get past their passion and explore what they think. My guess is it would be good for liberalism in the long run — and even better for America.

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Funny Girl: Barbra Streisand, my guilty pleasure. (National Review Online, 051208)

Jonah Goldberg

Chanukah came early for the Goldberg household last month. On November 23, Barbra Streisand wrote a letter to the editor complaining that the Los Angeles Times picked me up as a columnist. As gleeful as I was, I declined to respond. But now, just last night, Ms. Streisand chose to post to her website the “director’s cut” of her original letter to the editor, which apparently had been edited for space and, no doubt, for content by the LA Times. I could resist no longer.

As Streisand surely surmises, we in the warmonger and puppy-kicker community take it as a great badge of honor to be singled out for obloquy by the likes of her. Short of convincing Alec Baldwin to actually make good on his promise to flee the country, vexing the Dashboard Saint of Hollywood Liberalism is about as good as it gets. That my name is such wolf’s bane (or Yentl’s bane) to her that she must cancel her subscription to the Los Angeles Times is just gravy. Feel free to post pictures of me around your homes if you fear she may be coming through your town.

Streisand’s real complaint is that the Times will no longer carry Robert Scheer’s column. She’s simply wrong on the facts that my column replaced his. I’m part of a bundle which results, I believe, in a net gain of liberal voices. But that Scheer is out and I’m in is a great injustice in her eyes.

Now, Streisand is notorious for her desire, indeed her yearning, to be taken seriously. During the early days of the Clinton administration, when she was basking in the glow of Bubba’s gaze, she ostentatiously drenched herself in substance, watching C-SPAN and reading up on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, no doubt finding The Federalist Papers — A.K.A. the Founding’s liner notes — particularly helpful. But there were still some things she didn’t get. When Bill Clinton invited Sharon Stone to the White House for a consultation, instead of her, Streisand reportedly declared, “Why Sharon Stone? She doesn’t know anything about policy.”

But we shouldn’t mock her interest in substance. That’s a healthy sign of citizenship. So let us try to take Streisand seriously.

I am delighted to be in the Los Angeles Times and I’m deeply flattered by the opportunity. I would be saddened if Streisand were right in her claim that my presence will hurt the paper or if her insinuation that she somehow speaks for the larger community were true.

But Streisand is adamant. She writes, “The greater Southern California community is one that not only proudly embraces its diversity, but demands it. Your decision to fire Robert Scheer is a great disservice to the spirit of our community.”

She continues: “It seems that your new leadership, especially Publisher Jeff Johnson, is entirely out of touch with your readers and their desire to be exposed to views that stretch them beyond their own paradigms. So although the number of contributors to your Op-Ed pages may have increased, in firing Scheer and hiring columnists such as Jonah Goldberg, the gamut of voices has undeniably been diluted.”

Babs and “the Desirable”

So, taking Streisand seriously, we must ask: Is she on crack?

Robert Scheer may be the greatest writer since homo sapiens first scribbled on cave walls, but no serious person can believe that his views test the elasticity of Streisand’s “paradigms.” He reinforces them, he ladles concrete on them. Scheer confirms all of her biases and reaffirms all of her ill-considered views. Put aside the fact that both Scheer and Streisand are committed leftists who share almost identical views on most major issues. Scheer served as an informal adviser to Ms. Streisand on at least one occasion — when she delivered a speech to Harvard. Streisand, who recently called for President Bush’s impeachment, threw a book party for Scheer when his last anti-Bush book came out, and she regularly links to his articles on her always amusing website.

And even if you suspect I don’t have the intellectual firepower to burn toast, it’s hard to see how my views wouldn’t put just a bit of spring in her paradigm. Indeed, it’s doubtful that Scheer would even take the time to tell her that “gamuts” cannot be “diluted” or that if you are going to pronounce upon “principals of journalistic integrity” with Olympian pomposity, you might take an extra moment or two to spell “principles” correctly. Otherwise, when she writes that the Times is stepping away “from the principals of journalistic integrity, which would dictate that journalists be journalists, editors be editors and accountants be accountants” it sounds like she’s saying we should back away slowly from the dean of the Columbia Journalism School and other journalistic “dictators.” “Have that accountant beaten! He’s acting like an editor!”

Also, Streisand’s complaint can’t really be that I’m not “forthright” enough. Surely, as she luxuriates in her scented baths, attended to by handmaidens, she doesn’t read my columns and then hurl the pages in a rage at her assistant saying, “Damn that Goldberg! He doesn’t say what he means!”

So clearly, Streisand is not speaking for herself when she laments that my writing isn’t paradigm-stretching (don’t they have Botox for that?). But another possibility is that she was speaking for others. Perhaps she thinks the Times’s readership is unpardonably right-wing (though it demands diversity!) and therefore my voice will not stretch their views sufficiently. This would probably come as a shock to those who think liberal voices in California are a paradigm a dozen. Besides, she’s canceling her subscription, which suggests that it is my lack of forthrightness and my gamut-dilutingness that offends her.

No, the most likely scenario is that Streisand is using the concept of diversity the way so many on the Left do: i.e., diversity means All Good Things. Recall how Orwell had once complained in 1946 that fascism had come to have no meaning save “something not desirable.” Today, diversity means “anything desirable,” which is why the Streisand Left seems unable to grasp that diversity can be expanded and things can be made worse (an NBA with more midgets would be more diverse, but hardly improved).

One small example: When the FCC contemplated rule changes that would have hastened media consolidation, the Streisand Left caterwauled about the strangling of diversity that would ensue (a complaint echoed somewhat in her letter when she prattles on about corporatization). But the bogeyman they cited the most in their indictment was Fox News. Now these are the same people who believe that Fox is the Devil’s Own Network. One is certainly free to make that argument, but it is entirely inconsistent with the idea that Fox has contributed to a lack of diversity in the media. If you think there are too many apples, that’s fine. And you’re free to hate oranges. But you can’t argue that adding oranges to the apple pile makes it less diverse or that it dilutes the gamut of fruits.

This sort of thing is on display every day on the left. We were supposed to celebrate the diversity of the Clinton administration (dozens of liberal lawyers who look different but think alike), but black Republicans like Condi Rice, Colin Powell, and Clarence Thomas are ipso facto “inauthentic” and therefore don’t count toward “diversity.”

In fairness to most liberals, it’s clear that Streisand doesn’t really grasp the meanings of some fancy words. But Streisand likes fancy stuff so she uses them anyway. It’s sort of like not caring that some luxury items are inappropriate in some contexts, and wearing diamonds and high heels to a picnic thinking everyone will simply be impressed. We can’t hold her gauche use of “paradigm” and “gamut” or her righteous talk about “corporatization of our media” — even as she is a fixture of corporate media if ever there was one — against all liberals. But her use of “diversity” is perfectly consistent with her end of the political spectrum. Diversity is merely a cudgel to use against the Bad Guys, even when it makes no sense.

Obviously, even if Streisand’s paradigm were made of flubber, she’d never think highly of me. But it’d be nice if she could grasp that her disagreement has nothing to do with diversity — or diluted gamuts.

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Racist liberal media (townhall.com, 051208)

by Marvin Olasky

In a congressional hearing Tuesday, liberals said that racism caused delays in Hurricane Katrina relief and rescue. They’re right, but they misidentified the culprit.

As I’ve reviewed records of the week of Aug., 28, an ugly picture has emerged: Some politicians and journalists painted a portrait of impoverished, overwhelmingly African-American masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other as well as the police and rescue workers trying to protect and save them. For example, Mayor Ray Nagin said many of his constituents were in an “almost animalistic state.”

Four days after the storm hit, black political organizer Randall Robinson said the “thousands of blacks in New Orleans ... have begun eating corpses to survive.” Even for those who see cannibalism as benign, a feast after only four days is premature. CNN became hysterical about “groups of young men roaming the city, shooting at people, attempting to rape women.” Author Michael Lewis reduced the television message to a sentence: “Crazy black people with automatic weapons are out hunting white people, and there’s no bag limit.”

None of these rumors was true, as The New York Times belatedly reported a month after the winds died down: It called them “figments of frightened imaginations.” New Orleans Times-Picayune editor Jim Maoss also noted after the fact that if media had been characterizing the attitudes of “sweaty, hungry, desperate white people, middle-class white people, it’s hard to believe that these kinds of myths would have sprung up quite as readily.”

Journalists who got up close to the situation and let their eyes rather than their fears and prejudices inform them did not succumb to hysteria. Photographer Tony Sambato described the supposedly scary African-Americans at the New Orleans convention center as “families who listened to the authorities, who followed direction, who believed in the government. ... They’ve been behaving. They have not started any melees, any riots, nothing. They just want food and support. There’s no hostility there.”

Coast Guard Lt. Chris Huberty, who flew a rescue helicopter, also resented TV’s negative characterizations of black New Orleans residents: “There were plenty of people sacrificing for others, regardless of their demographic.”

When Wolf Blitzer on CNN at the end of the week said, “Had this happened in a predominantly white community, the federal government would have responded much more quickly,” he was probably right. Had not reporters made racist assumptions about black behavior and given airtime to a few purveyors of hatred, rescuers would not have had to view their operations as demanding military precaution rather than merely humanitarian speed. Had commanders not seen the need to arrive at the convention center with overwhelming force, they probably would have been able to evacuate people from there a day earlier.

Instead of tamping down hysteria, network talkers regularly stirred up racial anger. On NBC, anchor Brian Williams lectured that the hurricane would “necessitate a national discussion on race, on oil, politics, class, infrastructure, the environment and more.” On ABC, Ted Koppel began by orating that New Orleans is 67% black, and, “The slow response to the victims of Hurricane Katrina has led to questions about race, poverty and a seemingly indifferent government.” CNN’s Blitzer repeatedly called the hurricane victims “so poor and so black,” and prodded interviewees to find racism in the government’s response.

The facts, though, indicate that Katrina was an equal-opportunity drowner. Of the identified victims released to families from a makeshift New Orleans morgue, 44% were African-American, 47% Caucasian, 3% Hispanic and 8% unknown. Nor were blacks the only ones to see their homes destroyed. Katrina’s storm surge demolished 95% of the homes in 95% white St. Bernard parish.

One broadcaster from that parish noted: “It was over five days before the federal government showed up. ... Sixty-six thousand people live in my parish. ... They’re picking up pets in the city, and I still have people in the attics trapped, waiting on roofs for someone to come rescue them.”

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Why can’t I get arrested? (townhall.com, 051215)

by Ann Coulter

I’m getting a little insulted that no Democratic prosecutor has indicted me. Liberals bring trumped-up criminal charges against all the most dangerous conservatives. Why not me?

Democrat prosecutor Barry Krischer has spent two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to find some criminal charge to bring against Rush Limbaugh. Political hack Ronnie Earle spent three years and went through six grand juries to indict Tom DeLay. Liberals spent the last two years fantasizing in public about Karl Rove being indicted. Newt Gingrich was under criminal investigation for 3 1/2 years back in the ‘90s when liberals were afraid of him. Final result: No crime.

And of course, everybody cool in the Reagan administration was indicted. Or at least investigated and persecuted. Reagan’s sainted attorney general Ed Meese was criminally investigated for 14 months before the prosecutor announced that he didn’t have anything (but denounced Meese as a crook anyway).

I note that nobody ever wanted to indict Bob Dole or Gerald Ford (except, of course, other Republicans).

In the Nixon administration, liberals even brought “Deep Throat” up on charges – and he was one of you people! What, now I’m not even as hip as “Deep Throat”?

I’ve done a lot for my country. I think I deserve to be indicted, too. How am I supposed to show my face around Washington if I haven’t been “frog-marched” out of my office by some liberal D.A. looking to move to D.C. for the next Democratic administration? What’s a girl have to do to become a “person of interest” around here? Mr. Krischer, where do I go to get rid of my reputation?

Barry Krischer has been going around calling El Rushbo a criminal for more than two years but has yet to bring any charges. Last month, Krischer’s assistant, James Martz, told the court that his office has “no idea” if Limbaugh has even committed a crime. I’m no lawyer – hey, wait a minute, yes I am! – but it sounds like maybe Krischer’s maid has been out scoring him stupid pills again.

These liberals are fanatics about privacy when it comes to man-boy sex and stabbing forks into partially-born children. But a maid alleges that she bought Rush Limbaugh a few Percodans, and suddenly the government has declared a war on prescription painkillers.

Liberals are more optimistic about the charges against Tom DeLay than they are about the charges against Saddam Hussein – and the only living things Tom DeLay ever exterminated were rats and bugs.

In the remaining money-laundering case against DeLay, the prosecutors have acknowledged that they cannot produce the actual list of candidates who allegedly gained from the purported money-laundering scheme. But they hope to introduce a facsimile cobbled together from someone’s memory.

In other words, during Rathergate, the case against the president consisted of a faked memo, whereas the case against Tom DeLay consists of an imaginary one.

Charges like these are not brought at random. They are brought against people who pose the greatest threat to liberals. (What am I? Miss Congeniality?)

The only difference between the Stalin-era prosecutions – also enthusiastically defended by liberals – and these prosecutions is that it’s possible to get acquitted here. But the validity of the charges is about the same.

The only way to stop the left’s criminalization of conservatism is to start indicting liberals.

It wasn’t calm persuasion that convinced liberals the independent counsel law was a bad idea. It was an independent prosecutor investigating Bill Clinton (who actually was a felon!).

It wasn’t logical argument that got them to admit that – sometimes – women do lie about sexual harassment. It was half a dozen women accusing Bill Clinton of groping, flashing or raping them.

It wasn’t the plain facts that got liberals to admit that, sometimes, “objective” news reports can be biased. It was the appearance of Fox News Channel.

Can’t we rustle up a right-wing prosecutor to indict Teddy Kennedy for Mary Jo Kopechne’s drowning? Unlike the cases against Limbaugh and DeLay, Mary Jo’s death was arguably a crime, and we could probably prove it in court.

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The Left’s privacy hypocrites (townhall.com, 051221)

by Michelle Malkin

Allow me to sum up the homeland security strategy of America’s do-nothing brigade, led by the armchair generals at The New York Times and ACLU headquarters:

First, bar law enforcement at all levels from taking race, ethnicity, national origin and religion into account when assessing radical Islamic terror threats. (But continue to allow the use of those factors to ensure “diversity” in public-college admissions, contracting, and police- and fire-department hiring.)

Second, institute the “Eenie-meenie-miny-moe” random-search program at all subways, railways and bus stations.

Third, open the borders, sabotage all immigration enforcement efforts and scream “Racist” at any law-abiding American who protests.

Fourth, sue. Sue. Sue.

Fifth, yell “Connect the dots!” while rebuilding and strengthening the walls that prevent information-sharing between the CIA, State Department, Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and other key government agencies.

Sixth, hang the white flag and declare victory.

Seventh, sit back and wait to blame the president for failing to take aggressive, preventative measures when the next terrorist attack hits.

Repeat.

The hindsight hypocrisy of the civil-liberties absolutists never ceases to amaze. And their selective outrage over privacy violations never ceases to aggravate. Last Friday, The New York Times splashed classified information about the National Security Agency’s surveillance of international communications between suspected al Qaeda operatives and their contacts all over the front page in a naked attempt to sabotage the Patriot Act. This Tuesday, the newspaper continued to stir fears of “spying on all innocent Americans” by recycling old ACLU complaints about FBI monitoring of radical environmental groups, antiwar activists and some Muslim leaders and groups.

Alarmists in the Beltway want investigations (though not of the leakers who fed the Times its story). The civil-liberties sky is falling, they say, and never have Americans been subjected to such invasive snooping.

Funny enough, another story about unprecedented domestic spying measures broke a week before the Times’ stunt. But neither the Times nor the ACLU nor the Democratic Party leadership had a peep to say about the reported infringements on Americans’ civil liberties. Sen. Charles Schumer (by the way, Chuck, how’s that apology to Lt. Gov. Michael Steele over his stolen credit report coming along?) did not rush to the cameras to call the alleged privacy breach “shocking.” Sen. Robert Byrd did not awake from his slumber to decry the adoption of “the thuggish practices of our enemies.” The indignant New York Times editorial board did not call for heads to roll.

That’s because the targets of the spy scandal that didn’t make the front-page headlines were politically incorrect right-wing extremists.

According to the McCurtain Daily Gazette, in the days after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the U.S. government used a spy satellite to gather intelligence on a white separatist compound in Oklahoma. The paper obtained a Secret Service log showing that on May 2, 1995, two weeks after the April 19 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that killed 168 people, the FBI was trying to locate suspects for questioning.

Investigators zeroed in on the compound in nearby Elohim City. “Satellite assets have been tasked to provide intelligence concerning the compound,” the document said, according to the Gazette and Associate Press. The Gazette noted that “America’s spy-satellite program is jointly under the control of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of Defense (DoD). Targeting decisions are classified; however, persons familiar with the project say any domestic use of these satellites is barred by agreements between the CIA and DoD.” Photoreconnaissance satellites that gather intelligence from space usually target hostile governments and foreign terrorists. “The domestic use of a military satellite for domestic spying is a violation of DoD and CIA regulations regarding the proper use of top-secret national security satellites,” the Gazette reported.

But with the exception of a brief Associated Press recap, the story received absolutely no mainstream-media attention. No civil-liberties circus. No White House press-corps pandemonium.

The left believes the government should do whatever it takes to fight terrorists — but only when the terrorists look like Timothy McVeigh. If you’re on the MCI Friends and Family plan of Osama bin Laden and Abu Zubaydah, you’re home free.

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The Paranoid Style In American Liberalism (Weekly Standard, 060102)

by William Kristol

No reasonable American, no decent human being, wants to send up a white flag in the war on terror. But leading spokesmen for American liberalism-hostile beyond reason to the Bush administration, and ready to believe the worst about American public servants-seem to have concluded that the terror threat is mostly imaginary. It is the threat to civil liberties from George W. Bush that is the real danger. These liberals recoil unthinkingly from the obvious fact that our national security requires policies that are a step (but only a careful step) removed from ACLU dogma.

On Monday, December 19, General Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and now deputy director of national intelligence, briefed journalists. The back—and—forth included this exchange:

Reporter: Have you identified armed enemy combatants, through this program, in the United States?

Gen. Hayden: This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States.

Reporter: General Hayden, I know you’re not going to talk about specifics about that, and you say it’s been successful. But would it have been as successful-can you unequivocally say that something has been stopped or there was an imminent attack or you got information through this that you could not have gotten through going to the court?

Gen. Hayden: I can say unequivocally, all right, that we have got information through this program that would not otherwise have been available.

Now, General Hayden is by all accounts a serious, experienced, nonpolitical military officer. You would think that a statement like this, by a man in his position, would at least slow down the glib assertions of politicians, op—ed writers, and journalists that there was no conceivable reason for President Bush to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. As Gary Schmitt and David Tell explain elsewhere in this issue, FISA was broken well before 9/11. Was the president to ignore the evident fact that FISA’s procedures and strictures were simply incompatible with dealing with the al Qaeda threat in an expeditious manner? Was the president to ignore the obvious incapacity of any court, operating under any intelligible legal standard, to judge surveillance decisions involving the sweeping of massive numbers of cell phones and emails by high—speed computers in order even to know where to focus resources? Was the president, in the wake of 9/11, and with the threat of imminent new attacks, really supposed to sit on his hands and gamble that Congress might figure out a way to fix FISA, if it could even be fixed? The questions answer themselves.

But the spokesmen for contemporary liberalism didn’t pause to even ask these questions. The day after Gen. Hayden’s press briefing, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee blathered on about “the Constitution in crisis” and “impeachable conduct.” Barbara Boxer, a Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asserted there was “no excuse” for the president’s actions. The ranking Democrat on that committee, Joseph Biden, confidently stated that the president’s claims were “bizarre” and that “aggrandizement of power” was probably the primary reason for the president’s actions, since “there was no need to do any of this.”

So we are really to believe that President Bush just sat around after 9/11 thinking, “How can I aggrandize my powers?” Or that Gen. Hayden-and his hundreds of nonpolitical subordinates-cheerfully agreed to an obviously crazy, bizarre, and unnecessary project of “domestic spying”?

This is the fever swamp into which American liberalism is on the verge of descending.

Some have already descended. Consider Arlene Getz, senior editorial manager at Newsweek.com. She posted an article Wednesday-also after Gen. Hayden’s press briefing-on Newsweek’s website ruminating on “the parallels” between Bush’s defense of his “spying program” and, yes, “South Africa’s apartheid regime.”

Back in the 1980s, when I was living in Johannesburg and reporting on apartheid South Africa, a white neighbor proffered a tasteless confession. She was “quite relieved,” she told me, that new media restrictions prohibited our reporting on government repression. No matter that Pretoria was detaining tens of thousands of people without real evidence of wrongdoing. No matter that many of them, including children, were being tortured-sometimes to death. No matter that government hit squads were killing political opponents. No matter that police were shooting into crowds of black civilians protesting against their disenfranchisement. “It’s so nice,” confided my neighbor, “not to open the papers and read all that bad news.”

I thought about that neighbor this week, as reports dribbled out about President George W. Bush’s sanctioning of warrantless eavesdropping on American conversations. . . . I’m sure there are many well—meaning Americans who agree with their president’s explanation that it’s all a necessary evil (and that patriotic citizens will not be spied on unless they dial up Osama bin Laden). But the nasty echoes of apartheid South Africa should at least give them pause.

Yup. First the Bush administration will listen in to international communications of a few hundred people in America who seem to have been in touch with terrorists abroad . . . and next thing you know, government hit squads will be killing George W. Bush’s political opponents.

What is one to say about these media—Democratic spokesmen for contemporary American liberalism? That they have embarrassed and discredited themselves. That they cannot be taken seriously as critics. It would be good to have a responsible opposition party in the United States today. It would be good to have a serious mainstream media. Too bad we have neither.

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Progressive doublespeak (Townhall.com, 060104)

by Bruce Bartlett

According to a Dec. 25 report in the Boston Globe, the Democratic Party is joining forces with the activist group ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to place initiatives on state ballots this fall to raise the minimum wage. The idea is to energize the poor to vote for Democratic candidates, as well as the initiative.

ACORN’s involvement in this campaign is amusing because a few years ago the group sued the state of California in order to be exempted from its minimum wage requirement, which was higher than the federal government’s. In its appellate brief, ACORN acknowledged that the more it had to pay each worker, the fewer such workers it would be able to hire. Of course, the same thing is true for businesses, as well — something minimum wage advocates refuse to admit.

Furthermore, ACORN argued that paying its workers less than the minimum wage aided its organizing efforts. Said the brief, “A person paid limited sums of money will be in a better position to empathize with and relate to the low and moderate membership and constituency of ACORN.” Somehow I doubt that a business catering to those with low incomes would get any sympathy from ACORN if it made the same argument.

Indeed, ACORN has a history of denying its workers rights that it demands from corporations. For example, its “People’s Platform” says that all workers have the right to organize. Yet, when its own workers have tried to do so, ACORN strenuously fought them.

In 2001, all of the workers in ACORN’s Seattle office signed cards stating a desire to join the Industrial Workers of the World, a labor union with a long history of radicalism. ACORN’s management refused to recognize the union and locked out the workers. Eventually, ACORN relented and paid a $20,000 settlement. Afterward, an IWW organizer said, “This underscores further the doublespeak that causes their workers to unionize or resign in disgust, and it shows that (ACORN’s leaders) have learned nothing about workers’ rights.”

That same year, ACORN intimidated and fired workers in its Dallas office for threatening to organize. In 2003, the National Labor Relations Board found that it had violated the law. Said the NLRB, “By interrogating employees about their union activities, by informing employees that other employees have been discharged because of the union, by threatening employees that selecting the union to represent them will be futile and by threatening employees with discharge, respondent has violated section 8(a) of the act.”

Liberal doublespeak on the minimum wage has a long history. According to a fascinating article in the fall 2005 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, early advocates of the minimum wage knew perfectly well that it would lead to job losses. Not only that, the loss of jobs was actually a prime reason why they supported the minimum wage.

As Princeton University economist Thomas Leonard recounts the story, liberals of a century ago were strong supporters of eugenics — the idea that the quality of the human race could be improved by weeding out, even killing, those deemed to be unfit. The great novelist D.H. Lawrence expressed an appalling but typical view. Said Lawrence on one occasion, “If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace ... and then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them all in, all the sick, the halt and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile at me.”

Even President Theodore Roosevelt shared this philosophy. “I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding,” he wrote in 1914. Criminals should be sterilized, he said, and the feebleminded should be forbidden to leave offspring.

Sadly, many states enacted laws imposing forced sterilization on such people, a practice even approved by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927).

The minimum wage fit in with this philosophy, according to Leonard, because its advocates thought that inferior races and ethnic groups would be priced out of the labor market and become unemployed, thus reducing immigration and reproduction by such people. “This unemployment is not a mark of social disease,” wrote famous socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, “but actually of social health.”

Interestingly, minimum wage supporters of the Progressive Era also believed that it would price women out of the labor market, forcing them to marry and have children. Eugenicists were obsessed with reproduction because they feared that whites of Northern European stock were not having enough children and would eventually be overwhelmed by faster-reproducing groups in what we now call the Third World.

Today, we rightly condemn eugenics as racist. But many people still support policies such as the minimum wage that were originally planted in its soil.

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The anti-anti-terrorists (Townhall.com, 060104)

by Linda Chavez

The current hysteria over the president’s authorization of some domestic intercepts by the National Security Agency reminds me of similar reaction by liberals to the Cold War. Instead of recognizing communism as a clear and present danger to freedom and liberty here and abroad, many liberals decided the real threat to those values came from anti-communism itself. Anti-anti-communism became the defining characteristic of American liberals, who have never fully recovered their credibility with the American people when it comes to protecting the nation. The inheritors of that liberal tradition might today be defined as anti-anti-terrorists.

Whatever the government does to try to protect us from the threat of Islamic terrorists is immediately suspect. Instead of focusing on the real threat posed by an actual enemy, liberals today are more worried about imagined threats to civil liberties posed by the efforts to counteract terrorism.

Granted, we don’t yet know the full extent of the NSA program — and shouldn’t since it is among the most highly sensitive classified programs run by the government. According to the original news stories reporting on the program and the administration’s response, however, the NSA has intercepted communications from known terrorists overseas to persons in the United States without seeking a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Critics claim this is illegal, citing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which sets up a procedure for U.S. intelligence services normally prohibited from monitoring U.S. citizens and permanent residents to seek a warrant to do so from the FISA court. The president claims — and is supported by legal scholars and officials from previous administrations, including the Clinton Justice Department — that he has the authority to bypass the FISA procedure so long as he is responding to a foreign threat and acting in his role as commander in chief during wartime. Every president since FISA was enacted in 1978, from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton, has asserted similar authority, suggesting Bush is no radical in his assumptions. But this is an issue to be resolved in the courts, not in the halls of Congress, which cannot trump the Constitution by statute, much less the opinion pages of the newspaper.

My point here has more to do with the motives of those who’ve jumped on the NSA story than resolving the legal issues surrounding it. What is it about the liberal elite that automatically assumes the worst about our own government but is willing to assume only innocent intentions when it comes to those accused of wanting to do harm to America? Like liberal anti-anti-communists of the Cold War era, today’s anti-anti-terrorists assume nefarious intentions of the U.S. government, while clamoring to protect the rights of enemy agents operating in our country. Cold War liberals vigorously defended Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of giving the Soviet Union nuclear secrets, and State Department official Alger Hiss, one of several high-ranking Roosevelt administration appointees who spied for the Soviet Union. Even after the release of Soviet archival records and the Venona files, the secret communications between the Soviets and their U.S. agents decrypted by the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service, many liberals refused to admit the guilt of these individuals. Similarly, today’s anti-anti-terrorists refuse to acknowledge the threat of al-Qaeda agents and sympathizers in the United States, worrying instead that the real threat is from the American government, intent on spying on its own citizens.

We won the Cold War in spite of a “fifth column” operating in the United States and those who denied its presence. But it took trillions of dollars and the commitment of America’s leaders and the majority of our citizens to do so, a process that was undeniably made more lengthy and difficult by the anti-anti-communists. No doubt we will win the war on terrorism as well, but the anti-anti-terrorists may prolong the war and endanger American lives with their paranoid resistance to fighting the terrorists. Pogo was wrong: We have met the enemy, and he is not us.

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You don’t agree with me?! Why, you so-and-so! (townhall.com, 060131)

by Bill Murchison

Here’s a neat bit of news, courtesy of the scholarly community: Your political opinions reflect your inner anxieties and biases. Including — pssst — your Racial Views.

Let us tarry a moment with the deep thinkers at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, whose meditations the Washington Post reported this week. The society just came off a conference, wherein were presented, said the Post, “several provocative psychological studies about the nature of political belief.”

It would seem — I am still quoting the Post — that our politics are rooted in “emotion and implicit assumptions.” Not quite you-are-what-you-ate — more like you-aren’t-what-you-hate. One study — the Post again — “put self-identified Democratic and Republican partisans in brain scanners and asked them to evaluate negative information about various candidates. Both groups were quick to spot inconsistency and hypocrisy — but only in candidates they opposed.”

Another study said that “supporters of President Bush and other conservatives held stronger self-admitted biases against blacks than liberals did.”

A Harvard psychologist commented: “George W. Bush is appealing as a leader to those Americans who harbor greater anti-black prejudice.” Quod erat demonstrandum — the left long ago having determined that the only reason for opposing busing, affirmative action, etc. is hostility to the aims of blacks.

Here once more go the blind men, feeling the elephant out, saying lordly things about the whole with respect to the discrete parts they have noted. I wouldn’t imagine much will come of these various studies, apart from the interest they will excite among bloggers. Everybody knows there is some connection — some element even of bias — in political determinations. The damnable modernity of these revelations is what I might draw attention to.

Americans, circa 2006, pretty much assume rationality has fled the political scene. You can tell from the language. The Angry Left isn’t about to give George W. Bush a shred of credit for doing anything in which he believes. By Howard Dean’s standards, and those of the liberal bloggers, Bush-ism is a pyramid of lies and deceptions. Iraq! Weapons of mass destruction! Even Katrina! And now the next justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Samuel Alito Jr., who has convinced Joseph Biden and Teddy Kennedy that he and Bush are conspiring to roll back civil liberties, etc., etc.

The naturalistic explanation of politics makes all these notions plain as day — to those who buy into the naturalistic explanation of politics: everything a function of self-interest and inner emotion. Shall we not overlook the race card lying on the table? The argument is, unless the NAACP gets every item on its agenda, those who vote to deny that agenda are crypto-slave holders. Oh, can’t you just see Bush stalking the cotton fields, with bullwhip in hand, seeking to scourge the slackers and, especially, those slaves with some perversely exalted notion of human rights?

The naturalistic explanation of political preference is just now the biggest obstacle to anything like political reconciliation. If you know your opponents, of either party, are a bunch of no-goods, acting out their base instincts, you can write them off. In fact, you can commence calling them all sorts of bad names — starting with “liars.”

The naturalistic explanation of political preference shouts down Reason and, along with it, the religious understanding of society as a mass of men and women all in the same boat, spiritually speaking — none as righteous as he thinks, all burdened in greater or lesser degree by that old affliction our ancestors called sin. But, hey, this isn’t a church. It’s churches — right? — that want to shackle free thought and turn our minds and schools over to fundamentalists.

You hear such things, indeed: one more reminder of how public discourse falls apart once you begin to flagellate opponents on grounds of their shaky relationship to decency, honor, everything you’ve got, but not they; oh, no, not they, or they’d see things your way.

Try nailing down an argument harder, tighter, than with that alluring hammer.

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Carter Unmasked (WorldNetDaily, 060210)

“Jimmy Carter’s reputation for idealism has been one of the great swindles of American politics for two decades.” — The New Republic

The Real Jimmy Carter by Steven F. Hayward

The Nobel Prize is just the beginning: Jimmy Carter is enjoying a new day in the sun, with left-wing historians taking a “fresh look” at his disastrous presidency and trying to bamboozle Americans into thinking that it was actually successful. This ongoing Saint Jimmy campaign would be laughable if it weren’t part of a larger strategy to whitewash the records of failed Democrats and justify Carter’s outsize influence on today’s Democratic party. Although the voters decisively dispatched Jimmy Carter in 1980, his legacy lives on in potent form today and is likely to survive his death. But now in The Real Jimmy Carter Steven F. Hayward demolishes the Carter myth once and for all.

Hayward knows a real leader when he sees one (he’s the author of The Age of Reagan, 1964-1980 and Churchill on Leadership) and in this book he provides a wealth of devastating new information that proves that Carter was and is one of the worst American leaders in history. He explains why Carter’s presidency really was as bad as we thought at the time, or worse. Turning to today, he details how Carter’s lasting and dominant impact on the Democratic Party — the party of John Kerry and Hillary Clinton — has been calamitous, and why his supposed status as a “model” ex-president is the reverse of the truth (unless your idea of a model statesman is Jesse Jackson). Steven F. Hayward reveals:

* How Carter’s political persona amounts to little more than an odd combination of Machiavelli and Mr. Rogers

* Why the editor of the Atlanta Constitution called Carter “one of the three or four phoniest men I ever met”

* How Carter has again and again shown himself bereft of a solid intellectual foundation for his political views

* Carter as a politician: his habits of exaggeration, disingenuousness, and outright deception — belying his claim to occupy the moral high ground

* Carter’s weak, vacillating position on school desegregation as a member of a Georgia school board in the 1950s

* Carter’s 1970 run for Georgia governor: after conducting an appallingly cynical race-baiting campaign, he immediately proclaimed that the time had come for the South to repudiate its racist ways

* Why Carter the renowned liberal moralist once declared that “Lester Maddox is the embodiment of the Democratic Party” and “George Wallace and I are in agreement on most issues”

* Jimmy’s loopy side: who’s the only person elected to the presidency to have filed a UFO-sighting report with the Air Force? You guessed it

* Why the national media ignored Carter’s race-baiting and made him one of the darlings of the Democratic party in the early 1970s

* How, despite claiming to be “above politics,” Carter used the traditional weapons of power as Governor: patronage appointments, attempts to maneuver his supporters into key legislative posts, and more

* False: Carter’s claim, made during his 1976 presidential run, that he was a nuclear physicist

* Abortion: how Carter’s 1976 position on this issue vividly displayed his ability to stand on both sides of an issue

* How Carter’s 1976 election as president was not a fluke of the post-Watergate moment, but the fruit of his own carefully planned five-year effort

* Why even Carter’s notorious use of foul language in his mid-campaign Playboy interview may have been the result of careful calculation

* Carter: born again? Disquieting evidence that he was not as much “one of us” as evangelical Christians assumed in 1976

* The massive blunder Carter committed as President — that was repeated by Bill Clinton in 1993

* President Carter’s foreign policy: “McGovernism without McGovern”

* The Camp David accords: why Anwar Sadat exclaimed, “I’d just spent two years throwing the Soviets out of the Middle East, and now the United States is inviting them back in”

* The Carter executive order that Barry Goldwater blasted as “the most disgraceful thing a president has ever done”

* Inside the Carter White House during the disasters of the Sandinista takeover of Nicaragua, the energy crisis and the Khomeini Revolution and hostage crisis in Iran

* The “malaise speech”: why Carter made it, and the effect it had on his failed presidency

* Global 2000: the doom-and-gloom study that Carter released shortly before leaving the presidency — how most of its predictions have turned out to be wildly wrong

* Why the Carter Administration believed that the old Cold War strategy of containment was no longer necessary

* How Carter made direct contacts with Soviet officials to try to subvert President Reagan’s anti-Communist policies

* Revealed: the shocking extent of Carter’s clandestine efforts to sabotage the first Gulf War in 1990

* The Clinton Administration: how it became Carter’s virtual second term, despite Slick Willie’s disdain for Carter

* How Carter’s perspective has become dominant among contemporary liberals and his Democratic Party successors

* Carter’s Nobel Prize: how a Nobel official inadvertently revealed that it was actually meant as a slap in the face of the American people

* Carter the meddling ex-president: how, in the words of Time magazine’s Lance Morrow, some of his “Lone Ranger work has taken him dangerously close to the neighborhood of what we used to call treason”

* Bank robber Willie Sutton’s assessment of Carter: “I’ve never seen a bigger confidence man in my life, and I’ve been around some of the best in the business”

Steven Hayward demonstrates again and again that Jimmy Carter’s failures weren’t just accidents of history. They’re rooted in the character and ideology of the man himself. This wouldn’t concern anyone except Rosalynn and Amy if it weren’t for the fact that Carter continues to insert himself in the nation’s business, both at home and around the world. But The Real Jimmy Carter proves that the Emperor from Plains has no clothes — and never has.

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Dead or Alive? The Left’s constitutional issues. (National Review Online, 060222)

Jonah Goldberg

The living Constitution, which has performed innumerable feats of jurisprudential prestidigitation, has accomplished a miraculous new trick during the national debate over NSA surveillance. It faked its own death.

To do this, it needed the help of its numerous magicians’ assistants in the Democratic party (with some audience participation by Republicans, too).

If you recall, the “living Constitution” is the notion that the meaning of the Constitution changes over time. One day nine justices simply wake up, and when they arrive at work that day, they discover that the words in the document they studied their entire adult lives suddenly mean something new and fresh. It’s a bit like a science experiment where you try to grow mold in a petri dish. A dead (or “enduring”) Constitution is simply one that means what it says and says what it means. Obviously, this is a gross generalization, but you get the point.

Al Gore summarized the almost universal view among leading liberals when in 2000 he promised, if elected, to appoint judges “who understand that our Constitution is a living and breathing document,” and who grasp that “it was intended by our founders to be interpreted in the light of the constantly evolving experience of the American people.”

Notice how Gore used the word “understand” instead of “believe,” suggesting that the living Constitution is a fact of life and those who don’t see it are ignorant as opposed to merely wrong. This may seem like a pedantic observation, but it does capture in miniature the smugness of liberals who, ever since Woodrow Wilson mocked “Fourth of July sentiments,” have treated belief in the living Constitution as a sign of basic intelligence.

Enter the recent donnybrook over the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping. Suddenly, Al Gore — still largely speaking for the liberal establishment — is saying that the White House’s evolved understanding of constitutional requirements amounts to “disrespect for America’s Constitution which has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of the Constitution.” Suddenly, the Constitution isn’t alive, it’s a fabric. Liberals have had an overnight love affair with the founders, invoking good old Ben Franklin and his notion that “Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.”

Not long ago, liberals were telling us that such dead white men from the 18th century had nothing to teach us in a high-tech, globalized economy. But now that the White House is “adapting” and “evolving” in the face of an enemy that is using high technology and loopholes of globalization unimaginable to the founders in order to kill us, the hip modernists want to go back to the horse-and-buggy age.

Now, none of this speaks to the merits — or even the constitutionality — of Bush’s wiretapping. On the merits, the practice itself makes so much sense that even Democrats are terrified to denounce it. Instead, they claim — with some plausibility — that the White House simply cannot wiretap unilaterally, even when the communications involve a person overseas. That’s a good fight to take to the Supreme Court and the American people in both 2006 and 2008.

But the sudden love affair liberals are having with what they believe to be original intent is grossly hypocritical and opportunistic.

And yet it’s also instructive. Let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that Bush’s wiretapping is both corrosive to liberty and flatly contradicts the original intent of the founders. Well, in an age when the Constitution is made of flubber, that hardly makes it indefensible. I know that liberals think “evolution” has an inherently positive connotation; that if A evolves to B, then B must be better in some way than A. But, as any conservative will tell you, “evolution” and “improvement” are hardly synonymous.

For the first time in decades, liberals are grasping that the “living Constitution” can grow into something tyrannical. They had no problem with the Constitution’s blob-like expansion into areas conservatives cherish (nor did they care much when Bill Clinton used the Constitution in ways the anti-Bush crowd now defines as Orwellian). But now that the shoe’s on the other foot, they suddenly see genius in those old fusty white men.

The problem is, you can’t switch back and forth from living Constitution to dead and keep your credibility. The whole point of constitutions is that the rules remain the same when convenient and inconvenient, which is why justices like Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia often rule contrary to their political preferences. But liberals ask the Constitution to play dead when convenient, and then, when the temporary crisis has passed, they want it to burst forth in living Technicolor. In other words, the Founding Fathers are only right when Al Gore thinks they were right. All other times, they’re irrelevant old white men.

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Liberal goal for America: Gutless socialism (townhall.com, 060221)

by Herman Cain

The United States of America is drifting away from capitalism and its free-market foundations toward a gutless brand of socialism. Yet unlike the tyrannical dictators who ruled communist nations in the 20th Century, congressional liberals lack the guts to tell the public their true intentions. Those intentions are motivated by the Marxist philosophy of “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Instead of conducting a deadly revolution, liberals are waging their war on capitalism through public policy, assaults on our free-market system and socialistic rhetoric.

The oldest and most flagrant example of this gutless socialism began in 1913 with enactment of the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving Congress the power to “lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” The income tax code that followed forced a 1% tax on personal incomes above $3,000. Today it is a nine-million-word progressive violation of our liberties.

The next landmark example of gutless redistribution of wealth from those with “abilities” to those with “needs” is the Social Security system. Social Security began in 1935 as an assistance program for people who reached retirement age. The 1935 pamphlet describing the program stated that workers would never have to pay more than three cents on the dollar, up to a maximum of $3,000 of ones’ earnings. Twelve and four-tenths percent on the first $90,000 later, the program is now called an entitlement and is headed for a 2015 financial train wreck. Though President Bush and his bi-partisan Social Security Commission proposed a sound solution to fix the crumbling Social Security structure, congressional liberals on both sides of the aisle balked at any attempt to alter the socialistic underpinnings of the system’s original design.

In 1943, Congress continued the deliberate march toward socialism by enacting automatic withholding of taxes from our paychecks. Congress explained to the public that, since the U.S. was busy fighting World War II, automatic withholding was necessary to fund the war effort in a timely fashion. Congress also promised the public that automatic withholding would end as soon as the war was over. That war ended over 60 years ago. And if for some reason the government does not confiscate enough of our money during the year, we are charged interest for underpayment. That does not sound like the system our Founding Fathers envisioned.

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Even liberals in state legislatures are attacking capitalism through overt assaults on our free-market system. The Maryland legislature in January overrode their governor’s veto of a bill that will force corporations with 10,000 employees or more to pay 8% of their payroll to their employees’ health care costs. Unfortunately, nearly 30 other states are considering similar legislation. State policy makers who legally force corporations to carry out their income redistribution schemes are as gutless as their counterparts in Washington D.C.

State legislatures are not alone in their use of backdoor attempts to inflict the pain of socialism on businesses and the public. Since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf region, causing temporary spikes in gas prices, oil company executives have been called to Congress to justify their companies’ profits. Some misguided members of Congress have even demanded that oil companies return their “excess profits” to the public.

The third and most visible gutless method liberals employ to attack capitalism is the use of rhetoric that attempts to disguise their socialistic ideology. The rhetoric of gutless socialism preys upon the economic illiteracy of many Americans, which fans the fires of economic class warfare.

Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) actually told supporters last year at a San Francisco fundraiser, “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” That sounds like Karl Marx’s communism to me.

In January, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) issued a press release critical of the president and our growing economy that stated, “The President claims he has created a strong economy, but working Americans are telling a different story. They feel the American dream slipping further from their grasp and they know the reality is that this economy is not delivering for middle-class families.” When you look at the compelling positive metrics of the economy, this is not economic illiteracy. It is denial of economic reality.

Congressional liberals have carved out a position on every issue that defines success for their party as failure of our economy, failure of people to help themselves and even failure in our efforts to fight the war on terrorism.

National security is and must remain our top national priority. But replacing the income tax code, restructuring Social Security, restraining government spending and increasing economic literacy among the public must also be top priorities to end the march toward socialism. As the late Senator Everett Dirksen once said, “When they feel the heat, they will see the light.” Congress needs to feel the heat, generated by millions of their constituents demanding an end toward the march away from our free-market principles.

The debt we owe our founders and our grandchildren is to aggressively defend the success of capitalism and our free-market foundations. If we fail to pay this debt, the “shining beacon on the hill” that lights the path of hope and freedom across the globe will slowly flicker away, extinguished by our lack of will, not by our lack of skill.

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Hypocrites on the left (Washington Times, 060310)

Kanye West’s charge last year that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” got a lot of attention. Liberals loved it and used Mr. West’s words to slam the president for his failure to respond effectively to the flooding that killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of (mostly black) people in the Gulf Coast. If you read liberal opinion magazines and Web sites that touch on the full range of political and social issues, however, one can amend Mr. West’s statement to read: “White liberals don’t care about black opinionators.”

There is a wide range of issue diversity in many of America’s most influential liberal opinion and analysis magazines and Internet sites. It’s easy to find liberal thought on the war on terror, employment, immigration, the economy, the mess in Iraq, and the larger Middle East. Even Darfur gets a little run — albeit sporadically. That liberals agree, and disagree, on these and other issues and the advancement of liberal principles is all the better for the wide range of commentary. What is rare on those pages and sites, sadly, is a similar diversity among the analysts who provide the commentary and analysis.

Black and brown people provide very little of what is published in those magazines or on those sites. This is a problem that those who run these outlets better fix, or run the risk of being called, rightly, hypocrites by their conservative critics. How can you profess to be open and welcoming liberals when the door appears to be closed to any number of minority opinionists? What’s wrong, we ain’t good enough for you?

Go ahead, I dare you. Try to find more than a handful of minority columnists on these pages. Let’s take the Huffington Post, for example. HuffPo, which I love and read virtually every day, seems to have a hard time finding black people to publish. They can find comedians who moonlight as political analysts, journalists, bloggers, songwriters and musicians, as well as others who can publish almost anywhere they want — just not a lot of blacks and browns. If I didn’t know better, and I do, I’d believe that there were no blacks or browns capable of writing coherent, cogent and caustic commentary and analysis.

[Disclosure: I have sought entry into some of those opinion outlets and, with the exception of a column published by TomPaine.com, I have been uniformly rebuffed. While the disappointment of such luck has, no doubt, informed my beliefs as expressed in this column, they should not be seen as the sole source of my opinion here. The facts are as they are. And I’ll keep trying.]

Like last year’s peace march, which seemed to have more black people at the podium than in the audience, participation by minority columnists and analysts in the most influential liberal opinion organs is, to be kind, wanting. This is sad given that many of the issues on which liberals have the best ideas — poverty and equality to name two — greatly impact minorities. Add to this the fact that African Americans, for example, are among the most liberal people in the country, and one can only wonder what the editors of those media outlets are thinking. Perhaps I should give them the benefit of the doubt, because it appears that they aren’t thinking very much about this at all.

The gatekeepers of America’s liberal opinion organs must find and include a wider range of columnists and analysts if they really want to represent all that is great about liberalism. Failing that, they will never be able to spark the change they seek and will be relegated to the periphery of American political thought. And worse, they will continue to hold themselves open to the charge that they are simply elites satisfied with talking to each other and throwing spit balls at the other side.

Michael K. Fauntroy is an assistant professor of public policy at George Mason University.

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‘Nobel’ lies on campus (Townhall.com, 060421)

by Nathanael Blake

Rigoberta Menchu Tum was awarded the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize “in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples.” She is also guilty of a literary fraud that would get her expelled from OSU for academic dishonesty if she were a student. Or perhaps not – she’s going to be an honored speaker on campus this weekend.

Born in 1959 in a poor village of Guatemalan peasants, Rigoberta lost several family members, including her parents and a brother, in a civil war that raged for decades. Having become a radical opponent of the government, she left for Mexico in 1980, and quickly became assimilated into Marxist circles. In 1982, living in Paris, she dictated her story to Marxist scholar Elisabeth Burgos-Debray; the resulting book, I, Rigoberta Menchu, has been assigned reading in thousands of college courses, and Rigoberta has been the subject of thousands of theses.

So ubiquitous is she in academic circles that Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 Illiberal Education used her popularity as the symbol for the replacement of great classical works with mediocre multicultural education. “Rigoberta’s peasant radicalism provides independent Third World corroboration of Western progressive ideologies. Thus she is really a mouthpiece for a sophisticated left-wing critique of Western society,” and her book, “represents not the zenith of Third World achievements, but rather caters to the ideological proclivities of American activists.”

Such criticisms were for naught; Rigoberta won the Nobel the next year, with D’Souza ruefully remarking, “All I can say is that I am relieved she didn’t win for literature.” As it turns out, that might have been more appropriate. In the late 1990’s, the story that informed Rigoberta’s secular sainthood came apart. Anthropologist David Stoll, in research confirmed by the New York Times, revealed that she had been lying all along. She wasn’t illiterate, but had been educated in a prestigious Catholic boarding school. The land dispute central to formulating her Marxism beliefs didn’t pit her family against wealthy landowners, but against their own relatives. Her brother Nicolas didn’t die of starvation, but was alive and well in Guatemala.

But she retains much of her popularity. Her book is still assigned in classes, and she’s still welcome to speak at universities, including my own. Dan Flynn comments, “Her supporters find virtue in her mendacity because her falsehoods supposedly served a good cause.” But that’s only part of the justification. Rigoberta’s defenders haven’t just argued that her lies are noble (or Nobel, as the case may be), but that impugning her honesty is racist and ethnocentric. And those, as every college freshman (freshwoman, freshperson?) has learned, are very bad things indeed.

We are instructed that imposing the standards of historical accuracy that dead white male scholarship has created upon an indigenous woman of color is oppressive. She is to be allowed to appropriate the experiences of others as her own, and fabricate ones that never happened. According to this philosophy, the ideal of seeking objective historical truth isn’t an imperative for all of humanity that happened to reach its apogee in Western culture, but just one of many valid perspectives.

This relativism is very convenient for destroying any views its adherents oppose, and for insulating themselves from criticism. It also provides a sort of ideological coherence with its Marxism a la Marcuse, expanding class struggle beyond economics to include everything from race to sexuality, and thereby forms the basis for identity politics. Marxism as an economic policy is dead; Marxism as a social philosophy has never been more popular.

Its enemy is Western civilization, generally described as a hierarchical, heterosexual, white, Christian, patriarchal, capitalistic system of oppression. This allows groups that ought to be at each others throats (i.e. Muslims and feminists) to collaborate, because they’re both trying to destroy the same thing.

It also allows for a swift silencing of dissent. Anyone who opposes this neo-Marxism is easily dismissed if they don’t belong to the proper victim group, because they cannot possibly understand the issues. Their lot is to renounce the “oppressive” systems that have nurtured them, hence the spectacle of white liberals falling over themselves to denounce their own inherent racism. Furthermore, the Marxist doctrine of false consciousness provides a means for dismissing those such as Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, and Thomas Sowell who fail to conform to progressive ideas of what a minority member should think.

In short, playing identity politics has won many hands for the left. But it also annihilates what was formerly one of their great aspirations. Fraternity is dead. When truth is considered relative to our group classification, a brotherhood of man is impossible. Leszek Kolakowski observed that “all values and rights, in Marxist terms, are nothing but the temporary products of particular relationships of productions, nothing but the opinions that particular classes use to express their vested interests, to give them an illusory ideological shape.”

In the classical Marxist scheme, there was hope for eventual comity when economic class was abolished. This proved impossible, yet it was not as radical as the new Marxism of the multiculturalists. A class struggle that encompasses everything from sexual proclivities to skin color cannot be ended except by the abolition of all norms, that is, by the complete destruction of society.

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Two Rival Religions? (Mohler, 060526)

On November 3, 1921, J. Gresham Machen presented an address entitled, “Liberalism or Christianity?” In that famous address, later expanded into the book, Christianity & Liberalism, Machen argued that evangelical Christianity and its liberal rival were, in effect, two very different religions.

Machen’s argument became one of the issues of controversy in the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversies of the 1920s and beyond. By any measure, Machen was absolutely right—the movement that styled itself as liberal Christianity was eviscerating the central doctrines of the Christian faith while continuing to claim Christianity as “a way of life” and a system of meaning.

“The chief modern rival of Christianity is ‘liberalism,’” Machen asserted. “Modern liberalism, then, has lost sight of the two great presuppositions of the Christian message—the living God and the fact of sin,” he argued. “The liberal doctrine of God and the liberal doctrine of man are both diametrically opposite to the Christian view. But the divergence concerns not only the presuppositions of the message, but also the message itself.”

Howard P. Kainz, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Marquette University, offers a similar argument—warning that it is now modern secular liberalism which poses as the great rival to orthodox Christianity.

Observing the basic divide in the American culture, Kainz notes: “Most of the heat of battle occurs where traditional religious believers clash with certain liberals who are religiously committed to secular liberalism.”

Kainz offers a crucial insight here, suggesting that one of the most important factors in the nation’s cultural divide is that persons on both sides are deeply committed to their own creeds and worldviews—even if on one side those creeds are secular.

“This explains why talking about abortion or same-sex ‘marriage,’ for example, with certain liberals is usually futile. It is like trying to persuade a committed Muslim to accept Christ. Because his religion forbids it, he can only do so by converting from Islam to Christianity; he cannot accept Christ as long as he remains firmly committed to Islam. So it is with firmly committed liberals: Their ‘religion’ forbids any concessions to the ‘conservative’ agenda, and as long as they remain committed to their secular ideology, it is futile to hope for such concessions from them.”

Kainz’s argument bears similarities not only to J. Gresham Machen’s observations about the theological scene, but also to Thomas Sowell’s understanding of the larger culture. As Sowell argued in A Conflict of Visions, the basic ideological divide of our times is between those who hold a “constrained vision” over those who hold an “unconstrained vision.” Both worldviews are, in the actual operations of life, reduced to certain “gut feelings” that operate much like religious convictions.

Kainz concedes that some will resist his designation of secularism as a religion. “Religion in the most common and usual sense connotes dedication to a supreme being or beings,” he acknowledges. Nevertheless, “especially in the last few centuries, ‘religion’ has taken on the additional connotations of dedication to abstract principles or ideals rather than a personal being,” he insists. Kainz dates the rise of this secular religion to the French Enlightenment and its idolatrous worship of Reason.

Looking back over the last century, Kainz argues that Marxism and ideological Liberalism have functioned as religious systems for millions of individuals. Looking specifically at Marxism, Kainz argues that the Marxist religion had dogmas, canonical scriptures, priests, theologians, ritualistic observances, parochial congregations, heresies, hagiography, and even an eschatology. Marxism’s dogmas were its core teachings, including economic determinism and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Its canonical scriptures included the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao Tse Tung. Its priests were those guardians of Marxist purity who functioned as the ideological theorists of the movement. Its ritualistic observances included actions ranging from workers’ strikes to mass rallies. The eschatology of Marxism was to be realized in the appearance of “Communist man” and the new age of Marxist utopia.

Similarly, Kainz argues that modern secular liberalism includes its own dogmas. Among these are the beliefs “that mankind must overcome religious superstition by means of Reason; that empirical science can and will eventually answer all the questions about the world and human values that were formerly referred to traditional religion or theology; and that the human race, by constantly invalidating and disregarding hampering traditions, can and will achieve perfectibility.”

Kainz also argues that contemporary liberalism has borrowed selectively from the New Testament, turning Jesus’ admonition to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s,” as a foundation for “absolute secularism,” enshrined in the language of a wall separating church and state. Thus, “religion [is] reduced to something purely private.”

Secular liberalism also identifies certain sins such as “homophobia” and sexism. As Kainz sees it, the secular scriptures fall into two broad categories: “Darwinist and scientistic writings championing materialist and naturalistic explanations for everything, including morals; and feminist writings exposing the ‘evil’ of patriarchy and tracing male exploitation of females throughout history up to the present.”

The priests and priestesses of secular liberalism constitute its “sacerdotal elite” and tend to be intellectuals who can present liberal values in the public square. Congregations where secular liberals gather include organizations such as Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the National Organization of Women, and similar bodies. These groups “help supply a sense of affiliation and commonality for the religiously liberal.”

The rites and rituals of secular liberalism include “gay pride” parades and pro-abortion rallies. Interestingly, the eschatology of this movement is, Kainz argues, the distillation of pragmatism. “In the estimation of the religiously liberal,” Kainz asserts, “all lifestyles and all moralities can approximate this goal, as long as the proscribed illiberal ‘sins’ are avoided.”

Kainz readily admits that not all liberals are committed to this religious vision of liberalism. As he sees it, “There are many people working for social justice, human rights, international solidarity, and other causes commonly regarded as liberal without a deep ideological commitment.” His point is that conservatives may find common cause and common ground with these non-religiously committed liberals.

“For many ‘moderate’ liberals, liberalism is a political perspective, not a core ideology,” he observes. “In the culture war it is important for Christians to distinguish between the religiously committed liberal and the moderate liberal. For one thing, Christians should not be surprised when they find no common ground with the former. They may form occasional, even if temporary, alliances with the latter.”

Kainz’s article “Liberalism as Religion: The Culture War Is Between Religious Believer on Both Sides,” appears in the May 2006 edition of Touchstone magazine. His analysis is genuinely helpful in understanding the clash of positions, policies, convictions, and visions that mark our contemporary scene.

Though Kainz does not develop this point, all persons are, in their own way, deeply committed to their own worldview. There is no intellectual possibility of absolute value neutrality—not among human beings, anyway.

The conception of our current cultural conflict as a struggle between two rival religions is instructive and humbling. At the political level, this assessment should serve as a warning that our current ideological divides are not likely to disappear anytime soon. At the far deeper level of theological analysis, this argument serves to remind Christians that evangelism remains central to our mission and purpose. Those who aim at the merely political are missing the forest for the trees, and confusing the temporal for the eternal.

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The truth is alien to the left (townhall.com, 060524)

by Herman Cain ( bio | archive )

The ignorance strategy apparently worked so well last year to stifle any attempt to restructure the Social Security system that liberals – from both political parties – have extended this game plan to other issues. In George Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother constantly reminded the citizens that “ignorance is strength” to diminish the public’s desire to know the truth. Adherence to this principle kept the government in control and the citizens in the dark. Liberals now employ the ignorance strategy to distort the truth and deceive the public on all manner of issues, including the global war on terrorism, the economy and tax policy, border security and illegal aliens.

In 2005, liberals used the ignorance strategy to deny the fact that the Social Security system is near fiscal insolvency, despite numerous reports to the contrary conducted during past and present presidential administrations. Liberals continue to deny the crisis, and now claim Republicans manufactured a crisis where one doesn’t really exist. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) even said, “Social Security remains sound for decades to come.” The new liberal math evidently rounds up – a lot. The Social Security Trustees recently reported that in 2017 the program begins to pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes. Senator Reid, that is 11 years from now, not decades.

Recent polls indicate that the portion of the global war on terror waged in Iraq remains one of the most important issues to the American public. The ignorance strategy, though, has caused many to believe that our efforts in Iraq and elsewhere are somehow separate, and that to date the war has failed to produce successful outcomes.

In truth, the war on terror is a global mission, whether it is waged in Manhattan, London, Afghanistan or Fallujah. Liberals and many major media sources have succeeded in separating our efforts in Iraq from the war waged in other nations. A May 15 ABC News/Washington Post poll found that only 32% approve “of the way Bush is handling the situation in Iraq.” A May 16 CBS News poll, however, found that 46% approve “of the way George W. Bush is handling the campaign against terrorism.” These poll results reflect a general lack of knowledge in the public about the successes produced by our troops’ presence in Iraq.

In 2004, Iraqis regained control of their country. In 2005, Iraqi men and women voted on a constitutional referendum and voted to form a government under that constitution. On May 13, 2006, Iraq’s new government was inaugurated. Most important, there have been no successful terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001. President Bush did not start this war to pipe pilfered oil from Baghdad to Crawford. He ordered retaliation against a worldwide Islamic terrorist network hell-bent on destroying Western civilization.

Our national economy is booming, primarily due to the 2003 rate cuts in income, dividend and capital gains taxes. Unemployment is at 4.7%, over 2 million jobs were created in 2005, we are on pace to create another 2 million new jobs in 2006 and GDP has grown for 18 straight quarters. The $315 billion in tax receipts sent in April 2006 to the Treasury Department were the second-highest one-month total in history.

Yet, liberals remain undaunted in spreading ignorance about the factors that contribute to economic growth. The Senate recently voted to extend the current rates on capital gains and dividends taxes, while raising the exemption limits on the Alternative Minimum Tax. Following the vote liberal Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME), who voted against the extension, stated, “At a time when average-income Americans are really feeling the burden of high energy prices [and are unable] to purchase affordable health insurance, this is not the time to be widening the income gap in America.” Senator Snowe, the biggest contributor to any income gap is unemployment. The strong and stable economy is what keeps people working.

Senator Snowe failed to explain how taking someone’s money enables them to pay the energy bill and purchase health insurance. This is the same logic that produces whoppers such as “We can’t afford this tax cut,” “This tax cut will explode the deficit,” and “Tax cuts only help the rich.” Liberal class warfare is nothing more than a rhetorical diversion meant to get people to hate someone else because they may have a larger bank account. We should have declared liberalism a “hate crime” long ago.

Politicians from both sides of the aisle are employing the ignorance strategy on the illegal alien issue, but so far their efforts have not been able to fool the public. In a March 16 Zogby poll, 84% said English should be the official language of government operations, yet last week Senator Reid called that proposal “racist.” In a May 15 ABC News/Washington Post poll, 74% supported sending National Guard troops to the border, and 77% said the country is not doing enough to keep illegal aliens out of the country. Yet, the president and Congress are still timid about enforcing laws already on the books against illegal aliens and their employers.

Regardless of party affiliation, big government liberals obviously aspire to be the “Big Brother of Ignorance” toward the public. They truly do believe what they are saying, and that truly is ignorant.

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Bin Laden family gave $1 million to Carter: Ex-president reportedly met with terror leader’s brothers in 2000 (WorldNetDaily, 060602)

Former President Jimmy Carter’s center in Atlanta received more than $1 million from the family of Osama bin Laden, according to an investigative report.

A brother of the al-Qaida terrorist leader, Bakr M. bin Laden, funneled the money to the Carter Center in Atlanta through the Saudi Bin Laden Group, according to Melanie Morgan, chairman of a group opposing the Georgia Democrat called the Censure Carter Committee.

Morgan, a WorldNetDaily columnist, based her claim on papers she acquired from the Carter Center.

She points to a report showing Carter met with 10 of Osama bin Laden’s brothers early in 2000. The former president and his wife, Rosalyn, followed up the meeting with a breakfast with Bakr bin Laden in September 2000 and secured the first $200,000 towards the more than $1 million that has gone to the Carter Center.

Morgan says the connection between Carter and the bin Laden family is exactly the kind of charge leveled by Michael Moore against President Bush in the film “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

Morgan’s group commented in a statement: “If you think this news troubles Michael Moore and his friends in the liberal, anti-war crowd, think again. You see, they’re not interested in the truth – they only seem interested in advancing their defeatist political message: America is almost always wrong–America is the source of many of the world’s problems.”

There’s some hypocrisy at work here, Morgan contends.

“Michael Moore used his film to viciously attack George W. Bush and undermine support for the war on terror,” she told John Gibson on the Fox News Channel.

It turns out it was Carter, not Bush, hanging out with the bin Ladens, she said.

The Carters hosted Moore in the presidential viewing box at the 2004 Democratic National Convention while former President Bill Clinton addressed the delegates.

Gibson said the Carter Center declined the opportunity to respond to the charges.

Censure Carter is about to launch a second wave of national television ads urging Americans to rebuke Carter’s efforts in North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and elsewhere.

“The mainstream media is pretending that the Carter-bin Laden story is a non-issue, so the Censure Carter Campaign is out raising the money to air the facts in TV ads,” the group says.

As WND reported last year, Morgan’s Move America Forward said Carter was linked with a key figure in the U.N.’s oil-for-food scandal, Samir Vincent, who pleaded guilty to participating in numerous illegal activities.

Vincent admitted to receiving allocations for more than 9 million barrels of oil between 1996 and 2003 in return for serving as an agent of Saddam Hussein’s regime. He worked at Hussein’s direction, lobbying U.S. and U.N. officials to end sanctions and to instead implement the oil-for-food scam.

The first documented contact between Carter and Vincent was in September 1999. Vincent had organized a tour of Iraqi religious leaders to meet with individuals in the United States who might be persuaded to speak out against the sanctions against Iraq. The trip also included discussions of ways to oppose U.S. and British air strikes against Iraqi missile batteries in southern Iraq, which had fired on American and British aircraft engaged in enforcing the southern “No Fly Zone.”

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Liberalism, on the Couch: In search of root causes. (National Review Online, 060614)

What makes a liberal a liberal? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself lately, perhaps because every liberal I meet nowadays seems to ask me how in the world I could be a conservative. My stock answer is that I’d love to be a liberal because, you know, chicks dig the progressives. But also because I’d love to resolve debates with clever rejoinders like “Halliburton!” or “Fox News!” or “Karl Rove!,” and because I’d love to engage in intellectual group hugs rather than confront awkward truths, and because I’d love to show how my heart is in the right place by supporting benevolent-sounding but historically discredited social policies which end up devastating the very communities they’re intended to benefit. So, yes, I’d love to be a liberal . . . except these pesky I.Q. points keep getting in the way.

But I digress.

To consider the question of what makes a liberal a liberal, I’ll need to slide on my special soul-searching goggles and peer deeply into the mental lives of people with whom I disagree, to indulge in amateur psychologizing, to treat wild supposition as fact, to disregard evidentiary standards and analytical decency—in other words, I’ll need to write a Frank Rich column. This is no easy task. Maybe if I were a film critic peter-principled into the realm of political discourse, I’d be more comfortable with foreshortening the argumentative process to a series of thumbs-up/thumbs-down rhetorical moments; instead, I’ve developed the inconvenient habit of substantiating what I say, of grounding inference in specific observation, of keeping broad generalizations to a minimum. For the next half-dozen paragraphs, however, goodbye to all that.

Rich Rules.

The first factor I’d suggest in the causal chain that leads liberals to their politics is abject failure. People who are frustrated by their lot in life are often drawn to liberal ideas because modern liberalism’s contempt for the free market jibes with their efforts to rationalize their disappointments. This thought was driven home for me last year at the Small Press Book Fair in Manhattan. As you climb the stairwell at the Small Press Center on West 44th Street, moving from small presses on the first floor, to even smaller presses on the balcony level, and then to presses-that-exist-only-to-publish-the-press-founder’s-screed upstairs, you move progressively leftwards. Talk to any author on the upper floors, and he’ll swear that he’s been driven to self-publish because he refused to sell out. He wouldn’t compromise his message for the sake of wealth and success, unlike fill-in-the-name-of-a-popular-writer. Corporate capitalism beats down the true visionary, he’ll tell you, and he’s no company hack. What greater proof of his bona fides than the fact that no mainstream publisher was interested in his work?

But of course the majority of liberals are not abject failures. On the contrary, many have attained a considerable measure of social status and financial clout, which calls to mind another reason liberals become liberals—guilt. Guilt-induced liberalism is most common among the more successful members of historically marginalized and currently struggling groups like blacks and Hispanics, or among members of historically marginalized and currently prospering groups like women and Jews. The trappings of achievement—prestigious job titles, comfortable homes, swollen bank accounts—are a kind of inverse torment for such people, an ongoing crisis of authenticity, a sign of the dissolution of their identity within the marginalized group. They feel compelled, therefore, to demonstrate that their sympathies still reside with the underclass. The cartoonish version of this response is found in hip hop—where ostentatiously thuggish rappers ride around in stretch limos, dripping jewelry and sipping champagne, all the while swearing their allegiance to “the street.” The more insidious version is found in humanities classrooms—where ostentatiously underdressed professors browbeat their students with the message that good fortune in America carries with it the perpetuation of injustice and the tacit acceptance of oppression.

After failure and guilt, a third obvious cause of the liberal worldview is sin. There is, of course, nothing inherently sinful about the politics of liberalism. But in its modern incarnation, liberalism not only takes to heart the Enlightenment values of tolerance and skepticism, it hoists them aloft as intellectual torches and bears them forward in search of the dreaded Frankenstein Monster of moral judgment. Modern liberals deplore moral judgment—except in their collective outrage at conservatives—because they’ve decided, in their own lives, to abandon the doctrinal elements of Judeo-Christian morality in favor of an ethic whose guiding principle is, in the words of noted Shakespearean dunderhead Polonius, “To thine own self be true.” Hence, the liberal mantra, I’m not religious, but I consider myself a spiritual person. Roughly, this translates into: I don’t want to give up on an afterlife, but I don’t want to be judged by the stuff I’m doing. Liberals, therefore, seethe with resentment towards public displays of traditional faith out of fear such faith carries with it an implicit condemnation of their personal choices.

If failure, guilt, and sin are three principal causes of modern liberalism, a closely related epiphenomenon is psychotherapy—i.e., the hiring of a dubiously qualified stranger to serve as a sympathetic sounding board for your anxieties. I’d estimate that among people undergoing psychotherapy, liberals outnumber conservatives by ten to one. (I’ve got no way to document this claim, but, again, Rich Rules.) Liberals, on the whole, don’t like themselves very much, which is why they think self-esteem is a cure all. They perceive, rightly or wrongly, the steady disapproval of other people—especially their parents—whom they reflexively associate with the status quo. It’s the status quo that’s the source of their unhappiness, they conclude. The more theoretically inclined liberals may even point to the inequities of the status quo as evidence that happiness cannot be had in this life. “How can I be content with my lot,” they ask, “when so many others have so much less than I do? If only I weren’t so damn sensitive!” The apparent happiness of many conservatives, therefore, becomes a sign of their callousness. When I recently speculated about the correlation between therapy and left-of-center politics to a therapy-going friend of mine, he thought for a moment and then nodded in agreement. But that wasn’t surprising, he added, since people in therapy tend to be more in touch with themselves and with reality.

Which leads to the final, and perhaps overriding, cause of modern liberalism—genuine compassion. It’s easy enough for conservatives to survey the grab bag of dumb ideas to which liberals attach themselves and conclude that liberalism is the result of a privation, a lack of those pesky I.Q. points I mentioned at the outset. But that’s too glib, even by Rich Rules. Intelligent people are often drawn to dumb ideas because the dumb ideas speak to their hearts rather than to their heads. The roster of world-class intellectuals who failed to recognize the evils of Communism in the last century is a testament to human frailty, not human imbecility. Tyranny, like charity, begins with compassion; this lesson is utterly lost on liberals, for whom compassion is an absolute good. So it’s important to remember that the prime justification of liberalism, at least in the minds of liberals, is almost always fairness. They feel unfairness in their bones. It upsets them. That’s how they know they’re compassionate.

It is the misguided pursuit of fairness that, in the final analysis, drives the majority of liberals to liberalism. It’s a pursuit at which they cannot fail, since it’s never-ending; it’s a pursuit that alleviates their guilt, since it re-connects them with their roots; it’s a pursuit that cleanses their individual sins, since its goal is the common weal. The pursuit of fairness is itself a kind of therapy.

Liberals are entitled to it, however ill conceived the enterprise.

—Mark Goldblatt is author of Africa Speaks, a satire of black urban culture.

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Fairly Hated: Lessons in delusion from liberal historians. (National Review Online, 060501)

George W. Bush may be the worst president ever—at least, that’s what the newest issue of Rolling Stone says. The cover story is by Sean Wilentz, a prominent historian, who writes that when he and his Princeton colleagues rate our chief executives, Bush is a leading candidate for the bottom of the pile. And it’s not just them, but the whole profession. “Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.” Joe Conason is saying the same thing over at Salon (no, you’re not seeing double), observing that Bush “is earning a reputation as America’s ‘worst president.’” And no, that’s not déjà vu you’re feeling. It was exactly three years ago that Harold Meyerson announced in the pages of The American Prospect that Bush was “the most dangerous president ever.”

Wilentz says we should take very seriously the emerging consensus among professional historians, because it was arrived at through a scrupulous and dispassionate consideration of the facts. Possible objections are refuted. For example, we can be sure that their judgment wasn’t affected by the left-of-center tilt of most historians (which he acknowledges). Why? Because they’re more critical of Bush than of other Republicans like Ronald Reagan or even Richard Nixon. In fact, Wilentz’s argument shows how bias runs through these evaluations. It tells us less about Bush than it does about the sad state of debate among many academics—and makes the case for more intellectual diversity on America’s campuses.

Wilentz runs through a list of failures to prove Bush’s awfulness, but his exposition is rather selective. He describes the Bush Doctrine as “unprovoked, preventive warfare,” as if that fairly sums it up. He describes supply-side economics as “discredited,” as if it’s now objective knowledge that cutting tax rates doesn’t increase economic activity. He says that “anemic” job growth since 2001 is the result not of tax cuts but increased federal spending, but he never gets around to mentioning today’s low unemployment and how much lower it is than in Europe, where government spending is even higher. He says No Child Left Behind is a failure because many states don’t like it. He never mentions what effects NCLB might be having on, say, education. He reads a lot into the administration’s response to Katrina, but doesn’t compare it to the response of the state government that actually employed the responders closest at hand. And he makes the fanatical claim that Bush is trying to subvert checks and balances in order to create a “presidential absolutism” in which the wartime president has “limitless” powers. He paints Bush as an extremist ideologue who caters to either the narrow (corporations) or the rabid (Christian conservatives)—and so sets himself up for failure after failure. And even if he had presented these issues fairly, many topics are simply ignored.

Now, I wasn’t expecting footnotes in Rolling Stone, but a scholar doesn’t have to sacrifice analytic integrity just because he’s writing for a non-academic audience. If this is what Wilentz considers a fair-minded treatment of the facts, then writing about the Israel lobby might be more up his alley. My guess, however, is that he believes his discussion is fair. And he probably believes this because most of the people he talks to see these things roughly the same way. The academic world is an insular place when it comes to politics.

Wilentz insists that their liberal values aren’t the reason why so many historians come down hard on Bush. But his blindness to his own partisan outlook belies his claims to evenhandedness. It’s as if he just hasn’t noticed the peculiar way Bush has of getting under the skin of liberals (like…Wilentz). More than one liberal has said that what drives them to hatred of Bush isn’t so much his policies as his swagger and smirk, his privileged life, and his diction. That Bush is judged more negatively that any other president by these historians isn’t proof that Bush really is the worst; to the contrary, it’s what follows from the fact that liberals hate Bush and many historians are liberals.

Why do so many liberal intellectuals hate Bush so much? Something could be said for his personality and his ideology, but another factor—likely a major one—is his timing. Bush is a product of, and heir to, a conservative movement that is larger and more effective than it was 20 or 40 years ago. Today, conservatives hold more elected offices, connect with more voters, and have more of a media presence than ever. It’s not surprising that they are now better able to set the political agenda than when Reagan (much less Nixon) was president.

It’s not difficult to detect how many liberals feel about this sea-change in modern American history. Harold Meyerson called Bush the most dangerous president ever, and said that, by comparison, “I miss Ronald Reagan.” But he goes on to acknowledge that Reaganites wanted many of the same things Bushies do—they just couldn’t implement them. What Meyerson really misses is an America in which a conservative president had to try to govern without a House majority, without a significant number of like-minded Republican senators, without talk radio or conservative bloggers, and without more conservative judges. He misses an America in which liberals called the shots. It’s enough to have driven Wilentz to write an article for The American Prospect in 2004 urging fellow liberals to “fight like hell against the right.” Imagine what he’d have said if partisanship were a factor in all this.

— Gerard Alexander is a professor of politics at the University of Virginia and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Saint Hugo: The Religious Left begins its embrace of Hugo Chávez. (Weekly Standard, 060518)

WHEN VENEZUELAN PRESIDENT HUGO CHEVEZ met with the Pope earlier this week, he assured Benedict XVI that he is a Christian. And he told the press that has a special friend who is one too. Sort of.

“Our Bolivarian revolution is very Christian and I have a friend who isn’t Christian, but lately has said he is a Christian in the social aspect: his name is Fidel Castro,” Chávez announced. “I talk to [Castro] a lot about Christ each time we see each other, and he told me recently, ‘Chávez, I’m Christian in the social sense.’”

Chávez calls Jesus Christ a socialist and a revolutionary. And that’s the kind of Christ he wants to follow. It is not clear how much the Pope was persuaded. The Vatican has criticized efforts by Chávez’s revolutionary government to curtail the influence of the Catholic Church in Venezuela. Chávez has called the Catholic Church’s hierarchy a “tumor,” while Venezuelan Cardinal Rosalio Castillo Lara has accused Chávez of aspiring towards a dictatorship.

It will be no surprise if we soon see left-wing American clerics investing Chávez with a mystical reverence previously reserved for the likes of Fidel Castro and, during the 1980s, Sandinista honcho Daniel Ortega. Indeed, the canonization of Chávez in some quarters has already begun.

LAST FALL, Chávez addressed a rapturous crowd of fans at a United Methodist Church in Manhattan’s swank Upper West Side. (Here’s a photo.) Castro and Daniel Ortega have paid similar visits to liberal churches in Manhattan.

As he marched into the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, the strongman was greeted with loud applause and chants (in Spanish) of, “Chávez, friend, the people are with you.” Chávez shared the pulpit with Jesse Jackson. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who’s never met an anti-American dictator he couldn’t support, sat appreciatively in the audience. Also present were officials from the Cuban government.

“I felt a love for the Bronx and New York starting with my visit today,” Chávez noted in the church, while wearing a red shirt that symbolizes the Bolivarian revolution. He pulled a crucifix from his pocket and declared himself to be an “authentic Christian” who serves the poor. He was preceded by a Methodist minister and Catholic priest, who praised the Chávez regime for its literacy and healthcare programs. Chávez himself introduced the local Methodist bishop, Jeremiah Park.

ACCORDING TO A SUPPORTIVE METHODIST CLERIC who was in the audience, Chávez said, “I preach the word of Jesus Christ. He was a revolutionary. Christ is the good news. A revolt of hope is taking place today—hope for justice.” He continued: “Cuba and Venezuela are accused of being a destabilizing force in the hemisphere but the greatest destabilizing force is poverty. . . . I reach out my hand in friendship to the Bush administration, even though ‘you are the lion and we are the lamb.’”

Earlier this year, in gratitude for his brand of Christianity, some church groups helped organize a National Solidarity Conference for Venezuela in Washington, D.C. Sponsors included the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns and the Methodist Federation for Social Action. In 2004 the Maryknollers sent a solidarity delegation to Venezuela, led by Fr. Roy Bourgeois. Bourgeois is perhaps best known for leading demonstrations against the U.S. Army’s training school for Latin military officers at Ft. Benning, Georgia. While in Venezuela, Bourgeois met with Chávez and appeared on his daily television program, Aló Presidente.

After his visit, Bourgeois was enthusiastic about Chávez. “We’ve got a president and a government here that’s on the side of the poor that is offering the poor a vision that gives them hope and promise for a better way of life,” he explained, continuing:

[Chávez] recommends books. You know what one of the books was that he recommended? Noam Chomsky! He’s recommending all these articles that he has read in the newspaper—he is a teacher! He is looking at Latin America like few have: through the underside of history. He is looking at it through the eyes of the poor and the oppressed. And when you do that you are going to have a lot of enemies. And he’s got enemies.

Bourgeois warned that “the United States and George Bush are here to do everything they can to make sure that this revolution fails. Because if it succeeds, if the poor here will get justice, if there will be a real re-distribution of the resources here (especially the wealth, the money, the power) and in a country like Venezuela, this will spread to other countries. And so, what is at work of course and this is no secret, the U.S. is pumping money into Venezuela as we pumped money into Chile when Allende was there.”

The American Religious Left is prepared to support Chávez. When Pat Robertson quixotically suggested—and later retracted—that the United States could assassinate Chávez, many mainline church officials responded with immediate outrage. Slamming Robertson for his latest inanity was no doubt a pleasure for them. Sadly, these clerics will likely view defending Chávez from more serious international criticism not just as a pleasure, but a duty.

Mark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

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Today’s anti-American leftists betray their own radical heritage (Townhall.com, 060704)

By Michael Medved

Today’s militant leftists not only spread lies about America’s present but generate even more damaging distortions about the nation’s past – and in so doing differentiate themselves from the radical idealists of yesteryear.

Contemporary followers of Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill view the entire American experience as a disgrace, even a crime. They stress the nation’s guilt in committing “genocide” against Native Americans, enslaving millions of Africans, stealing Mexican land, despoiling the pristine environment, oppressing working people everywhere, and blocking progressive change with an imperialist foreign policy. One Jake Irvin of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington recently told the Wall Street Journal: “My political belief is that the U.S. is a horrendous empire that needs to end.”

In contrast, the radicals and revolutionaries of the past cloaked themselves in patriotic symbols and proclaimed their desire to call the nation back to its own highest ideals. From Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas to Paul Robeson and Abbie Hoffman, these agitators proudly quoted Jefferson, Lincoln, or Tom Paine, and agreed with the nation’s mainstream that Americanism (at least as they defined it) represented the “last, best hope of earth.” Even the Communist Party USA unblushingly honored national heroes: when they dispatched their fighters to support fellow Stalinists in the Spanish Civil War, the volunteers called themselves “The Abraham Lincoln Brigade” not the “Vladimir Lenin Brigade.” Stalin’s personal friend Paul Robeson achieved mainstream popularity with his “Ballad for Americans,” treating the Revolutionary War as a heroic struggle – not a malevolent conspiracy by greedy slaveholders (as it’s often portrayed today).

Despite his personal dalliance with the Communist Party, composer Aaron Copland crafted loving tributes to the American spirit, achieving vast popularity with works from his nationalist period (“Appalachian Spring,” “A Lincoln Portrait,” “Rodeo,” “Billy the Kid”), inventing a distinctive musical language of pioneers and open spaces without nods to multiculturalism or self-pity. Woody Guthrie, another embattled radical, proudly penned “This Land is Your Land,” an unblushing love song to his native soil.

Today’s radicals feel embarrassed by the leftwing flag-waving of 70 years ago, and insist that Americans should feel guilty rather than proud of their nation’s past and its role in the world. Cindy Sheehan, who became a worldwide celebrity by exploiting her son’s combat death in Iraq, recently posted a heart-rending rant on Michael Moore’s website, declaring: “I often have to ask myself why we, as Americans, so blindly follow our leaders down this path of violent destruction, and it has always been so. From the genocide and virtual extinction of our native population to dehumanizing black people so they could be used as human chattel and still be oppressed, even today, to still be the only so-called ‘civilized nation’ that executes people…Before we can change the world we have to look in our hearts and change ourselves. Before Casey was KIA in Iraq I led the life of rampant consumerism that wreaked havoc on my soul and the environment.”

Her personal guilt conforms to Colorado University professor Ward Churchill’s belief that the people who died in the World Trade Center could rightly be classified as “little Eichmanns” who deserved their violent, painful demise. Like Sheehan, he goes back to America’s “original sins” – maltreatment of Indians and enslavement of blacks- to argue against any sense of pride or patriotism for what this nation accomplished.

This negativity about the past directly threatens the nation’s future: spreading the idea among the younger generation that the entire American project isn’t worth sustaining or defending. Of course, the idea of conscious “genocide” again Native Americans is absurd – despite Cindy Sheehan’s claims of “virtual extinction of our native population” there are more self-identified Indians alive today than a hundred—or even two hundred – years ago.

Moreover, the assimilation and massive intermarriage with white people (even Bill Clinton claimed to be “part Cherokee”) erased far more self-identified Indians than the relatively rare (but undeniably loathsome) massacres by whites. Concerning slavery, Americans never invented it or instituted it – we inherited it, and with such great discomfort that anti-slavery activists were far better represented among the founding fathers (Franklin, Adams, Hamilton) than those who made an active case for slavery. David Brion Davis, the Yale professor who’s written magisterially about the history of the peculiar institution, makes clear the positive role of the American Revolution and its ideals in giving life (after many millennia of slavery) to the abolitionist movement around the world that ultimately put an end to this savage oppression. The United States, in other words, played a unique, prominent role in ending the institution, but played no role in establishing it.

These arguments matter because a nation embarrassed about its past, apologetic about its very existence, is a nation unable to defend itself from its enemies. The Fourth of July offers a unique opportunity to tell true stories about the land we love: not as a flawless paradise, but as a uniquely blessed haven that has provided more opportunities for more disparate populations than any nation in human history. In terms of our role in the wider world, one need not defend every decision by past leaders to recognize that no country has ever benefited the rest of humanity as consistently and abundantly as the United States.

In other words, the best response to America bashing radicals involves celebration, not castigation – an emphasis on joy, gratitude and pride rather than guilt and despair. Among other things, it’s simply more fun to be a patriotic American than a doom-embracing, “anti-imperialist” internationalist. There’s not better occasion than the anniversary of our independence to emphasize our uniqueness and, yes exceptionalism – to light a few firecrackers, eat some cherry pie, and join our neighbors in rejoicing in the Glorious Fourth.

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Obama’s Prayer: Wooing evangelicals. (National Review Online, 060706)

Last week, Senator Barak Obama explained how Democrats should appeal to Christians. First, Democratic politicians need to stop sneering at the 38% of Americans “who consider themselves committed Christians.” These people, the senator explained, just “want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives.”

Second, Democrats need to recognize that churches form real communities, and African-American churches in particular understand “in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the hungry and cloth the naked and challenge the powers and principalities.” Democrats can therefore look to at least some Christians as naturally drawn to progressive politics. In that light, Obama calls on fellow Democrats “to communicate our hopes and values in a way that is relevant” to such Christians.

Third, Democrats need to a more religified rhetoric. “If we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand their personal morality and social justice.” Lincoln used religious imagery; so did Martin Luther King. It can’t be all bad.

Fourth, by deploying Christian themes, Democrats can win hearts and minds, not just legal battles. “A transformation of conscience and a genuine commitment to diversity on the part of the nation’s CEOs could bring about quicker results than a battalion of lawyers.”

And last, Obama explains that Democrats can reach out to Christians without fear of betraying their party’s commitment to the higher principles of inclusiveness and diversity. That’s because the good parts of Christianity are not “religion-specific,” but can be matched up with universal values.

Obama was speaking in Washington at “From Poverty to Opportunity: A Covenant for a New America,” a conference organized by the liberal Christian group, Call to Renewal. Founded in 1995, Call to Renewal claims to have “partnership with groups across the theological and political spectrum,” but take that with a grain of salt. Call’s most prominent figure is Jim Wallis, the left-leaning evangelical whose most recent book, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, might be described as the manifesto of the emergent evangelical Left.

And that’s why Obama’s speech deserves attention. Obama, in Wallis’s terms, definitely “gets it.” Since his attention-grabbing speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, Obama has rightly been recognized as a rising star of his party. On that occasion, he seemed to repudiate the racial resentment mongering that has become a standard part of Democratic campaigns. But a close reading of the text, as well as his subsequent statements, made clear that he was essentially triangulating. He was saying No to Sharpton-style race-baiting, but No as well to any politics that would abandon race-based grievances. Obama’s path is to veil racial grievances in the less-threatening diversity lingo of educrats and corporate human resource departments. Smart move.

Obama’s Call to Renewal speech similarly triangulates. He is looking for the sweet spot between the hard-core secularist worldview of many Democrats and the tough-minded Biblical literalism of many Christians. If it’s triangulation, it’s also tightrope walking. For the sake of those hard-core secularists, he needs to offer solid, pragmatic reasons for cozying up to Christians. For the sake of the Christians whom he hopes to persuade to support Democratic political ideas, he needs to offer solid, credible assurance that his party will take their faith seriously — and is not being merely pragmatic.

He woos the secularist side by reminding Democrats that there are so darn many of these committed Christian believers — 38% of Americans. They are organized, their church communities mobilize people, and they have access to a powerful way of speaking, which Democrats could use too. Religion, moreover, is a great motivator that could help capture elite opinion to support Democratic policies.

These points could come off sounding cynical and manipulative: a Machiavellian counsel that Democrats need not miss out on the banquet. But Obama is aware of the danger of coming across as someone who simply wants to channel religious convictions towards a political agenda and he explicitly repudiates such cold calculation. He declares, “Nothing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith.” And, borrowing a metaphor from Jim Wallis, he compares such expressions to clapping off rhythm to the choir.

But how authentic can Democrats afford to be in this arena? Here we get to see Obama’s political mastery. If Abraham were to haul Isaac up to the roof of a church, knife in hand, he says, we would surely “call the police and the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away from Abraham.” It is a deft move, quietly suggesting that we ought not to take all that Biblical stuff out of context. We need, as Obama puts it, “some sense of proportion,” and Americans “intuitively understand this.”

Surely he is right about all of these points, and what comes next is a modest step forward. His “sense of proportion” becomes the compass for navigating “the boundaries between church and state.” In this vein he offers carefully hedged support for the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, for voluntary student prayer groups to use school property, and for “certain faith-based programs targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers.”

But are these worthy steps? Or are they just the sorts of minor concessions that Democrats might need to make in order to join the conversation? Some of Obama’s remarks leave room for doubt. His depiction of Christians as people who “want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives” continues as he says, “They’re looking to relieve a chronic loneliness…they need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them — that they are not just destined to travel down that long highway towards nothingness.”

Obama probably intends this as a fair depiction of Christian humility, but his condescension is a thick as pound cake at a church picnic. It sounds as though those people, the churchgoing Christians, are a rather sad lot. Unlike us, they haven’t got a real sense of purpose; unlike us, they are lonely; unlike us, they fear the existential nothingness. An unsympathetic listener might even hear the hint that we are rather proud of illusion-free commitments as we stare into the abyss of eternity.

Maybe Obama understands exactly how to translate Christian longing for redemption into words that the prideful heirs of his postmodern party can understand, but it doesn’t seem like an especially good way to reassure the evangelicals that he respects their ideas. Those ideas somehow come across in this rendition as improvised life rafts for people overwhelmed by their fears and insecurities. And Obama also seems to suggest that, with a little bit of coaching by their betters, these poor folk might realize that they can get a perfectly good sense of purpose, narrative arc, and cure for their loneliness by trading up to progressive politics. Somebody “out there” indeed cares for them. FDR, Bill Clinton, Barak Obama…

Obama’s tightrope walk faces another hitch when he enunciates the principle that “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.” The trouble is that religious folk (not just Christians) generally believe that they already are speaking to universal values. Most religiously committed people move effortlessly between the “religion-specific” rules of their congregation (whether-to-wear-a-hat-in-church style rules) and more general values (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”). In this sense, Obama’s distinction between universal and religion-specific values rings hollow.

And is it true that “democracy demands” allegiance to some sort of uprooted, context-free values? Like what? Obama doesn’t exactly say, but one word that he keeps returning to is “diversity.”

I would not like to misread Obama at this point. He is a serious man who may well one day lead the Democrats. But I am left with the uneasy sense that, once he has cleared away all those “religion-specific” values, what is left is mostly the ideological premises of his intellectually exhausted party. What does Obama take as the substance of those “universal values”? If he means a genuine and deep admiration for diversity, he is way off. Diversity is not a universal value. It is a political concoction that grew out of Justice Lewis Powell’s eccentric opinion in the 1978 Bakke case, which was then seized on and elaborated by campus Leftists in the 1980s. True, unlike most Leftist concepts, this one has achieved mainstream success. Taken up by corporate executives, by schoolteachers, and by the military as a less antagonistic way to promote racial quotas, diversity now almost has the feel of a universal value, for no better reason than that we live a society in which social elites chatter about it endlessly.

But it is best to remember that diversity is a relative newcomer to our national conversation — 202 years younger than our formal declaration of commitment to the ideals of freedom and equality; 2,500 years younger than the Greek enunciation of the ideals of reason and proportionality; and perhaps some 4,000 years younger than the Chinese enunciation of the ideals of complementarity, to mention only a few claimants to the status of “universal values.”

And diversity, of course, is not a constitutional principle — not unless we take Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s 2004 opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger as having written diversity into our Constitution. Even then, it is there only on loan, so to speak, since O’Connor famously wrote into her opinion a 25-year expiration clause.

What other compass points does Obama mention as possible universal values? Just one: “social justice.” Obama doesn’t unpack this phrase, but it generally points to government-enforced redistribution of private property according to the discretion of public officials. It has other convoluted meanings, but “social justice” is one of those nicely opaque terms that manages to sound wholesome while gesturing towards policies that, if plainly expressed, most Americans would strongly reject.

Obama is wise to keep his “universal values” discreetly in the background, out of the way of his pitch to fellow Christians. Explaining them would be awkward. His speech to the Call for Renewal conference, however, ended on a powerful note. He told a story about a Chicago physician who took exception to Obama characterizing (on his website) opponents to abortion as “right-wing ideologues.” That leaves no room, said the doctor, for people who oppose abortion on principled grounds. “I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.” Obama took the message to heart (while blaming his staff in his speech for the offending words), met with the doctor, corrected his website, and went to bed with a prayer that “we can live with one another in a way that reconciles the beliefs of each with the good of all.”

Obama, the man who dares to tell a story of how he was chastened and abashed by the powerful words of a critic, and who learned his lesson and amended his ways — that Obama is a figure to be reckoned with. I am not persuaded that he or Jim Wallis will find much political traction with this appeal to evangelical Christians. After all, the mainstream Protestant churches and a fair number of Catholics have been allied with the political Left for half a century. The combination of Christian faith and liberal ideology is hardly new, and it appears mostly to have worked to the detriment of the churches that have embraced it. The mainstream Protestant churches have lost millions of members, while the evangelical churches have boomed.

While he probably won’t achieve a large-scale political shift among evangelicals, Obama has positioned himself well. If he peels off only a few percentage points from the Republican base, he will be able to shift the results of some elections. When the Angry Left burns itself out, where will the Democratic party go? It might well go with someone who seeks to reconcile “the beliefs of each with the good of all.” That prayer probably owes more to the creed of diversity than to The Decalogue or the Sermon on the Mount, but no matter. Evangelicals and conservatives should pay heed. Sen. Obama’s attempt to graft the citrus branch of Christian piety to the hemlock tree of Democratic party just might bear fruit.

— Peter Wood, provost of The King’s College in New York City, is author of Diversity: The Invention of A Concept.

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Ward Churchill Appeals U. of Colo. Firing (newsmax.com. 060707)

The University of Colorado professor who likened some Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi official has appealed to keep his job as school officials move to fire him for what they say is research misconduct.

Interim Chancellor Philip DeStefano last week said the university should fire ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill; a faculty committee concluded last month that he committed misconduct.

Churchill requested a review Wednesday, the school announced. The process includes a confidential hearing, with the committee’s findings forwarded to the school president.

Churchill has vowed to sue if he is fired.

The professor penned a 2001 essay that compared white-collar workers at the World Trade Center to Adolf Eichmann, a key planner of the Holocaust. The essay attracted little attention until January 2005, when he was invited to speak at a New York college.

Colorado Gov. Bill Owens and others called for Churchill to be fired. University officials ordered an investigation into his scholarship.

School investigators said that Churchill misrepresented the effects of federal laws on American Indians and that he wrongly claimed evidence indicated Capt. John Smith exposed Indians to smallpox in the 1600s. It also said he committed plagiarism by claiming the work of a Canadian environmental group as his own.

Churchill said that the investigation was an attempt to dump him because of outside pressure, and that no professor’s work could stand up to such scrutiny.

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Big Ideas? Feh. Dems feel. (National Review Online, 060714)

By Jonah Goldberg

For several years now, liberal eggheads have been having what seems like an important debate: Do they need “big ideas” like the conservative movement had during its long march to power? Serious-minded liberals launched what Democratic idea-broker Kenneth S. Baer calls “the battle of the battle of ideas,” in which they argue about whether it’s time to argue about important arguments.

Just this week, Baer and Andrei Cherny — founders of a new, big-idea journal, Democracy — penned an op-ed in the L.A. Times calling for liberals to find new Big Ideas. In response to this effort, the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait says, and I’m not making this up: “Ideas? Feh.” A more eloquent statement was posted on the liberal blog TPM Cafe: “The problem isn’t getting people to believe in something — people can believe in anything. The problem is getting them to care.” That captures the essence of liberalism’s current plight. If it’s not about emotions — caring, hating, feeling — it’s about tactics. Big ideas have about as much animating force in liberal ranks today as Calvinism does at a porn studio.

Exhibit A is the liberal fight over Sen. Joe Lieberman’s reelection battle in Connecticut. Lieberman, America’s favorite Jewish uncle, is in the fight of his political life because limousine liberal Ned Lamont is challenging him in the Democratic primary. Oceans of ink and pixels have been devoted to explaining the factions behind this “civil war” on the left. Some paint it as the “netroots,” or left-wing bloggers, versus the Washington establishment. Others talk of hawks versus doves, or populists against elitists, the “party line” versus independents, cats versus dogs.

Alas, Chait has it right: “Feh.” For good or ill, there are no grand “big ideas” behind the anti-Lieberman cause. It’s driven by a riot of passions, chiefly against President Bush and “his” war. Any ideas are mere afterthoughts and rationalizations used to gussy up animus as principle. Several Lamont supporters, also known as “Nedheads,” have faulted Lieberman for such obscure transgressions as criticizing President Clinton’s behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Please. There was no lack of enthusiasm for Lieberman when the sainted Al Gore picked Joe as his running mate.

It’s also nonsense to say that this is about “the people” versus “the establishment.” Lieberman’s a three-term junior senator. Ted Kennedy, scion of America’s leading liberal dynasty, has been in the Senate 26 years longer. Is he not the establishment? Robert Byrd of West Virginia has been in the Senate since the mid-Jurassic period. That old, calcified chewing gum stuck underneath the establishment’s chair? He put it there. But while Kennedy and Byrd (and Gore, Howard Dean, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton) all outrank Lieberman in establishment credentials, they arouse little ire from the net-mob because they say what the throng wants to hear. (Hillary is a slight exception.) Attacks on “the establishment” are just code for “people we don’t like.”

The hawk-versus-dove analysis has similar weaknesses. The netroots crowd is obviously passionately antiwar, while Lieberman supports it. But there are other Iraq war supporters whom the Democratic base hasn’t targeted, such as Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who is also up for reelection. Meanwhile, Lieberman claims that the war is the only thing distinguishing him from Lamont. That’s not exactly right. Lieberman isn’t only pro-war, he’s seen as pro-Bush — a far greater sin. While the netroots crowd calls Lieberman “scum” and a “lying” this or that, their most damaging attack is a picture worth a thousand dirty words. It’s of Bush kissing Lieberman on the cheek, and anti-Joe jihadists have posted it everywhere in the lefty blogosphere.

Bush hatred drives — or poisons — almost everything in liberal politics now.

Chait himself wrote a bilious cover story for The New Republic in 2003 explaining why he hates everything, and I mean everything, about Bush. And just this week, Chait defended the proposition that Bush is a greater threat to the U.S. than Osama bin Laden because Bush has “wreaked enormous damage on the political and social fabric of the country” and has “strained the fabric of American democracy.” And Chait is seen as a moderate by the Daily Kos crowd.

But Bush hatred is just one side of the coin. The other is this bizarre, almost pathetic, yearning for Democratic self-esteem. It was amazing how much of the rhetoric from the recent Daily Kos convention in Las Vegas was about standing up, fighting back, and feeling proud to be Democrats. This liberal-pride crowd likes “fighting Dems,” and open expression of Bush hatred is the litmus test for whether you’re a fighting Dem. You can be a moderate, like Virginia Senate hopeful Jim Webb or former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, or a flaming liberal, like Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold, and that’s fine as long as you’ll “stand up and fight” and refuse to take this (expletive deleted) from that (expletive deleted) anymore. In fact, you can believe anything you want. You don’t actually have to have big ideas. The important part is that you care.

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Liberals: Born to run (TOWNHALL.COM, 060719)

By Ann Coulter

I knew the events in the Middle East were big when The New York Times devoted nearly as much space to them as it did to a New York court ruling last week rejecting gay marriage.

Some have argued that Israel’s response is disproportionate, which is actually correct: It wasn’t nearly strong enough. I know this because there are parts of South Lebanon still standing.

Most Americans have been glued to their TV sets, transfixed by Israel’s show of power, wondering, “Gee, why can’t we do that?”

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean says that “what’s going on in the Middle East today” wouldn’t be happening if the Democrats were in power. Yes, if the Democrats were running things, our cities would be ash heaps and the state of Israel would have been wiped off the map by now.

But according to Dean, the Democrats would have the “moral authority that Bill Clinton had” — no wait! keep reading — “when he brought together the Israelis and Palestinians.” Clinton really brokered a Peace in Our Time with that deal — “our time” being a reference to that five-minute span during which he announced it. Yasser Arafat immediately backed out on all his promises and launched the second intifada.

The fact that Israel is able to launch an attack on Hezbollah today without instantly inciting a multination conflagration in the Middle East is proof of what Bush has accomplished. He has begun to create a moderate block of Arab leaders who are apparently not interested in becoming the next Saddam Hussein.

There’s been no stock market crash, showing that the markets have confidence that Israel will deal appropriately with the problem and that it won’t expand into World War III.

But liberals can never abandon the idea that we must soothe savage beasts with appeasement — whether they’re dealing with murderers like Willie Horton or Islamic terrorists. Then the beast eats you.

There are only two choices with savages: Fight or run. Democrats always want to run, but they dress it up in meaningless catchphrases like “diplomacy,” “detente,” “engagement,” “multilateral engagement,” “multilateral diplomacy,” “containment” and “going to the U.N.”

I guess they figure, “Hey, appeasement worked pretty well with ... uh ... wait, I know this one ... ummm ... tip of my tongue ...”

Democrats like to talk tough, but you can never trap them into fighting. There is always an obscure objection to be raised in this particular instance — but in some future war they would be intrepid! One simply can’t imagine what that war would be.

Democrats have never found a fight they couldn’t run from.

On “Meet the Press” last month, Sen. Joe Biden was asked whether he would support military action against Iran if the Iranians were to go “full-speed-ahead with their program to build a nuclear bomb.”

No, of course not. There is, Biden said, “no imminent threat at this point.”

According to the Democrats, we can’t attack Iran until we have signed affidavits establishing that it has nuclear weapons, but we also can’t attack North Korea because it may already have nuclear weapons. The pattern that seems to be emerging is: “Don’t ever attack anyone, ever, for any reason. Ever.”

The Democrats are in a snit about North Korea having nukes, with Howard Dean saying Democrats are tougher on defense than the Republicans because since Bush has been president, North Korea has “quadrupled their nuclear weapons stash.”

It wasn’t that difficult. Clinton gave the North Koreans $4 billion to construct nuclear reactors in return for the savages promising not to use the reactors to build bombs. But oddly, despite this masterful triumph of “diplomacy,” the savages did not respond with good behavior. Instead, they immediately set to work feverishly building nuclear weapons.

But that’s another threat the Democrats do not think is yet ripe for action.

On “Meet the Press” last Sunday, Sen. Biden lightly dismissed the North Koreans, saying their “government’s like an eighth-grader with a small bomb looking for attention” and that we “don’t even have the intelligence community saying they’re certain they have a nuclear weapon.”

Is that the test? We need to have absolute certainty that the North Koreans have a nuclear weapon capable of hitting California with Kim Jong Il making a solemn promise to bomb the U.S. (and really giving us his word this time, no funny business) before we — we what? If they have a nuclear weapon, what do we do then? Is a worldwide thermonuclear war the one war Democrats would finally be willing to fight?

Democrats won’t acknowledge the existence of “an imminent threat” anyplace in the world until a nuclear missile is 12 minutes from New York. And then we’ll never have the satisfaction of saying “I told you so” because we’ll all be dead.

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How to Speak Liberal . . .Start by obfuscating. (Weekly Standard, 060809)

DURING A GET-TO-KNOW-YOU meeting with the new Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, last week, a veteran Washington journalist asked about possible bipartisan talks to deal with the growing cost of entitlements. “Would revenues be on the table?” he inquired. Paulson looked puzzled. Another journalist explained that the question was about tax increases. Would they be considered?

The questioner had used a word—”revenues”—drawn from the growing lexicon of liberalism. It is a language quite common now in Washington and in liberal political circles, and it’s designed to substitute softer or neutral words for harsher ones with political implications. It is a language of euphemism and, at times, deception. Paulson, by the way, wisely declined to answer the question.

The most striking recent example is Democratic representative John Murtha’s plan to “redeploy” American troops from Iraq. His idea, of course, is to pull all the troops out as soon as possible. But “redeploy” makes it sound like a tactical maneuver rather than a move to retreat, to give up, to cut and run. Other Democrats have adopted the word. Murtha, however, is sometimes more candid about what he has in mind, urging “immediate withdrawal” to Okinawa, more than 5,000 miles away from Iraq.

The classic substitute of a favorable word is “choice.” No, it has nothing to do with school choice. For liberals, “choice” offers a detour around the touchy word “abortion” with its clear meaning that something is to be aborted or killed—in this case, an unborn child. Those who favor a right to abortion are “pro-choice” and their anti-abortion or pro-life opponents are “anti-choice.” And the pro-abortion group once known as the National Abortion Rights Action League has become NARAL Pro-Choice America. NARAL is not an acronym, according to the group. The first “A” stands for nothing and certainly not for “abortion.” In the same vein, on July 19, members of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America approved changing that group’s name to the American Association for Justice. (What about Truth and the American Way?)

One thing liberals no longer favor is government “spending,” particularly on domestic programs. Instead, they want government to “invest.” This is what people do in their homes and in stocks and bonds. And for their investment, they get a return. Liberals would have you think that when government agencies spend on—whoops, invest in—domestic programs, the results are similar.

Liberals have also pulled a switch on what they call themselves. They’ve figured out that “liberal” is a pejorative word. In the minds of millions of Americans, it means woolly-headed thinking on every sort of issue. So liberals have morphed into “progressives.” And many of their sympathizers in the media have embraced the name change. Would they do the same if conservatives wanted to call themselves, say, “traditionalists”? I suspect not.

At the local level, liberals often go by a different name. They are “activists.” Again, the media have helped popularize that word. So the folks who protest plans to build a Wal-Mart in their town or suburb are “activists.” The people who oppose a zoning change to allow a church to be built are “activists.” What about those who don’t want an abortion clinic in their town? They’re still conservatives.

A few liberal euphemisms have embedded themselves firmly in the broad political vocabulary. Take “affirmative action.” It sounds like a nice thing. In fact, it consists of quotas or racial preferences, things that most Americans don’t think are so nice and for the most part oppose.

There’s also a special set of words that apply to Israel, and they all suggest the same thing: the need for pressure by the United States to force Israel to make concessions to Palestinians or other Middle Eastern foes. Newsweek recently urged the United States to get “involved” in the Middle East. Others call for the president to be “engaged” there. An “evenhanded” policy toward the Middle East? That, too, means leaning on Israel.

One liberal word hasn’t taken off yet. It’s “lies,” as in supposed untruths told by President Bush. One Bush “lie” was his saying that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq. Bush thought it was true, but it turned out not to be. Does that make it a lie? Another Bush statement labeled a “lie” was his claim in his 2000 campaign to be “a uniter, not a divider.” He believed that, too. So was it a lie? Liberals have failed to persuade very many of that.

The liberal transformation of political language won’t be complete until a substitute is found for a word that drives liberals crazy. That word is “patriotism.” On national security, liberals imagine they’re being accused of being unpatriotic (in truth, they aren’t). They have come up with an

answer anyway. Dissent, they say, is the highest form of patriotism. Not quite. Dissent may not be unpatriotic, but it certainly isn’t patriotism. Nice try, though.

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Why liberals are crushing dissent (Townhall.com, 060827)

By Kevin McCullough

Growing ever bolder in their naked grab for power they are leaving scorched earth behind those who disagree with them. This is why Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman, and Zell Miller no longer find themselves included in the modern Democratic Party. What is left over for the Democrats are wildly anti-American, anti-God, and anti-biblical leftists who are now bragging about their use of brute force to crush the voices of those who disagree with them.

Perhaps that’s why this week in one of the boldest moves yet by a sitting liberal, Democrat Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez proclaimed, “The real purpose of SB 1437 is to outlaw traditional perspectives on marriage and family in the state school system.”

He continued, “The way you correct a wrong (perspective) is by outlawing.’Cause if you don’t outlaw it, then people’s biases tend to take over and dominate the perspective and the point of view.”

Nunez’s solution to the people he disagrees with is to outlaw their ability to disagree with him.

And Nunez’s viewpoint is one that pervades liberals in his party and in the nation. That is why Nunez and his fellow democrats in the California State Assembly voted in unison to pass four bills that are all designed to punish people who disagree with them. To incarcerate someone for daring to criticize a different point of view - over a purely behavioral issue.

The bills in question have passed both houses and await Governor Schwarzenegger’s signature or veto. The bills were unanimously embraced by the Democrats and universally denounced by the Republicans.

But do they say?

These four bills would require that in every classroom from kindergarten through high school that perverse sexual activity be praised and highlighted in a positive light. They would require textbooks many of which would then also be produced for other states beyond the borders of California make positive references to the ideas of men putting on women’s under things. They would restrict school districts from being able to bar females from displaying dildos on the outerwear of their prom dress. And in functional sexuality courses from K-12 they would require positive explanation of the merits and instruction of anal intercourse.

These four bills are also dangerous in what they outlaw. No single teacher - not even in science classes - would be allowed to talk about the negative health impact of homosexual behavior. No school counselor would be allowed to confirm to a molested student that they felt wrong about continuing in a homosexual relationship that they were primarily drawn into because of earlier molestation to begin with. No mention of moral aspects of sexual behavior would be permitted unless immoral activity were praised and in fact referred to as moral.

In other words the pushing of the sexual envelope would be unleashed with a nitro-fueled explosion the likes of which has never been seen in America’s history.

The liberals in the state assembly knew that the average Californian would never support these radical measures, but they also knew that they will not be up for re-election this year and they are counting on Californians having very short term memories.

But one of the bills goes a step further. Its actual purpose is to cripple any state resources such as fire department or police protection for any religious institution (i.e. a Bible based church) that would in any way demonstrate negative “doctrine” or “propaganda”. So if an arsonist (who also just happened to be a radical activist) decided to burn down a church that was in their view teaching the faithful interpretation of scripture as it relates to sexual practice - then the local fire company could be barred from assisting in the recovery and protection of said facility.

So why are liberals going to such extremes to shut down and shut out any opposing view?

Because they are a stubborn and sinful people. People that are bent on reshaping a utopia that God did not design - and one that will never exist.

Just because the entire world claims there is no God - doesn’t make Him disappear. Just because a majority of voters might even say that two men hooking up is the moral equivalence of marriage - doesn’t mean it IS marriage.

Liberals are racked with guilt because the conscience that God put inside of them has told them again and again that such things are wrong. But instead of choosing to change their view, they have instead chosen to crush anyone and everyone who would give support to the message that their heart already knows.

Without Judeo-Christian morals there would be no society in place today that would’ve allowed freedom of speech. And as the moral framework of the Judeo-Christian society that America has always been is systematically being targeted for erasure the little power mongers, and dictators are already aligning to rule with absolute say.

Assembly Speaker Nunez’s view to “outlaw traditional perspectives” is shocking in its blunt regurgitation. It is also, sadly, not new to the hard left in America. And without the power of debate, ideas, and dissent it is being given a larger and larger place at the table.

So the godless have announced their intentions and now it is up to us to speak - while we still have voice. Call Gov. Schwarzenegger today 916.445.2841 and ask him to protect free speech, and perspectives of many sorts.

Moral guilt serves its purpose and the best way to rid one’s self of it is to change behavior. To attempt to appease it by stifling those you disagree with will only cause it to grow.

What happens when the opposition is gone and the guilt still pervades?

Common sense has been telling us this for years, will we listen?

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More of Carter’s little pills (townhall.com, 060829)

By David Limbaugh

When I wrote about Jimmy Carter’s antics recently, some suggested I should quit wasting my time discussing someone so irrelevant. Well, I’d be happy to comply, except that their assumption is incorrect. What this misguided and increasingly bitter man says, especially on foreign soil, does matter.

Don’t forget that the Democratic Party leadership embraces Carter, as witnessed by his prominent role in the party’s national convention, where he called President Bush — in no uncertain terms — a liar. Remember that when you’re tempted to think of Carter as just a benign senior statesman.

I’ll concede Carter has done some good works since he was defeated in 1980, but why that should insulate him from scrutiny for the many inappropriate and mean-spirited statements he’s made since then escapes me.

I thought Democrats unanimously agreed that one of America’s highest aspirations should be to ingratiate itself to its allies and other nations. Above all else, we should strive to be the most popular player on the international block.

They have brutalized President Bush for acting “unilaterally” and alienating the rest of the world. They say that by attacking Iraq he has made peaceful Muslims the world over — who are otherwise inclined to love us dearly, of course — hate us and become homicidal suicide bombers.

Why then, does Carter get a pass for constantly contributing to America’s negative image by telling the world how bad we are?

Well, now he’s not just telling them how bad (SET ITAL) we (END ITAL) are, but how bad our greatest single ally in the war is. Carter told The Sunday Telegraph, “I have been surprised and extremely disappointed by Tony Blair’s behavior. I think that more than any other person in the world the Prime Minister could have had a moderating influence on Washington — and he has not. I really thought that Tony Blair would be a constraint on President Bush’s policies towards Iraq.”

Carter said he holds Blair “substantially responsible” for his “compliance and subservience” to Bush, which has exacerbated America’s unpopularity overseas “in countries like Egypt and Jordan,” where “our approval ratings are less than five percent.”

Notice that Carter gets a twofer here, blasting both Blair and Bush with his rhetorical popgun. His unstated premise is that if Muslim countries disapprove of our policies in the war, they must be right and we must be wrong. Wouldn’t it be shocking if — just once — people like Carter would draw the opposite conclusion: that Egyptians and Jordanians are improperly sympathetic to the terrorist cause? And don’t tell me this isn’t about sympathy for Muslim terrorism.

Would you prefer to believe the Jordanians and Egyptians are righteously angry with us for deposing an incredibly evil dictator who enslaved, tortured and slaughtered his own people? Does that sound more reasonable to you?

Look at the Lebanese people’s overwhelming support for the Hezbollah terrorists. How much more evidence do we need that it isn’t our actions that cause them to hate us? Or, even if it is, that we can’t quit fighting this war just so we can score higher in foreign popularity polls? (This is just a wild hunch, but I’ll bet Jimmy’s best buddy, Fidel Castro, disapproves of Bush’s foreign policy, too.)

Since Carter has no plans to rebuke himself for slamming the leader of America’s strongest ally, perhaps other Democratic leaders will step up to the plate and at least gently admonish him for alienating our allies and trying to validate the Muslim world’s complaints against us.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Cuba’s President Fidel Castro (R) listen to the Cuban national anthem at the baseball stadium “Latinoamericano” in Havana in this May 14, 2002 file photo. REUTERS/Rafael Perez/Files (CUBA)

Right.

The truth is that Tony Blair has been a courageous statesman and a refreshingly reliable ally throughout the war. He’s stood tall against those in his own country and ours who have, in the spirit of Neville Chamberlain, turned their backs on the realities of 9/11 and pretended the evils we face don’t exist, rather than confronting them.

By contrast, Jimmy Carter only sees evil in those who are fighting for good and opposing evil, like George Bush, Tony Blair, the United States and Great Britain.

Since the Democratic ex-presidents club is so determined to violate the traditional rule that former presidents don’t criticize sitting ones, maybe President Bush should consider breaking that rule in reverse. As the sitting president, he might apologize to Tony Blair and the British people for the uncharitable, unfair and reprehensible remarks of former president Jimmy Carter, who has dishonored the sacrifices of America, Britain and their respective armed forces.

When it comes to foreigners’ attitudes toward America, I’ll take respect over popularity any day.

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Report: Air America to declare bankruptcy: Left-leaning talk network could stay alive under deal (WorldNetDaily, 060914)

The left-leaning talk network Air America Radio will announce a major restructuring Friday that is expected to include a bankruptcy filing, according to the website ThinkProgress.org.

The struggling network could remain on the air under the deal, but significant personnel changes already are underway, the website reported, citing three independent sources.

“We do know that there have been cash-flow problems,” Air America host Al Franken told the online publication Radar. “I haven’t been paid in a while. Like, there’s no cash flowing to me.”

Air America dismissed five employees yesterday, explaining they would be given no severance without a capital infusion or bankruptcy, ThinkProgess said.

The network also has severed ties with host Jerry Springer.

ThinkProgress commented that “the right wing is sure to seize on Air America’s financial woes as a sign that progressive talk radio is unpopular. In fact, Air America succeeded at creating something that didn’t exist: the progressive talk radio format.”

“That format is now established and strong and will continue with or without Air America,” the website said. “Indeed, many of the country’s most successful and widely-syndicated progressive talk hosts – Ed Schultz and Stephanie Miller, for instance – aren’t even associated with Air America.”

But a contributor to a discussion board on RawStory.com called the bankruptcy announcement a “sad day for America.”

“We are losing one of the few liberal voices and the neocon fascists are taking over the mainstream media. Soon there will only be one voice in America ... Big Brother.”

As WorldNetDaily reported last fall, Air America had no measurable audience in the nation’s capital according to the Arbitron rating service.

After WWRC-AM in Washington, D.C., recorded a mere fraction of a rating point in the spring with syndicated shows from the likes of lefty talkers Franken, Janeane Garofalo and Stephanie Miller, Arbitron couldn’t detect a measurable listenership for the station in the summer quarter, the Washington Post said.

The news came on the heels of the network asking its listeners to send in money, a financial scandal involving money siphoned from a Boys & Girls Club in New York City, a California radio station pleading for advertisers to sponsor the programming claiming it could not get a single ad, and a host apologizing for what some thought were threats against President Bush’s life.

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If only bin Laden had a stained blue dress (townhall.com, 060914)

By Ann Coulter

If you wonder why it took 50 years to get the truth about Joe McCarthy, consider the fanatical campaign of the Clinton acolytes to kill an ABC movie that relies on the 9/11 Commission Report, which whitewashed only 90% of Clinton’s cowardice and incompetence in the face of terrorism, rather than 100%.

Islamic jihadists attacked America year after year throughout the Clinton administration. They did everything but blow up his proverbial “bridge to the 21st century.” Every year but one, Clinton found an excuse not to fight back.

The first month Clinton was in office, Islamic terrorists with suspected links to al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center.

For the first time ever, a terrorist act against America was treated not as a matter of national security, but exclusively as a simple criminal offense. The individual bombers were tried in a criminal court. (The one plotter who got away fled to Iraq, that peaceful haven of kite-flying children until Bush invaded and turned it into a nation of dangerous lunatics.)

In 1995 and 1996, various branches of the Religion of Peace — al-Qaida, Hezbollah and the Iranian “Party of God” — staged car bomb attacks on American servicemen in Saudi Arabia, killing 24 members of our military in all. Each time, the Clinton administration came up with an excuse to do nothing.

Despite the Democrats’ current claim that only the capture of Osama bin Laden will magically end terrorism forever, Clinton turned down Sudan’s offer to hand us bin Laden in 1996. That year, Mohammed Atta proposed the 9/11 attack to bin Laden.

Clinton refused the handover of bin Laden because — he said in taped remarks on Feb. 15, 2002 — “(bin Laden) had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him.” Luckily, after 9/11, we can get him on that trespassing charge.

Although Clinton made the criminal justice system the entire U.S. counterterrorism strategy, there was not even an indictment filed after the bombing of either Khobar Towers (1996) or the USS Cole (2000). Indictments were not filed until after Bush/Ashcroft came into office.

Only in 1998 did the Clinton-haters (“normal people”) force Clinton into a military response. Solely because of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton finally lobbed a few bombs in the general direction of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

In August 1998, three days after Clinton admitted to the nation that he did in fact have “sex with that woman,” he bombed Afghanistan and Sudan, doing about as much damage as another Clinton fusillade did to a blue Gap dress.

The day of Clinton’s scheduled impeachment, Dec. 18, 1998, he bombed Iraq. This accomplished two things: (1) It delayed his impeachment for one day, and (2) it got a lot of Democrats on record about the monumental danger of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.

So don’t tell me impeachment “distracted” Clinton from his aggressive pursuit of terrorists. He never would have bombed anyone if it weren’t for the Clinton-haters.

As soon as Clinton was no longer “distracted” by impeachment, he went right back to doing nothing in response to terrorism. In October 2000, al-Qaida bombed the USS Cole, killing 17 sailors and nearly sinking the ship.

Clinton did nothing. This is only an abbreviated list of Clinton’s surrender to Islamic savagery. For a president who supposedly stayed up all night “working” and hated vacations, Clinton sure spent a lot of time sitting around on his butt while America was being attacked.

According to Rich Miniter, author of “Losing Bin Laden,” Clinton’s top national security advisers made the following classic Democrat excuses for doing nothing in response to the Cole attack:

# Attorney General Janet Reno “thought retaliation might violate international law and was therefore against it.”

# CIA Director George Tenet “wanted more definitive proof that bin Laden was behind the attack, although he personally thought he was.”

# Secretary of State Madeleine Albright “was concerned about the reaction of world opinion to a retaliation against Muslims and the impact it would have in the final days of the Clinton Middle East peace process.” (How did that turn out, by the way? Big success, I take it? Everybody over there all friendly with one another?)

# Secretary of Defense William Cohen “did not consider the Cole attack ‘sufficient provocation’ for a military retaliation.”

Less than a year after Clinton’s final capitulation to Islamic terrorists, they staged the largest terrorist attack in history on U.S. soil. The Sept. 11 attack, planning for which began in the ‘90s, followed eight months of President Bush — but eight years of Bill Clinton.

Clinton’s own campaign adviser on Iraq, Laurie Mylroie, says Clinton and his advisers are “most culpable” for the intelligence failure that allowed 9/11 to happen.

Now, after five years of no terrorist attacks in America, Democrats are hoping we’ll forget the consequences of the Democrat strategy of doing nothing in response to terrorism and abandon the Bush policies that have kept this nation safe since 9/11. But first, they need to rewrite history.

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Radical Islam vs radical Christianity (townhall.com, 060925)

By Star Parker

You would think that even Rosie O’Donnell could grasp that there is indeed a difference between “radical Christianity” and “radical Islam.”

No doubt conservative Christian evangelicals were who Rosie had in mind as “radical” Christians.

But, really Rosie, it must mean something, even to you, that no Christian leader has suggested that you be executed, or even that your house should be blown up. You must see some difference between not approving of your views and issuing a contract on your life.

Maybe sometime I’ll publish the letters I get from homosexual activists. Some don’t sound much different from the stuff coming out of the hills of Afghanistan. In Rosie’s vein, I can easily say there isn’t much difference between radical Islam and radical homosexual activism.

If we’re going to be looking for common ground, I actually see more between so-called radical Muslims and liberals than I do with conservatives.

They share the same unrealistic, childish view of the world driven by an infantile-like egotism.

Consider the experience of the great Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci who died of cancer last week. Fallaci spent her final years writing about the decline and collapse of her beloved Europe and its transformation into “Eurabia.” By simply being critical of Islam, Fallaci was indicted in her native Italy.

So Fallaci, in her declining years, could only return to her home country if she was willing to risk up to two years imprisonment for simply writing unflattering commentary about Islam.

Are you listening Rosie? Do you really understand the nature of the dear freedom that you have?

European reality, where America’s and Rosie O’ Donnell’s own left want to take us, demonstrates the common ground and meeting place of the far left and the far right.

Once the rules of civilization, the precious gift of our tradition and culture, are cast to the trash heap, they get replaced with new rules of the game that are generated by power and politics. The legal landscape of a totally secularized Europe is now re-written by the politically correct whose world view originates in their latest urge du jour.

The result is Italy casts out one of its great, liberal journalists whose crime is to be honest about those who want to destroy her country.

Freedom to speak is the gift of the civil, not of the politically correct.

Rosie O’Donnell doesn’t get it. She hasn’t a clue about the civilization and the tradition that opens the door for her to broadcast her adolescent meanderings to millions every afternoon. Out of pure ignorance she reduces the value of the gift she has to zero. History tells us that once you don’t understand what you have, you lose it.

The radical Islamists, like the politically correct in the morally relative West, make up their own rules and don’t appreciate the real truths of the world in which they live.

Does the president of Iran honestly comprehend where he stands? First of all, he wants nuclear power — the same nuclear power discovered and developed by Western science, the product of our open, honest, and thoughtful Western civilization he so abhors.

How about at least a thank you Mr. Ahmadinejad?

But, maybe more to the point, Ahmadinejad acts the way he does because he is as detached from the realities in which he lives as Rosie O’Donnell.

If we wanted to play ball with Ahmadinejad according to his own supposed rules, the game would be over in 10 seconds. If we really wanted to exercise our power, he’d be history. We could blow his regime to kingdom come and deliver him readily to the black eyed virgins in heaven that his jihadis so long for.

We don’t do it because we are civil and not because we can’t. Because we value life, what it means and the values that sustain it and make this dear gift possible. This is what those in the world of Islam that think they are powerful need to grasp.

It is sad and ironic that Muslim attacks on churches in response to innocent remarks made by the Pope in an important and thoughtful speech about faith and reason coincided also with Fallaci’s death.

Fallaci, who found inspiration in the message of this Pope, saying: “I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It’s that simple.”

She also wisely observed, “The moment you give up your principles and your values, the moment you laugh at those principles and those values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.”

Pay attention, Rosie.

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The week’s revelations (townhall.com, 060926)

By Thomas Sowell

This past week has told us more than we wanted to know about ourselves and about our enemies.

There was far more controversy over remarks made by the Pope than over the violence unleashed by Muslims against people who had nothing to do with what the Pope said.

That our enemies do not understand the significance of free speech in a free society, where things that offend us can be denounced without indiscriminate violence, is bad enough. But that we ourselves seem headed further down the slippery slope of self-censorship is chilling.

Tolerance has been one of the virtues of western civilization. But virtues can be carried to extremes that turn them into vices. Toleration of intolerance is a particularly dangerous vice to which western nations are succumbing, both within their own countries and internationally.

Double standards are being wrapped in the mantle of morality. The drive to extend Geneva convention protection to terrorists who are not covered under the Geneva convention is one of a number of dangerous self-indulgences by people who seem to think that being morally one-up is the ultimate and survival is secondary.

Senator Lindsey Graham’s comment that we are going to win in our struggle with terrorists “because we are better” was all too typical of this mindset.

It would be hard to know which would be worse — if he said it as just some offhand political rhetoric or whether he is really fatuous enough to believe it and irresponsible enough to gamble American lives rather than extract murderous secrets from captured cutthroats.

There is already evidence from Guantanamo that the prisoners there are abusing the guards far worse than any guards have abused these prisoners. Yet our media have no interest in that and have been willing to believe every allegation by these professional terrorists, including the physical absurdity of trying to flush the Koran — or any other book — down a toilet.

Unfortunately, these are not just isolated lapses in judgment. It is largely the same people who have for years been more protective of criminals than of their victims who are now more protective of captured terrorists than of those who are their targets.

When such attitudes became ascendant in our courts during the 1960s, the declining trend in crime rates suddenly reversed and skyrocketed, as liberal judges created new “rights” for criminals out of thin air and called it constitutional law.

But this goes far beyond judges and far beyond our own times. The political left has been weak on protecting society from criminals for more than two centuries.

No one should be surprised that this same attitude has led to great preoccupation with trying to get captured terrorists treated more nicely.

This past week has also seen revelations about our enemies. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’ cheap demagoguery at the United Nations was a clear sign of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of his anti-Americanism. Surely if he had anything concrete and serious to say against this country, he would have said it.

Equally clearly, he understood that no coherent argument was necessary. All that was necessary was to tap into visceral resentments and play to the gallery of those poisoned by envy and ready to blame their own lack of achievement on somebody else.

The president of Iran was slicker but his speech at the United Nations and his artful evasions at his press conference are also revealing and should be a warning. He too is obviously playing us for fools.

Those in the United States and in other western nations who are urging dialogue with Iran are repeating the tragic mistakes of the 1930s that led to World War II. People say talk is cheap but it can be enormously costly when it becomes just a way to forestall action while an enemy nation builds up its military threat.

Since Iran is not letting the idle chatter at the U.N. delay their rush to get nuclear weapons, they are more dangerous than the Nazis were — while we remain as gullible as those in the west who blundered into World War II and almost lost it.

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How the Left Was Won (townhall.com, 060926)

By Richard Mgrdechian

The following is an excerpt from the new book How The Left Was Won: An In-Depth Analysis of the Tools and Methodologies Used by Liberals to Undermine Society and Disrupt the Social Order by Richard Mgrdechian.

Let’s face it, when you get right down to it, all of liberalism is fueled by a singular strategy—a strategy which has been continually perfected and relentlessly executed over the past forty years. That strategy is to promote and exploit divisiveness.

Everything liberal politicians do is based on this simple principle. Tell the people that are given to hating the most, that they are the ones who are hated. Tell the people who expect the most, that they deserve more. Tell blacks to hate whites. Tell women to hate men. Tell the lazy to hate the motivated. Tell the poor that only conservatives are rich, and then be sure to tell them to hate them for it.

Class warfare, race baiting, name calling and man-hating—all with a singular goal: to get themselves in power by promoting and exploiting divisiveness. Of course, once this divisiveness turns into frenzy, these same people suddenly act as if they actually want to solve a problem that didn’t even exist before they did everything they possibly could to create it.

To liberals, every issue, every situation is an opportunity to divide. History, religion, the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the death of a soldier, a political debate, the hurricane which devastated New Orleans. Every tragedy exploited to divide. Every victory belittled to divide. Every incident, every word, every distorted statistic, every holiday—you name it, they will find some way to divide it.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the politicians who promote and exploit divisiveness; it is the people as well. Malcontents, jealous of anyone with any sort of success, come up with any way they can to attack those who are more successful then they are. Someone is rich only because they stole something from them. Certain groups are more successful only because they took advantage of them. Work has nothing to do with it. Intelligence has nothing to do with it. Planning ahead has nothing to do with it. Even luck has nothing to do with it.

And what do these kinds of people view as the solution to this imaginary injustice? Why special rights, privileges and opportunities for themselves, of course. Level the playing field. Get something for nothing. Take from the rich, the white, the male dominated, homophobic society that has already given them everything. Take what they have, what they built, what they earned—whether it be money, property, liberty or opportunity—and find some way, some justification, some cause or some guise to redistribute it to the people who have done nothing to earn it. To people who refuse to compete on merit. To people who insist on taking more out of society than what they put in to it. To people who don’t give a damn that their inclusion comes only at the expense of someone else’s exclusion. The strategy is simple, really—promote divisiveness and then exploit it for your own benefit.

Liberals should thank God every day for differences between people because without them, liberalism would be dead in the water. Without them, the country might have some stability. Without them, it might have a chance to survive. Without them, the problems between those who want and those who have might actually be manageable in some meaningful or productive way. But differences have given liberals the perfect opportunity to stop any rational discussion dead in its tracks. Differences have led to polarization. Differences have led to countries within a country. Differences have led to the dreaded xist-ism-monger-phobia. Differences have allowed liberals to add any of these four sounds to the end of any word they choose, virtually guaranteeing that they can get away with anything they want.

Worse yet, liberals actually have the nerve to turn around and endlessly accuse conservatives of divisiveness. To them, conservatives— who believe everyone should be held to the same standards—are somehow divisive. To them, conservatives—who believe everyone should have the same rights regardless of the guises used to justify different ones for different people—are somehow divisive. To them, conservatives—who sacrifice their time, money, careers and often their lives to defend the true meaning of freedom and liberty—are somehow divisive.

But the reality is that divisiveness does not come from those who are trying to make some contribution to our society. The reality is that divisiveness does not come from those who expect others to at least try to do the same. The reality is that divisiveness comes from those who are always trying to get something out of a society far beyond what they are willing to put back in. The reality is that divisiveness comes from those who are always trying to get something for nothing.

Richard Mgrdechian holds a degree in electrical engineering from the prestigious California Institute of Technology, as well as an MBA from Columbia University. Over the past several years, he has grown increasingly concerned by what he sees happening within American society and has provided a unique analysis of the strategies used by liberals to undermine that society in his new book How The Left Was Won.

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Stand Up For What You Believe? (townhall.com, 060926)

By Andrew Tallman

I was raised by a very loving, very open-minded, and very liberal mother. Although many of her beliefs did not replicate themselves in me, one vital life principle did: my mom taught me to always stand up for my beliefs.

No matter how many people were against me and no matter how unpopular it made me, she was adamant that I should be true to whatever I knew in my heart was right. And even though we grew to disagree about so many important things, our mutual commitment to this key maxim never wavered.

When friends were passing around a cigarette in a tent when I was eleven, it meant that I said, “No,” and even left the tent because they said I had to smoke if I stayed. When my pastor said things in confirmation class that I thought were wrong, it meant I questioned him about it. When I wrote papers in college disagreeing with my professors, it meant I wrote them twice as well just because I wanted to make sure my ideas were considered. And when I do my radio show every day, it means I say what I believe, though it challenges every single listener I have and runs the risk of them switching channels stations over it.

Stand up for what you believe, no matter what.

It’s the principle Martin Luther King died for following. It’s the principle Gandhi changed India by following. It’s the principle that got Christ crucified. And it’s the one great rally cry of liberal thinkers everywhere.

Which is why I find it so baffling that those who proclaim it the loudest turn right around and forget it when they attack the actions of our President, George W. Bush. Instead of encouraging him in his often unpopular choices as courageous and visionary, they criticize him for risking unpopularity with his peers by doing what he thinks is right, which they then deride as “acting unilaterally.”

But what if the others are all wrong? And what if he is right?

For years now, I have been hearing from liberal thinkers how crucial it is that we Americans listen carefully to the legal, political, moral, and religious ideas of people around the world. We should adjust our laws to reflect their notions. We should adjust our foreign policy to cater to their tastes. We must alter our notions of appropriate and inappropriate living to coincide with theirs. And we must never allow ourselves to be deceived into thinking that we might know something about God that they have forgotten or rejected.

But what if they’re all wrong? And what if we’re right?

But more to the point, what about the idea that even if the whole world is against you, you should stand for what you believe, no matter what?

Liberals aren’t suddenly supporters of the notion that all unpopular causes should be abandoned, are they? If so, they must uncomfortably note that virtually every one of their progressive objectives either is still or was originally very unpopular. Are they going to be suddenly defer to the broader population in matters regarding abortion, homosexuality, guns, capital punishment, drugs, and pornography? They would be compelled to do so if they were to become consistent with the principle they are using to criticize the President and this country. I hope they don’t, however, because, even though in this particular context they seem to have forgotten it, they and I both heartily agree that truth is not a popularity contest. I may not agree with many liberal views, but I resist the seductive temptation to dismiss them for their unpopularity.

But beyond particular current issues, just imagine how history would look if the few who believed in their cause had simply given up and deferred to the rest of the world. Professional athletes would all be white. Women would not be able to vote. Slavery would still be legal. America would still be a British territory. The Reformation wouldn’t have happened. And we’d still think of the Sun revolving around the Earth. These are all examples liberals proudly (and rightly) recount of people standing for unpopular truths over the peer pressure to accept popular errors.

This is no small principle they are abandoning.

The great liberal theme has always been to challenge the popular opinions and the authorities who proclaim them if they seem wrong, and I hope that never changes. So instead of forsaking the single most identifiable maxim liberals everywhere have always stood for in one awful moment of political hypocrisy, I would encourage them to say to President Bush, “We’re sorry. You’re the President. And even though we disagree with you, we will defend with our lives your right to do what you believe is in the best interests of our country. And if the rest of the world is against you, that’s okay. We, too, disagree with you, but we know that all right ideas encounter steep opposition. Don’t succumb to international peer pressure. Be courageous, and continue to stand up for what you believe. In this we will defend you. Not because we agree with you, but because we believe in that principle. For a while there, we had forgotten that this is what we truly believe. And we’re grateful somebody who disagrees with us cared enough to take the time to remind us of that fact.”

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Hurricane Foley: Who knew? (National Review Online, 061006)

If anything good can come from the mess regarding disgraced Florida Congressman Mark Foley, it is a new consensus against the sexualization of teenagers. Democrats and Republicans alike professed to be appalled by Foley’s efforts via the Internet to help male teens “explore their sexuality.”

Alas, this consensus is something of a mirage, since much of the Democratic outrage over Foley is opportunistic. The Foley flap is to sexual politics what the Dubai ports deal was to the national-security debate — a rare chance for Democrats to play to the natural conservatism of the country by attempting to get to the Republicans’ right on a hot-button issue. On the ports deal, the Democrats briefly were the party so robustly committed to national security that diplomatic considerations and openness to foreigners didn’t matter. On Foley, the Democrats, for now, are as zealously against teen sexual exploration as the most uptight member of the Christian right, with an undercurrent of disgust at homosexual sex thrown in.

The temporary turn on the Dubai ports deal didn’t last, as Democrats lapsed into their support for winking at illegal immigration and for diplomatic summits to address all foreign-policy problems, thus turning off any of the nativist-leaning hawks who might have been attracted to their posture on the ports deal. On Foley, their newfound sexual conservatism will be similarly difficult to maintain. Why would anyone who’s repelled by the Foley scandal turn around and vote for the party that is usually proud to represent sexual nonjudgmentalism?

The great divide in our cultural politics continues to be sex. The cultural left considers sex all-important and not important at all. All-important because it is a crucial means of self-expression; not important because the when, where and how don’t matter so much (sex is sex so long as it’s consensual). The cultural right considers sex wonderful and dangerous. Wonderful because it is the ultimate consummation of love; dangerous because if it is not carefully circumscribed, it destroys individuals and cultures.

The reaction of Democrats back in 1983 to the Gerry Studds scandal was more in keeping with its position in this cultural divide. Massachusetts Rep. Studds had had sex with a 17-year-old male page, to which Democrats merely tsk-tsked. Some argued that the relationship was consensual, so no harm, no foul. Studds was re-elected for six more terms and must be glad that he left Congress before it became a firing offense just to send sexually charged instant messages to former pages.

Democrats might benefit politically from the odor of incompetence that attaches to the Republican leadership in how they’ve handled the Foley mess, but on a moral level, there’s been no excuse-making of the sort that Democrats resorted to when President Clinton had his Monica dalliance. No one will believe that Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is going to be more suspicious of what gay congressmen are doing with the male pages — as some Democratic rhetoric implies — than Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Of course, it doesn’t take a puritan to object to a 52-year-old man luring a 16-year-old into cybersex. But this is all the more reason to reconsider the broader sexualization of teens in our culture. Britney Spears was the country’s hottest sexual commodity at age 17, but at 25 is considered over the hill. In the nation’s schools, sex education tends to encourage (“safe”) teen sexual activity, with little thought given to the fact that sexually active teens might well find sexually predatory adults (straight or gay) as their partners rather than other teens. In more than half of teen births, the father is an adult.

It would be a welcome development indeed if the Foley flap prompted a bipartisan turn toward the values of sexual probity. It is sexual irresponsibility, in the form of out-of-wedlock childbearing, that is at the root of many of the country’s social ills. But it’s not to be. Foley will be wrung for partisan advantage and then forgotten, as the culture war rages on.

— Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.

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Christian leaders facing Soros-funded ‘witch hunt’: CREW group instrumental in outing Foley now targeting Dobson, Bauer, Falwell, more (WorldNetDaily, 061006)

A Washington organization funded by billionaire George Soros has filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the U.S. Secret Service demanding information about the visits by Christians to the White House.

The Christians’ response?

“Bring it on!”

That’s from American Family Association founder Donald Wildmon, who told WND that he’s “scared to death. I’m shaking in my boots. I won’t sleep a wink tonight. The world has come to an end!”

Seriously, sir, how do you feel about such a group wanting information about your visits in Washington?

“If you go fishing in a pond, and there’s no fish in the pond, you won’t catch anything,” he told WND.

Wildmon was just one of nine Christian conservative leaders who were named in yesterday’s FOIA demand by Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington.

Others were James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; Gary L. Bauer, president of Our America Values; Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America; Louis P. Sheldon, of Traditional Values Coalition; Sheldon’s daughter Andrea Lafferty; Paul Weyrich, of the Free Congress Foundation; Tony Perkins, of Family Research Council; and Jerry Falwell, of Jerry Falwell Ministries.

CREW said it wanted all records “regardless of format, medium, or physical characteristics” that would relate “to any visit that any and all of the following individuals made to the White House or the residence of the Vice President from January 1, 2001, to the present.”

CREW also wants the taxpayers to pay for the costs of records production.

“CREW is a non-profit corporation … committed to protecting the citizens’ right to be aware of the activities of government officials and to ensuring the integrity of those officials,” the organization announced. “CREW will analyze the information responsive to this request and intends to share its analysis with the public, either through memoranda, reports, or press releases.”

Tom Minnery, a spokesman for Focus on the Family, said his organization wasn’t concerned, either, calling it just another attempt by “left-wing bullies” to intimidate conservatives.

“They’re unhappy when anybody unlike them runs the playground,” he told WND.

Wildmon said it was just a “publicity stunt” heading into the midterm elections in four weeks.

“The whole thing is political,” he said. “You’re going to have some far-left-wing media people making hay out of this. I doubt if anybody else cares.”

CREW had been in the news just a day earlier, with a WND report about Radar Magazine raising suggestions that CREW officials may have been involved in trying to publicize the events about former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley’s illicit electronic relationship with an underage former House page at this time.

The site noted that an almost-inactive website was created about the time CREW said it was asking the FBI for an investigation into the Foley case and then with little other activity it suddenly posted the infamous Foley e-mails.

The Wideawakes site noted that CREW is “one of four George Soros-funded ‘public interest groups’ which endeavors, like the others, to attack and discredit members of the GOP, and along with that agenda, to ensure in what appear to be extreme and underhanded methods, the ‘win’ for Democrats by default when a Republican takes his fall.”

Soros is the liberal billionaire who spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money in 2004 trying to prevent George Bush from being re-elected. Another of his projects is the left-wing www.moveon.org.

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Foley flap highlights Dems’ hypocrisy (townhall.com, 061006)

By Jonah Goldberg

The Democrats prayed for an October surprise, and like manna from heaven, a hypocritical, sexually disturbed Florida Republican dropped into their laps. They looked at the cyber-stalking ephebophile and said, “Behold, this is good.”

Overnight, Nancy Pelosi has emerged as the nation’s soccer grandmom, leading the mob alleging a GOP cover-up of a supposed sex predator and pedophile. (Foley may or may not be a predator, but pedophiles don’t dig post-pubescent teens; ephebophiles do.)

Almost as instantaneously, Democratic candidates denounced their opponents for taking money from Foley, as if acceptance of such funds constituted support for pederasty.

Let me be clear: I carry no water for the House GOP. Less than a month ago, I wrote that it would probably be a good thing if the Republicans lost the House, so I’m hardly inclined to rally to their flag because of their handling of this Foley mess. But let me make a prediction: Despite the moral panic sweeping Washington right now, this will backfire on Democrats, liberals and the gay left.

Self-described progressives are great at whipping up a moral frenzy when it serves their purposes, and hilariously indignant when moral majority types return fire. Remember the national St. Vitus’ dance over sexual harassment in the late 1980s and early 1990s? Liberals made sexual harassment their signature issue, rending their clothes and gnashing their teeth over Sens. John Tower and Bob Packwood and Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, among others. The puritanical zeal of these inquisitions cannot be exaggerated.

Then came Bill Clinton, who was, by any fair measure, a worse womanizer than Thomas or the rest of them. The Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit led, inexorably, to revelations of alleged rape and scandalous behavior with an intern. Forced to choose between power and principle, liberals and feminists held an impromptu fire sale on principles.

Whereas once feminists insisted “women don’t make these things up,” accusations of rape were dismissed instantaneously. Whereas once zero tolerance was the rule (“no means no”), feminist deity Gloria Steinem suddenly advanced a one-free-grope rule for powerful men. Whereas once even the appearance of impropriety was unacceptable, feminists suddenly argued that everyone should lighten up. Former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, elected in 1992 - the “Year of the Woman” - as part of the anti-Thomas backlash, argued that female interns should count themselves lucky in the Clinton White House. After all, she said, “30 years ago, women weren’t even allowed to be White House interns.”

It would be unfair to suggest that liberals have been clamoring for gays to have an unfettered right to hit on teenage boys and are only reversing themselves out of partisan opportunism. Although the fact that liberals hardly objected to Democratic Rep. Gerry Studds’ continued service in the House for 13 years after he admitted to having had actual sex with a teen page - as opposed to the less harmful cyber variety - and after an investigation revealed his advances were not always invited does cast a harsh light on those screeching about Foley being a sexual predator.

But it is fair to say liberals aren’t thinking things through. Democratic strategist Bob Beckel suggested this week that the mere fact Foley is gay should have “raised questions” about his friendships with pages. If Foley were a Democrat and GOP spinners suggested gays are automatically suspect as predators, the now-silent Human Rights Campaign and other gay rights groups would go ballistic.

What liberals don’t understand is that social conservatives actually believe their moral rhetoric, even when it’s politically inconvenient. That’s why GOP Rep. Bob Livingston of Louisiana had to resign when his marital infidelities became public during the Clinton impeachment, much to the chagrin of Democrats who wanted to advance the “everybody does it” defense of Clinton. And that’s why vast numbers of social conservatives now want House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s head on a pike.

Meanwhile, the only moral lapse that consistently offends all liberals is hypocrisy. As Howard Dean declared on “Meet the Press” last year: “Everybody has ethical shortcomings. We ought not to lecture each other about our ethical shortcomings.” But he continued: “I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy.” This is a convenient principle insofar as it can indict only people with actual principles.

Fanning the flames of righteous fervor over Foley will probably reap electoral benefits for Democrats. But the time will come when something like the “Foley standard” will be inconvenient to Democrats. In response, liberals will hold another fire sale. And yet, they will be stunned again when people claim the Democrats don’t stand for anything.

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Liberal Paranoia: A magnifying trick. (National Review Online, 061011)

By Jonah Goldberg

If the Christian base of the GOP gets its way, “All government employees — federal, state and local — would be required to participate in weekly Bible classes in the workplace, as well as compulsory daily prayer sessions.” We would all have to carry religious identity cards that “would provide Christocrats with preferential treatment in many areas of life, including home ownership, student loans, employment and education.” Non-Christians would be indulged as second-class citizens, “but younger members ... would be strongly encouraged to formally convert to the dominant evangelical Christianity.” Homosexual sex would be illegalized, while “known homosexuals and lesbians would have to successfully undergo government-sponsored reeducation sessions if they applied for any public-sector jobs.” Dissidents would be on the run, the popular culture censored by bureaucratic Cotton Mathers, and “the mainstream press and the electronic media would be beaten into submission.”

All of that is according to James Rudin in his book The Baptizing of America. I learned about it from a brilliant essay in the August-September issue of First Things, in which Ross Douthat surveys the scare literature demonizing “Christianists,” “theocons” and “Christocrats” - people who were under the impression that they were actually law-abiding, tax-paying, patriotic American citizens who happen to subscribe to the Christian faith. Little did they know they’re actually all about rounding up infidels and torching the Constitution.

Liberal paranoia isn’t solely Christophobic. “On the Media,” a public radio program that purports to be an objective watchdog of the press, recently interviewed Lawrence Wright, the author of the acclaimed book The Looming Tower, who also wrote the script for the mediocre 1998 movie The Siege, starring Denzel Washington. According to “On the Media,” the film was “prophetic” in that Wright had successfully “predicted” what would happen if America were attacked by terrorists. In the movie, Muslims are rounded up and put in concentration camps in sports stadiums, while martial law is declared in New York City. I guess I forgot to read the newspapers the day that happened.

A recent dispatch in the New York Times reported from a conference at Yale on the 100th anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s birth. Arendt, recall, was the author of the brilliant but flawed “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” which explored the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, and “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” which covered the trial of the bureaucratic mastermind of the Holocaust. At the Yale conference, according to the Times, political scientist Benjamin Barber “dismissed the idea that Islamist fundamentalism was in any way totalitarian but suggested that given the current administration in the United States, an ‘American Eichmann is not altogether impossible.’” For the record, under the Islamic fundamentalism of the Taliban, music was banned. Women were made chattel. Homosexuals were crushed with stones. Children were forbidden to fly kites. But don’t believe you’re lying eyes; take Barber’s word for it that such policies aren’t totalitarian. Oh, and be sure to watch out for the Eichmanns in our midst.

Others at the conference conjured similar phantasms. Writer Jonathan Schell said America hasn’t quite fulfilled Arendt’s checklist for totalitarian systems, but “we are on the edge of that abyss.” And so on. We’ve been on the edge of that abyss for a while now. During those dark years of John Ashcroft’s tenure as attorney general, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.), lamented that the government had become “thought police.” Sen. Russ Feingold, (D., Wis.), said that Americans had become “afraid to read books, terrified into silence” simply because the government was given the same power to investigate suspected terrorists that it long had to scrutinize drug dealers and mob kingpins.

One is tempted to invoke Orwell’s dictum that some things are so stupid, only an intellectual could believe them. But, the truth is, lots of otherwise normal people believe this stuff.

Yet Orwell’s point is still relevant. Intellectuals look at the world through literary prisms of theory. They come up with a vision of the world — one that usually magnifies their importance — and then select facts accordingly. Arendt herself was so convinced a Goldwater presidency would usher in an age of storm troopers, she looked for an apartment in Switzerland after he was nominated.

The waves of paranoia currently sweeping through America could be seen as the democratization of intellectual dementia. Criticisms of President Bush, Christians, the right wing, the Patriot Act, whatever: These are all fine. But presumably, such large claims against America should come with ample evidence to back them up. Instead, we get the opposite. The smaller the example, the greater its significance. And that trick is the intellectual class’s gift to America.

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Liberal media allergic to American values (townhall.com, 061011)

By Michelle Malkin

CNN founder Ted Turner opened his mouth this week at the National Press Club, and promptly demonstrated why America needs Fox News Channel now more than ever.

Three years after the invasion of Iraq, Turner is still pouting about public displays of patriotism on American airwaves: “I mean, I just really wonder during the, during the last war, you know, what business did it have in the news sets to have the American flag flying in the background. Uh, I mean, it was like the news media covered the Iraq war, at least at the beginning of it, almost as like it was a football game with us versus them.”

Funny, I can’t recall Turner getting his undergarments in a bunch when CNN chose Saddam Hussein’s side and former CNN executive Eason Jordan admitted the global news network had withheld reporting on Baathist atrocities in exchange for inside access and protection of its Baghdad staff. Recall Jordan’s confession published in The New York Times after America toppled Saddam’s regime in April 2003:

“I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.”

It’s fine and dandy for CNN to wave Saddam’s flag and carry his blood-stained water. But when Fox News sticks a two-postage-stamp-sized American flag on its screen? Only then will Ted Turner declare that journalism and reportorial objectivity have gone to hell.

But Turner’s disdain for putting American citizenship above “citizen-of-the-world” preening isn’t peculiar. It’s the prevailing attitude in our newsrooms. Remember after the September 11 attacks when Stacey Woelfel, news director at KOMU-TV in Columbia, Mo., directed his staff to “leave the ribbons at home” in order to show viewers “that in no way are we influenced by the government in informing the public”? Or how about when ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider told The Washington Post: “Especially in a time of national crisis, the most patriotic thing journalists can do is to remain as objective as possible. . . . [W]e cannot signal how we feel about a cause, even a justified and just cause, through some sort of outward symbol.”

Elite news editors shrug at their reporters’ highly politicized activities — from AIDS fund-raisers to pro-abortion rallies, environmental propaganda and unhinged Bush-bashing (new case in point: New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse’s recent moonbatty screed at Harvard University assailing everything from Gitmo to the Mexican-U.S. border fence). But wear a flag pin? Heresy!

When The New York Times blabs classified information about terrorism investigations and is reported to have tipped off FBI investigations of terror charity front groups, ethics mavens yawn. But when Fox News anchor Chris Wallace dares to broach President Clinton’s war on terror failures, the mainstream media caterwauling crescendos. When Wallace is derided as a “monkey” for doing his job and Fox News head Roger Ailes’ weight is mocked, the civility police in our journalism schools shut their eyes and ears.

When insipid New York Times columnists recycle mediocre columns into their umpteenth books, they score multiple book reviews and fawning magazine covers. When the No. 1 cable talk show host tops the best-seller list (again), crickets chirp. Bill O’Reilly’s latest book, “Culture Warrior,” is as much O’Reilly’s story of success as it is Fox News Channel’s. O’Reilly’s fight against America-snubbing “secular progressives” is also Roger Ailes’. When The New York Times disparaged O’Reilly’s war on the war on Christmas as a manufactured hoax, it was disparaging Fox News Channel’s decision to listen to its audience — and respond.

The liberal media’s 10-year allergic reaction to Fox News is triggered by any remotely positive exposure to American values on American airwaves. Well, here’s to the next 10 years of giving establishment journalism the hives. Keep Old Glory flying high. It’s driving Ted Turner mad.

==============================

‘American Mourning’ authors prepare to defend book: Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan issues threat to sue over claims in publication (WorldNetDaily, 061025)

[KH: how liberals resort to lies and defamation, and got what they deserved]

“American Mourning” co-author Melanie Morgan says she is prepared to defend the book against allegations of slander or libel, but she hopes it won’t go to that because she wants to spare the family of fallen hero Casey Sheehan any further pain.

It was his mother, anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, who told a nationally syndicated radio show by Stephanie Miller that she was preparing for possible litigation over allegations in the book that she became addicted to “online chat rooms of a pornographic nature” after her son died in Iraq.

“I am totally confident in my level of documentation,” Morgan told WND today. “It’s locked in a bank vault, and we are prepared to use it should Ms. Sheehan proceed to litigation.

“We hope that doesn’t happen for the sake of her family, the Sheehan family,” she said, because the documentation is “very graphic in nature.

“We had hoped to spare the family any further uncomfortableness and embarrassment,” she said.

The book, published by WND Books and released just a little over a week ago, already is climbing the ranks of Amazon.com and other book lists. It is the story of two families – the Johnsons and Sheehans – that lost sons in the war against terror. Their sons – Casey Sheehan and Justin Johnson – were best friends since they met at Fort Hood in Texas. They went to Iraq and died in the same area just six days apart.

But the book explains how little else the families have in common: with the Johnson family bonding closer than ever and Justin’s father, in fact, volunteering to replace his son in the war on terror and going to fight in Iraq.

The book explains how the Sheehan family, however, experienced difficulties and disintegration as Cindy Sheehan chose to turn her anger over the loss of her son against her own country and president.

Morgan told WND that she and co-author Catherine Moy both have been in contact with “a very high-powered attorney in L.A. who is an expert on slander and libel law.”

“We are prepared to hire him immediately should the need become apparent. That will depend on what Ms. Sheehan decides to do.”

She said she found out about the threat when CNN censored an interview with her about the book. A call placed by WND to CNN to comment on the situation wasn’t returned immediately, but the issue arose as Morgan was preparing for an interview on “American Mourning.”

Morgan said she was en route to CNN headquarters in New York when she got a call from the producer of the “Glenn Beck” show, outlining what the short interview was scheduled to cover.

The producer specifically mentioned the online chat room issue, Morgan said. But a few minutes later, she got another call from the same producer explaining that the interview would deal with all other aspects of the book, but not that.

Morgan said she asked why, and was told because it “involved legal issues.”

“Then we discovered Cindy Sheehan had appeared on the Miller show, saying she was going to sue,” Morgan said.

Sheehan had used the radio interview to call the authors “hate-mongers” and accuse them of “using our tragedy for profit.”

She dismissed the information in the book as hearsay.

“We wrote the book not to make life uncomfortable for Cindy Sheehan, far from it,” Morgan said. “We wrote it as a tribute to her son Casey, an honorable and dutiful soldier, a man who was tremendously inspiring in what he did.

“He volunteered not once but twice, and actually went into Sadr City to rescue fellow soldiers,” she said. “He was told he did not have to go. His story is an amazing story, as is Justin Johnson’s.”

“We felt and do feel we did a good job of trying to show how these men became such heroes to the American public. But we felt that it would be dishonest not to include contextual information about Cindy, her story, what she had been telling in the media, which was inaccurate in many respects,” Morgan told WND.

The book, according to Ann Coulter, is “a beautiful, raw war story that breaks the hearts and strengthens the resolve to protect America from her enemies.” David Limbaugh calls it “arguably the most poignant portrayal of love, loss, and grief that polarizes our nation today,” adding, “It moved and astounded me.” Sean Hannity says simply, “The truth in this book will set you free.”

Moy is an award-winning journalist and columnist for the Vacaville Reporter, Cindy Sheehan’s former hometown newspaper. Morgan, a weekly columnist for WND, is a talk radio show host in San Francisco and chairman of Move America Forward.

Kristen Schremp, a publicist for Morgan and Moy, has confirmed there are hundreds of telephone records, e-mails and other documents supporting the statements made in the book.

Fans of Sheehan have been responding to the book with vitriol, calling one of the authors “fat” and a “whore.” And those have been the calmer reactions.

The political website Crooks and Liars attacked Morgan as a “a fringe talk-show host” who was leader of “the low-class MAF organization.” However, despite the criticism, Morgan’s talk-radio show is one of the highest-rated drive time programs in the San Francisco media market – one of the largest markets in the nation.

The attack on Morgan’s leadership of the pro-troop organization, Move America Forward, seems designed to diminish her credentials as a prominent supporter of the men and women of the United States military. Move America Forward is the nation’s largest grass-roots pro-troop organization and has shipped over 16 tons of coffee, cookies, beef jerky and Gatorade to U.S. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The attacks quickly deteriorated into vulgarity and insult-laden jeers.

* “Michelle Malkin, Mary Matalin, Melanie Morgan... These right-wing b———s all have the same initials of MM.”

* “if i call those 2 women whores, then that’s MY responsibility.”

* “Bibi — but then that would be an insult to whores.”

* “That one on the left really needs to work on her eating disorder before she starts pointing that sausage finger.”

Finally, the comments became so over the top that the website owner intervened and instructed participants to ease up on their attacks. The site owner deleted dozens of the most offensive and vulgar posts, but dozens of new attacks were posted and not removed by the website’s administrator:

The anger by the participants seems to have confused them on some of the essential points of their protests. One individual criticized Morgan’s employment at a Republican political consulting firm, however Morgan has never worked for any such firm. Another participant identified co-author Moy as being an employee of KSFO radio along with Morgan. However, Moy has never had any connection with the radio station – she works at the Vacaville Reporter.

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Theo-Panic! Emotional, self-righteous, and close-minded politics. (National Review Online, 061017)

By Rich Lowry

In the 1650s, Oliver Cromwell governed England with a cadre of major generals, establishing a kind of low-church Protestant theocracy. Catholic priests were chased from the country, and Anglican clergy were suppressed. Censorship and blue laws were tightened.

What does Cromwell’s rule have to do with contemporary American political life? If your answer is anything other than “nothing,” you are probably in the grip of the “theo-panic” that is sweeping precincts of the American commentariat. They warn that America is beset by raging theocrats seeking to overturn our liberal democracy.

Otherwise respectable historians, Kevin Phillips and Garry Wills, have made this charge. It is a staple of the New York Times op-ed page. It has launched a slew of books with dire warnings: by Michelle Goldberg (“high tide for theocratic fever”), by James Rubin (“an effort to change America into a Christian theocracy”) and by Damon Linker (“the end of secular politics”).

The theocracy charge relies mainly on blowing Christian conservative positions out of proportion. Do Christian conservatives oppose the public funding of embryo-destructive stem-cell research? Well, then, Calvin’s Geneva can’t be far behind. Never mind that in opposing such funding, they are usually supporting the status quo. It’s a little like saying that because Democrats oppose cuts in Medicaid, they favor a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Purveyors of the theo-panic love to exaggerate the influence of the bizarre Christian Reconstructionists who actually want an American theocracy. As New York Times religion writer Peter Steinfels notes in a review of the spate of new books, Christian Reconstructionists play “a greater role in the writings of the religious right’s critics than they ever have in the wider evangelical world.” He notes that the flagship evangelical journal, Christianity Today, almost never shows up in these books, because, inconveniently, it is “moderate, reflective and self-questioning.”

National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru has pointed out that you can take all Christian conservative positions — including far-fetched ones like banning sodomy and contraception — and if they happened overnight they “would merely turn the clock back to the late 1950s. That may be a very bad idea, but the America of the 1950s was not a theocracy.”

Writing in First Things, Ross Douthat explains a problem with the theo-panic, which is that the influence of institutional religion is at a low ebb: “No prelate wields the kind of authority that Catholic bishops once enjoyed over urban voters, no denomination can claim the kind of influence that once belonged to the old WASP mainline, and the evangelical Protestantism that figures so prominently in anti-theocracy tracts is distinguished precisely by its lack of any centralized ecclesiastical government.”

The truth about Christian conservatives is that they support public-policy goals infused with a certain view of morality. This isn’t unusual. The greatest reform movement of the 20th century — the civil-rights movement — was explicitly Christian. Today, the opposition to torture is based on a moral view that trumps all practical considerations (the inviolable dignity of the human person). A moral sense is often behind the liberal opposition to the Iraq War and to the death penalty. No one in American politics says, “I believe this is immoral and therefore should become the policy of the United States.”

Some of the anti-theocracy writers claim that what sets Christian conservatives apart is that their advocacy is explicitly religious. But most of the time it isn’t. Take the high-profile issue of abortion. It doesn’t take any particular religious faith to think that embryos in the womb are humans deserving protection — the key claim of abortion opponents. But their critics don’t want to hear it.

For such self-professed advocates of reasoned discourse, they show an appalling tendency to want to shut down the other side with their swear word of “theocracy.” They are emotional, self-righteous and close-minded. They are, in short, everything they accuse Christian conservatives of being. When the theo-panic passes, maybe a few of them will regret their hysteria.

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Why Hollywood Is Insane: Eye-opening guided tour through America’s toxic entertainment industry (WorldNetDaily, 061027)

The spectacle of Michael J. Fox, writhing with Parkinson’s Disease, campaigning for Democrat politicians pushing taxpayer-funded embryonic stem-cell research is just the latest example of a stunning trend: With rare exceptions, Hollywood celebrities always seem to champion outrageous or immoral positions on crucial national issues, and to aggressively use their social power and prestige to advance such agendas.

Now, in one of its most anticipated investigations ever, WND’s monthly Whistleblower magazine is ripping the mask off America’s entertainment industry in a sensational and eye-opening November edition titled “WHY HOLLYWOOD IS INSANE.”

It’s often been said that if Washington, D.C., is America’s seat of power, Hollywood is its seat of influence. Indeed, the southern California venue is the epicenter of an ultra-powerful values-broadcasting machine that fascinates, influences – and in many ways, shapes – Americans’ lives, values and direction.

And yet, Hollywood’s “beautiful people” – the celebrities as well as the movers and shakers behind the scenes – share (with few exceptions) a worldview both alien and poisonous to traditional America.

“Did you know that nine out of 10 Hollywood films lose money?” asks Emmy-Award-winning producer-director-cameraman Jody Eldred in this issue of Whistleblower. “Did you know that the vast majority of new television shows are cancelled because no one is watching them? Do you wonder why?”

The obvious answer, says Eldred, is “because they’re mostly awful.” But why are they awful? “Because,” notes Eldred, “the people creating them are completely out of touch with the people they are creating them for! Their worldview is vastly different from the worldview of most Americans. We have a largely Christian nation, but Hollywood is largely un-Christian, and in many if not most cases, anti-Christian. They’re not just out of touch. They’re against you!”

Highlights of ‘WHY HOLLYWOOD IS INSANE” include:

* “My Hollywood days” by Joseph Farah

* “What Hollywood celebrities really believe,” a fascinating and comprehensive look at what America’s top actors and actresses believe about good and evil, God and religion, heaven and hell.

* “Hollywood: The dark side of the moon,” in which veteran comedy script writer (“MASH,” “Mary Tyler Moore,” “Diagnosis Murder”) Bert Prelutsky reveals exactly why Tinseltown is so liberal.

* “Living and working in a spiritual ghetto,” in which Emmy-winning media insider Jody Eldred describes Hollywood’s war on Christianity

* “Movie gets ‘PG’ warning due to Christian content” – what happens when Hollywood film raters decide too much Christianity may be harmful to children’s health

* “How the church abandoned Hollywood,” by Joseph Farah. Believe it or not, Hollywood didn’t abandon the churches; the churches abandoned Hollywood!

* “Brokeback Mountain: Rape of the Marlboro Man” by David Kupelian. An amazing tour through the mind of a propagandist intent on selling America same-sex marriage through film

* “Moral movies make more money,” in which a 10-year study proves the obvious, that family-friendly films are far more profitable than R-rated, sex-and-profanity-ridden fare

* “Judge’s decision kills family-friendly flicks,” on how the court system now says it’s illegal for third parties to delete F-words and other objectionable content from films

* “On-screen pedophilia destroying our young” by MovieGuide founder Dr. Ted Baehr, who shows why Hollywood allows a 12-year-old actress to be ‘raped’ on camera

* “Sneaking pedophilia into the movies,” in which David Kupelian demonstrates specific techniques being used to interject child molestation into America’s movies

* “The secret curse of Hollywood ‘stars’” by David Kupelian, a revealing look inside the minds and lives of celebrities, showing why so many have conflict-ridden lives and dysfunctional families

* And much more.

“This issue of Whistleblower is real dynamite,” said WND Managing Editor David Kupelian. “If you’ve ever wondered why Hollywood and the entertainment is the way it is, you’ll find out when you read ‘WHY HOLLYWOOD IS INSANE.’”

Yet despite all the insanity in America’s entertainment industry, there is a silver lining, notes WND Editor Joseph Farah. “There are some definite positive trends – including the fact that there are fewer R-rated films being made, since the industry is acknowledging they simply make less money in comparison with G-rated and PG-rated movies.”

This issue of Whistleblower reports on the positive, hopeful trends, including some bold new initiatives to give Americans more worthy and uplifting entertainment choices.

“Are you ready for the good news, the bad news and the ugly news about Hollywood?” asks Farah. “You’re going to get it right here.

“Lights. Camera. Action.”

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Nobody runs against Hollywood (Townhall.com, 061103)

By Brent Bozell III

Looking back at the fall campaign, it’s yet another cycle in which the Republican political brain trust sidestepped the issue of America’s growing concern for indecency oozing out of almost every perfumed pore of Hollywood. This time, it may have been the fatal mistake.

The number one issue of importance coming out of the ‘04 elections was “moral values,” thus presenting the GOP with the opportunity to pounce on the indecency issue during the ‘06 campaign. I visited with one Republican incumbent running for re-election and suggested that this would be an ideal theme for his campaign. He responded that in all his years in the Senate, he’d never received as much constituency mail as what landed in his mailbox, his email and his voicemail following the Janet Jackson Super Bowl striptease. But he also left me with the clear impression, validated later by his campaign performance, that he’d do nothing on this front.

Republican strategists pull muscles just thinking about Dan Quayle scorning the “Murphy Brown” single-mom plot in 1992.

Here and there were exceptions. In TV ads in Pennsylvania, family-values stalwart Sen. Rick Santorum told voters, “I’m even working with Hillary Clinton to limit inappropriate material in children’s video games, because it makes more sense to wrestle with America’s problems than with each other.” I’m sure a few other candidates had throwaway lines in their stump speeches. But there was nothing of substance, nothing serious coming out of this crowd.

And it was a lost opportunity in another way. The biggest rap against the GOP from its conservative base has been its do-nothing approach to governance, yet on the issue of decency the Republicans could point to a smashing legislative accomplishment. Still, no one could seem to locate the fact that on June 15, President Bush signed the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which increased tenfold the potential of FCC fines to those who continue to violate the public trust by pouring garbage on the public airwaves. The House version of the bill passed in June by a 379-35 margin, and the Senate passed it by unanimous consent — no roll call vote. It was a smashing success, exactly in line with the sentiments of the vast majority of Americans.

So why the campaign silence? Maybe it’s because, as with so many other “values” issues, the Republican leadership was never enthusiastic. It’s important to note that it took the Republicans in the Senate two and a half years after the Janet Jackson breast-baring to pass their version of the bill — and they did so only after massive constituency pressure.

And there’s the rub. The problem is that lawmakers in Washington, D.C., face two constituencies with wildly differing levels of enthusiasm.

On the outside are the American people. Across the ideological spectrum, they are fed up with Hollywood’s assault on their values, using the public airwaves they own. On the inside are the lobbyists for the entertainment industry giants, plying members of Congress with satchels of campaign cash and demanding only ... inaction. Which has a greater effect in politics today?

Take the idea of cable choice, which would allow viewers to choose their cable channels a la carte and, more importantly, not have to pay for networks they don’t watch or, more emphatically, find personally offensive. It’s a slam-duck idea, one conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats alike, could endorse.

In June, Sen. John McCain offered an amendment to a Senate telecommunications bill that would have offered regulatory incentives to cable operators to offer cable choice to their subscribers. But it was defeated in committee by a vote of 20 to 2. Conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats alike — they all fled. Only Sen. Olympia Snowe joined McCain in support.

One big reason? Common Cause reports that between 1991 and 2006, major cable industry interests and their trade groups spent more than $105 million on campaign contributions to federal candidates and on lobbying in Washington. Since 2003, major cable companies have ramped up “government affairs” spending and donating to keep Congress and regulatory agencies from asking tough questions about cable mergers and cable price increases, and to suffocate cable choice in the crib.

Will a strengthened Democratic presence in Washington prove to be any different in the indecency debate? In the Senate particularly, there are members of that party — Joe Lieberman, Jay Rockefeller, Byron Dorgan, Mark Pryor, Blanche Lambert Lincoln and Clinton come to mind — with proven records. A move in this direction could bring waves of conservative Democrats, once disaffected with their party, and now disdainful of their adopted GOP, back into the fold.

But would these Democratic leaders be willing to buck the lobbyists as well as their Hollywood benefactors? What of the Republicans? Will time in the wilderness allow them to rediscover their roots? It’s a wide-open question, with a wide-open field, and a continuing political opportunity. Time will tell who grabs it.

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14 Carter Center Advisers Resign Over Former President Jimmy Carter’s Book (Foxnews, 070111)

WASHINGTON — Fourteen members of a leadership group under former President Carter’s think tank resigned Thursday over concerns that Carter’s book on the Middle East does not represent “the Jimmy Carter we came to respect and support.”

The members of the 200-member Board of Councilors, a leadership advisory group founded in 1987, join a longtime Carter aide, Jewish groups and lawmakers who have publicly criticized the former president’s best-selling book “Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid” for inaccuracies and distorting history.

“It comes to the result of deep soul searching and a tremendous amount of angst,” said Steve Berman, a member who was appointed six months ago.

Berman, an Atlanta commercial real estate developer, said he was led to resign after becoming deeply troubled after reviewing Carter’s book, shocked by factual errors and a message that doesn’t serve the cause of peace.

“We’re trying to send a message that the issue of the Middle East is very complicated and complex,” Berman said. “There are two narratives that need to be heard.”

Berman refers to two narratives between the Israelis and Palestinians in contesting one piece of land. “Palestinian leaders have had chances since 1947 to have their own state, including during your own presidency when they snubbed your efforts,” the letter reads.

The members submitted a joint resignation letter, saying the book confuses opinion with fact.

“We can no longer endorse your strident and uncompromising position. This is not the Carter Center or the Jimmy Carter we came to respect and support. Therefore it is with sadness and regret that we hereby tender our resignation from the Board of Councilors of the Carter Center effective immediately,” the letter said.

Liane Levetan, a former Georgia state senator who served on the board for about 10 years, said Carter’s book “really hurt me.”

“To me, it’s a situation of telling the facts that are the facts. This is not a piece of fiction,” Levetan said. “There are some things in life that you just cannot overlook. The truth is something that has got to be told. And certain portions of this book do not tell the truth.”

Levetan said despite her respect for the Carter Center, she could not remain quiet over concerns of the book.

“When you are convinced that there’s something that’s wrong or not truthful, you can’t sit by on the sidelines and let things get by,” Levetan said.

The list of members resigning includes Alan Abrams, Berman, Michael Coles, Jon Golden, Doug Hertz, Barbara Babbit Kaufman, Levetan, Jeff Levy, Leon Novak, Ambassador William B. Schwartz Jr., William B. Schwartz III, Steve Selig, Cathey Steinberg and Gail Solomon. Another member plans to resign privately, Berman said.

The members say the book “portrays the conflict between Israel and her neighbors as a purely one-sided affair with Israel holding all the responsibility for resolving the conflict.”

“In light of the publication of your latest book ‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid’ and your subsequent comments made in promoting the book, we can no longer in good conscience continue to serve the Center as members of the Board of Councilors,” the letter reads.

Carter stands by his book and defends it against what he called “lies” and “distortions” against his book in an op-ed published in the LA Times last month.

Carter Center Executive Director John Hardman said the members of the group aren’t a governing board or associated with implementing work of the center.

“We are grateful to these Board of Councilors members for their years of service and support for The Carter Center in advancing peace and health around the world,” Hardman said in a statement.

The resignations come after Kenneth Stein, director of the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel of Emory University, resigned in December, saying the book distorts history to shape the reader’s opinion to one side of the issue.

“I just want to be sure that when people write history, people don’t do it for purpose of special pleading,” he said. “They write it the way it was. They don’t try to shape a person’s opinion and slide them down a path in order to come to an inevitable conclusion.”

Stein said the book contained “factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions and simply invented segments.”

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international Jewish human rights group based in Los Angeles, received more than 23,000 signatures for an online petition urging action against “Carter’s one-sided bias against Israel.”

Hier said he agrees with the 14 members decision to cut ties to the Carter Center because the book offers a distorted view of the Middle East.

“I think they did the right thing,” Hier said. “I think that the book was unworthy of a former president of the United States.”

The latest resignation also follows other questions to surface over the book.

Last month, Ambassador Dennis Ross, a former Mideast envoy and FOX News foreign affairs analyst, claims maps commissioned and published by him were improperly republished in Carter’s book.

“I think there should be a correction and an attribution,” Ross said. “These were maps that never existed, I created them.”

After Ross saw the maps in Carter’s book, he told his publisher he wanted a correction.

When asked if the former president ripped him off, Ross replied, “It sure looks that way.”

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The Liberalitarian Dust-Up: The Angry Left rebukes a would-be friend. (National Review Online, 070104)

By Peter Wood

Politics is about passions as well as ideas and the passion that has dominated American politics for at least a decade is anger. Conservatives got worked up over Clinton; Democrats got worked up over Clinton’s impeachment; and Gore’s slow motion concession in the 2000 election set the stage for the Left’s six long years of gathering rage. Early in 2006, a furious debate broke out between Republicans and Democrats, each accusing the other of harboring excesses of anger.

I devote a chapter of my new book (A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now) to tracing how American politics got infected with a distinctly contemporary style of anger that I call New Anger. This is the anger of show-offs and eager-to-ignite match-heads. It had been gaining ground in American culture for decades before arriving in mainstream politics. When it did arrive in politics, New Anger found homes on both the Left (e.g. Howard Dean) and Right (e.g. Ann Coulter), but the Left provided much more commodious quarters.

When I discuss the Left’s embrace of New Anger with people across the political spectrum, two not very satisfactory explanations keep coming up. One is that the party that is out of power has more to gripe about. Yes, but that doesn’t explain why the Left gravitated to a form of anger that exacerbated its unpopularity. Nor, why the Right, in similar circumstances kept its New Anger aficionados on the margins.

The other explanation that comes up, almost always from people on the Left, is that the extreme anger has an extreme cause. It is President Bush’s fault, because he has provoked beyond measure everyone outside his own Right-wing extremist base. According to this view, those on the Left who have resorted to flamboyant expressions of anger have done so because they are dealing with a historically unprecedented destruction by President Bush of the governing norms of American political discourse.

I think this explanation is even more dubious, requiring as it does a broad caricature of how President Bush has governed. In my book, I argue that the Left’s embrace of New Anger arises from something deeper: a generations-long shift in American culture and family life that connects much more profoundly with the Left’s worldview than with the conservative outlook.

Can I prove this? As an anthropologist attempting to make sense of subtle cultural shifts, I often have to settle for plausibility, not proof. But every once in a while something very much like a proof just falls, like an apple on Isaac Newton’s head. Case in point: New Republic Jonathan Chait’s response to a proposal from Brink Lindsey, vice president for research at the Cato Institute.

Let me start with a disclaimer. I don’t know Jonathan Chait. He may be a charming fellow, a good sport, and an excellent dinner companion. I have no bones to pick with him. In what follows, my concern is with the public role that Jonathan Chait has decided to play.

Lindsey to Dems: Come Hither

Libertarians have been fretting for several years over the rise of big-government conservatism and the increasingly prominent role played by social conservatives in the Republican party. In early December, armed with a new study that purports to show that as much as 13% of the national vote is swayed by libertarian convictions, Lindsey proposed in the pages of The New Republic (“Liberaltarianism”) that liberals turn to libertarians to form a new electoral alliance. Lindsey’s article caught the eye of Jonah Goldberg and others on “The Corner,” who looked at it skeptically but treated Lindsey himself with respect. But if anyone thought that mainstream American liberalism might welcome Lindsey’s overture, we learned otherwise a few weeks later, when TNR editor Chait replied. Chait treated Lindsey’s idea with withering disdain (“Kiss Me, Cato,” December 25; teased online as “TNR to Libertartians: Drop Dead!”).

In Chait’s view, libertarians vastly overrate their own numbers and their electoral importance; and Chait characterizes Lindsey’s proposed alliance as a fool’s bargain in which liberals would have to “agree simply to eviscerate” popular social programs including Social Security and Medicare. Chait concludes his riposte by invoking the scene in The Godfather, Part II, in which Michael Corleone responds to a corrupt politician who, after hurling a vicious insult, is asking for a bribe: “You can have my answer now if you like. My offer is this: nothing.”

Chait’s reply is notable not so much for his arguments as for his emotional style. Indeed, his tone of gloating nastiness and contumely so outshines the substance of his essay as to be its real point. Diplomatically telling Lindsey “thanks, but no thanks” would have sufficed if Chait had simply wanted to turn the proposal aside. Evidently, Chait wanted something more.

Theater of Rage

Chait’s response I think is best understood as a kind of political theater — a special kind of theater in which the performer enacts rage and attempts symbolically to annihilate his opponent. The performer in this drama looks for the applause of an audience that savors rhetorical grand guignol. Angry Left blogs such as the Daily Kos and Eschaton churn this stuff out by the yard, but mainstream print journalism has mostly steered clear of the style. Chait is one of a handful of mainstream opinion journalists (Paul Krugman is another) to dive in.

I come to this event with no special interest in the question, “Wither the libertarians?” Rather, I think Chait’s response to Lindsey is important for what it demonstrates about the temperament of the contemporary Left. It is the proof that the American Left’s anger is ultimately not about Bush.

In A Bee in the Mouth, I argue that Chait is a pivotal figure, a smart, well-informed political observer who is also the man who brought the Left’s visceral anger against Bush out into the open and made mere declaration of anger a respectable medium for mainstream liberals. Chait’s response to Lindsey offers me an opportunity to update my argument. Chait now shows definitely that his angry rhetoric cannot be explained as a one-time response to what he sees as the exceptional wickedness of President Bush. Rather, Chait’s anger in this case is directed at a would-be ally, which is just plain strange. Dismissing an unwanted valentine doesn’t usually require heavy armament.

Chait’s dust-up with Lindsey also contrasts with the tone of other commentators on Lindsey’s proposal, including Goldberg, but also Ramesh Ponnuru, Jonathan Adler, and Fred Smith, all of whom make their points within the bounds of conventional civility. Smith’s comment captures the general tone of this colloquy:

Our goal [is] to reach out to our liberal friends, seeking to restore their former faith in decentralization of power as a preferable way of helping the little guy.

Conservatives might well have risen in anger at Lindsey, whose TNR essay says some pretty stinging things about his erstwhile allies. But if conservatives are mad at Lindsey, they haven’t said so. Libertarians might also be angry with Lindsey, who was after all shilling their votes. But libertarians too seem to have taken the matter calmly. Lindsey’s own response to Chait’s article (“You Really Need Us”) is a model of decorum. So why did Chait adopt the persona of a gravely insulted Michael Corleone? Let’s go back.

Breaking a Taboo

In September 2003, Chait notoriously opened an essay (“Mad about You,” The New Republic):

I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I am tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too. I hate the inequitable way he has come to his economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility […]

“Mad About You” broke a long-standing taboo in serious political journalism. Before the article few would have thought that “I hate President George W. Bush,” was a respectable argument — or any argument at all. But Chait’s declaration somehow changed the chemistry of liberal political rhetoric. In the months that followed the article, declaring that one detested President Bush moved from the fringes to become a mainstream way for many liberals to articulate their political passion.

Anger at political adversaries, of course, is nothing new. Reflecting on the intensification of political anger in the last few years, some commentators have pointed to the extraordinary acrimony between partisans of Jefferson and Adams in the 1800 election as proof that the nation has seen worse. But that comparison misses something. Go back and read the vitriolic diatribes of 1800 and you will find numerous attacks on Jefferson as a would-be tyrant and a man of low morals; and numerous attacks on Adams as a scoundrel who would sell the nation back to the British. But you will nothing remotely like, “I hate Thomas Jefferson,” or “I hate John Adams.”

Why not? Americans in 1800 certainly knew what political anger was but they faced powerful restraints. George Washington, who was completing his second term, was a living reproof to those who couldn’t control their anger. He was known to be a man of quick temper who, by dint of hard effort, smothered it. That was the ideal. Children were taught from a young age that they had to master their anger, and that to fail at this was to own a morally serious flaw. Politics, being inherently oppositional, is bound to test such a principle. The newspapers and pamphlets of 1800 are full of Jeremiads, hard-hitting satire, and libelous personal attacks, and the writers give the impression (usually behind the mask of a pseudonym) of enjoying the rollicking pleasure of their verbal extravagance.

But there it stops. As far as I can tell, the partisan writings of 1800 never venture into the logic of, “Listen to me because I am really, really angry,” or, “The extremity of my anger proves the righteousness of my cause,” or, “Behold my disdain! It is a thing of wonder.” Those are some of the ways to tell the difference between the traditional forms of political anger and New Anger in its political manifestations. New Anger is about flaunting one’s anger as a kind of credential. It is a way of asserting one’s authenticity and, according to its own cultural logic, moving from authenticity to authority. Its essential message is, “I am to be believed and reckoned with because I am angry.”

Chait, as I said, is a key figure in bringing New Anger into mainstream Democratic politics, but New Anger itself had been churning through American culture for several decades. Think of Jimi Hendrix de-constructing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on his Stratocaster guitar, or John McEnroe on the tennis court reviling his own fans. The shift from a culture that prized self-control to a culture that prizes self-expression has unfolded over at least two generations. New Anger débuted as a political stance at the Yippie-inspired protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The riots, the spectacle of the Chicago Seven’s contempt for American culture at their trial, and the movement’s subsequent turn to terrorism, drained away the sense that this sort of anger had a welcome place in serious politics. New Anger, however, didn’t entirely dissipate. Rather, it settled into other domains of life. New Anger went on to flourish in music, sports, movies, and family life before it, once again, reached out to politics. All those people seeking to “empower” themselves in their private lives through angry expression, however, were destined sooner or later to think that narcissistic anger could work in public life as well.

Freedom to Hate

Chait’s “I hate President George W. Bush” essay turned out to be the signal that New Anger was waiting for. “There I said it,” wrote Chait, implying, Yes, I’ve long felt this but I was constrained not to put it into so many words. Now I’m free. Readers understood: henceforth they too would be free to present a firm declaration of anger as though it were the functional equivalent of intellectual analysis, evidence, and argument wrapped up into one.

My account of how New Anger came bubbling up in Chait’s 2003 article like the Texas crude in Jeb Clampit’s swamp, probably does not correspond with Chait’s own view of the matter. In February 2006, when Ken Mehlman had characterized Hillary Clinton as having “a lot of anger,” Chait offered a rebuttal on Hugh Hewitt’s radio interview program. Hillary, he said, “is just the opposite of angry. I think she’s robotic, passionless, dull.” It’s a revealing statement. Some might think the “opposite of angry” would be warm, friendly, and engaging. But New Anger casts anger as an altogether enlivening force, so that the “opposite” of anger becomes lifelessness: robotic, passionless, and dull. Fortunately for George Washington, when we had a new republic, we didn’t have Chait’s version of The New Republic. What Washington’s contemporaries commended as his dignified self-control, would by these lights, be a woeful lack of zesty anger.

In that interview, Chait went on to say that, “The whole notion of anger [in politics] is just weird and misplaced.” Hewitt, noticing that Chait seemed to be disavowing the notion and applying it at the same time, pressed him, and Chait added that he didn’t let his feelings get in the way of his being “cool and rational in analyzing what Bush does.” He distinguished his own emotion from the “rage” he saw among Republicans. Hewitt then read back to him the opening of “I hate President George W. Bush,” and succeeded in getting only Chait’s tepid admission that his language “might” have sounded like anger.

Libertarian Sarcasm

Which brings me back to Brink Lindsey and the possibility of a libertarian-liberal “fusion.” Libertarians come to the table with emotions too. Resentment over the “big government” turn in the Republican party and dismay over the increasing influence of “values conservatives” are apparent. Libertarians by and large see themselves as highly rational and committed to a principled calculation of where they should stand on a given issue. But as anyone who has ever touched a libertarian nerve can testify, libertarians also tend to be argumentative, sarcastic, and rude. Perhaps that is the influence of Ayn Rand, or maybe it comes from the conviction that libertarians see the pure light of rationality but are doomed to be ruled by their purblind inferiors. Here, for example, is an anonymous libertarian responding on a message board to a comment by Jonah Goldberg:

Yeah, I’m going to take advice from Jonah Goldberg about how the conservatives are more friendly to liberty.

“Don’t go looking for someone who doesn’t beat you honey. Nobody else loves you like I do. Especially not that suave Democrat. He’ll just beat you worse. Trust me. I can change, we just need counseling.”

Just say no to Battered Voter Syndrome.

More than a few libertarians indulge in New Anger-ish vituperation against their foes on issues such as illegal immigration and gay marriage. And the general tone of libertarians towards the undecided provides numerous lessons in how not to win friends and influence people.

So, having been rather hard on Chait for his heated response to Lindsey, let me acknowledge that he faced a difficult task. Even addressing himself to so thoughtful and well-mannered a libertarian as Lindsey, he was bound to address the libertarian crowd as well, and he might have considered that the best defense is a good offense.

Libertarian sarcasm, however, only now and then dips all the way into the well of New Anger. That’s because the libertarian is caged in his self-image as someone who is moved by enlightened self-interest and rational thought. His anger, he mistakenly thinks, is just a good tool for getting his point across. By contrast, New Anger in its pure form is its own point. The Newly Angry are moved by a sense that they are most authentic, most transcendently themselves, when they are unleashing their anger. New Anger is the narcissistic self in high dudgeon.

Perhaps this can be added to the many reasons why “liberaltarianism” won’t work. It is an emotional mismatch. Cindy Sheehan just isn’t a good mate for Sherlock Holmes.

— Peter Wood is author of a Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now.

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Why the ‘Christian Left’ is not (townhall.com, 070114)

By Kevin McCullough

They seem to share more anger for fellow Christians than they do towards evil. And this reality while unexplainable is nevertheless present and growing in influence.

This week I entertained one of the main spokespersons for the movement Dr. Tony Campolo. I asked him directly as to why his new book Letters to a Young Evangelical seemed to have such great disdain for the Christian Right.

He responded, “It’s the sense that they come across as judgmental, they come across as being the people who have the whole answer to everything and are not willing to give credulance to any other point of view, and it’s that absolute closed mind set that emerges from that context.”

Dr. Campolo went on to complain, as is also reflected in his book, that in the 2004 election cycle, ballot initiatives across 11 states to ratify marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman, “In almost every case in the marriage initiatives the ballot measures were used to deny gays all kinds of other rights.” When asked for proof of this assertion, he cited two examples neither of which held weight under even simple scrutiny - and he admitted as much too at least one of them.

Another key figure to this group is Jim Wallis, who preaches the gospel of helping the impoverished wherever he goes. His claim is that this is the single focus issue of his life’s work. He and Campolo both do so interestingly enough while complaining that the Christian Right are only a “two issue” focus group - abortion and gays.

Neither is truthfully representing their positions in doing so however. Both are on record opposing the efforts to defend biblical marriage from being redefined. Both viewed the state ballot initiatives as insincere merely meant to gin up an angry evangelical riot in the voting booth. Both have branched out to embrace the false issue of humanity caused global warming. Both also supported the Christian Left’s newest star - Rick Warren - in the controversy his stubbornness dug himself into by insisting upon the right to have Barack Obama give advice at Warren’s recent AIDS conference.

All three men shun the thought of biblically based Christians from standing firm against the creeping peril of evil in our culture. “Be more tolerant,” they would advise. “Reach out with love and understanding, not judgment and division.”

The ‘Christian Left’ is rife with such belief.

Unity, forgiveness, mercy, and constant appeasement are to be more highly favored than righteousness, holiness, faithfulness, and obedience.

In doing so the ‘Christian Left’ also claims to align itself with liberal ideas for the cause of helping the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden. When I asked Dr. Campolo for an example he actually cited, “a woman’s right... to vote.” What is this 1920?

If Wallis, Warren, and/or Campolo are reading this now, please hear this. There is a divide between liberals and conservatives over the relief of poverty, the easing of suffering, and setting the enslaved free. The divide is not the substance however, but rather the methods.

The American political left believe that only Americans should have the right to live in freedom, thus their hesitation and belligerence in advancing freedom in other corners of the globe. But is not freedom a gift from God, for his creation? The American political left is not concerned with the freedom and liberation of the unborn child - but they will speak at length about the evil of slavery that ended in the 1800’s. It was not leftists that marched for full civil rights in the 1960’s and it was not democrats who granted full civil rights in the 1870’s.

Wallis and company will argue for the relief of poverty but give political support to liberals in America who seek to keep the poor impoverished, and dependent upon government for the well being of their family, and future. Conservatives are the ones who wish to see taxes reduced, so that government revenues increase, safety net programs insured - and fewer people needing them in the first place.

And who was it that brought relief in record supply to Tsunami and Katrina victims - not the leftist Academics, spoiled Hollywood starlets, or the National Organization for Women.

It was the bible-believing, faith practicing, church going religious right.

For biblical Christians to associate themselves in any way with the progressive leftists in America today is to associate oil with water.

So take your pick, choose to be a faithful, biblically centered Christian, or a godless, amoral leftist - but the two do not go together.

Not if you’re sincere...

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Why Liberals Hate Christians (townhall.com, 070128)

By Kevin McCullough

Liberals in America despise Christians of true faith.

They do this because in doing so their own guilt is appeased, their anger is justified, and they can finally lay blame for their own misery at someone else’s feet.

Last night Alexandra Pelosi’s newest documentary, “Friends of God” aired on HBO. In that Alexandra is the daughter of the nation’s first feminist, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi it was all too easy to pre-judge where Alexandra’s work would land. An expose to uncover the hidden secrets of evangelicals in America, produced by the leftist daughter of the most prominent liberal feminist in America - hmm what would she say?

In fairness the first fifty minutes of the hour-long presentation take us behind the scenes of some varied examples of Christians living out their faith - in bold ways. From the “Cruisers for Christ” car club, to a family whom the producers attempted to cast as an off shoot of ‘Big Love’ (HBO’s series surrounding a polygamist ‘family’), from a truck stop featuring a chapel service for weary drivers, to a man who is attempting to place five giant crosses in every state of the union (to the cost of $25,000 per cross) - Pelosi’s work is largely un-narrated. Yet even in the selection of the cuts used Pelosi’s point is clear: cause Christians to appear as goofy, somewhat odd, and backwards as possible. The fish-eye effect of the camera angles alone accomplish this without Pelosi having to comment over the footage.

At roughly minute fifty one Pelosi turns even more sinister:

Off camera she asks, “So do you realize in places that I’m from, like San Francisco and New York, they think evangelicals are all haters. Like your truth is the only truth and everyone should believe the way you believe?” She asks this of the now disgraced Ted Haggard former president of the National Association of Evangelicals.

His response, “If you believe anything, then some people feel bad about that. We say marriage is a heterosexual relationship between a man and a woman. We say that moral purity is better than immorality. We say telling the truth is better than telling a lie. And anytime we say anything, and we’ve got 1500 pages of those things we say – the Bible, there are groups of people that are going to get nervous about that.”

Pelosi then cuts to a graphic: “One year after this interview, Pastor Haggard was accused of having homosexual encounters with a male prostitute. He admitted this to his congregation, “There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I’ve been warring against it all of my life.”

Pelosi then turns the camera over to the most dishonest voice in the entire presentation. Mel White, a former ghostwriter for Jerry Falwell and now a gay activist states, “Gay people love God and are in every church and have been since the beginning of recorded history.”

He reads some of Falwell’s fundraising letters to the camera. Pelosi then follows him to a worship service at Falwell’s church which shows him weeping during the singing of God Bless America .

The message could not be clearer. Evangelicals are bizarre, odd, hypocritical, and yes - they hate gays.

Pelosi knows she’s telling a lie. She even reveals it in one of the earlier cuts in dialogue with the man who is spending money out of his own pocket to place the crosses in different states. She comments to the soft-spoken man how amazed she is that “everyone” she has talked to has asked her to sit in their cars and try to win her to Christ. In one of the scenes with the home-school family of ten, even though she remarks to how different her friends would view motherhood, she can not help but laugh and coo a bit over the kids.

Pelosi knows that for the one voice of hypocrisy she documented in Haggard, that she visited one hundred pastors and churches that are committed to their calling, their families, and their God.

The conviction she documents of younger Christians is striking in the episode. And she is even to be commended for allowing several strong points to at least be verbalized by her subjects - who were doing so ad lib and as the fish-eye lens distorted their facial features across the screen.

But for liberals the resentment that will rise from her film towards Christians will be based in part on her out of context use of Haggard and White to make her point about homosexuality.

Though Haggard’s life did not live up to his own words, the words are true nonetheless.

Saying that I believe in something and that what I believe is in fact authoritative and exclusive is offensive to those who do not believe. Moral purity (abstinence before marriage, and fidelity in marriage, for life) is in fact a better life than one of multiple random partners. And telling the truth is better than telling a lie... even when it may embarrass some people.

Pelosi’s real anger should not be directed at Christians, who are at best broken examples of what God is and is about. But rather she should be angry with God Himself. It is He who says, “I am THE way, THE truth, and THE life.”

The saddest part of all of this is that while Pelosi sees the true peace, earnest conviction, and real life change in the Christians across the nation, she most likely believes herself to be beyond the reach of Christ or of acceptance by his people. What she and every liberal reading this would find instead is just the opposite.

While they may think that evangelicals are filled with hate... if they were to but ask - they would find instead the wellspring of grace, mercy, and love.

Evangelicals know that we are all sinners, none righteous but Him. He calls us to follow Him. We are expected to, and in doing so we will see that life’s economy runs best when following His plan. We do not behead those who choose not to. We simply want them to know the joy, peace, contentment and purpose we find in Him.

And it is the reality in seeing the joy, peace, and contentment that we have and that they do not - that drives liberals to draw angry conclusions.

==============================

Excerpt from An Interview with P.D. James (Anglican) by Ralph Wood (Baptist) (Modern Age, 000807)

Wood: What do you make of my suggestion that liberalism of the classic kind has a certain canker at its core—namely, an unwillingness to define the good, an eagerness to give all men the freedom to achieve this undefined freedom in their own way, no matter how outrageous. Is that a fair criticism?

James: Yes, I think that is a fair criticism. But of course liberalism doesn’t pretend to be religious because it says you can do exactly what you like as long as you don’t hurt others. Whereas religion says you can do exactly what you like, as long as you don’t harm yourself as well as others or disobey God. It’s a different kind of paradigm, isn’t it?

Wood: St. Augustine’s famous motto, as you know, was “Love God and do what you will.” But that’s a different kind of doing “exactly what you like.” Loving God means that we will put all of our other loves in order, and that this will produce the kind of freedom which puts real constraints on some of our loves. Our contemporary world, by contrast, regards all constraint as a loss of freedom.

——

Wood: You may be interested to hear that our daughter and son-in-law have both become Anglicans, Episcopalians as we say, for reasons you will find interesting. They argue that the average evangelical Christian service of worship makes them feel like spectators rather than participants, whereas in Episcopal liturgy, in Anglican liturgy, they are actively engaged and involved from the moment of the procession to the final recession. Of course, our daughter is a very good musician, and she often sings in the choir. But she makes the valid point Anglican worship engages all five of her senses—and thus her entire bodily existence—in rightly glorifying God. She and her husband are either genuflecting, or making the sign of the cross, or singing the liturgical responses, or listening to the homily, and sometimes they are even smelling the incense! The Anglican service doesn’t stand or fall upon the quality of the sermon, as so often happens in many Protestant services.

James: Of course the Eucharist is the central service. But you do not have that same degree of participation?

Wood: Our own congregation has monthly communion, which is much more frequently than in many Baptist churches.

Mrs. Wood: But our Baptist church does have a liturgy, a very modest one with a processional and a litany. Yet you often have Baptist services where, except for the hymns, there would be no other active participation within the congregation.

Wood: You may have heard the nasty jibe that many Protestant worship services consist of a concert followed by a lecture.

James: The church I often go to, All Saints Margaret Street, is a very fine church in which the Creed and the Gloria are often sung in Latin. They have the Angelus, and they have a professional choir. The priest doesn’t like it when people ring up and ask what the music is, because that is not what you are supposed to be going to church for. I absolutely agree. Of course, I think the Eucharist has to be the heart of the action; and I suppose this is also true in the Baptist church too, that Holy Communion is the heart of the worship? Or is it?

Wood: Honestly, it’s not. It’s secondary, even at best. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth put our case well when he said that the sermon should be the central Protestant sacrament. It’s the point at which, we believe, the Word of God comes to life in a vital and on-going way. There we encounter the living Christ as He engages us and our world. That’s a risky claim, of course, because preachers who discourse on current events or spout their personal opinions destroy the true act of worship. But we can certainly be agreed that the fundamental meaning of the word eucharist is “grace gift,” and that in the Redemption wrought by our Lord on his Cross we have received the supreme favor. I would add that this unparalleled Gift enables us to understand the nature of all other good gifts. Perhaps it is not inappropriate to observe, in conclusion, that you have received one of God’s good gifts in having just completed your 80th year of life while retaining sprightly health.

James: I think I have. I have received a huge blessing. I get the old aches and pains—who doesn’t?—though I’m very very lucky, and I thank God. I think very often that the basis of my religious belief is gratitude.

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The Question of Carter’s Cash: In which our reporter follows the money (National Review Online, 070123)

CLAUDIA ROSETT

Did Jimmy Carter do it for the money? That’s the question making the rounds about Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, an anti-Israeli screed recently written by the ex-president whose Carter Center has accepted millions in Arab funding.

Even in Carter’s long history of post-presidential grandstanding, this book sets fresh standards of irresponsibility. Purporting to give a balanced view of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, Carter effectively shrugs off such highly germane matters as Palestinian terrorism. The hypocrisies are boundless, and include adoring praise of the deeply oppressive, religiously intolerant Saudi regime side by side with condemnations of democratic Israel. In one section, typical of the book’s entire approach, Carter includes a “Historical Chronology,” from Biblical times to 2006, in which he dwells on events surrounding his 1978 Camp David Accords but omits the Holocaust. Kenneth W. Stein, the founder of the Carter Center’s Middle East program, resigned last month to protest the book, describing it in a letter to Fox News as “replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments.” As this article goes to press, more protest resignations, this time from the Carter Center’s board of councilors, appear to be in the works.

If there is a silver lining to any of this, it is that Carter’s book has drawn much-overdue attention to some of the funding that pours into the Carter Center, whose intriguing donor list includes anti-Israeli tycoons and Middle East states. Founded in 1982 and appended to Carter’s presidential library, the center has served for almost a quarter century as the main base and fund-raising magnet for Carter’s self-proclaimed mission to save the world.

In recent weeks, a number of articles have noted that Carter’s anti-Israeli views coincide with those of some of the center’s prime financial backers, including the government of Saudi Arabia and the foundation of Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, whose offer of $10 million to New York City just after Sept. 11 was rejected by then-mayor Rudy Giuliani because it came wrapped in the suggestion that America rethink its support of Israel. Other big donors listed in the Carter Center’s annual reports include the Sultanate of Oman and the sultan himself; the government of the United Arab Emirates; and a brother of Osama bin Laden, Bakr BinLadin, “for the Saudi BinLadin Group.” Of lesser heft, but still large, are contributions from assorted development funds of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, as well as of OPEC, whose membership includes oil-rich Arab states, Nigeria (whose government is also a big donor to the Carter Center), and Venezuela (whose anti-American strongman Hugo Chávez benefited in a 2004 election from the highly controversial monitoring efforts of the Carter Center).

A recent editorial in Investor’s Business Daily, headlined “Jimmy Carter’s Li’l Ol’ Stink Tank,” listed a number of “founders” of the Carter Center. The names were drawn from the annual reports, and included “the king of Saudi Arabia, BCCI scandal banker Agha Hasan Abedi, and Arafat pal Hasib Sabbagh.” And, writing last month in the Washington Times, terror-funding expert Rachel Ehrenfeld described links going back to the 1970s between the Carter family peanut business and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, whose Pakistani founder helped bankroll the Carter Center at least until BCCI went belly-up in 1991, busted as a global criminal enterprise.

There is, of course, much more to the Carter Center than this list implies. It is large, with assets totaling $377 million (as of 2005), an operating budget of some $46.8 million, a staff of some 150, a 200-member board of councilors, and hundreds of donors, including not only individuals and foundations, but the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. State Department. Some of the center’s work is devoted to such laudable causes as wiping out the parasitical guinea worm. Indeed, it is possible to glean from various news items and brief mentions in the center’s annual reports that some of the more intriguing donors, such as the sultan of Oman and the OPEC development fund, have been giving money for exactly such causes. According to one notation on the Carter Center website, for example, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia donated $7.6 million in 1993 to help Carter fight the guinea worm.

But notwithstanding such occasional tidbits, it’s stunningly hard to discern from the Carter Center’s public documents who is giving precisely how much, and for what. Donor names, sometimes listed only as “Anonymous,” are lumped under broad categories such as “$100,000 or more” or “$1 million or more.” There is no systematic tally of just how much “more” — no clear way to know, for example, whether Saudi money accounts for only a tad of Carter’s funding or a mighty dollop, and whether the Saudi share of total contributions has changed over the years. Neither is there any systematic disclosure of who is funding exactly what activities in the name of “waging peace,” “fighting disease,” and “building hope” — the center’s self-proclaimed missions. A reporter’s e-mail exchange with Carter Center press secretary Deanna Congileo elicits the response that none of the anonymous donors are from the Middle East, but no further details can be released without permission from the donors — which, even if granted, will take some time to obtain (stay tuned).

All this might be less disturbing had Carter confined his post-presidential efforts to such good works as vanquishing the guinea worm. But for years he has run his own mini-presidency — complete with a series of attempts to outflank or shape the policies of sitting presidents. These have included — to name just two examples — his letter-writing campaign in 1990 to members of the United Nations Security Council, in an effort to thwart the Bush I coalition that fought the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein; and his 1994 trip to North Korea, where he proposed to the dying tyrant Kim Il Sung a deeply flawed nuclear-freeze deal that may well have helped Kim’s son consolidate power and develop ICBMs and atomic bombs.

It could be argued that Carter, whatever his pretensions, is, after all, a private individual running a private foundation, and is therefore under no obligation to disclose full details of the getting and spending of the river of money flowing through his center. (In 2004, the most recent year for which the center’s website makes such figures available, donations totaled $146 million.) But in all his waging and fighting and building (and fundraising), Carter has been trading for years on the respect accorded to his former public office. Regardless of whatever room for murk the law allows, full financial disclosure is what sound judgment demands. The Carter Center itself makes much in promotional materials of its efforts to strengthen democracies by “promoting government transparency.” Is Carter so rigidly certain of his rectitude that he believes himself exempt from his own preaching?

In a recent Los Angeles Times opinion piece defending his new book (and insinuating that the debate over it is being controlled by pro-Israeli lobbyists), Carter wrote that he is merely seeking a “free and balanced discussion of the facts.” It is quite possible that even he may not know for sure whether he has molded his views to suit anti-Israeli donors; whether his center has attracted the money of such donors because they like his views; or whether, while fighting the guinea worm, he simply made the unrelated mistake of writing an appallingly biased and bad book. But having parlayed his former public office into global influence, he owes the public at least this much: Tell us, clearly and directly, enough about your supporters and their money that we can, with full information, decide for ourselves what is going on.

Claudia Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

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Who Are These Friends of God? A doumentary on HBO takes good hard look at Evangelicals. (National Review Online, 070130)

By Rebecca Cusey

It’s helpful, when watching Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary Friends of God, to picture her as the late, great Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin. Mentally swap her urban-hip voice for an Australian accent and her New York clothes for khakis, and she leads a tour through her perceived outback of American Evangelicalism: “We’re far from home, mates! Perhaps we’ll spot the Red-Tinted Evangelical Warbler. Crikey!” Friends of God: A Roadtrip with Alexandra Pelosi, appearing on HBO, is a safari film for liberals to gawk at the Evangelical natives. This is not to say that the documentary is unfair: Pelosi makes a genuine effort to understand what motivates these God-minded fellow countrymen and, in the process, gives Evangelicals the chance to see themselves as others see them.

The film begins with a scene of thousands of congregants in Joel Olsteen’s megachurch, Lakewood, lifting up their hands, closing their eyes, and singing “I am a friend of God.” She spends a great deal of time in the now-disgraced Ted Haggard’s New Life Church, which gave her almost unlimited access. Then the film takes on more of a roadtrip feel, a stop with the Christian Wrestling Federation, a conversation with Christian Comedian Brad Stein, a parking-lot discussion with Cruisers (of cars) for Christ, and a visit with a homeschooling family of 12. She hits the HolyLand Experience theme park in Orlando, where tourists point their camcorders at an actor giving Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, and then moves on to a Biblically themed miniature golf course and a drive-thru church. She meets with individual believers, such as the Rev. James Potter, who spends his own money to erect crosses all over the South, at $25K a pop. She follows one pickup-truck evangelist who has scripture emblazoned on his tail gate. Images of countless roadside crosses, religious billboards, and church marquees punctuate her interviews.

Finally, she visits political evangelicalism, such as Jim Sedlak of the American Life League, a Rock for Life rally, and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. She highlights the Big Three in Politics: Evolution, Abortion, and Homosexuality. She films Ken Ham, a creationist lecturer, asking children, “Who should you always trust first, God or the scientists?” Afterward, she asks the children what they believe, and, like children everywhere, including those who get a different kind of indoctrination in Manhattan’s elite prep schools, they dutifully recite the lesson they’ve just been taught. She shows some clips of Pro-Life speakers and the March for Life in Washington, D.C. She plays some clips of “one man, one woman” sermons. On one issue only, the homosexuality issue, does this child of San Francisco allow a rebuttal into her documentary. Mel White, a gay former-writer for Jerry Falwell, speaks of his perception of the evangelicals as anti-gay, then offers one of the most succinct assessments of evangelicals in the movie, “These people are sincere,” he says. In his mind, that makes them more threatening.

Filming took place before the recent election and when the debate over the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Alito was in full swing. Alexandra’s mother, Nancy Pelosi, was still minority leader of the House Democrats. Ted Haggard was still a pastor and president of the National Association of Evangelicals. Days after Pelosi finished filming the documentary, Haggard resigned from his post amid accusations of drug use and sexual misdeeds. Much of the buzz about her work comes from the inclusion of Haggard. There are, in the clear light of retrospect, some very creepy moments with Haggard. He claims that Christians have the best sex lives, then proceeds to interview two men in squirm-inducing detail about their activities with their wives. One of the final clips of the film shows Haggard talking about sexual purity and the responsibility of pastors to live a pure life.

Haggard aside, the documentary is as interesting for what it didn’t do as for what it did. Pelosi makes no mention of fundraising, budgets, or requests for offerings, often a method used to criticize the church. She doesn’t film anyone speaking in tongues, being “slain in the spirit,” or any of the other more charismatic expressions of evangelical belief. A gentle swaying and a few tears are as extreme as the worship gets. She asks fair, difficult questions. When the pick-up truck driving evangelist declares, “With Jesus, you’re a winner,” Pelosi asks, “Does that mean that if you don’t believe in Jesus, you’re a loser?” Turns out his answer is yes. She doesn’t do a lot of commentary in voice over, letting the people talk for themselves. Fair and balanced? Perhaps not entirely, but the film gives the impression that Pelosi is genuinely puzzled by the evangelical sub-species and genuinely trying to figure it out.

Pelosi’s questions are telling. She does not come across as hostile, but certainly as skeptical. “Do you think the Holy Spirit is here in the Burger King parking lot?” she asks the Cruisers for Christ. Their quick response that He is highlights her failure to understand that for Evangelicals, God works everywhere. “How do you parlay your religious power into political power?” she asks Jerry Falwell, not understanding that for many evangelicals, there is no divide between their values at church and their values at the voting booth.

There are other things she leaves out which skew the film. She interviews a mother of ten, who formerly had a dream of law school and a career in politics, but gave it up for homeschooling and child-rearing. Pelosi comments to her, “Most people I know, being home with ten kids is a nightmare,” but gamely runs the woman’s smiling statements that she loves her life. Pelosi doesn’t interview any other women about their careers, although the megachurches must have been bursting with career women, whether single, married, or working mothers. All her interviewees but one are Caucasian, although some of the churches appear to have a racial mix in their congregations. Her interviews are brief, spanning an afternoon or a single event at a church. She never gets past the initial evangelical witnessing moment to a deeper understanding of a person’s past, struggles, or questions. She doesn’t highlight anyone’s “testimony,” their story of how they came to faith in Christ, although evangelicals are generally eager to share them. She does not explore the theological aspects of the political views she highlights, although some of them are quite complex. Although many Christians fail to properly defend their positions beyond “the Bible says so,” there are others available who have threshed out these questions in great detail. Although she provides an epilogue about Haggard’s fall from the pulpit, the documentary would have gained depth from an exploration of the church’s struggle to deal with the sins of its pastor. (Although, to be fair, they may not have been open to media at such a gut-wrenching time.) Documentaries are defined by both what they explore and what they don’t. In this case, what has been left out is probably more important to understanding evangelicals than what has been put in. All this turns adds up to a shallow exploration of the subject, more Crocodile Hunter than Jane Goodall.

The biggest lesson of the film is that normalcy is in the eye of the beholder. When Pelosi shows thousands of people singing “I am a friend of God,” a club of skateboarders “skating for Christ,” or even an impassioned sermon, those familiar with evangelicalism see nothing odd. However, your average New Yorker or San Franciscan, or even your suburban neighbor who has never walked through the door of a church, sees something very strange indeed. Turning a hobby, such as skating or cruising cars, into an outlet for proselytizing may come across as artificial, even manipulative. The fervor of emotional worship, multiplied by thousands of worshippers, can leave those without that experience scratching their head. “There’s something very strange about these people,” says Pelosi to Haggard about the enthusiastic worshippers, “They’re so happy.” Happy, perhaps, but disconcerting nonetheless — or all the more — to many liberals. In an interview with the gay magazine The Advocate, she says, “A lot of New York liberal Democrats who go to the megachurches come back talking about how scary they are.” To those who have never been a part of evangelicalism, the lingo, the constant referrals to the Bible, the personal lifestyles defined mainly by their biblically imposed limits, religious passion, even the pure power of thousands of people at a rally, can be terrifying. Evangelicals would do well to understand this, not to conform to the broader culture, but to speak a language those outside the church can understand. Haggard, to his credit, seemed to understand the need to cut through the Christian culture to communicate to the rest of America, which is probably why he allowed Pelosi such access.

It’s significant that Pelosi latches onto the worship song “I am a friend of God,” using it for a good deal of the background music as well as the title of the film. This is something that torments secularists and people of other faiths about Evangelicals. In their eyes, evangelicals glibly claim to not only know God’s values, will, and direction, but to be His friend. Christians may forget, with constant reinforcement in the echo-chamber of church culture, how audacious that claim that is.

— Rebecca Cusey writes from Washington, D.C.

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Liberals Don’t Ask “What Happens Next?” (townhall.com, 070206)

By Dennis Prager

In general, the Left does not ask the question, “What will happen next?” when formulating social policy. Not thinking through the long-range consequences of their positions is liberalism’s tragic flaw.

Take almost any position that distinguishes the Left:

Will higher taxes help the economy?

The major reason the Left advocates tax increases is not that these tax increases will help the American economy. Higher taxes rarely help the economy, and most liberals don’t even make that argument. Their argument is about equality, the Left’s paramount value. The animating factor for the Left is narrowing the gap between the rich and poor. That is why so few on the Left have had moral problems with Fidel Castro’s totalitarian regime — Cubans may not have liberty, but almost all Cubans are equally poor. Likewise, that explains left-wing support for Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez even as he develops into a Castro-like dictator: He advocates economic equality.

Is continued illegal immigration good for America or for Mexico?

Regarding illegal immigration, what most concerns the Left is not the consequences of illegal immigration. It is compassion for the illegal immigrant. Now, I happen share that concern — were I a poor Mexican seeing no hope for me or my children in my corrupt homeland, I, too, would try to enter America illegally. But it is not enough to have compassion for the illegal immigrant; the responsible citizen needs to consider the consequences of vast numbers of people illegally entering his country. If America is increasingly unable to sustain — economically, demographically, in terms of crime — the great number of illegal immigrants, it is incumbent on all responsible people to figure out how to stem the flow of illegal immigrants. It is not even good for Mexico, because it enables that country to avoid needed reforms. Any country that knows its poorest citizens can go to another country from which they will also send back billions of dollars is hardly being pressured into doing anything about its poverty.

Is bilingual education good for immigrant children?

Here, too, compassion trumps effectiveness. The country that has successfully assimilated the greatest percentage of immigrants is Israel, and that country does not have bilingual education. Immigrant children in its public schools are immersed in Hebrew, despite the fact that Hebrew is far more difficult than English is for most of its immigrants (especially those speaking Latin languages). But it is not what works that matters for liberals advocating bilingual education; it is their perception of compassion and multiculturalism.

Does affirmative action help black students?

The Left supports colleges changing admissions standards to enable more African Americans, among other minorities, to enroll. Despite all the evidence that such policies often hurt minority students — they fail or drop out of college at greater rates than other students; they are not prepared for the demands of a more elite college; they feel they are seen as not having entered the college on their own merits — liberals continue to support race-based affirmative action. It may not help blacks, but they nevertheless deserve it because of America’s racist past.

What would the Kyoto Protocols do to the American and world economies?

As noted by the internationally respected Danish environmentalist Professor Bjorn Lomborg, the economic price America would pay if it abided by the Kyoto Protocols on carbon emissions would catastrophically impact the American — and therefore world — economy. Moreover, abiding by the Protocols would have a negligible effect on carbon emissions and global warming. But the Left has embraced global warming hysteria. And hysteria it is — according to the latest UN report, for example, the potential ocean level increase due to global warming is 1 foot, not the 20 feet of Al Gore’s documentary on global warming and lower than the 1.5 feet projected in the previous UN report.

Would withdrawal from Iraq increase or decrease human suffering?

Left-wing “peace activists” do not seem to concern themselves with the question of what happens if their policies are enacted and America leaves Iraq. But those of us who are concerned with this question are certain that war and murder, torture and rape of the innocent will increase. That is why “peace activist” is usually a misnomer. They usually bring war, not peace.

Does nationalized health insurance work?

Press reports and formal studies about Canada’s and Britain’s health care strongly suggest that those nationalized health care systems provide increasingly poor care to their nations’ citizens. But for those on the Left who want nationalized health insurance to come to America, Sweden is the preferred model, as if a relatively tiny, homogeneous, nearly all-middle-class country provides a more effective model than Canada or the United Kingdom.

In the view of many liberals, “What happens next?” is a pragmatic, but not idealistic, question by which to guide social policy. In fact, however, no question is as idealistic as “What happens next?” Asking it means that social policy is made by noble and compassionate minds, not hearts alone. In the rest of life, thinking through the consequences of actions is called “responsible” and “mature.” Those remain worthy goals in public life as well.

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The Left’s Definition of a “Hero” (TOWNHALL.COM, 070207)

By Michelle Malkin

Angry, left-wing Washington Post blogger William Arkin considers American troops in Iraq who believe in their mission “mercenaries” who are “naive” and should be thankful they haven’t been spit upon yet. Curdled Democrat Sen. John Kerry thinks those soldiers, who volunteer for service, didn’t “make an effort to be smart” and are “stuck in Iraq” because of their intellectual deficiencies. At the last anti-war spasm in Washington, liberal peace-lovers vandalized a military recruitment office — repeating an act of destruction taken by rock-wielding thugs across college campuses and at ROTC headquarters nationwide.

So, who inspires these troop-bashers? Whose courage do they cheer? Whom do they call “hero”?

Not the American soldier on the battlefield, willingly and freely putting his life on the line for his beliefs, his family, our country, security and freedom.

No, their idea of a military hero is Army Lt. Ehren Watada. Did Watada take a bullet for his comrades? Rescue innocent civilians from insurgent forces? Throw himself on a grenade? Ambush a terrorist sniper nest? No.

Watada’s the soldier who went on trial this week for defying orders to be deployed to Iraq — after volunteering for duty. For those deficient in English, here’s the meaning of volunteer: “To perform or offer to perform a service of one’s own free will.” Hundreds of anti-war groupies, including actor Sean Penn, showed up to cheer Watada.

Watada was scheduled to leave Fort Lewis, Wash., for his first tour of duty in Iraq last summer. Instead of getting on the bus with his fellow soldiers, he announced he would not go and denounced the war as “unjust” and “illegal.” He was the only military officer to refuse deployment to Iraq with Fort Lewis’ 4,000-member Stryker Brigade. The anti-war propaganda machine kicked into full gear for Watada, with coordinated press conferences in Tacoma, Wash., and Honolulu, where Watada grew up.

Some of Watada’s hometown neighbors are sick of his intellectual disingenuousness. Writing in Watada’s hometown newspaper, the Honolulu Advertiser, retired Col. Thomas D. Farrell, who served as an Army intelligence officer in Iraq in 2005-2006, retorted:

“How can anyone seriously claim that our military involvement in Iraq is illegal when both Congress and the U.N. have taken the steps to authorize it, and allow it to continue to this day? Lt. Watada argues that he has the right to make his own personal assessment, notwithstanding whatever Congress and the U.N. may do. If he’s right, why not make our personal assessments about how fast is safe to drive, or how much tax is our fair share? The answer is obvious: Anarchy would prevail, and the rule of law — the basis of all real freedom — would cease to exist.”

The only thing illegal here is Watada’s willful refusal to obey orders. Watada is just the latest in a line of losers abandoning their men, their mission and the rule of law. The left calls this “dissent.” The rest of us call it what it is: Desertion.

Many military observers say they smelled a rat when they first heard of Watada’s story. Watada graduated from Hawai’i Pacific University in 2003, joined the Army shortly after, went to Officer Candidate School and incurred a three-year obligation. Wrote Navy Officer Robert Webster:

“This guy graduated from college and then joined the Army, going to Officer Candidate school, after we had already started the Iraq campaign just to claim it was an ‘illegal’ war when his unit is called to go. Smells funny to me. In my mind, either the Army gave a commission to an idiot not aware of current events or he planned this all along.”

Soldiers making calculated political statements against their own troops? Wouldn’t be the first time — cough, cough, John Kerry. Idiot or schemer, Watada deserves a stiff, strong penalty for his lawlessness. An excellent proposal put forth at the military blog Op-For (op-for.com):

“Relieve him of operational duties and send him to work at Walter Reed, to handle the in- and out-processing of wounded veterans.”

Yes, where the real heroes are.

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Liberal emotion vs. Conservative logic (townhall.com, 070216)

By John Hawkins

It takes a lot more integrity, character, and courage to be a conservative than it does to be a liberal. That’s because at its most basic level, liberalism is nothing more than childlike emotionalism applied to adult issues. [KH: !!!]

Going to war is mean, so we shouldn’t do it. That person is poor and it would be nice to give him money, so the government should do it. Somebody wants to have an abortion, have a gay marriage, or wants to come into the U.S. illegally and it would be mean to say, “no,” so we should let them. I am nice because I care about global warming! Those people want to kill us? But, don’t they know we’re nice? If they did, they would like us! Bill has more toys, money than Harry, so take half of Bill’s money and give it to Harry.

The only exception to this rule is for people who aren’t liberals. They’re racists, bigots, homophobes, Nazis, fascists, etc., etc., etc. They might as well just say that conservatives have “cooties” for disagreeing with them, because there really isn’t any more thought or reasoning that goes into it than that.

Now, that’s not to say that conservatives never make emotion based arguments or that emotion based arguments are always wrong. But, when you try to deal with complex, real world issues, using little more than simplistic emotionalism that’s primarily designed to make the people advocating it feel good rather than to deal with problems, it can, and often has had disastrous consequences. Liberals never seem to learn from this.

Why don’t they learn anything from failed liberal policies? Because there is nothing underpinning them other than feelings and so even when they don’t work, their good intentions are treated, by other liberals at least, as more important than the results of their actions.

Just to name one example of many, look at Vietnam. South Vietnam was policing its own country and holding off aggression from the North with the help of the United States. But, people get hurt in wars, so wars are bad. As a result of thinking that went no deeper than that, liberals in Congress cut off the aid and air support we promised the South Vietnamese. The result?

The conquest of South Vietnam, a holocaust in Cambodia, millions dead and in prison camps, another million boat people, a crisis of confidence in America, and our country’s reputation around the world was left in tatters, which led to a revolution in Nicaragua, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and a lack of faith in the U.S. military which wasn’t truly restored until Operation Desert Storm.

So, we’re talking about one of the most shameful and damaging mistakes in American history. Yet, the left is pushing to do the same thing in Iraq, despite the fact that catastrophic consequences would surely also follow a U.S. retreat in that country.

But, this isn’t just about foreign policy. Look at Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty,” which did nothing to reduce the poverty rate despite the trillions that were spent; however, it did help drive the illegitimacy rate among black Americans from 22% in 1960 to 70% in 2005.

You could go on and on with these sort of examples — rent control, which causes housing shortages, the minimum wage, which costs poor people jobs, the liberal insistence on putting “making nice at the U.N.” above looking out for American interests. That’s what happens when you make decisions based on emotion and wanting people to like you, rather than using logic and doing the right thing.

Unlike liberals, conservatives tend to be primarily concerned with pragmatism, not niceties. This is one of the biggest reasons that conservatives have such a healthy respect for the traditions and institutions that have been proven to work over time and such contempt for those that don’t, like the United Nations and the federal government.

Does that mean conservatives are opposed to change? No, not at all, but there is a great reluctance to tinker with ideas and concepts that have proven successful time and time again throughout history, because the more they’re changed, the more likely they are not to work.

Moreover, in Thomas Sowell’s immortal words, conservatives believe that, “There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs.” Because of this, conservatives regularly do something that liberals seldom do: they consider the long-term consequences of their policies.

Sometimes in politics, that’s a tough duty. It’s always easier to say, “We’re going to use someone else’s tax money to give you this right now,” than it is to say, “We’re going to keep government out of your way and let you do this for yourself.” But, that’s the path conservatives have chosen for themselves. They’re willing to be attacked and called, in some form or fashion, “mean” in order to advocate policies that are good for the country.

In the end, that’s what liberalism versus conservatism all comes down to: sappy, feel good emotionalism that sounds appealing, but doesn’t work versus doing things the right way, even when it’s not easy.

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Liberal Contempt for Christians (townhall.com, 070302)

By John Hawkins

“Liberals hate religion because politics is a religion substitute for liberals and they can’t stand the competition.” — Ann Coulter

Most liberals in this country tend to treat Christians one of two ways: either with open, sniggering contempt or if they think they need their votes, they tend to switch over to hamhanded and grotesque pandering. That’s not to say that there aren’t liberal Christians, there are plenty of them, but they’ve just become accustomed to being treated by their fellow liberals like the sort of refuse you scrape off your shoes after a long walk through a cow pasture.

Every Christmas you have liberals fighting to purge any mention of Christianity or Jesus from Christmas celebrations. Then, during the year, liberal atheists like Michael Newdow and liberal organizations like the ACLU use the legal system to ceaselessly assault Christianity at every opportunity. Whether you’re talking about the Pledge of Allegiance, the Mt. Soledad Cross, or the Ten Commandments on the walls of a courthouse — you have liberals trolling through the courts looking for a liberal judge who’ll be willing to twist the Constitution in order to stick a thumb in the eye of their mutual Christian foes.

Meanwhile, the assault on Christianity continues unabated amongst the liberal rank and file. It’s always something. As an example, two anti-Christian bloggers were recently hired by the John Edwards campaign. Both of them later quit the campaign after it was revealed that they said things like this on their blogs,

Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit? A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.

Of course, in all fairness to Edwards, this sort of attitude towards Christianity is the rule, not the exception on the left side of the blogosphere, so the odds weren’t in his favor. For example, quotations like these aren’t terribly unusual on the left,

“Don’t you understand that the “Culture of Life” means bombing abortion clinics, bashing gays, and calling for the wholesale persecution and harassment of people who don’t share your religious views? In fact, nowhere is the radical Christian agenda being carried out with more zeal and aplomb than in Baghdad. KILL ANYONE WHO DOESN’T BELIEVE AS YOU BELIEVE!! TORTURE THEM IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE!! SET THEM ON FIIIIIIIIRE!! We don’t need no steenkin’ love and tolerance!! We’re CHRISTIANS!! WE MUST KILL!! KILL!! KIIIIILLLLL!!!” — Firedoglake

“Religious fanaticism is simply institutionalized psychosis and if we ever needed all the help we could get from reality folk (mystics) and courageous scientists, it’s now. Our planet cannot be pummeled much longer by these nut cases without passing infinitely tragic points of no return.” — The Smirking Chimp

Here’s a personal favorite, an eye catching post-election 2004 rant from Ken Layne, who’s now at the popular liberal blog Wonkette,

“Rove’s re-election strategy was elegantly simple: Scare the bejesus out of Jesusland. F@ggots are headed your way! Satanic Muslims are hiding everywhere! That’s all it took to get Jesusland to do the job. Intellectual conservatives like the National Review staff are flattering themselves if they honestly believe Jesusland cares about conservative thought. The “reality-based” folks are learning that Jesusland doesn’t even care about jobs or the economy. In Jesusland, it’s all the will of Jesus. No job? No money? Daughter got her cl*t pierced? Jesus is just f*cking with you again, testing your faith. Got the cancer? Oh well. Soon you’ll be with Jesus. Reality is no match for a mystical world in which an all-powerful god is constantly toying with every detail of your mundane life, just to see what you’ll do about it. Keep praying and always keep your eye out for homosexuals and terrorists, and you will eventually be rewarded ... all you have to do is die, and then it’s SuperJesusLand, where you will be a ghost floating in a magic cloud with all the other ghosts from Jesusland, with Jesus Himself presiding over an Eternal Church Service.”

Moving on, there’s James Cameron’s latest documentary/blasphemy, “The Lost Tomb of Christ,” which claims that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had children, based on some coffins that were found that may have had their names on them. Even though that’s a thin reed to hang a documentary on, notice that I said “may.” Biblical scholar Steven Pfann says that the name on the key coffin looks to be Hanun, not Jesus. But Hanun, Jesus, whatever, as long as there is an attack on Christians involved, liberals don’t care much about the particulars. That’s why Hollywood habitually treats Christians with such disdain on the silver screen and why liberals will tell you that dropping a crucifix in urine or smearing the Virgin Mary with feces is the sort of “art” we should be funding with our tax dollars.

Now usually, when you accurately explain to people what many liberals believe and use their own quotes to prove it, liberals come out of the woodwork to call it a “smear campaign” or claim that you’re “cherry picking” their comments. But, what I’m saying here has been said by other liberals, even if they tend to gloss over the magnitude of the problem. Take, for example, these comments from Barack Obama just last year,

“At worst, there are some liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word “Christian” describes one’s political opponents, not people of faith.”

If Barack had replaced, “some liberals” with “most liberals,” he would have been spot-on.

This would be a better country if liberals like Barack Obama would regularly stand up and say, “This is not acceptable,” when their fellow travelers on the left attack Christians instead of tossing out a line in a speech every now and again. It might not stop liberals from being inherently hostile to people of faith, but it might encourage them to think about their anti-Christian bigotry, instead of blindly following the crowd on the left.

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The Left: Character Assassins (Christian Post, 070307)

By David Strom

Unless you have been living under a rock lately, you’ve probably heard that Vice President Dick Cheney’s friend and advisor “Scooter” Libby has been convicted and faces jail time for…what, exactly?

Officially the charges were perjury and obstructing an investigation. But most of us have the sense that what Libby was accused of was leaking the name of a covert CIA agent in order to discredit her husband’s charges. In other words, Libby stands convicted in the court of public opinion of the kind of skullduggery that we associate with the Nixon White House.

That’s the Party line from Democrats when they comment on this case: “This verdict brings accountability at last for official deception and the politics of smear and fear,” said Sen. John Kerry (Ma.), leading the charge; Senator Harry Reid added “It’s about time someone in the Bush administration has been held accountable for the campaign to manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics.”

But that’s not what happened at all, and the fact that the Democrats have been pushing this line for years now demonstrates how hollow their protestations against the “politics of personal destruction” really are. The Democrats, in fact, are the masters of that art, and Scooter Libby is simply the latest in a long line of Republican victims of their character assassination.

The fact first: Scooter Libby did not ever leak CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name to the media as part of a White House scheme to discredit war critic; in fact, it was a liberal war critic and notorious gossip who dropped the name with intentions no worse than to puff up his image as being “in the know.” There never was a nefarious scheme to discredit war critics in this manner. By now the White House should be regretting their failure to come up with a good conspiracy to discredit their opponents, given how vicious the Democrats have been in going after them.

In fact, the biggest liars in this whole affair have been Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. Time and again, they have lied and distorted in order to hurt the White House, and of course turn themselves into liberal heroes. For their willingness to do so, they have been awarded rock star status in Democrat circles, and Plame has inked a $2.5 million book contract.

So if Libby didn’t mastermind a “vast right wing conspiracy” to slime Valerie Plame and her husband Ambassador Joe Wilson, just what did he do? Well, he didn’t leak the name, because Richard Armitage did that. In fact, what he did do according to the jury was try to cover up the fact that he may have confirmed to reporters what they already had gleaned from other sources, that Plame was at the CIA.

Confirming Plame’s CIA employment itself was not a crime; but covering up that he did so was perjury and obstruction of justice.

Just to be clear: Scooter Libby faces jail time for trying to cover up the fact that he did not commit a crime. In fact, at no time does the Special Prosecutor ever allege that the underlying crime he was investigating ever took place. It never happened.

Now I am not a lawyer, and I recoil at the idea of justifying Perjury and obstruction of justice by anybody for any reason. It sets a bad precedent to do so, which is why I was shocked by the Democrats’ defense of Bill Clinton’s perjury in the Monica Lewinski case. I personally think that Libby should not have been prosecuted, but I can understand why a Special Prosecutor might think differently.

Whatever the Special Prosecutor’s motives, though, one thing is perfectly clear: Scooter Libby is the victim of a well planned and well coordinated smear campaign by the Democrats—and the mainstream media—in order to discredit the Bush White House. The investigation was begun to find the perpetrator of a crime that never took place; throughout the investigation leading Democrats lied about what happened, what the investigation was about, and they are still lying about what the verdict means.

Democrats have become masters of the vile art of destroying individuals in order to further their designs for power, but they couldn’t achieve their goals without the active compliance of key members of the media. It was Tim Russert who hammered the nails into Libby’s coffin, and it is the New York Times which has relentlessly and shamelessly promotes the conspiracy theory that underlies the smear campaign.

The only reason why leading Democrats continue lying about this case is that the media doesn’t just let them get away with it, they actively encourage it. Saying or doing anything is apparently just fine as long as it might undermine a Republican administration. And threatening Republicans with jail is as a good a way as any to keep them away from political careers.

Leftists have been losing in the court of public opinion. In fact, one of the key factors in many Democrats’ victories last fall was the implicit promise that they wouldn’t act like liberals, raising taxes and sending spending through the roof. For decades the Democrats’ response to this is to pursue their agenda through the Courts.

First it was using the courts to get policy victories. Today, it is using the criminal courts to harass their opponents.

It’s time to stop this madness. Bush should Pardon Scooter Libby today.

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Liberals: A very modest proposal (townhall.com, 070312)

By Burt Prelutsky

My friend Pat Sajak recently made an excellent point. He said that inasmuch as he doesn’t take global warming to heart, he sees no good reason to alter his life style. However, he wonders why those who are insisting they can feel the rising ocean lapping at their ankles don’t take drastic action to alter theirs.

He’s right, of course. I mean, assuming you are one of those people who actually has faith in U.N. reports and really believes that man controls the earth’s thermostat, wouldn’t you have to shape up? I mean, wouldn’t you think these worrywarts would all begin riding bicycles and start wearing their snow suits to bed? It’s damn hard taking their “The End is Near” placards seriously when they’re driving their Hummers to and from the demonstrations.

Consider Al Gore, the man who could give Chicken Little lessons in panic and hysteria. As ominous as global warming is, it obviously hasn’t done anything to spoil his appetite. And why, when he isn’t shrieking into a microphone, doesn’t he look terrified? If you thought that, say, a giant comet was hurtling at the earth or a dozen nuclear bombs were set to explode, would be you be grinning and saying “Cheese” to every camera pointed in your direction?

The thing about liberals is that they’re always telling the rest of us how to live and then, oh so conveniently, ignoring their own advice. Take such professional busybodies as Arianna Huffington and Bobby Kennedy, Jr., for instance. She excoriates people who drive SUVs while she and her two tots live in a mansion that I can guarantee sucks up BTUs at a rate that would make your head spin. As for Mr. Kennedy, who spends his life screaming about what the rest of us are doing to destroy the ozone layer, he’s constantly gadding about on private jets.

Let us not forget that other holier-than-thou character, Michael Moore, who has also sworn off commercial airlines in favor of corporate aircraft.

Of course, that brings us to her royal highness, Nancy Pelosi, non-stop Speaker of the House. First off, she insisted on an upgrade to a larger military jet than the one her predecessor had. She wanted one with a private bedroom, a kitchen, and room for her entire family — second cousins included — on a jet that was capable of flying non-stop from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco.

When some people began to question the need she had for this airborne palace, she insisted that rabble-rousers were only raising a stink because she was a woman. Poor dear! She had no sooner lifted that marble ceiling all by her wonderful self, and here it came crashing down on her tiara!

Personally, I think she should have the largest plane the military has available. As I see it, they’ll need a jumbo jet just to get Pelosi’s ego airborne.

What’s interesting about global warming is how quickly the Left added it to their manifesto, right along with pacifism, affirmative action, bi-lingual education, open borders, and outlawing gun ownership. What makes global warming such a joke is the way that the same liberals who know even less about climatology than I know about 18th century Romanian poetry are trying to pass themselves off as science experts. As Michael Crichton pointed out, when folks start talking about consensus among scientists, they’re talking politics, not science. Nobody goes around claiming there’s a consensus of experts when it comes to the laws of thermodynamics or asks the U.N. to decide if there’s any validity to DNA. Only with global warming are we supposed to put it to a vote, and then abide by the results of a fixed election.

Let a scientist suggest that man plays a very puny role when it comes to determining the earth’s climate, and you can count on Al Gore’s goon squads trying to bully him into silence, and even questioning his right to teach or to conduct research.

When it’s pointed out that in the 1970s, in a world very much like the one in which we now live, the same crowd was worried sick over the coming ice age, it’s either dismissed as irrelevant or condemned as heresy.

The last time I argued with a left-winger about global warming, he actually said, “But what if we’re right?”

What logic! What insight! I felt as if I were arguing with someone transported from the Dark Ages, someone convinced that the earth was flat. Even if you showed him photos taken from outer space, showing the curvature of the earth, he would still say, “But what if I’m right?”

Funny, isn’t it, that these alarmists are always anxious to play the “what if” game when it comes to global warming, but not when it comes to global terrorism. Ask them, for example, what happens if we simply pull our troops out of Iraq, leaving it ripe for Al Qaeda? What happens if we ignore Iran and its threat to nuke its enemies? Or what happens if we decide to quit policing the world and leave such matters strictly up to the U.N.? (After all, they did a bang-up job in Cambodia in the 1970s and are doing equally fine work today in Darfur.)

The reason it’s so easy to despise liberals isn’t simply because they’re such blockheads, but because they are so hypocritical and self-righteous.

Understand, though, that I’m not suggesting they are entirely worthless. What I am suggesting is that we establish whether my suspicion is correct that they not only think like chickens and squawk like chickens, but actually taste like chicken. We could then raise them as livestock.

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Jesus Was No Leftist (townhall.com, 070313)

By Dennis Prager

Democratic presidential candidate and former Sen. John Edwards told an interviewer from the religious website beliefnet.com that Jesus “would be disappointed” at how little Americans help the destitute who live among them. Jesus, Mr. Edwards said, “would be appalled” at our selfishness.

In the view of John Edwards and other Christians on the Left, Jesus would raise taxes, promote single-payer, i.e., socialized, medicine, be pro-choice and advocate same-sex marriage. But most of all, Jesus would be anti-war, opposed to the military and essentially be a pacifist.

This is based largely on one of His most famous statements: “Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

The flaw in interpreting such statements as policy statements on how a nation should behave is that Jesus was speaking about the life of the individual — the micro — not about nations and the macro.

This confusion of micro and macro morality not only afflicts the Left, it also afflicts the Right. One example is when religious conservatives equate public and private cursing. While ideally one should refrain from using expletives in private as well as in public, there is no moral comparison between using such words in private conversations and using them in public. One trusts that if a religious conservative overheard a teacher using an expletive in a quiet conversation with one other person, he would not compare such speech to the teacher’s using that expletive while teaching a class. The first may be a personal sin, but the second is destructive of society.

Nevertheless it is the Left that is most oblivious to the distinction between the micro and the macro. Its understanding of Jesus is a good example. The Left would have us as a nation put this admonition of Jesus into practice: “If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

But Jesus was clearly referring to interpersonal relations. It is critically important when trying to understand any portion of the Bible or any other text to read a passage within the context of the surrounding material. As biblical commentaries often put it, “Context is king.”

Noting what precedes and what follows this verse shows that it deals with attitudes and behaviors of individuals in such matters as anger against another individual in one’s personal life, adultery, divorce, oath-taking, giving to the poor, prayer, fasting, prioritizing, worrying, etc. Jesus was talking about interpersonal relations and noted that in our relations with people in our lives, it is not generally a good idea to hit back.

Now imagine applying this to nations: Should we have said to the Japanese after they attacked Pearl Harbor, “Now that you have attacked us in the West, please also bomb our cities in the East”?

The idea that a country should offer its other cheek to an aggressor is simply immoral, not to mention suicidal. Such thinking renders Jesus and the Christian Bible foolish.

It also shows how hypocritical are the Left’s attacks on religious conservatives for taking the Bible literally. It is the Left that engages in a far more dangerous literalism when it applies Jesus’ words to national policy. Those on the religious Right who believe that God created the world in six 24-hour days are engaged in, I believe, a completely unnecessary literalism. But it is hardly dangerous. The Left’s biblical literalism, however, applying “turn the other cheek” to millions of its own citizens, is fatally dangerous.

Besides literalism, another point of hypocrisy: The Left attacks the religious Right for threatening to replace our democracy with a theocracy that will impose fundamentalist Christianity on the nation. Yet the people who loathe conservatives for using Scripture have no difficulty with those who cite Jesus’ words when arguing their positions — even when citing them incorrectly.

Jesus was no leftist. He was, among other things, a religious Jew who knew and believed his Hebrew Bible, which contains verses such as this one from Psalms: “Those of you who love God must hate evil.” That, not offering another city for terrorists to bomb, is likely what Jesus believed.

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The Dangers of Liberal Toleration: Tolerance that Isn’t (Touchstone, 070315)

By Jim Tonkowich

In the polarized world in which we live, the most praised virtue is toleration. We must be tolerant of all people, we are told—all races, genders, sexual orientations, ethnicities, religions, and cultures.

Fair enough, but while I’m trying to be tolerant, somehow abortion rights, same sex “marriage,” and New York City residents changing their gender on their birth certificates seems to have come in the back door all under the rubric of toleration. Exactly what is going on?

At the recent annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Washington, D.C., Dr. J. Budziszewski of the University of Texas addressed this question in a lecture entitled, “True Toleration and the Failure of Liberal Neutrality.” In it, he concluded that the toleration that has been foisted on the American public is not tolerant at all.

Toleration, which is hardly a new idea, has two possible rationales, according to Budziszewski. The first comes from the early Church fathers. This rationale grounds toleration on a paradox—the nature of the good is such that it demands that we put up with (tolerate) some bad. Their point of view centered on religious freedom. God does not coerce belief, and we cannot coerce belief either. People’s consciences may not be violated in the name of the good and the true and thus we must tolerate that which is not good and true, lovingly persuading others, but never forcing compliance in belief. This, said Budziszewski, is proper toleration.

The second rationale, claimed Budziszewski, grounds toleration on an “incoherence.” While the Church fathers urged toleration because of the nature of the good, liberals argue that we must suspend public judgments about the nature of the good. After all, as liberal philosopher John Rawls argued, while the Christian sees the good in one way, the Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Marxist, or hedonistic pleasure-seeker each see it in other ways.

Rawls calls each system a “comprehensive doctrine.” And since comprehensive doctrines can’t all be true, and each is more or less reasonable, the only solution for public discourse is to privatize them all, that is, ban all comprehensive doctrines from the public square. This, the argument goes, creates an environment of moral neutrality in which to make public decisions.

Rawls, said Budziszewski, considers his approach tolerant and just because he treats everyone in precisely the same way—not endorsing anyone’s comprehensive doctrine.

But in truth, Rawls is not being tolerant at all. His view privileges some comprehensive doctrines and suppresses others. Any doctrine that is easily privatized is privileged while any doctrine (Christianity for example) that by its very nature has public implications is suppressed. The liberal argument is nothing more than a camouflaged grab for power.

We see this in the abortion debate. Women, we’re told, want and need legal abortion. Arguments to the contrary from religious, natural law, or common good perspectives are ruled out of order. These are comprehensive doctrines with values that must not be imposed on others and should be privatized in the name of toleration. You are free to choose not to have an abortion, but you must be tolerant with others who choose otherwise. And so, without a debate about the actual issue of taking unborn human life, abortion is the law of the land.

Is this toleration? Certainly not.

First, said Budziszewski, this liberal toleration doesn’t live up to its own notion of toleration. Choice can never be neutral; it always discriminates between visions of the good. Same sex “marriage” is just as discriminatory as traditional marriage, because it repudiates traditional marriage. Legalizing abortion is just as discriminatory as prohibiting it because it runs roughshod over those who believe that abortion is an act of murder.

Nor is liberal toleration “tolerant” in the proper sense of the word. Advocates of liberal toleration don’t admit that they are judging, so they cannot possibly be judging justly. Since it violates others to judge them without admitting your criteria for judgment, liberal toleration is, in fact, thoroughly intolerant. Reasons can be debated, challenged, and overcome. Liberal toleration cheats by enforcing standards it will not admit to having.

This lack of candor, according to Budziszewski, leads to the great danger of a liberal confessional state. Our country has traditionally enjoyed a confessional state in that we have propounded public ideals. These ideals, our confession, have been declared, not coerced. In Communist states such as North Korea or Islamist states such as Saudi Arabia, the confession is declared and coerced.

In the liberal confessional state, for the sake of toleration, the confession is not declared, merely coerced. This led Budziszewski to conclude that “in this country, for the foreseeable future, the chief danger to religious toleration arises not from our avowed religions, but from the unavowed and illiberal religion of liberalism itself.” And it is a danger to us all.

Jim Tonkowich is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

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The Left-Wing Echo Chamber (townhall.com, 070318)

By Robert Bluey

Death threats. Harassing phone calls. Threatening e-mails. Such was a day in the life of Drew Johnson a few weeks ago.

His crime? Johnson is president of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, a free-market think tank that broke one of the juiciest stories of 2007. A day after the Academy Awards, on Feb. 26, Johnson’s organization reported details of Al Gore’s enormous utility bill. The former vice president had consumed nearly 221,000 kilowatt hours of electricity in a single year — more than 20 times the national average.

The story skyrocketed to the top headline on the Drudge Report, sending tens of thousands of visitors to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research’s Web site. With Gore facing charges of hypocrisy just a day after winning an Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth,” the news traveled fast.

Unfortunately for Johnson, it meant enduring days of attacks from liberals — even though the facts of the story came directly from public records.

Last week he visited Washington, D.C., to share his story. Johnson told a group of conservative bloggers at The Heritage Foundation that he heard from hundreds of angry callers, many of whom used profane language. The research center’s vice president, whose phone number was listed on the Web page, eventually had to change her number when the attacks became so persistent and threatening.

The phone blitz was only one avenue liberals used to intimidate. Johnson said his organization received thousands of e-mails, the vast majority of them negative and hate-filled.

Shortly after the story made headlines, popular liberal blogs Daily Kos and Huffington Post, laid out their plan of attack. A blogger called NeuvoLiberal wrote on Daily Kos, “please post any specific (action oriented) ideas you have for fighting back…. We’d like to target every person out there that is spinning in various rightwing and other outlet for this kind of smear job (the damage is done before you wake and smell the coffee).”

Over at Huffington Post, bloggers Dave Johnson and James Boyce issued another call to action: “Al Gore is a hero. Even heroes need help - join us, add to the comments, let’s find out everything we can about these guys and stop them in their tracks. Now.”

Their pleas were answered. Liberal blog Think Progress led the way with 655 comments on a post about the Gore story. Daily Kos was close behind with 481 comments. And 125 comments are attached to the Johnson-Boyce call-to-action post.

All this added up to one giant headache for Drew Johnson, who didn’t know where to turn to respond to the attacks being lodged at him personally, his employees and the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. While the initial Gore story received favorable coverage from conservative bloggers, these same people were silent when liberals began to distort the record.

One of the most outrageous charges, Johnson said, had to do with his background. The liberal “watchdog” Media Matters dug into Johnson’s past, noting that he had been a Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. Since ExxonMobil has contributed to AEI, that bit of information was enough for Media Matters to assert that Johnson was bought and paid for by ExxonMobil. Immediately, the liberal echo chamber began to hype the allegation, though Johnson swiftly denied it. Johnson had merely interned at AEI. Neither he nor the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has ever received money from ExxonMobil. But that didn’t stop MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann from playing up the mythical connection.

Instead of backing down and retreating, the episode has inspired Johnson. His three days of meetings in the nation’s capital introduced him to a wider network of contacts and left him eager to help build a network of bloggers who could defend conservatives under attack.

He has also hired an investigative reporter to produce more stories similar to the one about Gore — an unorthodox tactic for a think tank. But Johnson said sometimes that’s what it takes to discover the truth, no matter how inconvenient it may be for him personally.

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The Essence of Liberalism: Embracing Life’s Losers (townhall.com, 070321)

By Michael Medved

What constitutes the essence of modern liberalism?

Conservatives will return to decisive victories only if we come to terms with liberalism’s visceral appeal. The best way to overcome our ideological adversaries is to understand their approach to major issues.

While conservatives obsess over distinctions of right and wrong, and insist that inevitable consequences must flow from good and bad behavior (see last week’s column), liberals focus on differences of another sort entirely.

The rhetoric of today’s left shows that they see society divided between the privileged and the powerless, the favored and the unfortunate, victors and victims.

Liberals feel an irresistible instinct to take sides with the less fortunate.

While the right wants to reward beneficial choices and discourage destructive directions, the left seeks to eliminate or reduce the impact of the disadvantages that result from bad decisions. In place of the conservative emphasis on accountability, the left proffers a gospel of indiscriminate compassion.

This leads directly, and inevitably, to the liberal passion to sanctify victimhood.

“Enlightened” lefties long to embrace and exalt all those who claim to have suffered from hard luck or oppression: the homeless, single mothers, “people of color,” homosexuals, AIDS patients, feminists, convicted criminals, Native Americans, atheists, immigrants and many more. Recent Democratic Conventions have resembled festivals of fine whines, with countless testimonials from one victim group or another expressing hopelessness and helplessness unless the Donkey Party returned to power.

The leftist impulse to side with the underdog has become so powerful that liberals never bother to inquire whether a given “oppressed” group counts as deserving or not.

This explains the odd liberal sympathy for Islamo-Nazi terrorists, whose radically reactionary (indeed, medieval) ideology should make them anathema to enlightened opinion in the West. How can militant feminists applaud the anti-American rhetoric of Islamist crazies who want to keep all women in burkas as the property of their husbands, and how can gay activists identify with jihadi killers who endorse the execution of homosexuals? The widespread activism on behalf of the fanatical internees at Guantanamo remains one of the most spectacular displays of lefty lunacy in recent years. Aside from the common distaste for free-market economics and the shared desire for a reduced American role in the world, liberal ideologues see themselves as persecuted victims with natural fellow-feeling for exotic and angry third-worlders who blame all their problems on the USA.

The generalized anti-Americanism that afflicts so much of the contemporary left owes everything to this imperative to identify with the downtrodden. The United States is simply too prosperous and too powerful to win liberal sympathy while suffering nations (no matter how dictatorial their governments, or how dysfunctional their cultures) seem far more worthy of support.

Every important element of the liberal program stems from the one central goal of assisting the unfortunate. Pushing for high taxes, expensive social programs, universal health coverage, lunches and breakfasts in the schools, income redistribution, affirmative action, reparations, a higher minimum wage, more generous foreign aid, multiculturalism, gay marriage, protecting endangered species, animal rights, enhancing entitlements, affirming prison rights, providing generous benefits for illegal immigrants – all these leftist imperatives arise from a common commitment to protect the powerless and uplift the unfortunate.

In fact, the recent hearings about the shabby treatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reade Medical Center represented a concerted effort to transform America’s military into a victims group worthy of liberal sympathy. John Kerry’s notorious and derisive comments about kids who do poorly in school getting “stuck in Iraq” complemented this ongoing effort to portray active duty personnel as oppressed and hapless losers, rather than formidable and willing warriors.

The persistent preference for the powerless and purportedly oppressed applies only imperfectly to explaining leftist support for legalized abortion. The unborn, after all, plausibly qualify as the ultimate underdogs: innocent, fragile, utterly helpless. Nevertheless, they’ve never lived outside the womb and so failed to achieve the status of aggrieved victims – suffering from racism, sexism, homophobia, economic oppression. Moreover, the mother seeking the abortion represents a far more visible victim—which helps explain the desperate determination by pro-abortion forces to stop legislation in Georgia and elsewhere that would require abortion providers to offer ultra-sound images of the baby in utero before the woman makes the final decision to terminate her pregnancy. In other words, they don’t want anyone or anything to compete with the stressed, unhappily pregnant mother for pity and sympathy.

In fact, favored victim groups can lose their sacred claims on the liberal imagination as evidenced by shifting perspectives on the left concerning the State of Israel. In the wake of the devastation of the Holocaust, and with the Jews fighting for their lives against massive Arab armies in 1949 and ‘67, liberals naturally gave strong, nearly unanimous support to the Israeli underdogs. After the decisive victory in 1967, however, Israel assumed the role of regional power and began losing leftist support just as more and more conservatives came to appreciate America’s redoubtable and reliable ally. Today, the Jewish state counts as far too successful, economically productive and militarily formidable to win much liberal sympathy, while the Palestinians remain so pathetically divided, dysfunctional, impoverished and inept that lefties (even Jewish lefties) react to their radical rhetoric with either applause or apologetics.

That’s the problem with liberal sympathy for the downtrodden and underprivileged: if you make too much progress, you’ll compromise your claims to advocacy and assistance. The best victim groups are those that reliably maintain their victim status. In this sense, the leftist world view effectively discourages empowerment or the pursuit of prosperity and pushes suffering subgroups to more or less permanent self pity.

Moreover, raising taxes on high earners in order to provide more give-aways to the unproductive clearly punishes success while rewarding failure. All but the most willfully blinded liberal activist understands that punishing success helps to discourage it while rewarding failure and dysfunction encourages much more of the same. The massive failures of the US welfare system, and our ill-starred “War on Poverty,” indicate that if give people money in exchange for idleness you’ll get more indolence, and if you take away more money from the most industrious you’ll get less productive activity.

On occasion, conservatives criticize liberals for a failure to support standards or to make distinctions, but that’s not entirely fair, since leftists do love to emphasize the difference between rich and poor, lucky and unlucky, winners and losers.

Leftists feel virtuous and unselfish for invariably embracing the losers, but with this persistent preference it’s society itself that loses most.

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A Christian Can Be a Christian or a Liberal, But He Can’t Be Both (townhall.com, 060416)

By Doug Giles

Can a Christian be a liberal? Short answer: no. There is no way a Christian can buy into neo-liberal ideology and be faithful to the bigger-than-Dallas teachings of the scripture and expect to continue enjoying his hard-won religious liberties.

For the “Christian” to lean politically to the left means that he must blow off huge chunks of the Bible and replace the scripture with the make-believe notions of postmodernism’s malleable “Christ.” Only after torturing the scripture can the Christian then fit liberalism into his supposed relationship with God.

For the Christian who believes that unfeigned faith in Christ should correspond with Jesus’ high view of scripture, it is impossible to believe in God and be an adherent to postmodern liberalism.

Liberalism has been hijacked by bizarre special-interest thugs who defy the Word of God and believe that the Bible has no place in public life (except maybe in a museum where people can look at it from time to time).

The Christian skipping around the maypole wearing his rose-colored glasses who has a bent to the liberal left needs to understand something: if it were left up to the modern, secularized liberal establishment, he would be more restricted than Bill when Hillary’s in town. If the Christophobic thugs had it their way, Christians would be relegated to a marginalized spiritual ghetto on the sidelines of life.

For the naive Christian voter who thinks he can toss a ballot in the Nuevo liberal direction, please know that a vote toward the secular left could leave you bereft of sacred liberties. Thanks to the aggressive and ludicrous liberal lug nuts’ anti-Christian agenda, your vote for a liberal Christian is a vote for:

1. Christianity to be scrubbed from government and whatever turf the government owns. Thanks to the liberals, the Ten Commandments have about as much acceptance in our government and their properties as Rush Limbaugh would at Al Franken’s family reunion. The Judeo-Christian principles that formed the rock-solid foundation of this great American Experiment are now aggressively and consistently attacked by the lascivious left.

If . . . if . . . the secularists continue to stay behind the wheel of this American bus, you can kiss all semblance of Christianity good-bye in this heretofore God-graced government. Saint, you might as well say farewell to our government’s recognizing Christmas and adios to Good Friday if you’re going to vote the liberal ticket. If the secularists have it their way, Easter will be behind your keister, and you can kiss the Cross good-night as an acceptable public symbol that represents your faith and our nation’s recognition of Christ’s atoning work.

2. Secularism to be continually mainlined into our public school system. Thanks to rabid, vapid secularism, our public schools and universities would rather you be a Rocky Horror super freak than a Christian. If your beliefs run to the bizarre or the banal; or if you want to smoke the same philosophical crack that Caligula, Nero, Castro or Lenin freebased, they’ll accommodate you.

Our schools are totally open to anyone and to anything, unless, of course, you’re a Christian. And if that’s the case, then you’re likely to get more sympathy from a badger with minimal sleep than you will from liberal educators who are hard at work making your life hard. Let me repeat: A vote for the secular left is a vote for Christianity to continue to be officially vilified on campus and for Christians to be ostracized in campus life.

3. Public officials, employees and appointees to be pressured to hide their faith in the closet and suppress their public displays of belief in God lest they be grouped with Hitler, Osama, or Mussolini and then fired. Not only will the liberals aggressively work to prohibit the State from green lighting and recognizing Christianity as a legitimate and positive force in our land, they will also attempt to stifle Christians from influencing the path of government.

4. Public attacks on churches and Christians and attempts to restrict them in the private sector. Consider this, Christian pastor and Christian lay person looking to vote for the ludicrous left: the secular Mafioso’s intent is to make your ministerial life difficult, your evangelistic work taxing and your voice minimized. And good luck, pastor and church committee, in trying to buy property and get zoning with the anti-Christian libs at the helm.

5. The continued media endorsement of the same putrid, hedonistic stuff that sunk ancient civilizations. With the liberals in place, expect more weird crap in movies and on television. Expect to see more paintings of Christian symbols and saints smeared with elephant dung. Expect Christianity to be bashed and vilified and Christians made out to be buckled-shoed morons with three teeth and an IQ of 50. Expect the culture to coarsen. Expect your kids to continue to be exposed to things that only rock stars see backstage with groupies. A vote for a liberal is a vote to see Christians continue to receive special ridicule and be flogged more than a piñata during a Cinco de Mayo festival

Modern liberalism tosses out the scripture on several different levels. How a true believer in the Christ defined by the scripture can buy into what Jesus, the prophets and apostles said and also give credence to what these secular goons say is beyond me. In addition to liberalism’s obvious and odious pro-holocaust-like abortion stance, its anti-biblical view of marriage, its scripture-slamming aggressive secularism, and its feckless view of our nation’s defense, liberalism completely clashes with the Christian worldview. Secular liberalism’s aggressive desire to eradicate Christians’ rights should cause Christians to be concerned.

The Democratic Party’s liberalism has degenerated over the last 40-50 years in regard to its view of Christianity and Christian rights. This party, which formerly embraced and protected our nation’s great Christian heritage and teachings, no longer does so. Thus, today the Christian is between a rock and a hard place: he can either be a Christian or a liberal—but he cannot be both.

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Left spews deadly venom over Tony Snow’s cancer: ‘He is pure lying scum and should die ASAP!’ (WorldNetDaily, 070328)

Moments after White House Press Secretary Tony Snow’s new personal battle against cancer became public yesterday, a vicious assault was launched at left-leaning websites, with some message posters hoping for a swift death for the presidential spokesman.

“Under the heading of ‘What goes around comes around’, the cancer in Tony Snow is removing the cancer of Tony Snow from the national scene,” wrote TDoff on the D.C. gossip site Wonkette.com.

Omnilation wrote, “Dear Tony, I hate you. - God.”

A contributor called homofascist stated, “It is a bitch that I wouldn’t wish upon even a smarmy, evil f—face liar like Snow. Because really, isn’t he OUR smarmy, evil f—face liar?”

Some readers at HuffingtonPost.com reportedly said:

# “Sure holding all that bulls**t in your gut would make anybody sick..!”

# “The growth in his abdomen is his head stuck up his a**. F**k him!! He is pure lying scum and should die ASAP!!”

Beccawalton was among those calling for an end to the venom-spewing:

“Stop these mean-spirited and hypocritical posts. Just because you don’t like his politics (and I don’t, either), don’t revel in this. It’s inhuman and cruel. I’m not going to waste space to prove my liberal cred, just stop it!”

And PghLori noted:

“There are freakin’ idiots on both sides of the political divide, and here you’re looking at the lib side. Aside from the fact that it is just ignorant to make jokes about cancer, it’s also self-defeating, as [Rush] Limbaugh, [Sean] Hannity, etc. will refer to these postings as examples of hate-filled libs, just as they did with the Cheney board postings. Thanks a lot folks.”

In fact, the verbal attack on Snow came exactly one month after a similar onslaught against Vice President Dick Cheney who survived an assassination attempt in Afghanistan.

An example from the HuffingtonPost on Feb. 27 included:

“Jesus Christ and General Jackson too, can’t the Taliban do anything right? They must know we would be so gratefull (sic) to them for such a remarkable achievement.”

The HuffingtonPost is run by Arianna Huffington, who has described herself as “a former right-winger who has evolved into a compassionate and progressive populist.”

A disclaimer on her site above the remarks about Tony Snow states “these comments are the personal opinions of the individuals posting them and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Huffington Post. We do not generate, solicit, or moderate user comments, but reserve the right to remove postings as we see fit.”

Snow, 51, had his colon removed in 2005 and underwent six months of chemotherapy. Colleagues said his cancer has returned and spread to his liver and elsewhere, and that Snow told them he planned to fight the disease and return to his position.

“He is not going to let this whip him, and he’s upbeat,” President Bush said. “And so my message to Tony is, ‘Stay strong; a lot of people love you and care for you and will pray for you.’”

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As Cathy Seipp Lay Dying, Her Nemesis Took His Parting Shot on the Web (Foxnews, 070328)

Cathy Seipp was dying.

The 49-year-old newspaper columnist and conservative blogger, who had come from Manitoba, Canada, to become the sharp-tongued doyenne of the Los Angeles media scene, was only hours away from losing her years-long fight with cancer, leaving behind a 17-year-old daughter, a lifetime of work as a plucky and plain-speaking wordsmith, and the respect of colleagues from both sides of the political spectrum.

But what was supposed to have been a dignified end for a long-suffering single mom instead turned into what friends called a disgustingly public travesty, an example of the current Wild West atmosphere of Internet privacy issues, and a sordid showcase of just how far a beef can go.

Just hours before her death, “Cathy Seipp” suddenly seemed to undo decades of hard work with an oddly written letter posted on the Web site, www. cathyseipp.com. In what came off as more bizarre rant than heartfelt apology, her supposed “very last blog entry” called her years of journalism a “shoddy,” “despicable” and “irresponsible” career as a “fourth-rate hack.” Her political stance? All a mistake.

The fiery, unwavering supporter of George W. Bush supposedly said she’d done a complete 180 in the past year and was now an implied supporter of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. What was even more perplexing was that “Seipp” was taking mean-spirited potshots at her own daughter, Maia Lazar, whom she called an “obnoxious” and “arrogant” wanna-be “skank” who was “mentally ill.” Throughout the letter, the one person whom “Seipp” seemed most sorry for ever having offended was Maia’s 10th-grade journalism teacher, who had frequently clashed with mother and daughter. Finally, “Seipp” said she was probably to blame for her own illness — the “venom” she’d spewed for years was responsible for her terminal cancer.

Friends were horrified. They quickly realized that the letter was the work of an infamous character known as “Troll Dolls” who’d positioned himself as the blogger’s archenemy and bought the domain name www.cathyseipp.com years earlier (Seipp’s real Web site is www.cathyseipp.net). Troll Dolls is really Eliot Stein, a 54-year-old former online talk-show host and stand-up comedian who hadd taught Maia in a journalism class for a brief period in 2004, and who blamed Maia and Seipp for his departure from the school after only five weeks. Seipp’s friends marshaled their resources, creating an impromptu Internet chat room to make their plans, fingering Stein as the culprit, enlisting the help of a lawyer to serve him a cease-and-desist letter, and successfully lobbying Stein’s Internet host to take the Web site down permanently.

“He’s a genuinely weird dude [who wrote] a rambling, odd, mean, totally cruel series of posts ... designed to trick well-wishers, as Cathy lay dying, into reading a torrent of rage and bitterness against her,” Rob Long, an L.A. television writer and longtime friend of Seipp’s, wrote in an e-mail. “Just immensely cruel. It was easy to ignore when she was alive, but as she died it became intolerable — thousands and thousands of people wanted to reach out to Cathy and her family in the days surrounding her death, and this guy tricked, perverted and deeply hurt them. And for what? A years-old grudge?”

There was perhaps one silver lining, Seipp’s friends said. They first found Stein’s letter on March 20. Seipp died in the afternoon of March 21, never having known what Stein was saying in her name.

Legal observers say that the Seipp-Stein spat demonstrates how the Internet-using public still hasn’t figured out the boundaries of good taste and what the reasonable expectations of privacy are in a world where seemingly every other person keeps his personal thoughts in online journals that can be accessed by anyone with a computer.

“The expectation of privacy on the Internet is ludicrous from one point of view, but I don’t think there’s any bright-line rule about what you can and cannot say in a blog,” said Richard Idell, of Idell & Seitel, a San Francisco firm specializing in media and Internet law. “Whatever socially acceptable rules that may exist are still developing. You’re going to get some sharp words — that’s what’s going to happen — but when does it cross the line?”

And we can only expect to hear about more nasty feuds like Seipp’s and Stein’s being played out on Web browsers around the nation, according to Rebecca Jeschke, spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit group dedicated to maintaining free-speech and privacy rights in digital media.

“We’re definitely hearing more about these kinds of online arguments with public figures,” Jeschke said. “It does seem to be a place where people are using blogs to express themselves. They’re a reasonably new mode of communication, and people are feeling where their comfort level is.”

Even Seipp’s friends and supporters debate the meaning of Stein’s parting shot against Seipp.

“There’s no law against being a jerk,” said London-based Internet consultant Jacki Danicki. “But it’s the way in which you do it, like taking someone’s domain name to do that. And from a human-decency level, it’s not right.”

“If he truly felt he was wronged and Cathy had harmed him, then why didn’t he stand up and grow a pair and say it, instead of trying to adopt her voice?” said Mediabistro and Fishbowl L.A. blogger Kate Coe. “Most people who disagreed with Cathy had the balls to do it to her face and with their own name.”

But Luke Ford, blogger and onetime columnist on the porn business, defended Stein’s actions — even though Ford has himself been a frequent target of Stein’s attacks.

“It’s not nice, but since when was the First Amendment nice to people?” he said.

Stein is absolutely unapologetic.

And though both would be loath to admit it, he shares with Seipp at least one trait that may have led him to this point — an unwillingness to back down in the face of perceived injustice. He’s also endlessly self-aggrandizing, obviously bitter and easily worked into a frothy fury over issues that seem piddling by mainstream standards (for example, not many L.A. high-school teachers would be shocked into speechlessness by profanity). He gets especially worked up by what he sees as his persecution by Maia Lazar and Cathy Seipp.

How it Began

It started in September 2004.

Stein had just started as a journalism professor at a private school in Los Angeles called the Ribet Academy, where Maia was in 10th grade. Maia, he said, was undeniably bright and an excellent writer, and he made her editor-in-chief of the school newspaper. But things quickly went sour, and Stein ended up leaving the school in October after a dispute with Maia and her mother. According to him, he quit because of a tangential issue — the administration wanted to suspend Stein for a single day for responding to Maia on her blog before the school had formulated its official statement. (Ribet Academy said it would not comment on a former student or a former employee.) On his last day, Stein came to school dressed in a tuxedo and, class by class, told all of his students that his leaving was the fault of one particular 10th-grade girl. By all accounts, Maia became an outcast at school.

Any parent should know what happened next: Cathy Seipp fought back. And as a blogger, she naturally did it online with her trademark acid tongue, writing columns that detailed her daughter’s travails and mocked Stein as a “fat sweaty loser ... who used to have ambitions of being some kind of Internet personality.”

“I think he got off kind of lightly,” Coe said.

But Stein said some of Seipp’s comments disparaged his fitness to be a teacher and implied that his fixation on her daughter was less than wholesome.

“I am a teacher. I’m very successful as a teacher,” Stein said. “If I had a woman implying I should not be near children, you think that doesn’t deserve some sort of response?”

The blogging brawl escalated. In December 2004, Stein found out the domain name www.cathyseipp.com hadn’t been bought, so he purchased it himself under an obviously assumed name and began to fill it with anti-Seipp parodies — amateurish montages that stuck her head on the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” album cover or floating alongside other Republicans in a cartoon hell, for example.

“I’ve got an incredible sense of humor,” Stein said. “I’m an expert at Photoshop.”

When Seipp found out, she was frustrated by the bureaucratic hoops she’d have to jump to take www.cathyseipp.com from Stein under California law, which is considered to have relatively strong protections against cybersquatting. Seipp, who’d been diagnosed with lung cancer in 2002, resigned herself to Stein’s ownership of the Web site and blogged via www.cathyseipp.net instead.

“[It] means, if I remember well, paying several hundred dollars upfront to start the procedure and have a panel of experts review the claim and rule,” journalist Emmanuelle Richard, a close friend of Seipp’s, wrote in an e-mail. “It was very frustrating. She felt powerless and felt that she had to dedicate her energy and resources to her daughter and her health first.”

Seipp wasn’t alone: Stein had done it before. In 1997, a business deal with conservative radio preacher Roy Masters involving between $300 and $500 went awry, and Stein bought www.roymasters.com and turned it into a parody site with more examples of the Stein sense of humor — Masters done up as Dr. Evil from “Austin Powers,” for example. Wanting to avoid a potential long-term legal battle and bad publicity, Masters, now 79, decided to ignore Stein’s site.

“I’m not surprised at what he did this time,” Masters said. “It’s a hate addiction — once he starts he never stops. That’s how long he holds onto a grudge that doesn’t exist.”

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Why liberals get it wrong (on nearly everything!) (townhall.com, 070401)

By Kevin McCullough

Given the chance to do what is right, liberals will consistently choose otherwise.

U.S. actors John Travolta (front) and Tim Allen arrive on motorbikes for the U.K. premiere of “Wild Hogs”, in central London March 28, 2007.REUTERS/Toby Melville (BRITAIN)

They do so because they adopt a worldview that is based on “what feels good.” They follow impulses instead of moral standards. And they seem to cheer for our enemies instead of our allies. Which when you think of it seems to be a defining characteristic of someone who has lost their mind.

This week was replete with perfect examples:

# Rosie O’Donnell decided this week to throw the rest of her considerable heft (rhetorically speaking) behind the mullahs, and the crazy man in Iran. In a clip that will live in internet infamy she actually objects to calling terrorists “evil”. She took the side of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards over GPS. She then launched into conspiracy theory that the United States planned an organized destruction of World Trade 7. A theory that has already long been debunked - not by politicians - but by Popular Mechanics. On the upside - if we can merely convince her “family” (composed of people entirely unrelated to her) to vote her off, she may leave “The View” in May 2007.

# Al Gore dared to assault the intelligence of humanity by comparing the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1960’s (which his own father sought to stall) to his own pet project - global warming. Gore’s rhetoric that mankind is in control of the warming trend that is affecting seven planets in our solar system is laughable. But peddling his half-hatched theories to the genuine pain of people who endured ill-treatment only because of skin color defies seriousness.

# John Travolta, not to be outdone, felt free to lecture movie goers at the British premiere of his new movie, about the perils of global warming as well. Shortly thereafter it was discovered that as he was busy adding up some 30,000 flight miles in the past year, on his personal fleet of five airplanes, his personal carbon emissions rate stood at 800 tons; more than 100 times the average person.

# Congressional Liberals felt perfectly comfy spending nearly 48 billion of your tax dollars on pork, peanuts, and spinach over the past two weeks, but couldn’t find time to fund our soldiers before spring break. They also seem to have no opinion whatsoever about the fact that our allies are facing a serious crisis in our shared struggle against terror. And for a bonus they then turned around and increased the taxes you pay by $400,000,000,000.

# Diane Feinstein had an even tougher week because it was revealed that she and her husband were making serious dough off the war, and with her being on the Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee and all...

# Hillary Clinton had to resort to asking a philanderer to hit her campaign trail early, far in advance of when she had originally intended. Why? So that, in true keeping with her liberal mentality, she could stick the dagger in the heart of Barack Obama. The unintended result however may be coming back to haunt her in the not to distant future. Turns out even some liberals don’t like enduring Clinton’s best fund-raising technique. You and I commonly refer to it as a shakedown.

# CNN and James Carville both thought they had pulled one over on viewers, but in doing so demonstrated that they could stab a fellow liberal in the back as easily as Hillary herself. Both CNN and Carville also know and understand the importance of proper disclosure - and chose to not do so. Carville pretended to be giving an unbiased view of the Democratic primary race (even though he is on Hillary’s payroll,) and CNN pretended not to notice.

# Nancy Pelosi, following in the steps of John Kerry, Chris Dodd, and Howard Dean, is planning on going to Syria to consult with the enemy. Syria of course has been providing upwards of 80% of the suicide bombers that have killed innocent American G.I.s and Iraqi citizens in Iraq.

# A vile, liberal assault on Christians was only narrowly avoided this week, when people of strong faith objected to the use of Holy Week as a time to mock Jesus Christ.

# Omar Mohammadi, an ACLU attorney, decided to take up the case of the six flying Imams, and to file a lawsuit against the passengers on the airplane who the Imams originally scared in the first place.

# Liberals in New York City are crying out that Ronell Wilson - who was convicted of killing two NYPD police officers this week - not receive the death penalty. Wilson was the first person to be sentenced to death in New York in fifty years. Wilson was convicted of killing the officers “execution style.”

# The liberal mainstream media chose to willfully misrepresent the comments of Dr. James Dobson as it pertained to Fred Thompson running for President.

# And socially liberal Rudy Giuliani was for his wife being part of presidential cabinet meetings, before he was against it.

For sake of time I did not complete an exhaustive list from this past week, only the sampling listed above. But one thing becomes clear as you click from story to story, liberal thinking, philosophy, and policies will destroy our nation.

The heart stopping thing about 2007 is how boldly the immoral leftists will make these naked power grabs.

From the taking of our money that we work hard to earn and use to provide for our loved ones - to the direct communication, sympathy, and willingness to give the benefit of the doubt to those who wish to kill us - liberals are attempting to construct a society that few of us should wish to live in. Should they be left to their own devices they will rig the system to their own benefit and only the voices of “We the People” are able to stop them.

Liberals are almost always wrong, on nearly everything, and to not recognize it accelerates our own, painful, and dramatic destruction.

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“Why Liberals Revile the Risen Christ” (townhall.com, 070409)

By Kevin McCullough

Liberals detest the historical fact that Jesus Christ arose from the dead.

In doing so they betray the fact, that while they may attempt to embrace the Son of God as an icon of compassion, they have little actual intellectually honest use for the message or meaning of what He represented while on the earth. This rejection, hate, and rebellion against God neither lessens His reality, nor justifies their actions, attitudes, and behaviors in this life.

The worldview of modern liberalism is dependent upon a central truth- that God is either nonexistent or irrelevant. His mere existence is a condemnation of their thinking, and His involvement in mankind’s affairs guarantees their conviction in the court of absolute morality.

As a writer and broadcaster I have never been shy to point to my belief - not just in the God who created me, but also in His Son. In referring to His reality in my life liberals have wrongly presumed that I fancy myself speaking “for God,” or “putting words in His mouth.” I have been criticized for “pretending to know the mind and heart of God” more times than I can count. But such criticisms are misguided for the substance of the claims is false. I do not now, nor have ever presumed to speak on God’s behalf. He does not now, nor has He ever needed my assistance to carry His message. No argument that I have ever put into print was ever based on my self-generated view of what God thinks.

Liberals never cared about the integrity of such claims to begin with. Ultimately their battle has never been with a single thing that I’ve written, spoken, or broadcast. Rather the struggles within their own conscience, soul, and experience are against the truth that my assumptions rest upon. Most notably that Jesus Christ was dead but is no longer.

If Jesus Christ had stayed buried, the issue of His divine nature would have ended with Him. Yet if he did in fact rise, if he did in fact defy death, and constitute a mockery of sin, Satan, and his fallen angels - then that miraculous act alone would command the attention of the human experience. As it should!

If Jesus Christ was able to do what no other being has ever done - then the argument over whether God exists is concluded, and if God exists then his mere existence demands not merely our attention but our obedience. And if our obedience draws us to belief in Christ’s completed death, burial, and resurrection then we obtain permanent relationship with Him. This relationship then grants us life everlasting - and we in response should live our lives based on gratitude for God’s gift of life to us.

Liberals dislike words like “obedience” they are only able to associate its meaning to something equivalent to slavery. Yet when you consider what obedience is designed to encourage it is anything but. Would a parent think it unreasonable for a child to obey their instruction when the child is reaching for the hot stove, about to dart out into oncoming traffic, or jump into a body of water without the skills to swim? That instruction is designed to protect, save, and even enhance the child’s life. Instructing our children to “study hard, make good grades, and always be prepared to do your best” could in some sense be seen as “slavery to an outdated ideal” but in reality it enables that same child to achieve - sometimes more than even they believe they are capable.

Liberals will attempt to dispute the premise of my claims and refer to their own personal, deep, and life long admiration of Jesus as proof. This is exactly the type of utilitarian relationship godless liberals deceive themselves with. They will speak in glowing terms of how Jesus fed those who were hungry, but will ignore how he instructed those he fed to live righteously. With contempt in their voice they will remind you that Jesus loved the poor, but will ignore His guidance on stewardship and personal responsibility. Liberals will scream shouts of hypocrisy about Jesus’ “love for creation” in their demands to drive smaller cars, but ignore His attribute of complete sovereignty which oversees the cycles and the seasons of not just this planet but of all the created solar systems.

Liberals will also insist most assuredly that Jesus would never reduce modern sexual freedoms to old fashioned ideas of morality. They would argue that he would have (and therefore we must) embrace “love for all of man’s sexual expression.” Yet they purposefully remain blinded to the fact that Jesus said to the adulterous woman who was drowning in “sexual expression” to “GO and sin no more.”

If liberals have use for Jesus it is because of a distorted view of His compassion, which they perceive to be softness, and an obliviousness to His strength - which they now view as hateful.

Yet it need not be this way, for if the Son of God can endure temptation, be nailed to a cross, have his bones crushed and broken, be buried for three days -and still rise again, then truly is their any burden to heavy for Him to help you face?

Jesus Christ rose from the dead, fully God, fully righteous, and still wholly in control.

We are called to obey the voice of His Holy Spirit, believe in Him, and be given a new life. As we do - it will impact how we think, the actions we commit to, and the behaviors we engage in. These changes threaten the belief system of liberals who are steadfastly committed to the muck and the mire they now live in. Sin and selfishness often cause blindness.

Liberals like to embrace a compassionate but dead Jesus, they also revile the holy and risen Christ. Both of which are unfortunate.

For in trusting the risen Savior, you can know that His sovereignty is your safety net, His instruction is for your benefit, and His guidance is your gift of grace.

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Liberalism 101 (townhall.com, 070424)

By David Strom

Ever notice how the left’s solution to all the world’s ills is to create a bureaucracy?

The larger the better. The more government employees, the better.

Let’s take the example of providing transportation for people who can’t or don’t drive cars. As we all know, no matter how wealthy we become as a society or even as individuals, there will always be a few people who need help getting around because of economic circumstances, illness, or disability. Or who just plain can’t drive.

The solution that liberals have come up with is stunning in its scope: the building and subsidization of enormous, unwieldy, unproductive, and largely unsatisfying transit systems. If you ever for a moment think you might like government-run health care, take a look at the government-run transportation

system and you will foreswear ever toying with the idea again.

Transit is one of the greatest failure stories in America, on par with the welfare system prior to the reforms of 1996. Even as subsidies have skyrocketed, transit’s share of the transportation market has been steadily diminishing for decades. By any measure, productivity in transit has been declining while the rest of the economy has become much more efficient.

And yet, like welfare before it, transit (government-run transportation) is one of the most cherished programs of the left. If you ever feel the need to be compared to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, suggest the elimination of government-run transportation systems.

Let me give you an example from the area I know and love best: the Twin Cities metropolitan region here in Minnesota. We are blessed to have a regional government, unelected, of course, called the Metropolitan Council. Originally created to efficiently provide sewer and water service to the growing metropolitan area and coordinate planning among the zillion sovereign governments in the area, it has morphed into an unelected government spending over $600 million in tax dollars a year.

Of this, the Metropolitan Council spends over $300 million per year on providing transit services for basically Minneapolis and St Paul (most suburbs have opted out of the MetroTransit system)—and yet transit has a market share hovering around 2% of trips.

To put that in perspective, total State and Federal spending for all roads in Minnesota for the same year was $1.6 billion.

In other words, in order to provide about 2% of the trips for Minneapolis and St Paul—the Metropolitan Council consumed 19% of available money for the entire state. For most of us, that looks like a pretty bad deal, right? Spending more than 10 times as much per trip compared to road funding.

Worse yet, these trips can only take place at the government’s direction. You have to show up where they want you, go where they want to take you, and use it when they want to provide it. If there is a “choice” involved here, it’s almost entirely the bureaucracy’s.

But for a liberal, that’s a pretty good deal indeed.

Why? It’s pretty simple really. If what you are interested in is maximizing the number of government jobs and the number of people dependent upon government, transit spending is pretty darned effective. Compared to road funding, in fact, you wind up with many more government employees per dollar spent, and they are almost all permanent employees with union contracts.

And unlike roads, your clients are almost all under your thumb. While automobile drivers tend to go where they want when they want to, and have innumerable alternatives when you close a road or tunnel, transit riders are almost completely dependent. You can tell them where they can go, when they can do it, and even minor changes in bus routes or times can wreak havoc on countless lives.

And you can do all this while appearing to be as virtuous as an angel—after all, you are providing a service to people who would generally be helpless without it. They will even vote regularly to expand your service in the hope that more money will improve it.

Very few cities in America depend upon transit systems in any real sense, and each of those is characterized by tremendous density caused almost unheard-of in any 20th or 21st Century city. New York, Boston, and San Francisco come to mind. In these few cities transit can be seen as a public utility similar to roads—adding substantially to the vital transportation infrastructure necessary for any modern economy.

But for the vast majority of cities, such as Minneapolis and St. Paul, a government-run transportation system is a ridiculous government-employment scheme. Almost all the benefits of the system accrue to a small number of people, and almost all of those are the providers of the service, not the recipients.

In the real world, this system would get scrapped almost immediately, but in the loony world of liberals this is a huge success story. Understand why, and you understand the liberal mind.

In the liberal world, more government employees per dollar spent means more potential voters per tax dollar collected, because government employees are almost always liberals. They are paid to be, after all. And the more inefficient the system, the more liberals employed. And it is easy enough to get those liberals to support more spending for lousy government services, because it means more money in their pocket.

Best of all, because the service is lousy you can always convince everyone else that the system needs more money in order to provide the service better and to more people.

In the liberal world, inefficiency in government is a good thing. It means more government employees, probably unionized. It means more money going through their hands. It means more and more people under their control. What’s not to like?

Never, ever believe a liberal or moderate when they say that government services could be better if we just reformed the system; the liberal is lying, and the moderate is delusional. Government bureaucracies almost always have interests fundamentally in conflict with the people they supposedly serve. Individuals are almost always better off if they can provide for themselves or go into the competitive market to get a service, rather than depend upon government. Bureaucracies are always better off the more people who depend upon them and lack alternatives.

Getting back to transit: here in the Twin Cities we spend almost $2,500/year per daily transit rider, providing truly lousy service. What if we provided means-tested transportation vouchers to truly needy clients? I’d bet a million dollars that the system would be vastly better than what we have now.

It’ll never happen, of course. Because liberals won’t let it. They like inefficient government because it serves their needs well. That’s why we need to fight them every day and in every way we possibly can.

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10 Differences between Conservatives And Liberals (townhall.com, 070427)

By John Hawkins

Conservatives and liberals approach almost every issue with completely different philosophies, underlying assumptions, and methods. That’s why it’s so hard to find genuine compromise between conservatism and liberalism — because not only are liberals almost always wrong, their solutions almost always make things worse.

With that in mind, let me take a few moments to explain some of the key differences between liberals and conservative to you.

Bonus) Conservatives believe that judges should act like umpires instead of legislating from the bench. That means that judges should determine whether laws are permissible under the Constitution and settle debates about the meaning of laws, not impose their will based on their ideological leanings. Liberals view judges as a backdoor method of getting unpopular left-leaning legislation passed. They don’t want umpires, they want political partisans in black robes who will side with them first and then come up with a rationale to explain it.

10) Conservatives believe that individual Americans have a right to defend themselves and their families with guns and that right cannot be taken away by any method short of a Constitutional Amendment, which conservatives would oppose. Liberals believe by taking arms away from law abiding citizens, they can prevent criminals, who aren’t going to abide by gun control laws, from using guns in the commission of crimes.

9) Conservatives believe that we should live in a color blind society where every individual is judged on the content of his character and the merits of his actions. On the other hand, liberals believe that it’s ok to discriminate based on race as long as it primarily benefits minority groups.

8) Conservatives are capitalists and believe that entrepreneurs who amass great wealth through their own efforts are good for the country and shouldn’t be punished for being successful. Liberals are socialists who view successful business owners as people who cheated the system somehow or got lucky. That’s why they don’t respect high achievers and see them as little more than piggy banks for their programs.

7) Conservatives believe that abortion ends the life of an innocent child and since we believe that infanticide is wrong, we oppose abortion. Most liberals, despite what they’ll tell you, believe that abortion ends the life of an innocent child, but they prefer killing the baby to inconveniencing the mother.

6) Conservatives believe in confronting and defeating enemies of the United States before they can harm American citizens. Liberals believe in using law enforcement measures to deal with terrorism, which means that they feel we should allow terrorists to train, plan, and actually attempt to kill Americans before we try to arrest them — as if you can just send the police around to pick up a terrorist mastermind hiding in Iran or the wilds of Pakistan.

5) Conservatives, but not necessarily Republicans (which is unfortunate), believe it’s vitally important to the future of the country to reduce the size of government, keep taxes low, balance the budget, and get this country out of debt. Liberals, and Democrats for that matter, believe in big government, high taxes, and they have never met a new spending program they didn’t like, whether we will have to go into debt to pay for it or not.

4) Conservatives believe that government, by its very nature, tends to be inefficient, incompetent, wasteful, and power hungry. That’s why we believe that the government that governs least, governs best. Liberals think that the solution to every problem is another government program. Even when those new programs create new problems, often worse than the ones that were being fixed in the first place, the solution is always....you guessed it, another government program.

3) Conservatives are patriotic, believe that America is a great nation, and are primarily interested in looking out for the good of the country. That’s why we believe in “American exceptionalism” and “America first.” Liberals are internationalists who are more concerned about what Europeans think of us and staying in the good graces of the corrupt bureaucrats who control the UN than looking out for the best interests of this nation.

2) Conservatives, most of them anyway, believe in God and think that the Constitution has been twisted by liberal judges to illegitimately try to purge Christianity from the public square. We also believe, most of us anyway, that this country has been successful in large part because it is a good, Christian nation and if our country ever turns away from the Lord, it will cease to prosper. Liberals, most of them anyway, are hostile to Christianity. That’s why, whether you’re talking about a school play at Christmas time, a judge putting the Ten Commandments on the wall of his court, or a store employee saying “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays,” liberals are dedicated to driving reminders of Christianity from polite society.

1) Conservatives believe in pursuing policies because they’re pragmatic and because they work. Liberals believe in pursuing policies because they’re “nice” and make them feel good. Whether the policies they’re advocating actually work or not is of secondary importance to them.

==============================

10 More Differences Between Liberals And Conservatives (townhall.com, 070504)

By John Hawkins

Last week, people seemed to really enjoy reading about 10 Differences between Conservatives And Liberals. So, this week, I thought it might be a good idea to point out 10 more issues about which conservatives are right and liberals are wrong.

10) Conservatives believe that the United Nations is a corrupt, anti-American, anti-Semitic talking shop that is largely hostile to American interests and is too incompetent to be much of use in areas where it’s not. Liberals are internationalists who still have confidence in the UN. Moreover, they don’t seem to be overly concerned about signing our country on to international schemes that are slanted against us, or about the fact that nations that are largely hostile to our interests like China, France, and Russia have a veto over any significant action that the UN can take.

9) Conservatives believe that marriage is one of the most crucial building blocks of a healthy society, and that anything that weakens the institution has the potential to do enormous harm to our country over the long haul. That’s why we believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman. Liberals support gay marriage, and appear completely unconcerned about the long-term damage that glibly toying with something as important as marriage could do to our country.

8) Conservatives believe that companies should be taxed and regulated, but that the government has to be very cautious about adding new burdens on business. Businesses provide jobs, health care for many Americans, and enormous amounts of tax revenue, all of which could be jeopardized if we go overboard with taxes and regulations, thereby killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Liberals, on the other hand, being socialists at heart, have seldom seen a tax, new regulation, or expense that they would hesitate to impose on businesses, despite the potential for damaging our economy.

7) Conservatives have kept an open mind about global warming, but we have seen little hard proof that mankind is responsible for the small, roughly 1 degree global temperature increase over the last century. Saying that it is “scientific consensus” that mankind is causing global warming means little when more than 17,100 American scientists disagree. Liberals want to impose massive regulatory schemes that would increase taxes, cost millions of jobs, and cause fuel prices to skyrocket even though most environmentalists acknowledge that Kyoto and the carbon credit trading schemes that have been put forth wouldn’t make a huge dent in the amount of greenhouse gasses produced by mankind.

6) Conservatives believe that encouraging poor people to be dependent on the government is counterproductive. Instead, we believe that by keeping taxes low, the economy strong, and by supporting churches and charities, we can create an environment that allows the poor to help themselves. Liberals believe in keeping poor people as dependent on the government as possible because people who are reliant on the government for their sustenance tend to vote for the political party that will give them the biggest handout.

5) Conservatives may not be happy with how the war in Iraq has gone so far, but we believe that pulling out before the Iraqi government can defend itself from attack would lead to a nightmare scenario that has the potential to produce millions of dead Iraqis, a massive spike in worldwide oil costs, and an increase in terrorism after Al-Qaeda declares victory over the United States. Liberals understand the consequences for pulling out of Iraq too quickly just as well as conservatives, but they would prefer to see America lose the war in Iraq, despite the horrible consequences, because they believe it would benefit them politically.

4) Conservatives believe that the more distant the government gets from the constituents it serves, the worse it performs. That’s why, if it’s absolutely necessary that government become involved in an issue, it’s usually better for state and local governments to become involved instead of the Federal Government.

3) Conservatives believe in keeping taxes low because when taxes get high, they stifle economic growth and expansion; because it’s hard to justify giving the government more money when it wastes so much now, and because people should get to keep as much of their hard earned money as possible. Liberals prefer high taxes because it gives them more money that they can fritter away on big government programs and social engineering projects.

2) Conservatives believe that the market can better allocate resources than the government and that usually, when you see problems with the market — for example gas shortages or the exploding cost of health care — government interference with the workings of the market is at the root of it. Liberals have never seen a part of the economy that they wouldn’t prefer to socialize and put under government control, despite the fact that anything run by the government tends to be far slower, more inefficient, and more expensive than anything run by private industry.

1) Conservatives believe that America has been and continues to be the greatest force for good in the world today. As a nation, we do more to promote freedom, help those who need it, and stand up for what’s right than any other dozen nations combined. Liberals, on the other hand, always find a way to blame America first. Nobody, no enemy past, present, or future, will ever top American liberals when it comes to generating anti-American propaganda.

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Leftist Thought Control (townhall.com, 070504)

By David Limbaugh

The political left, which holds itself as progressive, rational and fact-based, is becoming an enemy of academic inquiry, and a practitioner of thought control on a wide variety of issues. Increasingly, from the left’s perspective, there is just one acceptable viewpoint.

Consider the subjects of evolution, global warming, special rights for homosexuals and abstinence education. Consider efforts of the left to silence conservative talk radio. Consider the mainstream media’s arrogant denial of its transparent liberal bias, pronouncing itself to be above politics and inherently objective and its critics somehow skewed.

Consider the leftist refrain that red-state conservatives do not merely possess a different worldview, but are not part of the “reality-based community.” Consider the near monolithic liberalism and secularism of our university faculties.

The U.S. House is expected to pass a landmark federal law that would expand hate crimes legislation to include attacks against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens. Opponents argue that it’s conceivable under the bill that if a rabbi, priest or pastor reads to his congregation a passage from the Bible condemning homosexuality, he could be considered an accomplice to any parishioner who later commits a “hate crime” against a homosexual.

Various activists are behind legislation that would prohibit public schools from continuing to teach Abstinence Until Marriage (AUM) in North Carolina and would force them to teach comprehensive sex education.

In my book “Persecution” I described the trials of a university professor who was disciplined for making available, but not mandating, materials in her class that deviated from the dogma of homosexual activists. One school administrator, in defending the school’s chilling action said, “We cannot tolerate the intolerable.”

Global warming alarmists tell us there is an overwhelming consensus on the issue and further debate is pointless. Yet there are a significant number of genuine dissenters in the relevant disciplines. Many more would doubtlessly emerge from the closet but for the potential financial consequences that might ensue. Plus, many of those counted as experts by the alarmists are scientists with no appreciable expertise in the field. Despite arguably insufficient data and questionable techniques to measure climate change historically, not to mention questions concerning the extent of man-made warming, the global warming zealots brook no dissent. They ridicule and castigate anyone, including those every bit as credentialed as they are, who refuses to imbibe their Kool-aid.

Their uncompromising certainty demonstrates staggering hubris, especially considering the track record of many scientists who have issued unequivocal conclusions, for example, in the health field, only to retract them a few short years later.

By pronouncing an end to debate — just because they say so — they betray the very principles they claim to uphold: an adherence to scientific inquiry and a commitment to facts and reason in favor of ideologically and politically driven conclusions.

Tom Bethell, in his “Politically Incorrect Guide to Science,” quotes author Michael Crichton as saying that consensus science “is an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.”

We are witnessing a similar phenomenon on the subject of evolution versus intelligent design. Evolutionist Richard Dawkins, explains Bethel, believes that evolution is not a debatable topic. “I’m concerned about implying that there is some sort of scientific argument going on,” said Dawkins. “There’s not.” Meanwhile the Intelligent Design movement is gathering courageous and impressive adherents who would debate the notion that no debate is going on.

But when these recalcitrant upstarts refuse to toe the line, they sometimes pay the price. Bethell tells of the publication by the peer-reviewed “Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington” of an article on the Cambrian Explosion by the Discovery Institute’s Steven Meyer. Though Meyer relied on the work of respected scientists in the article, its subject matter did not sit well with the “consensus” gods. Richard Stenberg, the editor of the journal, was virtually accused of being a religious fundamentalist and a right-winger for publishing the piece. He was required to “surrender his office and keys to the department floor, denying him access to the specimen collections he needed.” And, according to Bethel, “A senior Smithsonian scientist complained that publication of the article ‘made us into the laughing stock of the world, even is this kind of rubbish sells well in backwoods USA.’ Notice,” wrote Bethel, “it was not the substantive claims about the Cambrian Explosion that caused such fury, it was their publication in a peer-reviewed journal.”

If this trend continues, it’s hard to imagine what we’ll see in next decade. How the left can consider itself fair and open-minded in view of such developments is beyond comprehension.

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What is it with Jews and guns? (townhall.com, 070504)

By Burt Prelutsky

The other day, a friend of mine asked me why I thought those on the left hate guns so much. My initial reaction was to acknowledge that I have a tough time getting a handle on anything liberals say or think or do. It all seems wacky to me.

What’s more, I have no idea who compiles their playbook, although we are quite aware that they have one. It’s where they get all their talking points. For instance, we know that liberals favor affirmative action, although at the same time we also know they like to say that where race is concerned, they’re the ones who are colorblind. They also endorse bilingual education for Latinos even though it’s a handicap that the youngsters have a tough time overcoming, and may explain why such a depressingly small percent of them hang around high school long enough to graduate.

We know that leftists oppose capital punishment although I, for one, have never heard a compelling argument why a person who takes one or more lives in cold blood should be spared the ultimate punishment.

Furthermore, liberals seem to believe that same-sex marriages, abortions on demand, separation of church and state, not to mention open borders, are all covered somewhere in the U.S. Constitution. But if we’re going to be honest, one can see why liberals, who are far more prone than conservatives to forsake logic for emotion, would feel as they do about some of these issues.

As I say, I don’t know who makes their decisions. But it hardly matters if it’s a committee consisting of Bill Clinton, James Carville, Howard Dean, Chris Matthews, Nancy Pelosi, Jesse Jackson, Jimmy Carter, Charles Rangel, Barbara Boxer, Keith Olbermann, Michael Moore and Bozo the Clown, who set the agenda or it’s simply the editorial board of the New York Times. The thing is, they’re in perfect agreement that if only they got to make and enforce all the rules, this would be a far better world.

But why are those on the left so vehemently opposed to decent, law-abiding citizens owning guns? After all, most people — unlike Hollywood celebrities — can not afford to surround themselves with armed bodyguards. And as dedicated as the police may be to protect and serve, they’re usually not around at the very moment your life is being threatened. Besides, if liberals had their way and the Second Amendment was repealed, the only people in America with guns would be cops, criminals and the military. Interestingly, of those particular groups, criminals are the ones liberals hate the least.

Frankly, having given it some thought, I believe the reason that the Left hates guns so much is because of us Jews. With very few exceptions, we are terribly squeamish around firearms. The fear is totally irrational. It’s not just that we think someone will shoot us with our own gats, but that the guns, themselves, are anti-Semites, and will kill us of their own accord.

Sadly, it’s more than that. They also fear those Americans whom they most closely associate with gun ownership; namely, southern Christians.

Even though America is the most tolerant nation on earth, Jews tend to think if terrible things happened to their ancestors in 15th century Spain and 19th century Russia and 20th century Nazi Germany, it can and will happen here. It’s a form of paranoia. But it’s a very strange form. For as we all know, this is a nation of 300 million. So, wouldn’t you think a minority numbering a mere five million, and in constant fear of pogroms, would spend as much time as possible on the firing range?

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Liberals don’t get the joke, but they’ll try to get the one who made it (townhall.com, 070509)

By Jon Sanders

The Roman satirist Juvenal famously quipped “Difficile est saturam non scibere” — it’s difficult not to write satire. It was difficult nearly two millennia ago, and it still is today. What seems even more difficult now, however, is for the perennially offended in the media and academe to understand satire. Just ask Rush Limbaugh and Mike Adams.

Limbaugh and Adams have recently weathered ill-conceived attacks on their parodies, Limbaugh’s song “Barack, the Magic Negro” and Adams’ article supposedly advocating terrorism against gay bath houses in San Francisco. Opportunistic critics acted as if Limbaugh and Adams were seriously promoting racism and mass murder, when the truth was, both were turning to satire to denounce racism and mass murder.

One wonders, reading the overreactions to and deliberate misreadings of satire in today’s climate, whether Jonathan Swift’s publicist would have just resigned or tried to defend his client from reports that he advocated cooking kids in stews (as opposed, presumably, to harvesting their stem cells).

There is a simple but effective test of satire, one that hails back to Aristotle. “Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor,” he said, “for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.”

Note that the great logician pinpointed a very compelling reason for using humor: it is the best test of ideas. Humor is a challenge to the very core of an idea — its gravity, its seriousness. Laughter demands a response.

As Aristotle explains, an idea that cannot withstand mockery is suspicious. You shouldn’t trust it. Those who cannot tolerate jokes cracked at their ideology’s expense betray its weakness. Weak ideologies require something other than citizens’ shared ideals and support to maintain their power; frequently they resort to the power of the gun. It’s no coincidence that the Khmer Rouge and the Taliban banned laughter, or that citizens of Soviet Russia had to tell each other jokes behind their hands, hiding in bathrooms with the water running.

Also note that Aristotle provided a way to test the humor used to try an idea. It’s not enough that there is a joke. The joke must be defensible; i.e., it must “bear serious examination.” In other words, humor or satire should present a serious challenge to the idea, a challenge that can be investigated in its own right. If the humor fails to have a serious basis, it’s “false wit.” The satirist should therefore be able to defend his jest.

Back to Limbaugh and Adams. Controversy was slow in finding Limbaugh’s months-old spoof, but it has been growing recently. On Monday, a TV morning show on KOVR CBS-13 in Sacramento, Calif., suggested that the song was racist and implied that it might even be responsible for putting Obama in mortal danger. On his show that day, Limbaugh proved the parody wasn’t false wit.

In a line-by-line defense of the song, Limbaugh showed it spoofs the absurd problems Obama’s candidacy poses to race-obsessed Democrats. Its lyrics make clear that its provocative title and some material hail from David Ehrenstein’s March 19 Los Angeles Times article, “Obama, the ‘Magic Negro.’” He showed how other portions were inspired by the Obama/Sharpton feud and the steady drip of media reports doubting whether Obama is “black enough.”

In short order, Limbaugh left no room for doubt that the racism his song revealed was racism from the political Left. If media members and liberals truly find it objectionable, as their reaction to Limbaugh’s parody suggests, they know where it originates. Dare they root it out?

In contrast with the slow burn of Limbaugh’s parody, Adams’ article drew immediate rebuke from academics and leftists at home and abroad. They were aghast that an American professor would promote genocide, mass murder, and terrorist training. People representing the European Human Rights Council sent angry missives to Adams hotly denouncing his satire and threatening to take actions against him and his university over it. Even in his own university’s newspaper, the UNC-Wilmington Seahawk, Adams was accused of intent “to incite violence, hatred and bigotry” and said to be launching “global war on homosexuality.”

Adams was also able to prove his humor wasn’t false wit. In his responses, he showed how his column’s offensive ideas were drawn, point by point, from the web site operated by another American professor, Kent State’s Dr. Julio Pino. Pino’s site described itself as a “jihadist news service ... provid[ing] battle dispatches, training manuals, and jihad videos to our brothers worldwide” and openly proclaimed “In the Name of OBL. 2007: The Year of Islamic Victory.” Adams had been in the midst of a series of articles on Pino, but the university was defending him and academe at large wasn’t interested.

Adams’ spoof shattered the indifference to advocacy of mass murder and terrorist training that his previous columns had encountered. He proved that academics and the international Left were not deaf to those truly horrific ideas, and he showed whose ideas they were.

Incidentally, this difficulty with understanding satire isn’t universal. Both the Seahawk and KOVR ran polls of their audiences to see if they shared their misreadings of the parodies. Both were duly disappointed. At last check, 86% of respondents to a Seahawk poll about Adams’ column thought it was “humorous” and didn’t “go too far,” and 95% of respondents to the KOVR poll disagreed that “Rush Limbaugh’s song ‘Barack the Magic Negro’ is racist.”

At least for audiences familiar with Adams and Limbaugh’s occasional satire, understanding them is not so difficile after all.

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Angry Left: Indignation becomes a way of life. (National Review Online, 070515)

By Thomas Sowell

That people on the political Left have a certain set of opinions, just as people do in other parts of the ideological spectrum, is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is how often the opinions of those on the left are accompanied by hostility and even hatred.

Particular issues can arouse passions here and there for anyone with any political views. But, for many on the left, indignation is not a sometime thing. It is a way of life.

How often have you seen conservatives or libertarians take to the streets, shouting angry slogans? How often have conservative students on campus shouted down a visiting speaker or rioted to prevent the visitor from speaking at all?

The source of the anger of liberals, “progressives,” or radicals is by no means readily apparent. The targets of their anger have included people who are non-confrontational or even genial, such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

It is hard to think of a time when Karl Rove or Dick Cheney has even raised his voice, but they are hated like the devil incarnate.

There doesn’t even have to be any identifiable individual to arouse the ire of the Left. “Tax cuts for the rich” is more than a political slogan. It is incitement to anger.

All sorts of people can have all sorts of beliefs about what tax rates are best from various points of view. But how can people work themselves into a lather over the fact that some taxpayers are able to keep more of the money they earned, instead of turning it over to politicians to dispense in ways calculated to get themselves reelected?

The angry left has no time to spend even considering the argument that what they call “tax cuts for the rich” are in fact tax cuts for the economy.

Nor is the idea new that tax cuts can sometimes spur economic growth, resulting in more jobs for workers and higher earnings for business, leading to more tax revenue for the government.

A highly regarded economist once observed that “taxation may be so high as to defeat its object,” so that sometimes “a reduction of taxation will run a better chance, than an increase, of balancing the Budget.”

Who said that? Milton Friedman? Arthur Laffer? No. It was said in 1933 by John Maynard Keynes, a liberal icon.

Lower tax rates have led to higher tax revenues many times, both before and since Keynes’s statement — the Kennedy tax cuts in the 1960s, the Reagan tax cuts in the 1980s, and the recent Bush tax cuts that have led to record high tax revenues this April.

Budget deficits have often resulted from runaway spending but seldom from reduced tax rates.

Those on the other side may have different arguments. However, the question here is not why the Left has different arguments, but why there is such anger.

Often it is an exercise in futility even to seek to find a principle behind the anger. For example, the Left’s obsession with the high incomes of corporate executives never seems to extend to equally high — or higher — incomes of professional athletes, entertainers, or best-selling authors like Danielle Steel.

If the reason for the anger is a feeling that corporate CEOs are overpaid for their contributions, then there should be even more anger at people who get even more money for doing absolutely nothing, because they have inherited fortunes.

Yet how often has the left gotten worked up into high dudgeon over those who inherited the Rockefeller, Roosevelt, or Kennedy fortunes? Even spoiled heirs like Paris Hilton don’t really seem to set them off.

If it is hard to find a principle behind what angers the Left, it is not equally hard to find an attitude.

Their greatest anger seems to be directed at people and things that thwart or undermine the social vision of the Left, the political melodrama starring the left as saviors of the poor, the environment, and other busybody tasks that they have taken on.

It seems to be the threat to their egos that they hate. And nothing is more of a threat to their desire to run other people’s lives than the free market and its defenders.

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One Crazy Party: The paranoid style in American liberalism. (National Review Online, 070516)

By Jonah Goldberg

Most fair-minded readers will no doubt take me at my word when I say that a majority of Democrats in this country are out of their gourds.

But, on the off chance that a few cynics won’t take my word for it, I offer you data. Rasmussen Reports, the public opinion outfit, recently asked voters whether President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks beforehand. The findings? Well, here’s how the research firm put it: “Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five% of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know and 26% are not sure.”

So, one in three Democrats believe that Bush was in on it somehow, and a majority of Democrats either believe that Bush knew about the attacks in advance or can’t quite make up their minds.

There are only three ways to respond to this finding: It’s absolutely true, in which case the paranoid style of American liberalism has reached a fevered crescendo. Or, option B, it’s not true, and we can stop paying attention to these kinds of polls. Or there’s option C — it’s a little of both.

My vote is for C. But before we get there, we should work through the ramifications of A and B.

We don’t know what kind of motive respondents had in mind for Bush, but the most common version has Bush craftily enabling a terror attack as a way to whip up support for his foreign policy without too many questions.

The problem with rebutting this sort of allegation is that there are too many reasons why it’s so stupid. It’s like trying to explain to a four-year-old why Superman isn’t real. You can spend all day talking about how kryptonite just wouldn’t work that way. Or you can just say, “It’s make-believe.”

Similarly, why try to explain that it’s implausible that Bush was evil enough to let this happen — and clever enough to get away with it — yet incapable either morally or intellectually of doing it again? After all, if he’s such a villainous super-genius to have paved the way for 9/11 without getting caught, why stop there? Democrats constantly insinuate that Bush plays politics with terror warnings on the assumption that the higher the terror level, the more support Bush has. Well, a couple of more 9/11s and Dick Cheney will finally be able to get that shiny Bill of Rights shredder he always wanted.

And, if Bush — whom Democrats insist is a moron — is clever enough to green-light one 9/11, why is Iraq such a blunder? Surely a James Bond villain like Bush would just plant some WMDs?

No, the right response to the Rosie O’Donnell wing of the Democratic party is, “It’s just make-believe.” But if they really believe it, then liberals must stop calling themselves the “reality-based” party and stop objecting to the suggestion that they have a problem with being called anti-American. Because when 61% of Democrats polled consider it plausible or certain that the U.S. government would let this happen, well, “blame America first” doesn’t really begin to cover it, does it?

So then there’s option B — the poll is just wrong. This is quite plausible. Indeed, the poll is surely partly wrong. Many Democrats are probably just saying that Bush is incompetent or that he failed to connect the dots or that they’re just answering the question in a fit of pique. I’m game for option B. But if we’re going to throw this poll away, liberals need to offer the same benefit of the doubt when it comes to data that are more convenient for them. For example, liberals have been dining out on polls showing that Fox News viewers, or Republicans generally, are more likely to believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Now, however flimsy, tendentious, equivocal, or sparse you may think the evidence that Hussein had a hand in 9/11 may be, it’s ironclad compared with the nugatory proof that Bush somehow permitted or condoned those attacks.

And then there’s option C, which is most assuredly the reality. The poll is partly wrong or misleading, but it’s also partly right and accurate. So maybe it’s not one in three Democrats suffering from paranoid delusions. Maybe it’s only one in five, or one in ten. In other words, the problem isn’t as profound as the poll makes it sound. But that doesn’t mean the Democratic party doesn’t have a serious problem.

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Don’t Be So Sure: Presumptions on the Left. (National Review Online, 070516)

By Thomas Sowell

Radically different conclusions about a whole range of issues have been common for centuries. Many have tried to explain these differences by differences in conflicting economic interests. Others, like John Maynard Keynes, have argued that ideas — even intellectually discredited ideas that political leaders still believe in — trump economic interests.

My own view is that differences in bedrock assumptions underlying ideas play a major role in determining how people differ in what policies, principles, or ideologies they favor.

If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one% of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism, and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political Left.

If no one has even one% of the knowledge currently available, not counting the vast amounts of knowledge yet to be discovered, the imposition from the top of the notions favored by elites convinced of their own superior knowledge and virtue is a formula for disaster.

Sometimes it is economic disaster, which central planning turned out to be in so many countries around the world that even most governments run by socialists and Communists began freeing up their markets by the end of the 20th century.

That is when the economies of China and India, for example, began having rapidly increasing growth rates.

But economic disasters, important as they are, have not been the worst consequences of people with less than one% of the world’s knowledge superimposing the ideas prevailing in elite circles on those subject to their power — that is, on the people who together have the other 99% of knowledge.

Millions of human beings died of starvation, and of diseases related to severe malnutrition, when the economic ideas of Stalin in the Soviet Union and Mao in China were inflicted on the population living — and dying — under their iron rule.

In both cases, the deaths exceeded the deaths caused by Hitler’s genocide, which was also a consequence of ignorant presumptions by those with totalitarian power.

Many on the left may protest that they do not believe in the ideas or the political systems that prevailed under Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. No doubt that is true.

Yet what the political Left, even in democratic countries, share is the notion that knowledgeable and virtuous people like themselves have both a right and a duty to use the power of government to impose their superior knowledge and virtue on others.

They may not impose their presumptions wholesale, like the totalitarians, but retail in innumerable restrictions, ranging from economic and nanny state regulations to “hate-speech” laws.

If no one has even one% of all the knowledge in a society, then it is crucial that the other 99% of knowledge — scattered in tiny and individually unimpressive amounts among the population at large — be allowed the freedom to be used in working out mutual accommodations among the people themselves.

These innumerable mutual interactions are what bring the other 99% of knowledge into play — and generate new knowledge.

That is why free markets, judicial restraint, and reliance on decisions and traditions growing out of the experiences of the many — rather than the groupthink of the elite few — are so important.

Elites are all too prone to over-estimate the importance of the fact that they average more knowledge per person than the rest of the population — and under-estimate the fact that their total knowledge is so much less than that of the rest of the population.

They overestimate what can be known in advance in elite circles and under-estimate what is discovered in the process of mutual accommodations among millions of ordinary people.

Central planning, judicial activism, and the nanny state all presume vastly more knowledge than any elite have ever possessed.

The ignorance of people with Ph.D.s is still ignorance, the prejudices of educated elites are still prejudices, and for those with one% of a society’s knowledge to be dictating to those with the other 99% is still an absurdity.

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“Buck Fush” and the Left (townhall.com, 070605)

By Dennis Prager

Every day I see at least one car, usually more than one, sporting a bumper sticker that reads, “Buck Fush.”

Apparently, some of our fellow Americans on the left find this message to be profound and witty. But it is not these individuals’ presence or absence of wit or profundity that interests me here — both are so obviously absent, no comments are necessary. It’s their contempt for society and their narcissism that demand commentary.

Those blessed with common sense know there is a huge difference between public and private use of expletives. While the holiest among us might never utter an obscenity, most decent, even pious, individuals will use an occasional expletive in private under circumstances that can make its use morally, if not religiously, justifiable (as when using an expletive to describe some evil figure or after a heavy weight fell on one’s toe).

But higher civilization has always regarded the use of expletives in public (outside of, let us say, theatrical performances) as a form of assault on civilization. That is why as a broadcaster I am prohibited from saying seven selected words on the air. No one monitors my private conversations, but just about everyone, at least until the 1960s, understood that there was something very wrong in saying such words on the radio or putting them on billboards.

That is why we have, as a society, crossed a line when people put expletives on bumper stickers (“S—t Happens,” “Buck Fush”) or use them in public in distinguished company — as in newspaper interviews or campaign fund-raisers. Even the individual who puts a “Buck Fush” sticker on his or her car knows that the real “f-word” would constitute an assault on whatever remains of the concept of decency.

So what does the increasing ubiquity of such stickers tell us?

It says a lot about parts of the left. For one thing, it tells us that leftist anger — make that hatred — of its opponents is probably the greatest politically inspired hatred in the country. Certainly there were many on the right who hated former President Bill Clinton, and that hatred did at times reflect poorly on the right. But, to the best of my knowledge, no Clinton-hater ever put a “Cuck Flinton” bumper sticker on a car. Why not? Why didn’t any conservatives who hated President Clinton do what some leftists who hate President Bush do and use expletives publicly? After all, “Cuck Flinton” is just as witty as “Buck Fush.”

The answer is that parts of the left have little or no belief in the concept of “decency” as traditionally understood by Western civilization. They tend to dismiss such notions as bourgeois anachronisms; they place great value on individuals expressing themselves; and they view self-censorship as a form of fascism.

This latter reason is important: The ‘60s redefined narcissism as idealism. The individual’s feelings became sacrosanct.

That is why the self-esteem movement — the idea that how an individual feels about himself is far more important than what he actually accomplishes — arose from the left.

And that is why you almost never hear a conservative say “I am offended” when reacting to a liberal speaker or writer, but it is quite commonplace for a liberal to use those words in reacting to someone from the right.

“Make love not war” was another example of placing one’s feelings above other values. That is why it is a very good thing for the world that the previous generation, the one that fought Hitler, didn’t believe in making love rather than war.

For more than a few people on the cultural left, public cursing is simply a form of self-expression, just as many on the left deemed graffiti to be. Indeed, public cursing may be defined as verbal graffiti, a defacement of the public square. But the people who believe in the sanctity of the public square are far more likely to be on the right. And that is why you will see and hear far more public profanity on the left than on the right.

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Liberals adopt name for ‘progress’ (Washington Times, 070622)

By Christina Bellantoni

Don’t call them liberals. They prefer the term “progressive” and think their brand of politics is where the country is headed.

Historically, “progressive” has been defined as one believing in moderate political change and especially social improvement by governmental action.

For the thousands of liberal activists who gathered in Washington this week and want to “Take Back America,” the meaning of the word is that and more — it’s about taking action.

“It’s a willingness to fight,” said James Boyce, a host for BlogTalkRadio and a longtime Democratic political strategist. “It’s about spine and dogma and a certainty of movement. It’s a way to counter conservatives.”

And just who fits the “progressive” bill?

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the front-runner for the 2008 presidential nomination but not the favorite of this crowd, said she is that kind of politician when bashing Republicans at the conference this week.

“We’re going to send them packing in January 2009 and return progressive leadership to the White House,” the New York Democrat said, to loud applause.

Roger Hickey, co-director of Campaign for America’s Future, noted the term did not always belong to the Democrats: Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican who formed one of the original progressive parties and even Dwight Eisenhower once described himself as a “progressive Republican.”

Activists say there’s nothing new about the movement, but note its resurgence in the past year.

Jeff Cohen of Progressive Democrats of America co-wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times 21 years ago outlining the role of progressives in abolishing slavery and the women’s suffrage movement.

“It has been so long since progressives were afforded their place in political debate that many have forgotten the rich history of the American left and its contributions to society,” Mr. Cohen wrote. “History teaches us that what is ‘left’ today is often the common wisdom of tomorrow.”

Liberals, Mr. Cohen wrote, “have often been Johnny-come-latelies hovering timidly about the edges of social movements while others put their lives and livelihoods on the line. Typically, the liberals have entered the fray only after the waters were tested and deemed safe.”

Now, most activists whose top priority is getting U.S. troops out of Iraq describe themselves as “progressive” and define the “movement” as standing up to “establishment” Democrats.

Those activists say they are tired of the Washington line about “political realities” that prevent Congress from ending the war.

Mr. Hickey said the movement is driving the political debate among Democrats and forcing presidential hopefuls to the left.

The word “progressive,” he said, “goes beyond the traditional concept of liberalism, which we also subscribe to, and it has an emphasis on empowering people in the political and economic sphere. It languished in part because the word ‘liberal’ has been attacked a lot, combined with elitist terms like ‘limo liberal,’ and that’s really not what we’re about.”

Rep. Barbara Lee, an antiwar California Democrat and co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, cheered the recent release of a report showing Americans are not as conservative as some think.

“It’s time to put to bed the myth that this is a conservative nation. Americans are progressive,” she said. “They believe in the common good, and they want a government that works for everybody, not just the wealthy few.”

Mrs. Clinton has outlined a “modern progressive vision” in speeches since announcing her White House bid, but some liberals are doubtful because of her husband’s record.

A posting on liberal blog Firedoglake.com accused President Clinton of “very often selling out the progressive base” on legislation like NAFTA.

“For short-term advantage, he weakened the progressive movement. Perhaps it was a compromise he had to make, but that was then; this is now,” read the June 2006 post.

November’s midterm election was hailed as a triumph for Democrats with “progressive” platforms.

“This was a progressive victory,” Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos.com declared after Democrats seized control of Congress last fall, in large part with the help from liberal bloggers.

The “netroots” — liberal bloggers with growing influence — often call out Democratic leaders for not being courageous enough, and push what they call progressive ideals.

Mr. Moulitsas said the movement is productive, bringing “new blood” and “a cohesive sense of purpose,” and encouraged activists to “stand tough and fight back.”

The “progressive” label has not become popular merely because liberal has become a dirty word that Democrats want to avoid, Democratic strategist David Sirota wrote at HuffingtonPost.com.

“Many of today’s Democratic politicians ... are simply not comfortable taking a more confrontational posture towards large economic institutions (many of whom fund their campaigns) ... that regularly take a confrontational posture towards America’s middle-class,” he wrote.

Robert Borosage, co-director of Campaign for America’s Future, fired up the crowd at Take Back America this week by reminding them they aren’t striving for the center of politics.

“This is not time to trim our sails,” he said. “This is the time to claim the future. You must feel the fierce urgency of now. If we don’t grab it, someone else will, and they will take it in the wrong direction.”

==============================

Michael Moore’s latest scam (townhall.com, 070625)

By Star Parker

What’s the difference between art and propaganda? The artist wants to communicate and share and the propagandist wants to manipulate.

Michael Moore is a talented filmmaker, a great marketer, and a superb propagandist. Those skills have now been invested in his latest film venture about health care, “Sicko.”

Part of the shtick, of course, is the portrayal that he’s a man on a mission. A social crusader — a kind of Ralph Nader whose medium is film.

“I mean, it is really disgusting,” he says, “when a guy in a ball cap with a high school education is the one asking the tough questions....Criticize me? No. Somebody, really should show up and say, ‘Thanks.’”

But a lot of people are showing up and saying “thanks.” It’s why Moore, from what appears to have been pretty humble working class beginnings in Flint, Mich., is now a multi-millionaire and far from being a simple guy in a ball cap. Folks are saying thanks by plunking down fistfuls of dollars to see his films and buy and rent his videos.

Moore’s last film, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” a broadside attack on the Bush Administration and the war on terror, grossed $220 million worldwide and cost $6 million to produce.

Is he a social commentator? A man who lives to reform?

No, this is an entrepreneur from the far political left with a business model that is serving him very well. The usual left wing Hollywood con artist, who talks socialism and gets rich off capitalism.

Moore’s films are to social commentary what pornography is to human relations.

Find vulnerabilities and hot buttons, stimulate, provoke, exploit and sell tickets.

I’ve had a chance to see “Sicko” because I was on a TV panel that hosted Moore as part of his promotion campaign.

The film, which cost $9 million to produce, and likely will generate nine figure revenues, is out of the usual mold.

It pitches socialized medicine by cherry picking stories that allegedly testify to the success of the government-run systems in Great Britain, France, Canada, and even Cuba, and then finds horror stories to show how bad things are in the U.S.

I shot an e-mail to a friend, an American, now a long time resident of Great Britain, and asked about their National Health Service. Here’s the response:

“If you end up with an exotic disease that requires a lot of care, you’re screwed. For example, the waiting list for any kind of major surgery is long and for things like knee replacements you can wait for three years. Alzheimer’s drugs aren’t available on the National Health Service because they’re too expensive. More and more people are paying for private health insurance cover, and more and more companies are making it part of the perks package. So, Britain will end up with a two-tier system before too long where the “rich” get good private cover and the poor or uninsured have no alternative to the NHS.”

Moore and his rich left wing Hollywood buddies won’t have to worry about the inevitable shortages and distortions of socialized medicine. They’ll simply be living in their own private care universe.

Cuba? Call any Cuban expatriate here, and I’ve talked to a few, and they’ll tell you that the shoddy local care is never what a foreign visitor would see. What we do know is that Cuba has the highest abortion rates, highest suicide rates, and lowest fertility rates in our hemisphere. And we also know that any Cuban that tries to exercise free speech, like Michael Moore luxuriates in here, would soon become a non-person.

We do need health care reform in the United States. But problems get solved through analysis and integrity and not with sensationalism and exploitation.

We already have massive government involvement in our health care markets and there is good reason to believe that this is at least part of the problem. A third party payer system subsidized by the tax code and a patch work of state regulated programs and, hence, no national market.

Government run Medicare and Medicaid are in fiscal crisis and rote with distortions, waste, fraud, and abuse

Michael Moore thinks health care should be free. Why doesn’t he distribute this important work explaining why for free? After all, he’s said “...I made this film because I want the world to change.”

When word got out the other day that a pirated edition made its way onto the Internet, his friend and distributor, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, went into high alert taking online countermeasures to prevent distribution.

Moore himself, ever cool, said, “The more people who see it the better, so I am happy this is happening.”

So give it away for free, Michael. You’ll be ecstatic.

==============================

Sarkozy, Brown seen clashing on Europe’s future (Reuters, 070627)

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Gordon Brown’s anointment as British prime minister on Wednesday means the major European Union powers at last have a complete set of new leaders and the prospect of a new treaty to overhaul its rickety structures.

But in the corridors of Brussels the talk is of a likely clash between Brown and new French President Nicolas Sarkozy over the direction of Europe that could be as bitter as the 2003 bust-up between Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac over the Iraq war.

“They are poles apart on free-market competition versus state intervention, trade protectionism versus globalization and further enlargement versus drawing final borders for the Union,” a senior EU official said.

“This is a clash waiting to happen,” he said.

The two leaders, who got to know each other as finance ministers, also differ on the kind of European Union they want. Sarkozy favors stronger political integration while Brown is described by a British official as “a European minimalist”.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has established herself as the EU’s pivotal deal-maker in less than two years in office, may be hard pressed to reconcile their divergent agendas.

She shares Sarkozy’s enthusiasm for relaunching Europe politically and his skepticism about Turkey’s candidacy, but on free markets and trade, she is closer to Brown.

A French source said that in a teleconference between Sarkozy, Blair and Brown last week, the incoming British premier doused the easy bonhomie of the other two by gruffly insisting on the detail of Britain’s “red lines” for a new EU treaty.

DISTASTE

Sarkozy called Brown to congratulate him on Wednesday, but the French president’s spokesman gave few clues as to the tone. He said they had a long talk and Sarkozy “repeated his wish that they would work closely together” and invited Brown to Paris.

“The two men agreed to take joint initiatives, notably on the question of Darfur,” Sarkozy’s spokesman David Martinon said. “He told Brown again of his desire for Britain to take a full role in the European project.”

Brown has made little secret of his distaste for Brussels. His attendance record at meetings of EU finance ministers over the last decade has been poor.

One European commissioner, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “When he does turn up, it is to lecture us.”

Brown’s closest aide, Ed Balls, Economic Secretary in the UK Treasury, expounded a “hard-headed, pro-European” approach in a pamphlet last month “based squarely on advancing our national interest and the EU public interest”.

The new British leader is much closer to the European Commission’s liberal economic philosophy than is Sarkozy, who startled senior commissioners by expounding a protectionist outlook at a dinner on his maiden visit to Brussels last month.

One participant said the new French leader’s call for a “community preference” in trade was a throw-back to the 1960s.

Sarkozy’s performance at his first European summit last week highlighted his determination to pursue an active industrial policy aimed at building “European champions” without letting EU competition and market regulators get in the way.

He persuaded the German EU presidency to remove the goal of “free and undistorted competition” from the Union’s objectives.

Only a last-minute counter-offensive by the European Commission, business organizations and competition lawyers prompted summit leaders to add a protocol restating the legal basis for 50 years of EU competition and internal market policy.

Sarkozy presented the outcome as a victory against U.S.-driven free-market “dogma”, declaring “the word protection is no longer taboo”.

“We obtained a major reorientation of the objectives of the Union. Competition is no longer an end in itself,” he said.

British media said Brown was furious and telephoned Blair at the summit to urge him to fight on the competition issue.

TRADE FIGHT

Commission officials say that if there is serious progress in stalled world trade negotiations later this year, they expect a fierce fight by Sarkozy to defend subsidies to French farmers.

Brown has made a sweeping liberalization of world trade one of his key objectives, underpinning his belief that the EU must either embrace globalization or get out of the way.

One of his main contributions to Britain’s EU presidency in 2005 was a Treasury report savaging the Common Agricultural Policy as wasteful, outdated and damaging to farmers in the developing world.

An early collision is also in prospect over Sarkozy’s outspoken opposition to Turkey’s EU candidacy. The French leader says he wants EU leaders to discuss the bloc’s final borders in December and change the goal of negotiations with Ankara.

Britain has been the strongest advocate of enlargement, arguing it is good for prosperity and strategic stability.

France has long suspected London’s real aim in pushing expansion was to make closer political integration impossible and confine the EU to the role of a vast free-trade area.

==============================

Studies show: Felons smarter than liberals (townhall.com, 070704)

By Ann Coulter

Just in time for the Fourth of July, John Lott, author of the groundbreaking 1998 book “More Guns, Less Crime,” has released another amazing book: “Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t.” This book provides studies and analysis proving that your every right-wing instinct is based on sound economic analysis.

To wit:

# Women shouldn’t vote: “What changed ... that explains the growth of government? The answer is women’s suffrage.”

# Fox News Channel isn’t conservative: “Even employees of Fox News, which is widely regarded as a conservative channel, donate 81% of their contributions to Democrats.”

# Public schools are government re-education camps: “(P)ublic education was actually designed to spread government-approved values.”

# Nothing good has come from abortion: “(A)bortion, in fact, increases crime.”

# Felons vote Democrat: “Remarkably, it looks as if virtually all felons are Democrats.”

To make your flights even more enjoyable this summer, consider this interesting incentive system described by Lott: “To receive disability benefits due to job-related stress, air traffic controllers must present a well-documented stressful incident — a collision or close call — that has caused a deterioration in their performance. Unsurprisingly, when it became easier to file for disability, flights suddenly started experiencing more ‘close calls.’”

Say, wouldn’t it be even more stressful, deserving of a greater disability payment, if the near-miss involved an Iranian Air jet?

Lott shows that there are pretty clear answers to what lowers the crime rate, what increases the crime rate and what doesn’t have any effect at all. Despite their popularity as explanations for the remarkable drop in crime in the ‘90s, the aging of the population and the enforcement of quality-of-life crimes both had virtually no effect.

What did work was higher arrest and conviction rates, concealed-carry laws and the reinstitution of the death penalty. “Generally, the studies found,” Lott writes, “that each execution saved the lives of roughly 15 to 18 potential murder victims.” So basically, there’s a much bigger death penalty for having no death penalty.

Meanwhile, gun locks and gun self-storage laws lead to more deaths, for the obvious reason that if the owner can’t get to his gun in time, the beneficial effect of having a gun is lost. Lott also shows that crime skyrocketed in cities that implemented affirmative action policies that lowered allegedly “biased” and “irrelevant” tests for cops.

Speaking of crime, there’s even something for Paris Hilton in this book! Lott says that “when we analyze the overall consequences a criminal faces after conviction, we find a surprising result: Rich criminals face disproportionately high penalties.”

The Los Angeles Times recently did an analysis of jail sentences for Hilton’s precise offense: i.e., driving with a suspended license after being arrested for drunk driving. The majority of these offenders served four days, exactly what Hilton got — until she was returned to prison. By serving her full 23 days, Hilton served more time than 80% of people arrested for the same offense.

In addition to losing their reputations, their inheritances and generally their spouses, according to Lott, wealthy felons also earn less money post-conviction than poor defendants. Not relative to their prior salaries, but in direct comparison. “Amazingly,” Lott says, “after controlling for a variety of social and demographic factors, wealthier ex-convicts on average earn a lower salary after their conviction than poorer ex-convicts.”

Let’s hope so. Felons are usually Democrats. As Lott notes: “Michael Milken, Martha Stewart and Leona Helmsley share something in common besides being convicted felons — they are all Democrats. While their wealth sets them apart from the typical felon, their party registration is the same as most former convicts.”

I believe this point was subtly highlighted when Willie Horton told the press in 1988 that of course he supported Michael Dukakis for president. “According to academic studies,” Lott says, “from 1972 to 1996, on average, 80% of felons would have voted Democratic. An overwhelming 93% ostensibly would have voted for Bill Clinton in 1996.”

This is not because, as you might imagine, blacks have high crime rates and also happen to be overwhelmingly Democratic. Lott compares the voting patterns of felons and nonfelons, controlling for race, age, education level, religious habits, employment, age and country of residence. Wholly apart from all these factors, felons were still more likely to vote Democratic. Indeed, in the 2004 election, Lott says, felons in Washington state “voted exclusively for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.”

With so many felons being Democrats, the party might want to think about changing its mascot from a donkey to a jailbird. [KH: !!!]

Needless to say, Democrats are neurotically obsessed with restoring the right to vote to felons. But the ex-cons themselves rarely express any interest in regaining this particular right. What ex-cons want is the right to own a gun. “Felons,” Lott says, “who frequently live in poor, high-crime neighborhoods, want to be able to defend themselves.”

So the evidence is in on that one, too: Preferring the right to bear arms to the right to vote (for choice), convicted felons have a superior value system to liberals.

==============================

Hopelessly Devoted to Failure: The Left today. (National Review Online, 070821)

By Thomas Sowell

It is not just in Iraq that the political Left has an investment in failure. Domestically as well as internationally, the Left has long had a vested interest in poverty and social malaise.

The old advertising slogan, “Progress is our most important product,” has never applied to the Left. Whether it is successful black schools in the United States or third-world countries where millions of people have been rising out of poverty in recent years, the left has shown little interest.

Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves “progressives.” What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrongdoing.

One wonders what they would do in heaven.

We are in no danger of producing heaven on earth but there have been some remarkable developments in some third-world countries within the past generation that have allowed many very poor people to rise to a standard of living that was never within their reach before.

The August 18 issue of the distinguished British magazine The Economist reveals the economic progress in Brazil, Argentina, and other Latin American nations that has given a better life to millions of their poorest citizens.

Some of the economic policies that have led to these results are discussed in The Economist but it is doubtful that members of the political left will stampede there to find out what those policies were.

They have shown no such interest in how tens of millions of people in China and tens of millions of people in India have risen out of poverty within the past generation.

Despite whatever the left may say, or even believe, about their concern for the poor, their actual behavior shows their interest in the poor to be greatest when the poor can be used as a focus of the Left’s denunciations of society.

When the poor stop being poor, they lose the attention of the Left. What actions on the part of the poor, or what changes in the economy, have led to drastic reductions in poverty seldom arouse much curiosity, much less celebration.

This is not a new development in our times. Back in the 19th century, when Karl Marx presented his vision of the impoverished working class rising to attack and destroy capitalism, he was disappointed when the workers grew less revolutionary over time, as their standards of living improved.

At one point, Marx wrote to his disciples: “The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.”

Think about that. Millions of human beings mattered to him only in so far as they could serve as cannon fodder in his jihad against the existing society.

If they refused to be pawns in his ideological game, then they were “nothing.”

No one on the left would say such things so plainly today, even to themselves. But their actions speak louder than words.

Blacks are to the Left today what the working class were to Marx in the 19th century — pawns in an ideological game.

Blacks who rise out of poverty are of no great interest to the Left, unless the way they do so is by attacking society.

The poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits since 1994 but the Left has shown no more interest in why that is so than they have shown in why many millions of people have risen out of poverty in Latin America or in China and India.

Where progress can be plausibly claimed to be a result of policies favored by the left, then such claims are made.

A whole mythology has grown up that the advancement of minorities and women in America is a result of policies promoted by the Left in the 1960s. Such claims are often based on nothing more substantial than ignoring the history of the progress made prior to 1960.

Retrogressions in the wake of the policies of the 1960s are studiously ignored — the runaway crime rates, the disintegration of black families, and the ghetto riots of the 1960s that have left many black communities still barren more than 40 years later.

Whatever does not advance the Left agenda is “nothing.”

==============================

Why Liberals Always Protect Perverts (townhall.com, 070826)

By Kevin McCullough

When liberals are given the choice between acting decently or choosing the riches of perversion - liberals prefer perversion. And if protecting the honor, privacy, and even nakedness of vulnerable women and children is juxtaposed to say the slightest possibility that someone’s right to practice perversion might be curbed - liberals will come running to the aid of the pervert. In fact liberals will go so far to protect perversion that they will actually enlist the use of potential victims to make the case, consequences to the unsuspecting females be damned!

They will say it with a lawsuit. They will say it in print. They will even brag about it in mass media.

Liberals at their core have no sense of true north. They can’t determine right from wrong, good from evil, and in this case even help from hurt. Worse yet - they don’t care. The hardness of their hearts towards the victim is not only apparent in their actions, but the mockery of their words adds insult to injury.

Hence why Geraldo Rivera would defend the concealing of an illegal alien’s identity from the feds - even though he had been indicted on 31 counts of child rape, before executing three college kids in Newark this summer.

It also explains the actions this week of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

If you have ever dreamed of taking that fabulous shopping trip to New York City, you’d be advised to stay away. Because right now, this very minute, today...there is no law protecting the women you cherish in the dressing rooms of New York City boutiques, shops, department stores or even their hotel showers or bathrooms.

See if the owner of the hotel, the proprietor of the lingerie boutique, or the manager of any of the major shopping hot spots in Manhattan decided he wanted to drill a hole that allowed prurient viewing of your wife, fiancé, mother, sister, daughter or niece - in a space they would otherwise have reasonable expectations of privacy in - then he could do it, just for kicks, and there is no legal recourse you can take in response.

As long as there is no camera involved they can spy on your lovely’s lovelies and you can’t say “boo” about it.

This is why one lone city councilman is desperately attempting to change the law.

Peter Vallone Jr. had been receiving complaints in his Queens district office for a number of weeks about a pervert who had been ordering a bagel and coffee every morning and then parking himself directly under the train platform vent for the N-line subway. This particular perve had a thing for looking up women’s skirts and he found it amusing to calmly eat his breakfast while stretching his neck to peep. Vallone’s own staffers even complained as the place the man like to do his viewing from was literally steps from the councilman’s front door.

Vallone began to research the matter and discovered that the man was breaking no known law in New York. Incredulous at this dismaying fact the councilman drafted a resolution that would punish such behavior. As the New York Times put it:

The bill would make it illegal to look at a person’s “sexual or other intimate parts, in other than a casual or cursory manner, for the purpose of entertainment, sexual arousal or gratification, or for the purpose of degrading or abusing the person being viewed.”

Pretty straight forward right?

Not according to liberals.

The New York Civil Liberties Union (directly associated with the ACLU) issued a statement on Thursday calling the proposed legislation, “creepy lawmaking.”

Liberal radio talk show host Ron Kuby mocked Vallone for drafting the legislation. Kuby is also a slip-and-fall/criminal defense attorney. With great bravado Kuby bullied the councilman in the few minutes they had on-air together, and then went on to brag about all the money he would win from clients for the misapplication he potentially sees from such a law being passed.

Donna Liebermann the NYCLU’s executive director (and reportedly a female) added her own sentiments saying, “The problem with this legislation is that it’s trying to get at this amorphous, vague behavior of looking, which is very imprecise. The language of the bill reflects how vague the activity that they’re trying to get at is, and the problem is that it’s an invitation to abuse, to selective enforcement based on the whims or prejudice of the individual police officer.” Adding, “What kind of a look is degrading, and therefore unlawful, who’s to say?”

Well Donna, any woman who’s ever been the slightest bit attractive could tell you.

They get degrading looks, mental undressings, and even unwanted physical contact from creeps in society daily.

It’s only “imprecise” if no one desires justice or decency for the privacy of women and children. And it is impossible for it to be an invitation to abuse if men have their heads faced forward, and would perhaps bother to look women in the eyes. (Maybe Donna shops in New Jersey.)

So while liberals pledge to get rich while killing this bill, and labeling it “creepy lawmaking,” they have given us a supreme glimpse - a window to their soul if you will...

Liberals will profit mightily by giving aid to perverts, pandering to peeping toms, and giving sanctuary to 31 count indictees of child rape/executioners.

They will do this as opposed to protecting the privacy of their own girlfriend, fiancé, wife, mother, or daughters.

And when necessary they will even brainwash women to make the case for them.

So which is more “creepy” - banning the perverts or defending them?

Have we really arrived at the day in which we have to ask such questions?

==============================

Exposing How Liberals Misread the Bible (townhall.com, 070917)

By Frank Pastore

Liberals love to say “The Bible talks more about poverty than anything else,” and from this they claim support for their increasingly socialist agenda.

The problem is, nearly every one of them reject inerrancy—that is, the belief that the Bible in its original autographs does not contain any errors. So the argument fails.

Here’s how.

You can ask one question and expose the fundamental error in how liberals misread the Bible.

I did this last week in a lively exchange on my show with Bob Edgar, who’s recently stepped down as the general secretary of the National Council of Churches (ncccusa.org) in order to head up another liberal group called Common Cause (commoncause.org).

I had asked him to lay out his main thesis from his latest book “Middle Church: Reclaiming the Moral Values of the Faithful Majority from the Religious Right.” [Read Al Mohler’s excellent review here.] Seeing as how I’m a proud member of the religious right, I was curious as to how he planned to reclaim those moral values and, in particular, which moral values he was referring to.

To no one’s surprise, least of all to me, Edgar laid out exactly what I expected him to. I’ve heard the same thing dozens of times from other leaders of the religious left I’ve had on.

Essentially, they want religious people to care less about abortion, homosexuality and gay marriage and more about poverty, war and the environment. That is, they want people to support pacifism, environmentalism and socialism—or in terms of specific policies, they want higher taxes to grow a larger welfare state, immediate withdrawal from Iraq and everybody to pay a pollution tax in the form of carbon offsets.

Or, to be even more clear, they just want voters to put Hillary in the White House.

Edgar’s primary argument comes down to this. He said, “The Bible mentions abortion not once, homosexuality only twice, and poverty or peace more than two thousand times. Yet somehow abortion and homosexuality have become the litmus test of faith in public life today.”

Set aside the obvious point that though the words “abortion” and “homosexuality” aren’t in the text, the concepts certainly are at Exodus 21:22-25; Gen 19:5-8; Jude 7; Leviticus 18:22-23, 20:13; 1 Corinthians 6:9; 1 Timothy 1:9-10 and Romans 1:16-17, respectively. Far more than “not once or twice.” Killing an unborn child is murder and homosexuality is a sin. No way around it.

But here’s how to really expose how liberals misread the Bible. Ask them this question:

If the Bible is not the inerrant Word of God, then why should we assume that God cares more about one group of merely human words over another group of merely human words simply because they occur more frequently in the text?

You see, it all comes down to one’s view of inerrancy.

Inerrancy is the view that God is the author of every single word of the original autographs of both the Old and New Testaments, and that He superintended the human authors to compose and record without error exactly what He wanted, even down to the specific words that were used.

The religious left rejects inerrancy. It is a sine qua non of religious liberalism, and it always has been. Liberals believe the Bible merely “contains” the Word of God—it is not itself the very Word of God. And, obviously, they will tell you what parts are and are not “the Word of God”—and it’s no surprise that God ends up affirming whatever liberal political and social agenda they need to advance.

Indeed, while Edgar was president of the United Methodist’s Claremont School of Theology from 1990-2000 that institution became infamous for being a hub of the fringe Jesus Seminar wherein participants would literally vote with colored beads which verses of the New Testament they believed were probably said or not said by Jesus. As you could imagine, precious few of the “red letters” ended up being “authentic.”

Bottom line, when a liberal puts an emphasis on the frequency of the words in the Bible it’s not because they believe them to be inspired or divine, it’s because they’ve found some verses that allegedly support their political and social agenda.

And you should never miss an opportunity to call them on it.

Word counts—how frequently words appear in the text—are only as important as the author of the text. If God is not the author of the Bible, then it’s impossible to say God cares more or less about an issue based merely on word counts.

Since liberals decide which words “count,” the Bible will always affirm whatever it is they want to affirm. Only someone who believes in inerrancy can properly use word counts as a methodology to determine the important themes of a paragraph, chapter or book.

However, you’ve still got to be careful drawing conclusions from mere word counts. If you assume God cares more about things that occur more frequently in the text, and that He doesn’t care at all about things that don’t appear in the text, you end up with all kinds of strange results after just a few minutes with Bible search software.

For example, “war” appears three times as often as “peace,” “destroy” ten times as often as “create,” “slave” forty times as often as “free man,” and “drunk” six times as often as “sober.” Does this mean God is a war-loving god who loves destruction, slavery and drunkenness more than He loves peace, freedom and sobriety? Of course not.

Themes surrounding poverty do appear frequently in the Bible, and it’s been an ongoing theme of Western Civilization to bring social justice to the poor through political and economic reforms for over 2,000 years. Thank God for the advances we’ve made in representative government, human rights, democracy and capitalism—as best expressed by the United States—that have allowed us to improve the lot of so many of the world’s poor. The success of the West in doing so is due to the Judeo-Christian worldview at the foundation of Western culture—a foundation that rests upon the authority of the Bible, which is grounded on the doctrine of inerrancy.

For Bob Edgar and those on the religious left, they believe higher taxes, more pervasive socialism and centralized government are the most direct paths to social justice. They want the U.S. to look more like Canada and Europe in our education, our health care and our foreign policy—and they try to use the Bible to make their case.

It’s time to call them on it.

==============================

Bush vs. MoveOn: The president chastises Democratic leaders for their silence on the MoveOn ad. (Weekly Standard, 070920)

by William Kristol

PRESIDENT BUSH MET with ten or so columnists Wednesday afternoon for over an hour, answering questions on a wide variety of topics. Much of what the president said was, naturally, familiar; and some of his most interesting comments and reflections he put off-the-record. But there was at least one on-the-record answer by the president that should make news. For the first time, President Bush weighed in on the debate over the MoveOn.org ad that accused Gen. Petraeus of “cooking the books” and “betray[ing] us,” chastising Democrats for their failure to condemn the ad.

The president had been discussing the battle over the legislation re-authorizing the terrorist wiretapping program. One of the columnists noted, “But Jane Harman says that Mike McConnell [the Director of National Intelligence] is political; the same way the Democrats have been portraying Petraeus....” The President jumped in, seeming to welcome the opportunity to address the attack of Gen. Petraeus:

“When I saw the ad by the far left-wing people, I was incredulous at first and then became mad, because I—it’s one thing to attack me, it’s fine. It’s another thing to denigrate the integrity of somebody who’s wearing this uniform, because I felt that this attack was not just on General Petraeus, it was on the military up and down the line. And I expected there to be people on Capitol Hill standing up and saying this was wrong. And I was listening for those voices from the leadership up there, from the Democratic party, saying, this isn’t right. I didn’t

hear many loud voices.”

The president concluded, “...that was uncalled for, that ad. And so was the silence.” The president then went on to defended the integrity of McConnell as well.

The president struck at the Democrats’ key vulnerability in the wake of the MoveOn ad controversy: their silence in reaction to an attack on Gen. Petraeus that was also, in a way, an attack “on the military up and down the line.” For to accuse Petraeus of cooking the books is to accuse a host of his subordinates and staff of colluding with him in lying to Congress and the American public. And to remain silent in the face of this slander—indeed to maintain friendly relations, not to say a political alliance, with the MoveOn slanderers—is to show a striking lack of concern for the reputation and honor of the American military.

It was only a brief intervention by the president, yesterday. But he showed he still knows how to hit the Democrats where it hurts.

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Senate votes to scold MoveOn for war ad (Washington Times, 070921)

MoveOn.org’s controversial ad criticizing the top U.S. general in Iraq was called “disgusting” by President Bush at a press conference.

The Senate yesterday overwhelmingly condemned the liberal anti-war group MoveOn.org for its newspaper ad that last week accused the top U.S. general in Iraq of lying and misrepresenting the situation on the ground, a measure on which Democratic leaders had refused to allow a vote last week.

The nonbinding measure, offered by Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, passed by a vote of 72-25, with 24 Democrats and one independent, Bernard Sanders of Vermont, voting against it.

The furor over the ad (download pdf), which Republicans up to and including President Bush have denounced, has not subsided since it ran last week. It again placed Democrats on the defensive yesterday, and both House Minority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri and House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio yesterday called for a similar resolution in the lower chamber.

“Denouncing this unconscionable assault on Gen. David Petraeus’ integrity in a bipartisan manner would signal to the American people that these tactics have no place in our political discourse,” Mr. Blunt said.

Mr. Boehner also urged House Democratic leaders “to immediately schedule a vote ... to condemn the despicable attacks launched against this honorable man by a radical left-wing political organization.”

But House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat, declined to commit to any such measure.

The president got involved in the furor yesterday, calling the MoveOn ad “disgusting” at a White House press conference.

“I was disappointed that not more leaders in the Democratic Party spoke out strongly against that kind of ad,” Mr. Bush said. “And that leads me to come to this conclusion: that most Democrats are afraid of irritating a left-wing group like MoveOn.org — or more afraid of irritating them than they are of irritating the United States military.”

While 22 of the 49 Senate Democrats voted yesterday to condemn the ad, none of the four with White House ambitions did.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, the Democratic presidential front-runner, voted against the Senate measure, as did Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut. Sens. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Barack Obama of Illinois skipped the vote, which the latter denounced as an effort to score “cheap political points,” adding that the Senate should focus on ending the war, “not on criticizing newspaper advertisements.”

“By not casting a vote, I registered my protest against this empty politics,” Mr. Obama said.

The amendment to the Defense Authorization bill gave general praise to the U.S. military and Gen. Petraeus and also “specifically repudiate the unwarranted personal attack on General Petraeus by the liberal activist group MoveOn.org.”

MoveOn, which began a decade ago as an effort to fight the impeachment of President Clinton and has morphed into a key part of the Democratic Party’s “netroots.” They said Gen. Petraeus is distorting statistics from Iraq to give the false appearance that violence is decreasing as a result of the president’s surge of 30,000 troops earlier this year.

The MoveOn ad ran in the Sept. 10 edition of the New York Times, on the morning of congressional testimony by Gen. Petraeus.

“General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” the full-page ad said, and accused the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq of “cooking the books for the White House.”

Mr. Cornyn said that “for MoveOn.org and their left-wing allies to brand General Petraeus a traitor and a liar crossed a historic line of decency.”

Eli Pariser, MoveOn’s executive director, shot back at the president in a statement soon after the press conference, calling it “disgusting ... that the president has more interest in political attacks than developing an exit strategy to get our troops out of Iraq and end this awful war.”

Mr. Pariser said Mr. Bush “lied repeatedly to the American people to get us into the war” and accused the president of betraying the U.S. military and the American people.

In an e-mail to supporters after the Senate vote, MoveOn denounced it as meaningless posturing and promised a counterattack ad in the coming days against Republicans who “blocked a bill to give our troops adequate family leave before going back to Iraq.”

“This morning, the Senate didn’t pass an exit strategy for Iraq. They didn’t pass a bill to cover millions of uninsured Americans or combat the climate crisis. Instead, they condemned MoveOn.org,” the letter said, exhorting its recipients to fund the new ad buy.

The president’s strong comments about MoveOn dovetailed with Mr. Cornyn’s amendment to create the appearance of a coordinated Republican public-relations offensive. Less than two hours after the president’s comments, the Senate voted on the Cornyn amendment, which the Texan offered last week but was blocked by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat.

However, a Republican Senate aide said that there was no coordination between the White House and the Senate Republicans and that Mr. Cornyn had already planned to bring up the amendment yesterday. A Democratic aide verified this.

The Senate Republican aide, however, said that timing of the president’s comments was “serendipitous.”

The MoveOn ad sparked an instant backlash last week by Republicans on Capitol Hill, causing even aides to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, to remark that they wished the ad had not run.

News reports also revealed last week that the New York Times has sold the full-page ad space to MoveOn at a discount rate, slashing their regular rate of $181,692 to $65,000. Republican presidential nominee Rudolph W. Giuliani demanded — and got — the same rate for an ad he ran defending Gen. Petraeus last Friday.

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Did Democrats Go Too Far Going After Petraeus? (townhall.com, 070921)

By Lorie Byrd

Back in the days before the President’s poll numbers plummeted over Iraq, perhaps the Bush administration’s best strategy was the rope-a-dope. We saw it played over time and time again. Democrats would attack Bush, he would ignore them as if they were nothing more than gnats. Democrats would ratchet up their attacks, going farther and farther out on a limb with each successive one until — “thwap.”

Sometimes that thwap was delivered by events. Early in the first term, Nancy Pelosi repeatedly asked “Where are the jobs, Mr. President” as Democrats attacked Bush for his “tax cuts for the rich.” The thwap was delivered when the effects of the Bush tax cuts kicked in and each quarter saw a growing economy and gains in the job market. After denouncing the tax cuts and predicting economic doom and gloom would result, the Democrats lost any credibility they may have had on the economy when their predictions did not come to pass.

Other times the “thwap” was a deliberate smack down. The President would finally decide, after his opponents had progressed from calling him merely a puppy-hating Nazi to a full out baby murdering Hitler, to respond to the attacks in a forceful way – generally with irrefutable facts. Not only did his opponents then look wrong on the facts, but they looked a bit like raving loonies for having made such outrageous accusations. In some cases opponents of the President had aligned themselves with fringe figures like Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan, making it more difficult to come back to the mainstream where most Americans were.

The “wait and let your enemies self destruct” strategy does not always work though. The case of Joe Wilson, whose ever changing stories were treated as settled fact by almost all in the media, is one example of the administration not coming out to counter a story forcefully enough or early enough. Although Wilson offered varying versions of his story, many times at odds with documents or the statements of others, his version of events became the official storyline for most media outlets. It was the basis for the very first claims that “Bush lied.” The Wilson fairy tale is on course to be immortalized on film, even though we now know that Wilson and his wife, who posed for a famous spread in Vanity Fair, were far from camera shy, and that it was Richard Armitage who leaked the name Valerie Plame, not the White House. The lesson learned there is that sometimes if you wait around for the facts to come out, what happens is that the assertions become the conventional wisdom and no amount of facts disclosed at a later date will change the perception people got from the initial accusations.

Bush’s detractors would be more successful if they knew when to stop, but many don’t. There comes a point when even a friendly media can’t pull them back off of that limb. I think we may have just seen such a point over the past couple of weeks.

For several months, in anticipation of his congressional testimony, General David Petraeus was attacked with a campaign of accusations that he was a lapdog for the White House. The day the general testified, the liberal activist group MoveOn.org made a huge blunder by running a full page ad in the New York Times referring to him as General “Betray Us.” To accuse a well respected general in the U.S. military who was confirmed by a Senate vote of 81-0 of being a traitor was seen my many as outrageous and despicable. Democratic congressmen were asked to comment on the ad and were asked to distance themselves from it and to denounce MoveOn.org.

You might think those on the left would have learned their lesson and would not want to be seen attacking a decorated general, but they didn’t learn. The most recent outrage is an effort to question the medals worn by Petraeus. Unlike the case of John Kerry, whose war record was questioned first by fellow Vietnam Swiftboat Vets, the attacks on Petraeus are coming from liberal bloggers and anti-war groups. In this case the White House does not even have to decide whether or not to weigh in because there are more than a few members of the military and the military blogging community perfectly happy to deliver the smack down. I am confident this will not be a case like that of Joe Wilson where the accusations will overshadow the truth.

Democrats complaining about their patriotism being questioned have little ground to stand on if they are not willing to distance themselves from MoveOn.org and liberal bloggers engaging in attacks on General Petraeus. The left may have scored political points painting Karl Rove as a boogey man, but General Petraeus isn’t Karl Rove. Those of us on the right have learned our lesson and won’t be sitting by letting baseless attacks go unanswered. Instead we will be reminding voters which politicians thought their best argument on Iraq policy was to attack a highly respected general determined to win the war.

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Liberals Are Now Progressives (Again) (townhall.com, 070920)

By Matt Mayer

When Hillary Clinton recently discarded the term liberal for the term progressive, it reminded me of the famous question of whether a leopard could change its spots? The answer, of course, is no. A leopard is genetically a leopard as a liberal is philosophically a liberal whether she is called a liberal or not.

Nonetheless, it is important to know what a progressive is since that is now the preferred term of the left. It comes from the Progressive Era. One of its intellectual and political leaders was President Woodrow Wilson. The Progressive Movement’s chief aim was to centralize power by eliminating those pesky little concepts of separation of powers and checks and balances and escape the confines of a fixed constitution so that America could progress (not that it hadn’t up to that point as evidenced by the abolishment of slavery and its rise as a world power).

Wilson despised those constitutional mechanisms because they prevented government from “proceeding” in accordance with the will of “an outside master.” Wilson believed that the Constitution should be a living document. As Wilson stated: “All that progressives ask or desire is permission to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.” The outside master, then, was the fittest among us whose societal beliefs could be inserted into the constitution. Wilson thought certain men were able to “embody the projected consciousness of their time and people” and that these men whose “thought[s] run forward apace into regions whither the race is advancing” would master progress.

Wilson, of course, considered himself such a master. As Georges Clemenceau remarked about Wilson at Versailles, “He thinks he is another Jesus Christ come upon the Earth to reform men.”

Not surprisingly, the Progressive Movement’s adherence to Darwinism gave birth to eugenics. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and a leader of the eugenics movement, advocated for a “stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.” In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law permitting forced sterilization in which Oliver Wendell Holmes proclaimed: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The culmination of eugenics was the rise of Nazism in Germany and the Holocaust.

This dark side of the Progressive Era, thankfully, came to an end. Its belief that there are those among us who know better and shouldn’t be constrained by a fixed Constitution and limited government, unfortunately, did not. To escape the baggage of the term progressives, they started calling themselves liberals. Today’s liberals, like yesterday’s progressives, believe wholeheartedly that the answer to all of societies problems lies in the use of government by enlightened leaders to effectuate progress and view constitutional constraints as archaic and quaint.

The aim of the Progressive Movement succeeded as it gave birth to the rise of the administrative state and the consolidation of power in Washington during the New Deal and Great Society periods where many new rights and federal powers were suddenly found into the Constitution. This couldn’t have happened had the progressives not succeeded in amending the Constitution in 1913 first to provide for a source of funding the administrative state (the federal income tax via the 16th Amendment) and then to eliminate any check the states had on the power in Washington (electing senators by popular vote instead of by state legislatures via the 17th Amendment). When states lost their ability to reign-in recalcitrant senators with threats to appoint someone else after his term ended if they voted to expand federal power or push costs to the states, the principle of federalism suffered a horrible blow. Given the failure over the last thirty years to reduce the power in Washington, that blow may have been deadly.

While no reasonable person would claim that Hillary Clinton is a dark side progressive, the danger of the progressive-liberal beliefs in a living constitution and the idea that they know better than the rest of us is that the distinction between forced sterilization and universal healthcare rests solely on the degree of government coercion used to achieve the end and the wishes of five justices to see it happen. When politicians are unconstrained by a fixed constitution and checks and balances, we better hope their idea of progress is the right one.

Unlike the leopard, changing the Constitution with the progressive ideas du jour takes us from the rule of law to the rule of enlightened kings. We rejected that type of rule once already. Perhaps it is time to do so again. Now, that would be progress.

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Intolerance in the name of tolerance (townhall.com, 070925)

By Cal Thomas

I would not be as bothered by Columbia University’s decision to host Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad if Columbia and other universities had a consistent policy toward those they invite to speak and the rules applied equally to conservatives and liberals; to totalitarian dictators and to advocates for freedom and tolerance.

Any conservative who has ever tried, or actually succeeded, in speaking on the campus of predominately liberal academic institutions knows it can resemble to some extent the struggle experienced by African Americans when they attempted to desegregate lunch counters in the South during the Civil Rights Movement.

In the 1980s, I spoke at universities from Smith College in the East to the University of California at Davis in the West. At Smith, lesbians sat in the front row kissing each other while the rest of the crowd shouted so loud no one could hear me (NPR’s Nina Totenberg witnessed the riotous behavior, prompting me to remark, “I hope you’re getting this on tape, Nina, because this is what liberals mean by tolerance.”).

Former U.S. News and World Report columnist John Leo has been among the chroniclers of the demise of free speech on many college campuses. Writing in last winter’s issue of the publication City Journal, Leo noted that Columbia University officials prevented a large crowd from hearing Walid Shoebat, a former PLO terrorist who is now an anti-jihadist. The reason given was security, which as Leo pointed out is a frequent excuse for restricting speech. Had Shoebat remained a PLO terrorist, Columbia might have allowed the students in, because anti-Jewish rhetoric of the kind Ahmadinejad delivers always seems welcome on too many campuses. Only Columbia students and 20 guests were allowed to hear Shoebat speak.

Why would Columbia expect Ahmadinejad to answer what they promised in advance would be “tough” questions? Have they not seen him interviewed by America’s best reporters? He doesn’t answer questions. He uses the interviews to lecture America and make his propaganda points. The exercise is useless, except to him because he scores points at home for “standing up to Œthe Great Satan,’ or whatever the preferred term du jour for the United States is at the moment.

Last October at Columbia, a mob of students stormed a stage, curtailing speeches by two members of the anti-illegal immigration group known as the Minutemen. The students shouted “They have no right to speak,” which was revealing, given the “academic freedom” argument that is used to defend liberal professors and their frequent anti-American rants when conservatives attempt to shut them up.

As John Leo wrote, “Campus opponents of (Rep.) Tom Tancredo, an illegal immigration foe, set off fire alarms at Georgetown to disrupt his planned speech, and their counterparts at Michigan State roughed up his student backers. Conservative activist David Horowitz, black conservative Star Parker, and Daniel Pipes, an outspoken critic of Islamism, frequently find themselves shouted down or disrupted on campus.” The number of instances involving censorship of conservatives on college campuses and denial of honorary degrees to people who don’t toe the liberal line could fill a book.

There is something else about Columbia’s decision to admit Ahmadinejad and that is the notion that by exposing a tyrant and religious fanatic to a liberal arts campus - a man who believes he has been “called” to usher in Armageddon - might make him less genocidal and students and the rest of us more understanding. We understand he and his legion of murdering thugs wish to kill us and are contributing to the death of Americans in Iraq. What part of mass murder do they not understand at Columbia, or don’t they have time to study history these days?

Ahmadinejad is probably using his visit to case our country, like a bank robber does before a big heist.

Before we allow more of our enemies into America and give them a freedom unknown in their own countries, we should at least demand reciprocity. Their president gets to speak in America? Our president gets to speak in Iran. Their president has access to our media? Our president should have access to their media. And while we’re at it, how about for every liberal who gets to speak on campus, the school must also invite a conservative.

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Of Free Speech And Academic “Progressives” (townhall.com, 070925)

By Bill Murchison

So, in the end, Monday the Iranian wild man Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got a dressing down from the man who had invited him — in the name of free speech, you understand — to speak at Columbia University.

Likely, by time for the speech, Columbia President Lee Bollinger had no choice other than to perfume himself against the stench from a statesman who proposes to exterminate Israel, presides over one of the world’s least free regimes and may, to boot, have a secret nuclear weapons program going.

Bollinger had been getting unshirted hell from reasonable people displeased — as why wouldn’t they be — that Columbia would extend hospitality to such as Ahmadinejad. Among whose achievements, according to intelligence, is providing Iraqi terrorists with some of the most formidable explosives in play against U.S. military vehicles.

Columbia’s president protested that, in presenting Ahmadinejad, he was acting within a “longstanding [Columbia] tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate.” The kind of debate that would land the ordinary Iranian in the clink.

By the time all was said and done, Bollinger had clawed his way back to semi-respectability in polite society by insulting his guest — not the usual practice in polite society, but consider the depth of the hole Bollinger had dug for himself by insisting on being a good academic liberal. It’s the kind of thing academics do all the time — dig moral and intellectual holes.

Something else they do is pretend the Reserve Officers Training Corps is an instrument of fascism, the Confederate Underground, or whatever; which perception excuses them from allowing ROTC to recruit on campus. Sen. John McCain, appraising the day’s events, noted that Columbia has declared itself off limits to ROTC and its vital role in providing for the national defense.

The liberal academic establishment is something, all right. And has been, mostly, since the ‘60s, when Young America, or a significant portion of its alleged intellectual elite, decided the way to deal with “Fascist-Pig Amerika” was to burn draft cards and take over deans’ offices. What with the demonstrators now running the campuses they demonstrated against, one isn’t completely surprised to find Columbia hosting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — and a portion of the Stanford community campaigning not to host Donald Rumsfeld.

Stanford’s Hoover Institution, a prestigious and exemplary center “for the study of War, Revolution and Peace,” has engaged the former Defense secretary as a distinguished visiting fellow, in which capacity he’s to advise a task force on ideology and terrorism.

Well, wouldn’t you know it? The New York Times records that 2100 professors, students, staffers and alumni have signed an online petition of protest, asserting the Rumsfeld appointment’s incompatibility “with the ethical values of truthfulness, tolerance, disinterested inquiry, respect for national and international laws, and care for the opinions, property, and lives of others to which Stanford is inalienably committed.” Boo! Hiss! Throw da bum out!

It all seems to depend, in liberal academia, on whose free speech rights we’re talking about — those of a morally deranged foreign despot or of a retired American cabinet officer whose policies you don’t like. The jailer-in-chief of a once-sophisticated nation — let’s hear him out. Yea, free speech! And wouldn’t Mr. Madison be proud of our attachment to his First Amendment. As for a warmongering ex-flunky from the Bush administration — no, no, no. Why, his very words would corrupt our delicate ears!

The apparent moral asymmetry here — pay no attention to that. In the academy, we’re all good “progressives.” That’s the central point. Listening to foreign creeps who hate the United States is a moral obligation (and sometimes an unadulterated joy). Lending an ear to patriots who have sought to serve the United States out of love for its life and institutions — that’s another matter entirely, as the Stanford progressives trust Mr. Rumsfeld will understand while pondering the call to withdraw.

Is it too much to hope that just this once, maybe, a patriot can enjoy in academia the same moral footing as a national jailer and Jew-baiter? We’ll see soon enough.

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Why Liberals Make Atrocious Parents (townhall.com, 070929)

By Kevin McCullough

The leading liberals in America gave frightening clear evidence this week, that not only do they lack the wisdom to run the nation, but that by their own words they do not even understand the priorities of good parenting. The position of “parent” is God granted, yet they shirk with great disdain the desire to give their children the basic wisdom of life. In doing so they demonstrate clearly that they are contributing to one of our nation’s greatest deficits—the discernment and critical thinking skills of the next generation.

In the New Hampshire Democratic debate this week, the veil was pulled back on more than just the Democratic party’s great lie about their desire to bring the troops home in the global war on terror (none would even commit to doing it before the end of their first term) but perhaps more importantly their twisted views on family, sex, and parental responsibility were also highlighted.

Tim Russert asked the three front-runners for the Democratic nomination as to their comfort level of teaching a homosexual story of two boys consummating their lust for each other to children in the second grade. They all agreed they would support the teaching of such behavior, though they attempted to hem, haw, and confuse the issue mumbling about parents’ involvement.

John Edwards: “Yes absolutely...” (He would support the teaching of the story to second graders.) “I want my children to understand everything about the difficulties that gay and lesbian couples are faced with every day, the discrimination that they’re faced with every single day of their lives.”

Hillary Clinton: “Obviously, it is better to try to … help your children understand the many differences that are in the world. … And that goes far beyond sexual orientation. So I think that this issue of gays and lesbians and their rights will remain an important one in our country.”

Barack Obama: “The fact is, my 9-year-old and my 6-year-old I think are already aware that there are same-sex couples... One of the things I want to communicate to my children is not to be afraid of people who are different. …. One of the things I think the next president has to do is stop fanning people’s fears. If we spend all our time feeding the American people fear and conflict and division, then they become fearful and conflicted and divided.”

Obama in fact confirmed that his wife had already taken the opportunity to sit his six and nine year old daughters down to discuss same-sex behavior and why some radical same-sex couples believe society should redefine the God-sanctioned institution of marriage because of it.

But it was John Edwards that summarized for liberals everywhere what they actually believe: “I don’t want to make that decision on behalf of my children. I want my children to be able to make that decision on behalf of themselves, and I want them to be exposed to all the information... even in second grade to be exposed to all those possibilities, because I don’t want to impose my view. Nobody made me God.”

Edwards gave voice to words that liberals have thought and practiced for years.

Liberals, by the strictest understanding of the definition of the word, believe in lack of restraint, defying of limits, and excess—whether it’s taxes, education, or sexual practice. Truth can never be known and all focus must be given to the unknowable.

In and of itself the term “liberal” isn’t necessarily a bad one. For instance in the scriptures we are instructed to be liberal with generosity for those in need, forgiveness for those who repent, and mercy for those who suffer. But Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have taken it far beyond that.

Liberals today mean it as an excuse to wipe away other important elements of behavior like self-control, purity, moderation, and even delayed gratification. It’s my opinion that the lost virtue of restraint has in fact become one of our nation’s most important deficits—so much so that I devoted an entire chapter to the idea in MuscleHead Revolution.

But with these ideas liberals have even excused themselves of performing the task God gave them uniquely. It IS a parent’s job to teach a child how to think, the framework of what to believe, and to equip them to critique their own actions and the actions of others for even some very basic reasons—like self preservation.

Conservative parents teach disciplined behavior so that in their children’s private world they do not bring harm to themselves, and in public they do not bring harassment, discomfort or harm to others. The benefit of learning to be quiet at some times and places, helps a child to enjoy the exuberance of playtime later. Teaching a child not to touch everything they see, gives them self-control and prevents them from breaking things they should not have grabbed in the first place. Saying “no” when they reach for a hot pan on the stove, may seem rather harsh, scolding, and even angry—but in the end it has saved them from immense pain!

If you want to see this at work in the real world—take ten minutes to go randomly interview any girl who works in women’s retail today. The hellions that liberal moms bring into their store—and immediately lose track of the moment they begin trying things on are significantly different than the children who have been taught to stand quietly and wait until they are home to run, wrestle, hide, seek, laugh, and play.

John Edwards, though he represents the thinking of liberal mentality across the board, could not be more mistaken.

True nobody made him ‘God’ (and we all breathe easier for that.) But God did very much make him, and more importantly He made him a representative to his children, to teach, to instruct, to guide, and to help grow his children into fully functional and thoughtful adults who will then be able to do the same for their children in the days to come.

To not exercise the responsibility of teaching his children, or even more dangerously in Barack Obama’s case of willfully teaching his children behavior and immoral justification, liberals are at best proving that they do not have the critical discernment needed to recognize the difference between right and wrong. At worst they are demonstrating negligent or intentional contempt for their children and society. And if they are that confused about something so basic as instructing their children, how will THEY be equipped when weighing the balance of good and evil in the world and nation they hope to lead?

In exposing their thinking on something so simple to us they confirmed that I would never trust them to baby-sit my own child, therefore how on earth can they be given oversight of the free world?

Not on my watch!

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MoveOn.org Bullies Crack Down on Critics (townhall.com, 071003)

By Michelle Malkin

MoveOn.org, the left-wing extremists who bashed the commander of American forces in Iraq as a traitor, should get out of the political kitchen. The George Soros-funded hitmen can’t stand even a bit of heat from Mom-and-Pop retailers who tried selling T-shirts and mugs on the Internet critical of the “General Betray Us” smear ads against Gen. David Petraeus.

I heard from one of the independent T-shirt sellers targeted by MoveOn.org last week. The seller is a lifelong Democrat and member of the military. Incensed by the attack on Gen. Petraeus, the retailer opened up a shop at online store CafePress. The homemade designs at the PoliStew Cafe (www.cafepress.com/polistew) were stark and simple: “Move Away from Move On!” “MoveOn.org NoFriend to Dems.” “General Petraeus has done more for this country than MoveOn.org.”

For daring to raise a voice and raise some money for the troops (all proceeds from the sale of his items go to the National Military Family Association charity), this T-shirt seller earned the wrath of MoveOn.org’s lawyers. MoveOn.org chief operating officer Carrie Olson brought down the sledgehammer. She sent a cease-and-desist letter to CafePress demanding that PoliStew Cafe’s items and other anti-MoveOn.org merchandise be removed from the store.

Olson warned: “We have been alerted to an entire page of items on your website that infringes on our registered trademark, and we request that you remove all items immediately, and ask the poster to refrain from shipping any items purchased on this webpage. We also request that you give us contact information for the company / person who posted the items. This content has certainly NOT been authorized by anyone at MoveOn.org, nor anyone affiliated with MoveOn.”

Acceptable speech to MoveOn.org: Likening President Bush to Adolf Hitler, as they did in 2004.

Unacceptable speech: Little old mugs and hoodie sweatshirts gently satirizing the thin-skinned, left-wing mafia.

The pretextual copyright infringement claims are downright laughable. This isn’t about protecting MoveOn.org’s property rights. It’s about shutting up citizens who don’t have the deep pockets to defend themselves against frivolous claims by bullies in progressive clothing. Sane liberals should be ashamed at such free speech-squelching efforts. As Los Angeles Times blogger Jon Healey, the only other mainstream journalist to cover the crackdown, notes:

“Trademark law doesn’t confer monopoly rights over all uses of a registered phrase or symbol, however, and it wasn’t created simply to protect the trademark owner’s interests. Instead, it’s designed to protect consumers against being misled or confused about brands. The courts have repeatedly ruled in favor of parodies and critiques; that’s why www.famousbrandnamesucks.com doesn’t violate famousbrandname’s trademark. And most, if not all, of the items targeted by MoveOn were clearly designed to razz it, not to trick buyers into thinking they were the group’s products.”

CafePress refused to give in on several of the items. But the speech-chilling message is clear: Parody MoveOn.org and they’ll threaten to hunt you down and sue you. The PoliStew Cafe operator took down the pro-Petraeus, anti-MoveOn.org shirts and replaced them instead with merchandise referring to “THE GROUP THAT SHALL NOT BE NAMED.” An army of MoveOn mockers online has published photoshopped logos (“MoveOut.org,” “MoveOn.org: Surrender in Action”) in solidarity — daring the far-left lawyers to sue them.

Edward Padgett, a Los Angeles blogger who spread the word about MoveOn’s attempt to silence critics, laments: “For several years I have found MoveOn.org to be an inspirational anti-war group, but the past few weeks they have been an embarrassment to all Americans with their attacks upon President Bush and General Petraeus. I subscribe to the MoveOn newsletter, and even considered hosting an anti-war rally in San Dimas, but now I want no part of this radical group and will remove my name from their newsletter subscription . . . I guess to MoveOn, the First Amendment is only for the rich.”

Dissent-silencing tactics approved, apparently, by the MoveOn.org Democrats who are too busy bashing Rush Limbaugh to notice the gagging of ordinary citizens on their own side of the political aisle.

Welcome to George Soros’s America.

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Have You Hugged an Islamo-Fascist Today (townhall.com, 071025)

By Ann Coulter

College liberals are in a fit of pique because various speakers are coming to their campuses this week as part of David Horowitz’s Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week — not to be confused with Islamo-Fascism Appreciation Week, which I believe is in April.

Apparently liberals support Islamo-fascism.

The Democratic leadership might want to have a powwow with their base because I believe their public position is to pretend to oppose Islamic fascism.

Elected Democrats at least make empty rhetorical gestures about opposing Islamic fascism. Of course, amidst their nonspecific condemnations of Islamic terrorism, they make very specific demands that we genuflect before Islam and perform exotic fetishes on the fascists.

Liberals believe in burning the American flag, urinating on crucifixes, and passing out birth control pills to 11-year-olds without telling their parents — but God forbid an infidel touch a Quran at Guantanamo.

College campuses across the nation are installing foot baths to accommodate Muslims’ daily bathing ritual, while surgically removing the Ten Commandments from every public space in America. Maybe the Ten Commandments could be printed on towels and kept next to the foot baths.

The National Council for Social Studies recommended a lesson plan after 9/11 that included a story titled “My Name Is Osama” about a nasty little white boy, “Todd,” who taunts a fine upstanding Iraqi immigrant named “Osama.” Go ahead, laugh it up — we’ll see who’s laughing when “My Name Is Osama” ends up on ABC’s prime-time lineup next year.

This story was proposed in response to an event in which Muslims with names like “Osama” committed the most massive hate crime in U.S. history against 3,000 innocent civilians with names like “Todd.”

Still and all, Democrats who seek the votes of their fellow Americans continue to claim in a vague, meaningless way to oppose Islamo-fascism.

And then when speakers like Cyrus Nowrasteh, the writer and producer of the ABC miniseries “The Path to 9/11,” and Nonie Darwish, whose father founded the Fedayeen, show up on college campuses to criticize Islamic terrorism, the Democratic base threatens to riot. The only thing that makes the cut-and-run crowd mad enough to fight is the idea that someone, somewhere might be criticizing radical Islam.

Consequently, the speakers for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week require the sort of security phalanx one would expect for someone more like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Oh wait — no. Ahmadinejad was cheered by college students a few weeks ago — at least until he expressed reservations about sodomy. (On the basis of Ahmadinejad’s claims, instead of looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, how about we start looking for gays in Iran?)

Even American intellectuals like Dennis Prager and Michael Medved who are speaking during Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week are denounced by liberals as if they were David Duke. One pro-Islamo-fascism Web site indicts Medved on the grounds that he “has claimed that Islam has a ‘special violence problem.’” It doesn’t get much more diplomatic than that.

Conservative speakers are constantly being physically attacked on college campuses — including Bill Kristol, Pat Buchanan, David Horowitz and me, among others. Fortunately the attackers are Democrats, so they throw like girls and generally end up with their noses bloodied by pretty college coeds. But that doesn’t make it right.

Michael Moore can waddle anywhere he wants in America without fear of violence from Republicans. But we still have to hear about every testy e-mail Paul Krugman ever receives as if liberals are living in the black night of fascism. Any time Krugman wants to get into a “Most Vicious Hate Mail” contest, just say the word. You don’t hear me sniffling.

Congressional Democrats are constantly calling for conservative private citizens to be silenced. Even Democratic candidates for president and their wives are getting in on the act.

A few weeks ago, in the midst of Senate Democrats’ demand that Rush Limbaugh’s microphone be silenced, Lizzie Edwards distracted herself from the latest National Enquirer by announcing on Air America that Limbaugh’s draft deferment was phony.

I was pretty shocked. Who knew Air America was still on the air?

I know every time Democrats call for me to be silenced, I feel a delicious surge of martyrdom. For a brief moment, I understand the thrill the left gets by going around claiming to be victimized all the time.

I could almost imagine a poem:

First they came for Rush Limbaugh, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t Rush Limbaugh;

And then they came for Ann Coulter, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t Ann Coulter;

And then they came for David Horowitz, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t David Horowitz;

And then ... they came for me ... And by that time there was no one left to speak up.

Liberals claim to be terrified that the Religious Right is going to take over the culture in a country where more than a million babies are exterminated every year, kindergarteners can be expelled from school for mentioning God, and Islamic fascists are welcomed on college campuses while speakers opposed to Islamic fascism are met with angry protests.

If liberals want to face real fascism, try showing up on a college campus and denouncing fascism.

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The Left and the Term “Islamo-Fascism” (townhall.com, 071030)

By Dennis Prager

Last week, at universities around America, the conservative activist David Horowitz organized “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” The week featured a guest speaker, the showing of the documentary, “Obsession,” about radical Islam, and related activities.

As one of those speakers — at the University of California at Santa Barbara — I was particularly interested in the controversy Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week engendered as well as in the larger question of whether the term “Islamo-Fascism” is valid.

Various Muslim student groups condemned these awareness weeks and the term itself, charging that both are no more than expressions of anti-Muslim bigotry, i.e., “Islamophobia.” Nevertheless, Muslim student groups decided not to actively disrupt the week. Therefore most of the opposition to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week events came from leftist student groups.

This opposition took the form of opposing funding of speakers invited to campus; writing articles in campus newspapers attacking the speakers, the Awareness Week and the term “Islamo-Fascism” as essentially racist; and in some cases disrupting the speech.

I experienced the first two forms of leftist opposition; David Horowitz experienced the third as well. He was invited to speak at Emory University, but leftist students packed the hall and shouted him down. Emory officials did nothing to stop the harassment and the suppression of speech, and Horowitz was unable to deliver his talk. It is considerably more difficult to get conservative speakers invited to most American universities — or for them to be able to speak without being harassed — than it is for a Holocaust-denying, genocide-advocating leader, such as Iran’s Ahmadinejad at Columbia University, to deliver a speech at an American university.

In my case, about a quarter of the 300 students who came to my talk at UCSB were leftists opposed to my coming. But they allowed me to deliver my remarks without once trying to shout me down. There were, I believe, three reasons for this. One is that UCSB has a relatively calm political climate. Second, there was a serious police presence and it was clear that disrupters would be removed, if not arrested. Third, students told me afterward that I disarmed those who came to oppose me. Contrary to the demonized figure they had assumed I am — in one UCSB student newspaper column, I was compared to a Ku Klux Klanner for speaking on Islamo-Fascism — they saw a decent man, a sometimes funny guy, and heard a low-keyed, intellectual speech that contained not one word of gratuitous hatred.

It is worth mentioning that following my lecture, the student who wrote the column comparing me to a Ku Klux Klanner came over to me and said he was writing a column of apology to me and asked to be photographed with me. This is not surprising. Students at most universities are almost brainwashed into being leftist — and the way they are taught to disagree with their political opponents is by using ad hominem attacks. Conservatives are described over and over as mean-spirited, war-loving, greedy, bigoted, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, sexist, intolerant and oblivious to human suffering.

Such ad hominem labels are the left’s primary rhetorical weapons. So when leftist students are actually confronted with even one articulate conservative, many enter a world of cognitive dissonance. That is one reason why universities rarely invite conservatives to speak: they might change some students’ minds.

Regarding the term “Islamo-Fascism,” most students heard the arguments I presented for the legitimacy of the term for the first time in their lives. Very briefly summarized, these arguments were:

First, the term is not anti-Muslim. One may object to the term on factual grounds, i.e., one may claim that there are no fascistic behaviors among people acting in the name of Islam — but such a claim is a denial of the obvious.

So once one acknowledges the obvious, that there is fascistic behavior among a core of Muslims — specifically, a cult of violence and the wanton use of physical force to impose an ideology on others — the term “Islamo-Fascism” is entirely appropriate.

Second, the question then arises as to whether that term is anti-Muslim in that it besmirches the name of Islam and attempts to describe all Muslims as fascist. This objection, too, has a clear response.

The term no more implies all Muslims or Islam is fascistic than the term “German fascism” implied all Germans were fascists or “Italian fascism” or “Japanese fascism” implied that all Italians or all Japanese were fascists. Indeed, even religious groups have been labeled as fascist. During World War II, for example, Croatian Catholic fascists were called Catholic Fascists, and no one argued that the term was invalid because it purportedly labeled all Catholics or Catholicism fascist. When the left uses the term “American imperialism,” are they implying that all Americans are imperialists? Then why does Islamo-Fascism label all Muslims?

Third, given the horrors being perpetrated by some Muslims in the name of Islam — from the genocide currently being practiced by the Islamic Republic of Sudan, to the mass murders of innocents in Iraq, Israel, America, Britain, Bali, Thailand, the Philippines and elsewhere — what term is more accurate than “Islamo-Fascism”? “Islamic totalitarianism”? “Jihadists”? “Bad Muslims”?

The left’s organized crusade against Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week was simply the latest shame in the long and shameful history of the left’s inability to confront those engaged in great evil — like the left’s ferocious opposition during the Cold War to labeling communism as “totalitarian” or “evil” and its nearly universal condemnation of President Ronald Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.”

That Muslim student groups and other Muslim organizations joined with the left in the ad hominem condemnation of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week was most unfortunate. Many Muslims know well that there is indeed such a thing as Islamo-Fascism, and they should be the first to join in fighting it. It is not those who use the term “Islamo-Fascism” who are sullying the name of Islam; it is the Islamo-Fascists.

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How long before the A.D.L. kicks out all its Jews? (townhall.com, 071031)

By Ann Coulter

The Anti-Defamation League is to Jews what the National Organization for Women is to women and the ACLU is to civil libertarians. They represent not Jews or women or civil libertarians, but the left wing of the Democratic Party.

In the paramount threat of our time, the Democratic Party is AWOL. And those are the patriotic Democrats. The rest are actively aiding the enemy.

The blood of millions of Israelis is at stake, and the ADL is flacking for a party that yearns to surrender to the terrorists.

To hide the dirty little secret of the left’s burgeoning anti-Semitism, liberals act as if they live in abject terror of right-wingers. When it comes to conservatives, the Anti-Defamation League is the Pro-Defamation League.

For decades, most Jews supported the left, and the left supported Jewish causes. But the left moved on long ago. For liberals, Jews are just so “last Holocaust.”

The ADL gently chided Columbia University for making the “mistake” of inviting a genocidal, Holocaust-denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak. It tepidly criticized Ahmadinejad’s speech for being “a charade of half-answers and obfuscation.” That sounds like a fair description of Hillary’s current stump speech.

The ADL and its ilk reserve their real venom for a beast like Dennis Prager — a leading Jewish intellectual, author and radio talk show host. Last year, Prager made the manifestly obvious point that the first Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison, should take his oath of office not on a Quran, but on a Bible, in recognition of “the value system (that) underlies American civilization.”

According to the ADL, Prager’s column was not a trifling “mistake” on the order of allowing an American audience at one of America’s premier universities to give a standing ovation to a murderous, racist lunatic. Prager was “intolerant, misinformed and downright un-American.” I think I’d take “obfuscation.”

The relevant organs of pious liberal society were promptly rounded up to censure Prager, including the American Jewish Committee and two members of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, Rep. Henry Waxman and former New York Mayor Ed Koch — who called Prager a “bigot.” Do they have Ellison on the record acknowledging that the Holocaust happened?

The executive committee of the Holocaust Museum called Prager’s column antithetical to “tolerance and respect for all peoples regardless of their race, religion or ethnicity.”

But you’ll see that famed liberal “tolerance” dry up pretty fast if you render a simple statement of the beliefs of Christians.

The usual liberal coterie acts shocked and offended by Christians who actually believe Christianity is true — unlike Democratic politicians — to conceal the fact that the left is increasingly dominated by people conniving in the destruction of Israel.

How about having Tim Russert ask Hillary if she believes the New Testament is the perfection of the Old Testament? She claims to be a Christian. Let’s get it on the table: Is she or isn’t she? It doesn’t get any more bare-bones than that.

Let the cat out of the bag that a 2,000-year-old religion practiced by a majority of Americans teaches that Jesus came in “fulfillment of the scriptures,” and you might be better off if you had adopted the preferred approach of liberals’ new friends the Muslims and simply slit the Jew’s throat.

At least the ADL wouldn’t object.

They’re too busy conspiring with the Council on American-Islamic Relations to denounce Dennis Prager. And promoting gun control. And gay marriage. And illegal immigration. You know, all the issues that have historically kept the Jews safe.

The ADL denounces the teaching of intelligent design, the placement of the Ten Commandments on public property and Bibles in public schools. Any entity that disagrees with them on these issues will be labeled an “extremist organization.”

Gosh, it’s a good thing there isn’t a worldwide terrorist movement dedicated to killing Jews. The ADL might have to tear themselves away from promoting faddish liberal causes.

The ADL is more concerned with what it calls the “neo-Nazis” and “anti-Semites” in the Minutemen organization than with people who behead Jews whenever they get half a chance. It’s only a matter of time before the ADL gets around to global warming.

Earlier this year, the ADL issued an alarmist report, declaring that the Ku Klux Klan has experienced “a surprising and troubling resurgence” in the U.S., which I take to mean that nationwide KKK membership is now approaching double digits. Liberal Jews seem to be blithely unaware that the singular threat to Jews at the moment is the complete annihilation of Israel. Why won’t they focus on the genuine threat of Islamo-fascism and leave poor old Robert Byrd alone?

The ADL goes around collecting statements from Democrats proclaiming their general support for Israel, but it refuses to criticize Democrats who attack Joe Lieberman for supporting the war and who tolerate the likes of former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.

Sure, Hillary will show up at an ADL dinner and announce that she supports Israel. And then she gets testy with Bush for talking about sanctions against Iran in too rough a tone of voice.

What does it mean for the ADL to collect those statements?

The survival of Israel is inextricably linked to the survival of the Republican Party and its evangelical base. And yet the ADL viciously attacks conservatives, implying that there is some genetic anti-Semitism among right-wingers in order to hide the fact that anti-Semites are the ADL’s best friends — the defeatists in Congress, the people who tried to drive Joe Lieberman from office, the hoodlums on college campuses who riot at any criticism of Muslim terrorists and identify Israel as an imperialist aggressor, and liberal college faculties calling for “anti-apartheid” boycotts of Israel.

The Democratic Party sleeps with anti-Semites every night, but groups like the ADL love to play-act their bravery at battling ghosts, as if it’s the 1920s and they are still fighting quotas at Harvard.

Earlier this year, Rep. Virgil Goode Jr., R-Va., said “in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America.”

The ADL attacked him, saying, “Bigots have always hid behind the immigration issue.”

Like the noose hysteria currently sweeping New York City, liberals are always fighting the last battle because the current battle is too frightening.

Liberal Jews are on a collision course with themselves. They can’t reconcile the survival of Israel with their conception of themselves as liberals. The liberal coalition has turned against them. Jews are out; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is in. The new king knows not Joseph.

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The World Doesn’t Hate America, the Left Does (Townhall.com, 071127)

By Dennis Prager

One of the most widely held beliefs in the contemporary world — so widely held it is not disputed — is that, with few exceptions, the world hates America. One of the Democrats’ major accusations against the Bush administration is that it has increased hatred of America to unprecedented levels. And in many polls, the United States is held to be among the greatest obstacles to world peace and harmony.

But it is not true that the world hates America. It is the world’s left that hates America. However, because the left dominates the world’s news media and because most people, understandably, believe what the news media report, many people, including Americans, believe that the world hates America.

That it is the left — and those influenced by the left-leaning news and entertainment media — that hates America can be easily shown.

Take Western Europe, which is widely regarded as holding America in contempt, but upon examination only validates our thesis. The French, for example, are regarded as particularly America-hating, but if this were so, how does one explain the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France? Sarkozy loves America and was known to love America when he ran for president. Evidently, it is the left in France — a left that, like the left in America, dominates the media, arts, universities and unions — that hates the U.S., not the French.

The same holds true for Spain, Australia, Britain, Latin America and elsewhere. The left in these countries hate the United States while non-leftists, and especially conservatives, in those countries hold America in high regard, if not actually love it.

Take Spain. The prime minister of Spain from 1996 to 2004, Jose Maria Aznar, is a conservative who holds America in the highest regard. He was elected twice, and polls in Spain up to the week before the 2004 election all predicted a third term for Aznar’s party (Aznar had promised not to run for a third term). Only the Madrid subway bombings, perpetrated by Muslim terrorists three days before the elections, but which the Aznar government erroneously blamed on Basque separatists, turned the election against the conservative party.

There is another obvious argument against the belief that the world hates America: Many millions of people would rather live in America than in any other country. How does the left explain this? Why would people want to come to a country they loathe? Why don’t people want to live in Sweden or France as much as they wish to live in America? Those are rich and free countries, too.

The answer is that most people know there is no country in the world more accepting of strangers as is America. After three generations, people who have emigrated to Germany or France or Sweden do not feel — and are not regarded as — fully German, French or Swedish. Yet, anyone of any color from any country is regarded as American the moment he or she identifies as one. The country that the left routinely calls “xenophobic” and “racist” is in fact the least racist and xenophobic country in the world.

Given that it is the left and the institutions it dominates — universities, media (other than talk radio in America) and unions — that hate America, two questions remain: Why does the left hate America, and does the American left, too, hate America?

The answer to the first question is that America and especially the most hated parts of America — conservatives, religious conservatives in particular — are the greatest obstacles to leftist dominance. American success refutes the socialist ideals of the left; American use of force to vanquish evil refutes the left’s pacifist tendencies; America is the last great country that believes in putting some murderers to death, something that is anathema to the left; when America is governed by conservatives, it uses the language of good and evil, language regarded by the left as “Manichean”; most Americans still believe in the Judeo-Christian value system, another target of the left because the left regards all religions as equally valid (or more to the point, equally foolish and dangerous) and regards God-based morality as the moral equivalent of alchemy.

It makes perfect sense that the left around the world loathes America. The final question, then, is whether this loathing of America is characteristic of the American left as well. The answer is that the American left hates the America that believes in American exceptionalism, is prepared to use force to fight what it deems as dangerous evil, affirms the Judeo-Christian value system, believes in the death penalty, supports male-female marriage, rejects big government, wants lower taxes, prefers free market to governmental solutions, etc. The American left, like the rest of the world’s left, loathes that America.

So what America does the American left love? That is for those on the left to answer. But given their beliefs that America was founded by racists and slaveholders, that it is an imperialist nation, that 35 million Americans go hungry, that it invades countries for corporate profits, and that it is largely racist and xenophobic, it is a fair question.

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Prophet for Political Profit: Reverend of the Left. (National Review Online, 071113)

[KH: dare to call himself evangelical???]

By Peter Wehner

Jim Wallis — who is described on the website of Sojourners as a “bestselling author, public theologian, preacher, speaker, activist, and international commentator on ethics and public life” — also fancies himself as one who is in the “prophetic tradition.” That would include, according to Wallis, “the values of love and justice, reconciliation, and community that Jesus taught and that are at the core of what many of us believe, Christian or not.” Wallis is also author of a book which calls for “a new politics of compassion, community, and civility.”

Apparently the man who is in love with love, reconciliation, and civility is having to deal with some other, less admirable emotions, these days.

Wallis watched CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday night, which revealed the results of an investigation into the source of key pieces of information which were used by the Bush administration in the lead up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. (The source is an Iraqi defector whose until now was known as “Curveball” and whose real name is Rafid Ahmed Alwan). This led to Mr. Wallis writing this shrill posting on his blog on Monday morning:

I believe that Dick Cheney is a liar; that Donald Rumsfeld is also a liar; and that George W. Bush was, and is, clueless about how to be the president of the United States. And this isn’t about being partisan—I was raised in a Republican family with two Republican parents that I loved more than any two people in the world. I’ve heard plenty of my Republican friends and public figures call this administration an embarrassment to the best traditions of the Republican Party and an embarrassment to the democratic (small d) tradition of the United States. They have shamed our beloved nation in the world by this war and the shameful way they have fought it. Almost 4,000 young Americans are dead because of the lies of this administration, tens of thousands more wounded and maimed for life, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis also dead, and 400 billion dollars wasted—because of their lies, incompetence, and corruption.

But I don’t favor impeachment, as some have suggested. I would wait until after the election, when they are out of office, and then I would favor investigations of the top officials of the Bush administration on official deception, war crimes, and corruption charges. And if they are found guilty of these high crimes, I believe they should spend the rest of their lives in prison—after offering their repentance to every American family who has lost a son, daughter, father, mother, brother, or sister. Deliberately lying about going to war should not be forgiven.

There are a raft of reckless comments to sort through in these two paragraphs.

To begin with: Wallis offers no evidence that Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld lied, perhaps because no such evidence exists. For them to be liars mean they would have knowingly told a falsehood, which is simply not the case. Beyond that, you would not tell a lie that you knew would be exposed as a lie within months after it was told. Does Wallis really believe the Bush administration knew there were no WMDs in Iraq but decided to tell it any way, knowing that once the lie was exposed support for the war (and the administration) would collapse? Only a person who is suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome would believe such a thing.

The reality is that the president based his decision to go to war on badly flawed information, which is serious enough.

The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) is the intelligence community’s authoritative written judgment on specific national-security issues. The 2002 NIE provided a key judgment: “Iraq has continued its [WMDs] programs in defiance of U.N. resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.” And thanks to the bipartisan Silberman-Robb Commission, which investigated the causes of intelligence failures in the run-up to the war, we now know that the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) and the Senior Executive Intelligence Brief “were, if anything, more alarmist and less nuanced than the NIE” (emphasis added). We also know that the intelligence in the PDB was not “markedly different” from that given to Congress, including Democrats who supported the war.

The Silberman-Robb report also found “no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community’s prewar assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs. . . . Analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments.” What the report did find is that intelligence assessments on Iraq were “riddled with errors”; “most of the fundamental errors were made and communicated to policy makers well before the now-infamous NIE of October 2002, and were not corrected in the months between the NIE and the start of the war.”

In addition, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s bipartisan Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq concluded this: “The committee did not find any evidence that intelligence analysts changed their judgments as a result of political pressure, altered or produced intelligence products to conform with administration policy, or that anyone even attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to do so.”

Second, the person who most famously based his testimony of the account of “Curveball” was not Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld but Secretary of State Colin Powell — more often an opponent rather than an ally of the “neo-conservative hawks” who so alarm Wallis. When Secretary Powell gave his presentation to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, he believed what he said was true. I can say that without fear of contradiction for two reasons: first, Secretary Powell is an honorable and honest man; and second, he knew that if his testimony was shown to be wrong, his career would be forever stained.

Secretary Powell went out to Langley and spent days (and nights) there in an effort to source his claims. He obviously believed he had. Powell was wrong, as was the administration, and it ranks as among the worst intelligence failures in our history. But to imply, as Wallis does, that Colin Powell and the others are guilty of official deception, war crimes and corruption charges is deeply irresponsible, to say nothing of deeply uninformed.

Third, as Wallis must surely know, the list of prominent Democrats who believed Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs is long; it includes Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John Kerry, Jay Rockefeller, Harry Reid, Richard Durbin, Ted Kennedy, and many others. But for some reason Wallis seems unwilling to aim his outrage at his political allies. A true “prophet” would.

Fourth, Wallis has shown a persistent capacity to overlook the malevolence of Saddam Hussein. Saddam’s regime was one of the most sadistic and aggressive in modern history. It started a war against Iran (which claimed more than a millions lives) and used mustard gas and nerve gas. A decade later Iraq invaded Kuwait. Iraq was a massively destabilizing force in the Middle East; so long as Saddam was in power, rivers of blood were sure to follow. But Jim Wallis, who would have us believe he is consumed with seeking justice, seems not to care.

Fifth, Jim Wallis might want to acquaint himself with the reports by David Kay and Charles Duelfer.

Upon his return from Iraq, weapons inspector David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), told the Senate: “I actually think this may be one of those cases where [Iraq under Saddam Hussein] was even more dangerous than we thought.” His statement when issuing the ISG progress report said: “We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities” that were part of “deliberate concealment efforts” that should have been declared to the U.N. And, he concluded, “Saddam, at least as judged by those scientists and other insiders who worked in his military-industrial programs, had not given up his aspirations and intentions to continue to acquire weapons of mass destruction.”

And among the key findings of the September 2004 report by Charles Duelfer, who succeeded Mr. Kay as ISG head, are that Saddam was pursuing an aggressive strategy to subvert the Oil-for-Food Program and to bring down U.N. sanctions through illicit finance and procurement schemes; and that Saddam intended to resume WMD efforts once U.N. sanctions were eliminated. According to Mr. Duelfer, “the guiding theme for WMDs was to sustain the intellectual capacity achieved over so many years at such a great cost and to be in a position to produce again with as short a lead time as possible. . . . Virtually no senior Iraqi believed that Saddam had forsaken WMDs forever. Evidence suggests that, as resources became available and the constraints of sanctions decayed, there was a direct expansion of activity that would have the effect of supporting future WMD reconstitution.”

Beyond all this, though, is a larger point: There is an immense double standard that exists in American life, and especially in the American media. The “Religious Right” is often accused — and sometimes fairly accused — of being intemperate, uncivil, staggeringly simplistic, and uninformed when they speak out on matters of public policy. Yet this is precisely what Jim Wallis — whose rantings will garner far less attention than those of Pat Robertson or, when he was alive, Jerry Falwell — is doing. Wallis’s words could easily emerge from the fever swamps of the Left.

I have written before about how the politicization of religious faith can lead to its corruption. That is sometimes true of the “Religious Right;” as Jim Wallis has reminded us, it is also sometimes true of the religious Left.

For what it’s worth, I don’t believe Jim Wallis is lying in writing what he did. I simply believe he is deeply uninformed and politically tendentious, animated, and blinded by his political biases. And while he claims to be public theologian and a prophet, he’s a good deal closer to being a James Carville or a Paul Begala — though at least the latter don’t pretend to be “prophets” who are hovering above politics in a disinterested and morally serious fashion. Nor do they wrap their screeds in the garb of religious faith, pretending to be agents of reconciliation and civility when in fact they are simply undermining any possible claim to moral or intellectual seriousness.

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To Understand the Left, Read this Issue of Rolling Stone (townhall.com, 071113)

By Dennis Prager

The current issue of Rolling Stone magazine, its special 40th anniversary issue, reveals almost all one needs to know about the current state of the cultural left. The issue features interviews with people Rolling Stone considers to be America’s leading cultural and political figures — such as Al Gore, Jon Stewart, Bruce Springsteen, Cornel West, Paul Krugman, Kanye West, Bill Maher and George Clooney, among many others.

It brings me no pleasure to say that, with few exceptions, the interviews reveal a superficiality and contempt for cultural norms (as evidenced by the ubiquity of curse words) that should scare anyone who believes that these people have influence on American life.

First, the constant use of expletives.

As I wrote in my June 5, 2007, column, “‘Buck Fush’ and the Left,” “Higher civilization has always regarded the use of expletives in public (outside of, let us say, theatrical performances) as a form of assault on civilization . . . .”

That is why the amount of public cursing on the left and the way curse words are accepted as part of public and formal discourse may be as significant to understanding the left as anything the left says. It is the left’s way of showing rejection of the values of the middle class and of America’s Judeo-Christian civilization.

Typical examples:

Chris Rock “ . . . Bush f—ked up.” “That’s a major f—kup.” “I say some harsh s—t.”

Novelist William Gibson: “The s—t you’ve been doing for the past 400 years . . . .”

George Clooney: “ . . . my sister and I were quizzed on s—t.” “Now you’re going to hear about all this s—t.” “What the f—k’s wrong with you?” China “doesn’t give a s—t . . .” “I don’t give a s—t.” “This war is bulls—t.”

Billie Joe Armstrong: “What the f—k are you doing?” “ . . . when you say ‘F—k George Bush’ in a packed arena in Texas, that’s an accomplishment.” “I don’t have a f—king clue what they’re talking about.” “ . . . all the f—ked up problems we have.” “ . . . this girl was f—ked up.” “Why did I worry so much about this s—t?”

Jon Stewart: “We have a s—tload of guns.” “ . . . that f—ked up everything.” “We f—king declared war on ‘em.” “ . . . the whole f—king thing’s ours.” “Two vandals . . . can f—k up your way of life.” “I’ll take those odds every f—king day.”

Eddie Vedder: “Why the f—k is he doing that?”

Sam Harris: “ . . . any religious bulls—t.”

Meryl Streep: “Oh, f—k, why me?”

Tom Hanks: “People have stopped giving a s—t . . . .” “Where the f—k have you people been?”

In response to this, I will receive e-mails cursing me and noting that Vice President Dick Cheney once whispered a curse at Democratic Sen. Pat Leahy — on the floor of the Senate, no less. These e-mailers — and, to be honest, some religious conservatives as well — do not see any difference between cursing in public and using an expletive in a whisper. Many people have lost the ability to judge actions in context or to acknowledge gradations of sin. Is whispering the f-word when one assumes that no one else hears you say it really no different from using that word in a published interview or on a television show?

But even if no foul language were used by so many of those interviewed in Rolling Stone, the absence of serious thought would be enough to fear leftist influence on the country.

Some examples:

Jane Goodall: “We seem to have lost the wisdom of the indigenous people, which dictated that in any major decision, the first consideration was, ‘How will this decision we make today affect our people in the future?’”

The romanticizing of “indigenous peoples” is a popular leftist myth, believed not because it is true — “indigenous people” were just as cruel and raped the land just as much as later groups — but because it is a way of attacking the Western societies and cultures that replaced “indigenous peoples.”

Bill Maher: “ . . . [in 2003], it was a relatively small number of young Muslim men. Now, thanks to this clash of civilizations we’ve created, the threat could come from anywhere.”

According to Bill Maher and many others on the left, we Americans created this clash of civilizations. Presumably, prior to 2003 the Islamic world was morally similar to Western civilization. This, too, is a dogma of the left: Before our invasion of Iraq, the Muslim world was populated by peaceful young men; violent Islamists were made by America, not by any aspects of Islamic culture and values. Maher should tell that to the Armenians, to the blacks of the Sudan, to the Israelis, to the Algerians who have lost tens of thousands to Islamic terror, and to the others murdered and maimed by young Muslim men prior to America deposing Saddam Hussein. As noted by a Labor member of the British Parliament in the Guardian this past Sunday:

“Ten years ago, in November 1997, 50 Swiss tourists rose early to visit the Valley of the Kings across the Nile from Luxor in Egypt. Suddenly from the hills came a group of Islamists. They shot, disembowelled and decapitated the tourists.” While the American president was Bill Clinton, not George W. Bush.

Bill Maher on Republican opposition to radical changes and expenditures to fight carbon emissions: “I don’t understand what any person doesn’t get about ‘You’re going to die too!’ I mean, do they have their own air? I could understand that, because they’re selfish pr—ks by nature: ‘I’ve got my own air. What do I give a s—t?’”

Another central leftist dogma: Conservatives aren’t merely wrong, they’re “selfish pr—ks by nature.” That’s why, as regards manmade global warming leading to catastrophe on Earth, the left doesn’t address the challenges posed by many dissenting scientists. The left merely dismisses them as either paid by industry (the Newsweek cover story explanation for all dissent on this issue) or as human beings so selfish by nature that they even deny their own impending deaths.

Princeton Professor Cornel West: “ . . . a morally insensitive period from Reagan to the second Bush, when it was fashionable to be indifferent to the suffering of the most vulnerable.”

Again, the vileness of conservatives.

Cornel West: “Black folk in America have never been optimistic about the future — what have we had to be optimistic about?”

No matter how improved the lot of the vast majority of black Americans, leftists like Cornel West continue to argue that there is no reason for a black American to be optimistic.

These were entirely typical ideas in the Rolling Stone special edition. Along with the cursing, the picture they paint of the left is not a pretty one.

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Liberal Fascism (Townhall.com, 080107)

By Rich Lowry

The f-bomb of American politics is the word “fascist,” routinely hurled by the left at conservatives. Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater were smeared as incipient fascists, and George W. Bush now receives the honor, along with practically anyone to the right of Rosie O’Donnell on a college campus.

The operational meaning of the word “fascism” for most liberals who invoke it is usually “shut up.” It’s meant to bludgeon conservatives into silence. But many on the left also genuinely believe that there is something fascistic in the DNA of contemporary conservatism, as if Republican Party conventions would get their rightful treatment only if they were worshipfully filmed by Leni Riefenstahl.

In his brilliant new book “Liberal Fascism,” Jonah Goldberg (a colleague of mine) demonstrates how the opposite is the case, that fascism was a movement of the left and that liberal heroes like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were products of what Goldberg calls “the fascist moment” in America early in the 20th century. How we think of the ideological spectrum — socialism to the left, fascism to the right — should be forever changed.

Benito Mussolini was a socialist and earned the title “Il Duce” as the leader of the socialists in Italy. When he founded the fascist party, its program called for implementing a minimum wage, expropriating property from landowners, repealing titles of nobility, creating state-run secular schools and imposing a progressive tax rate. Mussolini took socialism and turned it in a more populist and militaristic direction, but remained a modernizing, secular man of the left.

The Nazis too were socialists, “enemies, deadly enemies, of today’s capitalist economic system,” in the words of the party’s ideologist Gregor Strasser. The party’s platform sounded a lot like that of the Italian fascists. The Nazis wanted to chase conventional Christianity from public life and overturn tradition, replacing them with an all-powerful state. Both Hitler and Mussolini were revolutionaries, bitterly opposed to “reactionary” forces in their societies.

By what standard, then, are they considered conservatives who took things to extremes? The left points to their anti-Semitism and militarism. But anti-Semitism isn’t an inherently right-wing phenomenon — Stalin’s Russia was anti-Semitic. As for militarism, these regimes looked to it as a way to mobilize and organize society, something deeply anathema to the anti-statist tradition of postwar American conservatism.

On the other hand, the progressive movement of the early 20th century looked to Mussolini as an inspiration and shared intellectual roots with European fascism, including an appreciation of the “top-down socialism” of Otto von Bismarck. Goldberg eviscerates Woodrow Wilson as the closest we have ever had to a fascist president. Wilson and his supporters welcomed World War I as an opportunity to expand the state, instituting “war socialism” and a far-reaching crackdown on dissent.

FDR picked up where Wilson left off. The crisis of the Great Depression was the occasion for reviving “war socialism.” The man who ran the National Recovery Administration was an open admirer of Mussolini, and the alphabet soup of New Deal agencies had their roots in World War I and the classic fascist impulse to mobilize society and put it on a war footing.

Goldberg sees the fascist exaltation of youth, glorification of violence, hatred of tradition and romance of “the street” in the New Left of the 1960s, still the subject of the fond memories for the liberal establishment in this country. Goldberg argues that “liberal fascism” — the phrase was coined by H.G. Wells, and he meant it positively — is a distant heir to European fascism. The liberal version is pacifist rather than militaristic and feminine rather than masculine in its orientation, but it also seeks to increase the power of the state and overcome tradition in sweeping crusades pursued with the moral fervor of war.

Goldberg’s keen intellectual history is, at bottom, a profound cautionary tale about the perils of state aggrandizement and of revolutionary movements. If nothing else, it should convince liberals that it’s time to find a new insult.

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Open-Minded Liberals? (townhall.com, 080124)

By Larry Elder [KH: black conservative]

Walter Cronkite, when asked whether he agreed that liberals dominated the major news media, told me, “Yes — if by liberal you mean open-minded.”

Are liberals more “open-minded” than conservatives?

To find out, a biennial survey conducted by the University of Michigan’s American National Election Studies uses a scale from 0 to 100 — 0 meaning shoot-the-person-on-sight hatred, and 100 meaning find-a-place-for-him-on-Mount-Rushmore adoration. The 2004 survey then asked 1,200 adults to define themselves politically.

Using this 0-to-100 scale, the survey asked those who described themselves as “conservative” or “extremely conservative” to rate “liberals.” Average score — 39. “Liberals” and “extreme liberals” gave “conservatives” a similar score — 38.

But the survey then asked respondents to apply the scale to specific people. How did “extreme conservatives,” in 1998, rate then-President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore? “Extreme conservatives” gave them both an average reading of 45. Twenty-eight percent gave Clinton a 0, with 10% giving that score to Gore.

How did “extreme liberals” rate President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in 2004? That group gave Bush and Cheney an average temperature of 15 and 16, respectively. Sixty percent of these extreme liberals gave Messrs. Bush and Cheney a 0. In other words, six out of ten Americans on the far left found that no evil, heinous person in the world could be worthy of more hatred than Bush and Cheney. For a little perspective, the then-alive Saddam Hussein received an average score of 8 from all Americans.

Dick Morris, a former aide to Bill Clinton, described how Clinton berated his 1996 Republican opponent, former Sen. Bob Dole. President Clinton said, “Bob Dole is not a nice man. Bob Dole is evil. The things he wants to do to children are evil. The things he wants to do to poor people and old people and sick people are evil. Let’s get that straight.”

After Republicans took control of the House in the mid-’90s, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., compared the newly conservative-controlled House to “the Duma and the Reichstag.” Dingell referred to the legislature set up by Czar Nicholas II of Russia and the parliament of the German Weimar Republic that brought Hitler to power.

Comparing Republicans to Nazis remains a favorite pastime of some Democrats. Billionaire Democratic contributor George Soros said the Bush White House displays the “supremacist ideology of Nazi Germany,” and that the administration uses rhetoric that echoes his childhood in occupied Hungary. “When I hear Bush say, ‘You’re either with us or against us,’” Soros said, “it reminds me of the Germans.”

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean characterized the contest between Democrats and Republicans as “a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.”

Last week at my local barbershop, the barber working at the chair next to mine, and his customer, discovered that I voted for George W. Bush. Shocked! Shocked! The customer stammered, “Why?”

Not particularly interested in a political discussion, I said something about keeping the country safe, opposition to big government, and support for low taxes.

“But how, how can you support somebody who pulled off 9/11?”

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“I believe 9/11 was an inside job.”

“You mean Bush murdered 3,000 people on American soil?” I asked.

“He did it to get black people.”

“Most of those killed in 9/11 were white,” I said.

“They were in the way.”

“Explain to me why people like Bush and Cheney run for public office in order to commit murder.”

“Because that’s what they do.”

“For what reason? To get rich?” I asked. “They already were.”

I then learned that somebody intentionally ruptured a levee in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina; that Bush simply serves as a puppet for others; and that “they” wish to “destroy” the little people in the middle class.

Finally, I sighed and simply asked, “How do you function day by day?”

“What do you mean?”

“How do you get up in the morning thinking that somebody in Washington, D.C., wants to murder you?”

I started to ask him where he places Bush on that thermometer, but I think I already knew. So I switched the conversation to the NFL playoffs.

Bottom line: Conservatives consider liberals well-intentioned, but misguided. Liberals consider conservatives not only wrong, but really, really bad people.

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U.S. Senator Wants to Revoke Funding From City of Berkeley, Calif., for Vote to Boot Marines (Foxnews, 080201)

WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., says the City of Berkeley, Calif., no longer deserves federal money.

DeMint was angered after learning that the Berkeley City Council voted this week to tell the U.S. Marine Corps to remove its recruiting station from the city’s downtown.

“This is a slap in the face to all brave service men and women and their families,” DeMint said in a prepared statement. “The First Amendment gives the City of Berkeley the right to be idiotic, but from now on they should do it with their own money.”

“If the city can’t show respect for the Marines that have fought, bled and died for their freedom, Berkeley should not be receiving special taxpayer-funded handouts,” he added.

In the meantime, a senior Marine official tells FOX News that the Marine office in Berkeley isn’t going anywhere.

“We understand things are different there, but some people just don’t get it. This is a part of the military machine that gives them the right to do what they do, but what they are doing is extreme,” the official said.

DeMint said he will draft legislation to rescind any earmarks dedicated for the City of Berkeley in the recently passed appropriations bill — which his office tallied to value about $2.1 million. He said that any money taken back would be transferred to the Marines.

DeMint’s office provided a preliminary list of items that would be subject to his proposal:

— $975,000 for the University of California at Berkeley, for the Matsui Center for Politics and Public Service, which may include establishing an endowment, and for cataloguing the papers of Congressman Robert Matsui.

— $750,000 for the Berkeley/Albana ferry service.

— $243,000 for the Chez Panisse Foundation, for a school lunch initiative to integrate lessons about wellness, sustainability and nutrition into the academic curriculum.

— $94,000 for a Berkeley public safety interoperability program.

— $87,000 for the Berkeley Unified School District, nutrition education program.

The Marine official, speaking with FOX News on Friday, said Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway scoffed at the news, but there are no plans for to protest the City Council’s decisions. There are definitely no plans to move the recruiting station either.

“To actually put something into law that encourages the disruption of a federal office is ridiculous. They are not going to kick a federal office out of its rightful place there, and this is not going to discourage those young patriots who want to be Marines,” the official said.

The Berkeley City Council this week voted to tell the Marines their downtown recruiting station is not welcome and “if recruiters choose to stay, they do so as uninvited and unwelcome guests,” according to The Associated Press.

The council also voted to explore whether a city anti-discrimination law applies to the Marines, with a focus on the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that prevents open homosexuality in the military.

The council also voted to give the antiwar group Code Pink a parking space in front of the recruiting office once a week for six months, as well as a protest permit.

The Marine recruiting office in Berkeley has been open for about one year, but has been the subject of recent protests by Code Pink members.

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Berkeley Vs. America, Again (townhall.com, 080206)

By Michelle Malkin

The troop-bashers in Berkeley are at it once more. But this time, the rest of America lashed back. Message to the Left Coast: It’s not the 1960s anymore.

On Jan. 29, the Berkeley city council passed several measures targeting the lone Marine recruitment office in town. The anti-war harridans at Code Pink have been picketing the center for months. Last fall, they defaced the building by slapping a sign that read “assasination” (sic) in the military office window. Instead of rising to defend the recruiters’ property rights, the city council and mayor voted to sabotage them further. They granted Code Pink special parking privileges directly in front of the Marines’ workplace to facilitate their protests — and also offered them a free sound permit for six months.

In the home of the free speech movement, the peace and love mob abused the power of government to help drive the Marines out of the city. They proceeded with zoning changes to treat recruiting centers like porn shops. They encouraged residents to continue to impede the recruiters’ work. Never mind federal law making it a crime to willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States. If that weren’t blood-boiling enough, the Berkeleyites put the troops under further siege by voting to send a letter to the U.S. Marine Corps calling them “uninvited and unwelcome intruders.”

Video of the council meeting showed city officials trashing the Marines as “the president’s own gangsters” and “trained killers” who are known for “death and destruction and maiming.” One of the council members complained that our men and women in uniform were responsible for “horrible karma.” Mayor Tom Bates offered to “help” the Marines evacuate.

But, of course, they continue to argue shamelessly that they’re not against the troops. Just against President Bush’s policies.

Only one council member, Gordon Wozniak, opposed the Code Pink measure — pointing out that the council was bending the rules, intentionally setting up a confrontation between the group and the recruitment office, and “showing favoritism.” He was outnumbered, 8-to-1. Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin and her minions gloated over the vote and turned up at the recruitment center to rub salt in the wound: “We are the defenders of democracy, the upholders of the Constitution. If it weren’t for people like the people in Berkeley, standing up for what they believe, we’d be living under Hitler.”

Her thugs defaced the recruitment center again — this time with a banner of bloody handprints stretched across the window as recruiters tried to do their jobs.

In another decade, Berkeley would have gotten away with this intolerant, illiberal, un-American power trip. But in the age of the Internet, talk radio and YouTube, word of the siege at Berkeley spread like lightning. And citizens across the country weren’t willing to look the other way. The San Francisco-based Move America Forward, led by talk show host/conservative activist Melanie Morgan, launched an online petition protesting the city council measures. Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina moved to strip Berkeley of pork barrel spending worth $2 million.

The American Legion mobilized as well. National Commander Marty Conatser lambasted the votes: “The American Legion not only strongly condemns this action by the City Council but also believes that a sincere apology is in order to all Marines, past and present. What these recruiters do is essential to our national security. Without recruiters we have no military. And I don’t think we can count on the flower children from Berkeley to protect this nation when it comes under attack. They have to remember that Marines are not the enemy; the terrorists are.”

After feeling the heat, not just from veterans, military families and troop supporters outside of Berkeley but also from their own embarrassed citizens, the council is waving a partial white flag: Two council members will move to rescind the obnoxious letter and Code Pink privileges next week. It seems a little light bulb went off in Councilwoman Betty Olds’ head: “I think we shouldn’t be seen across the country as hating the Marines.”

Too late. The city’s “horrible karma” is on full display. Sit back and watch Berkeley be Berkeley? No more.

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Who Is “Fascist”? The abuse and proper use of a political label. (National Review Online, 080213)

By Thomas Sowell

Those who put a high value on words may recoil at the title of Jonah Goldberg’s new book, Liberal Fascism. As a result, they may refuse to read it, which will be their loss — and a major loss.

Those who value substance over words, however, will find in this book a wealth of challenging insights, backed up by thorough research and brilliant analysis.

This is the sort of book that challenges the fundamental assumptions of its time — and which, for that reason, is likely to be shunned rather than criticized.

Because the word “fascist” is often thrown around loosely these days, as a general term of abuse, it is good that Liberal Fascism begins by discussing the real Fascism, introduced into Italy after the First World War by Benito Mussolini.

The Fascists were completely against individualism in general and especially against individualism in a free-market economy. Their agenda included minimum-wage laws, government restrictions on profit-making, progressive taxation of capital, and “rigidly secular” schools.

Unlike the Communists, the Fascists did not seek government ownership of the means of production. They just wanted the government to call the shots as to how businesses would be run.

They were for “industrial policy,” long before liberals coined that phrase in the United States.

Indeed, the whole Fascist economic agenda bears a remarkable resemblance to what liberals would later advocate.

Moreover, during the 1920s “progressives” in the United States and Britain recognized the kinship of their ideas with those of Mussolini, who was widely lionized by the Left.

Famed British novelist and prominent Fabian socialist H. G. Wells called for “Liberal Fascism,” saying “the world is sick of parliamentary politics.”

Another literary giant and Fabian socialist, George Bernard Shaw, also expressed his admiration for Mussolini — as well as for Hitler and Stalin, because they “did things,” instead of just talk.

In Germany, the Nazis followed in the wake of the Italian Fascists, adding racism in general and anti-Semitism in particular, neither of which was part of Fascism in Italy or in Franco’s Spain.

Even the Nazi variant of Fascism found favor on the Left when it was only a movement seeking power in the 1920s.

W. E. B. DuBois was so taken with the Nazi movement that he put swastikas on the cover of a magazine he edited, despite complaints from Jewish readers.

Even after Hitler achieved dictatorial power in Germany in 1933, DuBois declared that the Nazi dictatorship was “absolutely necessary in order to get the state in order.”

As late as 1937 he said in a speech in Harlem that “there is today, in some respects, more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past.”

In short, during the 1920s and the early 1930s, Fascism was not only looked on favorably by the Left but recognized as having kindred ideas, agendas, and assumptions.

Only after Hitler and Mussolini disgraced themselves, mainly by their brutal military aggressions in the 1930s, did the Left distance itself from these international pariahs.

Fascism, initially recognized as a kindred ideology of the Left, has since come down to us defined as being on “the Right” — indeed, as representing the farthest Right, supposedly further extensions of conservatism.

If by conservatism you mean belief in free markets, limited government, and traditional morality, including religious influences, then these are all things that the Fascists opposed just as much as the Left does today.

The Left may say that they are not racists or anti-Semites, like Hitler, but neither was Mussolini or Franco. Hitler, incidentally, got some of his racist ideology from the writings of American “progressives” in the eugenics movement.

Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is too rich a book to be summarized in a newspaper column. Get a copy and start rethinking the received notions about who is on “the Left” and who is on “the Right.” It is a book for people who want to think, rather than repeat rhetoric.

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Let Us Have Done with You: The 15-month New York State nightmare could soon be over. (National Review Online, 080311)

By John Derbyshire

A thing I ask myself a lot is: “Why the hell do I live in New York State?” State and local taxes here combine to the highest per capita figure in the nation. Health-insurance premiums are through the roof, owing to our state legislature having mandated coverage for moxibustion, aroma therapy, astral healing, and something called “Thai relief massage” (don’t ask me).

We receive 82 cents in services for every $1 we sends in taxes to the feds, ranking us 42nd in federal spending per tax dollar. The place is crawling with Democrats — both our U.S. senators and 23 out of 29 representatives. The roads are impossible within a fifty mile radius of Manhattan. Our offshore waters are a chemical soup. Al-Qaeda has us marked on their cave-wall maps with a big red-target circle. The climate is lousy — heat rash in summer, bronchitis in winter.

And then there’s our state government. Where does one start? Perhaps with Sheldon Silver, speaker of our state assembly since 1994. When not carrying out his legislative duties, Shelly is “of counsel” to Weitz & Luxenberg, the biggest firm of ambulance chasers in the state. For these services he gets an annual retainer from the firm, widely believed to be in seven figures. How hospitable has our state legislature been to tort-law reform? See if you can guess.

Still, Shelly feels that his efforts on this front may have been insufficient. In January he was called upon to name a member to a state panel that screens appellate and other judges. Whom did he pick? A chap named Arthur Luxenberg, name partner of Weitz & Luxenberg. Whether Luxenberg is the exact guy who signs Silver’s retainer checks, I do not know.

Then there’s state-senate majority leader Joe Bruno, recent subject of an FBI investigation into his consultancy services to an investment firm serving labor unions — unions with regular business before the legislature. Or how about Alan Hevesi, state comptoller until he resigned on a deal after pleading guilty to defrauding the government? Oh, it’s a fun place, New York State.

We might be willing to tolerate crooked pols if they at least got stuff done. What New York State pols mainly do is transfer resources from the private sector to the public sector. The number of state employees increases steadily while business flees the state. A neighbor from upstate tells me that if tumbleweed was native to the northeast U.S., it would be bowling down the streets of Syracuse, Buffalo, Binghamton. The state budget is looking at a deficit of $4.4 billion. With Wall Street tanking — Wall Street provides 10% of state tax revenues — this will not be getting better any time soon.

For such a dysfunctional state, a dysfunctional governor like Eliot Spitzer was a pretty good match. Spitzer was an overachieving corporate lawyer and grandstanding populist state attorney general before getting himself elected governor fifteen months ago. It’s been a long fifteen months.

Spitzer campaigned as a reformer who would clean up the state government and get the state economy back on a productive track. His slogan was: “Day One, everything changes.” This is Day 436. We’re still waiting.

How has Spitzer failed as governor? Let me number the ways.

The resignation of the aforementioned Alan Hevesi in December 2006 meant that Spitzer’s first big decision in office was the appointment of a new Comptroller. He turned the appointment into a power struggle with the legislature. The legislature, in the person of Sheldon Silver (who is the legislature, basically) swatted Spitzer aside contemptuously and appointed their own man.

Picking himself up, Spitzer then took a stand on the 2007 state budget, vowing to reform the entire budget process. Again, the Albany pros shoved him off the sidewalk, passing a budget clotted with new expenses and handouts to powerful labor unions, and increasing the number of state employees.

Struggling to his feet again, Spitzer sicced the state police on state senate majority leader Joe Bruno, and had his minions sow rumors about the 78-year-old pol. This ended badly — for Spitzer, of course. He was publicly admonished by the state attorney general.

Bloodied but unbowed, Spitzer launched a scheme to give state driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. This was too much even for New York — even for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a liberal’s liberal.

By the time this year’s budget show came round, Spitzer’s political position was similar to Sir Thomas Wyatt’s at the court of Henry VIII: “They flee from me that sometime me did seek...” He went ahead anyway with a proposal for 5% more state spending and an increased deficit — just the ticket when the state’s biggest single source of tax revenue is in a state of panic.

All the TV talking heads are telling me, with their sternest let-him-who-is-without-sin faces on, that it would be wrong, wrong to poke fun at Spitzer, to kick him when he’s down, to press for his resignation. We should reserve judgment, they tell me. We should think about his family, they tell me. It’s a victimless crime, after all, they tell me.

Well, I and my family have been living for 15 months in the state this guy presides over. We’ve been paying the taxes and premiums, seething in the traffic jams, watching the U-Hauls heading west, dealing with surly, feather-bedded state employees. What I say to the talking heads is: The hell with all that. And what I say to Eliot Spitzer is what Oliver Cromwell said to the Rump Parliament: “Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

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‘Non-Judgmental’ Nonsense: Yes, personal failings do matter in politics. (National Review Online, 080312)

By Thomas Sowell

What was he thinking? That was the first question that came to mind when the story of New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s involvement with a prostitution ring was reported in the media.

It was also the first question that came to mind when star quarterback Michael Vick ruined his career and lost his freedom over his involvement in illegal dog fighting. It is a question that arises when other very fortunate people risk everything for some trivial satisfaction.

Many in the media refer to Eliot Spitzer as some moral hero who fell from grace. Spitzer was never a moral hero. He was an unscrupulous prosecutor who threw his power around to ruin people, even when he didn’t have any case with which to convict them of anything.

Because he was using his overbearing power against businesses, the anti-business Left idolized him, just as they idolized Ralph Nader before him as some sort of secular saint because Nader attacked General Motors.

What Eliot Spitzer did was not out of character. It was completely in character for someone with the hubris that comes with the ability to misuse his power to make or break innocent people.

After John Whitehead, former head of Goldman Sachs, wrote an oped for the Wall Street Journal criticizing Attorney General Spitzer’s handling of a case involving Maurice Greenberg, Spitzer was quoted by Whitehead as saying: “I will be coming after you. You will pay the price. This is only the beginning and you will pay dearly for what you have done.”

When you start thinking of yourself as a little tin god, able to throw your weight around to bully people into silence, it is a sign of a sense of being exempt from the laws and social rules that apply to other people.

For someone with this kind of hubris to risk his whole political career for a fling with a prostitute is no more surprising than for Michael Vick to throw away millions to indulge his taste for dog fighting or for Leona Helmsley to avoid paying taxes — not because she couldn’t easily afford to pay taxes and still have more money left than she could ever spend — but because she felt above the rules that apply to “the little people.”

What is almost as scary as having someone like Eliot Spitzer holding power is having so many pundits talking as if this is just a “personal” flaw in Governor Spitzer that should not disqualify him for public office.

Spitzer himself spoke of his “personal” failing as if it had nothing to do with his being Governor of New York.

In this age, when it is considered the height of sophistication to be “non-judgmental,” one of the corollaries is that “personal” failings have no relevance to the performance of official duties.

What that amounts to, ultimately, is that character doesn’t matter. In reality, character matters enormously, more so than most things that can be seen, measured, or documented.

Character is what we have to depend on when we entrust power over ourselves, our children, and our society to government officials.

We cannot risk all that for the sake of the fashionable affectation of being more non-judgmental than thou.

Currently, various facts are belatedly beginning to leak out that give us clues to the character of Barack Obama. But to report these facts is being characterized as a “personal” attack.

Barack Obama’s personal and financial association with a man under criminal indictment in Illinois is not just a “personal” matter. Nor is his 20 years of going to a church whose pastor has praised Louis Farrakhan and condemned the United States in both sweeping terms and with obscene language.

The Obama camp likens mentioning such things to criticizing him because of what members of his family might have said or done. But it was said, long ago, that you can pick your friends but not your relatives.

Obama chose to be part of that church for 20 years. He was not born into it. His “personal” character matters, just as Eliot Spitzer’s “personal” character matters — and just as Hillary Clinton’s character would matter if she had any. [KH: !!!!!!]

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Enemy of Conservative Causes: Spitzer has been a dedicated and formidable foe. (National Review Online, 080312)

By Stephen Spruiell

If New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigns (as of this writing he has not), conservatives will be rid of a dedicated and formidable foe. Missteps and minor scandals marred his first term as governor and damaged his approval ratings, but he was by no means incapable of mounting a comeback until Monday brought news of his alleged penchant for pricey prostitutes. Spitzer’s history of hostility to conservative ideas provides a glimpse into what setbacks we might have suffered had he recovered from his first-term funk and persevered along a path that some predicted would take him all the way to the White House.

As New York state attorney general, Spitzer earned a reputation as an enemy of Wall Street for his high-profile lawsuits against the big investment firms. But he was an equally pugnacious opponent of conservative causes and ideas. In 1999, the year after he was elected, Spitzer embarked on a crusade to impose gun control via litigation. First, he joined Clinton secretary of Housing and Urban Development Andrew Cuomo in a successful attempt to bully gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson into adopting trigger locks and other changes favored by gun-control advocates. Then he joined the big-city mayors in an unsuccessful lawsuit against gun makers that tried to reclassify guns as a “nuisance.”

In 2002, Spitzer issued dozens of subpoenas targeting crisis-pregnancy centers, which offer counseling and explain alternatives to women considering abortions. Abortion-rights groups had complained that by claiming to provide “abortion alternatives,” these crisis centers were engaged in false advertising. “The charade is that they provide alternatives, when they don’t provide alternatives, they frighten women with horror films about abortion,” the president of Planned Parenthood told the Washington Post at the time. Spitzer, a longtime supporter of abortion rights, followed suit with an investigation and allegations of deceptive business practices, but he was forced to withdraw his subpoenas when the crisis centers moved to quash them.

By 2004, Spitzer was deep into his campaign to clean up Wall Street, and some critics on the right had accused him of going beyond law enforcement to a point where he was effectively creating new regulation through the threat of litigation. In a profile in The Atlantic, Spitzer dismissed these critics: “They reflexively evoke the words ‘free market’ without an understanding of what the term means. I believe in the market as much as anybody, but I believe I understand it better than they do. I understand that a market needs to have rules by which it lives.” Spitzer’s comment missed the point of much of the criticism — that as a state attorney general, he was not the person who should be making the rules.

In September of 2007, his first year as governor, Spitzer angered opponents of amnesty for illegal immigrants when he issued an executive order eliminating legal residency as a requirement for drivers licenses. The move prompted an intense backlash that Spitzer did not have the political capital to withstand. Though he won his gubernatorial race by the largest margin in New York history, Spitzer was by this point damaged by a scandal that involved the improper use of state police to collect information on a Republican state lawmaker. He was forced to rescind the order, but not before declaring its opponents to be aligned with the “rabid right.”

Finally, in what will probably be remembered as his last assault on a conservative idea (not counting his illegal solicitation of prostitution), Spitzer tried to raise taxes on New York state residents. As usual, his method employed a novel legal theory by which online vendors that had not customarily been responsible for collecting state sales tax suddenly would be. News of the scheme broke just before the holidays, however, and the resulting outcry forced Spitzer to postpone implementation of the plan.

An adulatory profile of Spitzer published in a 2002 issue of Time labeled him as a “passionate and partisan Democrat” who “spent a career pushing the law as a tool for social change.” True to this description, Spitzer was a man whose policy goals and the means he used to achieve them stood in opposition to conservative principles. He was, as National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru called him in 2004, the most destructive politician in America, and now he appears to have self-destructed.

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Whose Conduct Was More Reprehensible: Clinton’s or Spitzer’s? (townhall.com, 080313)

By Hugh Hewitt

First, limit the question to what is known beyond reasonable doubt: Elliot Spitzer’s serial assignations with call girls and Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky combined with his perjury about that affair.

Set aside Spitzer’s bullying prosecutions and his abuse of his office as governor. Try and forget the allegations against Bill Clinton from other women. Stick just to what is widely understood to be undeniable facts.

So, whose conduct is worse?

Callers to my radio show went 60-40 to proclaim Clinton the bigger heel. The reasons were two: He abused his position of power over an intern and he clung to power even after his guilt was exposed.

Those who blasted Spitzer pointed to his hypocrisy in having prosecuted others for the very conduct he is accused of engaging in, but others saluted his eventual decision to resign.

Many callers threw up their hands and declared a tie: Both guys were skunks.

There are fair arguments on all sides, but the discussion raises one key question: Given that Spitzer is being hounded from office as a result of his conduct, why is Bill Clinton still being celebrated on the campaign trail and honored far and wide? When did the absolution get conferred? When did the statute of limitations run on holding his repulsive conduct against him?

Of course Senator Clinton is not guilty of the sins of her husband except insofar as she participated in their cover-up, and that she was duped with many others is at least believable.

But this isn’t a question of criminal guilt but of a country’s willingness to welcome back to the White House a man who most definitely degraded the Oval office by his conduct.

Can you imagine Elliot Spitzer back in public life in eight years? If not, why has Bill staged such a comeback?

Could it be that many in the press and the electorate are simply amazed at Bill’s brazenness? His willingness to say or do anything? That America simply loves an unrepentant rogue?

If Spitzer had chutzpah like Bill’s, he would have walked out to the cameras, cited the Clinton precedent, and dared the new York legislature to impeach him while asserting it was time to get back to the people’s business.

Given the Clinton precedent, it might have worked.

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The Bad War: Left vs. military recruiters. (National Review Online, 080312)

By Michelle Malkin

Ideas have consequences. Inaction has consequences. For the past several years, I’ve chronicled the left’s escalating war on military recruiters — and the apathetic, weak-kneed response to it. The anti-recruiter thugs on college campuses and in liberal enclaves have thrived thanks to a combination of public indifference, law enforcement fecklessness and left-wing ideological apologism.

It has now been a week since the Times Square military-recruitment center bombing. The investigation continues — and so does the left’s denial of the ongoing campaign against military recruiters. At a national conference of anarchists in Washington, D.C., last weekend, a “solidarity sticker” glorifying the biker bomber made the rounds. On the Internet, “peace” activists threatened the Gathering of Eagles, a national military support group that organized a rally at Times Square last weekend. From Pittsburgh to Berkeley, anti-war extremists have smeared recruiters as “death pimps” and “child predators.” The militant Code Pink group continues to organize in-your-face protests to drive recruiters from major metropolitan areas.

The Times Square bombing was not an isolated incident, but an all-too-predictable symptom of reckless tolerance for dangerous “peace” peddlers skating on the edge of sedition. Lone nuts? Here is a brief history of the anti-military recruitment movement’s mounting acts of vandalism and violence. I’ll list, you decide:

March 2003: Antiwar zealots in Ithaca, N.Y., target a recruitment center that had been hit before with Molotov cocktails. On St. Patrick’s Day, wielding cups of their own blood, they entered a Lansing military recruitment office and splashed their blood over recruiter posters, military cutouts and the American flag. Daniel Burns, Peter De Mott, Clare Grady, and Teresa Grady were convicted in 2005 on two misdemeanor counts of trespassing and damaging federal property. All but Burns have been released from prison.

January 20, 2005: At Seattle Central Community College, Army recruiter Sgt. Jeff Due and his colleague Sgt. 1st Class Douglas Washington were hounded by an angry mob of 500 anti-war students. The recruiters’ table was destroyed; their handouts, torn apart. Protesters threw water bottles and newspapers at the soldiers. The far-left Students Against War had been agitating to kick the recruiters off campus. The college administration refused to punish the radicals.

Jan. 31, 2005: Recruiters in Manhattan reported that a door to their office had been beaten in. Anarchist symbols were scrawled in red paint on the building. On the same day, New York police collared a young Manhattan College junior and charged him with throwing a burning rag into an Army recruiting station and ruining the door locks with super glue.

Feb. 1, 2005: At a South Toledo, Ohio, recruitment center, unhinged protesters hurled manure all over the building. They broke windows and sprayed vulgar graffiti — “War is Sh*t” — on office property.

Mid-Feb. 2005: Twenty-year-old anti-war goon Brendan Walsh is sentenced to five years in federal prison for hurling a Molotov cocktail through the window of a Vestal, N.Y., military recruitment office in 2003.

March 2005: In East Orange, N.J., young anti-military protesters shattered the windows of an Army recruitment station and a neighboring Navy office. At City College in New York, a campus secretary protesting recruiters was charged with second-degree assault, disorderly conduct and obstructing governmental administration. Police also arrested students Justin Rodriguez and Nicholas Bergreen for resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and assaulting a police officer.

March/April 2005: Anti-war extremists at New York’s Bronx Community College shut down several military recruitment sessions. At UC Santa Cruz, “peace” thugs drove recruiters off campus after an hour-long demonstration of shouting and window banging.

May 2005: Anti-military students swarmed the booths of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the USAF at a San Francisco State University career fair. In Wisconsin, an Air Force ROTC information day was canceled due to threats by the University of Wisconsin-Madison chapter of Stop the War.

April 2006: UC Santa Cruz students ambushed military recruiters. Vandals at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill tossed cans of red paint in front of an ROTC office and spray-painted vulgarities all over its doors. University of Minnesota students splattered red paint all over an Army recruiting station.

December 2006: Anarchists in Lawrence, Kan., crippled business at an Army/Navy recruitment center, where workers’ car tires were slashed and bomb-proof glass had to be installed.

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Obama’s Pastor and the Traditional Religious Left (Christian Post, 080326)

Mark D. Tooley

Apologists for Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright have tried to portray him as a traditional voice for the black church in America. But the Chicago minister, who belongs to the nearly all white United Church of Christ (UCC) denomination, is far more recognizably the voice of the traditional white Religious Left than he is for the historically more conservative black church.

Wright’s calls for America’s damnation and his suggestion that our country deserved 9-11 are fairly traditional fare within the Religious Left, especially among the mostly white elites of his 1.1 million member denomination. His liberal stance on homosexuality, which is conventional within the UCC, is also anathema to historically black churches. Wright’s searing critiques of American foreign policy are far more common to the nearly all white Mainline Protestant denominations, of which the UCC is the furthest left, than to the historically black denominations. Not surprisingly, the UCC’s officers have rushed to defend Rev. Wright.

“Many of us would prefer to avoid the stark and startling language Pastor Wright used in these clips,” acknowledged UCC President John Thomas in a special March 17 statement. “But what was his real crime? He is condemned for using a mild ‘obscenity’ in reference to the United States. This week we mark the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, a war conceived in deception and prosecuted in foolish arrogance. Nearly four thousand cherished Americans have been killed, countless more wounded, and tens of thousands of Iraqis slaughtered. Where is the real obscenity here?”

According to Thomas, “Pastor Wright’s judgment may be starker and more sweeping than many of us are prepared to accept. But is the soul of our nation served any better by the polite prayers and gentle admonitions that have gone without a real hearing for these five years while the dying and destruction continues?” In typical fashion for UCC officials, Thomas rambled on about the supposedly widening “gap between the obscenely wealthy and the obscenely poor,” neighbors “relegated to minimal health care,” and “bailouts” for “unscrupulous lenders.” Thomas wondered: “Is Pastor Wright to be ridiculed and condemned for refusing to play the court prophet, blessing land and sovereign while pledging allegiance to our preoccupation with wealth and our fascination with weapons?”

Evidently not content with his one statement, Thomas also issued another salvo against Wright’s critics through a March 14 UCC news release. “Trinity United Church of Christ is a great gift to our wider church family and to its own community in Chicago,” Thomas gushed. “At a time when it is being subjected to caricature and attack in the media, it is critical that all of us express our gratitude and support to this remarkable congregation, to Jeremiah A. Wright for his leadership over 36 years, and to Pastor Otis Moss III, as he assumes leadership at Trinity.”

Thomas complained through his denominational news service that he was distressed by media reports that “present such a caricature of a congregation that been such a great blessing.” Naturally, the UCC president mostly declined to comment directly on Wright’s more inflammatory declarations. Instead, he vaguely complained about the attackers.

“These attacks, many of them motivated by their own partisan agenda, cannot go unchallenged,” Thomas insisted. “It’s time for all of us to say ‘No’ to these attacks and to declare that we will not allow anyone to undermine or destroy the ministries of any of our congregations in order to serve their own narrow political or ideological ends.”

Thomas visited Wright’s 6,000 member congregation as recently on March 2 and reported having been “profoundly impressed” by it all. “While the worship is always inspiring, the welcome extravagant and the preaching biblically based and prophetically challenging, I have been especially moved by the way Trinity ministers to its young people, nurturing them to claim their Christian faith, to celebrate their African-American heritage, and to pursue higher education to prepare themselves for leadership in church and society,” Thomas enthused.

Such enthusiasm by Thomas is understandable, not only given Wright’s far-left politics, but also his congregation’s generosity towards their denomination. The UCC news service report boasted that Trinity Church, which is the UCC’s largest congregation, has given $3.7 million to the denomination from 2003 to 2007. The shrinking and struggling UCC, which has lost nearly half its membership over the last 50 years, must be grateful towards Wright for his vitality amid the UCC’s overall grim demographic prognosis.

Also praising Rev. Wright’s ministry was the pastor of the UCC’s second largest congregation, the Rev. Kenneth L. Samuel of the predominantly black 5,300-member Victory UCC in Stone Mountain, Georgia. “There have been two major sins in the Black church that many Black churches will not address - homophobia is one and sexism is another,” Samuel explained to the UCC news service, “And Jeremiah Wright has been one of the articulate, courageous voices that has not been afraid to address these critical issues. If he can do that and still maintain his close connectivity to the Black community, and stay grounded in the Black ethos, that’s what has inspired me.”

Likewise coming to Rev. Wright’s defense was “Red Letter Christian” activist Diana Butler Bass on Jim Wallis Sojourners website. “As MSNBC, CNN, and FOX endlessly play the tape of Rev. Wright’s ‘radical’ sermons today, I do not hear the words of a ‘dangerous’ preacher (at least any more dangerous than any preacher who takes the Gospel seriously!),” Bass opined. “No, I hear the long tradition that Jeremiah Wright has inherited from his ancestors. I hear prophetic critique. I hear Frederick Douglass. And, mostly, I hear the Gospel slant—I hear it from an angle that is not natural to me. It is good to hear that slant.”

From her enlightened perspective, Bass concluded: “That is not, of course, comfortable for white people. Nor is it easily understood in sound bites. It does not easily fit in a contemporary political campaign. But it is a deep spiritual river in American faith and culture, a river that—as I had to learn—flows from the throne of God.”

Does Wright’s radicalized form of Christianity, dating back to his 1984 visit to Libyan madman dictator Muammar Qaddafi in the company of Nation of Islam honcho Louis Farrakhan, truly flow from the “throne of God,” as Bass discerned? In typical Sojourners fashion, she tried to ascribe Wright’s provocative views to the black church prophetic tradition. But that tradition inveighed against actual injustices, amid authentic human suffering, while remaining rooted in orthodox Christianity.

Wright’s problematic causes are primarily the fads of the mostly white Religious Left, which likes to believe it speaks for oppressed people. But these elites more commonly speak from cushy endowed professorates and tall steeple pulpits, not from a genuine experience of solidarity with the suffering. Typical Religious Left elites actually only dabble in a faux radicalism that, at best, liberates nobody, when not actually apologizing for genuine tyrants. Rev. Wright is no Frederick Douglas, and his UCC defenders resemble even less the sturdy New England Puritans who first founded their movement.

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How Liberals Lost a Liberal (Townhall.com, 080415)

By Dennis Prager

The Democratic Party’s preoccupation with the question of when America will leave Iraq rather than with how America will win in Iraq reminds me of how and why this nearly lifelong liberal and Democrat became identified as a conservative and Republican activist.

I have identified as liberal all my life. How could I not? I was raised a Jew in New York City, where I did graduate work in the social sciences at Columbia University. It is almost redundant to call a New York Jewish intellectual a liberal. In fact, I never voted for a Republican candidate for president until Ronald Reagan in 1980. But I have not voted for a Democrat since 1980.

What happened? Did I suddenly change my values in 1980? Or did liberalism? Obviously, one (or both) of us changed.

As I know my values, the answer is as clear as it could be — it is liberalism that has changed, not I. In a word, liberalism became leftism. Or, to put it another way — since my frame of reference is moral values — liberalism’s moral compass broke. It did so during the Vietnam War, though I could not bring myself to vote Republican until 1980. The emotional and psychological hold that the Democratic Party and the word “liberal” have on those who consider themselves liberal is stronger than the ability of most of these individuals to acknowledge just how far from liberal values contemporary liberalism and the Democratic Party have strayed.

Here are four key examples that should prompt any consistent liberal to vote Republican and oppose “progressives” and others on the left.

The issue that began the emotionally difficult task of getting this liberal to identify with conservatives and become an active Republican was Communism. I had always identified the Democratic Party and liberalism with anti-Communism. Indeed, the labor movement and the Democratic Party actually led American opposition to Communism. It was the Democrat Harry Truman, not Republicans, who made the difficult and unpopular decision to fight another war just a few years after World War II — the war against Chinese and Korean Communists. It was Democrats — John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson — who also led the war against Chinese and Vietnamese Communists.

Then Vietnam occurred, and Democrats and liberals (in academia, labor and the media) abandoned that war and abandoned millions of Asians to totalitarianism and death, defamed America’s military, became anti-war instead of anti-evil, became anti-anti-Communist instead of anti-Communist, and embraced isolationism, a doctrine I and others previously had always associated with conservatives and the Republican Party. This change was perfectly exemplified in 1972, when the Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern ran on the platform “Come home, America.”

This in turn led to the liberal embrace of the immoral doctrine of moral equivalence. As I was taught at Columbia, where I studied international relations, America was equally responsible for the Cold War, and there was little moral difference between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. They were essentially two superpowers, each looking out for its imperialist self-interest. I will never forget when the professor of my graduate seminar in advanced Communist Studies, Zbigniew Brzezinski, chided me for using the word “totalitarian” to describe the Soviet Union.

I recall, too, asking the late eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, in a public forum in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, if he would say that America was, all things considered, a better, i.e., more moral, society than Soviet society. He said he would not.

It was therefore not surprising, only depressingly reinforcing of my view of what had happened to liberals, when liberals and Democrats condemned President Ronald Reagan for describing the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.”

Identifying and confronting evil remains the Achilles’ heel of liberals, progressives and the rest of the left. It was not only Communism that post-Vietnam liberals refused to identify as evil and forcefully confront. Every major liberal newspaper in America condemned Israel’s 1981 destruction of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor (in which one person — a French agent there to aid the Israeli bombers, and who therefore knowingly risked his life — was killed). As The New York Times editorialized: “Israel’s sneak attack … was an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression.”

Most Democrats in Congress even opposed the first Gulf War, sanctioned by the United Nations and international law, against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and its bloody annexation of Kuwait.

And today, the liberal and Democratic world’s only concern with regard to Iraq, where America is engaged in the greatest current battle against organized evil, is how soon America can withdraw.

There were an even larger number of domestic issues that alienated this erstwhile liberal and Democrat. But nothing quite compares with liberal and progressive abandonment of the war against evil, the most important venture the human race must engage in every generation.

I can understand why a leftist would vote for the party not one of whose contenders for the presidency uttered the words “Islamic terror” in a single presidential debate. But I still cannot understand why a true liberal would.

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The Democrats’ Jimmy Carter Problem (townhall.com, 080423)

By Michelle Malkin

So much for Jimmy Carter’s triumphal peace mission in the Middle East. Like everything else he has done on foreign policy, the world’s biggest tool for jihad propaganda created yet another bloody mess. Quick review:

After proclaiming that Hamas terrorists were willing to accept Israel as a “neighbor next door,” Carter’s Hamas hug buddies flipped him the bird. They gladly accepted the diplomatic legitimacy Carter’s visit conferred upon them, while clinging bitterly to their insistence on the destruction of the Jewish state.

After laying a wreath in honor of the murderous Yasser Arafat, Carter dutifully agreed to deliver a letter from kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit to his parents on behalf of the terrorists who are holding him hostage. Shalit’s father rightly jeered Carter as nothing more than a postman for Hamas.

After Carter asserted that the State Department never clearly opposed his trip, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pointed out that she had explicitly warned him against meeting with Hamas. Not to mention all those bold-faced, unequivocal headlines before the trip announcing that “State Department opposes Carter meeting with Hamas chief” (USA Today) and “Rice Criticizes Carter for Reported Meeting Planned With Hamas” (Fox News).

What part of “Don’t meet with the Jew-hating killers, you idiot!” didn’t Carter understand?

Article 13 of the Hamas charter is also as clear as day: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

Jimmy Carter’s thick skull and moral myopia are an American embarrassment and an American problem. But more precisely: Jimmy Carter is a Democratic problem. He casts a long, feckless shadow over the party — and it will haunt the party through the Democratic National Convention in August and beyond.

Carter is a Democratic Party superdelegate who will undoubtedly seek a prominent role at the convention this August. But the party can ill afford a diarrhea-of-the-mouth moment from their elder terror apologist. The world is watching and listening.

Though he has not formally endorsed Barack Obama, Carter has made enough positive noise about the campaign to send Iranian TV into euphoria. The regime’s media arm led with an item earlier this week headlined, “Carter: Obama favorite worldwide.” The news item quoted Carter as saying that Obama is supported by “many people in Ghana, Nigeria and Nepal. … World opinion is strongly supportive of Obama, that’s all we hear.”

(Left off the list of legitimate world opinion, of course: Israel.)

Despite Obama’s milquetoast protestations of Carter’s visit and his technocratic disavowal of Hamas, Carter and Hamas are giving Obama two thumbs up. (Obama’s associations with anti-Semites like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the Louis Farrakhan-cheerleading Rev. Michael Pfleger give him all the cred he needs.)

Conservatives have mobilized to protest Carter’s terrorist shilling. GOP Rep. Sue Myrick called for his passport to be revoked; Rep. Joe Knollenberg wants $19 million in taxpayer funding to be withdrawn from his Georgia-based scholarly institution. But the Sick-Of-Jimmy-Carter Coalition isn’t just a Republican club. The Jewish Daily Forward reports that “some liberal observers…worry that the elder statesman may create headaches for the party at its nominating convention in Denver.”

Their angst is well placed. The question is: Will exiling America’s top Hamas apologist from the convention podium be enough to dispel the shadow of surrender? Or, to paraphrase Obama, can the Democrats no more disown Carter than they can disown the softheaded liberalism at the party’s ideological core?

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Placing Liberals Under a Microscope (townhall.com, 080428)

By Burt Prelutsky

What makes liberals so endlessly fascinating isn’t just that they manage with a consistency that verges on the miraculous to be wrong on every important issue, but the latitude they extend to their political leaders to lie, cheat and steal.

For instance, has any liberal ever questioned Al Gore’s apocryphal pronouncements about climate change in light of the fact that the man continues to live in a mansion and gad about in private jets? Now, thanks to Mr. Gore, we are having those new, terribly ugly light bulbs shoved down our throats. And if you think dealing with nuclear waste is a headache, just wait until you try to dispose of light bulbs jam-packed with mercury! Frankly, in view of Gore’s success at creating mass hysteria, I, for one, won’t be too surprised if the ecology Nazis next begin demanding that we insulate our homes with asbestos.

Chelsea Clinton, while giving one of her recent speeches for Mother Clinton, was asked whether, like Hillary, she recalled running from gunfire at the Kosovo airfield in 1996. The audience, no doubt filled with true believers, first groaned at the impertinence of anyone daring to question the First Daughter, then rewarded Chelsea with an ovation for saying nothing more than “I was there.”

Now that Chelsea is all of 28, I suppose, like her parents, she is mastering the technique of avoiding direct questions as the all-important first step in carving out a political career. The fact is, by 2016, when Hillary expects to be winding up her second term, her daughter would be 36 and of an age to make a run for the White House herself. Heck, if things pan out, none of the Clintons might ever have to pay rent again.

Let us not overlook that grand old sot of the Democratic party, Ted Kennedy. Although he preaches clean energy from his pulpit in the Senate, nary a liberal called him a hypocrite when he prevented windmills from being erected near his home because they might interfere with his view. Although how much he can really see through the bottom of a shot glass is anybody’s guess.

More recently, oil was dumped from his boat into the nearby bay, but you can’t expect that the guy who was never indicted for dumping a woman in a body of water would be reprimanded over such a trifle. Of course, if he were a Republican, the Boston Globe would call for his resignation and the New York Times would call for his head.

This brings us to Barack Obama. Accused of attending a racist, anti-American church, he first claimed he never heard Rev. Wright make a single blasphemous remark from the pulpit. Then, when he was reminded that he’d been sitting there Sunday after Sunday for 20 years, soaking in the sewage, he made a speech in which he pretty much ignored the specific, hate-filled remarks spewed by his mentor, except to say that he understood where Jeremiah Wright was coming from. Only later did we all find out that the Obamas had dropped over $25,000 in Wright’s collection box last year.

When Trent Lott made a single stupid remark to a bigoted white senator on the occasion of Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday, Lott was made to walk the plank by the Republicans. But when a black Democrat who, along with his wife, has received every benefit that a guilt-ridden white society has to offer, tells us that he never once spoke up when his surrogate father damned our nation; accused white people of inflicting HIV on black people in order to exterminate the race; and claimed that 9/11 was a case of America’s chickens coming home to roost; the liberals don’t ride him out of the party on a rail. Instead, they insist he gave a great speech and opened an honest dialogue on race.

Frankly, I find the Obama phenomenon a total mystery. He has the most left-wing voting record in the U.S. Senate, but claims he’s the guy who can bring Republicans and Democrats together. In his books and in his church attendance, he proves that he sees everything through a prism of race, but he contends he’s the guy who can unite blacks and whites.

I find it absurd that his entire platform consists of two extremely vague words — hope and change. That was pretty much the same thing the Democrats promised us before taking control of the House and Senate in 2006.

Well, recently, a friend of mine reminded me that just prior to the 2006 election, consumer confidence was unbelievably high; regular gasoline sold for about $2.25-a-gallon; and the unemployment rate was 4.5%.

Since then, consumer confidence has plummeted; gas now costs about a dollar-and-a-half-a-gallon more; unemployment stands at 5%; American homeowners have seen their home equity drop by over a trillion dollars, with 1% of our homes in foreclosure; and, for good measure, the liberals refuse to eliminate earmarks.

It wasn’t all bad news, though. The Democratic-controlled Congress, no doubt in appreciation for what they regarded as a job very well done, voted to increase their own salaries.

So, I can only assume that the change that Barack Obama longs for is to see the Republicans re-claim the House and Senate. If so, it’s the only thing the man has ever said or done with which I heartily agree.

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If We Could Talk to the Animals (townhall.com, 080522)

By Ann Coulter

You always know you’ve struck gold when liberals react with hysteria and rage to something you’ve said. So I knew President Bush’s speech at the Knesset last week was a barn burner before even I read it. Liberals haven’t been this worked up since Rev. Jerry Falwell criticized a cartoon sponge.

Calling the fight against terrorism “the defining challenge of our time” — which already confused liberals who think the defining struggle of our time is against Wal-Mart — Bush said:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

The way liberals squealed, you’d think someone had mentioned Obama’s ears. Summoning all their womanly anger, today’s Neville Chamberlains denounced Bush, saying this was an unjustified attack on Obambi and, furthermore, that it’s absurd to compare B. Hussein Obama’s willingness to “talk” to Ahmadinejad to Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler.

Unlike liberals, I will honestly report their point before I attack it.

The New York Times editorialized: “Sen. Obama has called for talking with Iran and Syria,” but has not “suggested surrendering to these countries’ demands, which is, after all, what appeasement is.”

“Hardball’s” Chris Matthews gloated all week about nailing a conservative talk radio host with this brilliant riposte: “You don’t understand there’s a difference between talking to the enemy and appeasing. What Neville Chamberlain did wrong ... is not talking to Hitler, but giving him half of Czechoslovakia.”

Liberals think all real tyrants ended with Hitler and act as if they would have known all along not to appease him. Next time is always different for people who refuse to learn from history. As Air America’s Mark Green said: “Look, Hitler was Hitler.” (Which, I admit, threw me for a loop: I thought Air America’s position is that Bush is Hitler.)

This is nonsense. Ahmadinejad looks a lot like Hitler did when Chamberlain agreed to meet with him at Munich, except that Hitler didn’t buy his suits from ratty thrift shops. Much of England reacted just as today’s Democrats would because, like today’s Democrats, they feared nothing more than another war. (Lloyd George lied, kids died!)

Lots of Britons cheered when Chamberlain returned from Munich and announced “peace in our time.” Without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, what on earth makes Chris Matthews think he would not be among them?

As Bush said at the Knesset, “There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words.” That was Chamberlain. And that is today’s Democratic Party.

What Matthews and the Times are saying is this: We can have a Munich, but we promise to be tougher than Chamberlain was. Therein lies the flaw in their logic. Yes, in the abstract, it is technically possible to “talk” without giving up Czechoslovakia (or in today’s case, Iraq or Israel).

But in reality, when talking to a lunatic without having first bombed him into submission, the only possible result is appeasement. Any talk with Hitler, or a McHitler like Ahmadinejad, that does not include handing over Czechoslovakia or Israel, like a game show parting gift, is going to be a relatively brief chat.

Churchill knew that before Chamberlain went to Munich. But a lot of Britons then, like a lot of Americans today, refused to see that blindingly obvious point.

Liberals think the way to deal with dangerous tyrants is to send in a sensitive president who will make Ahmadinejad fall in love with him. They imagine Obama becoming Ahmadinejad’s psychotherapist, like Barbra Streisand in “The Prince of Tides.”

President Bush described such people perfectly with his reference to Sen. William Edgar Borah, the one who said World War II could have been avoided if only he could have talked to Hitler.

Liberals refuse to learn from history because they put their hands over their ears and tell themselves over and over again: “Hitler was different.”

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The Left Is Wrong (townhall.com, 080507)

By John Stossel

She was once the darling of conservatives like Newt Gingrich, but now you can’t watch a television news-talk program without seeing her calling for more government and showing scorn for those who want less.

She’s Arianna Huffington, website impresario and author of “Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution and Made Us All Less Safe”.

I interviewed her for “20/20” last week because I was impressed by the success of the website she created. In just three years she made the Huffington Post a hot liberal opinion site.

What happened to Huffington’s beliefs? In 1994, she worked to promote the Gingrich Revolution. She appeared at political events with Bob Dole.

“I definitely called myself a conservative,” she told me. “I actually believed that the private sector would be able to address a lot of the issues that I believed were very important, like taking care of those in need. And then I saw firsthand how difficult it was. ... One of the problems with the Right is that they don’t believe in facts, and they don’t believe in evidence. And I was willing to change my mind, confronted with new evidence. And we would all be better off if we were willing to look at new evidence.”

So she turned to big government.

“What we need is serious government policies to address poverty.”

But they don’t work, I said.

“They don’t work as well as they should be working, but there’s a lot more we can do.”

She believes the old AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) program helped the poor and therefore welfare reform was not a good thing.

“[Reform was] not a success. A lot of people have been left without job training and therefore without the ability to really lead productive lives.”

I pointed out that since welfare reform, eight million people left the welfare rolls, and many found jobs they like, jobs that pay better than welfare. Although her favorite political candidates say life for the poor has gotten worse, incomes of the poorest Americans are actually higher today.

Confronted with a chart showing that, Huffington acknowledged that lower-income people are generally better off.

“In general. In general ... But you know we have over 30 million Americans living below the poverty line.”

But the Census Bureau says the percentage of families living below the poverty line fell from 11% in 1996 to 9.8% in 2006. The percentage of single mothers below the poverty line fell from 32.6% in 1996 to 28.3% in 2006. That looks like progress to me.

But Huffington had this retort: “The fact that we used to live in caves is not a justification for the state of affairs right now.”

Like most liberals, she believes America needs more regulation. OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) should be strengthened to protect workers.

I tried to acquaint her with the facts. While it’s true that since OSHA started, deadly job accidents have dropped, the truth is, deaths were dropping before OSHA. Between the late 1930s and 1971, job fatalities fell from more than 40 to fewer than 20 per 100,000 workers. After OSHA was passed, fatalities continued to fall, but no faster than before. It’s misleading to credit regulation for the improvement. Government gets in front of a parade and pretends to lead it.

Huffington’s reply: “If you were the husband of one of the women who died recently because OSHA regulations were not sufficiently implemented, you would not be so cavalier about the speed at which things get better.”

As if the government could guarantee zero job deaths.

Huffington has also joined the war on global warming. “We have two Priuses,” she says.

I pointed out that she also has a $7-million house that burns more carbon than a hundred people in the Third World. She said:

“There is no question that the fact that I’m living in a big house, I occasionally travel on private planes — all those things are contradictions. I’m not setting myself up as some paragon who only goes around on a bicycle.”

That honesty is a relief. If only she and others would own up to the other contradictions in the Left’s call for endlessly intrusive government.

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You Can’t Fuel All of the People All of the Time (townhall.com, 080626)

By Ann Coulter

Liberals dismiss studies that show a link between abortion and breast cancer, claiming they are biased because the people promoting the studies are “anti-choice.”

For the same reason, no one should believe the Democrats’ “energy” policies.

Democrats couldn’t care less about high gas prices. The consistent policy of the Democratic Party, going back at least to Jimmy Carter, has been to jack up gas prices so we can all start pedaling around on tricycles.

Environmentalists are constantly clamoring for higher gas taxes as the cure-all to their insane global warming theory. Clinton proposed a 26-cent tax on gas. John Kerry said it should be 50 cents. Gore endorsed the Malthusian proposal of Paul and Anne Ehrlich in “The Population Explosion” that gas taxes be raised gradually to match prices in Europe and Japan.

The result is consumers now pay about 46 cents per gallon in gasoline taxes. That’s not including taxes paid directly to the government by the oil companies and passed onto consumers. As the inestimable economist John Lott has pointed out, in the past 25 years oil companies have paid more than three times in taxes what they have made in profits.

B. Hussein Obama’s response to soaring gas prices is to have the oil companies collect even more money from us at the pump, proposing a “windfall profits tax” on oil companies. “Corporate taxes” sound like taxes on rich people, but all they do is force corporations to collect taxes on behalf of the government.

Democrats have worked hard to ensure that Americans pay as much for gas as Europeans do. After a quarter-century of gas tax hikes, a ban on drilling for oil and a complete destruction of the nuclear power industry in America, I guess liberals can declare: Mission accomplished!

In response to skyrocketing gas prices, liberals say, practically in unison, “We can’t drill our way out of this crisis.”

What does that mean? This is like telling a starving man, “You can’t eat your way out of being hungry!” “You can’t water your way out of drought!” “You can’t sleep your way out of tiredness!” “You can’t drink yourself out of dehydration!”

Seriously, what does it mean? Finding more oil isn’t going to increase the supply of oil?

It is the typical Democratic strategy to babble meaningless slogans, as if they have a plan. Their plan is: the permanent twilight of the human race. It’s the only solution they can think of to deal with the beastly traffic on the LIE (Long Island Expressway).

How do liberals propose we acquire the energy required for the economic activity and production that results in light appearing when they flick a switch? The larger enterprise involved in producing that little miracle eludes them.

Liberals complain that — as B. Hussein Obama put it — there’s “no way that allowing offshore drilling would lower gas prices right now. At best you are looking at five years or more down the road.”

This is as opposed to airplanes that run on woodchips, which should be up and running any moment now.

Moreover, what was going on five years ago? Why didn’t anyone propose drilling back then?

Say, you know what we need? We need a class of people paid to anticipate national crises and plan solutions in advance. It would be such an important job, the taxpayers would pay them salaries so they wouldn’t have to worry about making a living and could just sit around anticipating crises.

If only we had had such a group — let’s call them “elected representatives” — they could have proposed drilling five years ago!

But of course we do pay people to anticipate national problems and propose solutions. Some of them — we’ll call them Republicans — did anticipate high gas prices and propose solutions.

Six long years ago President Bush had the foresight to demand that Congress allow drilling in a minuscule portion of the Alaska’s barren, uninhabitable Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). In 2002, Bush, Tom DeLay and the entire Republican Party were screaming from the rooftops: Drill! Drill! Drill!

We’d be gushing oil now — except the Democrats stopped us from drilling.

Drilling on only 0.01% of ANWR’s 19 million acres was projected to produce about 10 billion barrels of oil. From all domestic sources combined, we currently produce about 1.8 billion barrels of oil per year. To a layperson like myself, 10 billion barrels seems like a lot of oil.

The other party — plus John McCain — ferociously opposed drilling in ANWR, drilling offshore or drilling anyplace else. Instead of Drill! Drill! Drill!, their motto could be: Kill! Kill! Kill!

They refuse to believe our abortion studies? I refuse to believe they care about Americans having to pay high gas prices.

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Why Liberals Lie About What They Believe (townhall.com, 080627)

By John Hawkins

Once you’ve watched liberals long enough to understand how they think — scratch that, how they feel — they become extraordinarily predictable.

To begin with, the liberal agenda is, in many respects, the same as it was in the thirties. Whether you call it communism, fascism, socialism, liberalism, or progressivism, the only real difference is how much they believe they can get away with, the way they sell it to people, and the latest trendy name for what they believe.

So, once the liberals pick a policy from their stale program to push, the next step is to get it implemented. This is where liberals have problems because whether a policy makes sense, is practical, or actually improves people’s lives is of secondary importance to them. What is important to liberals is whether supporting or opposing that policy makes them feel good about themselves.

This is why liberals continue to support dysfunctional policies that have been failing miserably for decades and why they often oppose common sense programs that have been proven to work time and time again — because it isn’t about whether it works or not, it’s about how it makes them feel.

In other words, a liberal will almost always prefer a policy that’s extremely expensive, is difficult to implement, helps almost no one, but seems “nice” — to a policy that is cheap, simple to implement, extremely effective, and seems “mean.”

However, since most Americans make decisions about policies based on whether or not they believe the policy makes people’s lives better or worse, liberals have had to become habitually dishonest about what they believe and want to do to get their ideas put into action.

This is a point worth stressing because many people who aren’t familiar with politics believe that conservatives and liberals are simply flip sides of the same coin and therefore, approach issues the same way. However, conservatives genuinely believe that this is a center-right country. That’s why conservatives have no qualms about being publicly labeled as conservatives and it’s part of the reason why we’re much more honest than the Left — because we believe that a majority of the American people generally agree with us and share our values.

So, those of us on the Right spend our time trying to explain to the American people what we really want to do, while the Left spends its time trying to hide what it really wants to do from the American people.

Because of this, when liberals don’t feel that the political winds are blowing in their direction, not only will they generally avoid discussing the things they believe, they will typically deny that they believe them at all.

Additionally, liberals go to bizarre lengths to tilt the political playing field in their favor. They move into the mainstream media so that they can tip what are supposed to be “objective” news stories in their favor. They get into positions of power in our educational system so that they can teach kids liberal propaganda before they’re old enough to know better. They uniformly support judges who care nothing about the Constitution as long as it moves liberal ideological goals forward. Even the Left’s support of illegal immigration is rooted in the desire to bring in millions of poor people from socialist countries who are more likely to vote Democratic. If they can’t convince the American voters they’re right, then they’ll just bring in some new voters.

More disturbing is the Left’s ever-increasing reliance on what are commonly thought of as fascist tactics. Liberals at college campuses attempt to disrupt conservative speeches and the Democrats want to try to drive conservative talk radio hosts off the air with the Fairness Doctrine. Conservatives like Tom DeLay, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter have been targeted criminally for political reasons and there’s even talk of trying to jail members of the Bush Administration over policy differences after they’re out of office. Ideological soulmates of modern liberals — like Stalin, Lenin, and Mao — would certainly approve of those tactics.

Still, even though this is a center-right country, we do have political cycles and there are times when those cycles favor the Left. When that happens and the Lefties start to get a bit more confident, usually a few liberals at the edges will start talking about what they want to do. At that early point, most other liberals will still vehemently deny their ideological goals to the public out of fear that it will prevent them from getting into power.

However, when the Left gains enough strength to be capable of getting one of the policies they favor implemented, all the liberals who previously denied that they supported it will unapologetically shift on a dime and vote for it en masse — while they rely on their ideological allies in the media and the fact that many Americans are ill informed about politics to cover their tracks.

So, if you want to know what liberals want to do, their words mean absolutely nothing because lying about their agenda has become as natural to them as chasing a cat is to a dog.

Instead, what you have to do is watch what other liberals have done when they have come into power. Look at Canada, where conservatives are being put on trial for hate crimes because they’ve dared to criticize Muslims. Look at European countries, where they have socialistic economies, sky high tax rates, rigid speech codes, and overweening nannystates. You can even look at liberal enclaves in the United States like Berkeley and San Francisco, where members of the military are treated like pariahs and they boo the national anthem.

If you believe the liberals in Berkeley, France, Canada or for that matter in the bowels of the Daily Kos or Huffington Post, are significantly different than, say Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, you are kidding yourself. The only differences are in what they think they can get away with and how honest they are willing to be about their agenda.

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Why a Black Artist Replaced the National Anthem (townhall.com, 080708)

By Dennis Prager

Last week in Denver, almost all the values of the post-1960s left were exhibited in one act.

It happened on the Denver mayor’s most important day — the one in which he was to deliver his annual State of the City Address. The day was to begin with the singing of the National Anthem by the black jazz singer Rene Marie. But Ms. Marie had, by her own admission, long had other plans. Instead of the National Anthem, she sang “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” a song written in 1899 and often referred to today as the Black National Anthem.

What Marie did embodied a plethora of leftist ideals and characteristics: Ethical relativism, multiculturalism, the supremacy of feelings, the belief that artists are above normal ethical standards and group victimization.

We begin with ethical relativism. The left’s opposition to Judeo-Christian values is first and foremost an opposition to objective, or universal, ethics. Ethics and morality are relative. There is no objective or universal standard of right and wrong. We are each the source of our own values.

These lessons were learned well by Marie. The notion that lying to the mayor of Denver (a Democrat, as it happens) when she agreed to his invitation to sing the National Anthem was unethical or immoral is foreign to Ms. Marie.

But how could she morally defend something so obviously immoral?

That is what ethical relativism made possible thanks to a number of values of the left.

One such leftist value is multiculturalism. Since the 1960s, a major goal of the left has been to weaken American national identity and replace it with other cultural, national, racial and ethnic identities (in effect, changing the motto of the United States from “From Many, One” to “From One, Many”). It has pursued this goal through bilingual education, election ballots in multiple languages, numerical guidelines in American history textbooks concerning the percentage of space allotted to given minorities, opposition to declaring English America’s national language, and rendering the term “flag waving” a pejorative that implies quasi-fascist sentiments.

One could well imagine a member of any number of other minorities substituting a different song for the National Anthem. The left has successfully taught millions of Americans to honor other national identities while either fearing or disparaging American nationalism. That lesson, too, was clearly learned by Marie.

The idea of a Black National Anthem is a multiculturalist paradigm. A black freedom song, a black hymnal, songs that gave African slaves on American soil some comfort and hope in the midst of their suffering, and, for that matter, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” — these all fit perfectly into an American national identity. Indeed, all Americans should know such songs. But a Black National Anthem, when substituted for the National Anthem, means that there are two nations on American soil, a black one and an American one.

The left’s second contribution to Marie’s value system has been its elevation of feelings above other values. For example, one determines right and wrong on the basis of how one feels (as opposed to, let us say, asking what one’s religion, or God, or any moral law that transcends one’s own feelings would say on a given matter).

Now, the elevation of one’s feelings above other considerations is generally viewed as a form of narcissism. And while narcissism is as old as humanity, until the 1960s it was generally regarded as a character flaw. Since the 1960s, however, it was more often heralded as a virtue. From recreational drug use to recreational sex, acting on one’s feelings, actions of self-centered narcissism, has been glorified.

The core of this attitude lies in the left’s veneration of feelings. How one feels became all-important. It even determines morality, the rightness or wrongness of an action. Thus, a generation of young people has been raised with the question, “How do you feel about it?” not “Is it right or wrong?”

Thus, Marie justified what she did in terms of feelings: “I want to express how I feel about living in the United State s as a black woman, as a black person,” she said. Her feelings were what mattered, and they were more important than elementary decency.

A third contribution of the left’s values to what Marie did is the elevation of the artist to the status of demigod. If the feelings of mere mortals can determine what is right and wrong, the feelings of an artist are even more important.

There is no hubris like that of many contemporary artists. At some point in the second half of the 20th century the belief arose that artists formed a moral elite.

Given the moral idiocies that have been more the norm than the exception among 20th century artists — the countless artists who have glorified Communism, Fascism and Nazism — facts alone render the idea of artist-as-moral-beacon foolish. But even in theory the idea has no merit. There is nothing in art that renders an artist more morally elevated than a sanitation worker.

Sure enough, being an artist was Marie’s justification for her dishonesty. Asked on her website, “Wasn’t this dishonest?” she responded:

“I can see how it may be perceived that way. But I looked at it a different way: I am an artist. I cannot apologize for that. It goes with the risky territory of being an artist.” Marie also told the press, “I don’t think it is necessary for artists to ask permission to express themselves artistically.”

Artists are above morality. While you and I should not deceive people, artists may.

The fourth contribution of the left to the Marie episode is its constant reinforcement of a sense of victimhood among all Americans who are not male, white, heterosexual and Christian. The moral consequence of this is that the victim, like the artist, like the feelings-determine-morality individual, can do more or less whatever he pleases.

It should be noted that many individuals on the left condemned what Marie did. And it is not for me to judge whether they did so out of conviction or political necessity; one must generally judge actions, not motives. But to the sincere liberal and leftist, I ask: Do you not see how left/liberal values made this episode possible?

Individuals on the left may condemn what happened in Denver City Hall on July 1, 2008. But, in fact, it was a triumph of leftist values.

Final note: If you do not now fear for America’s future, please go on the Internet and watch the Denver city officials respectfully watch a woman substitute her own song for that of the National Anthem. Watch how not a single official stopped her, or even demanded that the National Anthem be sung afterward. And listen to the applause. Then you will fear for our country’s future.

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Palin & liberalism (Townhall.com, 080908)

“The broader question if Sarah Palin becomes vice president, will she be shortchanging her kids or will she be shortchanging the country?” — NBC correspondent Amy Robach

“How dare they question whether Sarah Palin has enough time to spend with her children and be Vice-President. How dare they do that. When do they ever ask a man that question? When?” — Rudy Giuliani

Since Sarah Palin exploded onto the national scene a week ago, the American Left, including Obama’s press team AKA the mainstream media, has engaged in a bizarre orgy of sexism, misogyny, and grotesque attacks on her family. Let’s see, we’ve heard accusations that Sarah Palin, while she was governor this year, actually faked a pregnancy to cover up for her seventeen-year-old daughter Bristol — no, really, liberals pushed this story for days. Then after Palin revealed that Bristol is pregnant now and therefore couldn’t have been pregnant earlier in the year, the mainstream press spent a week cruelly using a 17 year-old-girl as a political pawn to get at her mother.

Then there were the Left’s claims that Palin had posed for nude pictures and their suggestion that her first son must have been born out of wedlock. Of course, we also can’t forget the fake bikini shots.

Additionally, the Left has also focused on Palin’s husband and brought up a drunk driving conviction he had 20 years ago (We have heard more about that from the MSM than the fact that Obama has done cocaine) and the Associated Press went so far as to say that Palin’s family are valid targets because they’re in photo-ops.

All this is on top of the fact that we’ve been treated to a full week of claims that a woman who is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama is too inexperienced to be John McCain’s Vice-President and worse yet, we’ve heard loud mouths opining that Sarah Palin can’t both run for Vice-President and be a good mother.

On top of all that, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of conservatives seemed to be absolutely thrilled with the selection of Sarah Palin, liberals spent much of the week running “when did you stop beating your wife stories” speculating about whether Palin had been vetted or whether McCain would drop her from the ticket.

That’s quite a change from the near worshipful coverage Barack Obama has gotten from the media for being the first black man to head the Democratic ticket or even the fawning reportage that Nancy Pelosi received when she became the first female Speaker of the House, isn’t it?

But, a conservative woman makes history and next thing you know, her pregnant 17 year-old-daughter is a front page target only a short time after the very same media spent weeks blacking out stories about John Edwards having a love child behind the back of his cancer-stricken wife.

Is the sort of treatment Palin has received a surprise? Regrettably, not to anyone who has been paying attention to how liberals attack women on the Right. Let me tell you what happens if you are a conservative woman who catches the attention of the American Left.

You are going to have liberals openly discuss gang raping you. You’ll be photoshopped with a fishhook in your mouth while liberals publicly call you the worst, most obscene things you can imagine. You will be photoshopped into pornography, you will receive death and rape threats, you’ll get strange stalkerish emails, you’ll receive demeaning, sexualized hate mail, and if they can find out where you live and where your children go to school, the info will start showing up on left wing blogs, comment sections, and forums before you can say, “We know where you live, lady.” These sort of attacks are not unusual or out of the ordinary; to the contrary, they are standard operating procedure on the Left when they go after strong, conservative women.

But, what about the liberal feminist blogs? Don’t they stick up for the conservative women? Oh, sure they do — just like they stuck up for Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey. To the contrary, the thing I have heard again and again from female bloggers is that the “feminist” blogs at best, turn a blind eye to the most grotesque smears aimed at conservative women and at worst, are leading the pack.

But, how can it be that liberals, who constantly pretend to be tolerant, enlightened supporters of feminism, regularly engage in this sort of crude sexism and misogyny?

There are three reasons for it.

First off, liberals believe that by virtue of being liberal, they can’t be sexist, even when they say sexist things. Combine that with the feminists’ willingess to turn a blind eye to misogynistic attacks on women who don’t share their views and liberals feel like they have a free pass to say absolutely anything about conservative women. If you are a liberal, you can call Condi Rice “Mammy,” say Sarah Palin can’t love her children and be Vice-President, and post the home address of a conservative woman on your blog — and you won’t have to pay any price for it whatsoever on the Left. In fact, attacking conservative women based on the fact that they are conservative women will earn you nothing but plaudits and plugs from other liberals for “fighting back” against those bleeping conservatives.

Next up, the Left has a creepy, Stalinesque approach to individualism and politics. Unless you are a straight, white male, the Left does not seem to believe you have a right to hold an independent political opinion. Whether you’re talking about blacks, Hispanics, Jews, women, gays, you name it — if you’re not a liberal, they’re going to try to intimidate and browbeat you back into line or drive you out of the public arena altogether. If you’re black, you’re a “race traitor,” if you’re a Jew, you’re a “neocon” who’s loyal to Israel first, if you’re a woman, then you’re a sexually repressed Stepford wife who’s not qualified to hold office, etc., etc.

Last but not least, because liberals don’t think that anyone other than straight, white males should be able to get away with having political opinions that differ from Ted Kennedy or Howard Dean, they do everything within their power to absolutely destroy any prominent examples, that blast their stereotypical view of the world, to tatters. That’s why the Left reserves their blackest hatred for people like Clarence Thomas, Condi Rice, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, and now Sarah Palin; it’s because they’re living, breathing, inspirational examples of people the Left is supposed to “own,” who don’t want or need liberalism to be a success. That, most of all, is why liberals hate and fear successful conservative women.

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Liberals Warnings About Obama Loss May Prove Self-Fulfilling (townhall.com, 080923)

by Dennis Prager

If Barack Obama loses the 2008 election, liberal hell will break loose.

Seven weeks before the 2008 presidential election, liberals are warning America that if Barack Obama loses, it is because Americans are racist. Of course, that this means that Democrats (and independents) are racist, since Republicans will vote Republican regardless of the race of the Democrat, is an irony apparently lost on the Democrats making these charges.

That an Obama loss will be due to racism is becoming as normative a liberal belief as “Bush Lied, People Died,” a belief has generated intense rage among many liberals. But “Obama lost because of white racism” will be even more enraging. Rage over the Iraq War has largely focused on President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. But if Obama loses, liberal rage will focus on millions of fellow Americans and on American society.

And it could become a rage the likes of which America has not seen in a long time, if ever. It will first and foremost come from within black America. The deep emotional connection that nearly every black American has to an Obama victory is difficult for even empathetic non-blacks to measure. A major evangelical pastor told me that even evangelical black pastors who share every conservative value with white evangelical pastors, including pro-life views on abortion, will vote for Obama. They feel their very dignity is on the line.

That is why the growing chorus — already nearing unanimity — of liberal commentators and politicians ascribing an Obama loss to American racism is so dangerous.

Andrew Sullivan of (set ital) The Atlantic: (end ital) “White racism means that Obama needs more than a small but clear lead to win.”

Jack Cafferty of CNN: “The polls remain close. Doesn’t make sense … unless it’s race.”

Jacob Weisberg of (set ital) Newsweek and Slate: (end ital) “The reason Obama isn’t ahead right now is … the color of his skin. … If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth.”

Nicholas D. Kristof of (set ital) New York Times: (end ital) “Religious prejudice (against Obama) is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice.”

Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, in a speech to union workers: “Are you going to give up your house and your job and your children’s futures because he’s black?”

Similar comments have been made by Kansas’s Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, and by writers in (set ital) Time (end ital) magazine. And according to The Associated Press: “A poll conducted by The Associated Press and Yahoo News, in conjunction with Stanford University, revealed that a fairly significant percentage of Democrats and independents may not vote for Sen. Barack Obama because of his race.” If you read the poll, it does not in fact suggest this conclusion. The pollsters assert that any person with any negative view of black life means that the person is racist and means that he would not vote for Obama. Both conclusions are unwarranted. But “Obama will lose because of racism” is how the poll takers and the media spin it.

Why do liberals believe that if Obama loses it will be due to white racism?

One reason is the liberal elite’s contempt for white Americans with less education — even if they are Democrats.

A second reason is that it is inconceivable to most liberals that an Obama loss — especially a narrow one — will be due to Obama’s liberal views or inexperience or to admiration for John McCain.

The third reason is that the further left you go, the more insular you get. Americans on the left tend to talk only to one another; study only under left-wing teachers; and read only fellow leftists. That is why it is a shock to so many liberals when a Republican wins a national election — where do all these Republican voters come from? And that in turn explains why liberals ascribe Republican presidential victories to unfair election tactics (“Swift-boating” is the liberals’ reason for the 2004 Republican victory). In any fair election, Americans will see the left’s light.

If Obama loses, it will not be deemed plausible that Americans have again rejected a liberal candidate, indeed the one with the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate. Liberals will explain an Obama defeat as another nefarious Republican victory. Combining contempt for many rural and middle-class white Americans with a longstanding belief in the inevitability of a Democratic victory in 2008 (after all, everyone they talk to despises the Republicans and believes Republicans have led the country to ruin), there will be only one reason Obama did not win — white racism.

One executive at a black radio station told me when I interviewed him on my radio show at the Democratic National Convention that he could easily see riots if Obama loses a closely contested election. Interestingly, he said he thought blacks would be far more accepting of a big McCain victory.

I pray he is wrong on the first point. But it does seem that liberals are continuing to do whatever they can to increase anger at America, or at least at “white America.” For 40 years, liberals have described the most open and tolerant society on earth as racist and xenophobic. If Barack Obama loses, the results of this liberal depiction of America may become frighteningly apparent.

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UMass Chaplain: Campaign for Obama, Get College Credits (Foxnews, 080924)

[KH: Liberals care only about the end; they could even use clearly illegal means.]

University of Massachusetts officials yesterday quashed efforts by an Amherst campus chaplain to offer two college credits to any student willing to campaign in New Hampshire this fall for Democrat Barack Obama.

Chaplain Ken Higgins told students in a Sept. 18 e-mail, “If you’re scared about the prospects for this election, you’re not alone. The most important way to make a difference in the outcome is to activate yourself. It would be just fine with McCain if Obama supporters just think about helping, then sleep in and stay home between now and Election Day.”

Higgins added that an unnamed “sponsor” in the university’s History Department would offer a two-credit independent study for students willing to canvass or volunteer on behalf of the Democratic nominee.

“It is relatively (easy) to do late add-ons,” Higgins wrote.

But university officials disavowed themselves of the effort after inquiries yesterday by the Associated Press. They said it could run afoul of state ethics laws banning on-the-job political activity, as well as university policy.

“There is no independent study for credit in the History Department that involves partisan political work, and no such activity has ever been approved,” said a statement issued by UMass-Amherst spokesman Ed Blaguszewski.

Higgins refused to identify the History Department sponsor and referred all further questions to university officials.

Blaguszewski said Higgins is one of about a dozen chaplains from different faiths working in Amherst, the flagship campus among the university’s five schools.

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Student Says School Persecuted Him for Being Conservative (Foxnews, 081216)

A former student at the Rhode Island College School of Social Work is suing the school and several of his professors for discrimination, saying he was persecuted by the school’s “liberal political machine” for being a conservative.

William Felkner, 45, says the New England college and six professors wouldn’t approve his final project on welfare reform because he was on the “wrong” side of political issues and countered the school’s “progressive” liberal agenda.

Felkner said his problems with his professors began in his first semester, in the fall of 2004, when he objected in an e-mail to one of his professors that the school was showing and promoting Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” on campus. He said he objected because no opposing point of view was presented.

He said Professor James Ryczek wrote to him on Oct. 15, 2004, saying he was proud of his bias and questioning Felkner’s ability to “fit with the profession.”

“I think the biases and predilections I hold toward how I see the world and how it should be are why I am a social worker. In the words of a colleague, I revel in my biases,” he wrote.

Felkner’s complaint, filed two years ago, alleges that Ryczek discriminated against him for his conservative viewpoint and gave him bad grades because of it in several classes. It also alleges discrimination by other professors and administrators.

Felkner said he received failing grades in Ryczek’s class for holding viewpoints opposed to the progressive direction of the class.

Felkner says he was also discriminated against by Professor Roberta Pearlmutter, who he says refused to allow him to participate in a group project lobbying for a conservative issue because the assignment was to lobby for a liberal issue. He alleges that Perlmutter spent a 50-minute class “assailing” his views and allowed students to openly ridicule his conservative positions, and that she reduced his grade because he was not “progressive.”

The Rhode Island College School of Social Work did not respond to a request for comment.

Felkner, a self-proclaimed free-market conservative, told FOXNews.com that during his final year, he wanted to do a project on “work first” welfare, which requires that recipients get jobs before they can get benefits. He said the school advocated an “education first” system, in which recipients get job training and don’t have to work for benefits.

“Basically it was a system that resulted in 2% of [Rhode Island’s] recipients being on welfare for over 10 years. It was just not working,” Felkner said. While at the college he had an internship with the governor’s office on public policy to work on welfare reform.

The social work organizing and policy degree program requires a student to complete a project that works for “progressive social change.” He was scheduled to complete his project in January, but he said the defendants’ actions kept him from finishing and graduating.

“There were two years worth of discrimination really, there’s no better way to put it, because I had different views than the school does,” Felkner said. “It’s kind of insane to think that someone studying how to help the poor can’t research welfare reform.”

Felkner also alleges in his complaint that the school’s treatment of him restricted his ability to express his opinions and that his bad grades damaged his professional reputation and would make it difficult for him to get a job as a social worker.

Kim Strom-Gottfried, professor of social work at U.N.C. Chapel Hill, said that faculty members should not impose their politics on students.

“My bottom line is I think clearly as faculty we have to appraise our students based on required competencies and demonstrations of that, whether critical thinking or whatever, but there shouldn’t be a belief litmus test for joining the profession or for an assignment,” Strom-Gottfried said.

“The questions I have in cases such as his — why would someone choose to affiliate with a profession that’s so at odds with his beliefs and his value-base? That’s always a question for me,” she said.

Bruce Thyer, professor of social work and former dean at the College of Social Work at Florida State University, has written about discrimination against conservatives and against evangelical Christians in social work. He said discrimination hurts the profession.

“I have seen students actively discouraged from perusing social work because of their politically conservative views. I’ve also seen it happen with students who have held strong religious views,” he said. “I think that the profession is a great and noble discipline and there are occasional episodes like this that cast a black eye, and it’s really unnecessary.”

Thyer said liberal and conservative social workers have the same goal — to help people — and that the school overstepped its bounds in Felkner’s case.

“I think it’s an overzealous faculty wishing to impose their own political views upon those of their students, and that’s unfortunate because there are many areas in which liberal and conservative thinkers within the discipline of social work have so much to agree upon,” he said. “Nobody’s advocating, certainly not Bill Felkner, that people not be helped.”

The college filed a motion for summary judgment this summer, but it was recently denied by the court. Felkner said the school is now seeking a settlement.

He said he would still like to receive his masters in social work, and he is still working on government policy on social welfare programs in Rhode Island through the Ocean State Policy Research Institute, which he founded after leaving the school.

“You can say what you want about the war on poverty and how it’s going, but I think that it hasn’t gone well and I think there are better alternatives, and I think it was a shame I wasn’t even allowed to research and pursue those interests,” Felkner said. “It’s indoctrination.”

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Wireless Company Mixes Liberal Politics With Business (Foxnews, 091216)

A San Francisco-based wireless company is working liberal political activism into its business plan in a unabashedly partisan marketing strategy that experts say could catch on in today’s polarized culture — but also could alienate many potential customers.

The company, CREDO, even boasts that it has the support of President Obama as it markets itself as an agent of social change. It pitches its mobile phone services with a vow to fight for “real” health care reform, free speech, peace and the environment.

To those ends, CREDO claims it has raised $63 million for liberal causes and groups such as the ACLU, Doctors Without Borders, Planned Parenthood and Earthjustice — all the while skewering its bigger, well-established rivals AT&T and Verizon Wireless for financially supporting Republicans and moderate Democrats.

It’s unclear whether the business strategy is paying off financially — CREDO’s figures aren’t available and company executives did not return messages requesting an interview. But in an age when companies of all stripes are trying to bolster their corporate images by appearing environmentally friendly, a highly partisan appeal is seen as a risky but potentially fruitful new approach.

“What’s happened to some extent is the country has become polarized along different political views,” said Fredric Kropp, a marketing professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. So a marketing strategy that exploits that tension could “induce the consumer to purchase from the company,” he said.

“It kind of makes sense, and I think it makes sense from all political viewpoints,” Kropp said. He was unable to think of any other companies that have adopted a similar strategy, though some companies have campaigned for particular causes, like Ben & Jerry’s support of organic farming.

But Peter Sealey, a management consultant and former head of global marketing for the Coca-Cola Co. told Fox News that CREDO’s strategy has no chance for success.

“This will absolutely not work,” he told FoxNews.com. “The idea is not going to work because a generalized agenda loses to a laser-like focused appeal.” An overtly political marketing strategy will alienate too many people, he said, regardless of the side the business takes.

Even so, CREDO may not be interested in winning over enough customers to be an industry leader if it is content carving out a niche while taking shots at the industry’s big names, as it did when it blasted AT&T and Verizon for their political contributions in one of its ads.

“Not only was AT&T a two-time maximum contributor to George W. Bush, they supported right-wing extremists like Senators Inhofe and Coburn,” the ad read. “Verizon Wireless has been a steady contributor to the Blue Dog Democrats — whose so-called ‘centrist’ approach threatens the public option in health care reform — since 2002.”

Neither AT&T nor Verizon responded to messages seeking comment.

CREDO’s political attacks, however, have opened it to criticism that it hasn’t lived up its own lofty standards.

Some critics on the left have taken the company to task for offering a credit card through the bank MBNA, the top contributor to Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. And union leaders have charged the company with hypocrisy for attacking its rivals.

“There’s no small irony in CREDO ‘calling out’ Verizon Wireless,” Steve Early, a former union organizer at AT&T and Rand Wilson, a AFL-CIO union organizer, wrote in the magazine In These Times. “CREDO itself is also completely non-union!”

Early and Wilson noted that AT&T is unionized and derided CREDO for “marketing itself as a bankroller of every kind of rights movement — except the workers’ rights one.”

Founded in 1985 as Working Assets, the company changed its name in 2007 in a move designed to better reflect the company’s belief that people can bring progressive change through donations to nonprofits and political activism.

CREDO has been politically active since the 2008 election cycle, when the company said it helped 2.5 million Americans register to vote. Through an action committee, the company launched several programs aimed at increasing voter turnout. One program, Pollworkers for Democracy, hired volunteers to staff polling places and ensure fair voting practices. Another allowed voters to remind friends to vote through a Web site.

On CREDO Action’s Web site, the company is campaigning, among other things, to derail the nomination of Ben Bernanke for a second term as Federal Reserve chief, and punish Sen. Joe Lieberman for threatening to help Republicans derail any health care bill that contains a government-run health option.

Michael Kieschnick, co-founder and president of the company, has written for the liberal online publication Huffington Post. He has blasted tougher restrictions on abortion coverage in the now-pending health care legislation, slammed Obama’s expansion of the Afghanistan war and lamented the resignation of Obama’s green jobs adviser, Van Jones, who stepped down after coming under attack by conservative commentators for his controversial statements.

Kieschnick said he was rewarded for his liberal work with an invite to a White House reception earlier this year for progressive leaders.

“As I passed through various security points at the White House, part of me kept expecting to be stopped,” he said in a news release. “I have never been to the White House before except to picket it, and have never been able to talk to the president or first lady.”

Kieschnick said the president was “impressed” when he told him what his company had done to fight former President George W. Bush.

The White House did not respond to requests for a comment for this story.

While CREDO’s efforts may have paid off politically, it’s not necessarily a recipe for business success.

Sealy noted that the money AT&T and Verizon spend on marketing is a “tidal wave.”

“These guys are spending in the billions,” he said. “It overshadows any attempt to come out and say, ‘I’m green and liberal and support causes.’”

Kropp agreed that a market leader like AT&T or Verizon would not add political ingredients to its marketing recipe.

“Whatever pleases people has the opportunity to alienate others,” Kropp said, calling it “a risky strategy.”

“It’s a much bigger downside risk. But for a smaller niche player, it might be a good strategy,” he said. “If you have a small share of the market and you’re trying to make your presence known, an aggressive strategy might work for you.”

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MLK Jr.’s Niece Doesn’t See Compliment in Reid’s ‘Negro Dialect’ Comment (Foxnews, 100112)

[KH: liberals’ double standard]

The Rev. Al Sharpton, the Congressional Black Caucus and the NAACP all jumped to the defense of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid after his controversial remarks about President Obama, but the niece of Martin Luther King Jr. is calling Reid’s comments “sadly outrageous.”

“If Michael Steele or any other conservative had said anything like it, the remarks would be labeled racist and plastered over every available news outlet,” Alveda King said in a statement released Tuesday.

“What would my uncle and my father think, to hear such things from one of the most powerful leaders in the country? Their ‘beloved community’ is sorely threatened when racism rears its ugly head once again.”

Sen. Russ Fiengold did his own soul searching after Reid was quoted in a book saying candidate Barack Obama in 2008 could benefit from being light-skinned and not having a “Negro dialect” unless he wants one. Feingold told a local television station late Monday that he’s still mulling whether Reid should stay or step down as majority leader.

“I’m thinking about that and we’re going to be getting together as a caucus next week, and that topic will come up. I have not decided whether these comments merit that or not,” Feingold told ABC affiliate WISN. “They’re very unfortunate. They should have never been said. So I need to think about it.”

But on Tuesday, he closed rank around the embattled leader. An aide to Feingold told Fox News the Wisconsin senator communicated through a senior member of his staff to Reid that he backs him as majority leader and is no longer unsure if Reid should remain in that position.

Some progressives bloggers, however, fearing Reid is a liability, said he should step down now so Democrats have a better chance of keeping the Nevada Senate seat in November. And while Reid reportedly called RainbowPush head Jesse Jackson to apologize after the gaffe was reported, Jackson has been uncharacteristically quiet on the racially tinged matter.

Reid said Monday that he “could have used a better choice of words,” and he signaled that he’s moving on.

“We have a lot to do,” Reid said. “I feel good about people reaching out to me. I’ve apologized to the president. ... I’m not going to dwell on this anymore.”

Other leading Democrats, including President Obama, have accepted Reid’s apology, while conceding that he used inappropriate language. But critics say it’s not Obama who needs an apology but Americans who Reid presumed would hesitate to vote for a black man.

Steele, the first black chairman of the Republican National Committee, is among those Republicans calling for Reid to step down. He and others say Democrats are operating by a double-standard, since they were insistent that former Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott step down in 2002 after he praised the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, a former segregationist, at his 100th birthday party.

Feingold said Lott’s remarks were more insensitive than Reid’s.

Obama, in an interview with TV One, called Reid a “stalwart champion ... of civil rights” and a “good man” who meant no offense.

“For him to have used some inartful language in trying to praise me, and for people to try to make hay out of that makes absolutely no sense,” Obama said. “He apologized, recognizing that he didn’t use appropriate language, but there was nothing mean-spirited in what he had to say and he’s always been on the right side of the issues.”

Nevada’s other senator, John Ensign, a Republican, said Monday that lawmakers should accept Reid’s apology. Republican Sens. John McCain and Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, said a determination on Reid’s fate should be made among Nevada voters and the Democratic caucus, respectively.

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How the Left Fakes the Hate: A Primer (townhall.com, 100326)

by Michelle Malkin

If you can’t stand the heat, manufacture a hate-crime epidemic.

After years of covering racial hoaxes on college campuses and victim sob stories in the public arena, I’ve encountered countless opportunists who live by that demented mindset. At best, the fakers are desperately seeking 15 minutes of infamy. At worst, their aim is the criminalization of political dissent.

Upon decimating the deliberative process to hand President Obama a health care “reform” victory, unpopular Beltway Democrats and their media water-carriers now claim there’s a Tea Party epidemic of racism, harassment and violence against them.

On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a tepid, obligatory statement against smearing all conservatives as national security threats. But her lieutenants had already emptied their tar buckets. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Chris Van Hollen accused Republican leaders of “stoking the flames.” Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn accused the GOP of “aiding and abetting” what he called “terrorism.”

Yet, the claims that Tea Party activists shouted “nigger” at black House Democrats remain uncorroborated. The coffin reportedly left outside Missouri Democratic Rep. Russ Carnahan’s home was used in a prayer vigil by pro-life activists in St. Louis protesting the phony Demcare abortion-funding ban in Obama’s deal-cutting executive order. Videotape of a supposed intentional spitting incident targeting Missouri Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver at the Capitol shows no such thing. Cleaver himself backed off the claim a few days later. He described his heckler to The Washington Post in more passive terms as “the man who allowed his saliva to hit my face.” Slovenliness equals terrorism!

The FBI is now investigating the most serious allegation — that Tea Party activists in Virginia are somehow responsible for a cut gas line at the home of Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello’s brother. But instead of waiting for the outcome of that probe, liberal pundits have enshrined the claim as conclusive evidence of the Tea Party reign of terror.

Need more reasons to treat the latest Democratic hysteria with a grain of salt the size of their gargantuan health care bill? Remember:

— In November 2009, Kentucky census worker Bill Sparkman was found dead in a secluded rural cemetery with the word “Fed” scrawled on his chest and a rope around his neck. The Atlantic Monthly, Huffington Post and liberal media hosts stampeded over themselves to blame Fox News, conservative blogs, Republicans and right-wing radio. Federal, state and local authorities discovered that Sparkman had killed himself and deliberately concocted a hate-crime hoax as part of an insurance scam to benefit his surviving son.

— In mid-October 2008, news outlets from Scranton, Pa., to ABC News to the Associated Press and MSNBC reported that someone at a Sarah Palin rally shouted “kill him” when Obama’s name was mentioned. In fact, the Secret Service (which was at the event in full force) couldn’t find a single person to corroborate the story — other than the local reporter for the Scranton Times-Tribune who made an international incident out of the claim. Agent Bill Slavoski “said he was in the audience, along with an undisclosed number of additional secret service agents and other law enforcement officers, and not one heard the comment,” the paper reported in a red-faced follow-up. Maybe the shouter is hiding with Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman’s real killer.

— In late October 2008, a gaggle of liberal blogs spread the rumor that a Republican supporter of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s had shouted that Obama was “a nigger” during a campaign rally in Iowa. Video and firsthand accounts showed that the protester did not shout “he’s a nigger,” but “he’s a redistributor.” A lefty activist at the “progressive” Daily Kos blog confirmed the truth — but to this day, the crisis-manufacturing smear stands uncorrected and unretracted across the Internet.

— In September 2009, supporters of Colorado Democratic Rep. John Salazar falsely accused a town hall protester of hurling a death threat at the congressman. Liberal blogs again disseminated the angry Tea Party mob narrative. A week later, the local press quietly reported that Grand Junction police had investigated the incident — and determined the claim was “unfounded.” A police spokeswoman revealed that “(p)eople who witnessed the interaction between the man who made the complaint and the suspect confirmed they never heard any direct threats made regarding Congressman Salazar.” Witnesses included a Grand Junction cop “in close proximity when the interaction took place.”

— In late August 2009, as lawmakers faced citizen revolts at health care town halls nationwide, the Colorado Democratic Party decried a vandalism attack at its Denver headquarters. A hammer-wielding thug smashed 11 windows and caused $11,000 in property damage. The perpetrator, Maurice Schwenkler, turned out to be a far-left nutball/transgender activist/single-payer anarchist who had worked for an SEIU-tied 527 group and canvassed for a Democratic candidate. Nevertheless, Colorado Democratic Party Chair Pat Waak continued to blame “people opposed to health care” for the attack.

Then, as now, being a Democratic Party official means never having to say you’re sorry for smearing conservative dissent.

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Conservatism, Extremism and the Bigoted Left (townhall.com, 100401)

by Rob Schwarzwalder

New York Times columnists Charles M. Blow (“Whose Country Is It?”, March 27) and Frank Rich (“The Rage is Not About Health Care,” March 28, 2010) are denouncing with smug delight and stentorian admonition the “bullying, threats, and acts of violence” (Blow) following the passage of the Obama health care bill.

“Small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht” is what Rich calls the apparent excesses of a tiny minority of anti-Democratic health care bill protestors. His own crypto-racist presuppositions are apparent in Blow’s evisceration of those he terms “extremists:”

Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.

Let me posit for Mr. Blow an alternative scenario: For the Left,

Even the optics must be disturbing. A (nationally recognized) woman (Sarah Palin) opposed the health care bill that passed the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal opponents included a practicing Catholic (John Boehner) and a Jew (Eric Cantor). And prominent black men (former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele and former Godfathers Pizza chairman Herman Cain) didn’t want the black man in the White House to sign the bill into law. It’s enough to make a New York secular liberal go crazy.

Frank Rich., fueled by the same reactionary unction as Mr. Blow, writes something eerily similar in his piece:

The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play.

Again, allow me to rephrase:

The conjunction of a black Republican National Committee Chairman and a female conservative vice-presidential candidate – topped off by a wise African-American conservative on the Supreme Court and a powerful evangelical committee chairman – would sow fears of disenfranchisement among the tiny self-anointed secular elite in the media and the academy no matter what policies were in play.

However, unsatisfied with smarmily tarring all conservatives with the base brush of bigotry, Rich returns to the 1964 Civil Rights Act as further evidence of the Right’s calumny (apparently ignorant of the fact that more House Republicans voted for it than Democrats). Blow goes one better, asserting that Tea Partiers, per a Quinnipiac University Poll, shows them to be “disproportionately white, evangelical Christians and ‘less educated … than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack’.”

Ah, the Evangelical Slur rears its head: conservative Christians just don’t have the smarts the rest of society possesses. This assertion is to intellectual credibility what the Big Mac is to nutrition. The tired asseveration that evangelicals are pear-headed ignoramuses fails the test of serious scrutiny. According to a comprehensive poll done in 2004 by GreenbergQuinlanRosner Research for the PBS program “Religion and Ethics,” “About 22% of white evangelicals hold 4-year college degrees, compared with 27% of the general population. (One) quarter (27%) of white evangelicals have some sort of post-secondary education, compared to 26% of the general population.”

Sadly, Blow and Rich were silent when images of a decapitated George W. Bush, of guns being placed to his head, and tee-shirts bearing the message, “Kill Bush” were rampant among the Left. Throughout most of the 2000s, the blogosphere was flooded by horrible messages of hate and vileness and violence directed at the 43rd President. Most of us on the Right attributed these sickening things to a minority of political opinion, yet remained troubled that MoveOn.org, Michael Moore, Arianna Huffington and other pop culture “acceptables” accepted and encouraged Bush hatred as though it were merely boisterous patriotism. Jonah Goldberg correctly calls this “liberal fascism.” Now that a handful of people go too far, suddenly conservatives (both Tea Partiers and Republicans) are (I derive this list from exactly two op-eds over a three day period in the New York Times):

* Frothing

* Copper-faced

* Apoplectic

* Goons

* Vigilantes

* Unglued

* Homicidal (at least rhetorically)

* Apocalyptic (not to be confused with apoplectic – see above)

* Petulant

* Hysterical

* Bullies

* Desperate

* Extremists

* Angry

* Frustrated

* Nefarious

* Mad (Tea Partiers)

* Anemic (Republicans)

* Bigoted (Tea Partiers)

* Violent (Tea Partiers)

* Anachronistic

And most are, I suppose, bad dressers, to boot.

Both Blow and Rich conclude triumphantly that white conservatives are a dying breed and that the demographics of America doom the (overwhelmingly white) Tea Party movement to failure. Here, to borrow a phrase from the late Israeli diplomat Abba Eban, Blow and Rich experience “an isolated spasm of lucidity.”

America’s racial and ethnic composition is indeed changing. Conservatives need to take seriously the reality that sometime in the mid- to late-century, American whites will become merely the largest plurality in a multi-ethnic nation. We have to do a far better job of winsomely and thoughtfully engaging people of color and persuading them that the conservative vision of personal responsibility, limited government, lower taxes and true social justice (for the born and the unborn) is the best course for our – and I emphasize, our – nation.

But Blow and Rich should consider the wisdom of America’s greatest President, Abraham Lincoln (a Republican, no less!): The hen is the wisest of all the animals because she never cackles until her eggs are hatched.

The battle over the ideas and convictions that should shape our country should never include in its ranks those pathetic souls on either extreme whose malevolence, whether racial, ethnic or ideological, inspires their political conduct. But Charles Blow and Frank Rich should beware of cackling too soon.

Whose country is it? All of ours. Of “We, the people,” who lived not under a whimsical state manipulated by a Leftist bourgeoisie elite, but a constituted political order grounded in a written text and the unwritten but palpable virtue of an informed citizenry. Conservatives are fighting to keep it. And we’ve just begun to fight.

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Violent Liberal Hate Rhetoric: Fifteen Quotes (townhall.com, 100330)

by John Hawkins

In an effort to distract people from the destructive, illegitimate power-grab-of-a-bill masquerading as health care reform that the Democrats just passed over the objections of the American people, liberal members of Congress have spent days over-hyping threats against them. Of course, the sad reality is that EVERYONE who achieves any notoriety at all in this business gets death threats, but it’s only treated as noteworthy by the press when it happens to liberals. Had the exact same events that followed the health care debate happened to Republicans instead of Democrats, it wouldn’t have been a page one story in any major paper in the nation.

Meanwhile, if conservatives truthfully refer to Barack Obama as a socialist or encourage people to fight back against the takeover of 1/6 of our economy, we’re hysterically accused of inciting violence, while liberals who actually call for violence and publicly wish death upon conservatives are given a free pass.

Well today, that free pass has run out because people are going to get just a taste of the violent rhetoric that has been coming from the Left for years in this country. Conservatives have long since been willing to stand up and say that they oppose political violence and threats coming from our side – as well we should. So, when will Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama finally stand up and condemn the ocean of violence and hatred being spewed by their friends, supporters and ideological allies?

“A spoiled child (Bush) is telling us our Social Security isn’t safe anymore, so he is going to fix it for us. Well, here’s your answer, you ungrateful whelp: [audio sound of 4 gunshots being fired.] Just try it, you little b*stard. [audio of gun being cocked].” — A “humor bit” from the Randi Rhodes Show

“I want to go up to the closest white person and say: ‘You can’t understand this, it’s a black thing’ and then slap him, just for my mental health” — New York city councilman Charles Barron

“..And then there’s Rumsfeld who said of Iraq ‘We have our good days and our bad days.’ We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say ‘This is one of our bad days’ and pull the trigger.” — From a fundraising ad put out by the St. Petersburg Democratic Club

“I believe in ecoterrorism.” — James Cameron

“...In an ideal world, American consumers could be convinced to do the right thing through an appeal to logic with public service messages like the ‘What Would Jesus Drive?’ TV campaign, but the kind of people who would buy a car that increases the risk to other motorists in an accident can’t be reasoned with. They’re selfish and stupid. It’s unfortunate that drivers must worry that their SUVs are being targeted by insulting stickers and Molotov cocktails, but one thing’s for sure: It couldn’t be happening to a more deserving group of people.” — Ted Rall winks at ecoterrorism

“F*** God D*mned Joe the God D*mned Motherf*cking plumber! I want Motherf*cking Joe the plumber dead.” — Liberal talk show host Charles Karel Bouley on the air.

“Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.” — The Village Voice’s Michael Feingold, in a theater review of all places

(Rush Limbaugh) “just wants the country to fail. To me that’s treason. He’s not saying anything different than what Osama Bin Laden is saying. You might want to look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker but he was just so strung out on Oxycontin he missed his flight. ... Rush Limbaugh, I hope the country fails, I hope his kidneys fail, how about that?” — Wanda Sykes

“You guys see Live and Let Die, the great Bond film with Yaphet Kotto as the bad guy, Mr. Big? In the end they jam a big CO2 pellet in his face and he blew up. I have to tell you, Rush Limbaugh is looking more and more like Mr. Big, and at some point somebody’s going to jam a CO2 pellet into his head and he’s going to explode like a giant blimp. That day may come. Not yet. But we’ll be there to watch. I think he’s Mr. Big, I think Yaphet Kotto. Are you watching, Rush?” — Chris Matthews

“I have zero doubt that if Dick Cheney was not in power, people wouldn’t be dying needlessly tomorrow....I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.” — Bill Maher

“If I got (Condi Rice) a— on camera, I would put my Mars Air Jordans so far up her butt that the Mayo Clinic would have to remove them.” — Spike Lee

“For those of you who do, as a matter of principle, oppose war in any form, the idea of supporting a conscientious objector who’s already been inducted [and] in his combat service in Iraq might have a certain appeal. But let me ask you this: Would you render the same support to someone who hadn’t conscientiously objected, but rather instead rolled a grenade under their line officer in order to neutralize the combat capacity of their unit?” — University Professor Ward Churhill on supporting soldiers who frag their officers

“Drudge? Aw, Drudge, somebody ought to wrap a strong Republican entrail around his neck and hoist him up about six feet in the air and watch him bounce.” — Liberal radio host, Mike Malloy

“I know how the ‘tea party’ people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their ‘Obama Plan White Slavery’ signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads.” — The Washington Post’s Courtland Milloy

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The Left Squashes Life’s Little Pleasures (townhall.com, 100413)

by Dennis Prager

Reading the onslaught of angry denunciations of Burger King by mental health organizations and mainstream media reporters this past week reminded me of a characteristic of the Left not often commented on: a certain joylessness, even an antipathy to the little joys that contribute more than almost anything else to most people’s ability to endure the difficulties of life.

These characteristics further reinforce the view that Leftism functions as a (secular) religion. Like medieval Christians who wore hair shirts and Puritans who thought dancing was sacrilegious, the Left, consciously or not, is uncomfortable with many of the joys — with notable exceptions such as sex and drugs — that people experience.

Needless to say, the Left always has noble explanations — usually, the protection of people’s emotions and health — for opposing and even banning many joys of life. But the end result is fewer of these little joys that mean a great deal to people.

Burger King’s ad was innocuous and innocent. It featured the company’s royal mascot running through a building, knocking a person over and crashing through a glass window to deliver the new Burger King Steakhouse XT burger. Called “crazy” by those present, he was finally tackled by men in white coats. “The king’s insane,” the ad noted, for “offering so much beef for $3.99.”

This has triggered a storm of criticism from activists (a term which, unless otherwise specified, means liberal or left).

Michael Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, called the ad “blatantly offensive ... I was stunned. Absolutely stunned and appalled,” he said. David Shern, president and chief executive of Mental Health America in Alexandria, Va., echoed this assessment. And reporters from the Associated Press to the Washington Post all agreed.

If this were isolated, it would be worth mentioning only in the context of wondering why people who run mental health — and most other activist — organizations seem to have little common sense. They should listen to William Gardner of Los Angeles, who wrote to me:

“I am a father of a 24 year old son with mental health issue. I am particularly tuned to protecting my son’s self-image. My son and I have both seen the Burger King Ad that you have referred to. It did not occur to either of us that the Burger King Ad was offensive in any way. Why would I raise my son to be hyper-sensitive about his disability? My objective as a parent is to strengthen him. Making him hyper-sensitive would have the opposite effect.”

But the Left has problems with much else as well: smoking (including cigars and pipes); virtually all kids games that can make a kid feel at all bad or get hurt; wood-burning fireplaces; cars; most jokes or any flirting in the workplace; incandescent light bulbs; cool homes in summer; and more.

Smoking

One of life’s great little pleasures is tobacco. Just watch old war reportage to see the serenity and joy a cigarette brought to a wounded soldier. Though I do not smoke cigarettes, I have been smoking cigars and pipes since I was in college (my father still smokes cigars daily at age 91), and it would be difficult to overstate how much I enjoy both.

No one opposes educating the public about the dangers of cigarette smoking. Cigarette smoking shortens the lives of up to a third of smokers, often in terrible ways, and that is what public health organizations should be saying. But the battle against smoking and tobacco has become a religious crusade for anti-smoking zealots, who are almost invariably on the Left. If the Left hated Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro as much as it hates “Big Tobacco,” the world would be a better place.

But because the Left hates the fact that people smoke (tobacco, not marijuana, which the Left defends) it uses totalitarian (I use that term with no exaggeration) tactics to eliminate it. Just as the Soviets removed Trotsky from old photos, anti-smoking zealots have forced the removal of cigarettes from old photos — from photos of FDR, from the famous Beatles photo — and from movies whenever possible. Torture and murder are ubiquitous in films, but smoking is all but banned — even cigars are now banned from James Bond films.

Smoking has been banned in entire cities, outdoors as well as in. In Pasadena, Calif., one cannot even smoke in a cigar store. That the Left has contempt for Prohibition reveals a lack of self-awareness that is quite remarkable.

Kids Games such as Tag, Dodgeball, Soccer, Touch Football, Monkey Bars

Virtually every game I played as a child during school recess is now banned because organizations such as the National Program for Playground Safety deem games in which kids are “running into each other” as too dangerous. Someone might get hurt.

Until a few years ago, just about every American boy, and many girls, played dodgeball. No more. This joy, too, has been eliminated from American life. “We consider it inappropriate to use children as human targets,” said Mary Marks, physical education supervisor for Fairfax County, Va. And it may hurt the feelings of kids who are eliminated. For the same reason — potential hurt feelings of those eliminated — musical chairs is no longer played in some schools.

Some might argue that these bans are not because of Leftism but because of fear of lawsuits. But in light of how leftwing the trial bar is, that only reinforces my argument.

Pinups

For men working in, let us say, a car repair shop, there is not much by way of excitement or visual beauty. So the typical repair shop or factory had its pinup calendar — a calendar featuring a photo of a beautiful woman in a sexy pose, usually clad in no more than a bikini, sometimes less. The Left, in another totalitarian move, has banned pinups. The reasons: Sexism and possible Hostile Environment. How can a woman possibly work or bring her car into a repair shop where there is a picture of a scantily clad woman? The same people who clamor for a woman’s right to walk in public with no top on (because men are allowed to) have banned photos of women with no top on.

Flirting at Work

A joy in life since the advent of men and women has been men flirting with or “chatting up” women. No more. Virtually anything related to a male reaction to a fellow employee who is female can be grounds for his losing his job and worse. What began as a campaign against bosses trading professional advances for sexual favors has degenerated into the elimination of essentially all the fun — and, yes, potential emotional hurt — of man-woman dialogue. At work, a man never knows what comment to what woman will trigger his being sent, a la Communist regimes, to a “re-education” program, being fined, having charges leveled against him, being humiliated, having a permanent mark on his employment record, and, of course, losing his job.

There is no question that some men went too far in their sexually charged comments to women. But as a rule, we have wildly overreacted. Women are not wimps. But the Left has inculcated a sense of victimhood into large numbers of women and thereby rendered them weak — just as it has, in ways too numerous to mention, emasculated men. I deplore crude comments. But in the America I grew up, it was legal to speak crudely, and either decent men would shut the crude man up or women would give the man a well-earned smack across the face.

Today, any hint at the sexual tension that naturally and joyfully exists between the two sexes has been banned. In the attempt to eliminate all pain caused by potentially inappropriate comments, the Left has done what it tries to do about all pain — ban actions that may lead to it. As a result, gone are the joys of the man-woman repartee in the workplace.

Cars

For most Americans, the car is not only a source of much pleasure, it is also rightly identified with individual liberty. But here, too, to the extent the Left is able to, it will tell you what kind of car you can drive and, if possible, get you out of your car and into mass transit.

The Home

To the Left, your home is not your castle; it is another place of too many joys that the Left would like to ban.

One joy I particularly identify with is the wood-burning fireplace. In California, activists on the Left, aka environmentalists, have banned them from being built in all new homes. Too many harmful emissions. Meanwhile, at the other end of the temperature spectrum, activists wish to determine how low you can set your air conditioner, lest you use more energy than the Left believes you should.

Do you like your present light bulbs? The Left has banned them in favor of CFLs that contain mercury. These new bulbs give a fair number of people headaches, emit less pleasant light, are initially much more expensive and, if broken, necessitate opening windows even in winter, and people and pets must leave the area. The EPA has issued a 16-point procedure to follow if a CFL bulbs breaks.

Indeed, if the Left had its way, the house would eventually become an anachronism as everyone gradually moves into space-saving, less polluting, less energy-wasting apartments.

Every poll has concluded that liberals are less happy than conservatives. There are many reasons for this, and given the importance of little joys to happiness, the Left’s religious-like opposition to many of them is surely one of those reasons. The problem for the rest of us, however, is that, like most unhappy people, many folks on the Left don’t like seeing anyone happier than they are.

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Why Are Liberals So Afraid of Prayer? (townhall.com, 100426)

by Harry R. Jackson, Jr.

The last two weeks have been anything but calm in the world of faith and religion. Conservative Christians are wondering whether they are being betrayed by both the White House and the court system. The ruling of a Wisconsin judge that the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional and violates the concept of the separation of church and state has been like a blow to the solar plexus for battle weary Christians. In the much touted culture wars, there has never been such an open case of liberals throwing down the gauntlet in a specific area that has been deemed “Christian territory.”

Perhaps the blame for this change in the political atmosphere should be laid at the feet of the current administration and it’s concept of pluralism. After all, the president boldly declared last year that the US was no longer a Christian nation. This remark infuriated the faithful and set the stage for millions of rank and file Christians to question his personal faith. Next, he did not attend the National Day of Prayer and refused to make a declaration or statement until late in the day last year. Conservative Christian powerbrokers watched tentatively as the administration attempted to bring new leaders into the president’s advisory circle. These new leaders had no real national cache’ with the Christian masses. Despite the fact that the president attended a Congressional prayer breakfast earlier this year, his approach seems to have been aimed at “defanging” the politically powerful, religious right.

The latest debacle concerning the National Day of Prayer is even more volatile than the other issues. Uninviting Franklin Graham to speak at the Pentagon has raised eyebrows among the faithful from Maine to Mississippi and everywhere in between. It almost goes without saying that Franklin Graham holds a very prominent place in the evangelical community because of the stature of his dad - Billy. President Obama’s visit with Billy Graham this weekend may be a sign that he knows that he has gotten himself into deep waters. The benign neglect approach to the conservative, religious community may backfire and create irreconcilable differences between this president and millions of the nation’s Christians.

Who ever would have thought that prayer would have caused a national controversy? After all, in these turbulent times, we could use both divine wisdom and God’s gracious intervention.

The need for the nation to pray about her problems would be high on my grandmother’s To-Do list. In fact, she often said, “Prayer changes things!” As a black woman who was also part Native American, she was very proud to achieve the status of Licensed Practical Nurse. She was a natural caregiver whose profession was simply an extension of the way her mother before her had lived out her faith - visiting the sick and shut-ins her church. Her generation saw America change because of a non-violent civil rights movement that was fueled by civil disobedience and the power of prayer. Her personal life also changed because of prayer and faithfulness. In fact, she lived long enough to see her four daughters and her 15 grandchildren all graduate from college. Two of us even attended a prestigious Ivy League graduate school, with one of her grandsons becoming the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Perhaps political liberals believe that the religious right will be emboldened or strengthened, if they are allowed to pray in public places or on special national holidays. Or maybe they believe that some form of psychological harm will befall those who are not attached to one of the many Christian denominations. Contrary to the public myths, everyone is encouraged to pray to the God of their own religious tradition. More importantly, acts of hatred, name-calling, or intolerant public jeering have never occurred at one of these prayer events.

It seems to me that the great faith of our leaders has not drawn the nation to prayer. Instead the huge needs of the nation have always driven men of faith and goodwill to pursue divine intervention. As I mused on this, I came upon a prayer offered up to God on behalf of the US people in June of 1944. I have included just a snippet of this prayer:

“Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith…

“Many people have urged that I call the nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. ...

“With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace — a peace invulnerable to the scheming(s) of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil. Thy will be done, Almighty God. Amen.”

I am thankful that FDR prayed this bold prayer in clear and understandable terms during World War II. I pray that President Obama will catch the spirit of prayer and follow FDR’s example. For the rest of us, let’s not be afraid of the power of prayer. Let’s use this awesome spiritual weapon to ensure the continued light and favor that America has enjoyed over the past 234 years.

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The Left and Islam: A Love Story (townhall.com, 100604)

by Diana West

At some future date, when what Andrew C. McCarthy calls “the freedom culture” is again secure (we hope), the jihad-opposition will see itself divided into two camps in histories written about our current time: those who ineffectually supported efforts to stop “terrorism” and other supposedly generic outbreaks of violence in such lands as Iraq and Afghanistan; and those, far fewer in number (at least in that difficult decade following 9/11), who recognized terrorism as but one aspect of the civilizational assault emanating from expansionist Islam.

If the freedom culture wins, it will be because the latter group grew in influence. And if the latter group grows in influence, it will be due to such books as McCarthy’s excellent, ground-breaking new work, “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.”

Islam and the Left? Since this notion will raise some eyebrows, I asked Andrew himself to elaborate on this and some other related questions.

Q: Why are Islam and the Left, as you demonstrate in “The Grand Jihad,” not such strange bedfellows?

A: “For all their disagreements on matters like women’s rights, gay rights and abortion, Islam and the Left are in harmony on big-picture matters: They are authoritarian, totalitarian in the sense of wanting to control all aspects of human existence, virulently anti-capitalist, and regard the individual as existing merely to serve the collective. Consequently, they have the same obstacle in common: our freedom culture - i.e., Western liberalism, U.S. constitutional republicanism, and their foundation, individual liberty. Historically, Islam and the Left ally when there is a common enemy. But I’d stress that what I am talking about here is an alliance, not a merger. I am not claiming, as someone ridiculously suggested to me the day the book came out, that Barack Obama wants to impose Sharia.”

That appropriately noted, the book does highlight the closely interweaving principles of Islam and the Left, the ummah (Islamic community) and ACORN, both of which “bore from within,” in Saul Alinsky’s phrase, to hollow out what we might think of as “the Unum” — as in E Pluribus Unum. Linking these points, having documented President Obama’s career as a community organizer, his embrace of ACORN, his radical associations, Andrew writes in “The Grand Jihad”:

“The common denominator (throughout Obama’s career) is a purpose to break down the Unum at its foundations, what he (Obama) called the ‘grass roots.’ For America he plans an atom bomb. Or to be more precise, an atoms bomb: countless communities in cities and towns across the land, organized along Saul Alinsky’s brand of Marxism, into socialist enclaves. It fits hand and glove with Yusuf Qaradawi’s voluntary (Islamic) apartheid, the enclave strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood. Each atom smothers the individual freedom and enterprise that have defined the American character, replacing it with welfare states that prize dysfunction and reward the rabble-rousers.”

But we ignore the assault through “willful blindness,” to borrow the title of Andrew McCarthy’s first book about his role as a federal prosecutor in convicting the “blind sheik” and his accomplices for bombing the World Trade Center in 1993. Instead, he observes in the book, our policy-makers obsess over “one tactic, terrorism” while ignoring terrorism’s goal: Islamization through the implementation of Sharia (Islamic law). I asked him to explain.

He replied: “From the beginning of my involvement in counterterrorism in the early nineties, I’ve been struck by the government’s portrayal of terrorists as beasts who kill for no better reason than to kill - as if the fact that they are brutal means that they are insane. Government does this as part of its narrative that terrorists couldn’t possibly be accurately representing a well-grounded interpretation of Islam, and therefore must be ‘perverting’ or ‘hijacking’ Islam, or must be traitors against the ‘true Islam.’

“There is a logic to terrorism. It is jihad, the purpose of which is to implement, spread, defend or vindicate Sharia, the Muslim legal code. Sharia is deemed in Islamist ideology to be the necessary precondition to Islamicizing a society. Once you realize that, you quickly realize that the same Sharia-driven campaign can be waged, and is being waged, by non-violent means, and that the violent and non-violent methods are inextricably linked.”

Read “The Grand Jihad” and so realize. And quickly!

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Editorial: Allan Rock’s faulty concept of free speech (National Post, 100702)

Last March, when controversial American conservative pundit Ann Coulter first proposed to speak on the University of Ottawa campus, the school’s vice-president academic and provost, François Houle, sent an infamously smug, patronizing letter to Ms. Coulter, warning her to “educate” herself about what kinds of speech are and are not acceptable in Canada “before your planned visit here.”

He added a thinly veiled threat that “promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges.” To avoid arrest or a lawsuit, he cautioned ominously, “weigh your words with respect and civility in mind.”

Now, thanks to an access to information request by The Canadian Press (CP), we have learned that U of O president Allan Rock, the former federal Liberal Justice minister — not Mr. Houle — was the force behind the intimidating email to Ms. Coulter.

The CP reports that the day before Mr. Houle’s message was sent to Ms. Coulter, Mr. Rock sent his own message to Mr. Houle instructing him to warn her of the potential for legal action should she go ahead with her planned address. In a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black, Mr. Rock wrote that “Ann Coulter is a mean-spirited, small-minded, foul-mouthed poltroon … ‘the loud mouth that bespeaks the vacant mind.’ She is an ill-informed and deeply offensive shill for a profoundly shallow and ignorant view of the world. She is a malignancy on the body politic. She is a disgrace to the broadcasting industry and a leading example of the dramatic decline in the quality of public discourse in recent times.”

A firestorm followed the release of Mr. Houle’s sneering email. He received hundreds of angry, often vicious emails. Dozens of newspapers, this one included, wondered about his fitness for the job a leading a university, which is supposed to be a sanctuary for free inquiry, not a shrine for the worship of political correctness.

Not once during the maelstrom heaped upon Mr. Houle did Mr. Rock step up and admit he was actually the person behind his vice-president’s correspondence. Indeed, the emails obtained by CP indicate that after criticism of the provost’s letter heated up, Mr. Rock — who as Justice minister for Jean Chrétien was responsible for such controversial legislation as the gun registry and divorce laws that force men to pay tax on the child support they send their ex-wives — considered making a public offer to Ms. Coulter to return to the university and speak. Such a move would have been self-serving, making Mr. Rock look like the defender of free speech, even though it was him all along who wanted to “chill” Ms. Coulter’s remarks.

Mr. Rock was not the only one hoping to intimidate the controversial writer into moving her speech off campus. Mr. Rock seems to have been acting on the request of Seamus Wolfe, Ottawa’s student federation president, who had posters for the Coulter event removed from student union property and who wrote to Mr. Rock urging that “you notify Ms. Coulter that she is not welcome on our campus, and that her event will not occur on uOttawa property.”

Of course, Messrs. Rock, Houle and Wolfe all would see themselves as champions of free expression, which highlights the danger posed by of hate-speech laws: They give intellectual cover to censorship by permitting politically correct persons simply to define any speech with which they happen to disagree as “hate speech.”

In this regards, perhaps most troubling was Mr. Rock’s instruction to Mr. Houle that the latter urge Ms. Coulter “to respect that Canadian tradition” of free speech “as she enjoys the privilege of her visit.”

Free speech is a right, not a privilege. The right to speak one’s mind did not descend from government or a university official. The world “privilege” implies a freedom that can be taken away at the pleasure of those in power or on the bench. By their nature, privileges cannot be bulwarks against the abuse of power.

For a former head of the Law Society of Upper Canada to have such a false concept of fundamental political rights is appalling. Indeed, it casts doubt on his ability to lead a university.

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With Friends Like These, Who Needs Keith Olbermann? (townhall.com, 100729)

Ann Coulter

While engaging in astonishing viciousness, vulgarity and violence toward Republicans, liberals accuse cheerful, law-abiding Tea Party activists of being violent racists.

Responding to these vile charges, conservative television pundits think it’s a great comeback to say: “There is the fringe on both sides.”

Both sides? Really? How about: “That’s a despicable lie”? Did that occur to you simpering morons as a possible reply to the slanderous claim that conservatives are fiery racists?

All the accusations of “racism” at anti-Obama rallies so far have turned out to be completely false. The most notorious was the allegation that one black congressman was spat on and another called the N-word 15 times at an anti-ObamaCare rally on Capitol Hill last March.

The particularly sensitive Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., perhaps walking too closely to a protester chanting “Kill the Bill,” was hit with some spittle — and briefly thought he was a Freedom Rider! When observers contested Cleaver’s account — with massive video evidence — he walked back his claim of being spat upon.

The slanderous claim that a protester called the civil rights hero John Lewis the N-word 15 times was an outrageous lie — never made by Lewis himself — but promoted endlessly by teary-eyed reporters, most of whom cannot count to 15.

The media never retracted it, even after the N-word allegation was proved false with a still-uncollected $100,000 reward for two seconds of video proof taken from a protest crawling with video cameras and reporters hungry for an act of racism.

When St. Louis Tea Party co-founder Dana Loesch did make the point on CNN that no one spat on any black congressmen at the anti-ObamaCare rally, a liberal on the panel, Nancy Giles, told her to “shut your mouth,” while alleged “comedian” Stephanie Miller repeatedly called Tea Party activists “tea baggers.”

It’s like watching Hitler hysterically denounce Poland for being mean to Nazi Germany while Polish TV commentators defend Poland by saying, “There are mistakes on both sides.”

Meanwhile, we do have video proof of the New Black Panthers standing outside a polling station in Philadelphia in 2008 with billy clubs threatening white voters who tried to vote. And there is video footage of Sarah Palin, Karl Rove,

Condoleezza Rice as well as a slew of conservative college speakers being assaulted by crazed liberals.

We also have evidence of liberals’ proclivity for violence in the form of mountains of arrest records. Liberal protesters at the 2008 Republican National Convention were arrested for smashing police cars, slashing tires, breaking store windows, and for possessing Molotov cocktails, napalm bombs and assorted firearms. (If only they could muster up that kind of fighting spirit on foreign battlefields.)

There were no arrests of conservatives at the Democratic National Convention.

Over the past couple of election cycles, Bush and McCain election headquarters around the country have been repeatedly vandalized, ransacked, burglarized and shot at (by staunch gun-control advocates, no doubt); Bush and McCain campaign signs have been torched; and Republican campaign volunteers have been physically attacked.

It was a good day when George Bush was merely burned in effigy, compared to Hitler or, most innocuously, compared to a monkey.

In the fall of 2008, Obama supporters Mace’d elderly volunteers in a McCain campaign office in Galax, Va. In separate attacks, a half-dozen liberals threw Molotov cocktails at McCain signs on families’ front yards in and around Portland, Ore. One Obama supporter broke a McCain sign being held by a small middle-aged woman in midtown Manhattan before hitting her in the face with the stick. These are just a few acts of violence from the left too numerous to catalog.

There were arrests in all these cases. There was, however, absolutely no national coverage of the attacks by Obama supporters.

Obama is in danger from the Tea Partiers! The Poles are mobilizing on the border!

Since Obama became president, the only recorded violence at Tea Parties or Town Halls has been committed by liberals. Last fall, a conservative had his finger bitten off by a man from a MoveOn.org crowd in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Two Service Employees International Union thugs have been charged with beating up an African-American selling anti-Obama bumper stickers at a St. Louis Tea Party in August 2009.

Respected elder statesmen of the Democratic Party have referred to Obama’s “Negro dialect” (Harry Reid), said he would be getting them coffee a few years ago (Bill Clinton), and called him “clean” (Joe Biden). And that’s not including the former Ku Klux Klan Democratic senator, the late Bob Byrd.

So I’m thinking that maybe when conservatives are called racists on TV, instead of saying, “There are fringe elements on both sides,” conservative commentators might want to think about saying, “That is a complete lie.”

Liberals explode in rage when we accuse them of being unpatriotic based on 50 years of treasonous behavior. They have zero examples of conservative racism, but the best our spokesmen can think to say when accused of racism is: “Man is imperfect.”

Conservatives who prefer to come across on TV as wonderfully moderate than to speak the truth should find another line of work and stop defaming conservatives with their “both sides” pabulum.

I hear BP is looking for a new spokesman.

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Why the Right Fears Transforming America — and the Left Seeks It (townhall.com, 100907)

Dennis Prager

The giveaway regarding presidential candidate Barack Obama’s plans for America was his repeated use of the words “fundamentally transform.”

Some of us instinctively reacted negatively — in fact, with horror — at the thought of fundamentally transforming America.

The “us” are conservatives.

One unbridgeable divide between left and right is how each views alternatives to present-day America. Those on the left imagine an ideal society that has never existed, and therefore seek to “fundamentally transform” America. When liberals imagine an America fundamentally transformed, they envision it becoming a nearly utopian society in which there is no greed, no racism, no sexism, no inequality, no poverty and ultimately no unhappiness.

Conservatives, on the other hand, look around at other societies and history and are certain that if America were fundamentally transformed, it would become just like those other societies. America would become a society of far less liberty, of ethically and morally inferior citizens and of much more unhappiness. And cruelty would increase exponentially around the world.

Conservatives believe that America is an aberration in human history; that, with all the problems that a society made up of flawed human beings will inevitably have, America has been and remains a uniquely decent society. Therefore, conservatives worry that fundamentally transforming America — making America less exceptional — will mean that America gets much worse.

Liberals worry over the opposite possibility — that America will remain more or less as it is.

Two famous statements encapsulate the operative liberal worldview.

The first was attributed to Robert F. Kennedy by his brother Sen. Edward M. Kennedy:

“There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were, and ask, ‘Why not?’”

The other is one of the most popular songs of the last 50 years, John Lennon’s “Imagine”:

“Imagine there’s no heaven. It’s easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people, living for today.

“Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too, Imagine all the people, living life in peace.

“You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.

“Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can. No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people, sharing all the world.

“You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.”

Regarding the Kennedy quote, a conservative would respond something like this:

We conservatives look at America and ask, how did something so decent, so different from other societies, ever get created and last over 200 years? Of course, we always seek to improve it. But more than anything else, we seek to preserve it and its core values. We do not “dream of things that never were.” We dream the same dream as our American forefathers did — to maintain a society committed to the values of E Pluribus Unum, Liberty and In God We Trust. As for utopian dreams, we believe they are more likely to result in nightmares — horrors that would engulf America and the world if America were to be transformed.

To Lennon’s song, a conservative would respond:

Lennon’s utopia is our dystopia. A world without God to give people some certitude that all their suffering is not meaningless is a nightmare. A world without religion means a world without any systematic way of ennobling people. A world without countries is a world without the United States of America, and it is a world governed by the morally imbecilic United Nations, where mass murderers sit on its “human rights” councils. A world without heaven or hell is a world without any ultimate justice, where torturers and their victims have identical fates — oblivion. A world without possessions is a world in which some enormous state possesses everything, and the individual is reduced to the status of a serf.

Liberals frequently criticize conservatives for fearing change. That is not correct. We fear transforming that which is already good. The moral record of humanity does not fill us with optimism about “fundamentally transforming” something as rare as America. Evil is normal. America is not.

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Liberal Crackup (townhall.com, 100915)

Walter E. Williams

Charles Krauthammer, in his Washington Post column (8/27/10), said, “Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed,” pointing out that overwhelming majorities of Americans have repudiated liberal agenda items such as: Obamacare, Obama’s stimulus, building an Islamic center and mosque near ground zero, redefinition of marriage to include same-sex marriage, lax immigration law enforcement and vast expansion of federal power that includes unprecedented debt and deficits.

The nation’s elite and the news media see being against the Obama-led agenda as being racist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, mean-spirited and insensitive. Paul Krugman, columnist for The New York Times, has a different twist expressed in “It’s Witch-Hunt Season” (8/29/10). Krugman says that the last time a Democrat sat in the White House, Bill Clinton, he faced a witch-hunt by his political opponents. “Now,” Krugman says, “it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse,” asking, “So where is this rage coming from? Why is it flourishing? What will it do to America?”

Professor Krugman and others among America’s elite blame some of the rage on talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. They are only partially correct. What talk shows have accomplished is they’ve ended the isolation of many ordinary Americans. When the liberal mainstream media dominated the airwaves, Americans who were against race and sex quotas were made to feel as though they were racists and sexists. Americans who were against big government were portrayed as mean-spirited and uncaring. What talk radio and the massive expansion in non-traditional media have done is not only end the isolation, but more important, the silence amongst ordinary Americans.

Krugman says that what we’re witnessing is “political craziness.” Therefore, the overwhelming majority of Americans who think our borders ought to be secure and think we should have the right to determine who enters our country are politically crazy. Americans who can find nothing in the U.S. Constitution granting Congress the power to take over our health care system are politically crazy. Americans who think a mosque should not be built in the shadows of the Muslim-destroyed World Trade Center are simply religious bigots. By the way, those who oppose the building are not saying there’s no legal or constitutional right to do so any more than they would say a person has no legal or constitutional right to curse his parents, but neither is a good idea. In Thomas Sowell’s column on the topic (8/31/10), he reminds us that “If we all did everything that we have a legal right to do, we could not even survive as individuals, much less as a society.”

Krugman predicts that political craziness, and by inference crazy Americans, will result in a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and play chicken with the federal budget. Chicken with the budget is precisely what Defundit.org has called for. Already they’ve obtained the pledges of 165 congressional candidates not to fund any part of Obamacare.

While America’s liberal elite have not reached the depths of tyrants such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler, they share a common vision and, as such, differ only in degree but not kind. Both denounce free markets and voluntary exchange. They are for control and coercion by the state. They believe they have superior wisdom to the masses and they have been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. They, like any other tyrant, have what they see as good reasons for restricting the freedom of others.

Their agenda calls for the elimination or attenuation of the market. Why? Free markets imply voluntary exchange. Tyrants do not trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrants think they should do. Therefore, they seek to replace the market with economic planning control and regulation.

Why liberalism has become an ugly sight, as Krauthammer claims, is because more and more Americans have wised up to their agenda.

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God, Liberals and Liberty (townhall.com, 101012)

Dennis Prager

In a recent column, New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow wrote: “It’s sometimes easy to lose sight of just how anomalous our (America’s) religiosity is in the world. A Gallup report issued on Tuesday underscored just how out of line we are.”

Given Blow’s leftwing politics and his point was that all rich countries except for the United States are secular and that all poor countries are religious, he was obviously not making this point in order to celebrate America’s “anomalous” religiosity.

He should have. America’s anomalous religiosity is very much worth celebrating — not because it leads to affluence, but because it is indispensible to liberty. Had Blow made a liberty chart rather than an affluence chart, he might have noted that the freest country in the world — for 234 years — the United States of America, has also been the most God-centered.

Yes, I know that the Islamic world has also been God-based and that it has not been free. But that is because Allah is not regarded as the source of liberty, as the America’s Judeo-Christian God has been, but as the object of submission (“Islam” means “submission”).

Since the inception of the United States (and, indeed, before it in colonial America), liberty, i.e., personal freedom, has been linked to God.

America was founded on the belief that God is the source of liberty. That is why the inscription on the Liberty Bell is from the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 25): (SET ITAL) “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”(END ITAL)

The Declaration of Independence also asserts this link: All men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Because the Creator of the world is the source of our freedom, no state, no human being, no government may take it away. If the state were the source of liberty, then obviously the state could take it away.

Both reason and American values therefore make these claims:

1. The more important the state is, the less the liberty.

2. The more important God is, the smaller the state.

3. Therefore, the more important God is, the more liberty there is.

A proof of the validity of these assertions is that as this country — the country, not the government — becomes more secular, it becomes less free, just as has happened in other Western countries. We have far more laws governing human conduct than ever before in America’s history. And Western Europe has even more, including limitations on as basic a liberty as free speech.

So, too, every totalitarian state except Muslim ones (because a religious government is the Muslim ideal) seeks to abolish religion. Stalin, for example, murdered virtually every member of the clergy, and came close to destroying all religion, in the Soviet Union. He understood that a totalitarian state cannot allow a competing allegiance.

And in democratic Western Europe, the ever-expanding state is inevitably accompanied by an ever shrinking God and religion.

This is largely what the current culture war — actually a non-violent civil war — is about. The left seeks an ever-expanding state with, by definition, ever-expanding powers. And a fundamental aspect of that program is the removal of God and religion from as much of American life as possible. This is pursued under the noble-sounding goal of ensuring “separation of church and state.” But whatever the avowed aim, the result is the same: secularize as much of society as possible, its institutions and, most importantly, its values.

Over time, much of America has belatedly awakened to the realization that two counter-revolutionary (as in American Revolution) trends were occurring at a breakneck pace: God was being replaced by the state as the source of liberty, and liberty was eroding.

To use a Civil War simile, the secular Fort Sumter took place in 1962, when the United States Supreme Court (Engel v. Vitale) overthrew the decision of the highest court of New York State, and ruled that the following prayer, said in New York State schools, violated the Constitution:

“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.”

Few rational, let alone religious, Americans believed that this non-denominational prayer, which no school child had to recite, violated the American Constitution. The purpose of the ruling was to impose secularism on America.

Since then, the leftwing attack on religion in America has proceeded at a rapid clip:

— Though Los Angeles (“the Angels”) was founded by Christians, the tiny cross on the seal of Los Angeles County was removed by the three liberal members of the five-member Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

— Wishing a fellow American “Merry Christmas” has been widely rendered unacceptable.

— A speaker at public high school graduations may not say “God bless you” to the graduating class.

— The Bible, the basis of American values instruction for most of American history, is not taught at virtually any non-religious school in America.

Examples are too numerous to list.

And now, commensurate with the removal of God from American society, the most leftwing government in American history is expanding state powers to an unprecedented degree.

Our leftwing party has passed — more accurately imposed, since it did so without a single vote from the opposition party — legislation that will massively expand state powers. And it is preparing to govern more and more of Americans’ lives without passing any legislation. As reported by the Los Angeles Times last week: “White House staff changes are being made with an eye toward achieving goals through executive actions rather than by trying to push plans through the next Congress.”

It was inevitable.

From its inception, the left has regarded God and religion (especially the Judeo-Christian varieties) as impediments to its goals: “Trust in Us (Leftwing intellectuals)” has supplanted “In God We Trust.” And so, God-based liberty gives way to state-based controls.

Whichever side you are on, at least you can now better understand why the non-left is fighting. For liberty’s sake, not just for God’s.

==============================

You Don’t Have to be Crazy to be a Democrat, But it Helps (townhall.com, 101028)

Ann Coulter

With the media sneering about the Tea Party candidates being a bunch of nuts, how about we take a look at some of the Democrats running this year?

We’ve got Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, who personally presided over the housing crash after getting that gay prostitution business behind him. Of course, Frank’s actions are nothing compared to Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul’s alleged participation in a college prank. Now, THERE’S a scandal!

California Sen. Barbara Boxer refuses to say whether a newborn baby is a human life. When Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., asked her on the Senate floor a few years ago whether she believed a baby born alive has a constitutionally protected a right to live, Boxer was stuck for an answer. Her nonresponsive replies included these:

“I support the Roe v. Wade decision. ...

“I think when you bring your baby home, when your baby is born — and the baby belongs to your family and has all the rights. ...

“Define ‘separation’ ...

“You mean the baby has been birthed and is now in its mother’s arms? ...

“The baby is born when the baby is born. That is the answer to the question. ...

“I am not answering these questions! I am not answering these questions!”

(Also, I think she said: “Please call me ‘senator.’”)

That’s not Patty Murray-stupid, but it’s still pretty stupid. How many late-term abortions are you planning to get, Californians, that it’s worth being represented by such a cretinous woman?

Even if you are under the misimpression that Boxer’s Republican opponent, Carly Fiorina, is somehow going to outlaw abortion in California, Carly will cut your taxes so much that you’d be able to fly to Sweden for all your abortions and still come out ahead!

Liberals are indignant that Sarah Palin writes speech notes to herself on her hand. This week, Alex Sink, the Democratic candidate for governor in Florida, was slipped a debating point by her makeup artist, texted by a campaign aide in violation of the rules during a debate with her Republican opponent, Rick Scott.

Oh, those thick Tea Party candidates!

Last weekend, Illinois governor Pat Quinn — Rod Blagojevich’s running mate — stood silently as his supporter, state Sen. Rickey Hendon, blasted Quinn’s Republican opponent, Bill Brady, as “idiotic, racist, sexist, homophobic.”

Hendon has repeatedly made headlines over the past few years for his inappropriate behavior toward female colleagues. Once — during a Senate debate — he asked Sen. Cheryl Axley if her hair was naturally blond and then publicly propositioned her.

Another time, Hendon tackled Rep. Robin L. Kelly, knocking her to the ground after a House-Senate softball game she had come to watch in office attire.

Of the impeccable Brady, Hendon wailed: “If you think that women have no rights whatsoever, except to have his children, vote for Bill Brady. If you think gay and lesbian people need to be locked up and shot in the head, vote for Bill Brady.”

Even the Chicago press was shocked by this, calling on Quinn to apologize. Quinn has “renounced” Hendon’s remarks, but refused to apologize.

But watch out for the Tea Party candidates! There are some real loose cannons in that bunch.

Also last week, Rep. Ron Klein, Democrat of Florida, hysterically claimed he had been “threatened” by one of the Vietnam Veteran bikers supporting his Republican opponent, Allen West.

The man who had allegedly “threatened” Klein is 60 years old and goes by the terrifying name of ... “Miami Mike.” Mike told the Miami Herald that he had simply e-mailed Klein, saying that he deserved to be voted out of office and, in addition, he needed “a good ass-kicking, which I’d be more than happy to do even though I’m a lot older than you.”

As Miami Mike said: “A threat? Give me a break. He cannot be scared of what I wrote. If he is, he is just a real baby.”

Apparently so. Klein turned Mike’s e-mail over to the Capitol police, where they promptly burst out laughing and then ordered framed copies of the e-mail.

Speaking of little girls in pink party dresses, Keith Olbermann has repeatedly claimed that Allen West “disgraced his uniform.” Weirdly, he never gives details of how he thinks West did that. (Maybe Olbermann could check on war-zone protocol with fake-Vietnam War veteran Dick Blumenthal, who’s running for the Senate from Connecticut by lying about having served in Vietnam.)

As a colonel in Iraq, West was interrogating an Iraqi terrorist who knew about a planned ambush. Unable to get him to talk, West shot a gun near the terrorist’s head, whereupon the frightened but unharmed detainee spilled the beans.

Because of that, West’s men were able to capture a potential attacker and identify future ambush sites. There were no further attacks on West’s men.

As West later told The New York Times, “There are rules and regulations, and there’s protecting your soldiers.” He said, “I just felt I’d never have to write a letter of condolence home to a ‘rule and regulation.’”

When the Army considered court-martialing West, thousands of letters poured in defending West and thanking him for what he had done. Ninety-five members of Congress signed a letter to the secretary of the Army in support of West. No court-martial was ever convened.

Liberals won’t say that John Phillip Walker Lindh disgraced his country. Washington Sen. Patty Murray thinks Osama bin Laden is a swell guy for building “day care centers” in Afghanistan. But they say a hero like Allen West “disgraced his uniform” by saving the lives of American soldiers.

Yeah, the Tea Party candidates are a real embarrassment.

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Why the left hasn’t seized the day (National Post, 101210)

Dan Gardner

Sometimes what’s most interesting is what isn’t happening. And what’s not happening in politics today is the left.

In the United Kingdom, an austerity budget introduced by the governing coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats has done little to help Labour, which continues to muddle along in the polls. In Germany, Angela Merkel and her Christian Democrats are unpopular, but the left has fractured and the Social Democratic Party is weaker than ever.

In the United States, the Republicans are intellectually bankrupt but the Democrats still managed to lose the House of Representatives last month and a Democratic president was compelled this week to accept tax cuts for millionaires — casting the American left into the sort of despair it felt during the Bush years.

And Canada? The Conservative government gets under the skin of left-wingers like no Progressive Conservative government ever did, and the Liberals have gone from the weak leadership of Paul Martin to the laughable campaigning of Stéphane Dion to the incessant stumbling of Michael Ignatieff. This is the time for New Democrats to surge.

They’re not surging.

This sure isn’t what anyone expected in 2008. A global financial meltdown. A terrible recession. Soaring unemployment. Free-market cheerleaders discredited. The headline on the front page of the Washington Post captured the mood perfectly: “The End of Capitalism,” it read.

So why has the left failed to seize the day?

“I think it’s because we need a more agile response than the old left was accustomed to,” Jack Layton tells me in his office on Parliament Hill. He then proceeds to demonstrate his agility.

“I would call it ‘gossamer economics,’” he says, adapting an engineer’s phrase used to describe bridges that are structurally strong but light in appearance. “You focus on letting small business, innovative sectors, local communities and municipalities — that often have very good ideas about things that could be done to get things going in their own local communities — use the central state, the national government, to empower that creativity at the local level.”

I hadn’t quite grasped the meaning of “gossamer economics” yet. So Layton elaborated. “If you look at the new approach to energy, for instance, it’s all based on decentralization, particularly around energy efficiency. My buddy Amory Lovins likes to talk about negawatts. If you can save a megawatt cheaper than you can produce one, then go out there and save it. And by the way, you’ll also create more work by doing that. And we’ve got lots of negawatts out there. We’ve got lots of homes — we’re moving into the heating season, and they’re turning up their furnaces. If we have people out there with caulking guns, insulation and new triple-glazed windows, all over the country, people apprenticing, young people having jobs in their local area, you wouldn’t have to fly to the tar sands for a three-week shift or a two-week shift and then go back home for a week. You’d be able to work right there in your own community, upgrading the building stock.”

Now, I like triple-glazed windows as much as the next guy, but we were talking about global politics at a pivotal moment in history. This sounded like the third bullet point on page six of a really boring campaign brochure. Could there be a clue here about why the left is failing to seize the day?

I asked Layton about the old left. A message like “nationalize the coal industry” was easy to communicate because it was big, simple and dramatic. What he’s talking about isn’t any of those things, is it?

“Sure it is,” he objected. “Well, maybe it’s complicated. But I’m saying” — he paused, as if drawing his biggest rhetorical gun — “let’s use the national government to empower citizens, businesses and communities to make the changes that we need.”

“What does ‘empower’ mean?” I asked.

“It means we want to support you in your innovation,” Layton said. “A national government should support people in their innovation.”

So in response to convulsions shuddering through global capitalism, the most important leader of the Canadian left calls on government to support people in their innovation.

“Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but the statutory and fiscal impediments to decentralized innovation!”

OK, I don’t want to be hard on Jack Layton. A lot of what he says is good, practical stuff. I really do like triple-glazed windows. But it doesn’t exactly sing. And truth be told, it’s not all that left-wing.

The problem is the same one that has plagued the left for 30 years: Nationalization and wealth redistribution vanished from the intellectual climate, leaving free-market thinking to dominate the unspoken assumptions which are the foundation of political debates. There was a time when a leftist who embraced those assumptions could still seem fresh and different, but that was before Bill Clinton sold his soul, Tony Blair invaded Iraq and “third way” became a punchline.

British historian David Kynaston noted that even if Winston Churchill’s Conservatives had won the election of 1945, “they almost certainly would have created a welfare state not unrecognizably different from the one that Labour actually did create.” That was the intellectual paradigm of the day. There was no escaping it.

The free-market paradigm was rattled in 2008, but it still stands. If the left steps outside the paradigm, it makes itself unelectable.

If it stays within, it has nothing more exciting to offer than minor variations on the status quo and triple-glazed windows.

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Scrooge Was A Liberal (Ann Coulter, 101222)

It’s the Christmas season, so godless liberals are citing the Bible to demand the redistribution of income by government force. Didn’t Jesus say, “Blessed are the Health and Human Services bureaucrats, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”?

Liberals are always indignantly accusing conservatives of claiming God is on our side. What we actually say is: We’re on God’s side, particularly when liberals are demanding God’s banishment from the public schools, abortion on demand, and taxpayer money being spent on Jesus submerged in a jar of urine and pictures of the Virgin Mary covered with pornographic photos.

But for liberals like Al Franken, it’s beyond dispute that Jesus would support extending federal unemployment insurance.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the Bible, but it does nicely illustrate Shakespeare’s point that the “devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”

What the Bible says about giving to the poor is: “Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” (2 Corinthians 9:7)

Being forced to pay taxes under penalty of prison is not voluntary and rarely done cheerfully. Nor do our taxes go to “the poor.” They mostly go to government employees who make more money than you do.

The reason liberals love the government redistributing money is that it allows them to skip the part of charity that involves peeling the starfish off their wallets and forking over their own money. This, as we know from study after study, they cannot bear to do. (Unless they are guaranteed press conferences where they can brag about their generosity.)

Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks’ study of charitable giving in America found that conservatives give 30% more to charity than liberals do, despite the fact that liberals have higher incomes than conservatives.

In his book “Who Really Cares?” Brooks compared the charitable donations of religious conservatives, secular liberals, secular conservatives and “religious” liberals.

His surprising conclusion was ... Al Franken gave the most of all!

Ha ha! Just kidding. Religious conservatives, the largest group at about 20% of the population, gave the most to charity — $2,367 per year, compared with $1,347 for the country at large.

Even when it comes to purely secular charities, religious conservatives give more than other Americans, which is surprising because liberals specialize in “charities” that give them a direct benefit, such as the ballet or their children’s elite private schools.

Indeed, religious people, Brooks says, “are more charitable in every measurable nonreligious way.”

Brooks found that conservatives donate more in time, services and even blood than other Americans, noting that if liberals and moderates gave as much blood as conservatives do, the blood supply would increase by about 45%.

They ought to set up blood banks at tea parties.

On average, a person who attends religious services and does not believe in the redistribution of income will give away 100 times more — and 50 times more to secular charities — than a person who does not attend religious services and strongly believes in the redistribution of income.

Secular liberals, the second largest group coming in at 10% of the population, were the whitest and richest of the four groups. (Some of you may also know them as “insufferable blowhards.”) These “bleeding-heart tightwads,” as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof calls them, were the second stingiest, just behind secular conservatives, who are mostly young, poor, cranky white guys.

Despite their wealth and advantages, secular liberals give to charity at a rate of 9% less than all Americans and 19% less than religious conservatives. They were also “significantly less likely than the population average to return excess change mistakenly given to them by a cashier.” (Count Nancy Pelosi’s change carefully!)

Secular liberals are, however, 90% more likely to give sanctimonious Senate speeches demanding the forced redistribution of income. (That’s up 7% from last year!)

We’ll review specific liberals next week.

Needless to say, “religious liberals” made up the smallest group at just 6.4% of the population (for more on this, see my book, “Godless”).

Interestingly, religious liberals were also “most confused” of all the groups. Composed mostly of blacks and Unitarians, religious liberals made nearly as many charitable donations as religious conservatives, but presumably, the Unitarians brought down their numbers, making them second in charitable giving.

Brooks wrote that he was shocked by his conclusions because he believed liberals “genuinely cared more about others than conservatives did” — probably because liberals are always telling us that.

So he re-ran the numbers and gathered more data, but it kept coming out the same. “In the end,” he says, “I had no option but to change my views.”

Every other study on the subject has produced similar results. Indeed, a Google study of philanthropy found an even greater disparity, with conservatives giving 50% more than liberals. The Google study showed that liberals gave more to secular causes overall, but conservatives still gave more as a percentage of their incomes.

The Catalogue for Philanthropy analyzed a decade of state and federal tax returns and found that the red states were far more generous than the blue states, with the highest percentage of tightwads living in the liberal Northeast.

In his book “Intellectuals,” Paul Johnson quotes Pablo Picasso scoffing at the idea that he would give to the needy. “I’m afraid you’ve got it wrong,” Picasso explains, “we are socialists. We don’t pretend to be Christians.”

Merry Christmas to all, skinflint liberals and generous Christians alike!

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Libeling the Right: The Key to the Left’s Success (townhall.com, 110117)

Dennis Prager

Last week, following the murder of six people and the attempted murder of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, the American people were given a vivid display of the single most important tactic of the left: libeling opponents.

Most Americans have been naively and blissfully unaware of this aspect of the left’s arsenal against the right. But now, just as more Americans than ever before understand the left’s limitless appetite for political power in an ever-expanding state, more Americans than ever before understand that a key to the left’s success is defaming the right.

I do not recall any major American daily attacking another major American daily the way the Wall Street Journal attacked The New York Times last week under the heading “The New York Times has crossed a moral line.” I do not recall Pulitzer-Prize winning Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer ever expressing contempt toward a colleague the way he did against The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman last week. Krauthammer ended his Washington Post column “Massacre, then libel” with this sentence: “The origins of Loughner’s delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman’s?”

People are awakening to the seminal fact of left-wing success: The only way the left can succeed in America is by libeling the right. Only 20% of Americans label themselves liberal, let alone left. How, then, do Leftists get elected? And why don’t more Americans call themselves conservative when, in fact, so many share conservatives’ values?

The answer to both questions is that through its dominance of the news media, entertainment media and educational institutions, the left has been able to successfully demonize the right for at least half a century.

The left rarely convinces Americans to adopt its views. What it does is create a fear of the right that influences many Americans to align themselves with the left.

For example, most Americans want to retain the man-woman definition of marriage. Even most voters in liberal Californians want to. The left has not been able to convince even Californians to redefine marriage to include members of the same sex. So what the left did was to declare as “haters” all those who wanted California to retain the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. Proposition 8 became “Prop. Hate.”

But the Left’s modus operandi was never as apparent as it was this past week when it took a tragic mass killing of innocents by a violent mentally ill individual and transformed it — within hours — into an attack on the decency of the Right: specifically Sarah Palin, the tea party, Fox News and talk radio.

The same left, led by The New York Times, that warned against making any quick assumptions that Islam had played any role in Maj. Nidal Hasan’s murder of 13 people and wounding of 30 others at Fort Hood, immediately declared that the Arizona murders were largely a result of a “climate of hate” induced by Palin and other conservatives.

It wasn’t true. They knew it wasn’t true. And, yes, it was a libel.

But when you control all the major news media, Hollywood, much of the rest of the culture and most of the high schools and colleges, how are most people one supposed to realize that it is not a valid description of the right?

What makes last week different is this: The left, for the first time, does not have the same monopoly over mass information, and the Republican Party is no longer emasculated. There is talk radio, there is the Internet, there is Fox News and there is a vigorous conservative Republican Party. So, when the left unleashed its libel against the right, claiming that it was responsible for a “climate of hate” that produced Jared Loughner, to its shock, America did not lie down and believe it. Many millions did, as usual. But for those with eyes to see, it was a false accusation, and for many, for the first time, it provided a clear view into how the left operates.

As it becomes ever more obvious that Loughner’s crimes had nothing — absolutely nothing — to do with conservatives, the left will do three things: change the subject by criticizing Palin’s use of the term “blood libel,” (a term whose use by Palin was honorably defended by Professor Alan Dershowitz, a prominent Jewish liberal); deny it ever really blamed the right for the Loughner’s crimes (hoping, with good reason, that Americans have a short memory); and continue to blame the right for creating the “climate of hate” that the left itself has created.

That is why it is important for conservatives and honorable liberals not to allow Americans to forget what the left did last week. It is the key to giving conservatives the good name they deserve. And it is the key to giving the left the name it deserves.

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5 Pieces Of Common Liberal Rhetoric Designed To Incite Violence (townhall.com, 110118)

John Hawkins

Since Jared Lee Loughner went on his rampage in Tucson, we’ve been treated to perfectly ridiculous liberal howling about “violent rhetoric.” The reason it’s “perfectly ridiculous” is that “liberals being liberals,” they’ve tackled the whole debate in such a politically correct manner that it makes the debate laughable.

According to liberals, what words supposedly incite violence? Words like “targeting,” “locked and loaded,” “crossfire,” “job killing,” “double barrel,” etc. In other words, it’s not people actually calling for violence; it’s commonly used phrases — that have long been used to describe politics — that cause bloodshed by lathering up maniacs. Of course, only a complete moron could believe this – and, yes, if you believe this, I mean you personally are a moron.

Of course, even most liberals aren’t this stupid. So, they’ve latched on to this theory for two reasons. The first is sheer opportunism. They’re going to ignore the countless times their side has used words like “job killing” and “targeted” and they’re going to pretend that only conservatives do this. This shows they’re hypocritical and have no intellectual honesty. But, that’s just par for the course for the professional Left.

However, the other reason is more sinister: Liberals commonly say things that, if they really believe the words that are coming out of their mouths, would lead to political violence. Let’s talk about just a few examples.

BushHitler: Calling George Bush “Hitler” and Republicans “Nazis” became such a regular occurrence that it became jejune during the Bush years. Whether it was

Sandra Bernhard saying,

“The real terrorist threats are George W. Bush and his band of brown-shirted thugs” or

Michael Moore,

“The Patriot Act is the first step. “Mein Kampf” — “Mein Kampf” was written long before Hitler came to power. And if the people of Germany had done something early on to stop these early signs, when the right-wing, when the extremists such as yourself, decide that this is the way to go, if people don’t speak up against this, you end up with something like they had in Germany. I don’t want to get to that point.”

If you could go back in time, before Hitler came to power, would it be immoral to kill him? People like Michael Moore, Sandra Bernhard and the rest of the professional Left were hoping someone would say “no” all during the Bush years.

The population of earth is “unsustainable:” At a minimum, you could go all the way back to Malthus on this argument, but liberals have become much more insistent about this crackpot argument in recent years. Just to name one example, Ted Turner has declared the species can’t survive without reducing the population,

“If we’re going to be here [as a species] 5,000 years from now, we’re not going to do it with seven billion people.”

So, how do we terminate billions of people to make life on the planet “sustainable?” The left-wing support for abortion and cutting off DDT have certainly eliminated millions, but that doesn’t seem to be getting the job done. Is it going to take a Twelve Monkeys style virus? Would you trust one of the environmentalist left-wingers who thinks life on this planet is unsustainable — with one of the many extremely lethal bioweapons that are out there? Would you trust Ted Turner with one? After all, if life is “unsustainable” with the current population, billions of people have to die.

Bush invaded Iraq to get revenge for his daddy / enrich Halliburton / get their oil / lied us into war: It wasn’t enough to oppose the war in Iraq. No, liberals had to accuse Bush of causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of U.S. soldiers for the most frivolous reasons imaginable.

Remember what Michael Moore said?

“I want him [Bush] paraded in handcuffs outside a police house as a common criminal because I don’t know if there’s a greater crime than taking people to war based on a lie. I’ve never seen anything like Bush and his people. They truly hate our constitution, our rights and liberties. They have no shame in fighting for their corporate sponsors.”

“Let the people see what war is like. This isn’t an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush’s folly. That said, I feel nothing over the death of mercenaries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.” —Markos Moulitsas Zúniga on the four Americans who were murdered by terrorists and then had their corpses desecrated in Fallujah, Iraq.

“(George Bush) betrayed this country! He played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place!” —Al Gore

Very few of these people actually believe what they were saying: the anti-war protests evaporated the moment there was a Democrat in office. But, what were these liberals really hoping to accomplish with their rhetoric? Were they hoping that a father who lost a son in Iraq or a soldier who saw his friends die, would pick up a sniper rifle and kill Bush for sending people to die for nothing? What would you do if a man sent your 18 year old son to die so he could make a few bucks for his friends?

The only way to save the planet is by decimating the world economy to fight global warming: So, if global warming is going to kill us all, along with the hapless polar bears, unless we do something, then what do we do? Some liberals have already suggested the next step: Criminalizing dissent. Here’s

David Roberts from Grisoft,

“When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these b*stards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.”

Here’s Greenpeace on their blog this year,

The proper channels have failed. It’s time for mass civil disobedience to cut off the financial oxygen from denial and skepticism.

If you’re one of those who believe that this is not just necessary but also possible, speak to us. Let’s talk about what that mass civil disobedience is going to look like.

If you’re one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this:

We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.

And we be many, but you be few.

So, if you doubt global warming, they want you either jailed or killed as a war criminal — if they bother to get that far. They may just save time by showing up where you live or work, presumably with a gun, like Jared Lee Loughner.

George Bush and 9/11: He LIHOP or MIHOP: During the Bush years, we heard prominent liberal after liberal claim that the Bush Administration let 9/11 happen on purpose or made it happen on purpose. This was and still is a mainstream view on the Left. Everyone from Rosie “it’s the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel” O’Donnell to Van “(Bush may have) deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen” Jones believes it.

We’re hunting and killing Al-Qaeda across the globe because they’re responsible for 9/11. So, if the Bush Administration were really responsible for 9/11, what should we be doing to them? Yet, liberals are very comfortable with making this assertion. What’s more likely to really lead to violence? Saying you’re targeting someone to be defeated in an election or falsely accusing someone of murdering nearly 3,000 Americans? Which is really worse?

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Put Left-Wing Speech Control in the Cross Hairs (townhall.com, 110201)

Dennis Prager

The most common left-wing objection to the right is that it wants to control others’ lives. But, both in America and elsewhere, the threat to personal liberty has emanated far more from the left.

In the past generation, the left has controlled so much speech and behavior that these controls are now assumed to be a normal part of life.

Through the use of public opprobrium, laws and lawsuits, Americans today are less free than at any time since the abolition of slavery (with the obvious exception of blacks under Jim Crow).

Public opprobrium is known as political correctness, and it has suppressed saying anything — no matter how true and no matter how innocent — that offends left-wing sensibilities.

“Merry Christmas” offends leftist views on multiculturalism. So, it’s largely gone. [KH: not really]

Honest discussion of male-female differences is also largely gone — a lesson the former president of Harvard Larry Summers painfully learned when he simply asked if fewer women succeed in math and science because of innate differences between men and women.

Discussion of disproportionate rates of black violence is not allowed, no matter how well intentioned — unless it is to “prove” how racist America is because of the high number of black men in prison.

In Europe — and in all likelihood coming to America — Christians who, citing the Bible, argue for a heterosexual ideal are arrested.

Thanks to the left, students at colleges get speech codes. They learn early in life that much speech is not permitted.

One may not favorably compare Western or American culture with that of any other. Led by Jesse Jackson, leftists chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go” at Stanford University. And away it went.

The left owns the language. Married women are not to be referred to as “Mrs.” but as “Ms.” And the words “lady,” “feminine” and “masculine” have largely gone to their graves. High school and college teams with American Indian names must drop those names because by definition, according to the left, they offend American Indians.

(This last example has always perplexed me. Why does the name Florida State Seminoles offend Indians? One caller to my radio show once responded to that question by asking me how I would feel as a Jew if some team took the name “Jews.” I told him that I would be thrilled. For nearly 4,000 years, Jews have been looking for fans.)

Back to leftist controls on speech: One can only speak of male-female differences if the difference shows the female as superior. Thus to say women are innately more intuitive is perfectly acceptable, but to say men are innately more likely to excel at math is “sexist.”

A woman may reveal as much of her body as she wishes. But if a man is perceived by a woman as looking too long at what she reveals, or if he comments on what she reveals, he may be fired from his job and/or sued for “sexual harassment.” A woman may wear a miniskirt and crop-top, but a man may not have a calendar of women wearing miniskirts and crop-tops on his desk at work. That constitutes sexual harassment and a “hostile work environment.”

Graphic torture and frontal nudity may be shown on screen, but smoking cigars or cigarettes may not. A Churchill museum in London has removed the cigars from wartime Churchill photographs, FDR has had his ubiquitous cigarette holder removed from his photographs, and the cigarettes have been removed from the Beatles’ hands in the famous photo of them crossing Abbey Road.

The list of forbidden words and behaviors due to Leftist activism is quite extensive.

The latest example is the left’s war on any words or imagery that come from the worlds of war or guns.

Already, “crusade” has been removed from Americans’ vocabulary — lest it offend Muslims. Overnight, the left effectively banned the use of a perfectly legitimate word that usually described an admirable preoccupation with doing good — “that newspaper is on an anti-corruption crusade.”

Now, the left has announced that words such as “target” and “cross hairs” are offensive — on the idiotic pretense that such imagery causes people to murder. If I were the CEO of Target stores, I would be concerned — will my company be sued because of its name and logo?

Will the word “war” be next? Perhaps “war on poverty” caused murder. And how about “war on cancer” — only God knows how much killing that caused. Perhaps we should now say “project to eliminate cancer.” But, then again, doesn’t “eliminate” have genocidal overtones?

It was understandable but mistaken for Sarah Palin to take down her map of congressional districts in cross hairs. There was absolutely nothing wrong with that map. Only the totalitarian left argues that it caused the murders in Tucson or anywhere else.

So what’s the answer?

If you love liberty, you must target the left and put its totalitarian tendencies in your cross hairs. We must shoot down political correctness and wage a crusade for truth and liberty. All those ladies and gentlemen who cherish personal and societal freedom must fight like great Indian chiefs, braving secondhand smoke if need be, in affirming a masculinity that has been under relentless attack. And yes, we must even endure the taunts of our foes and, at the appropriate time of the year, wish fellow Americans a “Merry Christmas.”

Then, and only then, will we be able to vanquish lies, defeat the foes of liberty, and once again be able to proudly sing a national anthem that affirms that “the bombs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.”

If we don’t, that line in “The Star-Spangled Banner” will go the way of “Merry Christmas.”

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Democrats: Emboldening America’s Enemies and Terrifying Her Allies Since 1976 (townhall.com, 110216)

Ann Coulter

The Middle East is on fire again, and crazy Muslims with funny names aren’t helping things — Mahmoud, ElBaradei, al-Banna, Barack ...

The major new development is that NOW liberals want to get rid of a dictator in the Middle East! Where were they when we were taking out the guy with the rape rooms?

Remember? The one who had gassed his own people, invaded his neighbors and was desperately seeking weapons of mass destruction? The guy who emerged from a spider hole looking like Charlie Sheen after a three-day bender?

Liberals couldn’t have been less interested in removing Saddam Hussein and building a democracy in Iraq. So it’s really adorable seeing them get all choked up about democracy now. Say, as long as liberals are all gung-ho about getting rid of out-of-touch, overbearing dictators, how about we start with Janet Napolitano?

Why did they want to keep Saddam Hussein in power again? Yes, that’s right — because he didn’t have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Their big argument was that Saddam was five long years away from developing them.

By my calculations, that means as of March 2008, Israel would have been gone and Saddam would have been in total control of the Middle East.

Thanks, liberals!

But they were shocked by Mubarak. Liberals angrily cited the high unemployment rate in Egypt as a proof that Mubarak was a beast who must step down. Did they, by any chance, see the January employment numbers for the United States? The only employment sectors showing any growth at all are medical marijuana cashiers, Hollywood sober-living coaches and “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” understudies filling in for maimed cast members.

Are we one jobs report away from liberals rioting in the street?

Mubarak supported U.S. policy, used his military to fight Muslim extremists and recognized Israel’s right to exist. Or as the left calls it, three strikes and you’re out.

Obama was so rough on the Egyptian leader, the Saudis reportedly had to ask him not to humiliate Mubarak. (You know, like Chinese President Hu did to Obama.) In fact, Mubarak may be the only despot Obama didn’t bow to.

You’d think Mubarak and Obama would be natural allies. Mubarak lives in Egypt; Obama created a pyramid scheme known as ObamaCare. To win Obama’s support, maybe Mubarak should have dropped the whole “president” thing and called himself “czar.” Obama seems to like czars.

Or he should have announced that Egypt was going to blow $500 billion on a high-speed bullet train nobody wanted.

You know another country where Obama wasn’t interested in democracy? (I mean, besides the U.S. when it comes to health care reform?) That’s right — Iran.

Iran is ideal for democracy: It has a young, highly educated, pro-Western population, and happens to be led by a messianic, Holocaust-denying lunatic.

Liberals say: Why upset that apple cart? Much better to support tumult and riots against our allies than our sworn enemies.

When peaceful Iranian students were protesting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s stolen election in 2009, we didn’t hear a peep out of Obama. The students had good reason to believe the election had been rigged. In some pro-Ahmadinejad districts, turnout was more than 100%.

Wait, no, I’m sorry — that was Al Franken’s election to the U.S. Senate from Minnesota. But there was also plenty of vote-stealing in Ahmadinejad’s election.

When it came to Iran, however, the flame of democracy didn’t burn so brightly in liberal hearts. Even when the Iranian protester, Neda, was shot dead while standing peacefully on a street in Tehran, Obama responded by ... going out for an ice cream cone.

But a mob of Egyptians start decapitating mummies, and Obama was on the horn telling Mubarak he had to leave. Obama didn’t acknowledge Neda’s existence, but the moment Egyptians started rioting, Obama said, “We hear your voices.”

He can hear their voices? He couldn’t hear the voices of the tea partiers, and they were protesting on the streets of Washington, D.C.

But as long as Obama can hear the voices of protesters in Cairo, why doesn’t he ask them what they think about ObamaCare? Maybe the Egyptians can change his mind.

The fact that liberals support democracy in Egypt, but not in Iraq or Iran, can mean only one thing: Democracy in Egypt will be bad for the United States and its allies. (As long as we’re on the subject, liberals also opposed democracy in Russia, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and all the Soviet satellite states, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, Grenada, Nicaragua and Minnesota.)

Democrats are all for meddling in other countries –- but only provided a change of regime will harm U.S. national security interests.

Time and again, Democrats’ fecklessness has emboldened America’s enemies and terrified its allies, which I believe was the actual slogan of the State Department under Jimmy Carter: “Emboldening America’s enemies, and terrifying her allies, since 1976.”

For 50 years, Democrats have harbored traitors, lost wars, lost continents to communism, hobnobbed with the nation’s enemies, attacked America’s allies, and counseled retreat and surrender. Or as they call it, “foreign policy.”

As Joe McCarthy once said, if liberals were merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that at least some of their decisions would serve America’s interests.

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To Liberals, Every Woman Looks Like a Hotel Maid (Townhall.com, 110519)

Ann Coulter

I suppose we’ll know the truth when the DNA testing comes back, but close observers of privileged liberal men are not shocked by the accusations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the socialist head of the International Monetary Fund. (And you thought you were getting screwed by your banker!)

Only in Hollywood movies are handsome lacrosse players from nice families seen as likely rapists. In real life, they look more like the 5-foot-2-inch Roman Polanski or pudgy, unathletic Bill Clinton — or the homunculus 5-foot-2-inch Strauss-Kahn.

But, it is argued, how could Strauss-Kahn possibly think he could get away with the violent rape of a chambermaid in a $3,000-a-night hotel room, booked in his name?

First of all, Strauss-Kahn has evidently gotten away with treating the fairer sex as his playthings for some time. No wonder his nickname among the French is “le grand seducteur,” which I believe roughly translates to “the short, tubby serial rapist.”

The New York Times reports that as far back as 2007, Brussels journalist Jean Quatremer remarked on Strauss-Kahn’s troubled behavior — “close to harassment” — toward women, saying the press knew all about it, but never mentioned it because “we are in France.”

When Strauss-Kahn was appointed to the I.M.F., Quatremer sardonically warned that the international institution was not the same as France, but instead had “Anglo-Saxon morals.”

Second, it’s not unheard of that a wealthy liberal would assume the law does not apply to him. Actually, let me restate that: Wealthy liberals always assume that laws don’t apply to them. After all the waivers the Obama administration has been dishing out like candy, are there any liberals left to whom Obamacare will apply?

We might also ask how a governor of New York could think he could get away with hiring prostitutes to service him in similarly pricey hotels, bringing them across state lines, and using his friend’s names to book the girls, year after year.

But Eliot Spitzer thought he could get away with that. Fortunately he has been brought to justice and sentenced to hosting a lame show on CNN.

Still, rape is a more serious crime than being a frenzied masturbator paying for sex. For that, I give you Andrew Luster, multimillionaire Max Factor heir, whose mother gives to every liberal cause under the sun from Barbara Boxer and Loretta Sanchez to Moveon.org, Emily’s List and pro-gay marriage groups. (If only her son had been gay!)

Her son not only drugged and raped a string of women, but made videotapes of his crimes.

On the tapes, Luster can be seen sodomizing unconscious women with lighted marijuana cigarettes, candles and plastic swords, and then talking into the camera about the unconscious women lying on his bed. The tapes were carefully labeled with titles like “Shauna GHBing,” referring to gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, known as a date-rape drug.

Luster was cataloging video evidence of his own criminal acts — and yet he thought he could get away with it.

He almost did, too, fleeing the country during his 2003 trial. He was caught and is now serving 124 years in prison, having been convicted, in absentia, of 86 crimes, including 20 counts of drug-induced rape, 17 counts of raping an unconscious victim, and multiple counts of sodomy and oral copulation by use of drugs.

Also out of Southern California we have Roman Polanski, the legendary director of two good movies and about a hundred unbelievably horrible ones, who drugged and anally raped an underage girl, according to the police report.

Not only did Polanski think he could get away with it, he did get away with it by fleeing the country (to France) when he discovered, to his shock and dismay, that in America, a person can actually be sentenced to prison for drugging and raping a 13-year-old. That was in 1977. He has never been brought to justice.

Liberals supported Polanski’s evasion of punishment for child rape, with the Hollywood left denouncing his arrest in Switzerland a couple of years ago, howling that he had suffered enough! Wasn’t he prevented from coming to the U.S. to pick up his Oscar in 2003?

You know who’s suffered enough? Anybody who sat all the way through “The Pianist.”

Liberal male misogyny goes back even farther than Polanski’s three-decades-old child rape.

As Phyllis Schlafly points out in her book “Feminist Fantasies” (with a stirring foreword by Ann Coulter), for centuries, famous left-wing men have treated “their wives and mistresses like unpaid servants.”

Their credo might well have been, “From each, according to my needs ...”

Schlafly bases her review of liberal woman-haters on the book “Intellectuals” by historian Paul Johnson. Among the left-wing heroes highlighted by Schlafly from Johnson’s book are Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ernest Hemingway, Henrik Ibsen, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Karl Marx.

Johnson writes that the pint-sized — 5 foot 2 1/2 inch — communist-sympathizing Sartre “was notorious for never taking a bath and being disgustingly dirty.” He said admiringly of the Nazis, “We have never been as free as we were under the German occupation.”

The flyweight Sartre famously turned Simone de Beauvoir into his “mistress, surrogate wife, cook and manager, female bodyguard and nurse.” (Sadly, she never learned how to give someone a sponge bath.) All the while, the smelly midget committed a stream of infidelities, viewing women “as scalps to add to his centaur’s belt.”

In “the annals of literature,” Johnson writes, “there are few worse cases of a man exploiting a woman.”

As he got older, Sartre’s sexual conquests got younger, including teenaged girls.

Like Spitzer, Luster and Polanski, liberal men seem driven by their massive insecurities (often based on physical defects, such as their diminutive size or soap allergies) to choose unconscious, illiterate, servant-class and teenage females as their sex partners. But let’s not drag pocket-sized Woody Allen’s name into this, as my column appears in many family newspapers.

Karl Marx kept a female slave from the time she was 8 years old, eventually using her not only as a servant but as his mistress, never acknowledging his child with her or paying her at all. She waited on him hand and foot while he explained to the world that profit is the stolen surplus value of the laborer. Like so many liberal icons, Marx seldom bathed and left his wife and children in poverty.

As Schlafly says, no wonder liberal women think men are pigs: Their men are pigs.

Maybe Strauss-Kahn is innocent, but students of liberal comportment base their suspicions of his guilt not on fairy tales from Lifetime: TV for Women, but on 200 years of disgusting sexual behavior by liberal men.

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Glenn Beck Vs. The Mob (Ann Coulter, 110629)

Of all the details surrounding the liberal mob attack on Glenn Beck and his family in New York’s Bryant Park last Monday night, one element stands out. “No, it won’t be like that, Dad,” his daughter said when Beck questioned the wisdom of attending a free, outdoor movie showing in a New York park.

People who have never been set upon by a mob of liberals have absolutely no idea what it’s like to be a publicly recognizable conservative. Even your friends will constantly be telling you: “Oh, it will be fine. Don’t worry. Nothing will happen. This place isn’t like that.”

Liberals are not like most Americans. They are the biggest pussies on Earth, city-bred weaklings who didn’t play a sport and have never been in a fight in their entire lives. Their mothers made excuses for them when they threw tantrums and spent way too much time praising them during toilet training.

I could draw a mug shot of every one of Beck’s tormentors, and I wasn’t there.

Beck and his family would have been fine at an outdoor rap concert. They would have been fine at a sporting event. They would have been fine at any paid event, mostly because people who work for the government and live in rent-controlled apartments would be too cheap to attend.

Only a sad leftist with a crappy job could be so brimming with self-righteousness to harangue a complete stranger in public.

A liberal’s idea of being a bad-ass is to say vicious things to a conservative public figure who can’t afford to strike back. Getting in a stranger’s face and hurling insults at him, knowing full well he has too much at risk to deck you, is like baiting a bear chained to a wall.

They are not only exploiting our lawsuit-mad culture, they are exploiting other people’s manners. I know I’ll be safe because this person has better manners than I do.

These brave-hearts know exactly what they can get away with. They assault a conservative only when it’s a sucker-punch, they outnumber him, or he can’t fight back for reasons of law or decorum.

Liberals don’t get that when you’re outnumbering the enemy 100-1, you’re not brave.

But they’re not even embarrassed. To the contrary, being part of the majority makes liberals feel great! Honey, wasn’t I amazing? I stood in a crowd of liberals and called that conservative a c**t. Wasn’t I awesome?

This is a liberal’s idea of raw physical courage.

When someone does fight back, liberals transform from aggressor to victim in an instant, collapsing on the ground and screaming bloody murder. I’ve seen it happen in a nearly empty auditorium when there was quite obviously no other human within 5 feet of the gutless invertebrate.

People incapable of conforming to the demands of civilized society are frightening precisely because you never know what else such individuals are capable of. Sometimes — a lot more often than you’ve heard about — liberals do engage in physical violence against conservatives ... and then bravely run away.

That’s why not one person stepped up to aid Beck and his family as they were being catcalled and having wine dumped on them at a nice outdoor gathering.

No one ever steps in. Never, not once, not ever. (Except at the University of Arizona, where college Republicans chased my assailant and broke his collarbone, God bless them.)

Most people are shocked into paralysis at the sight of sociopathic liberal behavior. The only ones who aren’t are the conservative’s bodyguards — and they can’t do anything without risking a lawsuit or an arrest.

My hero Tim Profitt is now facing charges for stopping a physical assault on Senate candidate Rand Paul by a crazed woman disguised in a wig.

But the disturbed liberal whose assault Profitt stopped faces no charges — she instigated the entire confrontation and then instantly claimed victim status. In a better America, the cop would say, “Well, you provoked him.”

Kentucky prosecutors must be very proud of how they so dutifully hew to the letter of the law (except in the case of Paul’s assailant).

Maybe they wouldn’t be such good little rules-followers if they ever, just once, had to face the liberal mob themselves. But if Beck’s own daughter can’t imagine the liberal mob, I suppose prosecutors can’t be expected to, either.

Michael Moore and James Carville can stroll anywhere in America without risking the sort of behavior the Beck family experienced. But all recognizable conservatives are eternally trapped in David Dinkins’ New York: Simply by virtue of leaving their homes, they assume a 20% chance of being assaulted.

Bullying is on the rise everywhere in America — and not just because Obama decided to address it. It’s because no one hits back. The message in our entire culture over the last two decades has been: DON’T FIGHT!

There were a lot fewer public confrontations when bullies got their faces smashed.

Maybe it’s time for Beck to pony up some of those millions of dollars he’s earned and hire people to rough up the liberal mob, or, at a minimum, to provide a legal defense to those like Profitt who do.

These liberal pukes have never taken a punch in their lives. A sock to the yap would be an eye-opening experience, and I believe it would do wonders.

They need to have their behavior corrected. It’s a shame this job wasn’t done by their parents. It won’t be done by the police.

As long as liberals can’t be normal and prosecutors can’t be reasonable, how about a one-punch rule against anyone bothering a stranger in public? Then we’ll see how brave these lactose-intolerant mama’s boys are.

Believe me, liberal mobbings will stop very quickly after the first toilet-training champion takes his inaugural punch.

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Liberals’ View Of Darwin Unable To Evolve (Ann Coulter, 110831)

Amid the hoots at Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry for saying there were “gaps” in the theory of evolution, the strongest evidence for Darwinism presented by these soi-disant rationalists was a 9-year-old boy quoted in The New York Times.

After his mother had pushed him in front of Perry on the campaign trail and made him ask if Perry believed in evolution, the trained seal beamed at his Wicked Witch of the West mother, saying, “Evolution, I think, is correct!”

That’s the most extended discussion of Darwin’s theory to appear in the mainstream media in a quarter-century. More people know the precepts of kabala than know the basic elements of Darwinism.

There’s a reason the Darwin cult prefers catcalls to argument, even with a 9-year-old at the helm of their debate team.

Darwin’s theory was that a process of random mutation, sex and death, allowing the “fittest” to survive and reproduce, and the less fit to die without reproducing, would, over the course of billions of years, produce millions of species out of inert, primordial goo.

The vast majority of mutations are deleterious to the organism, so if the mutations were really random, then for every mutation that was desirable, there ought to be a staggering number that are undesirable.

Otherwise, the mutations aren’t random, they are deliberate — and then you get into all the hocus-pocus about “intelligent design” and will probably start speaking in tongues and going to NASCAR races.

We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record — for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.)

But that’s not what the fossil record shows. We don’t have fossils for any intermediate creatures in the process of evolving into something better. This is why the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard referred to the absence of transitional fossils as the “trade secret” of paleontology. (Lots of real scientific theories have “secrets.”)

If you get your news from the American news media, it will come as a surprise to learn that when Darwin first published “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, his most virulent opponents were not fundamentalist Christians, but paleontologists.

Unlike high school biology teachers lying to your children about evolution, Darwin was at least aware of what the fossil record ought to show if his theory were correct. He said there should be “interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps.”

But far from showing gradual change with a species slowly developing novel characteristics and eventually becoming another species, as Darwin hypothesized, the fossil record showed vast numbers of new species suddenly appearing out of nowhere, remaining largely unchanged for millions of years, and then disappearing.

Darwin’s response was to say: Start looking! He blamed a fossil record that contradicted his theory on the “extreme imperfection of the geological record.”

One hundred and fifty years later, that record is a lot more complete. We now have fossils for about a quarter of a million species.

But things have only gotten worse for Darwin.

Thirty years ago (before it was illegal to question Darwinism), Dr. David Raup, a geologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, said that despite the vast expansion of the fossil record: “The situation hasn’t changed much.”

To the contrary, fossil discoveries since Darwin’s time have forced paleontologists to take back evidence of evolution. “Some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record,” Raup said, “such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information.”

The scant fossil record in Darwin’s time had simply been arranged to show a Darwinian progression, but as more fossils were discovered, the true sequence turned out not to be Darwinian at all.

And yet, more than a century later, Darwin’s groupies haven’t evolved a better argument for the lack of fossil evidence.

To explain away the explosion of plants and animals during the Cambrian Period more than 500 million years ago, Darwiniacs asserted — without evidence — that there must have been soft-bodied creatures evolving like mad before then, but left no fossil record because of their squishy little microscopic bodies.

Then in 1984, “the dog ate our fossils” excuse collapsed, too. In a discovery The New York Times called “among the most spectacular in this century,” Chinese paleontologists discovered fossils just preceding the Cambrian era.

Despite being soft-bodied microscopic creatures — precisely the sort of animal the evolution cult claimed wouldn’t fossilize and therefore deprived them of crucial evidence — it turned out fossilization was not merely possible in the pre-Cambrian era, but positively ideal.

And yet the only thing paleontologists found there were a few worms. For 3 billion years, nothing but bacteria and worms, and then suddenly nearly all the phyla of animal life appeared within a narrow band of five million to 10 million years.

Even the eye simply materializes, fully formed, in the pre-Cambrian fossil record.

Jan Bergstrom, a paleontologist who examined the Chinese fossils, said the Cambrian Period was not “evolution,” it was “a revolution.”

So the Darwiniacs pretended they missed the newspaper that day.

Intelligent design scientists look at the evidence and develop their theories; Darwinists start with a theory and then rearrange the evidence.

These aren’t scientists. They are religious fanatics for whom evolution must be true so that they can explain to themselves why they are here, without God. (It’s an accident!)

Any evidence contradicting the primitive religion of Darwinism — including, for example, the entire fossil record — they explain away with non-scientific excuses like “the dog ate our fossils.”

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