The following article presents one interpretation of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. For a counter-view written by Ryan Mauro, in favor of Mitt Romney’s electability, click here. 

For well over a year now, we’ve been hearing that Mitt Romney was the inevitable nominee for the Republican Party.  I’ve personally heard it from Republican fundraisers, Republican Party staffers, and high-ranking conservative commentators.  Not only was Romney inevitable, they’d say, he deserved inevitability, because he was clearly the most electable candidate.

With Newt Gingrich blowing Romney’s inevitability meme out of the water in South Carolina and Florida, the question is no longer whether Mitt is inevitable – he’s not—but whether he deserves to be the nominee based on electability.

I believe Mitt is, in fact, virtually unelectable.  By contrast, I believe that Newt Gingrich has a serious shot at beating President Obama.  Here’s why.

(1) Narrative.  Presidential elections are decided on narrative and who gets to define it.  In 2004, conservatives succeeded in defining the race as a strong and stable wartime president against a flip-flopping Vietnam-era radical who lied about his war record.  In 2008, Obama and the media defined the narrative, which quickly became “The Chosen One.”

In 2012, the conventional Republican wisdom goes, Republicans must run as bland a candidate as humanly possible.  If they do, Obama’s record will be the issue rather than the Republican candidate.  Romney is clearly the least offensive candidate.

There’s only one problem: every narrative has to define both candidates.  The Republican establishment may wish to define Romney as a successful businessman and CEO with governing experience.  But he will be defined instead as a 1% elitist out of touch with mainstream Americans; his Bain Capital background will be trotted out to no end; his failure to create jobs in Massachusetts will become a key campaign issue (he was 46^th out of 50 during his tenure).  The Obama campaign is drooling to get their hooks into Romney – that’s what the entire Occupy Wall Street movement has been about.

Romney has been absolutely incapable of fending off such attacks in the primaries.  Gingrich trashed Romney over Bain Capital, and it clearly had an effect with South Carolina voters; Romney’s tax records have been more of an issue than Newt’s marriages in the last two weeks, despite the best efforts of Marianne Gingrich.

In fact, it gets even worse for Romney.  Historically, boring candidates don’t do the defining – they get defined.  Name the more boring candidate in each election since 1976, and you will be naming a loser: Ford, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, H.W. Bush, Dole, Gore, Kerry, McCain.  This is an unbreakable rule.  Boring candidates do not have the charisma or capacity to define themselves.

What’s worse, they don’t have the ability to define their opponents, either.  Romney is especially plagued by this.  The two issues of this campaign will clearly be Obamacare and job creation.  Romney loses on both – he created the model for Obamacare, and his job creation record is extraordinarily spotty.  The best argument he can make about Obama is the one he’s been making: that Obama is incompetent, that he has “amassed an actual record of debt, decline and disappointment.”  It’s a good argument.  It’s just  not a winning argument.  Kerry tried the same argument in 2004; Dole tried the same argument in 1996.  Defining Obama as incompetent won’t cut it, because in fact, he is extremely competent – at achieving far-left goals.

Want to know Obama’s counterargument?  It’ll look a good deal like Andrew Sullivan’s infamous Newsweek piece.  And if this campaign gets bogged down in the details of whether a recovery is actually taking place, even as Obama defines Romney as an out-of-touch richy-rich guy, Obama will win.

It will be significantly more difficult for Obama to craft a narrative about Newt.  Obama can’t attack Newt on lobbying – Obama’s stacked his administration with lobbyists, and he was the #2 recipient of Fannie/Freddie money in the Senate.  He can’t attack Newt on job creation – if Obama wants to argue Gingrich era job creation vs. Obama era job creation, good luck to him.  He could go after him on his personal life, but the only people who care about that are conservative, anyway.  He can’t attack Newt as an elitist – they’re both professors.  So what’s left?  The “crazy old coot” argument.  If Newt can avoid that pitfall, as he’s been doing so far with Romney, he can maintain his image as the “big idea guy” who worked with and against Clinton to create massive economic growth.

As for Newt defining Obama – well, Newt hasn’t been shy about that.  His goal is to paint Obama not just as incompetent but as unexpectedly radical – a man who posed as a moderate but governed like a hard-left ideologue.  Newt has been impressively articulate on this.  He may not cite Alinsky during the general election, but you can bet he’ll go after Obama on Obamacare, foreign policy spinelessness, and socialistic redistributionism.  McCain hit on that theme last time, but only in the last two weeks – and by then, it was too late.  Newt has already come up with the single catchiest title for Obama: The Food Stamp President.  It works because not only is Obama putting people on food stamps, he’s ideologically committed to increasing the number of people on food stamps.  This title sticks.  But it won’t stick coming from Romney, who looks like he’s never met anybody on food stamps.

(2) Numbers.  The Republican establishment constantly acts as though it must run the most moderate possible candidate in order to win.  Candidates without clear vision, in this view, run the best.  Once again, that’s wrong.  Gallup shows that 40 percent of Americans consider themselves conservative; 35 percent of Americans consider themselves moderate; just 21 percent of Americans consider themselves liberal.  That means that for a Republican to win convincingly, he need only win less than one out of three moderates and draw the entire conservative base.

To nobody’s surprise, President Barack Obama has formally announced that he will seek reelection with a video that’s clearly geared toward motivating fans rather than attracting newcomers, as it’s decidedly light on reasons why the incumbent Democrat should be given four more years in the White House.

Fortunately, Newsweek White House correspondent Daniel Stone gets a bit more specific on the Daily Beast, laying out the case he expects Team Obama to make. Let’s take a look at his points, as well as the flip side.

Last week’s economic report showed an unemployment rate continuing to fall—incredibly slowly. It’s not good enough, but it still is progress, Obama will say. Defending the actions the administration took—especially the $987 billion Recovery Act—will fall to Joe “the stimulus sheriff” Biden, who will be fortified by a team of crack researchers preparing colorful graphs showing lines with positive slopes. Obama the president had trouble arguing the hypothetical that “we’d be worse off if I did nothing,” but Obama the candidate might have better luck. Any Republican will publicly doubt him, but would only be able to offer the same hypothetical that he or she would have done any better.

On the other hand, Obama’s going to have to explain the fact that he explicitly claimed his stimulus plan was needed because it would prevent unemployment rising to 8%, we passed it…and unemployment rose past 8% anyway. He’ll have to answer for record job losses. And while the latest economic news is encouraging, it’s tentative—labor force participation is still low, and Obama is unlikely to support one policy that could accelerate recovery further still:

The United States has stood alone while the rest of the developed world has moved forward with a pro-growth strategy of slashing corporate tax rates. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that its 30-nation membership cut corporate tax rates an average of 7.1 percentage points in the past decade, and the United States will have a federal corporate tax rate one-third higher than the OECD average of 25.7 percent.[2] When Japan’s corporate tax rate is lowered, the United States is one of three nations that will not have reduced the rate.

Corporate taxes are considered the most inefficient of all tax systems. They increase the cost of capital and slow economic growth. Nearly every economist believes that that tax burden falls on individuals, namely the workers and shareholders of the company. A more efficient corporate tax system would increase economic growth and boost the labor market.[3]

Stone continues:

Most partisans either love or hate Obama’s controversial policies. But some of the independents who occupy the valuable middle ground can still be swayed. Don’t know what to think about health care reform? Here, look at this video about a family it saved from disaster. Doubt the success of the auto bailout? Read this story about GM bouncing back. From the stimulus to the war in Libya, Obama’s oppo researchers will be armed with reasoned explanations in snazzy multimedia packaging.

I’m sure we’ll see many such prepackaged stories about the miraculous impact of Obama’s policies on the lives of the American people, but whether or not they’re true is another story (anecdotes from socialized medicine proponents have this funny tendency to get debunked), and the president’s challenger will have no shortage of less pleasant consequences of ObamaCare to reply with. (There’s also the little detail that ObamaCare’s biggest, most disastrous provisions don’t take effect until after the election…) The president’s foray into the car industry will be similarly challenged. And while the polls on Libya are too mixed to make firm guesses about the political ramifications, Obama’s conduct thus far in the conflict is ripe with pitfalls, from his inability lay out a clear national interest or concrete objectives to confusion over who exactly we’re supporting among the rebels and concerns over how much we’re serving the United Nations rather than the United States.

Obama is likely to embrace the problems posed by the annual deficit and long-term debt, laboring to show that he’s more concerned about America’s fiscal issues than his GOP challenger. But the difference between them, Obama’s team will say, is his level-headed approach to solving them. Where someone like Paul Ryan wants to cut $4 trillion dollars over the next decade by taking a knife to Medicare and Medicaid, Obama may head toward the more populist ground that we can’t turn our backs on our seniors—and will hope to pick up their votes.

In other words, Obama’s going to appeal to emotion as a way to avoid making tough choices. We’ve been over ad nauseum the trillions in new spending Obama keeps calling for (speaking of which, did you hear we have to double federal conservation spending?), so it’s hard to imagine many people other than left-wing ideologues taking a good look at Obama’s credibility on the issue without laughing.

George W. Bush staked his reelection on the rationale that “you don’t change horses midstream.” Obama’s will be something akin to “so much more to get done.” A second term gives the president significant leeway to move beyond fear of re-election, and Obama’s team will woo the party base and valuable donors with a new list of wants: Immigration reform that is fair and works. Energy and climate policies that actually have teeth. Gun control that makes sense and solves perennial problems.

That’s a good message for motivating diehard leftists who’ve thus far been underwhelmed by Hope ‘n Change, but as a general election message, promising a hard leftward shift is riskier. Have they forgotten 2010, the healthcare town halls, and the rise of the Tea Party movement already?

When Republicans hammer Obama by pointing out that Washington is more dysfunctional than ever, the president’s team will hit back with a simple message: patience. Campaign volunteers will be given a list of ways Obama has made Washington more open and transparent, like posting White House visitor logs online, speedier responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, and the administration’s Open Government Directive. But the big change doesn’t happen in two years. In fact, they’ll say, it takes more than four.

I’d love to see Obama run on transparency, given that it’s one of many, many campaign promises he’s broken since taking office. As for the “give me time” argument, there’s some truth to it, but in order to make it stick, you need to have something to show for your efforts, something that suggests things have at least been headed in the right direction. And on that score, Obama comes up short.

Most of Stone’s analysis alludes to the perennial question, “are you better off now than you were four years ago?” And while that’s valid and important, I’d like to suggest that there’s another question, related yet distinct, that none of these points speak to, but Americans should ask themselves just as seriously: are you freer than you were four years ago?

A look at the worldview, agendas, tactics, and supporters of the campaign to break the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza. (Click here to see the complete overview.)

As one would expect, this campaign is focused on external appearances, and not toward challenging allegedly "extremist" views among fellow Muslims. And it's predictably deceptive. Glowing generalities like the one on the car pictured above require readers to project their own cultural understanding of ideas like "women's rights" onto the propaganda presented to them.

Muhammad favored "women's rights," did he? But what was the extent of what he thought the rights of women were? Qur'an 4:34 allows men to hit their wives. Qur'an 2:23 says "our women are a tilth for you (to cultivate) so go to your tilth as ye will." Qur'an 2:282 says a woman's testimony is worth half a man's. And Sahih Bukhari 4.54.460 says "If a husband calls his wife to his bed (i.e. to have sexual relation) and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning."

"U.K. ad campaign launched to improve image of Muslims," by Scott Maniquet for the National Post, June 7 (thanks to Nicolei):

Let's face it, some religions do a good job getting their feel good message across, while for whatever reason, some others have a much harder time.

But probably no religion is in more need of a good public relations overhaul than Islam.

This became apparent in Britain when a recent poll found that 58% associated Islam with extremism and 50% associated it with terrorism. The poll also found that only 13% of respondents believed that Islam - called the "religion of peace' by its adherents - was based on peace.

And we all just pulled that idea out of our hats one day -- no particular reason at all.

In response, the Exploring Islam Foundation has launched a U.K. ad campaign to bolster public perception of the religion.

The Inspired by Muhammad campaign features photos of Muslim professionals next to catchy phrases like:

"I believe in social justice. So did Muhammad."

Again, that depends on your idea of justice. Subjugation of unbelievers? Cutting the hands off of thieves and stoning adulterers? Executing apostates?

"I believe in women's rights. So did Muhammad."

"I believe in protecting the environment. So did Muhammad."

A spokesman for Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think tank which seeks to promote a "British Islam. . . free from the bitter politics of the Arab and Muslim world, told London's Independent:

"This campaign is important because it can help non-Muslims to better understand the faith that inspires and guides their Muslim friends, neighbours and colleagues.

"This initiative also helps British Muslims reclaim the Prophet Mohamed as a time-honoured guide for peace, compassion and social justice from those who seek to twist his teachings."

Right, vague generalities will let all the air out of "chapter and verse."

With 80% of Canadians agreeing with Quebec's proposed niqab ban, perhaps we will be seeing a similar campaign here in the future.

Pamela Geller on Fox and Friends explains the whys and wherefores of our SIOA religious liberty bus campaign, and ably answers some common objections.

Noam Chomsky was one of the organizers and promoters of the MIT-Harvard campaign to boycott and “divest” Israel a few years back.  Well, last week Israel decided to boycott one of its own boycotters. Chomsky was refused entry into the country when he tried to cross over from Jordan, for purposes of giving an anti-Israel speech at a Palestinian “university” in Ramallah.  As such, Chomsky joined the very select club of people who have been prevented from entering Israel because of their blatant anti-Israel activities and their open collaboration with terrorists.

Chomsky was on his way to give an anti-Israel speech at Birzeit University.  (Instead he gave the speech by videoconference from Jordan.)   Now, Chomsky had been in Israel for visits before, and was even hosted at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheba.  In fact the entire “ban” was evidently nothing more than some bureaucratic glitch in the instructions to Israeli border passport checkers.  Chomsky was invited at the Jordan River Crossing to enter the country instead through the Tel Aviv airport.  Ironically, the Israeli bureaucratic glitch resulted in Israel accidentally doing the right thing.

But this did not prevent a worldwide campaign of anti-Israel vilification by the usual crowd, denouncing Israel for the “banning” of Chomsky, complete with denunciations of “Israeli fascism.”   Led by the Daily Kos, the leftist blogs declared, “Chomsky was banned by the occupation army,” even though the Israeli army had nothing to do with it. Far leftists inside Israel joined in the brouhaha. Chomsky groupies accused Israel of suppressing freedom of speech.  Never mind that there are sufficient reasons to keep Chomsky out of Israel that have nothing to do with his anti-Israel opinions, such as his friendly ties and meetings with the Hezb’Allah terrorist group or his long track record of celebrating and promoting Holocaust deniers.  In fact, no sooner was Chomsky denied entry into Israel than he popped over to Lebanon, and there met with the Hezb’Allah terrorists and attended a salute to Hezb’Allah chief murderer Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, as reported in the Ya Libnan, a Lebanese news service.

Chomsky himself denounced the Israeli decision to block his entry as “Stalinism.”  To tell the truth, when I first heard that Chomsky accused Israel of Stalinism I assumed he meant it as a compliment.  Chomsky has gone out of his way to defend Stalin and he publishes his own articles in all the prominent Stalinist websites.  But like most Stalinists these days, Chomsky prefers to label himself an “anarchist.” This, of course, is the very same individual who spent much of his career as the academic spokesman for the Khmer Rouge regime, the ultra-communists who can only be described as Stalinists on steroids.  Chomsky defended Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge as they annihilated the Cambodian population and he still doubletalks his way out when asked about the genocide that the Khmer Rouge conducted. He once claimed the Khmer Rouge actually SAVED millions of Cambodian lives.  Even far-leftist The Nation demolished Chomsky for his toadying up to Pol Pot.

There have only been a few other cases of people being prevented from entering Israel because of their ties to terrorists or their involvement in anti-Semitic or anti-Israel campaigns.  Norman Finkelstein, the unemployed hate-monger fired by DePaul University, was banned from entering Israel a couple of years back because of his intimate collaboration with Hezb’Allah terrorists. Others banned from Israel include  Richard Falk, the retired Princeton propagandist who has made a career out of denouncing Israelis as Nazis. He was denied entry into Israel as a UN “investigator,” because that UN “investigation” was nothing more than a campaign of lies and smears about Israeli “war crimes.” Falk earlier had been allowed to enter Israel as a private citizen.

Chomsky has, in the past, been welcomed to enter Israel even though he proclaims that he considers both the US and Israel to be far worse than Nazi Germany.  When not dealing with linguistics, Chomsky may be best known for his obsessive cheering on of terrorists and occasionally holding meetings with them.  Chomsky has pow-wowed with Hezb’Allah terrorists.  He has also long been a major promoter of Holocaust deniers. Like Falk and Finkelstein, Chomsky has long led the campaign to boycott and “divest” Israel.  Even a free speech absolutist must concede that there is some logic to a victim of a boycott boycotting that boycotter.  Chomsky has led the jihad against Israel’s existence for as long as he has been a public figure.  He is also a pathological serial liar.

Now, whether or not one agrees with them doing so, democratic countries, in fact, often deny entrance to people whose opinions or politics they find repulsive.  The very same people now whining about Israel refusing Chomsky access to the country to engage in anti-Israel agitation were strangely silent when Britain prohibited 16 people from entering the country on grounds that they held politically incorrect opinions.  These included US radio host Michael Savage.  Before that, the UK banned Rev. Fred Phelps from entering the country because he is anti-gay.  Dutch politician Geert Wilders, a candidate for the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, was barred from entering the UK because of his opinions.  The UK has banned a whole host of Israelis from entering their country, including activist Moshe Feiglin.

The United States has banned all sorts of people from entering, not limited to those suspected of having ties to terror groups.  In some cases it was because of their political views.  Journalist Robert Fisk was banned for this reason.  Professor John Milios from Greece was banned.  Curiously, few in the world denounced the US for being a fascist country on that basis.  Tariq Ramadan, the darling of the pro-jihad Left, was barred until recently from both the US and France.  Liberian President Charles Taylor and other leading Liberians were banned from entering the US because of their support for rebels in Sierra Leone.  Canada has also banned people because of their views or behavior, most famously the case of George Galloway, the British Member of Parliament because of his intimate ties to Saddam Hussein.

Germany, Austria and some other European countries routinely ban Neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers from entering their territories and sometimes jail them when they enter.  Germany banned the Reverend Moon from entering.  And so on.

In the late 1970s, a professor of literature at the University of Lyon named Robert Faurisson wrote two letters to Le Monde claiming that the gas chambers in concentration camps used by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews did not exist and were a Jewish hoax.  Faurisson was convicted of Holocaust denial and hate speech in two trials in France, in 1983 and 1990.

Noam Chomsky has long been the most prominent defender of Faurisson.  Chomsky’s father had been a Hebrew teacher at Gratz College in Philadelphia (which I attended in the 1960s).  Chomsky the younger may be the most academically distinguished Jewish anti-Semite on the planet, even though his theories about linguistics have evidently lost much of their favor among researchers in recent years.

In the 1980s Chomsky signed a petition denying that Faurisson was an anti-Semite and saluting Faurisson as a “respected professor.”  Chomsky not only defended Faurisson’s “academic freedom” but endorsed the content of Faurisson’s anti-Semitic diatribes.

Chomsky also wrote the foreword to one of Faurisson’s Holocaust denial books. There Chomsky wrote: “Is it true that Faurisson is an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi? As noted earlier, I do not know his work very well. But from what I have read — largely as a result of the nature of the attacks on him — I find no evidence to support either conclusion. Nor do I find credible evidence in the material that I have read concerning him, either in the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort.”

In defending Faurisson, Chomsky wrote: “I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers or even denial of the Holocaust. Nor would there be anti-Semitic implications, per se, in the claim that the Holocaust (whether one believes it took place or not) is being exploited, viciously so, by apologists for Israeli repression and violence. I see no hint of anti-Semitic implications in Faurisson’s work.”

Now if anyone is looking for another reason why Israel should legitimately prevent Chomsky from setting his paws on the Holy Land, how was that?  Add it to Chomsky’s role in the Israeli boycott movement and his associations with terrorists.

Should Israel have prevented Chomsky from entering?  It was clearly justified in doing so. But was that the right choice?   Personally – I would have let him in and then immediately had him arrested him for Holocaust denial (if not of Jews then surely regarding the genocide of Cambodians) and anti-Semitism.  Like many countries in Europe, Holocaust Denial is illegal in Israel, although the law is never enforced against anyone, even Arab politicians.  And Israel has an “anti-racism” law on the books, albeit one only used against rightwing Jews, and Chomsky is clearly in violation of it.

Indicting Chomsky under that would have made such a wonderful legal precedent.

Visit Newsreal

Faiza Ali, of the New York chapter of CAIR, has declared that Muslims can freely leave Islam without anything to worry about. Islam, she says, does not practice coercion and preaches that forced faith is not true belief. She has made this assertion in her criticism of Pamela Geller’s “Leaving Islam” ad campaign on city buses. The campaign is aimed at helping Muslims, like Rifqa Bary, who are fearful of leaving their religion due to Islam’s death penalty for apostasy.

Hmmm, if Faiza is right, I wonder what this poor family’s trouble is all about.

I have an idea, let’s start a fund to send Faiza Ali to Iran, and then to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Let her stand in the middle of a busy street, in each nation’s capital, and start announcing that she is a Muslim and that she is leaving Islam to become a Christian or, better yet, a Jew. Let her hand out some flyers denouncing Islamic teachings such as: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.” (Bukhari 9.84.57).

We’ll pay for her whole trip if she agrees to prove her point with this little fun experiment. And when she makes it back after all the partying, clubbing, rest and relaxation (that she will hopefully be able to fit around her apostasy charade),  we will offer her a cash prize — on top of paying for her trip and the resources needed for the flyers, etc.

Who’s with me?

*

Meanwhile, watch Pamela Geller explain her campaign on Fox and Friends:

New York (CNN) -- "Fatwa on your head?" a new series of provocative ads on New York City buses asks. "Is your community or family threatening you? Leaving Islam?"

The ads, sponsored by an organization called Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA), direct viewers to refugefromislam.com, a website designed "for people who are thinking of leaving Islam or are leaving Islam and need resources" to protect them from harm.

Practicing Muslims who find the ads offensive should "ignore it," SIOA leader Pamela Geller told CNN. "It's not directed to them."

Speaking on conservative Sean Hannity's radio show recently, Geller said, "it's time for Americans to stand up against the evil of Islamic jihadi terrorism and Islamic supremacism." The SIOA, which is funded by its online readership, is currently lobbying to block a mosque proposed near the World Trade Center site.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations in New York says the ads are nothing more than "Islam bashing."

"Islamophobes are notorious for their cheap tactics that seek to marginalize American Muslims and divide communities," CAIR Community Affairs director Faiza Ali said in a statement.

"Pamela Geller uses the same tactics as tobacco companies, hiding the cancerous nature of her agenda behind a smokescreen of feigned concern. Geller is free to say what she likes, just as concerned community members are free to critique her tactics and motives," Ali said.

Speaking at a Tennessee "Tea Party" convention earlier this week, Geller called CAIR an "unindicted co-conspirator Muslim-brotherhood front Hamas-tied" organization.

That's not just Pamela Geller's opinion. The Justice Department designated CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case.

Although the same campaign caused controversy when SIOA bought ad space on public buses in Miami, New York Metropolitan Transit Authority spokesman Aaron Donovan told CNN that no one has asked the MTA to remove the ads yet.

"We have not gotten complaints on it, to be honest," he said. Like most ads seen on MTA subway cars and buses, the campaign will run a month. Last April, Donovan remembered, the MTA ran ads for whyislam.org -- an organization which encourages visitors to explore the Quran and seeks to "challenge popular stereotypes and misconceptions about Islam" -- on the subway system....

This is a campaign video; Jihad Watch is a 501c3 organization and we never endorse political candidates. However, I certainly endorse Barber's message here about the 9/11 Mosque.

Christopher Hayes, Washington editor for the far-left Nation magazine, offers a ringing endorsement of the thug tactics used by the Service Employees International Union and National People’s Action against Bank of America executive Gregory Baer.

You’ll recall that on his TV show Glenn Beck did a segment on the hundreds of angry, loud, purple-shirted SEIU members and National People’s Action activists who showed up at Baer’s house in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. They caused a ruckus, scared his family, frightened his neighbors, and used his home as a staging ground in their efforts to embarrass Bank of America and give so-called Wall Street reform legislation a boost.

After perfunctorily stating he was “dispositionally inclined to cringe at actions like this,” Hayes said he “got over that real quick when Trenda Kennedy of Springfield, Illinois, took the bullhorn on Baer’s steps.” He quoted Kennedy saying, “In America, every seven seconds one of our homes goes into foreclosure … My home is one of those!”

So somebody’s misfortune justifies urban terrorist tactics against a bank executive? Apparently that’s what Hayes believes. He might as well grab Al Sharpton’s bullhorn and start mindlessly chanting, “No justice! No peace!”

Hayes then praises the “Showdown in America,” an anti-capitalism campaign run by NPA, People Improving Communities through Organizing (PICO), and SEIU.” In his best MarxistSpeak, Hayes regurgitates the party line about America’s current economic problems: “The campaign aims to dismantle the entire Wall Street-Washington corporatist axis, which gave us the financial crisis, the bailouts and 7 million foreclosures since 2008, a million of which have ended in repossession.”

“It’s about damn time,” Hayes concludes, voicing his approval for the campaign.

Scaring the pants off suburbanites is absolutely necessary in order to generate the upheaval required to bring capitalism to its knees, argues Hayes.

Note that in his profoundly dishonest op-ed Hayes doesn’t assign any blame to government policy for America’s economic problems. There’s no discussion of the Community Reinvestment Act, home mortgage interest deduction, or the Fed’s crazy cheap money interest-rate policy.

To left-wingers like Hayes, the government can do no wrong.

Is the GOP still trying to shed the label of “Party of No”? Perhaps the better question is: “should they”?

The Democrats and the Republicans each have a plan for the future of your country, and you have the momentous responsibility this fall to determine the direction this country will take at a time of ideological divisiveness and political peril perhaps not seen in at least a generation.

The Democrats. I offer you two sources to ascertain the plans Democrats have formulated for the 2010 Congressional elections. First, there is the Manager’s Memorandum from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Let me summarize this odd document for you. The plan is to paint all Republicans as birthers and extremists, and to blame them for the present economic conditions even a year and a half after the inauguration of Barack Obama, and more than a year after the Democrats’ failed $787 billion stimulus package.

Second, there is Obama’s former campaign manager David Plouffe’s prescription for Democratic midterm success, which he laid out in the Washington Post.  There are similarities here. Plouffe too wants to continue to blame the past Administration, but he encourages touting the vast benefits of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (read failed $787 billion stimulus), but he added the necessity to pass the health care plan and the need to live up to ethical standards that Democrats demanded of Republicans.

We’ll give him credit for pushing the Dems to get the health care deal done, and we laud his intentions as far as “draining the swamp” in D.C., however, both of these alleged positives are likely to redound to the detriment of Democrats in November. The health care bill is still unpopular, and when last checked, the swamp is still teeming with every slimy life-form that Washington has ever spawned.

Obama struck the Plouffe-inspired midterm chord this past Thursday:

The Republicans. After video with the same content as that above aired on “Meet the Press” this week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, appearing as a guest on the weekly show, articulated the crux of the GOP campaign strategy in this way:

Sounds like he wants to run against George Bush one more time, doesn’t it?  I mean, look, the administration’s–the, the American people have taken a look at what this administration’s done.  They’re running banks, insurance companies, and car companies.  They nationalized the student loan business, which will kill 31,000 private sector jobs.  They’ve taken over health care.  They’re in amount–they’re about to do to financial services what they did to health care.  Their appointees over at the FCC are trying to take over the Internet.  They’ve doubled the national debt in the last–will double the national debt in the next five years, triple it in 10.  The American people are appalled by this.

So the GOP strategy is indeed to be the Party of No for now with an eye towards better policies in the future. Saying no to the nationalization of car companies, health care, student loans and financial institutions isn’t a bad place to start a campaign. It is indeed saying no, but no is what needs to be said when the bills proposed are ill-conceived, unread, and detrimental to the nature of this great nation.

In the future I’m sure that I’m going to want a more detailed plan from those whom I elect to Congress, but for now, we are speeding towards a dangerous precipice and I just want someone who knows we need to slam on the brakes, not hit the accelerator.

Ron & Rand Paul will be the first to tell you how much they revere George Washington, how they’re the Last Politicians In America ™ who are faithfully carrying out his ideas. But there’s one lesson the Father of our Country took to heart growing up that the Pauls somehow missed:

Associate yourself with Men of good Quality if you Esteem your own Reputation; for ’tis better to be alone than in bad Company.

Sins of the Father

Ron Paul’s associations with the bigoted, lunatic fringe of American politics—including white supremacists, anti-Semites, and 9/11 Truthers—are by now the stuff of legend.  On November 14 and November 25 of 2007, Andrew Walden wrote two stunning American Thinker posts detailing many such skeletons in the elder Paul’s closet:

• Ron Paul is a regular guest on the radio show of 9/11 Truther Alex Jones, a strong Paul supporter. Walden writes that “Paul’s committee paid 9-11 conspiracy nut and talk-show host Alex Jones $1300. Jones claims the payment is a partial refund after he over paid August 27 when giving Paul a $2300 contribution.  Aaron Dykes of Alex Jones’ company Magnolia Management and Alex Jones’ Infowars website gave Ron Paul $1600” (Paul himself, while being careful not to explicitly call 9/11 an inside job, has signaled his sympathy for the Truther movement).
• Paul has been endorsed and aggressively supported by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, Holocaust denier Hutton Gibson (yep, Mel’s dad), the white supremacist American Nationalist Union, the Communist newspaper People’s Weekly World, scores of authors and commenters on various other racist websites, & the white supremacist Stormfront.org.  In particular, Stormfront founder Don Black donated $500 to Paul, and when pressed on whether or not the money would be returned, the Paul campaign was non-committal. Perhaps most disturbingly, Walden cites an October 2007 post by blogger Adam Holland, who highlights “White Will” Williams, a neo-Nazi leader who also served as web coordinator for Paul’s Tennessee campaign.
• Paul has been promoted, and his writings featured, in the American Free Press, a newsletter run by Holocaust denier Willis Carto. Walden writes that Michael Medved, who asked the Paul campaign to confirm or deny whether Paul knew or approved of Carto’s reprinting his work, did not receive a response…but in January 2008, Reason reported that “Cato Institute President Ed Crane told reason he recalls a conversation from some time in the late 1980s in which Paul claimed that his best source of congressional campaign donations was the mailing list for The Spotlight” (the former name of American Free Press).

One of the biggest scandals of Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign erupted when The New Republic’s James Kirchick revealed that, for years, Paul had been involved with a series of newsletters that often ventured into bigotry and conspiracy-mongering, including praise for David Duke and speculation that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing may have been “a setup by the Israeli Mossad.”  In response, Paul denied having written any of the racist articles and claimed to have “no idea” who did.

But the libertarian-leaning Reason Magazine’s reporting on the controversy has found that, in past campaigns, Paul both admitted to and defended having written some of the articles (concerning “black teenage male[s]” who are known for “how unbelievably fleet of foot they can be” when committing robberies). Reason’s work also reveals that Paul likely knows more about the rest of the newsletters than he lets on, including many reasons to believe their author was crackpot Lew Rockwell (a longtime Paul ally), evidence that Paul profited substantially from the letters (a June ’93 tax document reports “an annual income of $940,000 for Ron Paul & Associates, listing four employees in Texas (Paul’s family and Rockwell) and seven more employees around the country”), and revelations that that the newsletters’ ugly tone and content was probably a deliberate attempt to exploit paranoia and bigotry for political gain.

The sum total of the evidence is wholly consistent with Ron Paul’s infamous history of outlandish conspiracy theories regarding new “Gulf of Tonkin incidents” manufactured by the US government as a pretext to invade Iran, a coup by the CIA, which now “runs everything,” the Trilateral Commission doing…well, something nefarious, the Federal Reserve’s hand in everything from Watergate to CIA assassinations, his claims of a dark “neo-con” takeover of America, and his insistence that even appeasement-minded Barack Obama is a war-monger.  It also accounts for the angry, unhinged, and sometimes anti-Semitic nature of his most loyal supporters.

Like Father, Like Son

Rand Paul has admitted that his views are “very, very similar” to his father’s, and that apparent differences between the two Pauls can be attributed to presentation differences for campaign purposes.

And it shows.  Rand Paul shares his father’s willingness to frequent Alex Jones’ show, and Stormfront is just as happy to support Rand as they were his dad.  On April 23 and April 26, NewsRealBlog’s Jeanette Pryor revealed Paul the Younger’s cozy relationship with Adam Kokesh, a radical anti-war activist who attempted to shout down John McCain’s acceptance speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention, has called for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, has called for American servicemen to abandon the armed forces (at a 9/11 Truther rally, no less), and advocates that Americans stop paying federal income taxes.

In December, Rand Paul’s campaign spokesman, Chris Hightower, resigned amidst revelations that he once belonged to a Satanic death-metal band, wrote poetry ranting about “Christian lies,” has jovially written on his MySpace page about black reaction to the “KKK” on one of his hoodies (to quote Hightower: “LOL!”), ranted against Southern Baptists and in defense of polygamist cults, and blamed America for 9/11.  The campaign unequivocally distanced itself from most of Hightower’s baggage—except for 9/11.

While most on the Right do not match the slanderous caricature of conservatism the Left has concocted, the Cult of Paul stands as the sole exception. The Pauls seem to hold themselves to no standards of moral decency or good taste in advancing their careers, welcoming and encouraging (sometimes subtly, sometimes not) hatred and paranoia in their own midst, standing up to it only when it becomes a matter of bad publicity—and even then, they can be counted on to go no further than absolutely necessary, for fear of alienating any one part of the coalition of bigots, demagogues, and conspiracy theorists they have assembled.

They are the False Prophets of the American Founding, styling themselves as heirs to the wisdom and heroism of Washington, Jefferson and their colleagues when, in fact, neither their character nor their ideas are worthy of our forefathers. The cause of truly restoring fidelity to our founding principles is too important for serious, conscientious conservatives to indulge these charlatans.

_____

Hailing from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Calvin Freiburger is a political science major at Hillsdale College.  He also writes for the Hillsdale Forum and his personal website, Calvin Freiburger Online.

I am State Senator Russell Pearce, the author of SB1070, which was signed by Governor Jan Brewer.  Fear mongering and misinformation is the tool of the Left against this common sense legislation.

Paul Kantner of the 1960s rock band Jefferson Airplane once remarked, “San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.”  When I first heard that San Francisco was planning to boycott Arizona over the SB 1070, this description seemed apt.

However, when neighboring Oakland’s city council voted 7-0 to boycott Arizona last week, and President Pro Tem of the California State Senate Derrell Steinberg announced a campaign in the legislature to boycott us, it became clear that San Francisco is merely ahead of the California crazy curve.

Why did I propose SB 1070?  I saw the enormous fiscal and social costs that illegal immigration was imposing on my state.  I saw Americans out of work, hospitals and schools overflowed, and budgets strained.  Most disturbingly, I saw my fellow citizens victimized by illegal alien criminals.

The murder of Robert Krentz—whose family had been ranching in Arizona since 1907—by illegal alien drug dealers was the final straw for many Arizonans.  But there are dozens and dozens of other citizens of our state who had been murdered by illegal aliens. Currently 95 illegal aliens are in Maricopa County jail for murder.  When do we stand up for Americans and the rule of law? If not now, when?  We are a nation of laws, a Constitutional Republic.

Most of the hysterical critics of the bill do not even know what is in it. SB1070 simply codifies federal law into state law and removes excuses and concerns about states’ inherent authority to enforce these laws and removes all illegal “sanctuary” policies.

The law does not allow police to stop suspected illegal aliens unless they have already come across them through normal “lawful conduct” such as a traffic stop, and explicitly prohibits racial profiling.  Illegal is not a race, it is a crime.

Aside from the unfounded accusation of racial profiling, the chief complaint about the bill is that it infringes on federal jurisdiction by enforcing laws.  Arizona did not make illegal, illegal.  It is a crime to enter or remain in the U.S. in violation of federal law. States have had inherent authority to enforce immigration laws when the federal government has failed or refused to do so.

For all their newfound respect for the authority of federal immigration law, the open borders advocates who oppose SB 1070 have no problems with “sanctuary cities” across the country that explicitly obstruct federal immigration authorities to protect illegal aliens, even though are illegal under federal law (8 USC 1644 & 1373.)

In 2008, San Francisco began a campaign to encourage illegal aliens to take advantage of the city’s public services.  Mayor Gavin Newsom stated, “We have worked with the Board of Supervisors, Department of Public Health, labor and immigrant rights groups to create a city government-wide public awareness campaign so that immigrants know the city won’t target them for using city services.”

The results were tragic. A few months after the campaign, Edwin Ramos, an illegal alien and member of the MS 13 gang, murdered San Francisco resident Tony Bologna and his two sons who he mistook for rival gang members.  Ramos had a lengthy criminal record including a felony assault on a pregnant woman.  He was arrested on gang and weapons charges and promptly released just three months before the murder.  Not once did San Francisco report him to immigration authorities.

One month after the murder of Bologna, illegal alien Alexander Izaguirre stole Amanda Keifer’s purse and then intentionally ran her over with an SUV, laughing as she hit the pavement and fractured her skull.   Four months earlier, Alexander Izaguirre had been arrested for felony dealing of crack cocaine.  Not only did San Francisco refuse to turn him over to immigration authorities, they expunged his record and helped get him a job, which is criminal in and of itself.

Keifer asked the obvious question, “If they’ve committed crimes and they’re not citizens, then why are they here?  Why haven’t they been deported?”

The answer is that politicians like Gavin Newsom and Phoenix Mayor Gordon put the interests of illegal aliens before the safety of American citizens.

Our law is already working.  One can just scan the newspapers and see dozens of headlines like “Illegal Immigrants Leaving Arizona Over New Law: Tough, Controversial New Legislation Scares Many in Underground Workforce Out of State,”

In contrast, American citizens are leaving California.  For the last four years, more Americans have left the state than have moved in.

In criticizing the SB 1070, Barack Obama said, “Our failure to act responsibly at the federal level will only open the door to irresponsibility by others.”  There is nothing irresponsible about enforcing our law, but President Obama is right in that this is only necessary because the federal government does not do its job.

But the solution is not “comprehensive immigration reform,” a euphemism for amnesty. This will only encourage more illegal immigration.  And making illegal aliens legal does nothing to change the social and fiscal costs they impose on Arizona or the nation as a whole.  The Heritage Foundation’s research puts the cost of amnesty at over $2.5 Trillion dollars.

The federal government simply needs to enforce its immigration laws by cracking down on employers of illegal aliens, securing our borders, and deporting illegal alien criminals.

If states understand states rights and our Constitutional duty and responsibility to our citizens this legislation in Arizona will be a model for states across the nation and the federal government, it will end illegal immigration to America, but President Obama is looking towards San Francisco instead.

State Senator Russell Pearce represents Arizona’s 18^th Legislative District.

This article is reprinted from City Journal

Cast your mind back to January 2009, when Barack Obama became the president of the United States amid much rejoicing. The hosannas—covering the inauguration was “the honor of our lifetimes,” said MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews—by then seemed unsurprising. Over the course of a long campaign, hyperbolic rhetoric had become commonplace, so much so that online wags had started calling Obama “the One”—a reference to the spate of recent science-fiction movies, especially The Matrix, that used that term to designate a messiah.

It all seems so long ago now, as one contemplates President Obama’s plummeting approval ratings and a suddenly resurgent Republican Party. Yet it’s worth looking closely and seriously at the election-year enthusiasm of media elites and other Obamaphiles, much of which was indeed, as the wags recognized, quasi-religious. The surprising fact is that the American Left, for all its claims to being “reality-based” and secular, is often animated by the passions, motivations, and imagery that one normally associates with religion. The better we understand this religious impulse, the better we will understand liberal America’s likely trajectory in the years to come.

The first signs of the spiritual zeal that would eventually play a significant part in Obama’s election came not from Washington or Chicago but from Hollywood. Our moviemakers are adept at measuring the zeitgeist of the nation—of its liberal half, anyway—and are a powerful force in shaping it. And for more than a decade, they’ve been churning out what critics call “black-angel” movies. These films feature a white protagonist guided to enlightenment by a black character, usually of divine or supernatural origin or, at the very least, in touch with spiritual experiences that the main character lacks. With the black angel’s help, the white hero finds salvation.

The genre includes, to name just a few, The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), in which Will Smith—playing a caddie who is really, the film hints, God—restores Matt Damon’s golf game and love life; Bruce Almighty (2003), in which Morgan Freeman, as God, bestows his powers on a manic Jim Carrey; and the awful What Dreams May Come (1998), in which Cuba Gooding, Jr. is a wise soul guiding Robin Williams through the afterlife. These movies have been numerous enough, David Sterritt points out in the Christian Science Monitor, to confuse TV’s buffoonish Homer Simpson: in one episode, “Homer mistook a black man in a white suit for an angelic visitor, all because (according to his embarrassed wife) he’d been seeing too many movies lately.”

Far and away the best of the black-angel films is Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile (1999), based on a novel by Stephen King, whose knack for setting his finger on the cultural pulse has made him a multimillionaire. The basso profundo Michael Clarke Duncan plays John Coffey (note the initials), a gigantic black man wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of two little girls in Depression-era Louisiana and sentenced to death; Tom Hanks plays Paul Edgecomb, a prison guard who discovers that Coffey is not only innocent but also a Christlike miracle worker. Coffey’s laying-on of hands restores a dead mouse to life, cures Edgecomb of a bladder infection, and heals the warden’s wife’s brain cancer. Shortly before he is executed—the jeering of the girls’ anguished parents and the weeping of the prison guards who know the truth recall the account of the Crucifixion in Luke—Coffey has this exchange with a tortured Edgecomb:

Edgecomb. Tell me what you want me to do. You want me to take you out of here? Just let you run away? See how far you could get?

Coffey. Why would you do such a foolish thing?

Edgecomb. On the day of my judgment, when I stand before God, and He asks me why did I—did I kill one of His true miracles—what am I going to say? That it was my job? . . .

Coffey. You tell God the Father it was a kindness you done. . . . I want it to be over and done with. I do. . . . I’m tired of people being ugly to each other. I’m tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day.

The writer or director of a black-angel film recognizes the unspeakable injustices once perpetrated by his country on black people; he wants to be forgiven the sins of his fathers. If he is simply a comedian, he makes Bruce Almighty, casting a black man as God in a sort of lighthearted flattery. If his waters run deeper, he understands that no plum role can atone for the crimes that weigh on him. Instinctively, he realizes what thinkers from Aristotle to Marcel Mauss have known: that whenever a gift is given, the prestige of the giver increases and that of the recipient declines. So he tells a story in which a black man gives the greatest gift of all, suffering—like Jesus in Christian theology—for others’ sins, in fact demanding to suffer, and by demanding, forgiving. White America is pardoned its wrongs, while black America, by pardoning, is elevated to godhood.

Are these movies ultimately condescending to blacks? After all, the white protagonist, the person who will be saved or damned according to his decisions, is invariably more interesting than the serene black angel hovering nearby. Indeed, the condescension, if such it is, is a cinematic version of affirmative action—a denial to blacks of Everyman’s struggle for salvation; a magnanimous extension to them of paradise.

And this brings us to Barack Obama’s liberal support during the campaign, which was decidedly different from the regular media bias that conservatives often complain about. “I haven’t seen a politician get this kind of walk-on-water coverage since Colin Powell a dozen years ago flirted with making a run for the White House,” said Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz on Meet the Press in February 2007, a day after Obama announced his candidacy. “I mean, it is amazing . . . a guy with all of two years’ experience in the United States Senate getting coverage that ranges from positive to glowing to even gushing.”

“Walk-on-water coverage” was exactly right, and though the media seldom framed their worship quite that explicitly, the exceptions were telling. Here’s San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford on June 6, 2008:

Many spiritually advanced people I know . . . identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

San Francisco, you shrug. Consider, then, what Samantha Fennell, formerly an associate publisher of Elle, wrote on the magazine’s website a month later:

Barack Obama must be elected President of the United States. . . . I have thrown myself into a new world—one in which fluffy chatter and frivolous praise are replaced by a get-to-the-point directness and disciple-like devotion. It’s intense and intoxicating. . . . When I attended my second “Obama Live” fund-raiser last week at New York City’s Grand Hyatt, . . . I was on my feet as Senator Obama entered the room. Fate had blessed me in this moment. . . . In a moment of divine intervention, he saw me,

. . . grabbed my hand, and gave that brilliant smile of his. I literally said out loud to the woman next to me who witnessed my good fate, “I’ll never wash this hand again.”

Fashion writers, you say. But here is Evan Thomas, a Newsweek editor, on the show Hardball with Chris Matthews last June:

Thomas: Reagan was all about America. He talked about it. Obama is, “We are above that now, we are not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial, we stand for something.” I mean, in a way, Obama is standing above the country, above the world. He’s sort of God.

Matthews. Yeah.

Thomas. He’s going to bring all different sides together.

True, Thomas wasn’t so much evincing Morford’s and Fennell’s giddy devotion as describing, perhaps too admiringly, one of the ways Obama elicited it.

The deifications and hagiologies were particularly overt in the remarks of prominent black figures. Filmmaker Spike Lee, predicting an Obama victory, implicitly compared the candidate with Christ: “You’ll have to measure time by ‘Before Obama’ and ‘After Obama.’ . . . Everything’s going to be affected by this seismic change in the universe.” Jesse Jackson, Jr. called Obama’s securing the Democratic nomination “so extraordinary that another chapter could be added to the Bible to chronicle its significance.” Louis Farrakhan went one better, according to the website WorldNetDaily: “Barack has captured the youth. . . . That’s a sign. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking.”

The website ObamaMessiah.blogspot.com has diligently chronicled many more instances of such talk, which seems positively cringe-making in 2010. It seems unfair to blame Obama himself for most of it, though he surely set the tone with a brand of mystical campaign rhetoric unfamiliar to presidential politics—in this country, anyway. In February 2008, a concerned Joe Klein of Time noted: “There was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism—‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for’—of the Super Tuesday speech and the recent turn of the Obama campaign.” (The full quotation: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”) To this day, BarackObama.com displays at the top of its homepage the following words (attributed to Obama, though nobody seems to have been able to pinpoint the speech): “I’M ASKING YOU TO BELIEVE. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington . . . I’m asking you to believe in yours.”

Whether or not the Obama campaign realized it, that demand for faith was an updated echo of innumerable passages in the Gospels: “Everything is possible for him who believes”; “Whoever lives and believes in me will never die”; and so on. If the first component of the Obama creed was faith, though, the second was surely hope—the audacious hope whose name famously adorns one of the president’s two autobiographies. We need only add charity to have what Catholics call the three Theological Virtues, which Paul mentions in First Corinthians. Perhaps we should not have been surprised, then, when a day before his inauguration, Obama breathtakingly upended the meaning of Martin Luther King Day, transforming a holiday devoted to the memory of a civil rights leader—and perhaps also to such ideas as equality, tolerance, and the evils of racism—into a day of public service. “It’s not a day just to pause and reflect—it’s a day to act,” Obama announced. “Today, ordinary citizens will gather together all across the country to participate in the more than 11,000 service projects they’ve created using USAservice.org. And I ask the American people to turn today’s efforts into an ongoing commitment to enriching the lives of others in their communities, their cities, and their country.”

An astute moviegoer could have predicted the candidate’s manner: confident but calm, eloquent but modest. Obama wasn’t a loud race-baiter like Al Sharpton; he was a deep-voiced, serious, almost sad, observer, a black angel come to forgive the iniquity of guilt-racked liberal America.

How can we explain this sudden, brief eruption of messianic fervor into our politics? Perhaps by looking at the religious climate of the country and the world, which have been witnessing a religious revival over the past 30 years. Whether you call this phenomenon the “revenge of God,” as the French scholar Gilles Kepel does, or “resacralization,” as the sociologists do, or echo the title of the recent book by Economist editors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back, the evidence is hard to ignore. In the United States, as everyone knows, the Religious Right has made huge advances since the 1970s. During the same period, what Kepel calls “re-Islamization” movements have appeared in the Middle East and beyond, aiming “to propagate Islam everywhere until humanity was converted into ‘ummanity.’ ” All over the world, Christianity is growing—in particular, Pentecostalism, a denomination just a century old that, along with “related charismatic movements,” now claims a stunning 500 million adherents, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reports. To make a long story short, Peter Berger and Anton Zijderfeld’s In Praise of Doubt sees just one geographical exception to a “furiously religious world”—Western and Central Europe. And even there, Kepel tells us, a “significant re-Christianization movement” has appeared in France in the form of Pentecostal Catholicism.

In America, this revival is reflected in popular culture, too, and not just in black-angel movies. Recall the trend that the bloggers were referring to when they dubbed Obama “the One”: over the past few decades, a slew of science-fiction movies, from E.T. to the second Star Wars trilogy to Superman Returns, have drawn parts of their plots from the New Testament (How Science Fiction Found Religion, Winter 2009). Or look at the recent tattoo craze, in which the most popular designs are not the working-class hearts and arrows of yesteryear but mystical, so-called tribal, patterns. During the seventies and eighties, writes Margo DeMello in Bodies of Inscription, “tattooing began, for the first time, to be connected with emerging issues like self-actualization, social and personal transformation, ecological awareness, and spiritual growth.”

On what Matthew Arnold famously called the “sea of faith,” then, it may be that a rising tide raises all ships. If reawakened religious feeling can prompt people to inject messiahs into their movies and dyes into their skin, why shouldn’t it prompt them to vote for a black angel? Perhaps we should simply identify Obamaism as one more manifestation of a wider resurgence of spiritual enthusiasm—a manifestation that differs from the others merely in having a political component—and stop worrying about it.

Yet the political component is of immense importance. If twentieth-century history teaches us anything, it’s that political religions spell trouble. Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism, and Nazism aren’t just called “political religions” by scholars today. In all three cases, observers at the time recognized and worried about the movements’ religious natures. Those natures were no accident; Mussolini, for instance, called his ideology “not only a faith, but a religion that is conquering the laboring masses of the Italian people.”

One reason that observers saw the great totalitarianisms as religious was that each had its idol: Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Lenin in Russia, followed by Stalin. Take Grigory Zinoviev’s description of Lenin: “He is really the chosen one of millions. He is the leader by the Grace of God. He is the authentic figure of a leader such as is born once in 500 years.” Stalin’s cult of personality was far more developed and sometimes explicitly idolatrous, as in the poem that addressed the despot as “O Thou mighty one, chief of the peoples, Who callest man to life, Who awakest the earth to fruitfulness.” And in Italy, writes the historian Michael Burleigh, “intellectual sycophants and propagandists characterised [Mussolini] as a prodigy of genius in terms that would not have embarrassed Stalin: messiah, saviour, man of destiny, latterday Caesar, Napoleon, and so forth.”

To point out these words’ uncomfortable similarity to the journalists’ praises of Obama is not to equate the throngs who bowed down to totalitarian dictators with even the most worshipful Obamaphiles. But the manner of worship is related, as perhaps it must be in any human society that chooses to adore a human being. The widespread renaming of villages, schools, and factories after Stalin, for example, finds its modern-day democratic parallel in a rash of schools that have already rechristened themselves after Obama, to say nothing of the hundreds of young sentimentalists who informally adopted the candidate’s middle name during the presidential race. Even the Obama campaign’s ubiquitous logo—the letter O framing a rising sun—would not have surprised the scholar Eric Voegelin. In The Political Religions (1938), Voegelin traced rulers who employed the image of the sun—a symbol of “the radiation of power along a hierarchy of rulers and offices that ranges from God at the top down to the subject at the bottom”—from the pharaoh Akhenaton to Louis XIV and eventually to Hitler.

The worship of a charismatic leader was just one reason that twentieth-century intellectuals regarded the great totalitarianisms as inherently religious. Another was their immense scope, which included not just matters traditionally considered public—war, taxes, even the offices of the welfare state—but also the private lives and practices of individuals. “The totalitarian movements which have arisen since World War I are fundamentally religious movements,” wrote the political scientist Waldemar Gurian in 1952, in part because they “cannot conceive of realms of life outside and beyond their control.” Sixteen years earlier, the legal scholar Marcel Prélot had commented that “the totalitarian state, naturally extending its field of action far beyond the recognized domain of the conventional state, claims to constitute both a political entity and an ethical and spiritual community, . . . the state itself being a church.”

Obamaism is far narrower, and far more benign, than that. But another strand of modern liberal politics encroaches so far on the private sphere that it begins to resemble the political religions. On the excellent webcast Uncommon Knowledge, Czech president Václav Klaus recently compared “two ideologies” that were “structurally very similar. They are against individual freedom. They are in favor of centralistic masterminding of our fates. They are both very similar in telling us what to do, how to live, how to behave, what to eat, how to travel, what we can do and what we cannot do.” The first of Klaus’s “two ideologies” was Communism—a system with which he was deeply familiar, having participated in the Velvet Revolution in 1989. The second was environmentalism.

Klaus could have expanded his list. Environmentalism does indeed tell its adherents “what to eat” (pesticide-free organic food, preferably grown nearby to cut down on trucking) and “how to travel” (by public transportation or, better yet, bicycle). But it also lays down rules on nearly every aspect of life in a consumer economy: how to wash your clothes (seldom); how to wash yourself (take a shower, not a bath, and use a low-flow showerhead); how to light your house (with fluorescent bulbs); how to choose your TV (look for the Energy Star logo!); how to go to the bathroom (with high-efficiency toilets and recycled paper); how to invest, clean, sleep, and dress (in environmentally friendly companies, with nontoxic chemicals, on sheets made of “sustainable fibers,” and in clothes made of the same); and even how to procreate (Greenpeace has issued a guide to “environmentally friendly sex”).

Think about the life that a truly conscientious environmentalist must lead! Compared with it, the devout Muslim’s five daily prayers and the pious Jew’s carefully regulated diet are a cakewalk. What the British historian Alfred Cobban wrote about totalitarianism—that it “takes the spiritual discipline of a religious order and imposes it on forty or sixty or a hundred million people”—applies perfectly to environmentalism, except for the part about imposition. And there, one might give Jonah Goldberg’s answer in Liberal Fascism: “You may trust that environmentalists have no desire to translate these voluntary suggestions into law, but I have no such confidence given the track record of similar campaigns in the past.” Recycling mandates come to mind, as does the federal law that will impose silly-looking spiral lightbulbs on us all by 2014.

There’s also a close resemblance between the environmental and biblical views of history, as the late novelist Michael Crichton pointed out in a widely reprinted speech. “Environmentalism is in fact a perfect twenty-first-century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths,” Crichton said. “There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all.” That judgment day currently assumes the form of various global-warming disasters that will happen unless we immediately perform still more rituals. Never mind that the science so urgently instructing us to reduce carbon emissions—thus hobbling economic growth and prosperity around the world—is so young, and so poorly understood, that it can’t explain why global warming seems to have stalled over the last decade. Far more persuasive is the argument from faith: we’d better repent, because the End is nigh.

Barack Obama doubtless tapped into environmentalists’ spiritual longings when he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination. “Generations from now,” he proclaimed, “we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.” Italics mine; grandiloquent prophecy his.

Religion has long been a powerful force in American politics, of course, for good and ill. The difference with the more traditional varieties of religion was the open acknowledgment that they were religious. The First Amendment promised that they could never become established churches; generations’ worth of jurisprudence closely regulated the way they could interact with government. And when a campaigning politician acknowledged forthrightly that he derived a policy from, say, his understanding of the Bible, his potential constituents understood that, however reasonable the policy might be, what underlay it was faith, not reason. The emerging liberal religions are very different: as emotionally captivating for some, at least for a time, as Christianity or Judaism, but untrammeled by any constitutional amendment; as grounded in faith, but pretending to dwell in the realms of reason and science.

Obama’s speedy fall from godhood since his election has been encouraging, perhaps a sign of America’s traditional reluctance to embrace a Great Leader. But it’s far too early in his administration to assume that the fall will be permanent. Radical environmentalism, moreover, will surely be around long after Obama has left the White House. And the threat of other charismatic leaders will remain as well—a troubling lesson that we can learn from no less a religious authority than the Bible. A nation that bends the knee once, as the book of Judges bleakly demonstrates, is all too likely to bend it again.

Benjamin A. Plotinsky is managing editor of City Journal.

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The question needs to be asked: What exactly is Organizing for America (OFA) actually organizing for America?

Answer: Whatever America’s first Marxist president wants.

Organizing for America is a phony grassroots campaign organization run by the Democratic National Committee that proposes to replicate the community organizing techniques Barack Obama learned from the teachings of his fellow Chicagoan, Saul Alinsky. (This is a problem in part because community organizing is local in nature. If it goes national, it’s something else.)

In an online strategy session conducted yesterday by OFA Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, the fast-talking political street fighter with the demeanor of a discount shoe salesman made what has to be one of the most breathtakingly stupid statements in American politics that I can remember. Plouffe said

Obviously there’s a big debate right now in Washington around financial reform to make sure that we’re putting the American people and consumers first, not the big banks on Wall Street and to make sure that all of us, this is a global recession that’s affected people deeply in this country and around the world, never happens again and I know so many of you are out there fighting on this issue now and hopefully very soon we will be able to report to the American people that we passed meaningful financial reform. [emphasis added]

So now the Obama administration is going to abolish recessions? Obama is going to abolish the business cycle? Even Communist countries never quite managed to do that.

Meanwhile, the Democrats recognize that the days when political parties could rest easy between elections are long gone. OFA is a permanent campaign apparatus dedicated to perpetuating the mystique of President Obama’s leadership.

Not surprisingly, OFA turns a lot of Republicans off. Said David Norcross, chairman of the Republican National Lawyers Association:

It’s creepy. … It’s a permanent personal apparatus built around one man, meant to reinforce his cult of personality. It has precious little to do with Democrats. … With both Bushes, Clinton, Reagan, it was about the party. This is about Obama. And what happens after him? Is this an attempt to put together a movement very different from the Democratic Party and to take it over and to supplant it?

The Obama administration came to power promising to “transform” America and they have attempted to make good on that promise. The White House and Congress have broken with the American past in ways that few administrations have done, unmooring the ship of state from safe harbor and sailing ahead without the slightest idea of where their “transformation” is truly taking us.

It’s more than just establishing a Euro-style social democracy in a nation that consciously rejected the European model of government 221 years ago. That would be bad enough under any circumstances — even when justified by their belief that no crisis should go to waste, and that the economic downturn offered the opportunity to greatly enhance the power of the federal government.

To that end, the Democratic Party and its leftist allies have chosen the most monumentally imprudent gamble since the New Deal, with little thought to the unforeseen consequences that will flow from their efforts.

The manner in which they are seeking to impose their new-fangled vision of America on the rest of us is by using the moniker of “comprehensive reform” on three of the most important sectors of our society — health, banking, and energy — to radically alter the structure of government, and forever change the relationship between the ordinary citizen and Washington, D.C.

Not content with seeking to wrap government’s tentacles around those three vital economic spheres of influence, the Democrats are also seeking comprehensive reform of immigration and labor law — both of which have far more to do with enhancing their political position with electoral allies than with addressing problems in those areas.

Whenever a politician says he wants “comprehensive reform” of anything, grab your wallet. History has shown us that such efforts always lead to unintended consequences that redound unfavorably to the individual citizen’s wealth and liberty. Whenever government’s reach exceeds its grasp — as in passing a 3,000-page health insurance reform bill — it is certain that we will be paying more, getting less, and enjoying fewer choices, thus incrementally reducing our freedoms.

Take comprehensive campaign finance reform. Democrats are apoplectic over the recent Citizens United decision that tossed out several odious portions of the McCain-Feingold Act regarding corporate participation in the political process. But that act was meant to alter the 1974 comprehensive campaign finance reform amendments that gave us the Federal Election Commission, limits on contributions, and disclosure requirements. At the time, we were assured that the “reforms” would reduce the influence of special interests in the electoral process while curbing the appetites of “fat cats” to contribute. How’s that working out for you guys?

Each and every “reform” in campaign finance has led to the ludicrous spectacle of special interest lobbyists finding giant loopholes. The unintended consequences of well-intentioned reform have been a bigger role for special interests, a larger slice of fundraising being done by fat cats, and more corruption of electoral politics. It’s hard to imagine how anything decided by the Supreme Court in Citizens United could give corporations and unions any more influence with candidates and political parties than they enjoyed previously.

With health insurance reform, we still don’t know where some of the slippery slopes will lead, or what kind of massive dislocations are in store for us as a result of Congress passing this comprehensive monstrosity. But even before most of this comprehensive reform bill goes into effect, we are seeing the fruits of Congress’ imprudence. Told by almost every opponent of the measure that comprehensive reform would cause insurance premiums to skyrocket, Democrats referred to those making such charges as “liars” and assured us day after day that premiums would actually come down.

The president’s own Health and Human Services Department begged to differ. More than a week prior to the final vote, Medicare’s Office of the Actuary delivered a report concluding that premiums for individuals and companies would rise significantly under Obamacare. There is some debate over whether the report could have come out prior to the vote (whether it would have changed anybody’s mind is another question) but the fact remains; the rise in premium costs were not intended by the president or congress and yet, the unanticipated has become reality.

Of course, this is the tip of the iceberg. The same will hold true for comprehensive financial reform now being considered by the senate. Despite differences in the Senate and House bills, there is going to be some kind of “consumer protection” agency. The thought of government “protecting” consumers or anyone else should give us all pause. In this specific case, the House bill would set up a board to determine whether financial instruments — stocks, mutual funds, mortgages — were too complex for the consumer to understand when the broker sold the product. Aside from protecting us from our own stupidity, the board will have the power to come down like a ton of bricks on both the broker and the company employing him with fines and even jail time.

The makeup of the board would be determined by the president. Imagine the politics that could be played in this scenario if a large financial institution won’t contribute to Democrats or otherwise play ball with the party in power. The board’s discretionary power would be immense and much mischief could be in the offing if the House version of the agency becomes law.

It doesn’t matter what putative tasks that government wants to assign for itself, anytime that Congress comprehensively tries to address a supposed injustice, or take on a big problem, it is a given that government will carve out a role greater than it had previous to the reform. It is a sure means of growing the size of the federal behemoth. Unintended consequences notwithstanding, you can take that to your federally run bank and cash it.

Will “comprehensive immigration reform” slow the number of illegals coming into this country? That’s what we will be told it is intended to do. Will making it easier to set up a union shop via the so-called “card check” bill — the most comprehensive “reform” of labor law in a generation — raise wages and increase job opportunities? That’s the bilge that will be pumped out of Washington when the Democrats try and sell the undemocratic measure. Will cap-and-trade lower the emissions of greenhouse gasses by one molecule? Not on your life; but it sure will give the feds a stranglehold on energy production in America.

Prudence as a civic virtue has disappeared from public life. It’s just not the style in these days of massive, nation-changing legislation and a president with one eye on the polls and the other on the history books. One of Cicero’s Four Cardinal Virtues, prudence, he wrote, “is the knowledge of what is good, what is bad, and what is neutral.” Russell Kirk believed that prudence was one of the ten most important conservative principles, saying, “[a]ny public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity.” It would seem that both classical and contemporary philosophers had a better handle on what the liberals are doing than Republicans in Congress.

In an age where anything is justified in the cause of “social justice,” or advancing “positive rights,” the Left’s massive attempts at “comprehensive” reform are unsettling society, discarding America’s first principles, and uncoupling citizens from the traditions that have been lovingly and courageously handed down by our ancestors at great cost in blood and treasure. It is being done without so much as a sniff in the direction of continuity in government, as Democrats seek to shatter convention and substitute an alien philosophy that alters society in ways that most of those who voted for “change” in 2008 could never have dreamed. What is really needed in America today is not comprehensive reform but a comprehensive cleaning of our House – and the Senate.

You have a right to be free.

The freedom of conscience is guaranteed by the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18, which declares that people have the right to change religions or have no religion at all.

Muslims have a right to this freedom. Yet all too often they are harassed or threatened for leaving Islam, even in the U.S.

Stand for religious liberty against this violent intimidation. Help sponsor an SIOA bus ad offering aid to those who make the difficult and often dangerous decision to leave Islam. We're taking this campaign nationwide.

Today our Freedom Buses are rolling again on the streets of Miami. You can find details on how we defeated CAIR and succeeded in running these ads here.

Please help us keep the Freedom Buses running: donate to the SIOA religious liberty campaign.

The freedom of conscience is guaranteed by the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18, which declares that people have the right to change religions or have no religion at all.

Muslims have a right to this freedom. Yet all too often they are harassed or threatened for leaving Islam, even in the U.S.

Stand for religious liberty against this violent intimidation. Help sponsor an SIOA bus ad offering aid to those who make the difficult and often dangerous decision to leave Islam. We're taking this campaign nationwide.

You can find details on how we defeated CAIR and succeeded in running these ads in Miami here.

Donate to the SIOA religious liberty campaign via Paypal here. If you have any trouble with that link, click on the "Contribute to Jihad Watch" button on the upper right of the Jihad Watch front page. All donations will go to the SIOA bus campaign.

Elitism can be a dangerous thing in politics, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has imperiled both his reelection campaign and the fortunes of his Labor Party after a particularly unflattering demonstration of it.

The British media has dubbed it “Bigotgate.” In one of those unscripted moments that so often spells political suicide, Brown this week suffered a ruinous encounter with a Labor Party voter in the working-class mill town of Rochdale. In the course of meeting “ordinary voters” – part of an electoral strategy designed to make the famously brooding prime minister seem more people-friendly and accessible – Brown paused to talk with one Gillian Duffy. As a 65-year-old widow and lifelong Labor voter, Duffy might have seemed just the kind of constituent Brown needs to burnish his credentials with the average British voter.

Alas for Brown, Duffy also had the presence to ask about a concern that increasingly has been on the minds of British voters in recent years: the record-high rates of immigration, particularly from Eastern Europe, and its impact on British towns like Rochdale. As the cameras flashed, Brown obligingly nodded along, praising Duffy as a “very good woman.” In the safety of his official car, however, Brown lashed out at his aides for forcing him to endure what he called “a bigoted woman.” The whole exchange with Duffy was “ridiculous,” huffed a flustered Brown. And there the matter might have rested but for one detail that Brown in all his ire had overlooked: the microphone on his lapel was still live; the media captured his entire outburst.

In its striking condescension, Brown’s moment of unaware outage called to mind President Obama’s equally revealing assertion, during a 2008 presidential campaign stop, that “bitter” voters in small-town America “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Obama didn’t quite call these Americans bigots, but the implication was clear enough. But there the similarity ends. Politically, “Bigotgate,” which came on the day before the final British prime ministerial debate, will likely prove far more damaging for Brown than Obama’s off-the-cuff candor did for the president.

There are two main reasons for that. The first is that the scandal has served to underscore the considerable political weaknesses of Gordon Brown. After long dwelling in the shadow of the rhetorically deft Tony Blair, Brown has proved an inept successor. Not only does he lack Blair’s gift of eloquence, but he has no enthusiasm for the back-patting and handshaking that is the essence campaign politics and, hence, no talent for it. Little wonder that his calculated attempt to reach out to the average Briton has backfired in such spectacular fashion.

As expected, Brown has spent the hours post “Bigotgate” in a state of profuse apology, even making a 45-minute trip to beg forgiveness from the “bigoted woman” herself. He now insists that that was the wrong word to use and that he in fact shares Duffy’s concern about controlling immigration. Yet, these efforts to repair the damage have been clumsy and not at all credible. Bill Clinton may or may not have felt the voters’ pain, but at least he did a passable impression of empathy. A similar feat is clearly beyond Brown.

Bigotgate is also damaging because it reveals just how out of touch the UK’s governing elite is on an issue of paramount concern for voters: immigration. In worrying about the high rates of immigration, Duffy was in fact speaking for many in the country. Polls show that immigration is the second-most important topic for British voters, with 29 percent naming it as one of the most pressing issues facing the country.

Those concerns are well founded. Britain’s powers-that-be dramatically underestimated the impact of mass immigration into the UK over the past decade. In 2009 alone, Britain experienced a net migration – the sum total of immigration in and out of the country – of over 200,000. That figure, high for what is already considered one of Europe’s most crowded countries, was actually a decline from 2007, according to Britain’s Office for National Statistics, when the net migration reached 233,000. That was almost six times the rate of net migration that the UK had throughout the 1990s, when the rate was around 40,000-50,000 people per year. (The total population of the UK is around 61 million, 51 million of which resides in England.) In the context of this massive influx of foreign immigrants, it’s not surprising that Britons have started to wonder where it will all lead – whether in terms of social cohesion, quality of life, or the cost in taxes for the welfare and social services for which immigrants are eligible.

If Brown and Labor’s last-place standing in almost all of Britain’s major opinion poll is at least in part a reflection of that anxiety, then Bigotgate seems certain to contribute to the party’s defeat in the May 6 general election. Brown won’t lose solely because of immigration. But his inability to speak cogently about that issue – or even to tolerate its being raised by voters – is a good indication of why he and his party are so out of favor with the British public.

Jacob Laksin is managing editor of Front Page Magazine.