At a time when our foreign policy is in the hands of the feckless, delusional, and incompetent, it is bracing to have Peter Collier’s fascinating biography of Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s smart, no-nonsense, straight-talking ambassador to the U.N. Collier, along with his sometime co-author David Horowitz, is the Plutarch of American political biography, having authored earlier books on the Kennedys, Fords, Rockefellers, and Roosevelts. Himself a convert from left-wing dogma and delusion, he brings to Kirkpatrick’s life both flawless story-telling skills and a shrewd eye for the psychological, intellectual, and social detail that tracks Kirkpatrick’s development from a reflexive liberal Democrat to a formidable opponent of appeasement and the staunch defender of political freedom who became, in William Safire’s phrase, “the courage of Ronald Reagan’s convictions.”

Kirkpatrick’s life is a paean to the American heartland and its clear-eyed realism about human nature and the limits of the politically possible. She was born in 1926 in Duncan, Oklahoma to a New Deal, Yellow-Dog Democrat oil driller named Welcher “Fat” Jordan. In 1940 the family followed the oil boom to Mount Vernon, Illinois, where Jeane’s keen intellect and restless curiosity fomented dissatisfaction with the small-town limits on both her mind and gender. Her first stop was at Stephens College, a two-year girls’ school in Columbia, Missouri. A visit to New York City convinced her that her intellectual ambitions needed larger scope, so she enrolled at Barnard, “where women could take themselves seriously,” she would write later. On weekends she hung out in the Village, and knew James Baldwin well enough to call him “Jimmy.” Yet a trajectory that seemingly pointed to becoming a conventional left-wing New York intellectual was deflected by her critical mind, which was not satisfied with the received opinions of her milieu. Contrary to her professors and classmates, for example, a reading of the Alger Hiss trial transcripts convinced her of Hiss’s guilt. Likewise she supported Truman in the 1948 elections while the “romantic leftists,” as Collier calls them, voted for Henry Wallace.

Her independent intellectual development continued at Columbia University, where she studied political science. Her mentor was Franz Neumann, a German Jew who had been a lawyer in the Weimer government. Neumann was an independent Marxist who lacked the starry-eyed admiration for Stalin that afflicted many American leftists. Her study of the inner workings of Nazi governance, which taught her, as she said later, “the human capacity for evil,” changed her life. So too did meeting Evron Kirkpatrick in Washington D.C. in 1951, who hired her as his research assistant. “Kirk,” as he was called, worked in the State Department and was a close friend of Hubert Humphrey as well as an anti-communist New Deal Democrat. Fourteen years Jeane’s senior, he became “the Pygmalion who would intellectually sculpt her in a way that brought her fully to life,” Collier writes. Her first assignment was to edit some papers detailing daily life in the prewar Soviet Union. The experience of learning what Kirkpatrick called “a hell purposefully created by government” was another critical stage in her development as a warrior against totalitarianism and its appeasers.

Kirkpatrick’s next stop was Paris, where she traveled to escape a serious illness and a burgeoning romance with Kirk. Once more, a path that would have led a less critical intelligence into leftist orthodoxy was blocked by Kirkpatrick’s reaction to the famous quarrel between one-time comrades Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre over support for the Soviet Union and its permanent revolution. Reading Camus’ The Rebel and listening to his lectures convinced Kirkpatrick that Camus had both the facts on his side and the moral high ground. She was particularly impressed by what she called “his suspicion of abstract theory and its friendship with totalitarianism; his elevation of the human dimension over the political one; his focus on the impact of ideas and the personal consequences of ideologies.” As Collier describes this transformative experience, one begins to see emerging the champion of freedom and human dignity who three decades later would give moral and intellectual force to Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy.

Back from France, Kirkpatrick eventually married Kirk and settled in Georgetown, where she connected with others like herself, heartland refugees, “very American, yet slightly alien among the elites” of postwar Washington, Collier describes them, bright people from modest backgrounds who “made their way by sheer intellectual force rather than by networks,” “pragmatic ‘show me’ people, and unapologetic in a patriotism that would not be shaken even during the turbulence of the Vietnam era.” She met other recovering leftists, like onetime Trotskyite James Burnham, and former communist Sidney Hook, both of whom later would become some of flabby liberalism’s most trenchant critics. As the sixties spiraled downward into left-wing thuggish intolerance, knee-jerk anti-Americanism, and apologetics for communist tyranny, she began to see the same conditions she had studied in other countries that had degenerated into totalitarianism from a lofty, abstract utopianism. The New Left’s assault on centrist liberalism––institutionalized in the 1972 highjacking of the Democratic party and its marginalization of lower-middle and working-class constituents in favor of a “new elite” of lawyers and other professionals––was to Jeane another sign that the old anti-communist, socially compassionate but pragmatic liberal Democrat no longer had a place in a party increasingly dominated by the sectarian left. Like many of those liberals who would get mugged by reality, Kirkpatrick had to find a more independent path.

Question & Answer Session

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Republicans and some former intelligence professionals expressed anger at the administration for failing to protect Dr. Afridi. Representative Peter King (R-NY) suggested that the White House “put him [Afridi] out there,” but the administration immediately denied the charge, suggesting that it was Pakistan that leaked Afridi’s name.

While the cut may be small, it comes on the heels of a re-examination of aid to Pakistan by Congress. In light of the closing by Pakistan of the primary truck route into Afghanistan last November following a friendly fire incident, the subcommittee on foreign aid voted recently to cut military assistance to Pakistan by 58%. And the anger expressed by senators over the treatment of Dr. Afridi suggests that a sea change may have occurred in congressional opinion regarding support for Pakistan, as members appear tired and frustrated with Islamabad’s double game of supporting terrorists while reluctantly assisting US intelligence in tracking down members of al-Qaeda.

Who is Dr. Shakil Afridi and what was his role in the bin Laden raid? The top medic in the Kyber tribal region, Afridi was recruited by the CIA to run a fake Hepatitis-B vaccination program in Abbottabad in order to acquire a DNA sample from one of bin Laden’s children in the compound where he was hiding. An investigation by the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, concluded that Afridi probably didn’t know he was helping the CIA find bin Laden specifically. Brig. General Shaukat Qadir, who conducted the investigation, wrote in a report obtained by the BBC that, “He was merely paid to follow instructions.”

The mystery is why Afridi, who was arrested less than 3 weeks after bin Laden was killed, stuck around after the raid. It may be that Afridi believed his assistance to the CIA in killing bin Laden would please the Pakistani government. It is even possible that Afridi didn’t know he was working for the CIA. Regardless, the Obama administration apparently did little to persuade the doctor to leave Pakistan.

Former intelligence analyst Peter Brookes of the Heritage Foundation told Fox News, “You probably wouldn’t want to have tipped him off ahead of time, but maybe the day right afterward you would have wanted to have helped him leave Pakistan — and the same with anybody else who was working with us.”

But former military intelligence officer Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer told Fox News, “From what I’m hearing, we did pretty much nothing,” he said. “We did nothing diplomatically at all, didn’t raise a finger. … From what my sources tell me, we did nothing to try and help this guy.”

State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland disputes that, saying the administration had “regularly taken up” the issue of Dr. Afridi with the Pakistani government. Shaffer suggests that if they did, they did not press the issue due to the sensitivity of ongoing negotiations over re-opening the truck route into Afghanistan.

In fairness, most liberals do not feel affection for the worst of the worst among leftists such as Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Che Guevara, or Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones.

But there are a few domestic radicals who have attained a kind of folk hero status in left-wing circles.

Convicted cop killer and Black Panthers member Mumia abu Jamal, would-be GOP convention bombers David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder, ACORN founder and cyber-terrorism advocate Wade Rathke, Obamacare architect and convicted swindler Robert Creamer, Earth Day booster and murderer Ira Einhorn, imprisoned terrorist lawyer Lynne Stewart, Weather Underground leaders Jeff Jones, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn, just to name a few.

“Speedway Bomber” Brett Kimberlin isn’t famous enough yet to have a cult following on the Left but give the determined, energetic activist time. A few short years after his release from federal prison the radical leftist has been embraced by all the right people, winning grants from the George Soros-funded Tides Foundation and wealthy celebrities.

He’s earned the confidence of leftist luminaries such as Teresa Heinz Kerry and Barbra Streisand who have sent money to his activist group, the Justice Through Music Project. The seven-year-old Bethesda, Maryland-based 501c3 nonprofit entity buys into the radical environmentalist agenda, supports the goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and claims to have registered 100,000 people to vote. (See its latest IRS Form 990 [tax return] here.)

This Maryland resident is a political trailblazer of sorts. Kimberlin is a tactical innovator whose tried and true methods would have impressed the father of modern community organizing, Saul Alinsky. The late conservative Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart recognized Kimberlin’s unique talents last fall, tweeting that the convicted terrorist and his confederates needed “exposure.”

Kimberlin, as blogger “Liberty Chick” previously reported, spent almost 17 years in prison after being convicted of detonating bombs in a week-long terror spree in Speedway, Indiana. “One of the blasts horribly maimed a man so badly that it directly led to that man’s suicide a few years later, which was proven when the widow of that bombing victim successfully sued and won a civil judgment against Kimberlin for $1.6 million,” she wrote. Of course Kimberlin not only failed to pay the woman, but denied doing anything wrong. His refusal to cough up what he owed his victim’s wife led to a revocation of his parole.

He also claimed he was secretly exonerated by the powers that be. A record of this surreptitious pardon is bound to surface any day now, delivered by a leprechaun in a unicorn-pulled stage coach.

Until proof of the covert clemency arrives, Kimberlin is focusing on bullying conservatives into silence, which is the same thing that so much of progressivedom is concentrating on nowadays. But unlike Van Jones and the various Marxist agitators who have inflicted damage on conservative talk radio and innocuous groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) through innuendo and smears, Kimberlin gets in his enemies’ faces.

Literally.

A man named Aaron Walker (blogging name Aaron Worthing) is now claiming that Kimberlin tried to frame him for a crime he did not commit. Kimberlin alleges that Walker battered him in a court house even though it’s pretty clear from videos and other evidence that nothing of the sort happened. Walker explains what happened in a heavily annotated, nearly 28,000 word essay at his website Allergic to Bull. In a nutshell, it appears Walker briefly snatched Kimberlin’s iPad away because he feared the violent ex-con was going to hit him with it. Walker says he never made physical contact with Kimberlin and the video evidence embedded in the lengthy blog post appears to confirm his story. The minor scuffle created more legal headaches for Walker.

Why was Walker in court with Kimberlin? Because Kimberlin sued him for daring to write about his criminal record.

In 2009, Playboy Magazine published an execrable screed by writer Guy Cimbalo. His topic? 10 conservative women he’d like to “hate-f**k.” Mr. Cimbalo’s reasoning? “But there is a way to reach across the aisle without letting principles fall by the wayside. We speak, naturally, of the hate f**k. We may despise everything these women represent, but godd*mmit they’re hot. Let the healing begin.” Cimbalo goes into detail. TownHall columnist Amanda Carpenter, “is a walking, talking Faustian f**k bargain.” Syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin is a ‘”highly fu**able Filipina” and a “Beelzebabe.” Fox News’ Megyn Kelly is also debased. “You need to flagellate your genitals for wanting to f**k this woman.” Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who co-hosts’ “The View” is “the clean-cut American sweetheart who elicits our filthiest thoughts. Endlessly perky, this golden goddess probably has her Catholic school uniform still in the closet, and she wouldn’t mind putting it on before taking it off for a session of sweaty, anti-American hate f**king.”

Flynt and Cimbalo are hardly unique. Former Florida Congresswoman Katherine Harris who was at the center of the recount controversy in the 2000 presidential election, was repeatedly mocked by several leftists seemingly obsessed with her breasts. After a 2005 appearance on Fox’s Hannity & Colmes she was derided for “working her admittedly impressive twin assets to best advantage,” her “fake, bouncing breasts” and for really wanting to “accentuate her heaving bosom” during the interview. Moving up the political hierarchy, liberal Wisconsin radio host John “Sly” Sylvester sexually denigrated Republican lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch, contending she performed “fellatio on all the talk-show hosts in Milwaukee” and had “pulled a train,” as in taking on a number sexual partners at the same time.

First Ladies are fair game as well. In 2005, serial misogynist Bill Maher did a “comedy” bit about how the president has resumed drinking, during which he showed a doctored photo of Laura Bush with a black eye and a bandage over her eyebrow. The late Christopher Hitchens criticized Maher for it. “It must be to his credit he (the President) got Laura Bush to marry him. She’s an absolutely extraordinary woman,” said Hitchens. Maher’s response? “Oh, come on. That’s like Hitler’s dog loved him. That is the silliest reason…”

Maher obviously has “issues” with conservative women. He has called former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin a “dumb twat” and a “c**t.” He also “joked” about former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s wife needing a vibrator. Such intellectual “prowess” is matched by Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi, who wrote a column in which he imagined columnist Michelle Malkin narrating her pieces with a “big hairy set of balls in her mouth.” In a recent piece for National Review, Malkin herself reveals that Taibbi’s misogyny is the tip of a rather large iceberg. “If I had a dollar for every time libs have called me a ‘Manila whore’ and ‘Subic Bay bar girl,’ I’d be able to pay for a ticket to a Hollywood-for-Obama fundraiser,” she writes.

In the same piece Malkin also acknowledges an obvious reality: Sarah Palin is Target Number One when it comes to sexually abusing conservative women. Photoshopped pictures of her in a bikini have been published all over the web. A pornographic video starring porn actress Lisa Ann as Palin was released by Hustler with the title “Who’s Nailin’ Palin.” Leftist author Joe McGinniss literally moved next door to Palin in Alaska in order to write a book about her. “The Rogue” contains unsubstantiated gossip regarding Palin’s “fetish for black guys” and attempts to justify the leftist conspiracy theory that Trig is not really her son. “It is perhaps the most blistering assessment of her character possible that many Wasillans who’d known Sarah from high school onward told me that even if she had not faked the entire story of her pregnancy and Trig’s birth, it was something she was eminently capable of doing,” he writes. He amplifies his misogynistic efforts by characterizing Palin as a stripper who ”practices politics as lap dance, and we’re the suckers who pay the price. Members of our jaded national press corps eagerly stuff hundred dollar bills into her g-string, even as they wink at one another to show that they don’t take her seriously.”

The nine-minute video, shot with a student’s cell phone or other video device and uploaded to YouTube, is aimed at the ceiling and shows neither teacher nor students. Much of the audio is crowded with crosstalk, as the class sounds fairly disorderly throughout. But it does capture a heated confrontation between a desperately, illogically, and inarticulately defensive social studies teacher and a couple of her freethinking students who dared to express irreverence for Obama.

The footage begins with the teacher in a North Rowan High School classroom discussing the recent allegation that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney bullied a classmate in prep school over four decades ago. “Didn’t Obama bully somebody, though?” a student asks. “Not to my knowledge,” the teacher replies.

Apparently her knowledge isn’t as broad as that of the students, who proceed to inform her about an incident Obama describes in his purported autobiography Dreams from My Father, in which he details how he teased and shoved a middle-school girl — the only other black student in his grade. The teacher’s response is a dismissive “I don’t know.” When she tries to shut the discussion down, the students quickly and correctly point out the unfairness of her bias: “If you’re gonna talk trash about one side,” a student says, “you gotta talk trash about the other.”

“Stop, no, because there is no comparison,” the teacher says sharply. Romney, she says, is merely “running for president. Obama is the president,” and he “is due the respect that every other president is due.” When the student perceptively notes that they’re both “just men, they’re equal,” the teacher retorts, “No, they’re not,” and continues to argue that Romney does not deserve the same respect as a sitting president.

“But Obama is not God,” one student protests, a taboo statement certain to cause the heads of leftist educators everywhere to explode. “Listen, let me tell you something, you will not disrespect the President of the United States in this classroom,” the teacher says. The student asserts that he’ll say what he wants. “Not about him, you won’t,” the teacher shoots back. The student persists in arguing that he intended no disrespect; he was merely asking a question. Just as persistently, the teacher sidesteps his point and lectures him about slandering the president. Apparently she is unacquainted with the definition of “slander,” since the student was merely referring to an episode from Obama’s own autobiography.

“When Bush was in, everybody talked shit about Bush,” another student counters. “’Cause he was shitty,” interjects another student, and the teacher does not berate her for it. Instead, she changes tack and continues to target the original student: “Do you realize that people were arrested for sayin’ things bad about Bush?… Do you realize you are not supposed to slander the president?” She knows that neither of these statements is true. If it were illegal to slander a president, half the country would have been incarcerated during the Bush administration.

This is the message of supporters of the beleaguered Elizabeth Warren, the U.S. Senate hopeful whose baseless claims of Native American heritage have hurt her political career almost as much as it helped her academic career.

“Warren’s claim to be ‘part Indian’ is correct in mythical terms,” Bernie Quigley rationalizes at The Hill. “Every old-school white Oklahoman is in this regard even if this [is] nominally not true. But it is not a lie to want to be Indian and to imagine your ancestors were. It is to be free of Europeanism.” The Fourth Estate fanboy writes that Warren “brings a fresh, classical Americanism from the heartland back to us in Boston,” which he adds is “lucky” to have her.  “She adds stock and substance.”

The Harvard Law professor may add substance. But her devotees’ contorted embrace of the embarrassing ancestry yarn seems as readily explained by substances as any substance behind it. With proffered evidence of the Cherokee background of Warren’s great-great-great grandmother coming from the 21st century rather than the 19th, the already flimsy basis for the professor claiming minority status in an affirmative-action-obsessed academia now appears so obviously a careerist’s exploitation of identity politics. Just don’t tell that to the Warrenites, whose devotion to St. Elizabeth doesn’t allow for any inference of deception on her part.

When The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner dubbed Warren a “progressive super-hero” last year, he may have knocked a progressive deity down a notch.Her fanatical acolytes have routinely put the cart before the horse, all but confirming Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before President Obama had announced a nominee and launching several 2016 “Warren for President” sites before a vote had been cast in her senate race in Massachusetts. The New Republic’s Tiffany Stanley took notice in an article subtitled “Inside the cult of Elizabeth Warren.” She noted that “Warren commands a legion of loyalists apparently willing to rush, at a moment’s notice, to her defense,” an observation confirmed by Stanley’s subsequent experience of an inbox full of hate mail.

The magnitude of this tragic mayhem can be viewed in another light. According to a Tuskegee Institute study, between the years 1882 and 1968, 3,446 blacks were lynched at the hands of whites. Black fatalities during the Korean War (3,075), Vietnam War (7,243) and all wars since 1980 (8,197) come to 18,515, a number that pales in comparison with black loss of life at home. It’s a tragic commentary to be able to say that young black males have a greater chance of reaching maturity on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan than on the streets of Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, Newark and other cities.

A much larger issue is how might we interpret the deafening silence about the day-to-day murder in black communities compared with the national uproar over the killing of Trayvon Martin. Such a response by politicians, civil rights organizations and the mainstream news media could easily be interpreted as “blacks killing other blacks is of little concern, but it’s unacceptable for a white to kill a black person.”

There are a few civil rights leaders with a different vision. When President Barack Obama commented about the Trayvon Martin case, T. Willard Fair, president of the Urban League of Greater Miami, told The Daily Caller that “the outrage should be about us killing each other, about black-on-black crime.” He asked rhetorically, “Wouldn’t you think to have 41 people shot (in Chicago) between Friday morning and Monday morning would be much more newsworthy and deserve much more outrage?” Former NAACP leader Pastor C.L.

The first day of the conference brought in approximately eighty people at its peak, including a number of women in hijab (head scarf), typing furiously on laptops. Others sported keffiyehs and dreadlocks; a smattering of Arabic and French could be heard; and a scruffy, bearded fellow wandered around with what appeared to be a journal under his arm, Historicizing Anti-Semitism, that one suspects is not exactly kosher. It was just another day in Berkeley.

Hatem Bazian, IRDP director, Near Eastern studies senior lecturer, and conference convener started out by apologizing for the forty-minute delay in kicking off the event. He chalked it up to “Muslim Time”—a reference to the popular phrase among African-Americans, “Colored People’s Time”—and joked that “Swiss watches run forward, but Muslim watches run backward.” He thanked the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)—an Islamist organization posing as a defender of civil rights— for its participation in the conference (Zahra Billoo, CAIR Northern California Executive Director, spoke the next day) and for partnering with CRG to produce the 2011 report, “Same Hate, New Target: Islamophobia and Its Impact in the United States”—a report that falsely accuses a number of public figures of perpetrating “Islamophobia.” Bazian also thanked “individuals who send us hate mail” for demonstrating “the need for this conference,” about which, he claimed, there had been “considerable chatter,” including “wild” and “threatening” statements. All this “despite the fact that we have the first Muslim president,” he added, chuckling. This sarcastic reference to the American public’s perception of Barack Obama’s Muslim background would be repeated throughout the day as incontrovertible evidence of “Islamophobia.”

Tariq Ramadan, the controversial Oxford University professor of contemporary Islamic studies and grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna, demonstrated a capacity for what his critics have described as doublespeak with his keynote speech. Titled, “A Global Perspective on Constructing Muslim Otherness,” Ramadan’s talk was rife with contradiction. At one point, he acknowledged that the “victim mentality” is counterproductive for Muslims and other minorities:

People are relying on fear, mistrust, [and] nurturing the victim mentality. You can see this among Blacks, Latinos, [and] Muslims. Sometimes they play the victims. Victims are talking to each other. We are the victims of your colonization, legal colonization. It’s the way you accept the role given by the dominant: you become the victim.   

Yet pushing victimhood was the principal purpose of the conference. Moreover, Ramadan contributed to that narrative by implying that assimilation—the antidote to the balkanization caused by nurturing a victim mentality—was impossible in the U.S.:

At the end of the day, you might be a Muslim-American, Black, Latino, but not really. Us versus them. . . . After four generations, you are Muslim with an American background.

Ramadan admitted that something other than mere bigotry might be at the heart of what’s been disingenuously dubbed “Islamophobia”:

[S]ome of them are very sincere when it comes to being scared of the Muslim presence. . . . Try to understand the logic that is behind the whole thing . . . there is a great deal of mistrust towards our intentions as Muslims. We should go beyond the discussion of ‘we are discriminated’ towards a more comprehensive approach. . . . People can be genuinely scared; we have to face this.

He then added:

We have to get rid of this idea that the world is divided between the West and Islam. Instead of speaking about peace and living together, we respond with a discourse that is exactly the same.

But he went on to do just that, accusing both Republicans and Democrats of collusion—although he allowed that “some are less Islamophobic than others”—and claiming that “the people who are pushing it [are] the Tea Party and the Neocons.” Given that the Tea Party has focused exclusively on economic issues and that Neoconservatism is hardly a political force to be reckoned with of late, Ramadan’s rhetoric was hopelessly out of touch.

Ramadan eventually revealed why so many find him so dangerous by hinting at a belief in conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks and the Mohamed Merah shootings in Toulouse, France, which resulted in the deaths of three soldiers, a rabbi, and three children at a Jewish school. Acknowledging that “there is a new anti-Semitism in France, which is coming from Arabs and Muslims,” he then accused “strong Zionist groups” of complicity for somehow “nurturing this kind of racism.” As he put it:

I know about 9/11, but I still have some questions about behind the scenes, the way it was used . . . I still have questions about what happened in France [Toulouse]. We should try to understand the alliances we find behind old enemies.

To imply that “Zionists”  are benefiting from atrocities against Jews and others goes beyond the realm of conspiracy theory into classical anti-Semitism.

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