But the Oval Office has never seen a prevaricator quite like President Obama.

President Obama has forged his entire political career around his ability to be whatever others want him to be. As Obama himself put it in his second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their views.” But Obama isn’t just a blank screen: he is a Magic Mirror.

That’s why Obama has routinely puffed up and bulked out his autobiography, pandering to different audiences based on political necessity. While other politicians may craft their messages to appeal to diverse groups, Obama crafts himself. Many politicians flip-flop; Obama is the only politician who flip-flops on his own biography.

Hence the importance of the fact that Obama’s literary agency when he was trying to sell a book stated he was “born in Kenya” – and that Obama allowed that biography to go uncorrected for 16 years, until after he launched his campaign for the presidency.

In his early life, it helped Obama to lie about himself in terms of race. He admits to it in Dreams From My Father: “I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.”

As he entered college, it helped Obama to craft himself as an exotic international, as David Maraniss reported in Vanity Fair. So he did.

In his post-college career, it helped Obama to portray himself as a racial radical, someone who could be comfortable in the pews of Jeremiah Wright and the company of Derrick Bell, but wouldn’t be comfortable with a white composite girlfriend he created in Dreams From My Father. And so he became that man.

It also helped him to be seen as a class warrior, the kind of fellow who had given up a burgeoning Wall Street career to fight for the poverty-stricken underclass – which is why, in Dreams From My Father, he neglects to mention that the Wall Street firm for which he worked, Business International Group, was essentially a tiny sweatshop, that he never climbed the food chain, and that he remained a low-level worker for the brief period of time he was there.

As his career progressed, it benefited Obama to portray himself as a moderate. That’s when he crafted his life into a story of a unified America rather than a divided America. In his earlier period, in Dreams, Obama indicted American society for “the tragedy” of his “mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds.” In his later period, by the time he was running for president, he’d claim that his racial background was an embodiment of America’s dedication to racial equality.

My first experience with Israel Apartheid week came back in 2000 at UCLA, when I was greeted on campus with pamphlets openly fundraising for Hamas and Hezbollah.

It was a spectacle I’d see repeated year after year. Just before September 11, the Muslim student newspaper Al-Talib ran a story joking about changing the name of the magazine to Al-Taliban and making Osama Bin Laden editor-in chief.

Every year, I’d ask the editorial team at the UCLA Daily Bruin to run a column on the association between the Muslim Student Association and terror groups; each year, they’d turn me down. Finally, after they decided to run a piece I’d written on the subject, they submitted it to the MSA directly for vetting. The piece never ran.

That was over ten years ago. But nothing has changed.

The University of California system is dominated by Israel Apartheid Week at least once per year per campus; in a not-coincidental correlation, anti-Semitic incidents on campuses seem to be rising.

On March 8, UC president Mark Yudof wrote an open letter decrying the hate. “Attempting to shout down speakers is not protected speech,” he wrote. “It is an action meant to deny others the right to free speech … What is not acceptable are hate-driven physical and … verbal attacks on any group or individual that are meant to silence or intimidate those who would express differing opinions.”

This week, congressional candidate Mark Reed called on Representatives Brad Sherman and Howard Berman to investigate anti-Semitism at University of California and California State University campuses. As Tammi Rossman Benjamin, Hebrew lecturer at UC Santa Cruz recently wrote in a complaint, “The harassing and intimidating environment for Jewish students has been worsened by the fact that NO other racial or national origin group on campus has been subjected by faculty or administrators to such hostile and demonizing criticism.”

Columnist Marsha Sutton of the Del Mar Times recalled one incident from June 2011, in which the UCSD libraries were shut down due to budget cuts. Palestinian activists immediately took over the buildings and hung Palestinian flags on them. When a Jewish student hung up an Israel flag, however, it was quickly torn down. “These actions,” writes Sutton, “would never be tolerated at a county or city library, so why are they permitted at a state-supported university library?”

“I have long wanted to make a film about the Dreyfus Affair, treating it not as a costume drama but as a spy story,” said Polanski. “In this way one can show its absolute relevance to what is happening in today’s world – the age-old spectacle of the witch-hunt of a minority group, security paranoia, secret military tribunals, out-of-control intelligence agencies, governmental cover-ups and a rabid press.”

He may want to make the story of Dreyfus into a leftist parable, but it was a real event with a real underlying cause. But Polanski has a history of ignoring real anti-Semitism in his films, despite the fact that he is a Holocaust survivor. The Pianist had several soft stereotypes of Jews in it, including guests in a café checking whether their gold coins are genuine; meanwhile, the film soft-pedals the brutality of the Germans – in the film’s climactic scene, the main character is let go by a German officer who is converted to kindness by the character’s piano-playing.

This is typical Hollywood. Anti-Semitism can never be treated as an actual phenomenon – instead, it is a metaphor for other suffering. No doubt; Emile Zola,  who exposed the Dreyfus prosecution as a fraud, will be portrayed not as an enterprising truth-teller, but as a synonym for today’s modern leftist press.

This stunt was followed by the Obama administration’s attempted legitimization of one of the top Egyptian presidential candidates, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, as a moderate. The Los Angeles Times went so far as to label Fotouh a “dynamic pragmatist.” Dynamic may not have been the right word – it’s too similar to dynamite, which is apparently Fotouh’s political method of choice. In 2004, he said, “I would personally hope to have a chance to bear arms to confront the US occupation in Iraq.” But happy days are here again on the Nile!

This, in the opinion of the Obama administration, is all charming multiculturalism. When the Egyptian parliament discusses bills allowing men to have sex with their dead wives, that’s just a lifestyle choice. When Chinese smugglers traffic pills filled with powdered human baby flesh, and when the Chinese government beats the wife of a dissident to force him to abandon the US embassy, that’s simply a disagreement about the meaning of freedom. And we can all agree to disagree, can’t we?

It’s time to stop worrying about the rest of the world, says the Obama administration. It’s time to start worrying about the real threat: us. This week, President Obama promised that the time had come to refocus from external enemies to the real battles that need fighting here at home. “After more than a decade of war,” he said in his weekly address, “it is time to focus on nation building here at home.”

This was one of Obama’s favorite themes during the 2008 campaign – the notion that Americans required fundamental change. It’s why Michelle assured Americans that “before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.”

We are, in short, a dangerous bunch. And we require government to fix our brokenness.

What was even weirder, though, was Obama’s language in embracing same-sex marriage:

[W]hen I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.

It’s easy to miss the key point in this Melville-ian sentence. It isn’t that Obama supports same-sex marriage. It’s that he thinks that soldiers, airmen, marines and sailors are “out there fighting on my behalf.”

Say what?

The members of the US military fight on behalf of all Americans, not Obama personally. Now, it’s possible that President Obama meant just that – he was expressing individual gratitude for a collective benefit we all receive from the military.

Or, it’s possible that Obama thinks that the troops are out there carrying out his work.

Based on Obama’s treatment of the killing of troops in the past, it’s quite likely the latter. Take, for example, Obama’s trip to South Korea in 2009, in which he told troops that they made a “pretty good photo-op.” Or Obama giving himself a shout-out for flying to Afghanistan last week … in the middle of giving shout-outs to actual troop units on the ground in country. Or, most egregiously, Obama patting himself on the back repeatedly regarding the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

Obama seems to see the troops as his personal plaything. It’s certainly true politically – last week, he announced that on behalf of the troops, he would be transforming America:

As a new greatest generation returns from overseas, we must ask ourselves, what kind of country will they come back to? Will it be a country where a shrinking number of Americans do really well while a growing number barely get by? Or will it be a country where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules – a country with opportunity worthy of the troops who protect us?

The troops are a prop for Obama. They either do his bidding abroad so that he’s free to pursue his agenda at home, or they can be used as excuses to push for a more socialistic government domestically.

Even when Obama is attempting to be self-effacing, his arrogance shines through. Troops, both gay and straight, should be offended by his tendency to politick with their sacrifice, and to treat their sacrifice as action on his personal behalf.

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This week, President Obama’s campaign put out an ad suggesting that had Mitt Romney been President of the United States, he wouldn’t have authorized the mission to “get Bin Laden.” That ad featured Bill Clinton – yes, the same Bill Clinton who routinely missed opportunities to get Bin Laden – stating that Obama took “the harder and the more honorable path.” Then these words appear on the screen: “Which path would Mitt Romney have taken?”

The answer: the same path as every President of the United States in the history of the country. Even Jimmy Carter (as Romney said)  would have had no problem making this call. The fact that we were all surprised – and face it, we were – when President Obama ordered the hit is evidence that we didn’t expect him to do the right thing.

In fact, as the evidence shows, Obama did the right thing  only after safely ensuring that should anything go awry, he’d have someone to blame. Here’s the memo that then-CIA head Leon Panetta wrote about the Obama order:

Received phone call from Tom Donilon who stated that the President made a decision with regard to AC1 [Abbottabad Compound 1]. The decision is to proceed with the assault.

The timing, operational decision making and control are in Admiral McRaven’s hands. The approval is provided on the risk profile presented to the President. Any additional risks are to be brought back to the President for his consideration. The direction is to go in and get bin Laden and if he is not there, to get out. Those instructions were conveyed to Admiral McRaven at approximately 10:45 am.

Notice anything odd here? There are a few elements that are strange. First, Obama places all operational authority under Admiral McRaven (who, by the way, received exactly zero credit in any of this). To ensure that Obama would be able to throw McRaven under the bus should things go south, he spelled out that the approval was based only on the “risk profile presented to the President.” Any additional risks were to be “brought back to the President for his consideration.”

This is strange language. Typically, it is understood that a president is giving orders based on the risk profile presented – what else would he give approval for an operation based upon? The extra sentence here spelling out how Obama might stop the mission if the risk profile changed  is extraneous. More than that, it’s troubling – military situations are always fluid, and the risk profile constantly changes. Were the military to update President Obama with every change in risk profile, the operation would never take place.

This is the Rodney King case. And it’s worth remembering because the similarities between it and the Trayvon Martin case are far too eerie to ignore.  And its worth remembering too that the King case ended with a major American city in flames.

On March 2, 1991, Rodney King and two of his friends, Bryant Allen and Freddie Helms, were driving through Los Angeles. King was driving drunk – probably twice the legal blood-alcohol limit. At 12:30 in the morning, two officers saw King speeding. They pursued King through the streets of Los Angeles, with King’s pedal to the metal and the speedometer hitting upwards of 80 mph in residential areas. King admitted later that he was trying to get away from the cops because a DUI would put him back in prison for violating parole on a robbery charge.

Eventually, officers surrounded King’s car. Allen and Helms surrendered quietly and were not harmed. King, however refused to emerge from the car. When he did, he reached for his waistband; one of the cops drew her weapon and told King to get on the ground. He complied. But when four cops – Officers Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno and Rolando Solano – went to subdue him, he lashed out at them. Officer Stacey Koon then tasered King. But King refused to go down. The officers, recognizing that tasers should immediately lay low those struck with them, believed that King was on PCP.

That’s when the famous taping began. Powell, Wind, and Briseno began beating King, who continued to try to get up. After 56 blows, King finally lay still.

Initially, the police dismissed the video; the person taping then gave it to the media. The outcry was deafening. The full facts of the case weren’t made available to the public – the public was left with the impression that the officers simply decided to beat up a slightly uncooperative black man.

Koon, Powell, Briseno and Wind were charged with use of excessive force. The original jury trial was supposed to take place in a heavily minority area, but was transferred to Simi Valley, a heavily white area. The four officers were essentially acquitted.

And riots broke out. Huge riots across South Central Los Angeles. Stores were looted. Asian-owned stores in particular were targeted and burned to the ground.

She continued, “It’s an amazing experience – one that could change your life while shaping this country for decades to come.” Change again! But it’s the mode of change that was interesting  in Michelle’s pitch: “If you take a position as a fellow, you’ll help more people to step up at the local level, where there are so many opportunities to make so much change. You’ll register voters, recruit and train volunteers, run phone banks, have conversations with people on their front porches, and build the relationships that will bring your community together to fight for progress.”

That’s a busy summer. Let’s take these elements one at a time. First, Michelle wants me to help people step up at the local level. She doesn’t really define that. Somehow, I doubt she wants me to give job training that would encourage people to support their families. She probably isn’t interested in me filing LLC papers for folks so they can get a business started. She also doesn’t want me passing the hat for charitable causes or getting socially disorganized kids into church groups that might help them. “Stepping up,” according to Michelle, means shilling for her husband.  After four long years, change has come down to getting her husband getting a second term. What kind of change is this?  The king in the familiar aphorism, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

But there’s more. I can register voters, too. Now, as a general matter, I’m not much for registering voters. That’s because if people don’t care enough to have registered, I don’t want them voting. It’s not difficult to register to vote – you can do it quickly and easily. It’s your civic duty to figure out how to make yourself eligible for the vote. In fact, you can even walk into a library or post office and pick up a form. That’s part of citizenship. If you haven’t bothered to register, I’m not enthused about your vote cancelling mine out. I’m fine with fewer voters – too many voters already vote based not on the positions of the candidates, but on whether they “seem like a nice guy.” The last thing I want is more ignorant voters.

The same is not true for the left.

Mainstream figures on the American left rub elbows with anti-Semites on a regular basis. Many of them embrace the anti-Semitic program of forcing Israel into concessions to terror groups like Hamas. And many of them sit in Congress.

Even as Israel faces attack from Iran, Egypt, and Gaza, 74 House Democrats joined J Street, the radical front group for George Soros that essentially advocates for the destruction of the State of Israel. J Street, as Breitbart.com editor-in-chief Joel Pollak has pointed out, has supported the morally depraved Goldstone Report and opposed sanctions against Iran. J Street has purportedly backed off of some of these positions, likely at the behest of the Obama administration, which has been feeling so much heat from the Jewish community that it reportedly asked Media Matters to dump its in-house anti-Semite, M.J. Rosenberg.

The newest J Street initiative is the Cohen-Yarmuth-Connolly letter, named after three members of Congress: Steve Cohen (D-TN), John Yarmuth (D-KY), and Gerry Connolly (D-VA). The letter itself pushed the Obama administration to take a harsher role in the peace process, effectively forcing Israel into concessions to terror groups. Here’s a full list of the signatories to J Street’s letter:

Steve Cohen (TN-9)

Gerald Connolly (VA-11)

John Yarmuth (KY-3)

Tammy Baldwin (WI-2)

Earl Blumenauer (OR-3)

Suzanne Bonamici (OR-1)

Bruce Braley (IA-1)

Lois Capps (CA-23)

Michael Capuano (MA-8)

Andre Carson (IN-7)

Hansen Clarke (MI-13)

William Lacy Clay (MO-1)

Emanuel Cleaver II (MO-5)

John Conyers, Jr. (MI-14)

Jim Cooper (TN-5)

Danny Davis (IL-7)

Susan Davis (CA-53)

Peter DeFazio (OR-4)

Diana DeGette (CO-1)

Rosa DeLauro (CT-3)

John Dingell (MI-15)

Lloyd Doggett (TX-25)

Mike Doyle (PA-14)

Donna Edwards (MD-4)

Keith Ellison (MN-5)

Anna Eshoo (CA-14)

Sam Farr (CA-17)

Chaka Fattah (PA-2)

Bob Filner (CA-51)

Charlie Gonzalez (TX-20)

Raul Grijalva (AZ-7)

Luis Gutierrez (IL-4)

Martin Heinrich (NM-1)

Maurice Hinchey (NY-22)

Rush Holt (NJ-12)

Jesse Jackson, Jr. (IL-2)

Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX-30)

Hank Johnson (GA-4)

Ron Kind (WI-3)

Barbara Lee (CA-9)

John Lewis (GA-5)

Dave Loebsack (IA-2)

Stephen Lynch (MA-9)

Edward Markey (MA-7)

Betty McCollum (MN-4)

Jim McDermott (WA-7)

Jim McGovern (MA-3)

Brad Miller (NC-13)

George Miller (CA-7)

James Moran (VA-8)

Eleanor Holmes Norton (DC)

John Olver (MA-1)

Ed Pastor (AZ-4)

Chellie Pingree (ME-1)

Jared Polis (CO-2)

David Price (NC-4)

Charles Rangel (NY-15)

Laura Richardson (CA-37)

Lucille Roybal-Allard (CA-34)

Bobby Rush (IL-1)

Jan Schakowsky (IL-9)

Kurt Schrader (OR-5)

Louise Slaughter (NY-28)

Adam Smith (WA-9)

Pete Stark (CA-13)

Mike Thompson (CA-1)

John Tierney (MA-6)

Paul Tonko (NY-21)

Nydia Velazquez (NY-12)

Chris Van Hollen (MD-8)

Melvin Watt (NC-12)

Henry Waxman (CA-30)

Peter Welch (VT-AL)

Lynn Woolsey (CA-6)

This week, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released video showing a young white man entering a polling place in Washington D.C. to vote in the presidential primary.

He walked  up to the desk and asked a poll worker for the ballot of Attorney General Eric Holder, and gave Holder’s address. The worker began to hand him the ballot, at which point the young man said he wanted to show his identification. “You don’t need it,” the poll worker replied. “It’s all right. As long as you’re in here, you’re on our list, and that’s who you say you are, you’re okay.”

The tape broke huge, with Matt Drudge championing it at the top of the Drudge Report. And sure enough, the Department of Justice, which sometimes plays to Drudge’s tune, responded with ire and outrage: “It’s no coincidence that these so-called examples of rampant voter fraud consistently turn out to be manufactured ones.”

Except, of course, that wasn’t the point. O’Keefe wasn’t voting fraudulently; he was showing the public how easy it would be for someone with bad motives to vote fraudulently. And the DOJ knew that – it would take a full-on fool not to understand that point.

But the DOJ has no interest in that point. It is  far more interested in leaving loopholes for voter fraud than in filling in those gaps.

Their stated motive for opposing voter ID is that increases the possibility of  racial bias. As the Associated Press recently reported, “Liberal groups have said the requirements are the product of Republican-controlled state governments and are aimed at disenfranchising people who tend to vote Democratic – African-Americans, Hispanics, people of low-income and college students.” The Justice Department, in attempting to stop the implement of Texas’ new voter ID law, cited the same rationale, explaining that “Hispanic voters in Texas are more than twice as likely than non-Hispanic voters to lack a driver’s license or personal state-issued photo ID.”

Why this should be true is anyone’s guess. It is certainly not due to institutional racism – if it were, then the state would be sued on a regular basis for violating the Civil Rights Act. There are two forms of photo-issued ID in Texas: driver’s licenses and simple identification cards. Both are available through simple applications. Voters must register to vote. Why shouldn’t they also have to register to receive an ID beforehand?

And it isn’t expensive to get an ID, either. An original driver’s license in Texas costs $16; a six-year extension costs $25. A photo ID costs $6. It costs less that a decent Carl’s Jr. meal to register for identification.

The speech covered all the same ground as the rest of his speeches lately: he’s declaring class warfare on the rich. In this speech, though, he went into particular depth on his vision of economics. Or rather, his blindness with regard to economics.

Obama casts his re-election campaign as a debate between becoming a nation “where a shrinking number of people are doing really, really well, but a growing number are struggling to get by,” and a nation where “everybody gets a fair shot … does a fair share … plays by the same set of rules.”

There’s only one problem with this – Obama isn’t on the side he thinks he’s on. According to Robert Reich, Obama’s interim economic advisor, Obama’s supposed economic recovery has gone almost entirely to the top 1%. So his economy is the economy creating unfairness – greater government interventionism does not translate into greater prosperity for those who are not top earners.

But Obama continued. “This is the defining issue of our time,” he said. He admitted that “Government is not the answer to everything.” And he added that the free market “is the greatest force for economic progress in history.” But, he said – and you knew there would be a but – “through our government,we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.”  What kinds of things can’t we do well? Apparently we’re bad at education – although private education routinely outstrips public education in terms of performance. Apparently, we’re bad on our own at health care – even though the most highly-privatized sectors of our health care economy are also the most efficient. And apparently we’re bad at saving our money for the future – even though Social Security is an enormous Ponzi scheme that has essentially gone bankrupt.

No, said Obama, we need government for all of that. “This is not some socialist dream,” he blathered. “They have been made by Democrats and Republicans for generations, because they benefit all of us and they lead to strong and durable economic growth.”

This is nonsense. Worse, it is ahistoric nonsense. Every major government program undertaken by this country has cramped economic growth. Government has exploded over the last decade, but our living standards are essentially the same as they were ten years ago. The programs Obama is so fond of quoting are in dire need of reform – if they’re not reformed, they will be gone within the next two decades. Obama himself is cutting $500 billion from Medicare in order to fund his greater government.

But we still haven’t gotten to the crux of Obama’s vision. Here it is: “When we guarantee basic security for the elderly or the sick or those who are actively looking for work, that doesn’t make us weak.  What makes us weak is when fewer Americans can afford to buy the products that businesses are selling, when fewer people are willing to take risks and start their new business, because if it doesn’t work out they worry about feeding their families …. In this country, prosperity has never trickled down from the wealthy few.  Prosperity has always come from the bottom up, from a strong and growing middle class.”

But he has one problem: the First Amendment does not allow him, as president, to use the power of government to fight his enemies. Obama’s solution to this dilemma lies in 501(c)3 charitable organizations working in close tandem with the federal government.

Here’s how it works. First, President Obama forges deep and abiding connections with like-minded charitable organizations. These are theoretically supposed to be non-partisan, but they are typically not – they have a direct line to the White House. So, for example, Media Matters for America coordinates routinely with the White House on important issues of the day. And they are experts at initiating so-called secondary boycotts.

Their expertise was honed in the Don Imus affair, as the Daily Caller reported. When Imus made offensive comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, Media Matters sprang into action, coordinating with other allies and pushing for a boycott of advertisers on Imus’ show. Soon, Imus was gone.

They quickly moved on to Lou Dobbs. They attempted to force his advertisers to stop buying time on his radio show; in particular, they looked to put pressure on Ford. And they were successful. By November 2009, Dobbs had moved on from CNN, to Media Matters’ delight.

All this time, Media Matters was working with the Obama Administration. Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, met regularly with Media Matters to plot strategy. Media Matters had weekly calls with the White House.

The stage was set. The actors were in place.

Their first joint target was Glenn Beck. While the White House claimed that Fox News wasn’t a “real” news channel, Media Matters worked the back channels, coordinating with Color of Change to “expose Glenn Beck’s racist rhetoric in an effort to educate advertisers about the practices on his show.”

What does it mean when the President of the United States tells the leader of a foreign nation that he has more “flexibility” to negotiate away U.S. Interests after he’s reelected?

It means the country is in serious trouble.

Last week, President Obama spoke with Dmitry Medvedev at an event in South Korea. What he didn’t realize is that his microphone was still on when he decided to get candid with the Russian president. “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense,” he said, “this can be solved, but it’s important for him [Putin] to give me space …. This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” Medvedev nodded and replied, “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you … I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.” And then he said, “I stand with you.”

So, what’s the problem? The mainstream media certainly didn’t seem to see one. They thought that this was just Obama being “too honest” – obviously, he will have more flexibility after winning re-election.

But there’s more to it than that. This is the President of the United States telling a country that is effectively an enemy – Russia has variously backed Syria, Iran, China, and Venezuela in their anti-American plays – that we will hand them what they want should they take off the pressure for a few months. As usual, Obama has it wrong. The  job of the President of the United States is not to treat the people of the United States as an inconvenient obstacle to handing anti-American regimes what they want. The job of the President is to represent the people of the United States and their interests. Obama didn’t just reject that job, he took action directly in opposition to it.

But there’s even more to it than that. This is Obama’s entire re-election strategy.

Obama faces two particularly thorny issues with regard to his re-election effort. The first is oil prices, which have skyrocketed recently. The second is Iran.

When it comes to oil prices, Republicans have jumped on the president with both feet, blaming him for higher pump bills. That’s led Obama to do what he does best: blame others. This week, he blamed the big oil companies for rising gas prices, and suggested that their tax breaks be repealed (a proposal immediately rejected by the Democratic Senate).

Let’s begin with the media. The initial narrative they seized upon was one of George Zimmerman, a “white Hispanic,” targeting Martin for wearing a hoodie, tracking him down, beginning a fight with him, and murdering him. Afterward, the narrative goes, Martin was not arrested by the police because either the police were racist, or they completely misconstrued Florida’s “stand your ground” law.

To make this narrative work, the media had to paint Martin as a saint, and George Zimmerman as a devil. If they had cared about accuracy, they would have realized that the character of both the supposed victim and perpetrator was irrelevant – only the events of the night in question matter. Instead, they decided to tell the American public that Zimmerman was a racist pig, while Martin was a clean-cut young man with no history of suspicious behavior.

So they released a picture of Martin that was several years old and emphasizing his youthful innocence rather than a more recent picture showing his gold chains and tatts. They suggested that Martin was a model student, rather than a troubled young man suspended from school for carrying an empty marijuana baggy.

Meanwhile, Zimmerman was portrayed as a latent member of the Ku Klux Klan, even though he was a mentor to two teenage kids of a black woman in Florida, and helped in a fundraiser for a black church.

So what’s the real story? According to police, Martin attacked Zimmerman by punching him and knocking him down; he then began slamming his head into the sidewalk. Witnesses corroborated this account. Zimmerman then shot Martin in the chest. Zimmerman was found with bloody lacerations to the back of his head and a swollen lip, consistent with his story.

Did the media do anything good by pumping it as a racial narrative without clear evidence? Of course not. But they made hay, turning a local killing into a national issue.

President Obama was 34 years old in 1995. He was no longer a child, or a teen, or even a particularly young adult. He was a fully mature fellow, ready to run for the State Senate of Illinois. And here’s what he thought about the nature of race in America, particularly in times of economic turmoil:

In an environment of scarcity, where the cost of living is rising, folks begin to get angry and bitter and look for scapegoats. Historically, instead of looking at the top 5% of this country that controls all the wealth, we turn towards each other, and the Republicans have added to the fire.

Does this sound familiar? It should. That first sentence is almost a direct quote of President Obama’s infamous 2008 comments in San Francisco, when he ripped anyone who was not a toe-the-line liberal: “it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Obama was on this subject a solid 15 years ago. And it’s never left him.

Unfortunately, it’s supremely typical leftist-speak. Leftists believe that there is something pathologically wrong with those who disagree with them. Worse, it’s based in the notion that America is irredeemably racist, incapable of moving beyond skin color and making judgments based on logic. The idea that Americans immediately turn to blaming minorities demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the progress achieved in civil rights over the last fifty years. More than that, it dramatically underestimates the American people, who are manifestly not racist, and cannot be made so by bad economic times.

The second sentence, too, speaks to the modern Obama. It sounds like the most radical rhetoric of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Apparently, Americans aren’t wrong to scapegoat people for bad economic times – they’re just not scapegoating the right people. They should be scapegoating “the top 5% of this country that controls all the wealth.”

Why is it that the top 5% are innately responsible for the impoverished in America? Obama explains by citing his international background:

It’s about power. My travels made me sensitive to the plight of those without power and the issues of class and inequalities as it relates to wealth and power. Anytime you have been overseas in these so-called third world countries, one thing you see is the vast disparity of wealth of those who are part of power structure and those outside of it.

It’s not as though they haven’t tried this before. Whenever Democrats have trouble riling up voters about their agenda – as they are now – they quickly revert to their tried and true playbook. Specifically, page 138: “Drive a wedge between women and men. Women tend to vote liberal; if you can alienate them from men, they vote even more liberal.”  It comes right after the rule on page 137: “Use scare tactics about Social Security to get the votes of seniors.”

There’s only one problem: the scare about women isn’t  going to work.

The premise of an alleged Republican  war on women is faulty as well as sexist: it assumes that women are the mild and weak and require men to pay for their services. The Democrats, including columnists like Sally Kohn, lament the fact that in February 2011, “anti-choice Republicans pushed a rogue measure to cut off all federal funding from Planned Parenthood, even though less than 3% of services provided by Planned Parenthood are abortions, none of which are paid for using federal grant dollars. Still, Republicans saw an opportunity to fire up their fringe base while undermining a liberal-leaning advocacy organization.”

Meanwhile, stealth activist Sandra Fluke famously appeared before Congress to explain why a Catholic institution should pay for her birth control: “In the media lately, some conservative Catholic organizations have been asking what did we expect when we enroll in a Catholic school?
We can only answer that we expected women to be treated equally, to not have our school create untenable burdens that impede our academic success.”

But all of this assumes that women are incapable of providing their own contraception or pay for their own health care. This is sheer nonsense. Birth control costs $9 per month (and poor Fluke can afford it – she spent time recently in Spain and Italy with her boyfriend). Planned Parenthood is hardly the only health care provider. Independent women are willing for us to hear their roar – as they  tell everybody else that they can handle their own bodies, thank you very much. Even so, liberals still  contend that Republicans are fighting a war on women while they themselves try  to subsidize women to keep them  dependent.

In an interview with WFTV, President Obama suddenly discovered what it is that has troubled Americans about Marxism for well over a century. The crucial exchange occurred when Obama was asked about gas prices. “Well, as long as gas prices are going up, people are going to feel like I’m not doing enough, and I understand that,” Obama observed. “Ultimately, though, there’s no silver bullet.”

Then came the critical question. “Your opponents say they can get gas to the $2.50 range,” said the interviewer. “What do you think Americans should be OK with?” Obama, avoiding the question, shrugged, “First of all, nobody believes that. They know that’s just politics. Anybody who says we can get gas down to two bucks a gallon just isn’t telling the truth.”

But President Obama didn’t answer the question.

The real question is why he couldn’t. After all, this is a president who has stated over and over that prices and wages should be set on the basis of fairness. He tried to claw back Wall Street bonuses because investment bankers were making more than they “deserved” to make; he says the rich should pay their “fair share.”

The problem, of course, is that nobody knows what is fair—for wages, bonuses, or gas prices. Is it really fair for some people to pay a far lower percentage of their income to the federal government than others? Is it fair that some people buy ground chuck and others New York strip?

That he struggled to say  how much Americans should have to pay for gas should not have surprised the president. Economists have struggled for centuries to determine what people deserve to pay for precious commodities. . Invariably, they insist on more control of the economy, stating that the blind hand of the market simply cannot produce a fair and just system. That’s why Thomas Edison wrote, “What is wanted is some person familiar with the selling and buying, the technical as well as the financial end of all industries, to devise some generic scheme that business can work on.”

Top-down technocrats fail to understand how an undirected system can work so well. That’s because they don’t understand freedom. How can hundreds of millions of people, all pursuing their self-interest, create more wealth than hundreds of millions of people all directed toward a single end? How can fairness by achieved by seeming randomness rather than by hierarchical control of the right-minded?

Politics is deadly serious, but it is also fun. Andrew recognized that simple truth because he didn’t take himself, or anybody else, all that seriously. It was that genius for laughter that made him an iconic figure. Take, for example, his famed strategy for dealing with hate on Twitter: retweeting. For those who don’t engage in this vast chat room, Twitter can be a brutal experience: accusations and jokes flying fast and furious, your reputation on the line with each 140-character tweet. Andrew was a master of invective, of course – one of my favorite Andrew tweets came just before his death, when he called out David Brock: “Knew about David Brock’s party boy lifestyle. But the $8,000 Louis Vuitton suit bag & painted bust of a Roman soldier?! What taste!”

But he was more famous for retweeting the hate that came raining down on him daily – distributing the hate far and wide for everyone to see. His point was simple: nasty people deserve broad, not narrow viewing. Transparency is key.

That was a theme for Andrew. Don’t trust the media. Don’t trust the narrative you’re given. Figure it out yourself.

It was a perspective drawn from Andrew’s life experience. He grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish household in Brentwood, where he breezed through school without much effort; during college he was a slacker fed a steady stream of Frankfurt School critical theory. When he got back to Los Angeles and entered the real world, though, he realized that the hypocrisy of the left was endless. He recognized that political correctness was a weapon and, more importantly, a shield for the left.

Pat Buchanan was recently fired from MSNBC over his latest book.  It is not as if MSNBC suddenly realized that it had an  anti-Semite on staff. If they really cared about that, they would have fired him years ago. As I’ve written, they only hired him in order to use him as the cardboard cut-out conservative

Last week, Buchanan proved that point in full color. He did an interview on Russia Today – the Kremlin-sponsored channel that features radical leftists like Thom Hartmann – in which he tackled the issue of Israel and Iran. “There are people that want a war,” Buchanan said. He continued:

I mean, do not think no one wants a war. You don’t have wars unless someone wants it. And quite clearly the Israeli government would like to see the United States smash Iran’s nuclear program, which they think is creating the additions where Iran could, with one leap forward, get a bomb. The Israeli lobby would like to see a war. They support the Israeli government. Neoconservatives do. Many Republicans do. There are many Americans who genuinely believe that if Iran — they believe Iran is moving toward a weapon; and if it is, they would favor military action to prevent it. There are a number of people who want a war.

He went on to suggest that Israel’s position on this was a greater threat to the United States than Iranian nuclear weapons.

Now, Pat Buchanan has long been an anti-Semite. His repulsive publication, The American Conservative, is an isolationist tract featuring the writings of magazine co-founder and open Jew-hater Taki Theodoracopulos, who calls himself a “soi-disant antisemite.” He once characterized Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld as a “very homely, simian-looking Jew who couldn’t punch his way out of a nursery,” and remarked that the United States was in danger of becoming “Israel-occupied territory,” meaning that it would be controlled by “those nice guys who attack rock-throwing youth with armour-piercing missiles.” Said Theodoracopulos, “the way to Uncle Sam’s heart runs through Tel Aviv and Israeli-occupied territory.”

Buchanan himself is little better. He has engaged in Holocaust denial, stating that diesel exhaust couldn’t have killed 850,000 Jews at Treblinka; he’s criticized the U.S. government for its apology for sheltering Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk. William F. Buckley wrote of Buchanan: ”I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism.” As White House Communications Director, Buchanan urged President Reagan to visit the SS cemetery at Bitburg in Germany, providing an excellent photo-op for neo-Nazis everywhere. According to reports from the time, Buchanan had the unmitigated gall to lecture Jewish leaders who protested that they were “Americans first” and wrote over and over in his notebook one phrase: “Succumbing to the pressure of the Jews.” He wrote Reagan’s line that the SS officers were “victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps” – easily one of the most sickening presidential lines in American history. Buchanan wanted the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations closed down because it was “running down 70-year-old camp guards.”

Last week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that they would not allow Sacha Baron Cohen, star of the upcoming comedy The Dictator, to attend the Oscars. Although he was later allowed to attend, the Academy initially banned him because he intended to show up dressed as the title character from his new movie, complete with long black beard, white uniform, and chestful of fake medals.  The movie itself is the “heroic story of a Middle Eastern dictator who risks his life to ensure that democracy never comes to the country he so lovingly oppressed.”

So why did the Academy originally attempt to bar outrageous comic from attending? Deadline Hollywood’s Nikki Finke asks the key question, “Whether the fact that the 84th Academy Awards will be beamed into 200 countries had anything to do with Baron Cohen being banned from the Oscars was unclear.”

Baron Cohen responded to the Academy’s lack of humor with a decidedly  un-PC comment on his website: “Admiral General Aladeen willd elvier a formal response tomorrow morning to being banned from the Oscars by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Zionists.”

So, the Academy was reluctant to allow Baron Cohen to show up wearing a goofy dictatorial outfit because the night is simply too serious – or because he might offend actual dictators around the world. Welcome to the Oscars, where it’s forbidden to take yourself too lightly or to tick anybody off … except Republicans.

And that’s the problem with Hollywood. They take themselves way too seriously. Who cares if an actor shows up in costume? That’s what these people do for a living – they dress up as other people and say lines they’ve memorized. Why in the world should they care if somebody mocks them on a red carpet while they’re busy feting themselves?