This treatment is on vivid display in the new book Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America’s War on Terror Before and After 9-11 by David Horowitz and Ben Johnson. Perhaps not too surprisingly, the most unrepentant offenders were the renegades cocooned in academia.

“Seeing an opportunity to discredit the allied cause, American radicals began an anti-sanctions movement based solely on the Iraqi regime’s propaganda,” Horowitz and Johnson write of the Left’s efforts in the run-up to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. “The founder of the movement was [University of] Texas journalism professor and jihadist sympathizer Robert Jensen, who claimed that ‘each month 5,000 to 6,000 children die because of the sanctions.’”

Working journalists were not much less reckless than journalism professors such as Jenson. The outlook of the fourth estate can be seen in, among other ways, their coverage of abuses, verifiable or alleged, at the Abu Ghraib prison for prisoners of war.

If the number of stories on Abu Ghraib equaled the number of legitimate complaints unearthed by every bipartisan official source, all the major media would have tapped and sapped this journalistic well in about a month. Instead, we are still seeing Abu Ghraib stories four years after the last official report was submitted. “There were 24 New York Times stories on the holocaust during World War II compared to hundreds on Abu Ghraib during the Iraq War” in that same newspaper, Horowitz pointed out at the national Press Club here on April 22.

As the title of his book indicates, it is big-name Democrats Horowitz primarily takes to task for setbacks in the war on terror. “As a result of Howard Dean’s surge in votes and fundraising [Sens. John] Kerry and Edwards took an anti-war stance” in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, Horowitz observed. “Gephardt, Biden and Lieberman didn’t go along.”

“Gephardt retired and Lieberman was driven out of the party.” Horowitz himself is a fairly high-profile political pilgrim who has moved from red-diaper baby to Conservative-Republican senior citizen.

Among the bill of particulars he faults congressional Democrats for in the war on terror: thwarting investigations of terrorists. “Senator Robert Byrd introduced a bill to establish a commission that would investigate the now-crippled surveillance program,” Horowitz and Johnson recount. Sen. Byrd said that such a commission “will lift the fog of secrecy and clandestine government activity aimed at law-abiding citizens.”

“How a citizen taking an international call from a previously identified member of a terrorist organization would qualify as ‘law-abiding,’ the senator didn’t explain,” Horowitz and Johnson note. The scary thing is that Sen. Byrd is the Democratic Party’s go-to guy on the Constitution, perhaps because his fellow Democrats think he was there when it was written.

“Responsible criticism expresses policy differences without malice towards the soldiers implementing those policies or their commanders defending the national interest,” Horowitz and Johnson write. Though it does not make up the bulk of the book, the authors do deliver such critiques themselves.

“More precisely, they failed to see that we are in a war with Islamists who were terrorists, a failure contributed to by the Bush Administration’s reluctance to recognize the religious nature of the enemy we face,” Horowitz and Johnson write.

“It is a civilizational war,” Horowitz explained at the Press Club. “It is against a movement within Islam, not Islam itself.”

Horowitz also criticized elements of the first President Bush’s incursion into the Gulf. “The coalition that Bush 41 assembled to go into the war in Iraq was too multilateral,” Horowitz said. “It included the Arabs, Chinese and Russians, all of whom were doing business with Saddam and had no interest in overthrowing him.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

http://www.aim.org/aim-column/unfriendly-fire-from-left/

Keynesian economic doctrine, not under that name, but in substance, is back in the news in a truly menacing way.  Senator Obama proposes to repeat the policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that turned an ordinary two-year recession into an eight-year disaster, with unemployment rates continuously in the high teens.

The key elements of Senator Obama’s proposed economic policies, as in the New Deal and the stagflation of the 1970s, are much higher taxes, along with a pervasive increase of business regulations and price controls in healthcare and energy (which sharply depress business activity and employment rates), full-frontal embrace of labor unions (which will push up wages and benefits to levels deterring profitable expansion of industrial production), and massive new government deficit spending (which will accelerate the already dangerously high rate of inflation and devaluation of the dollar).  Carried out as he proposes, Senator Obama’s polices will lead us again into the swamp of stagflation.

The basic thrust of Keynesianism is the belief that control of the economy must be collectivized at the Federal level, because private business is incapable of providing full employment, and because the proper goal of economic policy must be thwarting greedy businessmen to attain so-called social justice: equal distribution of income and wealth, without regard to merit, capability, or hard work.

Not surprisingly the New York Times editorial board and the Times’s propagandist Paul Krugman are prominent Keynesian enthusiasts.

In practice (in the 1930s Depression and in the 1970s stagflation) Keynesian economics caused devastating harm to every citizen.  In the stagflation of the 1970s not only was unemployment distressingly high, particularly in Midwestern industrial areas, which became known as the Rustbowl, but inflation wiped out roughly 57% of the purchasing power of every citizen’s lifetime savings.

For an eminently readable analysis of Keynesian economics, the economic bedrock of liberal-progressive worship of the socialist religion, read Professor Murray Rothbard’s 1947 critique, Spotlight on Keynesian Economics.

One caution:  when Professor Rothbard speaks of liberal economists, he is using the classic terminology of 18th England that referred to true freedom: laissez-faire economics, free from government intervention, not to today’s American sect of the international religion of socialism.

Thomas E. Brewton
http://thenma.org/blogs/index.php/brewton

That being said, as much as I want my little rays of sunshine to have a high GPA (not that a jiffy GPA means squat anymore given the bogus bunk being taught in school) I want them to have an equal or higher level of street smarts: what some would call a sixth sense, an otherness, a discerning spirit, a fourth dimension, or what I call a well-honed and greased BS Detector (BSD).

Street smarts will give our kids the shrewdness to see through the veil of crap most guys, governments, gimmicks, gadgets, gurus and evil girlfriends live behind. Being the helpful guy that I am, I want to help you help your kids whet their BSD and overcome any proclivity they have to becoming as sharp as a sack of wet rats and assist them to discern that which is detrimental to their lives - even if it’s all dressed up as the greatest thing in all the world.

Bad dates, greasy politicians, scum sucking marketing leeches, PR mooks, agents, corporate America, late night infomercials, televangelists, used car salesmen, and mechanics all love the gullible dolt who has a weak dung detector. Therefore parents, one of the most important things you can ever do for your offspring is to help them become shrewd and skeptical young ‘un who cannot be bamboozled by people, places, and ideas that seek to do them harm.
So what is BS?

You can call it bull crap, or the nicer sounding Latin term “stercore tauri,” or simply bull, horse hockey, bollocks, gobbledygook, humbug, Reverend Wright, tall tale, propaganda, fiction, lie, bunkum, spin, or truthiness. Whatever you want to call it, BS can be defined as: “Communications where reality and truthfulness aren’t nearly as vital as the ability to manipulate the audience to get it to do whatever one wants done.”

Unofficially, the term BS wove its way into the American whoop and warp back in 1915 when Theodore Roosevelt screamed it after he saw an ugly bearded woman carrying a temperance sign. The earliest attestation mentioned by the Concise Oxford Dictionary is in fact T. S. Eliot, who between 1910 and 1916 wrote an early poem to which he gave the title “The Triumph of Bullshit.” In American slang the term came into popular usage during World War II.

As your children plow through life in postmodern times they’re going to be hit with a tsunami of sewage coming from various institutes and people. I know it’s cruel, it sucks, and it’s a shame that our kids have officially missed out on the Leave it to Beaver scenario that many of us were fortunate enough to have lived through. But it’s no use crying about it. We must make certain our charges can deftly navigate the crap-laden rapids of our culture and come out of this thing smelling like roses.

To keep it simple, tell your children that their BS detector is essentially, as one comedian said, that little voice inside their heads telling them to listen to the little voice inside their heads. It’s an internal salvific alarm alerting them to the fact that they’re in the process of being bamboozled. It will be to their own detriment if they ignore this in-house salvo. If they hone and listen to it when it screams, they’ll be the wiser, safer and richer for it.

Everybody has a BSD. Obviously, some folks have better ones than others. No matter where your kids currently are in their abilities to spot BS in all of its varied forms, if they will apply the following three simple principles I guarantee their dates with morons, their purchases of stuff they don’t need, and their gullibility in regard to the MSM’s propaganda will diminish, and they’ll take on a shrewd life-saving edge:

1. Become a skeptic. Our English word skeptic comes from the Greek word skopos, which means someone who scopes things out. Whether it’s a car or a polygamist cult or a current politician, train them to look under the hood a little bit more, would ‘cha pops? An easy exercise to increase their righteous doubts is to have them stand in front of a mirror with their arms crossed and one eyebrow raised, look down their nose and say, “yeah, right” in a sarcastic tone. Have them do this about 100 times every morning before they’re off to school. Yes, parents, it is your job to make your kids healthily suspicious before they date it, buy it or vote for it.

2. Trust your Gut. God has hardwired us so that when we are in danger, or when we’re getting scammed, or when we’re about to say, “yes, coffee sounds great!” to an axe murder that our body, mind and spirit freak out. Our “gut” will check us, and the little voice inside our head will start calling us unflattering names in an attempt to get our attention before we get raked over the coals. Remember, your gut check/BSD is your friend, and never forget this maxim: When you are picking up on something, you’re picking up on something. Pay attention, por favor.

3. Hang out with mature, sharp and successful people and allow them to speak into your life. I know for young people it’s not sexy to hang out with people other than their peers. However, if you’re honest, young person, most of your friends are idiots with very weak BSDs, correct?
Young person, if your parents, grandparents, pastors or whoever are successful and have enriched, happy lives, sidle up to them because they can sharpen your BSD. They have expertise, experience, honesty, and a spiritual maturity that you can roll into your profit if you surround yourself with them . . . and if you listen.

Yes, young blood, you can become wise beyond your years and by osmosis have a highly-attuned BSD which will set you up for safety and security by simply befriending and adhering to the counsel of mature, righteous adults. Yep, older folks who have been there and done that bring many things to the table that your goofy BFF cannot provide. Don’t blow these people off. Matter of fact, the more you surround yourself with wise counselors the more life is going to kiss you on the mouth rather than kick you in the butt.

Doug Giles

But this is just another so-called survey that is reported backwards. It turns out that, even by their unscientific criteria, 49 percent of the Americans they surveyed said that they were “thriving, with few health or money worries.” So, why is this reported as if the preponderance of our fellow citizens is claiming to be “struggling”?

Here is how Reuters begins their report:

Many Americans are struggling through life but only 4 percent are truly miserable, with no hope for the future, according to a survey released on Tuesday.

Nearly half—49 percent—describe themselves as thriving, with few health or money worries, according to the researchers at the global polling organization Gallup and health consulting firm Healthways.

Then the report goes on to say that 47 percent claim they are “struggling” and that 4 percent are without hope.

So, why did the survey get reported that Americans are “struggling” when most said they were doing just fine? Why, because it makes for a better beat-up-America story, that’s why.

So, to “prove” it’s all doom and gloom, Reuters assures us that this is America and we are all in dire straits. “You are getting the detail of what it is like to live in this country,” Reuters reports Daniel Kahneman, a professor emeritus at Princeton University in New Jersey, as saying.

I find it a bit hard to believe that this gives us any “detail of what it is like to live in this country,” though. According to what Reuters is reporting, the results of this survey were obtained by “… asking 70 different questions about well-being. These include questions about diagnosed diseases and daily physical discomfort, employment and income but also subjective questions about mood and happiness.” In other words, the claims presented here are based on the “feelings” of those surveyed, not on scientific and economic data. In fact, no data but what people claimed on the telephone seem to have been used to formulate the results of this report.

So, when we call someone on the phone and ask them if they “feel” they are struggling, is this “feeling” based on anything concrete, or is it based on the “feeling” that Americans want to do better and are frustrated that they aren’t? Further is it even legitimate when compared to what is going on elsewhere in the world so that we can measure what “struggling” might even mean?

In Australia, for instance, the median household income is about $38,000 and it’s about the same in New Zealand. In Hong Kong it is $31,000. In Israel, $37,000. In Ireland and Scotland it’s around $35,000. But in Canada it is about $43,000 and in Switzerland $54,000. Still, when looking at these western nations (or a western styled economy in the case of Hong Kong), the US fares pretty well. So, comparatively on the basis solely of income, the average American household has little to “feel” despondent about.

On the other hand, in China you’d be lucky to make $2,000 annually. In India $4,500 is the number. It’s $2,000 if you are a citizen of Mexico and somewhere near $9,000 in Brazil. Let’s ask Americans what their “feelings” would be if they made that amount annually?

Naturally, the people conducting this “survey” want to use it to push their political agenda.

Dr. Virginia Gurley, senior medical director of Healthways, said the results can directly inform the political debate on health care, the future of programs such as Medicare and even international trade. “We are having trouble competing because of the cost of health care and its effects,” Gurley said.

Ah, there you have it. It isn’t that Americans are really doing so badly when compared to folks in other western nations, and it is for sure that Americans aren’t doing as badly as those in second tier and third world nations. It’s really that these people want a platform so that they can use these so-called results to push their ideas to “inform the political debate” in the US. And Reuters is happy to comply.

So, let’s push American’s uninformed “feelings” that they are in worse shape than ever, that they are downtrodden and misused by those eeeevil rich folks, and let’s play on those “feelings” so that we can create socialist programs that give people like Dr. Virginia Gurley the power she craves.

Thanks, Doc, but I think your prescription is nothing but placebo pills while you wring your hands in expectation of killing the patient! And thanks to Reuters for chasing the ambulance.

1) “Many Americans struggling in life, survey finds”

Obama refuses to wear a flag lapel pin because he thinks it is more patriotic to criticize his country than to support it, or even to wear a symbol of its support.

Obama thinks those of us out here in flyover country are all a bunch of bitter, gun-toting, Bible-thumping bigots furious at “those who don’t look like us.”

That really should be enough to sink this lightweight candidacy filled with vague language about “hope” and “change” - what George Will has called “rhetorical cotton candy.”

But wait. There’s more. Just when we thought Obama had shot himself in the last foot he had available, he presents us with another gift.

On top lapelgate and pastorgate and bittergate, now comes stategate. It seems that the brilliant Barack Obama doesn’t know how many states there are in our union. In an off-the-cuff statement you will not hear about on the nightly news, Obama declared that during his presidential campaign, he has visited 57 states. He also said that he has one more to visit: Alaska and Hawaii. I swear to you, that’s what the man said.

Here are his exact words: “I’ve now been to 57 states...I have one more to go...they wouldn’t let me go to Alaska and Hawaii.”

Now, try to imagine if John McCain - or any other Republican - had uttered such a stupid statement in public. Is there any doubt that person would have been pilloried and Dan Quayled for the remainder of this campaign? (At least when Quayle questioned the spelling of potato, he had some basis in fact for his inquiry: the plural of the word is “potatoes” - with an “e.”)

McCain is still being vilified for referring to Iran-supported terrorists in Iraq as al Qaida, as if the vast majority of Americans care about the distinction between a Sunni and a Shiite terrorist.

Entire books have been written about the gaffes of George W. Bush. He has been castigated for everything from his mispronunciation of the word “nuclear” (he always says “nucular”) to his inability to communicate with the press. His mangled syntax has been regular fodder for the crew at “Saturday Night Live” for his entire two terms in office. “Misunderestimated” was always one of my personal favorites.

But even the most misinformed American can tell you this country has 50 states, having learned that information in what? Kindergarten?

But fear not, Obama supporters; excuses will be made by the mainstream media. “He was tired,” we will be told, or “he misspoke.” And they will only tell you that if they are forced to report on the matter at all. The New York Times (and most other major newspapers), CNN, ABC, CBS, tax-supported PBS and especially NBC are so pro-Obama it is downright embarrassing, and make no mistake, they will continue to circle the wagons around this guy, just as they have done throughout this campaign.

Perhaps Obama should be a contestant on Fox’s “Are you smarter than a 5th grader?” Or maybe Jay Leno could interview him out on Hollywood Boulevard as part of his Tonight Show “Jay Walking” segment.

How many of our states have you been to, Senator Obama? Fifty-seven? That’s very impressive. I hope you get the chance to see the other one. Or is it two?

© Copyright 2008 by Doug Patton

The Clean Water Act requires these plants to use “the best technology available” to safeguard fish and other aquatic organisms swept up in the water flow. The Supreme Court recently agreed to decide, in the case of Entergy v. EPA, whether the Environmental Protection Agency can lawfully allow power companies to avoid hugely expensive “closed-cycle” cooling systems in favor of cheaper “once-through” systems that save fewer fish.

“This case requires the Supreme Court to pretend that the welfare of wildlife can be incorporated into a legal system designed to protect the rights of man,” said Thomas Bowden, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute. “The ‘best technology’--for whom? Fish or men? There is no rational way for a court to ‘balance’ a fish’s interest in living against man’s interest in producing electricity.

“The Founding Fathers gave us a constitutional structure of checks and balances, including judicial review by the Supreme Court. But for such review to be rational, the court must apply an objective standard in each case. The highest such standard--the individual human being’s right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness--is implicit in the Founders’ recognition that ‘to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men.’

“By the standard of individual rights, any law purporting to protect wildlife from men would be struck down immediately, as a violation of man’s right to sustain his life by exploiting nature. But America’s lawmakers have sunk to a level unthinkable to the Founders. Through such statutes as the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and a variety of other environmental protection laws, Congress has conferred upon wildlife a legal status equal to men.

“This creates an impossible dilemma for judges. If fish and men are equal before the law, whose welfare should prevail when their interests conflict? There can be no rational answer.

“With standards out the window, it’s impossible to predict which irrational or subjective factors will end up controlling the outcome--the judges’ sentiments, their personal political views, or random outside pressures. All we can know for sure is that the result will be neither rational nor consistent with America’s founding ideals.”

Thomas Bowden is an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute.

Copyright © 2008 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

A large number of people, most of whom apparently are residents of New Orleans, have favored me with four-letter-word denunciations of The god That Failed New Orleans.

A common allegation was that I had written that New Orleans deserved its fate.  No one, however, cited specifics, for good reason: I wrote nothing to that effect.

For example:

And do they want the levees to break? I guess it depends if you are (as a New Orleans blogger commented to a brain-dead Repug at the link) “a fuckmook” who believes New Orleans deserved it (and there are, sadly, many more like this)...My thought is that they ... don’t care. We’re the last major city port at the mouth of the largest river system in the United States, and they don’t give a rat’s ass. We have some of the best food, culture, history and characters to be found, and are unique unto ourselves in this world, but they pretty much summed it up with Dennis Hastert’s comment: “It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.”

In other words, New Orleanians don’t need to exert themselves rebuilding the city.  They’re entitled to have the taxpayers of the nation do it for them, because New Orleans has all sorts of things that cater to sensual appetites.

No emailer advanced a single argument to counter the specific points I made, which were that New Orleans, a once great commercial city, had become after 1927 mired in hedonism and dependence upon the welfare state.

New Orleans rejected the God that led settlers in New England to take personal responsibility for their actions and to found public education, industry, and the progenitor of the Constitution of the United States.  Instead, New Orleans on balance after 1927 turned to worshipping the welfare state, looking to the atheistic materialism of socialism for its salvation.

That point is irrefutable if one compares the record of New Orleans after the mid-1950s with those of Houston, Dallas, Mobile, Memphis, Atlanta, and Tampa.  Moreover, whenever New Orleans has made real economic progress, it’s generally been under the impetus of outsiders who came to the city.

National Bank of Commerce knocked the moribund Whitney National Bank off its first-place ranking only after a banker from Dallas came in to assume the CEO’s position.

One of the city’s premier real estate developments, One Canal Place, was conceived and built by Joe Canizaro, who came from Mississippi.

Even the famed Superdome was not financed and erected by local interests.  After New Orleans’s investment banking firm Howard, Weil, Labouisse & Fredericks tried several times unsuccessfully to raise the necessary funds, Mills Lane, the CEO of Atlanta’s Citizens & Southern National Bank, assembled a consortium of banks across the south to float the necessary bonds.

Obviously not everyone in New Orleans is a slave to the welfare state.  But on balance its residents have drifted since 1927 into the entitlements mentality: abandonment of personal responsibility and individual initiative.

The socialist welfare state is a form of slavery, or more accurately, a sort of neo-feudalism in which the individual has no rights independent of the figurative “piece of ground” to which the political state has assigned him.

Hilaire Belloc anticipated this in his 1912 book, The Servile State. He noted that, while the just-beginning socialist state in Great Britain was doing nice things for workers, it was at the price of their liberty to decide whether to work, when to work, or where to work.  Recipients of unemployment benefits, for example, had to report to employment offices and take whatever jobs were offered to them, or face punishment.

Belloc’s prescience was confirmed after World War II.  Sir William Beveridge, one of the British Labour Party authors of socialized medicine and other welfare-state services after World War II, stated the necessity quite forthrightly.

“…the State,” he wrote, “ in this field [attempting to guarantee full employment] is not wholly master of events so long as it desires to preserve the freedom of individuals……the State cannot undertake the responsibility for full employment without full powers.”

In other words, central planning necessary for imposition of socialism cannot become effective without subordinating the rights of individuals to the goals of the planners.  That is simply a degree of servility.

Once acculturated to this mentality, a society cannot reverse field. It would be like expecting rotten fruit to become fresh and sweet again.  It would be like taking a zoo animal back to the wild.  Uniform experience is that zoo animals accustomed to being fed and protected within their own private territories (cages) become completely disoriented, sicken and die (if not eaten shortly by predators) out in the native habitat of their wild kind.

In the same way, New Orleanians corrupted by many generations of worshipping the god of the welfare-state instinctively look to the government to do whatever needs to be done and flounder fecklessly while waiting for outsiders to do what they ought to have the moral fiber and gumption to do for themselves.

Thomas E. Brewton

...The National Council of La Raza bills itself as a “civil rights” organization. It would be more appropriate to say it disguises itself as such. It camouflages itself as such. It hides its real purpose and true intents as such – with the willing and skillful assistance of many of my media colleagues.  Full Piece

Obama is prepared to meet with a man who is supporting Muqtada al-Sadr and other anti-American Shiite forces in Iraq.  These forces are killing American soldiers.

Obama is prepared to meet with a man who is supporting Hezbollah, a terrorist organization that as I write this is trying to overthrow the democratically elected government in Lebanon.  A quarter century ago, Hezbollah was responsible for the deaths of 241 American soldiers at their barracks in Beirut. 

Obama is prepared to meet with a man who is leading the effort to develop a nuclear bomb while at the same time declaring that Israel should be “wiped off the map”.  For good measure, he said the Holocaust is “a myth.” On the occasion of Israel’s 60th anniversary, the man with whom Obama so desperately wants an audience referred to the Jewish State as “a stinking corpse.”

This is the sum of the man with whom Obama seeks to engage in dialogue.

In an interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft in February 2007, Obama said that not talking to Iran and Syria “flies in the face of our experience during the Cold War.  And Ronald Reagan understood that it may be an evil empire, but it’s worthwhile for us to periodically meet to see are there (sic) areas of common interest.” ( http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/09/main2456335_page2.shtml )

Well, it is clear that Barack Obama does not understand Ronald Reagan. 

Ronald Reagan did not meet with Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov or Konstantin Chernenko.  He did not meet with these Soviet leaders because they were not committed to allowing their people to live in liberty.  In Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan found someone who had some humanity in him and wanted to reform Communism.  Even though Reagan and Gorbachev had a great rapport, Reagan knew that Gorbachev was still committed to and part of the Communist way of life.  With Ronald Reagan, it was trust but verify.  With Barack Obama, it is trust at face value. 

I do find it interesting how some liberals who express a newfound respect for Reagan.  Take this case in point.  Earlier this week, I was corresponding with a singer/songwriter who enjoys a modest amount of fame.  She is an ardent supporter of Obama.  The singer/songwriter pilloried Hillary Clinton for pledging to “obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel.  For his part, Obama said Hillary sounded too much like President Bush.  The singer/songwriter, while deploring Ahmadinejad’s language, believed that our leaders should not stoop to their level.  She added that Reagan was far more elevated in his language.

Funny, but I don’t particularly recall the Left being overwhelmingly enamored with Reagan after he publicly declared the Soviet Union as “an evil empire” in March 1983.  Anthony Lewis of The New York Times called the speech “primitive” and that his rhetoric was “a mirror image of crude Soviet rhetoric.” When I pointed this out to the singer/songwriter, she replied that she was busy raising a 2½ year old and did not have time for further discussion.  I’m sure she would have reacted similarly had I pointed out that Richard Cohen of The Washington Post called Reagan “a religious bigot” or that The New Republic declared the speech left friend and foe alike “with the impression that the President of the United States was contemplating holy war.” ( http://www.newt.org/tabid/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/3234/Default.aspx )

Barack Obama might acknowledge the Soviet Union was an evil empire.  But I am sure a younger Barack Obama held a similar view of Reagan’s evil empire speech while attending Columbia University in the early 1980’s.  It is amazing how the passage of a quarter century can change the impression of a man and his message.  Maybe there’s a chance liberals will view George W. Bush with a similar fondness in 2033.  Perhaps by that time the singer/songwriter will have more time to discuss politics. 

But until then we must ask why Obama wants to talk to Ahmadinejad and what America gets out of such a conversation.  Like many liberals, Obama wishes to restore America’s reputation in the world, whatever that means.  By the world are liberals talking about every other member state in the UN?  Or do liberals simply mean socialist governments in Europe?  Or perhaps just the Muslim world?  If it is the latter why on earth do we want to restore our reputation with countries that execute people for engaging in homosexuality?  Restoring our reputation in the world doesn’t actually accomplish anything other than make liberals feel good about themselves.

Obama insists that he would offer Ahmadinejad a choice.  His platform on Iran reads:

If Iran abandons its nuclear program and support for terrorism, we will offer incentives like membership in the World Trade Organization, economic investments, and a move toward normal diplomatic relations.  If Iran continues its troubling behavior, we will step up our economic pressure and political isolation.  Seeking this kind of comprehensive settlement with Iran is our best way to make progress. ( http://www.barackobama.com/issues/foreignpolicy/#iran )

Never mind that Bush Administration withdrew its objections to Iran joining the WTO nearly three years ago and that negotiations to join the WTO are ongoing.  Does Obama honestly think membership in the WTO will serve as an inspiration for Iran to renounce terrorism, disband Hezbollah and re-establish diplomatic ties with the United States?  But let us, for argument’s sake, suppose Iran accepts these conditions.  How does WTO membership stop Iran from pursuing its nuclear program and supporting Hezbollah and Shiite militias in Iraq in a clandestine manner?  It is interesting that Obama prides himself as a candidate whose opponent will not be able to say he “gave George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran.” Yet Obama seems entirely prepared to give Ahmadinejad the benefit of the doubt on Iran.  Once again, Obama trusts but doesn’t verify.  While this policy might make us more popular outside the United States it will do little to serve America’s interests.

If you think about it you might ask how President Obama traveling to Tehran to meet with Ahmadinejad any different than former President Jimmy Carter’s recent meeting with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Damascus?  There is one difference.  Obama won’t wait until after he has left office to debase his reputation on the world stage.

Aaron Goldstein

But here’s the problem. Senator McCain has made it harder to confirm judicial conservatives to the bench. (Judicial Watch neither opposes nor endorses candidates for pubic office.)

While Senator McCain’s speech properly chastised liberals in the Senate for blocking judicial nominees, what did McCain do when he had the chance to help stop them cold? Well, here he is, in his own words:

“Of course, in the daily routine of Senate obstructionism, presidential nominees to the lower courts are now lucky if they get a hearing at all. These courts were created long ago by the Congress itself, on what then seemed the safe assumption that future Senates would attend to their duty to fill them with qualified men and women nominated by the president. Yet at this moment there are 31 nominations pending…Things almost got even worse a few years ago, when there were threats of a filibuster to require 60 votes for judicial confirmations, and threats in reply of a change in Senate rules to prevent a filibuster. A group of senators, nicknamed the “Gang of 14,” got together and agreed we would not filibuster unless there were ‘extraordinary circumstances.’”

McCain went on to defend the deal he helped broker, saying it “showed that serious differences can be handled in a serious way, without allowing Senate business! to unravel in a chaos of partisan anger.”

I have two responses to these statements.

First, using a filibuster to block an up-or-down vote on judicial nominees is flat out “unconstitutional.” (See Judicial Watch’s landmark lawsuit filed against the Senate.) I don’t care how “extraordinary” the circumstances, there is never a good reason to violate the U.S. Constitution’s “advice and consent” clause in the interest of political expediency.

And second, no one was advocating the “chaos of partisan anger” as the antidote to the liberal hijacking of the judicial confirmation process. Principled conservatives simply were asking that the Constitution’s rules be followed by the U.S. Senate in the consideration of judicial nominations. That “chaos of partisan anger” talk sounds more like Patrick Leahy than a principled conservative.

In the end, some fine judicial nominees who would have embodied McCain’s stated judicial philosophy are not on the bench because of him and his “Gang of 14.”

New JW Panel: “Election 2008: What the Media Isn’t Telling You”

Next Thursday, May 15, Judicial Watch will host an educational panel entitled, “Election 2008: What the Media Isn’t Telling You.” The panel will be held here at 1:00 p.m. in the National Press Club (in Washington, DC) and will feature special guests Jim Bopp, Attorney for Bopp, Coleson & Bostrom; Cliff Kincaid, Editor of the Accuracy in Media Report; and Curt Levey, Executive Director of the Committee for Justice.

Our discussion will highlight issues being downplayed by much of the media during this election season, including political scandals, problems in the campaign finance system, and current and future battles over judges.

If you are interested in attending next week’s panel, we would love to have you join us. (All of Judicial Watch’s educational panels are free of charge.) To register, email media@judicialwatch.org or call 202-646-5172.

Tom Fitton
http://judicialwatch.org/

WND has reported several times on issues involving the promotion of Islam in public school texts, including a recent situation in which California parents complained their children were being taught that “jihad” to Muslims means “doing good works.” Full Item

Yes, Barack Obama has said that he wishes to protect corruption, not eliminate it. Has he agreed to turn his back on fighting corruption merely so that he might be able to count the votes of union thugs in his column?

It has been revealed by inside sources that Obama secretly promised the Teamsters that he will end the strict oversight that the Federal government has through an independent oversight board that was set up in 1992 because of the mob influence rampant in the Teamsters. Obama has claimed that he favors “examining” the review board, but refuses to state publicly what that means.

However, the Wall Street Journal claims that they have found out that Obama means to scale back the board and this isn’t too hard to believe since the Democrat controlled Congress has also been slow to approve funding of the Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) of late, paving the way to defund it and let it lie fallow. If Obama follows suit with the Democrats in Congress who are trying to give corrupt unions a free hand to indulge in more corruption with no government interference, it would seem to fit the Democrat agenda. This also shows that Obama is no “reformer” and not interested in changing anything in Washington but the party of the President.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Obama’s secret promises are a bit “unusual.”

It’s an unusual stance for a presidential candidate. Policy makers have largely treated monitoring of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters as a legal matter left to the Justice Department since an independent review board was set up in 1992 to eliminate mob influence in the union.

You bet it seems an “unusual stance” especially from the so-called candidate of “change.” After all, a secret deal to eliminate an agency that has been very effective at rooting out union crime and corruption does not ring true with a candidate who claims that he wants a “new day” of truth in Washington D.C.

Obama has said, though, that his promises to the Teamsters is not a “blanket commitment.”

But, what Obama is quoted as having said is just another example of his penchant of say nothing at all and using a whole lot of words to do it.

“I wouldn’t make any blanket commitments,” the Illinois senator told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“What I’ve said is that I would examine what is going on in terms of the federal oversight that’s been taking place but it’s been in place for many years.”

Obama said the Teamsters had done “a terrific job cleaning house” and suggested it could be time for the Teamsters “to get treated just like every other union.”

“That’s something that I’ll absolutely examine when I’m president of the United States,” he said.

This is all stuff and nonsense. Has he made a commitment to let the a corrupt, Mob infested union off the hook or not? No one can say because he talked out of both sides of his mouth once again.

It should be noted, too, that this oversight of the Teamsters is independent of politics and is a venue of the Justice Department. But, if Obama really does end up trying to eliminate a review board that has been successful in rooting out criminals in unions, how does this make him a “fresh voice” in Washington? It looks more like he is just another Democrat that panders to unions and turns his face from their criminal activities.

Not much “change” there.

1) Wall Street Journal

Not to CBS. No, CBS has decided that the real story is that what we have here is “right-wing radio commentators” and “the bloggers” are who is responsible for “operation chaos.” But, in truth, few other radio people are pushing their listeners to re-register and no high profile conservative blogger I know of is doing so either. The whole thing is the brainchild of Rush Limbaugh, not “right-wing radio commentators”—commentators as in plural, more than one.

CBS is bending over backwards in order NOT to mention Limbaugh’s name so as not to give him publicity, apparently. But, it simply is not factual to say that “right-wing radio commentators” are responsible for this crossover voting effort when it is basically ONE “right-wing radio commentator.” This spiteful avoidance of naming Limbaugh makes their report factually incorrect.

Let’s be honest even if CBS cannot; this whole crossover voter plan is the effort of Rush Limbaugh and Rush Limbaugh alone. It is not the plan of “the bloggers” and “right-wing radio commentators.”

But on CBS’s Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer, both Douglas Wilder(D-VA) and James Clyburn (D-S.C.) warned that there would be unrest if “young voters” did not get them some Barack at the democrat Party National convention. Additionally, both blammed “the bloggers” and “right-wng radio” without mentioning Limbaugh by name.

Wilder said that the Democrats faced a “riotous” convention if the will of the people - in terms of a candidate with the greatest number of pledged delegates and primary or votes - was usurped by the party’s superdelegates. “People would be tremendously upset,” he said.

Not to be outdone, Representative Clyburn jumped the there-will-be-blood bandwagon.

Clyburn, however, went further, believing that such a decision might inspire violence.

It would certainly breed discontent, he said, especially among younger voters, as he described his visits to historical black colleges and universities in his district: “That is what these young people were saying to me. They were very, very upset with all of this talk about superdelegates overturning their energies and overturning their efforts.

Two high profile black leaders both claiming that violence will occur if the Democrat Party does not pick Obama seems like pretty big news. Yet, not many news outlets are talking about this.

There is also another aspect that the MSM are ignoring about this whole crossover voting drama. In 2000 the MSM was all a flutter over the fact that thousands of Democrats were re-registering as Republicans to vote for John McCain. This was universally reported as an item of interest if not something to be encouraged. The MSM was thrilled that Democrats and moderates were rooting for McCain during the 2000 primaries and they joyfully reported it as a sign that “the maverick” was the man to solve the partisan rancor in Washington DC.

Yet, now that it is Republicans crossing the aisle to vote in the Democrat primaries, suddenly this is something to be alarmed at? Something that might cause riots?

One has to wonder why the different treatment of the same idea? Why was it OK in 2000 but not now? And, there is a substantive difference between what Limbaugh is doing now and what Democrat voters did in 2000. Limbaugh’s aim is to make the Democrat primaries last as long as possible so as to give Barack Obama more time than the media was willing to give him to make mistakes and to reveal himself more fully to the voters. Limbaugh claims not to have an interest in which one, Hillary or Obama, becomes the Democrat Party nominee. On the other hand, in 2000, Democrats were actually trying to pick the candidate who would be running on the GOP ticket.

Yet, here we have CBS and Face the Nation painting Limbaugh as trying to pick Hillary as the Dem candidate and they are reporting on it as if this represents a danger to the process.  Apparently, it’s only a “danger” if it is the Democrat Party’s process that is being meddled with because they didn’t care about any meddling in the GOP’s process in 2000. In fact, they thought it was great.

Like I said, one has to wonder why the different treatment of the same idea?

Bernstein, now an election analyst for CNN, has reason to be concerned about where all of this may lead. His parents were members of the Communist Party USA, and he says in his book about them, Loyalties, “I am proud of the choices they made.”

The Hayden and Bernstein pieces have to be understood in the context of the Democratic Party being on the verge of nominating a “working class hero” as their presidential candidate who does not attract many votes from the working class. And that is why Senator Clinton sees an opening and believes she can still seize the nomination. But she’s got some skeletons in her closet, too.

The basic message of Hayden and Bernstein seems to be that the Democrats should abandon the practice of linking either presidential candidate to communists because they are both tainted. But we’re just beginning to get to the heart of the issue. Do we have candidates that are in any way linked or sympathetic to the greatest killing machine in the history of planet earth? The Black Book of Communism puts the death toll from communism at about 100 million. A memorial to the victims of communism has been erected in Washington, D.C.

On one of the major issues of our time, have these candidates been right or wrong?

We know where Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright stands. We know that his charge that the U.S. created AIDS was based on Soviet disinformation. But he also had this to say in his National Press Club speech: “Our congregation stood in solidarity with the peasants in El Salvador and Nicaragua, while our government, through Ollie North and the Iran-Contra scandal, was supporting the Contras, who were killing the peasants and the Miskito Indians in those two countries.”

In fact, Ollie North, a member of the staff of the National Security Council, was implementing a policy of the Reagan Administration to thwart a communist takeover of Central America. Some of the Miskito Indians were actually helping in the fight against the Soviet- and Cuban-backed Communist Sandinistas.

Whose side was Obama on during the fight for Central America?

Hayden’s Pro-Communist Record

One can understand why Hayden, a member of “Progressives for Obama,” takes offense. Hayden and Ayers were key members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the violence-prone group that laid siege to college campuses in the 1960s. One of their main goals was making sure the communists conquered South Vietnam. Ayers, of course, would go on to plant bombs as a member of the SDS-spawned Weather Underground communist terrorist group. Hayden would win notoriety as Jane Fonda’s husband and become a politician.

“Progressives for Obama” is quite a collection. A quick review discloses two names from the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, an off-shoot of the old Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA (CPUSA). They include Carl Davidson, formerly of SDS, and Jim Campbell. Two other names come from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose Chicago branch has backed Obama from the start. They are Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornel West. West showed up at Jeremiah Wright’s National Press Club speech to cheer and whistle.

Hayden is almost as controversial as Ayers, a self-described communist. A leader of protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, Hayden wrote a June 4, 1968, “Dear Col. Lao” letter that ended, “Good fortune! Victory!” This was a letter to a North Vietnamese official. So here we have someone who was cheering for the communist enemy killing Americans. They openly displayed flags of the Viet Cong, the organization sponsored by the regime in Hanoi, North Vietnam, also known as the National Liberation Front.

Hayden, in brief, played a pivotal role in America’s Vietnam defeat and the deaths of millions.

Hayden’s letter to Col. Lao was designed to introduce him to Robert Greenblatt, the coordinator of the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. The MOBE was run by a group that included members of the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Workers World Party, the SDS, and other such organizations.

Is this the kind of “patriotism” that Obama approves? What does Senator Clinton think of an Obama supporter who worked for an enemy victory in Vietnam?

It is apparently acceptable to somebody because Hayden’s website boasts that he has received awards from such groups as the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, the Rainforest Action Network, and Paw-PAC (animal welfare).

Isn’t it interesting how someone who became a cheerleader for the communists now gets awards for protecting trees and animals?

By contrast, the book, A Viet Cong Memoir, includes a note of apology “to my betrayed comrades, who believed they were sacrificing themselves for a humane liberation of their people.” One of the authors, Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the Viet Cong, escaped the communist takeover in a boat. He was one of hundreds of thousands of “boat people.”

Hayden’s failure to apologize indicates he’s a true believer. And he’s enthusiastic about Obama.

Spanking Hillary

Hayden currently contributes to the far-left Huffington Post website and The Nation magazine, where he made much of Hillary’s work for a communist law firm. One of his citations is Carl Bernstein’s book about Hillary, A Woman in Charge. This is actually an old story. We covered it in an AIM Report back in 2003. Hayden, of course, doesn’t really care whether she associated with communists. He calls her work there “honorable.” He just thinks she’s a hypocrite for calling attention to Obama’s communist ties, such as the “imagined association” between Obama and Ayers. (Their relationship is described by the Obama campaign as “friendly.”) Hayden also finds fault with Hillary for making an issue out of Obama’s association with his pastor Jeremiah Wright.

Hayden decries the “campaign of defamation” against Obama, who has “transformational appeal.”

Carl Bernstein added his voice to the controversy, saying in a dispatch on the Huffington Post not only that Hillary worked for that firm but that her linking of Obama to Ayers might be “21st century McCarthyism” or “ideological demagoguery.”

This is what “McCarthyism” has become―telling the truth about communists.

Bernstein has a personal conflict of interest, having written a book, Loyalties, about his parents Al and Sylvia Bernstein being members of the Communist Party USA. He reveals that Democratic liberal Senator Edward Kennedy helped him obtain government documents about his father’s case in particular. His father was questioned about a possible relationship with a member of a Soviet espionage network named Louise Bransten. 

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

Bernstein says that he feared coming upon some “parental Pumpkin Paper.” But his father explained away the Bransten connection by saying he had only attended a “party” with her. That closed the case for Carl Bernstein, who was part of the Washington Post investigative team that brought down President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal. As journalist Victor Lasky would later point out in It Didn’t Start With Watergate, it was a scandal in which Nixon or his staff stood accused of using tactics employed by previous Democratic administrations.

Nixon was a special target. As a Congressman, he had seized upon the hidden documents known as the Pumpkin Papers of former communist Whittaker Chambers in order to make the case that former State Department official and United Nations founder Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. Chambers had publicly named Hiss as a communist. The Pumpkin Papers proved it.

In his father’s case, Bernstein writes that documents showed that Louis B. Nichols, the assistant director of the FBI for internal security matters, said that he would be probably be able to furnish a witness identifying Alfred Bernstein as a Communist Party member. (Bernstein confirms that his father and mother were members). Later, Bernstein writes, Nichols would become “the Bureau’s liaison to Richard Nixon’s White House.” Bernstein includes this information as if it’s damaging to the FBI, Nixon, or both. 

But whatever one can say about Nixon, he was not naïve about the communist threat. And he was right on target about Hiss.

The Pattern

Bernstein and his partner, Bob Woodward, worked for a paper, the Washington Post, whose late owner, Katharine Graham, was known as a prominent liberal committed to the success of the Democratic Party. Less well-known is the fact that she had worked for a time as a reporter in San Francisco and developed a rather sympathetic view of “radical” labor leader Harry Bridges, who turned out to be a secret member of the CPUSA central committee. “One of her [Katharine Graham’s] sources was Harry Bridges, the head of the longshoremen’s union,” says the official Washington Post website, still unable to set the record straight about this notorious communist agitator.

After Watergate and the forced resignation of Nixon, Bernstein would turn his attention to the sins of the Central Intelligence Agency, writing a piece for Rolling Stone, the rock-and-roll publication, entitled, “The CIA and the Media.” He also spent some time at ABC News trying to expose secret U.S. support for anti-communist fighters in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation.

Getting to the Hillary connection, in his Huffington Post dispatch on “The Question of Hillary Clinton’s Guilt-By-Association Tactics,” Bernstein wrote about Jessica Mitford, the “muckraking journalist” whose husband Robert Treuhaft, ran the communist law firm where Hillary worked.

Bernstein said, “In the 1980s, Jessica Mitford visited the Clintons at the governor’s mansion in Little Rock. She and Treuhaft had left the communist party in 1958, years after the revelation of Stalin’s murderous crimes, but―Jessica Mitford wrote in her memoir, A Fine Old Conflict, she quit ‘not primarily over some issue of high principle, but because it had become dull....boring. Rather like London’s debutante circuit.’”

He goes on, “When Jessica Mitford died in 1996, Hillary Clinton wrote Bob Treuhaft a lovely condolence letter from the White House…” But does any of this make Hillary a Stalinist, he asked. Or a Communist sympathizer? Of course not, he replies. All of this is just silly, he says. And it’s just as silly, he suggests, for Hillary to make an issue of Obama’s ties to Bill Ayers.

But wait. In Mitford’s 1977 book, A Fine Old Conflict, she writes about how Al Bernstein signed her up as a member of the United Federal Workers Union, which she considered “a step towards finding the Communist Party.” The union, she adds, had been publicly denounced by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as Communist-dominated. This charge was “not wide of the mark,” she admits.

The afterword of another Mitford book, Poison Penmanship, is written by Bernstein, who praises Mitford for educating the public about how journalism should be a “simple process” of seeking “the best obtainable version of the truth.”

They Can’t Handle the Truth

If this is the case, then why is Bernstein afraid of pursuing the truth about Obama? Why the outrage over Senator Clinton drawing attention to a well-documented personal connection between Obama and a communist terrorist? Is there something else more damaging that has to be hidden from public view? Does new information have to be discredited in advance as “McCarthyism?”

The information may have to do with Obama’s upbringing. Obama says that he was raised by his mother and grandparents. But those aren’t the only people who had influence over him during his formative years. His own book, Dreams From My Father, talks about a mysterious “Frank” giving him advice, reading poetry, and telling him not to believe that―expletive deleted―about the American way of life when he went off to college. We know who “Frank” is. He was a member of the Communist Party who started writing for the Honolulu Record at the suggestion of Paul Robeson, another secret member of the CPUSA, and Harry Bridges. His “poetry,” like the sermons of Pastor Wright, was laced with anti-American sentiments.

Don’t wait for Carl Bernstein or the Washington Post or the rest of the major media to cover any of this. But it will come out.

Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report.

http://www.aim.org/aim-column/communists-the-media-and-the-democratic-party/

And Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s spiritual mentor, who has defended the notion that Zionism is racism, compared white kids to “rocks,” and propounded the theory that the government invented AIDS to kill off Black folks.

Last week Obama finally decided he had heard enough and rebuked the Raging Reverend, calling his latest rant “divisive and destructive” and “giving comfort to those who prey on hate.”

Then there’s Mr. Obama’s embrace of radical feminism. Like Rev. Wright’s black liberation ideology, the core of feminism is a dogmatic belief in a malevolent, all-pervasive conspiracy that renders its victims helpless. Call it capitalism or the patriarchy, the effect is the same.

And just as Jeremiah Wright spews his hatred for American society, feminists blame every unpleasantness on the alleged shortcomings of men.

This past Thursday New York Times columnist Gail Collins indulged in her latest anti-male diatribe: “Men with egos are, of course, the central topic this week.” Every roadbump in the campaigns of the two Democratic challengers, Collins insists, can be blamed on those nincompoopish, self-centered men.

It comes as an enormous relief, I’m sure, to learn that Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi don’t suffer from inflated egos.

Let’s take a look at the issues the National Organization for Women is pushing—http://www.now.org/issues/—and then compare them with the Women for Obama website: http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/womenissues . (Both bear a remarkable resemblance to the women’s platform of the Community Party of the USA – but that’s another story.)

As you can see, Sen. Obama is marching lock-step with the radical feminist agenda, pretty much from A to Z:

Abortion: Obama endorses the entire abortion package, including partial birth abortion. The National Abortion Rights Action League gave Obama a perfect 100% score over the last three years.

Child Support: Obama wants to spend $4.9 billion over 10 years to throw more low-income dads in jail. That will force more single moms onto the welfare rolls. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

Contraception: Obama wants to expand teenager’s access to contraception. Remember last month’s comment that he didn’t want his daughters to be “punished” with a baby?

Domestic Violence: The democratic candidate believes that women are never violent towards their husbands. (I guess Hillary laying tracks on Bill’s face and singer Amy Winehouse beating up her hubbie don’t count.)

Gender Wage Gap: Barack insists discrimination is the reason why women chose to work fewer hours than men, and that needs to be fixed with stronger enforcement of the Equal Pay Act.

Math and Science: Women hold only 12% of science and engineering jobs in business and industry. More proof of the patriarchy keeping women down.

Title IX: Obama wants to continue Clinton-era policies that impose government-enforced quotas on men’s participation in college athletics.

Women-Owned Businesses: Female-owned businesses are more likely to have their loan applications denied. Didn’t I tell you discrimination lurks everywhere?

Women’s Health: Obama wants to fund the separate-and-unequal “Centers of Excellence in Women’s Health” that turn away uninsured men with serious medical problems.

And then there’s the matter of Michelle Obama. An intelligent and charming woman, I’m certain. But is she First Lady material? I have my doubts.

At a New York fundraiser, she tweaked the Illinois senator for not “putting his socks actually in the dirty clothes” – a necessary qualification, we know, for every man who one day hopes to become president.

And at a Hollywood event, Mrs. Obama uttered this derisive remark: “I am always a little amazed at the response that people get when they hear from Barack. A great man, a wonderful man. But still a man.”

But still a man? Somehow this reminds me of the patronizing attitude that once galvanized the civil rights movement.

Michelle continued, “And then there’s the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy’s a little less than impressive.”

Lives with me in my house? That’s right, Barack was a waif who showed up one day on Michelle’s doorstep. He should be appreciative.

“For some reason this guy still can’t manage to put the butter up when he makes the toast, secure the bread so that it doesn’t get stale, and his 5-year-old daughter is still better at making the bed than he is.”

Barack Obama, the latest hen-pecked Democratic candidate who has pretensions of becoming the next Leader of the Free World.

Carey Roberts
http://thenma.org/blogs/index.php/roberts