“Halftime in America” is a punchier version of Wag the Dog’s reelection slogan, “Don’t Change Horses in Midstream.” They might have tried, “The Best is Yet to Come,” but Bloomberg already took that one.

It’s one of those wonderful side benefits of socialism that the gap between corporate advertising and a campaign commercial blurs. What’s good for GM is good for America and what’s good for Chrysler is good for Obama. We may not have the pipeline, but we’re still pipelining taxpayer money to a few precious union jobs with car companies that look a lot like the UK’s car companies did in the seventies.

You can’t really blame Chrysler for trying to preserve its Motor City brand, even if it’s with a commercial that wasn’t actually filmed in Detroit. It’s much easier to put together some inspiring scenes of a Detroit recovery if you shoot it in Los Angeles, a place that has its problems, but which is much more likely to have cheerful couples waking up in apartments that seem to be entirely made of glass.

The Motor City brand is one of those things that doesn’t mean a whole lot anymore, but still stirs up sentimentality, like the immigrant experience or freedom of speech. That Detroit is as real today as the Chicago depicted in Sandburg’s poem which served as the hog butcher, tool maker and wheat stacker to the world. Today Sandburg might have called a food stamp scanner, scammer and welfare taker instead.

American industry is a ghost of that former vigor, its hog butchering, tool making and wheat stacking done in by the progressive vision of a post-industrial society. Today it’s Shanghai that might qualify for a Sandburg poem and it’s also the only place to find that kind of aggressive industrial growth, but Halftime in Shanghai doesn’t sound the same even if Shanghaiing American industry is the name of the game.

Chevy, another government bailout recipient, eschewed the phony clip show patriotism and cut right to showing that their truck could survive an apocalypse. Unlike Halftime in America, that ad could have been filmed in Detroit, which has major apocalypse potential. If you have to choose between trying to convince Americans that Motor City is back or convincing that the end of the world is near but that the right truck can help you make it out alive, go with the second one.

But Chrysler needs the Motor City brand, because it doesn’t exist anymore. After a brief two year period of being an American company again after its sale by Daimler-Benz, it is now owned by Fiat, which is as All-American as its CEO, Sergio Marchionne, who does not sound very much like Clint Eastwood. It needs that image of American industry, even if it’s an Italian company still employing some American workers and an American brand.

Everyone needs their myths, even if it’s the myth of a booming Motor City created in Los Angeles, starring a California movie star by a company headquartered in Turin, Italy. It beats the tawdry reality of Detroit. It’s not as if anyone confuses myths with reality, or commercials with substance.

Some of Eastwood’s most famous Westerns were actually filmed by Italian directors in Italy. If Sergio Leone could give us Eastwood staging six gun duels in the Apennine Mountains off the Adriatic Sea, then why can’t Sergio Marchionne give us Clint Eastwood pacing around an LA stage and breathily pontificating on how hard it is to keep the people and car companies of Detroit down.

We needed the Westerns at a time when the frontier was closing, and if toward the end they were ugly vicious little tableaux of unredeeming violence being filmed in Spanish ghost towns, no one really cared anymore. As the American car company goes the way of the Wild West, we have spaghetti car commercials instead of spaghetti Westerns reassuring us that we are still the same people we used to be. Strong, resilient and capable of recovering from anything with enough bailout money.

Halftime in America didn’t explicitly set out to promote Obama, but it didn’t need to. Its theme was hope. Its purpose was a defense of widely unpopular policies. It didn’t need to mention him by name, any incumbent would have done. Its come on is the same one used in every casino and by every street corner three-card monte dealer. “Don’t stop now. Sure you may be behind, but if you throw it all in, you’ll double your money.”

Halftime in America depends on the metaphor of halftime to convince us to discount the past and embrace hope and change all over again. Forget how badly we fumbled the ball and believe that this time we’ll make the touchdown.

But the right metaphor isn’t a closely fought game where the lovable underdogs are behind and they just need one golden moment to make it all worthwhile. It’s a game where the quarterback has spent most of the game playing golf a 100 miles away, where the players are angry people who can’t play football but sued their way onto the team, and the coaching staff only knows how to incite the home crowd to assault the opposing fans, but have no idea how the game is played and think rules are for suckers.

The White House didn’t blow a dog whistle for deep-pocketed liberal donors on Monday. No, the administration whipped out a supersized vuvuzela. Blaring message: Let loose the campaign finance-bundling hounds of super PAC war!

President Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, who served as White House deputy chief of staff for operations before assuming 2012 re-election duties, announced the super PAC super-flip-flop in a mass e-mail to supporters and a blog post published on the left-wing Huffington Post website. In a related conference call to major campaign finance bundlers, Messina encouraged these high-dollar donors to start funding Priorities USA Action. That’s the Democratic super PAC founded by former White House staffers Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney.

Super PACs and campaigns are barred from coordinating with each other. Nevertheless, Messina said that “senior campaign officials as well as some White House and Cabinet officials will attend and speak at Priorities USA fundraising events.” Of course, they “won’t be soliciting contributions.” Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

This brazen about-face for Team Obama is a goldmine of campaign lies, contortions and epic hypocrisy. Let us count the ways.

— A bundle of contradictions. “Bundling” is the rustling up of aggregate contributions from friends, business associates and employees, a practice to circumvent individual donation limits that Obama has long condemned. When he announced his presidential intentions in 2007, candidate Obama decried “the cynics, the lobbyists, the special interests who’ve turned our government into a game only they can afford to play.” He indignantly singled out “the best bundlers” who get the “greatest access” to power.

Last week, Obama acknowledged raising at least $74 million through his team of big-time bundlers who have been showered with access, tax dollars and plum patronage positions. This elite group of Hollywood celebrities (such as open-borders actress Eva Longoria), political cronies (such as Chicago bagman Louis “The Vacuum” Susman) and politically correct businessmen (such as bankrupt Solyndra investor George Kaiser) now totals a whopping 445 gold-card members.

— The roar of the revolving door. In his Monday announcement, Messina bragged about how the White House has enacted “sweeping” reforms to “close the revolving door between government and lobbyists.” In truth, the administration has widened the carousel and removed the brakes. The Obama-cheerleading Fishwrap of Record (The New York Times) itself identified at least 15 bundlers “involved in lobbying for Washington consulting shops or private companies.”

Moreover, “at least 68 of 350 Obama bundlers for the 2012 election or their spouses have served in the administration in some capacity; at least 250 of the bundlers visited the White House, and another 30 have ties to companies that conduct business with federal agencies or hope to do so in the future,” according to a recent iWatch News report.

On January 29, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was interviewed on CBS news.  When asked about the situation with Iran, Secretary Panetta responded: “[I]f they [Iran] decided to [build a nuclear device], it would probably take them about a year …  [and] …if they proceed and [if] we get intelligence…then….there are no options that are off the table” for the US commitment to stop Iran from building a nuclear arsenal.

Sounds good, except for all the “ifs:”  “if they produce” and “if we get intelligence” and “if they decide to do it”

Panetta’s “ifs” create the impression that there may in fact be no threat from Iran, that Iran may not be pursuing nuclear capacity, that there is as yet no actionable intelligence about Iranian WMDs, and that maybe Iran has not decided to pursue a nuclear option.

But facts of which Mr. Panetta must be aware tell us the opposite.

Back in the ‘60s the Shah tried to start a WMD program for Iran but it floundered and was abandoned.  In the mid-1990s the Ayatollahs restarted the program. Iran said it wanted nuclear power for clean energy needs, but in 2002 an Iranian exile group shared with Western intelligence secret Iranian documents revealing a clandestine program to enrich weapons-grade uranium.  The facility at Natanz was built with the assistance of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program.  Under threat of sanctions, the government agreed in 2003 to halt work on uranium enrichment; but in 2006, less than a year after Akhmedi-Nejad took power, the Iranian government announced that it was going to restart its uranium enrichment. No “ifs” about that.

From 2005 onward US intelligence organizations and the Israeli Mossad worked together to locate and sabotage the financial underpinnings of the Iranian nuclear project.  On September 9, 2009, American intelligence concluded that Iran had the nuclear fuel necessary to build an atomic bomb, thanks in part to a hitherto undocumented underground plant near the city of Qom. Most recently in January of this year, Iran announced defiantly that it was going to start an additional uranium enrichment site, fortified to withstand even the most powerful of America’s bunker-busting bombs. No “ifs” about that either.

In May 2011, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akhbar Salehi addressed a regional economic summit in Tehran.  He told his audience that he was optimistic that nuclear inspectors would not find anything amiss when they visited Iran.  Of course he was optimistic. For the past 20 years Iran has done a great job of hiding those of their WMD sites that were devoted to the development of military uses for nuclear weapons.

American efforts to counteract the Iranian threat have been limited to sanctions and efforts to persuade EU allies to cease cooperation with Iranian financial institutions, the most significant of which were H.R. 1905, the Iranian Threat Reduction Act of (May) 2011, and the Senate’s decision in December 2011 to approve sanctions against Iran’s central bank. Although, as has recently become clear, President Obama does not support such actions, even though a nuclear Iran now threatens the American continents, he nonetheless signed these newest and most comprehensive sanctions on December 31, 2011.  No “ifs” in the opinion of Congress nor in Obama’s acquiescence.

Throughout the past decade Iran has argued that it merely wants to generate clean, green electricity with its nuclear program; but a host of reports from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), thoroughly documented in a series of articles in the NY Times, create the more than merely credible case that Iran has been well on its way for over a decade to developing a nuclear device for military use. The New York Times offers no support for any “ifs.”

If you were to suggest in a public forum that just possibly Israel’s failure to reach a peace agreement with a terrorist organization run by kleptomaniacs and homicidal maniacs, which still continues to applaud the murder of Israeli children, might possibly be due to the terrorists and not because of Israel, then according to the consensus of the left, you are an Israel Firster.

The paradigm of the Israel Firster only works if you assume that the America First position is to support Islamic terrorists. Even if we were to dismiss the threat of Islamic terrorism to the United States then a position sympathetic to the territorial claims of Islamic terrorists in Israel would still not be the America First position. It would be the Muslims First position.

The left, which deploys names like Israel Firsters, is certainly not calling for neutrality in the conflict, rather it would like us to side with the Muslim Brotherhood and the assorted Islamic terrorists scattered throughout the region. Arguably the United States has been doing this for some time already.

Obama stuck his finger in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s chest, but bowed to the Saudi King. When he visited Turkey, he made no mention of the Turkish settlements in occupied Cyprus, but when Biden visited Israel, he threw a fit over a partial approval for a few houses in Jerusalem. The United States doesn’t fund many terrorist groups, but the bulk of the funding that it allots to terrorists goes to terrorists operating in Israel and killing Israelis.

Last week the State Department put out a list of designated terrorist organization. That list includes the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. The Brigade has not only committed numerous atrocities against Israelis, it at one point threatened to launch terrorist attacks against America. The Brigade is the military arm of the Fatah group which controls the Palestinian Authority. The Authority is the beneficiary of an average of 600 million dollars a year in direct assistance, and indirectly through the UNRWA which has already received an initial 55 million dollars from the United States in 2012.

Terrorists who murder Israelis don’t just indirectly benefit from American aid; that money is going to pay the salaries of convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons. Some of those terrorists received training and weapons from the United States. I would like to be able to say that this sort of thing is one of the innovations of the Hussein administration, but it’s an an artifact of two previous administrations.

This is usually how countries treat other countries that they are at war with. In this case it is an artifact, not of an Israel Firster policy, but of a Muslim Firster policy. There is no interpretation of Israel Firster that accommodates the United States arming and funding terrorists. But there is an extensive global policy of rewarding and appeasing Muslims.

Opponents of Israel often complain that they are being “silenced” in some intangible ways, but the United States government has certainly never criminalized criticism of Israel. However, it continues to conduct discussions with the OIC, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, on ways to suppress and censor criticism of Islam. Nor has the Secretary of State suggested that critics of Israel should be subject to “peer pressure and shaming,” which she has for critics of Islam.

American soldiers have been dying incessantly to protect Muslims for decades now. They died in Somalia to protect aid to Somali Muslims. They died in the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait and protect the Muslim holy sites of Mecca and Medina from Saddam Hussein. They died over Yugoslavia to build a state for the Muslim terrorists of the KLA. Thousands of American soldiers have died to protect Muslims from other Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the last year alone, the United States has helped overthrow secular governments to make way for Muslim ones. When the Libyan ruler refused to resign, Obama sent in NATO jets to bomb his forces into submission so that the Al Qaeda- and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group could take power.

While the United States abandoned Iranian students protesting against an Islamist regime, it overthrew governments in Egypt and Tunisia to make way for Islamist takeovers. The Saudis got to use tanks in Bahrain, but Gaddafi was hunted down and killed for a genocide that never happened.

What do you call all that but a Muslim Firster foreign policy?

In “The Audacity of Hope,” a book title taken from a sermon of his vilely anti-Semitic former black Muslim mentor, Obama wrote, “I will stand with the Muslims.” And he has done it.

Obama has stood with the Muslims in Cote d’Ivorie, where armed force was used to illegally seat a Muslim ruler against the ruling of the country’s supreme court. He has stood with the Muslims in Kenya, where his cousin and his Muslim backers forcibly wrote Sharia Law into the Constitution. He has stood with the genocidal Muslims in Indonesia, not the Christian Papuans whose land is occupied and whose representatives are persecuted.

The White House so delicately catered to the religious sensitivities of Osama bin Laden’s sympathizers that the administration ordered his corpse washed, wrapped it in a white sheet, and made it the subject of Islamic prayers. American Catholics, 54 percent of whom supported Barack Obama in 2008, have no such luck winning the administration’s religious toleration.

At issue is Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s bureaucratic mandate that all employers—including Catholic schools, hospitals, and charities—pay for contraceptives, sterilization, and morning-after pill abortifacients through their health insurance plans. The administration recently revealed that the only relief Catholic conscientious objectors will receive is a reprieve until August 2013.

“The Obama administration has just told the Catholics of the United States, ‘To Hell with you!’ There is no other way to put it,” Bishop David Zubik explained to his Pittsburgh diocese last week. “‘To Hell with your religious beliefs. To Hell with your religious liberty. To Hell with your freedom of conscience.’” Zubik’s fellow bishops were somewhat more diplomatic in the language they used last Sunday.

At the behest of Catholic bishops, parish priests across America read a rebuke to the Obama administration from the pulpit at mass. “The federal government, which claims to be ‘of, by, and for the people,’ has just dealt a heavy blow to almost a quarter of those people—the Catholic population—and to the millions more who are served by the Catholic faithful,” one variant of the letter explained. “The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced last week that almost all employers, including Catholic employers, will be forced to offer their employees health coverage that includes sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraception. Almost all health insurers will be forced to include those ‘services’ in the health policies they write. And almost all individuals will be forced to buy that coverage as a part of their policies. In so ruling, the Obama Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty.”

The provision is certainly an assault on liberty. But why did it take an assault on the Church’s liberty for the bishops to recognize this?

The state forcing private employers to buy employees health insurance, let alone the more intrusive dictate of what specifically such coverage must provide, usurps liberty. That an unelected bureaucrat, rather than an elected legislature, would issue an order not promulgated in the alleged enabling legislation assaults democracy. The one-size-fits-all order that men, post-menopausal women, and homosexuals purchase health insurance that pays for birth-control pills, RU-486 abortion pills, and other services that they cannot possibly use imposes a choice that none would freely make.

President Obama’s pals in the media are at it again, this time cheering Team Obama’s command of the latest technology. One outlet is entranced by the Obama campaign’s use of Google+ to conduct “the first completely digital interview from the White House.” A mobile technology news site declares that “President Obama’s decision to use Google+” and “embrace of social media…enhances his reputation as a tech-savvy commander-in-chief.” Another media outlet gushes that the Obama campaign represents “the first national political adoption” of mobile credit card readers. Yet another marvels at how “President Obama has Twittered, Googled and Facebooked millions of American voters.” Fast Company expects Team Obama “to storm into new digital territory in the upcoming race,” thanks to the Obama campaign’s hiring of “uber-hipster and tech rebel Harper Reed as the organization’s chief technology officer.” Calling Obama “the Google-style candidate,” The Financial Times adds, with a sense of fait accompli, “Mr. Obama’s campaign Facebook page already has 24m friends.” Translation: Why even bother trying to challenge our tech-savvy, with-it, and above-all, hip commander-in-chief?

This all calls to mind some of the nonsense said early in the Age of Obama.

A Computer Weekly column, for instance, praised “Obama’s technology presidency,” declared the new president a “technology-savvy leader” and applauded Obama for “leadership by example” in the area of information technology.

Perhaps worst of all was a piece penned by Anna Quindlen mocking John McCain because he “doesn’t text-message or have a BlackBerry or use e-mail.” The next president of the United States needs to be a “techie,” she declared, because “Americans cannot afford” a president who is “out of it”—and because America’s national security depends on it. “If Osama bin Laden beat us with a laptop,” Quindlen queried, “shouldn’t we at least have a president who is reasonably conversant with one?”

The short answer was then—and remains today: “Not necessarily.” Being a “techie” is not a prerequisite for being president.

By Quindlen’s logic—and the logic of her media brethren who confuse technological acumen with governing competence—presidents should have a working knowledge of everything that the U.S. government and its enemies use to pursue their respective objectives, as well as everything average Americans use in their daily lives. Of course, we know that’s not possible or necessary.

Forgive Republican candidate Mitt Romney for his alleged failure to adequately explain why he paid “only” 14 percent of his income in taxes.

The honest answer — “Well, because my accountants couldn’t figure out how to get them any lower” — does not work in this or very many other election years. Romney seemed flat-footed because, like most business people, he seeks to minimize costs and expenses.

This includes taxes.

A normal wealthy-and-proud-of-it guy would have said: “Let me get this straight, pal. I’m not supposed to take every legal advantage provided me by the tax laws to reduce my taxes?” For what it’s worth, about 15 percent of Romney’s last two years of income went to charity — substantially higher than the percentage given by the Obamas or Joe Biden’s $380 (not a typo) of his quarter-million dollar income in 2006.

“Tax savings” allows people more money to save, spend, invest, bequeath and donate. On some level, even Democrats understand this.

Democrat Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., is one of them. In 2001, Massachusetts lowered it state income tax rate. But the legislature showed mercy for the Bay State’s guilt-ridden, tax-hike-supporting liberals. The tax form allowed the filer to check a special box — and pay the old, higher rate. Out of more than 3 million tax filers in 2004, a tiny fraction of 1 percent — 930 taxpayers — volunteered to pay the higher rate. Among those who declined the opportunity was Mr. Frank. Frank explained, “I don’t trust the legislative leadership and Gov. (Mitt) Romney to make the right decisions.” Instead, Frank said, “I’ll donate the money myself.” What?! Charity might better spend money than can government, which, by its nature, operates less efficiently and more expensively than can private welfare?

Democrat Sen. Howard Metzenbaum from Ohio (served 1974, 1976-1995) was another tax-supporting Democrat not too keen on paying more in taxes than he needed to. But after retirement, the wealthy Metzenbaum moved to Florida, which, unlike Ohio, is a state with no estate or personal income taxes. This saved him millions.

Democrat John Edwards’ wife Elizabeth, during the 2004 campaign, said rich politicians like her husband reveal “character” when they vote against financial “interest” by supporting higher taxes.

This is the same John Edwards who, as a trial lawyer winning big jury awards, established a separate sub-corporation to accept the money, paying him through dividends rather than income. Perfectly legal. But this allowed Edwards to avoid some $600K in Medicare payroll taxes.

President Obama and his radical feminist enforcers have had it in for Catholic medical providers from the get-go. It’s about time all people of faith fought back against this unprecedented encroachment on religious liberty. First, they came for the Catholics. Who’s next?

This weekend, Catholic bishops informed parishioners of the recent White House edict forcing religious hospitals, schools, charities and other health and social service providers to provide “free” abortifacient pills, sterilizations and contraception on demand in their insurance plans — even if it violates their moral consciences and the teachings of their churches.

NARAL, NOW, Ms. Magazine and the Feminist Majority Foundation all cheered the administration’s abuse of the Obamacare law to ram abortion down pro-life medical professionals’ throats. Femme dinosaur Eleanor Smeal gloated over the news that the administration had rejected church officials’ pleas for compromises: “At last,” she exulted, the left’s goal of “no-cost birth control” for all had been achieved.

As always, tolerance is a one-way street in the Age of Obama. “Choice” is in the eye (and iron fist) of the First Amendment usurper.

Like the rising number of states who have revolted against the individual health care mandate at the ballot box and in the courts, targeted Catholics have risen up against the Obamacare regime. Arlington (Va.) Bishop Paul Loverde didn’t mince words, calling the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services order “a direct attack against religious liberty. This ill-considered policy comprises a truly radical break with the liberties that have underpinned our nation since its founding.” Several bishops vowed publicly to fight the mandate.

Bishop Alexander Sample of Marquette, Mich., asserted plainly: “We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law.”

It’s not just rabid right-wing politicos defying the Obama machine. Pro-life Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania denounced the “wrong decision.” Left-leaning Bishop Robert Lynch threatened “civil disobedience” in St. Petersburg, Fla., over the power grab. Lefty Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote that Obama “botched” the controversy and “threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus” by refusing to “balance the competing liberty interests here.”

White House press secretary Jay Carney blithely denied on Tuesday that “there are any constitutional rights issues” involved in the brewing battle.

The Obama administration has spent three years and billions of tax dollars in efforts to jump start a “green energy” industry in the United States. The president says that “sustainable,” clean energy sources are the wave of the future, vital to America’s future security and the well-being of the entire planet. And yet, after all this time and all that money, all the administration has to show for those efforts are a series of spectacular failures that would make a less arrogant leader blush.

The Solyndra fiasco is the highest-profile of the president’s many green failures, but it’s hardly the only one. Barely a week goes by but that we learn of yet another government-funded “clean energy” boondoggle. Let’s consider a few examples.

Late last year, Beacon Power Company filed for bankruptcy protection. Beacon had previously received a $39 million government-guaranteed loan in order to fund research aimed at producing energy storage devices on an industrial scale. These kinds of “super batteries” are necessary solely to cover for the deficiencies and unreliability of solar and wind power.

Last Thursday, Ener1 Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection. Ener1 develops lithium storage batteries for electric cars manufactured by a company called Think Holdings, AS, which in turn has a manufacturing company located in Elkhart, Indiana. Ener1 received over $130 million in stimulus funds, and a $480 million loan from the Energy Department, promising to deliver 1,400 jobs to Indiana, while Think Holdings would generate a further 415 jobs. To date, Enre1 has created 275 jobs, while Think Holdings is down to 2 people who guard a plant at which about 100 electric vehicles – most of them unfinished – sit idly in storage.

A year ago, Vice President Joe Biden hailed Ener1 as one of “100 Recovery Act projects changing America.” “A year and a half ago, this administration made a judgment,” he said at the time. “We decided it’s not sufficient to create new jobs—we have to create whole new industries.” Unfortunately for Ener1, the free market did not share the Vice President’s enthusiasm. Demand for expensive, short ranged, small electric cars has not materialized, and thus Ener1 has no market for its product.

Even the much-ballyhooed Chevy Volt has turned into a disaster. Fire hazards aside, there is simply no demand for the vehicle beyond some arms of government, a few corporations with cash to waste and rich, tree-hugging celebrities who can afford the luxury of pretentiousness. Chevrolet hoped to sell 10,000 Volts in 2011. Actual sales amounted to 7,671 units. GM has temporarily laid off 1,200 workers on the Volt production line and is considering slowing down production. A recent study concluded that real cost of Volt – when you consider all of the government subsidies involved in developing and building the car – is about $250,000 per unit. To borrow one of the environmental movement’s favorite terms, it’s hard to see how production of the Volt could ever be sustainable in the free market.

In what has become part of his general re-election strategy, president Barack Obama is touting the government bailout of automakers GM and Chrysler as a great success. “The American auto industry was on the verge of collapse. And some politicians were willing to let it just die. We said no,” Obama told college students last week in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “We believe in the workers of this state.” Yet much like other pronouncements of “fact” that come from this president, the devil is in the details, many of which don’t remotely square with the reality. Much like the banks, the auto industry was “too big to fail,” and it was “saved” in exactly the same fashion: with a multi-billion dollar bailout, courtesy of the American taxpayer.

Let’s begin with the president’s central assertion, i.e. the American auto industry was on the verge of collapse. While there is no question that GM and Chrysler were in trouble, several other U.S. auto producers, such as Ford, Honda and Toyota, were in no danger of going under. The reason GM and Chrysler were in trouble was largely due to their own shortcomings, namely mismanagement, and labor costs that were out of control. Moreover as this article from 2005 reveals, GM was in trouble long before the current financial crisis exacerbated its problems. From 2000 to 2005, GM had already lost 74 percent of its market share, was saddled with more than $1600 per vehicle in “legacy costs” (read: “union pensions and health benefits”) and, because of its union agreements, the automaker couldn’t close plants or lay off workers without paying a stiff penalty, or run plants at less than 80% capacity–whether they made money or not.

Thus for GM and Chrysler as well, it wasn’t a matter of if, but when such profligacy would be their eventual undoing. As the financial crisis hit, both automakers were on the verge of collapse. Yet that reality didn’t sway Congress, which, at that time, was insufficiently attuned to the “never let a crisis go to waste” mentality that would eventually lead to multi-billion dollar bailouts of the banking sector and insurance giant AIG. Congress voted against emergency loans in late 2008.

At that point George W. Bush made the kind of end run around Congress that president Obama has raised to an art form: after being informed by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson that he (Paulson) had no authority to use funds from the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) for an auto bailout, the former president authorized $17.4 billion in loans with the proviso that both companies develop restructuring plans after Obama became president. Mr. Obama, as is his wont, then “doubled down” on his determination to use taxpayers funds to save both companies.

No doubt he was aided by a document produced by the Center for Automotive Research (CAR). Their worst case scenario, a 100 percent cessation of operations by the “Detroit Three” (Ford, which never took bailout money, was included in the scenario) “would be a loss of nearly 3.0 million jobs in the U.S. economy–comprised of 239,341 jobs at the Detroit Three, 973,969 indirect/supplier jobs and over 1.7 million spin-off (expenditure-induced) jobs.” Yet as it is pointed out here, “the report gave no consideration to the more realistic scenario that one or two of the Detroit automakers might turn to Chapter 11 reorganization.”

Why not Chapter 11 bankruptcy? Politics. The same unions that threw their support behind Barack Obama’s presidency wanted quid pro quo. A Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding was viewed as a lose-lose proposition for the United Auto Workers Union (UAW), whose contracts would have undoubtedly been re-worked to include major concessions, and a pro-union president eager to portray himself as a savior of a major American industry. That the administration made a complete mockery of bankruptcy laws in the process was of little consequence.

In April 2009, Barack Hussein Obama curtsied (some observers called it a “deep bow”) to his royal highness, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, king of Saudi Arabia.  Middle East protocol experts were clear that this was an unnecessary gesture, and that a simple handshake would have sufficed.  The White House denied the curtsy, but videos and photos of the gesture zapped around the Internet telling the truth to anyone interested.   King Abdullah’s only two claims to fame are the two sacred cities of Islam and about 25% of the world’s oil.  One can only wonder which of the Saudi king’s two assets evoked Obama’s obeisance.

It is now beginning to look like this unnecessary, uncalled for, awkward but perhaps telling bit of subservience by the president of the world’s strongest country, the commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful army, and the leader of the free world, to a jihadist Islamo-fascist, imperialist, supremacist, totalitarian, tyrannical, triumphalist, theocratic, apartheid, misogynistic, terrorist-supporting ruler of a petty sheikhdom, may have been a harbinger of future subservience.

Flash forward two years.  A soon-to-be nuclear Iran threatens the entire world, Muslim and Christian, Occident and Orient, and of course Israel and the United States. Yet, during these past two years, Obama has consistently chosen political theatre over substantive action to prevent Iran’s progress toward WMD capacity; a course of action decidedly contrary to the political and economic and security interests of the USA and the free world.  As is clear from the obvious fact that neither Russia nor China nor North Korea will join other nations in imposing economic sanctions on Iran, the much vaunted UN sanctions will in no way impede Iran’s nuclear program.

As Congresspersons Tom Price (R-GA) and Trent Franks (R-AZ) explained:¹

There is no ban on investment in Iran’s petroleum sector. With one exception, there is no ban on banking with Iran, foreign investment in Iranian bonds, insurance for Iranian shipping, or the provision of trade credits to Iran. In short, the resolution will cause minimal economic hardship for the regime, and, like the preceding three U.N. measures, will do little or nothing to impede the regime’s march toward a nuclear military capability. Those provisions that in some way restrict Iran’s conduct are easily circumvented through the use of front organizations and alternate banking relations.

In order to pass this resolution, the Obama administration, due to long-standing objections from Russia and China, jettisoned every proposal that might actually harm Iran’s economy.

The House version of the decidedly tougher Iran Sanctions Act (ISA, H.R. 2194) would, in contrast to the U.N. resolution, accomplish the following: It would fully implement and enforce the 1996 ISA law to encourage foreign governments to direct that all state-owned and privately-owned entities cease all investment in and support for Iran’s energy sector and all exports of refined petroleum to Iran, and would impose sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran and any other bank in Iran that is engaged in proliferation activities or support of terrorist groups. The House bill would also greatly restrict the use of the President’s waiver authority. For more information on H.R. 2194, click here to review the RSC analysis of the legislation.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration requested that Congress not debate the Iran Sanctions Act until after passage of the U.N. resolution. By putting ISA on the back burner, the Obama administration delayed progress on sanctions with actual substance, opting instead to throw its full support behind the decidedly weaker Security Council resolution, presumably in hopes of obtaining a “public relations victory” following passage of toothless U.N. sanctions (emphasis added).

Did Obama so highly value a PR victory that he would subordinate America’s strategic security needs to his political image?  Back in June 2010, it looked like Obama preferred form over substance, rather than a determined effort to stop Iran’s seemingly inexorable march toward nuclear power: either that or he wanted Iran to win. Today it looks much more like he wants Iran to win.

The anti-American activists of the Occupy Wall Street movement announced they plan to violently disrupt the G8/NATO summit in Chicago on May 19.

Adbusters, the Noam Chomsky-friendly magazine that spearheaded the Occupy movement, claims the movement will conduct a massive occupation of Chicago “in the tradition of the Chicago 8.”

Of course the radicals of the Chicago 8 organized riots at the Democratic Party’s national convention in that city in 1968. Hundreds of police officers were injured.

Adbusters vows that this time the rioters won’t give an inch to the police. A massive occupation of Chicago involving “50,000 people from all over the world” will begin on May 1:

And this time around we’re not going to put up with the kind of police repression that happened during the Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago, 1968 … nor will we abide by any phony restrictions the City of Chicago may want to impose on our first amendment rights. We’ll go there with our heads held high and assemble for a month-long people’s summit … we’ll march and chant and sing and shout and exercise our right to tell our elected representatives what we want … the constitution will be our guide. [ellipses in original]

When the nations of the G8 and NATO begin meeting May 19, the movement plans to press its demands. Occupiers want an economy-killing “Robin Hood Tax” to be imposed on financial transactions, an international agreement to curb carbon emissions, and “a nuclear-free Middle East” (translation: the unilateral nuclear disarmament of Israel), according to Adbusters.

And woe to the powers that be if they don’t give in to the radicals’ demands.

And if they don’t listen … if they ignore us and put our demands on the back burner like they’ve done so many times before … then, with Gandhian ferocity, we’ll flashmob the streets, shut down stock exchanges, campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe … we’ll make the price of doing business as usual too much to bear. [ellipses in original]

The Occupy Wall Street movement grew out of an event last Sept. 17 in lower Manhattan called the US Day of Rage that was organized by Adbusters. Organizers vowed that the mass protest would be nonviolent in nature. This raised the question of why they named their event after the original “Days of Rage” that took place in Chicago in 1969. That tumultuous year, members of what was later to become known as the Weather Underground provoked four days of riots and demonstrations against The System.

Editor’s note: To read David Horowitz’s pamphlet, Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, click here. To purchase it, click here.

“Of no other occupant of the White House can it be said that he owed his understanding of the political process to a man and a philosophy so outside the American mainstream, or so explicitly dedicated to opposing it.”

– “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model” by David Horowitz

When Newt won the battle of South Carolina, he also laid out the stakes for the larger conflict beyond the primaries and even beyond the election. It is the battle for the soul of America. In the 2004 election, John Edwards borrowed James P. Cannon’s Two Americas metaphor to showcase his vision of a divided nation.

“Today under George W. Bush, there are two Americas, not one. One America does the work, while another America reaps the reward,” Edwards said. And south of the North Carolina senator’s old seat, Gingrich expressed another and truer vision of the two Americas:

I believe the debate we’re going to have with President Obama over the next eight or nine months will be the outlining of the two Americas.  The America of the Declaration of Independence, the America of Saul Alinsky.  The America of paychecks.  The America of food stamps.  The America of independence.  The America of dependence.

As Obama embarks on an election strategy that makes class into the pivot of a divided nation, Newt shifted the debate from the pivot of class to the pivot of opportunity. The descent of the Democratic Party into the depths of class warfare demagoguery marks the final phase of their transformation into the Alinsky Party. A party whose sole electoral strategy is its economic divisiveness, rather than opportunity creation.

Gingrich had not only turned a radical left-wing metaphor on its head, he pointed it directly at the enemy and framed the Two Americas as a choice between Alinsky’s America and our America. It is a theme that David Horowitz and the David Horowitz Freedom Center have introduced into the national dialogue; warning early on of the revolutionary left’s exploitation of the Alinsky model and its consequences for the future prosperity of our nation under an avid practitioner of it.

In 2009, David Horowitz wrote, “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model” which explored the ideas of Alinsky and their incorporation into the battle strategy for radical social change of the Obama administration. Before there was a Chicago community organizer in the White House, a Chicago community organizer named Saul Alinsky had written the map that would take his latter day successor from small time social justice shakedowns all the way to the biggest social justice power grab since the days of Mao and Lenin.

When Obama took office, the bust of Churchill was removed from the Oval Office, but White House spokesman Jay Carney has refused to deny the ongoing rumors that a portrait of Saul Alinsky does hang in the White House, saying only that “The President’s background as a community organizer is well documented in his own books. His experience in that field contributed to who he is today.”

Apparently a better relationship between Democrats and Republicans is in the eye of the beholder. One day after his State of the Union speech, where he told Americans that genuine reform can’t happen unless we “end the notion that the two parties must be locked in a perpetual campaign of mutual destruction; that politics is about clinging to rigid ideologies instead of building consensus around common sense ideas,” president Barack Obama had what might be charitably described as a less than cordial encounter with Arizona’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer.

“He was a little thin-skinned,” Brewer said during a later interview on local radio station News/Talk 92.3 KTAR. “I was a bit taken aback by his stance and his attitude [on the tarmac],” she added. noting that Obama walked away from her “[as] I was trying to make a point that I thought that my book was right and correct.” The book in question is “Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure America’s Border,” about Brewer’s approach to dealing with Arizona’s illegal alien problem. According to the governor, the president was “a little disturbed” regarding her description of a previous meeting between the two in the Oval Office on June 3rd, 2010.

At a press conference after that meeting, she described their talk as “very cordial, very very cordial.” Yet as one watches the video of that presser, one gets the impression that Ms. Brewer is carefully measuring her words. Apparently she was. In a review of the book published by the Arizona Republic, Brewer reportedly described the get-together as “one that started with some chitchat,” she writes. “But after a few minutes, the president’s tone got serious–and condescending.” She further noted that Mr. Obama “has repeatedly made fun of those of us who want to see the law enforced, saying we want a ‘moat’ with ‘alligators’ in it around our country. The reason he has resorted to these failed attempts at humor, I think, is that he supports a policy that is fundamentally undemocratic, and he knows it.”

Thus, what should have been a routine exchange of greetings between a visiting president and a state governor got testy. Brewer offered Obama a letter, which she later said was an invitation to sit down with her to discuss Arizona’s economic “comeback” and to join her for a tour of the U.S.-Mexican border. A brief exchange followed with Brewer pointing her finger at the president, and Mr. Obama apparently walking away before the Governor could finish what she was saying. A White House official seemingly confirmed Brewer’s account of the incident. “The governor handed the president a letter and said she was inviting him to meet with her,” the official noted. “The president said he’d be glad to meet with her again, but did note that after their last meeting, a cordial discussion in the Oval Office, the governor inaccurately described the meeting in her book. The president looks forward to continuing taking steps to help Arizona’s economy grow.”

This media-orchestrated kerfuffle obscures the larger political picture, one that was also addressed by the president in the State of the Union speech. “I believe as strongly as ever that we should take on illegal immigration,” said Mr. Obama. “That’s why my Administration has put more boots on the border than ever before. That’s why there are fewer illegal crossings than when I took office. The opponents of action are out of excuses. We should be working on comprehensive immigration reform right now.”

On January 19, President Barack Obama’s campaign staff released a video, “America and Israel: An Unbreakable Bond” – a piece rife with half-truths and distortions. As patently false as it seems to anyone with a properly jaundiced eye, it nonetheless requires a response.  For one suspects that those American Jews eager to find a reason to vote for Obama may be all too ready to stand convinced of what they are being told.

Recently elected NY Congressman Bob Turner gave an interview in Israel last week, in which he said, “I think American support militarily has been more an investment in our own defense..”  It was a refreshingly honest and significant observation that directly applies here.

Obama likes to claim – as he does in this video – that US military cooperation with Israel makes him a huge supporter of Israel.  But this cooperation serves US needs and goals in important ways: the US requires an Israel that is militarily solid.  Nothing wrong with that.  It means US interests coincide with Israeli interests in this respect. But Obama misrepresents when he claims the US does this for Israel.  And it should be noted here that it is the Pentagon, which understands the military situation, that has always been the major promoter within the US of cooperation with Israel.

This same principle applies to other, related, matters.  Last year the Israeli embassy in Cairo was attacked.  The ambassador and his staff got out, but two Israeli security guards were caught in the building and in danger of being killed.  Obama (and I note here there were others from elsewhere involved as well) intervened and helped get those guards out safely.  He then made a great deal about how he worked on Israel’s behalf.  Nonsense.  Imagine what would have happened if those guards had been killed, when, according to international law, a country is responsible for the safety of foreign embassy personnel within its borders.  Israel would have had to respond very strongly – perhaps there would have been war.  Obama knew this, knew that there was risk of a disastrous turn of events in the Middle East and he had to try to cool things.  All to the good. But he didn’t do this for Israel.

Did Israelis, including Netanyahu, thank him for his actions here and elsewhere? Of course. That’s the diplomatic thing to do.  But the Israeli prime minister did not do so with the expectation that Obama would use this expression of appreciation as an endorsement come election time.  The Obama team merely borrowed an earlier clip and added it to their video. I haven’t discussed this with Netanyahu personally, but I am reasonably confident that the prime minister is privately praying that Obama loses – for Obama has been rude to him and a thorn in his side in many respects.  But it’s neither politic nor appropriate for him to voice any opinion in the matter.

As to Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s praise of Obama, which is given considerable play in the video:  It’s long been known in Israel that Barak is an Obama “buddy.”  This is a man who is intensely disliked by those Israelis who care about preserving their nation.  Barak is the one who sanctions middle of the night expulsions of people in “unauthorized” communities in Judea and Samaria, allowing young children to be dragged from their beds into cold rain.  What Barak says should carry no weight with caring people.

The imagery of Obama at the Kotel, which begins the video, is designed to grab at the heart.  But for some this is more likely to grab the stomach:  Obama has not visited Israel once since he’s been in office – even though he is a much-traveled president. Where does he travel? To Muslim countries, mostly. He had no trouble visiting Indonesia, which is engaged in horrendous human rights violations.  Not a word about that. But from a podium in Indonesia, of all places, he criticized settlements in Judea and Samaria.  It was no accident – he was showing Muslims how tough he is with Israel. This is a friend of Israel?

It was officially called the State of the Union Address, but what President Obama actually delivered on Tuesday night was a campaign speech targeted directly at his base. The message went something like this: “Unions, environmentalists, teachers, Hispanic immigrants, women, I’m your president…I’m your candidate.”

Consider the code words and messages sprinkled throughout the speech.

The president began with a shameless signal to the Code Pink crowd and anti-war left—the folks who fueled his rise and run for the White House. “For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq,” he declared, sidestepping the unraveling situation that has emerged as a result. And he went on: “We’ve begun to wind down the war in Afghanistan. Ten thousand of our troops have come home. Twenty-three thousand more will leave by the end of this summer.” Again, never mind what is left behind.

For Big Labor, he boasted about his efforts to get “workers and automakers to settle their differences” and get a government-owned, union-run General Motors “back on top as the world’s number one automaker.”

He gratuitously mentioned a “unionized plant in Milwaukee” and cited key union cities in key states for good measure: “Detroit and Toledo and Chicago…Cleveland and Pittsburgh.”

For the teachers’ unions, he lamented how “tight budgets have forced states to lay off thousands of teachers” and called on Congress to give states “the resources to keep good teachers on the job.” Drifting into meaningless platitudes, he promised that in exchange he would support programs to “replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.”

While on the subject of meaningless platitudes, the president boasted that “there are fewer illegal crossings than when I took office.” The reason for that, of course, is that he’s presiding over the worst economy in four decades. In other words, there are no jobs to entice immigrants to cross America’s southern border—legally or illegally. (See Mitch Daniels’ sparkling rebuttal for more on why.)

But the president’s main message on immigration was for the amnesty lobby: “Hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge: The fact that they aren’t yet American citizens. Many were brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet they live every day with the threat of deportation,” he chided. “Let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people,” who, it pays to recall, are not responsible enough to legalize their status.

Had enough of fat cat Barack Obama, his jet-setting wife and his multi-millionaire Chicago consigliere/real-estate mogul Valerie Jarrett attacking the “rich”? Well, brace yourselves. You’ll be hearing much more from the White House about the “wealthy few” who aren’t paying their “fair share” as Obama’s re-election campaign doubles down on class-war demagoguery.

As usual, there’s always a set of immunity charms for the privileged friends and family of the ruling class. When it comes to all the Green Robber Barons who’ve reaped an obscenely unfair share of billions of tax dollars from the Obama administration, the envy trumpeteers will be quieter than a nest of mute church mice.

Obama’s State of the Union address defiantly pitched a new round of clean energy spending orgies to help the “middle class.” But how have the serial bankruptcies and near-bankruptcies of several federally subsidized solar companies — all under Obama’s watch — helped anyone but an upper-crust elite of eco-crats and their lobbyists and consultants?

Bankrupt Solyndra, billionaire George Kaiser. In the wake of the half-billion-dollar Solyndra stimulus bust, company officials revealed plans to hand out hefty bonuses totaling $500,000. Months before the politically connected solar energy manufacturer went belly up, it was doling out bonus payments of between $40,000 and $60,000 to several executives. Last week, a local CBS News crew caught employees at the Silicon Valley headquarters trashing solar panel glass tubes worth an estimated $10 million.

The now-abandoned Taj Mahal complex cost ordinary Americans more than $733 million. But billionaire Democratic donor and frequent White House guest George Kaiser, whose nonprofit foundation was Solyndra’s biggest investor, is still sitting pretty. He and the other private investors of Solyndra will recoup their losses ahead of taxpayers. And while they blast their GOP opponents, double-standard Democrats will remain AWOL on the glaring tax-avoidance strategies of the wealthy Kaiser Family Foundation.

Bankrupt Beacon Power, fat Democratic coffers.

The Republican re-embrace of former Speaker Newt Gingrich says a lot about whom he sees as his opponent — and it isn’t just President Barack Obama. It’s the media.

If not for major media’s embrace, Obama would still be sitting in the Senate, perhaps mulling another run for the presidency. A UCLA economist-political scientist recently tried to measure how the liberal media bias influences the way people vote. He concluded that this bias gives the Democrat candidate 8 to 10 percentage points.

Republicans understand this. So does Gingrich — on a very deep level. He knows the media dislike him above and beyond their anti-conservative Republican disdain. That he is testy, no-nonsense, whip smart and knowledgeable makes him formidable. That he engineered the 1994 GOP takeover of the House and pushed former President Bill Clinton into governing in the center makes him effective.

The good news for the media is that Gingrich is a Southern white male Christian Republican. He belongs to a group for which no advocacy organization exists to play the race/sex/religion card when Gingrich gets called — on-air by cable hosts and pundits — “racist,” “disgusting” and a “pig.”

Gingrich bites back. Hard. Thus, he addresses the question of his messy personal life while hitting the CNN moderator for bringing this up as the first question. Gingrich knows he lacks the Reaganesque “aw, shucks” persona. Reagan used his sunny disposition to counter the media’s attempt to portray him as a dangerous nutcase whose finger should never go near the nuclear button — not unlike how many try to portray Gingrich.

Gingrich will call out the media for ignoring the bombshell that Obama’s mother did not fight with her insurer over her medical bills, as Obama movingly and repeatedly told Americans in making his case for ObamaCare.

Gingrich will question why the major media behaved so indifferently for so long about matters like Obama’s 20-year association with a racist, anti-Semitic pastor.

Gingrich will ask why the press yawns when the Obama administration stops using expressions like “shovel ready,” “save or create” millions of jobs and “stimulus.”

Gingrich will remind Americans about Obama’s promise to end the influence of “lobbyists.” By any normal understanding of the term, the White House remains a lobby-rich environment where Obama officials insist on lobbyist meetings off-premises. This means there is no White House log, allowing the administration to brag about an alleged decrease in lobbying.

Gingrich will point out the hypocrisy of being called a “lobbyist” though he never registered as one.

Yet the media fail to apply this flexible definition of “lobbyist” when it comes to the Obama administration.

Gingrich will ask why the media remain so incurious about Obama’s grades at prep school, Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law — even as Obama admitted, in his first book, that he wasn’t much of a student.

To convince the world that sharia-based laws protect personal freedoms and human rights for all, Islamists engage in the time-honored Muslim tradition of lying about their own beliefs to conceal their true nature. This form of deception is known as “taqiyya.” Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is engaging in taqiyya as it prepares to lead Egypt’s newly elected parliament and to assure Egyptian citizens and the world at large that they are peace-loving advocates of universal human rights. The Obama administration is buying this taqiyya hook, line and sinker — and spreading it.

Just last week, for example, U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson met with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie, congratulating the group for the victory of their political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), in the elections for a new parliament. She listened attentively as Badie assured her that sharia law “ensures personal freedoms for all.” When Badie told her the United States had to prove to Muslims that it has seen the error of its ways in past dealings with the Muslim world, Patterson followed the lead of President Obama. She apologized for what she said were past American mistakes and promised that the U.S. will “learn from them to avoid their recurrence in the future.”

Back in Washington, D.C., State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in a January 5th press briefing that the United States trusts the Muslim Brotherhood party’s good intentions. Choosing to downplay an interview by a senior Muslim Brotherhood leader with Al Hayat, in which he said that the treaty with Israel is not binding, Nuland responded:

We’ve seen this press report. I would say that it is one member of the Muslim Brotherhood. We have‬ had other assurances from the party with regard to their commitment not only to universal human rights, but to the international obligations that the Government of Egypt has undertaken.

The Muslim Brotherhood and its Obama administration partners in taqiyya ask us to accept at face value the Brotherhood’s current face of moderation. We are supposed to believe that it has eschewed violence, wants to maintain peaceful relations with Israel and is dedicated to fostering an open pluralistic democracy in Egypt in which all of its citizens are treated equally.

The facts unfortunately do not support this rosy picture. For example, the “one member of the Muslim Brotherhood” whose hostile remarks earlier this month against Israel were dismissed as irrelevant by the State Department spokeswoman was the Brotherhood’s deputy leader, Dr. Rashad Bayoumi. He said in his interview that his organization will not recognize Israel “under any circumstance.” Bayoumi added that “we do not recognize Israel at all. [Israel is] an occupying criminal enemy.”

Dr. Bayoumi’s interview took place just a few weeks after Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie welcomed Hamas’s Gaza leader, Ismail Haniyeh, at the Brotherhood’s Cairo headquarters. Haniyeh said during his visit that “Our presence with the Brotherhood threatens the Israeli entity.” For his part, Badie had nothing but praise for Hamas, which has not renounced violence and was after all the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Dr. Mahmoud Saad al-Katatni, the Director of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party until he resigned on January 21, 2012 to serve as the speaker of the new Egyptian parliament, said last month that the parliament is expected to reevaluate the Camp David peace treaty that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed with Israel in 1979:

A long time has passed since the Camp David accord was signed and like the other agreements it needs reevaluation and this is in the hands of the Parliament[.]

Al-Katatni denied a report in an Israeli newspaper that had claimed the Muslim Brotherhood has reached understandings with the United States and Israel regarding the importance of safeguarding the peace treaty with Israel:

The report in the newspaper is completely unfounded. There have been no contacts or understandings with the American or Israeli side about the peace treaty that President Anwar Sadat signed in 1979.

Is the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated leader’s equivocation on a 32-year-old treaty, which has maintained peace between Egypt and Israel, what the State Department’s spokeswoman had in mind when she expressed confidence in the Muslim Brotherhood’s “commitment… to the international obligations that the Government of Egypt has undertaken”?

And what do we make of the report from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which closely monitors the Arab media, about the recent virulent anti-Semitic writings appearing on the Muslim Brotherhood’s website, Ikhwanonline.com? The report stated:

The website of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Egypt, Ikhwanonline.com, contains articles with antisemitic motifs, including Holocaust denial and descriptions of the ‘Jewish character’ as covetous, exploitative, and a source of evil in human society. While articles of this tenor have been posted on the site in the past, their posting has recently taken on greater importance in light of the group’s increasing strength following the ouster of the Mubarak regime, as reflected by the results of the recent parliamentary elections.

In addition to antisemitic content, articles on the site also include praise for jihad and martyrdom, and condemnation of negotiation as a means of regaining Islamic lands. Among these are articles calling to kill Zionists and praising the September 9, 2011 attack on the Israeli Embassy in Cairo – which one article called a landmark of the Egyptian revolution.

Saying one thing to guarantee Obama administration support for the Muslim Brotherhood and saying another on the Muslim Brotherhood’s own website is vintage Islamist taqiyya.

How about universal human rights such as freedom of religion and expression? Again, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Obama administration want us to forget about the Muslim Brotherhood’s past positions on denying certain rights to women and religious minorities. They expect everyone to fall in line and embrace the “moderate” leadership of today, exemplified by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, Mohammed Badie, and the former director of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party, who was just chosen as the speaker of the parliament, Mahmoud Saad al-Katatni.

Both Badie and al-Katatni espouse sharia law as the basis for governing Egypt, but maintain that sharia law, inclusive democracy and universal human rights are all compatible with each other. To this end, as noted above, Badie claims that sharia law “ensures personal freedoms for all.” Al-Katatni said in an interview with al-Jazeera that the Freedom and Justice Party “is not a religious party but it’s a civil party… that seeks a modern and democratic state but with a ‘Islamic reference’.” The Muslim Brotherhood’s website describes al-Katatni as “renowned for his moderate stances.”

The global warming apocalypse and its Elmer Gantry, Al Gore, may have faded from public view lately, but that old-time green religion is still making mischief. President Obama has just delayed until after November’s election a decision on the Canadian Keystone XL pipeline. This truly shovel-ready project would create thousands of blue-collar jobs, help hold down the price of gasoline, and lessen our dependence on oil imported from thugs like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

The administration’s excuses for this move are preposterous.  The State Department sniffed that it needs more time “to determine whether the Keystone XL pipeline is in the national interest” and, as Obama said in his announcement, can “protect the American people.” But three years, nine public meetings, and reams of reports have already shown that the pipeline’s alleged dangers to the Ogallala aquifer, or the malign effects of “dirty” crude oil, or the threat to endangered species, are specious pretexts. Like his slow-down of oil drilling permits and reduction of oil production on federal lands––down 40% compared to ten years ago––Obama’s decision is in fact both political and ideological, a mollifying bone tossed to the bicoastal progressive elites on whom Obama depends for campaign contributions and political support.

For these affluent urban-dwellers, the cult of environmentalism is a cheap way to indulge a vaguely leftist dislike of industrial capitalism while enjoying all the benefits that a high-tech, oil-fueled, free-market economy confers on them. Like the “telescopic philanthropy,” to use Charles Dickens’ label, directed at distant ghetto-dwellers or the Third World poor, the urban nature-lover conspicuously displays his concern over a natural world under assault by capitalism’s depravities. But he does so only from within a cocoon of technology that assures him a reliable, safe supply of food, freeing him from the drudgery of wresting sustenance from a hostile natural world; and that protects him from the disease, drought, famine, predators, malnutrition, and the other natural evils afflicting our ancestors and those living in the Third World today.

Equally hypocritical is the Marxist agenda lurking in environmentalism, which blames the degradation of the environment on the same free market capitalism and economic globalization that have created blue-state wealth. Given communism’s abject failure as an economic and social system, contemporary Marxism has insinuated itself into environmentalism as a way of wielding influence and recruiting adherents from among those dissatisfied with modern life and the trade-offs required by a free economy and its creative destruction. Issues such as pollution or species extinction are thus explained as the consequences of an evil capitalist empire that oppresses the international proletariat and the natural world alike. That’s why at most protests against the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank or Wall Street, the hammer and sickle can be seen flying beside the banners of Greenpeace. Forgotten, of course, is the fact that communist regimes like the old Soviet Union and today’s China are some of history’s worst polluters.

What gives this strange Marxist nature-love wider political traction, however, is the patina of science that disguises its mythic origins. Sentimental idealizations of nature as our true home, a superior realm of peace, harmony, freedom and simplicity destroyed by civilization and technology, are as old as the Greeks and their myths of the Golden Age and the Noble Savage. But today’s modern environmentalist cloaks these ancient myths in the robes of science. Overpopulation, pesticide pollution, resource depletion, extermination of species, and of course global warming have all over the years been presented as scientifically established facts that show the destructive consequences of modern capitalism. But in each case, the apocalyptic predictions have all ended in a whimper, and the science supposedly supporting them exposed as partial, incomplete, politically motivated, and riddled with unexamined assumptions and at times outright fakery. Nonetheless, politicized nature-love camouflaged with “science” permeates popular culture and our public schools, where kids are taught lies about drowning polar bears and melting ice caps, the quasi-pagan cult celebration Earth Day is solemnly celebrated, carbon-based fuels are demonized, and driving a Prius is a sacrament.