Idkal

If John McCain were truly a maverick, he would publicly break from the politically correct culture that demands obedience to its global warming narrative. But sadly, he continues to do the opposite.

Liberals have denominated McCain a maverick because he has taken so many positions contradictory to his party’s platform and to the conservative ideology that undergirds it. Now that he is the putative Republican nominee, you don’t hear much about his maverick nature, but it’s certainly not because he’s changed his ways in opposing his party.

Last week, he affirmed his commitment to comprehensive immigration reform, even though earlier he stepped back from it to curry favor with conservatives. One wonders what other shoes will inevitably drop should he win the presidency, especially because he has indicated he would most likely be a one-termer.

Will he revert to his visceral revulsion to the Bush supply-side tax cuts? Many supply-siders, after taking McCain to the woodshed on the issue, assure us he can be trusted on it.

If so, their efforts will redound to the benefit of the economy and nation should McCain win the election. But some of these same supply-side advocates insist we shouldn’t expect him to move rightward on too many other issues.

Sorry, but I reject that zero-sum thinking, as should my fellow supply-siders; they certainly do in the realm of tax policy. While I will vote for McCain against either Democratic opponent, I don’t believe we should abandon efforts to reform the “reformer” on other issues besides taxes. Are we supposed to declare a moratorium on the expression of our principles for fear it could damage his electability?

If conservatives don’t make an effort to hold McCain accountable for his liberal proclivities, then no one will, to the guaranteed detriment of the national interest. In fact, pushing him to the right while we still have a chance will enhance his electability.

Which brings me back to the subject that inspired this column: McCain’s regrettable upcoming speech outlining his vision to combat global warming.

In a preview of the speech, CNN reports that McCain will say: “We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great. The most relevant question now is whether our own government is equal to the challenge.”

No, Sen. McCain, the most relevant question is whether political leaders will have the diligence to study this issue and the integrity and courage to stand up to the propaganda of the enviro-bullies. The question is whether you can be a maverick where it counts.

It is not Earth’s ecosystem that hangs in the balance, but America’s future. Those whose vision isn’t blurred by green-colored glasses and the temptation to win accolades from the leftist-dominated culture can see that the global push to “save the planet” is more about destroying capitalism, private property and Western culture than sound, science-based environmental stewardship. Never mind the staggering contradiction that free market economies produce cleaner environs.

Indeed, I hate to break it to some of my fellow evangelical Christians who are falling into the trap along with McCain, but the global warming proselytes don’t share your worldview. Do you realize you are jumping in bed with those who are promoting a pantheistic deification of the environment and a diminution of the dignity of human beings created in God’s image?

Contrary to the mandated script from the warming zealots, there is plenty of credible dissent in the scientific community about global warming, particularly man’s role in it. Much of this dissent comes from scientists in fields related to weather studies. Imagine that.

The fact that the enviro-church fathers have “outlawed” dissenting opinion and slander those offering it tells us something fishy is afoot.

And for you McCain supporters who think the only issues that matter are the war and taxes, not to mention abortion and immigration — all of which are incalculably important — I urge you not to underestimate the gravity of the global warming issue and the potentially devastating consequences of rolling over on it.

If Republicans also acquiesce to this false religion and its required “good works,” we are headed toward a path of economic and societal destruction in the name of saving the planet.

It’s time for Newt Gingrich to get off that couch with Nancy Pelosi and for John McCain to jump off this insidious global warming train that might as well be armed with enemy bombs and aimed at the heart of this nation and its economy.

Popularity: 5% [?]

The question, my fellow election watchers, is not, “Why won’t Hillary do the honorable thing and quit?” but “Why won’t Democrats do the honorable thing and quit trying to force her to?”

Did Democrats make Ted Kennedy quit when he fought Jimmy Carter through the Democratic convention in 1980 in an effort to dislodge pledged delegates though Carter had already secured a majority? That was far worse than anything Hillary is doing.

Until one of the candidates secures the magic number of delegates (a majority) — and that number is a moving target, given the limbo status of Florida and Michigan — there is no nominee. A plurality won’t cut it.

Nor is the candidate with the most pledged delegates automatically entitled to the nod of the superdelegates or even most of them. The superdelegates are free agents, who may choose either candidate for any reason.

The superdelegate system was designed to give the superdelegates maximum prerogative, which only makes sense because the party bosses established it to ensure their own control over the nomination process. The whole idea was to give them the power to substitute their judgment for the will of the people if, in their political omniscience, they determine the people’s choice to be not prudent.

Well, Democrats made their own bed. Just because they’ve encountered a recalcitrant candidate who will not march to their orders, they can’t suddenly change the rules in the middle of the election — a lesson they should have learned in Florida in 2000 — and force the superdelegates to follow the pledged delegates. Free means free. The candidates may lobby for the supers’ votes just as if, collectively, the supers were the last state.

Why should Hillary be deprived of her right to campaign in this one last “state,” especially considering the dramatic changes that have occurred since the primary season began?

Indeed Hillary can make a compelling case that the superdelegate system was made to order precisely for the predicament in which Democrats now find themselves. The leading candidate in both popular vote and pledged delegates (putting aside the knotty issues surrounding Michigan and Florida), might be an entirely different person than voters in earlier primary states assumed.

Under the system they created, shouldn’t Democrats be encouraging Hillary to give it her best shot to win over the supers? If she is correct that Obama is unelectable, she could theoretically persuade a very large percentage of them to vote for her — enough to get her to the magic number. If it were not possible, the whole super-system of providing a safety valve against the initially popular but ultimately unelectable candidate would be a farce.

But a number of factors are complicating the situation. Most party bosses and the media remain in the tank for Obama and are incapable of objectively assessing his electability. They are in hot pursuit of those ethereal hopes and dreams about which he prefers to speak and from which he resents being “distracted.”

There’s also some ambiguity about Obama’s declining electability, considering the North Carolina and Indiana primary results. But for the Obama-slanted demographics in North Carolina and Operation Chaos in Indiana, who knows what would have happened in those states?

But the main complication — obviously — is race. If the supers were to exercise their right to veto Obama as unelectable, they would be inviting an exodus of black voters that many fear could make the entire Democratic Party unelectable for the foreseeable future.

Regardless, Hillary still has every right to make her case to the supers, and she has strong arguments. Not only has the Obama candidacy proved itself to be a very risky proposition; Hillary has proved her mettle through this hotly contested ordeal.

Though I’m still as adamantly opposed to the Clintons politically as I’ve ever been, you have to give the devil her due. She began as the entitlement candidate — kind of the Democrats’ version of Bob Dole. But during the campaign, she was knocked all the way down to the curb yet pulled herself back up by her own bootstraps to be in contention again.

Against all odds, the infatuation of the media, the swooning of intoxicated Obama groupies, and the perpetual motion machine that is her annoying, gaffe-prone husband, she is still hanging in there. Her resiliency — despite all her flaws — is formidable, even if it springs from her lifelong obsession to acquire power.

Most party bosses and the media know Obama is seriously damaged and that it could get worse. But they’re not about to abandon their phantom hope in his messiahship, especially not in favor of that saint turned demon hellbent on torpedoing their dreams. For that, they loathe her — almost as much as they do the commander in chief of Operation Chaos.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Almost every week, a new damaging story emerges about Barack Obama. Lucky for this wounded “messiah” that his disciples in the mainstream media neglect, until the last possible minute, their duty to investigate these reports. This week, there’s a brand-new one, which has surfaced too late to affect the critically important Indiana and North Carolina primaries, but demands scrutiny nonetheless.

The Wall Street Journal — admittedly a mainstream media outlet, save the editorial page — has started the ball rolling on this one with a May 5 article examining the possible reasons behind the International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ endorsement of Obama. We’ll have to see whether Barack’s disciples follow up.

The public line — both of Obama and the Teamsters — is that Obama secured the union’s support by strongly condemning NAFTA, which the Teamsters believe results in the exportation of jobs. Hillary Clinton has been critical of NAFTA, as well, and even says she opposed it from the beginning. But her assertion is almost as incredible as the Bosnian sniper-fire tale because she and her two-for-one co-president were instrumental in bringing the trade agreement to fruition.

So NAFTA might be a factor, though Obama doesn’t completely toe the line on protectionism, favoring certain smaller-scale agreements the Teamsters oppose. He also opposes expanded oil drilling in Alaska against the preferences of the union and favors comprehensive immigration reform over strenuous Teamsters objection. So what does Barack have over Hillary, besides her lateness to the party in opposing NAFTA?

The Journal tells us on page A1, “Sen. Barack Obama won the endorsement of the Teamsters earlier this year after privately telling the union he supported ending the strict federal oversight imposed to root out corruption, according to officials from the union and the Obama campaign.”

Whoa! What’s this all about?

Well, 20 years ago, the Justice Department filed a federal civil racketeering complaint against the Teamsters, alleging the union had “made a devil’s pact” with the Mafia. A year later, the union settled with the government, agreeing to a consent decree in exchange for a dismissal of the lawsuit.

The WSJ reports the decree established a three-member independent review board to investigate and monitor possible corruption within the union and “required the direct election of the union president and other officers by rank and file members, in an election overseen by a court-appointed officer.” Prior to the decree, delegates elected the union president.

Teamsters President James P. Hoffa has pushed for relaxation or elimination of federal involvement since he took office in 1999, arguing that oversight is very costly and that corruption has diminished dramatically. He reportedly lobbied Obama for a year to support his position.

While officials of the oversight board agree that corruption has been reduced, they insist that if the board were eliminated, it would surely re-emerge. The union, they say, is not equipped or inclined to police itself.

Interestingly, neither the Teamsters nor Obama denies that Obama has expressed the view that the consent decree has “run its course.” They just deny there was any quid pro quo between Obama’s position and the Teamsters’ endorsement. After all, Obama came around to his position opposing federal oversight in July or August 2007, and the union didn’t endorse him until February 2008. Why the delay?

Well, the WSJ reports that fellow Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards also agreed with the union on this issue, and “when Mr. Edwards dropped out of the race in January, the union endorsed Sen. Obama in February.”

The timing is undeniably curious and perhaps suspicious. But what is more troubling to me than that or even Obama’s substantive position on the issue is that he has voiced a position on it at all.

The issues surrounding the consent decree are a judicial matter, outside the purview of the executive branch. It’s up to a federal judge to decide whether and when the consent decree should be relaxed or withdrawn.

But sadly, Obama understands, like Bill Clinton intimately understood, that judicial affairs can be affected by the political branches, such as through sympathetic appointments to the Justice Department and the courts. So it is no small matter that a presidential candidate would consider intervening, albeit indirectly, in a judicial question, especially one involving potential corruption.

Who can say at this point whether Obama has nefarious intentions concerning this? But it is difficult to understand what benign motives would lead him to take a position against the advice of the sitting review board that corruption and elections require continued supervision, especially in light of the union’s endorsement. We’ll see if the “watchdog” MSM pursue this story.

Popularity: 5% [?]

You might expect the lead prosecutor against the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to tout the criminal justice system as the premier strategy to fight terrorism. If so, you’re wrong.

It is precisely because of Andy McCarthy’s experience in that capacity that he understands — in a way others can’t — the crippling limitations of law enforcement and criminal prosecutions in combating global terrorism.

Though he led the Justice Department prosecution team that convicted Omar Abdel Rahman, the “Blind Sheik,” McCarthy is painfully aware that “as a class, baby-boom attorneys know nothing of war. Prosecutors included.” Even this successful effort left way too many militants in place and encouraged the idea that they could attack us with impunity.

The entire orientation of the criminal justice system is to protect the rights of innocents, affording the accused due process and a litany of other constitutional protections. But we are at war with an enemy who doesn’t fight wars according to conventional rules. If we continue to treat them as criminal suspects rather than enemy combatants, they’ll always be many steps ahead of us in a war that only they are fighting. While our government frets over their constitutional rights — rights to which enemy combatants have never been historically entitled — it abdicates its duty to protect American lives.

Before the 9/11 attacks, we simply did not understand that Islamic terrorists had declared war against the United States and that to have any chance in this war, we’d have to engage them militarily.

But even today, partly because of our successes in fighting the war, a good portion of our society won’t or can’t see we are at war. Among those realistic enough to recognize we are at war, far too many think we can pacify the terrorists if we’ll just engage in smarter diplomacy, reform our “imperialistic” impulses and otherwise alter our foreign policy.

In his book, “Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad,” McCarthy debunks these myths and makes a compelling case — sure to drive the purveyors of political correctness to apoplectic distraction — that the Islamic jihadist enemy we face isn’t at war with us because of our geopolitical malfeasance or this or that indignity we’ve allegedly visited upon them.

Their hostility, their aggression, their bellicosity, indeed their brutality, argues McCarthy, springs from Islam itself and its sacred writings. Indeed, the primary cause of Islamic terrorism, he says, is Muslim doctrine.

Islamic terrorists, he says, aren’t some fringe group of violent radicals who have hijacked a religion of peace. While the violent ones are a minority, they are a frightfully significant one in a religion whose membership is about 1.4 billion.

Even many of the so-called moderate Muslims, he notes, share many of the radicals’ goals, if not their deadly methods. These nonviolent Muslims are often sympathetic to what McCarthy calls “soft jihad,” which includes promoting the Islamization of our culture, the adoption of Shariah law, sensitivity training for our law enforcement officers and the like. The “moderates” often defer to the jihadists, especially in theological matters, because of their erudition and command of the scriptures.

It would be bad enough if many Americans had their heads in the sand about the true nature and threat of Islamic terrorism. But sadly, our domestic law enforcement and intelligence communities also have a history of failing to take jihadism seriously. If you don’t understand the enemy, you cannot begin to fight it effectively.

If Muslim doctrine is the ultimate source of the jihadist threat against us, we must take that into account in formulating our security doctrine, such as punishing states that enable the exportation of the most radical, violent strains of Islam and refusing to tolerate their terrorist sanctuaries. While McCarthy doesn’t advocate profiling, he does say we can’t treat a person’s ideology as irrelevant.

Instead of approaching the war tentatively, we must be aggressive, offensive and pre-emptive. And while it’s fine for us to harbor the hope — however unrealistic — that Islam will reform itself, we must not under any circumstances apologize for who we are and who we are not. And we are not — and don’t intend to become — an Islamic society.

McCarthy is not the garden-variety pundit pontificating about the threat of Islamic jihad based on a plethora of articles or books he’s read. He became familiar with the enemy firsthand while directing the historic prosecution he relates in riveting detail in his book.

“Willful Blindness” is not only captivating — it is sobering, even horrifying, shaking us out of our complacency and demanding we face head-on the relentlessness, unscrupulousness and implacably permanent commitment of our enemy to our total submission or destruction.

Popularity: 5% [?]

When it comes to the connection between Barack Obama and his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright — or to John McCain’s various positions on whether criticizing Obama for his relationship with Wright is fair game — my head is spinning.

At first, the Obama defenders said Jeremiah Wright doesn’t speak for Obama. Not only have Obama’s ill-wishers taken Wright’s statements out of context but they have unfairly imputed those statements to Obama.

Next, we witnessed the beginning of the Jeremiah Wright rehabilitation tour. He appeared on Bill Moyers’ show, endeavoring to present himself as a calm, reasonable person whose statements had been twisted against him.

Then he spoke at the Detroit NAACP dinner. Forgive me if I have a different take than most Wright critics, but I read the transcript of the Detroit speech in its entirety and did not detect too much, if any, incendiary language.

Wright presented a rather innocuous talk about the differences in human beings and how our differences do not mean certain groups are deficient — “just different.” His theme seemed to be that we should strive to overlook people’s differences and work toward reconciliation because we are all made in God’s image. Bravo. Who could object to that?

In his speech the next morning at the National Press Club, Wright continued with that theme, which was fine as far as it went. But alas, he couldn’t help dipping his foot a little further into the waters of controversy.

He touched on black liberation theology, revealing, inadvertently or not, that his religious views are formed through a racially tinted prism. He strategically characterized the recent scrutiny of his sermons as “not an attack on Jeremiah Wright,” but “an attack on the black church.” And he huffed that his congregation has sent dozens of kids to fight in this nation’s wars, while those who have called him unpatriotic have sent “4,000 American boys and girls of every race to die over a lie.”

But these subjects were tame compared to his responses to the moderator’s questions following the speech, where Wright reverted — full bore — to the offensive themes to which we’ve been exposed recently.

In so doing, he undid the undoing of the damage he tried to undo with his two “reconciliation” speeches. In front of a large audience, he fatally undermined his recent protest that Obama’s opponents have taken his sermon utterances grossly out of context.

Among the highlights, Wright said, “In biblical history, there’s not one word written in the Bible between Genesis and Revelations that was not written under one of six different kinds of oppression.” This, I suppose, is part of his justification for black liberation theology’s presumed reading of the Bible through the lens of race and oppression.

He also clarified his thoughts on reconciliation, plainly articulating that our “country’s leaders have refused to apologize” for slavery and “until racism and slavery are confessed and asked for forgiveness,” there can’t be reconciliation. He mentioned nothing, of course, about the Civil War. He also indignantly stood by his statement “God damn America,” saying, “God damns some practices.”

When given an opportunity to retract or soften his statement that the government lied about inventing HIV as a means of genocide against African-Americans, he said, “I believe our government is capable of doing anything.” And he strongly refused to denounce Louis Farrakhan, saying, “Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains.”

In view of Wright’s elucidations, I find it difficult to understand how the candidacy of Barack Obama cannot be mortally wounded by his longtime, voluntary and intimate association with this man. How can Obama possibly preach national harmony, reconciliation and bipartisanship coming from this type of church culture — which Wright appears to say harbors an unforgiving spirit? Where else, if not from his church, are we to assume Obama gets his ideas on reconciliation?

But in the interest of that spirit of bipartisanship to which Obama claims to aspire, let me also confess that I can’t begin to comprehend John McCain’s regrettable condemnation of North Carolina Republicans for reasonably raising the Wright issue — which, by the way, is bigger than John McCain or his candidacy. Nor can I understand McCain’s belated halfhearted about-face on this subject.

The Rev. Wright is certainly entitled to his opinions, and he is certainly entitled to deliver them from his pulpit — tax questions aside. And John McCain is certainly entitled to continually bite the hand that feeds him.

But voters also have rights — and duties. Among them is their duty to decide whether they want to elevate to the presidency a man who can’t plausibly separate himself from the disturbing, toxic views of his own pastor.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Loyal Democrats should be grateful to Hillary Clinton, the Energizer Bunny of presidential politics, for her perseverance. Had she not stayed in the race against enormous pressure to bow out in favor of the media’s anointed one, Democrats would have ended up nominating that “seriously flawed” candidate.

But wait. They’re almost destined to anyway. They have little choice. How can they avoid nominating Barack Obama — no matter how compromised he has become?

Just consider the magnitude of the Democrats’ dilemma. They desperately want to regain the White House. They believed, as did political oddsmakers, the stars were lining up to make 2008 their banner year for both the presidential and congressional elections. Barack Obama had emerged as seemingly the most impressive candidate in years.

But when things seem too good to be true, they usually are. There was no way Obama could measure up to the supernatural image his supporters and the media painted of him. But little did we know that he would crash so far and so fast, that he was not only not messianic but also, like Hillary, “seriously flawed,” in the words of Washington Post columnist David Broder.

Despite Obama’s string of successes, he hasn’t been able to win any major states, except for his home state of Illinois. He got blown out in Pennsylvania, even against the other “seriously flawed” candidate, who recently reminded voters, via sniper tall tales, of her propensity to prevaricate.

While Obama distinguished himself in the early debates, he damaged himself in recent ones, showing much less poise under fire than we’d come to expect. He replaced Hillary as whiner in chief when ABC’s debate moderators put him on the hot seat about his personal relationships and his elitist statements that disparaged millions of Americans.

No matter how much apologists insist his longtime association with the Rev. Wright is irrelevant, a good percentage of Americans will not be fooled. No matter how glibly Fox News’ Alan Colmes speciously claims it’s unfair to impute to Obama the views of former terrorist William Ayers, it’s damning enough that Ayers and everything he stands for don’t viscerally repulse Obama. How can Americans prudently entrust the Oval Office to a man who would have anything to do with a self-professed, unrepentant Pentagon bomber, much less allow this anarchist to throw a state Senate fundraiser for him?

It’s hard to see how he overcomes Wright, Ayers and the gratuitous, categorical insult to small-town Americans and other disclosures that are sure to follow. And if all that weren’t enough, Republicans will be prepared to use Obama’s history of uncompromising, extreme liberalism to undermine his claim to be a bipartisan uniter. He’ll have difficulty, for example, explaining away his radical and heartless position supporting partial-birth abortion and, some argue, even certain cases of infanticide.

Despite all these revelations and what they portend for Obama’s electability, Democrats face two possibly insurmountable obstacles to dumping Obama: their purported commitment to small “d” democracy and the race issue.

We’ve heard them selectively bellyaching for eight years that “every vote must count.” But has anyone ever stopped to notice that the very superdelegate system Democratic Party hacks devised was designed precisely to circumvent that principle? It’s the best evidence since Democrats tried to disenfranchise military voters that they don’t believe their own hype about counting every vote.

The superdelegate system was put into place to allow party bosses to manage just this kind of dilemma, where they discover late in the game — after most votes have been cast already — that their leading candidate might not be suitable or electable after all. The system would empower them to substitute their preferred candidate for the popularly chosen one.

The superdelegate process gets little attention when things go well, but now that it could be invoked to supersede the will of the popularly chosen pledged delegates, it’s a whole new ballgame.

If the candidate were the screaming Howard Dean, the superdelegates could dump him with much greater ease. But with Obama, the race issue necessarily comes into play.

If the pooh-bahs decide to throw Obama overboard after he has come so close to capturing the nomination, it is inconceivable to me that a large number of African-Americans — not to mention the far left of the party — won’t believe he was robbed, in no small part because of his race.

The nation can ill afford to endure such racial bitterness, but the Democratic Party may not survive with it. We all know the party depends on a statistically monolithic constituency in the African-American community, without which it couldn’t even be competitive in national elections.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario now in which Obama doesn’t capture the nomination, even if he continues to tank. If Hillary’s resurgence continues, she’ll have strong arguments in favor of her nomination, but they’ll have to fall on deaf ears.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Barack Obama, stubbornly clinging to his right to be charismatically shallow, at first complained that Hillary Clinton was unfairly criticizing him for being all flair and fluff with no substance. Now he’s upset that Clinton and the media won’t let him discuss substance. Based on some of his speeches lately, I’m thinking he ought to be grateful for the diversion because his policy proposals might not survive serious scrutiny.

Maybe it’s unfair to interpret literally Obama’s repeated stump speech assertion that we Americans aren’t perfect but are “perfectible” and conclude he possesses a New Age or secular humanist worldview rather than a Christian one, which clearly rejects the notion of man’s perfectibility.

Then again, his policy proposals do sound strikingly utopian — almost as if he’s saying we truly can achieve perfection, end poverty, eradicate health care problems, establish universal harmony, legislate away all corruption, and attain wholesale energy independence without, by the way, liberating ourselves from the shackles of enviro-policemen, who forbid us from exploiting our own resources.

Obama’s pitch to fawning audiences is so hopelessly idealistic and his promises so painfully unrealistic that it’s amazing he’s taken as seriously as he is.

If George W. Bush were to deliver the pap Obama routinely includes in his speeches, he’d be laughed off the stage. “Saturday Night Live” skits would be hard-pressed to exaggerate the vacuousness of his utterances. In fact, I’d be surprised if sympathetic journalists weren’t cleaning up Obama’s quotes before publishing them. But YouTube isn’t so forgiving. “We believe we can change, and that’s the kind of hope I’m talking about.”

Obama says he understands that solving our problems “won’t be easy,” but when you listen closely, you get the sense he really does believe that with minor governmental tweaks, the problems will magically disappear.

When discussing the corrupting influence of money in politics, he implies that if we would just neutralize lobbyists, legislators would attend to the “people’s interests” rather than “special interests.”

But this fallaciously presumes there is a basic consensus among Americans as to what is in their (and the nation’s) best interests.

Our differences are not just born of corruption or process. We don’t always agree on what the problems are, much less their solutions. Even if it were possible to eliminate money corruption from politics, we’d still have the red-state/blue-state divide. We’d still have people in small towns, Mr. Obama, holding fast to their religion and their guns, and we’d still have an urbane coastal elite looking down their noses at them.

Purging the lobbyists would not usher in a new era of harmony; ideological differences, which proceed largely from worldview, have always existed and always will. If Obama were actually committed to unity, he could promote something less ambitious than ideological nirvana in America. He could encourage his fellow liberals to quit polarizing people on grounds of race, economic status or gender. Indeed, Obama contributes to poisoning those waters when he blithely states we’d do a better job of addressing our education problems if we didn’t look at the plight of black and Latino kids and say, “That’s not our problem.”

Please speak for yourself, Mr. Obama, for it is liberals such as you who oppose school vouchers aimed at freeing kids from entrapment in inner-city schools.

Instead, Superintendent Obama will decree that government “invest” in early childhood education, presumably so Big Brother can begin the indoctrination process earlier. He’ll make public schools put more emphasis on art, music, science and poetry. He’ll make college more affordable to everyone.

Obama’s unrealism also dominates his approach to foreign policy. He insists he doesn’t just want to end our involvement in the Iraq war but “end the mindset that gets us into war.” He admonishes us not to focus on the “common enemy,” but on restoring “a sense of diplomacy.” Employing a stunningly novel concept, he’d try to resolve our differences with other nations without resorting to war.

Setting aside that George Bush did exhaust all realistic diplomatic avenues before attacking Iraq, Obama’s recurring theme rears its naive head again: We can all get along — even terrorists — if we remove the arbitrary barriers against believing in man’s perfectibility and that even terrorists and tyrants aren’t evil.

Obama’s health care proposals are similarly fantastic. He would provide every American with coverage that’s at least equal to that of members of Congress. With his executive wand, he would reduce everyone’s premiums by $2,500 a year and outlaw exclusions for pre-existing conditions. Dr. Barack would also mandate that the health care industry focus more on prevention and primary care. But wait, there’s more: He’ll accomplish all this by the end of his first term.

This is just a sampling. But what’s scarier than Obama’s far-fetched promises is that people — in droves — believe them. We must hope others are paying closer attention.

Popularity: 5% [?]

The dirty little secret about Barack Obama’s indictment of flyover country is that he said what liberals, including Hillary Clinton, believe. Sufficient proof of this can be found in the liberal outrage at Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate, where Obama was pressed both by the moderators and Clinton to explain Bitter-gate, Wright-gate, Ayers-gate and Flag pin-gate.

Consider the uncannily similar reactions of columnists Tom Shales and Stephen Silver.

Shales expressed indignation that ABC News moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos would dare ask Obama to justify his insulting remarks about small-town Americans and his relationships with certain anti-American people.

Shale’s fumed, “For the first 52 minutes … Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with.”

Shales was particularly perturbed that Stephanopoulos “came up with such tired tripe as a charge that Obama once associated with a nutty bomb-throwing anarchist.”

He was equally peeved at Gibson for bringing up, “yet again, the controversial ravings of the pastor at a church attended by Obama.”

Columnist Silver is annoyed that Gibson and Stephanopoulos “asked shamefully superficial and gotcha-oriented questions” and for the first half of the debate dwelt only on “rehashes of the nonsense non-stories of the past month — it was all-Wright, all-’bitter,’ all-Bosnia sniper fire, all flag pin all the time.” These were all, wrote Silver, “questions about nothing.”

Silver characterized the recent stories about Obama’s association with unrepentant terrorist William Ayers as “the sort of stuff that only right-wing bloggers and e-mail forwarders care about.”

Excuse the quotes, but nothing captures the sneering condescension of media liberals better than their own words.

What do the assessments of these two fairly typical liberal columnists have in common? Well, quite simply their agreement that reports about Obama’s pastor, his terrorist friend and his obvious contempt for small-town Americans are superficial distractions that are irrelevant to Obama’s suitability for the highest office in the land.

The mainstream media’s trivialization of this string of damning stories on Obama brings into sharp relief the ever-widening worldview chasm that separates liberals from conservatives. For them to let Obama get away with brushing off his elitist, contemptuous remarks about small-town Americans as a mistake or as a mere “mangling of words” proves they not only don’t understand the gravity of the insult but also probably agree with it.

It is impossible to spin Obama’s statement as misspeak. As witnessed by his “typical white person” remark, Obama liberally engages in the type of stereotypical thinking he so readily condemns in others. If a conservative had offered such stereotyping, it would be off with his small-town head.

The Obama stories are anything but superficial and couldn’t be more relevant. Obama has revealed more about himself by advertising his obvious misapprehension of what makes small-town Americans tick and his voluntary associations with a racist, anti-American, obscenity-spewing pastor and an unrepentant terrorist than we could ever learn through rote repetition of his policy preferences.

It’s astonishing that a man who is nearly deified by his admirers and personality-cultist groupies as a “post-racial” unifier displays such disrespect for his fellow Americans. How could so-called small-town Americans warm to the candidacy of a man who presumes they attend church, own guns and oppose illegal immigration because of bitterness and bigotry? What indescribable arrogance and elitism.

When someone is so fundamentally wrong about such fundamental things, he clearly does not have the requisite judgment to be president of the United States. For the mainstream media to be wholly oblivious to the hyper-relevance of these stories demonstrates they are on the left side of that chasm that separates Americans according to their worldviews. They are so eaten up with their own self-assurance, superiority and elitism that they are blinded to their own bias.

If Hillary weren’t so widely disliked, the Obama stories might be devastating to his candidacy. But the media don’t get this either, thinking that Obama’s failure to plummet in the polls is because Americans don’t care about these stories. There’s nothing there; let’s move on.

If they’re right — that Americans don’t care that this presidential candidate looks down on them based on categorical assumptions by which he has sized them up, thinks he knows better than they do about what motivates them, what’s in their best interests and that government largesse is their only salvation — we’re in worse shape than I thought.

If I’m right, these are big stories that won’t — and by all means shouldn’t — be ignored.

Popularity: 5% [?]

One of the silver linings of the mostly dismal presidential campaign has been that Democrats have finally come to see — perhaps admit is a better word — that the Clintons are pathological and ruthless power addicts. But that late-coming epiphany looks increasingly irrelevant, as the ascendancy of Barack Obama delivers a whole new set of deeply troubling concerns.

Democrats — all but committed to this fresh, charismatic figure — are forced to deny or downplay the almost daily revelations about Obama that would have derailed less promising candidates already. But they have to be concerned.

Given Obama’s uncompromising liberalism, it was only a matter of time before his pretense toward unity and bipartisanship would be exposed for the mirage that it is. The contentiousness of the Democratic contest has just accelerated the process.

As these damaging items slowly dripped out about Obama, he was able to brush them aside dismissively. You’ll recall his refusal to wear a flag pin, his categorical statement that “it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances,” his assessment that the lives of our fallen soldiers in Iraq have been “wasted,” his mindless promise to withdraw troops from Iraq according to an irresponsibly arbitrary timetable, and his naive remark that he would attach no preconditions to negotiating with the tyrants of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea.

The cumulative force of Obama’s common-themed actions and statements would have compelled even a statistician to doubt they could be attributed to coincidence. Wasn’t an objective pattern emerging to suggest that Obama would hardly be the fiercest guardian of America’s national security interests?

Nor have reports of his voluntary alliances and allegiances done anything to remove those doubts. Everyone paying attention knows by now that a number of people intimately associated with Obama have made derogatory statements about this nation he seeks to lead.

His wife, Michelle, stunned people with her admission that Barack’s rise to power and the people’s hunger for change made her “really proud” of her country “for the first time in (her) adult lifetime.” This was his soul mate speaking.

Even more people are aware of the incendiary, vulgar, anti-American and racist tirades of Obama’s longtime pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Obama’s lip-service condemnation of Wright’s statements, which Obama unconvincingly pretended not to have heard, still might have defied all natural laws of credulity and fooled the majority of the people were it not for further shoes that were destined to drop.

Then there’s Obama’s mysterious association with former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers — whose group bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon and the State Department in the 1970s — which would have been enough to end any other presidential candidacy. So far, the mainstream media have shown no curiosity about the nature and extent of Obama’s relationship with Ayers, despite Ayers’ lack of repentance and defiant statements, “I don’t regret setting bombs” and “I feel we didn’t do enough.”

If all this weren’t enough to make us wonder whether Obama has issues with America, he made sure we know when telling us that small-town Americans, because of their bitterness about economic hardship, cling to religion, guns and hostility toward immigrants.

With such distorted perceptions about his fellow citizens, it’s no wonder Obama appears bitter and angry at this nation. Given his experience with hostility emanating from his own pastor’s pulpit, it’s not surprising that he sees Middle America through that jaundiced prism and jumps to the perverse conclusion that small-town Americans turn to God out of bitterness. Obama has some nerve presuming to lecture the rest of us about prejudice and being out of touch with what people think.

Obama couldn’t be more wrong about what motivates people to seek a relationship with God. Though this may not compute for the liberation-theology mindset, it seems to me people turn to God in humble repentance, seeking forgiveness for their own sins and shortcomings rather than validation for their bitterness and permission to continue sinning. They go in pursuit of that “hope” Obama waxes so eloquently about, but they tend to place their reliance on God rather than government as the source of their hope.

More and more, when Obama talks about the alleged “antipathy” people have toward “people who aren’t like them,” one can’t help but speculate whether he’s projecting his own feelings of antipathy and bitterness toward others and the nation.

Even Obama’s slick tongue will have difficulty deflecting the conclusion that his assessment of God-loving Americans as embittered, gun-toting nativists is of a piece with his wife’s regrettable remarks and the disturbing fulminations of his beloved pastor.

If Obama wants to hold himself out as a tolerant, colorblind uniter, he should do a far better job of walking that walk.

Popularity: 5% [?]

While there is plenty of room for robust debate about Iraq, what concerns me is that the direction of this discussion has, ironically, taken our eyes off the real ball, which is our national security.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe the Iraq war has everything to do with our national security. How we proceed — whether we maintain sufficient forces there to ensure the nation’s long-term stability or prematurely withdraw with reckless disregard for the consequences — is critically relevant to our national security.

But instead of focusing on the national security implications, we are perennially bogged down in quibbling over the partisan flash points of whether we should have attacked Iraq in the first place or whether we’re being perceived as liberators or imperialists.

Have any of the Democratic presidential candidates ever been asked, for example, whether they’ve considered the consequences of withdrawing our troops according to an arbitrary time schedule they have fashioned for political purposes?

They are forever excused for dodging this question on the illogical basis that the consequences of a precipitous withdrawal are not their responsibility. They didn’t get us into this war in the first place (allowing here, of course, for a willing suspension of disbelief as to Hillary’s assertion that she was deceived into voting for the Iraq war resolution).

Also, the media gives Democrats a free ride on this point because of their shared assumption that we stirred up an Islamist hornet’s nest by invading Iraq. As such, withdrawal can’t possibly produce negative security consequences because it would reverse that reason for Islamist angst against us.

And don’t forget that Democrats refuse to discern that Iraq is a part of the war on terror and so, regardless of the specific consequences to Iraq if we hastily withdraw, it will not impact our national security significantly.

By contrast, I think most Republicans, in varying degrees, believe Iraq is part of the war. Even if we were wrong about Saddam’s Iraq being a terrorist-sponsoring state at the time we attacked — which I strongly reject — our terrorist enemies have made it their business to make Iraq part of the war.

Both al-Qaida, our primary jihadist enemy, and Iran, an undeniably terrorist-sponsoring state, are committed to defeating America in Iraq and thwarting the new Iraqi government. Al-Qaida’s global war against us will persist, irrespective of our invasion of or withdrawal from Iraq.

Even if Democrats know in their heart of hearts that withdrawing too soon will damage our national security, they have a vested interest in stubbornly adhering to their politically advantageous line that we wrongfully attacked Iraq (because Bush allegedly lied about WMD, etc.) and won’t give it up. They’re not about to forfeit this powerful hammer that can always be used to bludgeon Republicans. And they accuse Bush of politicizing the war!

Unfortunately, timid Republicans — just as on the issues of race, tax cuts, entitlement reform, health care and others — too often act ashamed, defeated and apologetic, instead of taking the offensive themselves and shaming the Democrats for their irresponsible positions. Republicans have virtually conceded the high ground on the question of whether we should have attacked Iraq — although there are dozens of justifications and although most Democrats joined them — and thus begin at a disadvantage in any discussion about the issue. Almost anything they say on national security matters seems to be tainted by this unspoken and unwarranted concession.

But the paramount issue of our day, and of our future, remains national security. Quite apart from Iraq, the parties have radically different approaches to this issue, and Republicans need to do a better job of articulating the life-and-death distinctions involved.

In a nutshell, Democrats are hard-wired against recognizing the nature, depth and intensity of the Islamist global threat against us. Their addiction to the Western-denigrating nostrums of multiculturalism and distorted notions of “tolerance” prohibit them from perceiving the enormity of the terrorist presence within Islam. Republicans, to a far lesser degree, have been cowed by political correctness into downplaying the threat, as well.

Far too many on the left believe we can find common ground with terrorists and their state sponsors if we will just quit pushing our weight around on the global stage and open a dialogue with tyrants such as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Those possessed of slightly more realism understand that we’re in this war for the long haul, Iraq or no Iraq, bases in Saudi Arabia or not, Gitmo or no Gitmo, waterboarding or no waterboarding. We are the infidels — and that will not change until we are destroyed or submit.

Not until we recognize that — and it shouldn’t have to take another 9/11 to remind us — can we properly protect ourselves. These are the issues that must be center stage in this election campaign, not whether we were justified in invading Iraq.

Popularity: 5% [?]