Reprinted from spectator.co.uk.

Conservatism is dead in Britain — as it is in Europe, as it is in most of the world — and if you want to know what the problem is, a good place to start is the one where I’ve just been: the David Horowitz Restoration Weekend in Palm Beach, Florida.

Horowitz is a prominent US activist, author and intellectual whose Freedom Center, if you didn’t know better, you might assume was a conservative think tank. But it’s not. As Horowitz reminded us on the first night of our three-day palm-fringed extravaganza of cocktails, fine cuisine, and sound conservatism courtesy of Mark Steyn, Ann Coulter, Herman Cain, Allen West, Baroness Cox, Bernie Goldberg, Douglas Murray and, ahem, James Delingpole, ‘We’re not a think tank. We’re a battle tank.’

And Horowitz is right of course, as he has been since the early Eighties, which is the moment he converted from cradle socialism (his parents were communists — or ‘progressives’, as so many of their ilk generously styled themselves) to Reagan conservatism. What Horowitz understands, as far too many do not, is that western civilisation is facing its greatest crisis since the second world war; that this trouble has been brewing for decades; and that if we lose this war we lose everything: our freedom; our livelihoods; our culture; our future; our very existence.

Often former leftists make the best conservatives — think Paul Johnson and Peter Hitchens — for they suffer fewer illusions about how devious, dangerous and unprincipled the left can be. Schooled in Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and the Leninist method, Horowitz knows all too well that the left will lie, besmirch, cheat, character-assassinate, bully, threaten, blackmail, ballot-box-stuff, bomb, kill, anything to get its way. Conservatives are no match because ‘they’re too decent, too civilised,’ up against ‘destroyers, racists, bigots. I refuse to call them liberals — we are the liberals. They are totalitarians.’

If this sounds extreme to some readers — and it will, even in The Spectator, which says it all really — let’s consider briefly the state of the world right now. The USA, bastion of the free world, is on the brink of collapse. Its economy is $15 trillion in debt, brought low by out-of-control Keynes­ian deficit spending, itself the response to a crisis generated in part by a suicidal scheme to make mortgages available to people who could never afford to pay them back, exacerbated by the ever more burdensome encroachment of the state on the private sector.

In the Middle East, the only stable, productive democracy in the region is assailed on all sides by Islamofascist failed states hellbent on destroying it. And instead of standing up for their only friend in this strategically vital region, its former western allies nitpick over settlements and borders, because that way they won’t have to feel so bad when the Iranians nuke it off the map.

Horror of horrors! Those nasty Republicans are at it again – holding President Obama “hostage” unless he agrees to their outrageous demands as a condition for their votes to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. At least, that’s what New York Times op-ed columnist and left-wing demagogue-economist Paul Krugman would have us believe in his latest slanderous attack on Republican budget-cutters.

In his op-ed column today entitled “America Held Hostage,” Krugman accuses the Republicans, who control only the House of Representatives, of blackmailing President Obama by threatening to throw the country into economic ruin unless they get their way on spending cuts.

Krugman uses his usual scaremongering tactics to warn about the “seriously bad consequences” if the debt ceiling isn’t raised. He warns:

For if we hit the debt ceiling, the government will be forced to stop paying roughly a third of its bills, because that’s the share of spending currently financed by borrowing. So will it stop sending out Social Security checks? Will it stop paying doctors and hospitals that treat Medicare patients? Will it stop paying the contractors supplying fuel and munitions to our military? Or will it stop paying interest on the debt?

Krugman paints a Depression-era picture of

nervous seniors…wondering how to pay for rent and food

Nevertheless, Krugman urges President Obama to call the “extortionists’ bluff,” rather than give in on any spending cuts in the absence of major tax increases. Thus, if his warnings are to be believed, Krugman by his own admission is willing to risk letting seniors starve and live in the streets, Medicare patients to die due to lack of medical care and our soldiers to fight without bullets, in order to score political points against the evil Republican “extortionists.”

But, to give the devil his due, I think Krugman knows in his heart of hearts that his dire warnings of Armageddon if the debt ceiling is not raised on time are nonsense. He must know that we can still pay our interest obligations and debts as they come due, whether or not the debt ceiling is immediately increased. Thus, he appears willing to mislead his readers about the “seriously bad consequences” of a failure to raise the debt ceiling right on time while urging Obama to play chicken with the Republicans whom he demonizes with childish epithets.

Krugman likes to say that

the federal government is basically an insurance company with an army

But the truth is there are plenty of discretionary areas in the federal budget, outside of “insurance” and defense, that can be suspended without sacrificing our seniors, national defense, or the most vulnerable members of our society.

Federal education and agriculture subsidies come to mind. The discretionary portion of the federal education budget for fiscal year 2011 alone is $68.5 billion.  Discretionary spending for agriculture is approximately $24 billion. Thus, nearly $100 billion of spending could be immediately suspended from just the Education and Agriculture departments alone, if the debt ceiling is not raised exactly on time, with no impact on seniors, the most vulnerable or national defense.

What Krugman refuses to acknowledge is the financial Armageddon that is certain to occur if we continue along the spending trajectory set by the Obama administration.

If the United States continues to spend with reckless abandon, we will go bankrupt. It is common sense that raising the debt limit even more, without moving the nation back to the pre-economic crisis spending levels of 2008, is like giving more whiskey to an alcoholic.

Krugman believes that we can simply print our way out of the debt mess, even if that means inflation. In another article he wrote in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, Krugman said that the inflationary consequences to the rest of the world of our printing too much money are “not our problem, fellas.”

Aside from the xenophobic implications of Krugman’s flippant remark, he is wrong that printing too much money is not our problem. Trying to solve the debt problem and to create jobs through flooding the markets with more paper money is just setting us up for more economic disasters. A principal reason has to do with the effect of devaluation of the dollar resulting from printing more money on the price of dollar-denominated oil.

Krugman argues that what’s pushing up raw material prices, including oil, is the rapidly growing demand from the emerging world. That is only partly true. Supply disruptions and artificial constraints imposed by the Obama administration on domestic drilling also contribute to the problem. So do speculators. But the single most important reason for the spike in oil prices is the devaluation of the dollar, to which oil prices are pegged, as demonstrated by the following chart:

Paul Krugman is so blinded by his left-wing wealth redistributionist ideology that he is willing to throw facts and disciplined economic analysis aside to make his political points. His articles are turning into demonizing demagoguery not worthy of an Economics Nobel Laureate.

Joseph Klein is the author of a recent book entitled Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations and Radical Islam.

Ron Paul’s descent into self-parody continues. Earlier this week, the newly official presidential candidate offered his unique take on the mission that killed Osama bin Laden:

“I think things could have been done somewhat differently,” Paul said this week. “I would suggest the way they got Khalid [Sheikh] Mohammed. We went and cooperated with Pakistan. They arrested him, actually, and turned him over to us, and he’s been in prison. Why can’t we work with the government?”

Asked by WHO Radio’s Simon Conway whether he would have given the go-ahead to kill bin Laden if it meant entering another country, Paul shot back that it “absolutely was not necessary.”

“I don’t think it was necessary, no. It absolutely was not necessary,” Paul said during his Tuesday comments. “I think respect for the rule of law and world law and international law. What if he’d been in a hotel in London? We wanted to keep it secret, so would we have sent the airplane, you know the helicopters in to London, because they were afraid the information would get out?”

Actually, there are conflicting reports about the possibility that the United States did have Pakistan’s permission to get bin Laden on our own if we got a bead on him. Now, your guess is as good as mine as to who’s telling the truth, but something tells me that getting the details straight wouldn’t change Paul’s opinion. Either way, one wonders if Paul has ever stopped to consider the fact that bin Laden spent six years in a sizeable compound built in a town dominated by the Pakistani Army, and wonder how that little detail could have possibly escaped the Pakistanis’ notice.

Ed Morrissey succinctly explains what should be obvious to a veteran congressman who’s been active in foreign policy debates for years:

For one thing, had we found him holed up in London, we would have been able to trust the British intelligence service to cooperate.  MI-5 didn’t spend more than a decade helping to build up the Taliban and playing footsie with radical Islamists the way Pakistan’s ISI did, primarily as a bulwark against India.  Moreover, as Paul should know, we tried trusting Pakistan once before on an opportunity to target bin Laden when Bill Clinton had a chance to target his compound.  The ISI warned bin Laden, and to paraphrase President George Bush, we wound up sending a $10 million rocket into a ten-dollar tent to hit a camel’s butt.

Paul also implies that it would have been preferable to take bin Laden alive. While a live bin Laden could conceivably have been a valuable intelligence source, our experience with how to prosecute Zacarias Moussaoui and Khalid Sheik Mohammed suggest that the question of how to try the terror kingpin would have been an even bigger circus. Nor is the fact that we killed him worth losing sleep over morally—serving lethal justice to the planet’s worst evildoers sends a message to the world about what we will and won’t tolerate. And whether or not he was armed when the SEALs took him down is irrelevant; would we really want our soldiers to have risked the possibility that bin Laden had been wearing a bomb vest, or had booby-trapped the room?

Lastly, I’d like to draw Paulestinians’ attention to the bit about respect for “world law and international law” (we can skip the “rule of law” at home for now, since we already know he doesn’t respect that). I’ll be the first to agree that America shouldn’t simply disregard foreign laws whenever we’d like, but the extreme degree to which Paul takes it here goes way beyond responsible caution and into blind, unconditional deference, without regard for practical necessity or whether or not a particular nation is a good-faith actor. This brand of “non-interventionism” is hardly the sort of prudence championed by true conservatives and libertarians; it’s an internationalist submission of the United States’ interests and foreign policy to the interests of friend and foe alike, and as such is much more at home on the Left.

If that’s what you’re looking for in a presidential candidate, that’s one thing. But can we please dispense with the nonsense that Ron Paul is some sort of infallible arbiter of “true” conservatism?

Conservatives who are still under the delusion that they can persuade the Left to tone down their rhetorical attacks and play nice would do well to check out Howard Kurtz’s latest column on the Daily Beast, which gives us yet another round of hypocritical finger waving over the Republican Party’s “liability on the fringe.”

Kurtz begins with, of course, the Birthers:

The [House Republican] caucus has 85 new members, more than 30 of whom are new to elective office—“the kamikazes,” they are privately called—and some took strong exception to being urged not to talk about President Obama’s birth certificate. “Well, I don’t think he was born in this country,” one freshman snapped.

A lone quote from a single unnamed GOP freshman, who represents “some” of a group of thirty or so? I guess they just don’t make epidemics the way they used to.

The birther nonsense seems especially pointless—and corrosive—when one considers that Obama was planning the helicopter raid that would kill Osama bin Laden days later, as he was releasing his long-form Hawaii certificate. Conservative author David Frum says bin Laden’s death should end the racially charged insinuations “that President Obama’s identity and loyalties lie elsewhere.”

Frum is no wild-eyed rebel; he helped coin the phrase “axis of evil” in the Bush White House and opposes virtually all of Obama’s agenda.

Don’t you just love it when lefties presume to tell us which conservatives to take seriously? I’m not sure what Kurtz means by “wild-eyed rebel,” but David Frum’s opinion here is meaningless, considering he’s made a cottage industry out of erecting “far-right” straw men he can loudly denounce so publications like the Daily Beast will fawn over how Serious and Responsible he is. Irresponsible attacks (racial or otherwise) against Obama obviously shouldn’t be tolerated, but they should be rejected on their own merits, not because he nailed bin Laden. Likewise, the political no-brainer of taking out the world’s most wanted terrorist shouldn’t insulate the president from substantive critiques of his “identity and loyalties,” like Matthew Vadum’s. Making bad decisions neither justifies dishonest attacks against you nor exempts you from honest ones.

These are the rumblings of slow-motion earthquake, a tectonic shift that may well redefine what it means to be a Republican. What was truly appalling about the birther craziness is how many in the GOP refused either to criticize those peddling the crackpot conspiracy theory—which included Donald Trump—instead offering a wink, a nod, and passive phraseology about taking the president at his word.

Yeah, nobody in the GOP or on the Right is willing to cross the Birthers…well, unless you count Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Michael Steele, National Review, Human Events, American Spectator, Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Andrew Breitbart, Hot Air,  Townhall, Red State, and NewsRealBlog. Besides, Birther numbers have plummeted since Obama finally released the thing, suggesting that at least a fair chunk of them really were just suspicious about the president’s apparent reluctance to release it, and that they’re happy to move on now that their curiosity’s been satisfied.

Ah, but hold on, Kurtz says, nuttiness “goes well beyond” Birtherism:

It has roots in John McCain putting Sarah Palin on the ticket. Right-leaning commentators who assailed Palin as unqualified were either excoriated (Kathleen Parker got 12,000 hostile e-mails, some saying she should have been aborted), forced out (Christopher Buckley purged from National Review, the magazine founded by his father), or fired (Frum losing his job at American Enterprise Institute).

Of course, McCain couldn’t possibly have picked Palin because he really thought she’d be a good running mate! (Also, apparently Palin on the bottom of the ticket is proof that the party’s dominated by hard-nosed fanatics, while Maverick’s presence at the top of the ticket means nothing.) I’m sorry that anonymous people on the Internet said mean things about Parker, but that kind of comes with the territory. Christopher Buckley (who, recall, not only disliked Palin but endorsed Obama) wasn’t “purged”; according to editor Rich Lowry, Buckley offered to resign from what was actually a fill-in position for the then-on-hiatus Mark Steyn anyway. Nor was Frum—AEI says they let him go because he hadn’t exactly been earning his keep for some time.

Is the GOP becoming a smaller tent where dissent is grounds for banishment?

Someone’s always carping about imaginary crackdowns from GOP thought police. And yet somehow, we never seem to feel the effects of any such crackdown.

Veteran congressman Mike Castle was booed at a 2009 town meeting when he told an angry woman waving a birth certificate that Obama is a citizen; voters dumped him for Christine O’Donnell in a Senate primary. Former Sen. Alan Simpson, calling the birther flap “absurd,” tells me the GOP is being pulled toward an unrelenting focus on social issues: “If the new paradigm is a test of purity, we haven’t got a prayer.”

Delaware voters had many reasons to boo Castle aside from Birtherism—the guy’s positions were so far to the left on economics, social issues, and defense that one wonders why he even bothered to run as a Republican. Aren’t voters allowed to side with candidates they agree with on the issues? If not, then what’s the point of primaries?

Not everyone agrees. Former Newt Gingrich aide Tony Blankley says “both parties have their extremes, and their leadership can’t embrace them. But you never want to disperse the energy of your supporters. It has to be managed.” Maybe, but Democrats have never enabled the Bush-caused-9/11 nuts this way.

No, prominent elected Democrats just post at Daily Kos, compare Republicans to Nazis, endorse Michael Moore’s conspiratorial lies, and attend churches led by racists. Completely different!

Howard Kurtz and his ilk show little interest in creating original arguments against the Right, and they barely even try to disguise or justify the misdirection and double standards they’ve been recycling for years. If the prevalence of these reruns doesn’t convince you that the Liberal Inquisition can’t be appeased, nothing will.

Most of the nation is still celebrating the elimination of Osama bin Laden, the monster behind one of the worst days in American history. Some are relieved bin Laden can no longer aid the jihadist cause; others take pleasure in knowing the suffering he caused us has been partially repaid.

But at least one voice is having none of it. At the Huffington Post, “specialist in transformational change” (whatever that means) Dr. Pamela Gerloff writes that celebrating bin Laden’s death is mentally unhealthy and geopolitically dangerous:

“Celebrating” the killing of any member of our species–for example, by chanting USA! USA! and singing The Star Spangled Banner outside the White House or jubilantly demonstrating in the streets–is a violation of human dignity. Regardless of the perceived degree of “good” or “evil” in any of us, we are all, each of us, human. To celebrate the killing of a life, any life, is a failure to honor life’s inherent sanctity.

Plenty of people will argue that Osama Bin Laden did not respect the sanctity of others’ lives. To that I would ask, “What relevance does that have to our own actions?” One aspect of being human is our ability to choose our own behavior; more specifically, our capacity to return good for evil, love for hate, dignity for indignity. While Osama Bin Laden was widely considered to be the personification of evil, he was nonetheless a human being. A more peaceable response to his killing would be to mourn the many tragedies that led up to his violent death and the thousands of violent deaths that occurred in the attempt to eliminate him from the face of the Earth; and to feel compassion for anyone who, because of their role in the military or government, American or otherwise, has had to play a role in killing another. This kind of compassion can be cultivated, as practitioners of many different spiritual traditions will attest […]

It is hard not to think that some of the impulse to celebrate “justice being done” may also contain a certain pleasure in revenge–not just “closure” but “getting even.” The world is not safer with Osama Bin Laden’s violent demise (threat levels are going up, not down); evil has not been finally removed from the Earth; the War on Terror goes on–so any celebration must be tempered with the sobering fact that much work still needs to be done to establish peace.

There’s a lot to unpack here, most of it awful. But first, for the sake of fairness and decency one fair point must be acknowledged: If we truly recognize the intrinsic worth of all human life, we have to recognize that even the worst among us have souls, warped and polluted though they may be, and be careful not to think casually of any killing—even just and necessary killing, as bin Laden’s death clearly was. Now, I’d be lying if I told you I haven’t found some satisfaction in the confidence that Osama now knows the afterlife isn’t quite what he expected, but I also have to admit those thoughts don’t live up to the standard my Savior has set for me.

So we shouldn’t take pleasure in exacting bloody vengeance, but there is another aspect to the celebration that is entirely appropriate. As I survey the reactions of friends, acquaintances, and pundits, it seems to me bloodlust is not the primary animating force of their celebration. Justice is. People are celebrating the fact that an act of tremendous evil has been punished, ensuring that bin Laden will never again threaten the United States and sending a clear message to our surviving enemies: hurt us, and we’ll find you, no matter where on earth you go, no matter how long it takes. And when we do, you won’t like what comes next.

Celebrating the destruction and punishment of evil is not only a proper impulse in a free society it’s a necessary one. Quite simply, a society that does not strongly embrace and venerate the punishment of evil is a society that is incapable of survival.

Gerloff’s failure to understand this is bad, but it’s not what makes her piece one of the most disgustingly immoral things I’ve read in recent memory. No, that would be the moral equivalence between America and the jihadists who want us dead. “Good” and “evil” are placed in scare quotes. We’re told a better response would be to “feel compassion” for anyone involved in any military or government who “has had to play a role in killing another,” as if a drone strike on a terrorist hideout and detonating yourself in a crowded subway are equally tragic. And then there’s this:

The truth is that “celebrating justice” when one person is killed–as happens regularly in the gang wars of American cities–only incites further desire for revenge, which, from “the other side’s” viewpoint, is usually called “justice.”

Consider this: If a leader in our country were killed in the manner in which Osama Bin Laden was killed, as “justice” for his acts of aggression in the War on Terror–and supporters of that act were shown proudly chanting their country’s name, singing their national anthem, and demonstrating in the streets–Americans would likely feel more sickened than joyful, wouldn’t you think? The impulse to celebrate a death depends on what side you’re on.

It doesn’t matter how little you think of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or any American leader. It doesn’t matter how much you disagree with US military operations in Libya, Pakistan, Iraq, or Afghanistan. There is no comparison between any of our leaders or actions and those of al Qaeda, Hamas, or Hezbollah. “The other side” might say their cause is justice and ours is revenge, and some might even believe it. But reality is what it is regardless of “viewpoints.” Those who seek to kill and dominate infidels are the bad guys, and the ones trying to stop them are the good guys.

Period.

If the rest of the country were so foolish as to believe that the key to peace with monsters is quashing the celebration of monsters’ deaths, the ensuing suffering would be staggering. However unhealthy the “psychology of revenge” may be, it pales in comparison to the poison that is the neurosis of moral equivalency.

We knew this was coming. No American victory in this day and age, not even the long-overdue death of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, is safe from political hijacking by the useful idiots of the Left.  Within hours of hearing the good news, left-wing Daily Beast flunky Peter Beinart took to the keyboard to declare that the War on Terror is finally over.

Wow, what a relief! So that means Iran’s nuclear program is kaput? Er, no. Well, maybe it means the UN Security Council has stopped playing nice with Middle Eastern thug regimes. Wait, that didn’t happen, either. I know – peace between Israel and the Palestinians is finally in sight! Nope, try again. Um, then maybe anti-American sentiment among Muslim populations is waning? Uh-uh.

If none of that’s the case, then what does Beinart mean?

I don’t mean that there is no threat of further jihadist attack. In the short term, the threat may even rise. I don’t mean that we should abandon all efforts at tracking terrorist cells. Of course not. But the war on terror was a way of seeing the world, explicitly modeled on World War II and the Cold War. It suggested that the struggle against “radical Islam” or “Islamofascism” or “Islamic terrorism” should be the overarching goal of American foreign policy, the prism through which we see the world […] It made East Asia an afterthought during a critical period in China’s rise; it allowed all manner of dictators to sell their repression in Washington, just as they had during the Cold War; it facilitated America’s descent into torture; it wildly exaggerated the ideological appeal of a jihadist-Salafist movement whose vision of society most Muslims find revolting.

Bin Laden’s death is an opportunity to lay the war on terror to rest as well. Although President Obama avoids the phrase, its assumptions still drive our war in Afghanistan, a crushingly expensive adventure in nation building in a desperately poor country whose powerful neighbor wants us to fail. Those assumptions fuel anti-Muslim racism in the United States, where large swaths of the Republican Party have decided they are at risk of living under Sharia law. And they blind us to the differences among Islamist movements, allowing Glenn Beck and company to depict Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as al Qaeda’s farm team.

Instead, we can now take on real problems, like debt and China. Because Barack Obama has been such a crusader on those issues so far.

I’m struggling to decide what the most contemptible part of this screed is. Is it the insane implication that Obama taking one problem less seriously will lead to him taking the others more seriously, despite his manifest unseriousness towards both? The way he relies on his own past smears of conservatives as Islamophobes to prop up his latest thesis? Where he casually says, oh by the way, the Cold War was no big deal either?

I don’t know what the sleaziest element is, but it’s easy to see which one is the most dangerous:

The war on terror is over; Al Qaeda lost.

This has perhaps been no greater point of contention between hawks and doves since the September 11 attacks: is the War on Terror simply an effort to destroy the terrorist organization under whose banner 9/11 was carried out, or is it a larger struggle against the broader ideological movement of which al Qaeda was but one part?

I hate to break it to you, but despite the loss of their leader, al Qaeda has by no means been neutered, and either way, they’re far from the only Islamofascist game in town. Extremists have won a string of governments throughout the Middle East, and in particular, NRB’s Moshe Phillips notes that Hamas is still kicking. Indeed, learning where bin Laden was hiding—right under the noses of our Pakistani “allies”—should be enough to illustrate why it’s a bit early to herald a new era of U.S.-Mideast relations.

Then again, it’s not as if any of the above would change Peter Beinart’s mind—recall that according to him, the War on Terror has never been a war. Whether Osama bin Laden’s relaxing in a compound or sleeping with the fishes means nothing to him; he’d be saying it’s time to pack up regardless. In that sense, his entire column is a farce—bin Laden’s death is just the latest pretext of seriousness he’s using to whine, “are we there yet?”

As the White House deals a devastating blow to one Obama conspiracy theory, leave it to leftists to dig up another one to browbeat allegedly-bigoted conservatives with. At the Daily Beast, pseudo-feminist Michelle Goldberg “traces the far-right history of the claim” that something funny’s going on with Barack Obama’s academic background:

Claims about Obama’s educational history date back to September 2008, when The Wall Street Journal attacked him for not releasing his school records, writing in an editorial, “Some think his transcript, if released, would reveal Mr. Obama as a mediocre student who benefited from racial preference.” Since then, Orly Taitz, queen of the birthers, has developed elaborate theories about Obama’s college years. As Taitz argues, Obama himself acknowledged that he was directionless when he started college. How, then, did he get himself accepted into the Ivy League?

Despite purporting to refute the right-wing “fever swamps,” Goldberg won’t actually reference the WSJ piece again, so it’s worth mentioning that it makes substantive points, among them that the ambiguity of Obama’s college days doesn’t square with the prominence of his personal story in his claim to fame. And as Andy McCarthy points out, Obama has a habit of modifying details of his biography for different audiences. (Ace has more solid analysis of Obama’s college days here.)

But not a peep about any of this from Goldberg. Instead of addressing what serious Obama critics have said, she spends the next couple paragraphs shooting down the theories of Orly Taitz, an especially destructive Birther attorney, who speculates that Obama attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student, attended for a mere nine months instead of two years, and even that he got into Harvard Law thanks to the machinations of a Saudi prince.

Whatever the fact-to-crap ratio of Taitz’s allegations may be (the Saudi connection seems outlandish, but the explanation of the National Student Clearinghouse rep, who says Taitz got bad results from submitting queries to NSC’s database incorrectly, doesn’t seem adequate either), it’s ultimately a sideshow. The point is, Goldberg is making clowns like Orly Taitz the face of the opposition rather than McCarthy or the Wall Street Journal editorial board because she wants to delegitimize their argument without addressing it. Why? Why else—race-baiting:

It’s easy enough to see why this particular narrative has endured. Not only does it position the president as a Muslim Manchurian candidate with longtime ties to agents of the caliphate, but it also assures resentful whites that this seemingly brilliant black man isn’t so smart after all. In that sense, it’s of a piece with the right-wing obsession with Obama’s use of a teleprompter, and with the widespread suspicion that he didn’t really write the eloquent Dreams From My Father, a claim Trump recently made at a Tea Party rally. Obama, in this view, is both sinister and stupid, canny enough to perpetrate one of the biggest frauds in American history but still the ultimate affirmative-action baby.

Trump is clearly not as intelligent as Obama, but he’s not an idiot, either. When he blows this particular dog whistle, he knows exactly what the Republican base is hearing.

No, the Right’s desire to knock Obama’s brain down a peg is a reaction to the endless mainstream media narrative that conservatives and Republicans are morons, while Obama is a genius (indeed, look no further than Goldberg’s own unsupported claim that Donald Trump’s intellect “clearly” pales in comparison to The One’s). To demonstrate the absurdity of claiming this is about Obama’s race, let’s perform a little thought experiment.

Imagine for a moment that instead of black Democrat President Barack Obama, we currently have white Democrat President Barry Osborn, who, aside from his racial and ethnic background, is identical to Obama in every way—same handling of the economy, same healthcare plan, same treatment of Israel, and the same positions on abortion, guns, etc. Then take any of the claims listed above—the president isn’t that bright, he didn’t write his book, he’s helpless without a teleprompter. Regardless of their particular merits, simply ask yourself: do you really think we’d be treating Osborn any more favorably than Obama? Do you think we’d pull these punches against a white ideological opponent, or be more open to left-wing ideas just because they came from a white leftist?

Of course not. Leftists understood from the start that Obama’s skin color would make a potent weapon for smearing opponents instead of engaging their ideas, which is exactly what Michelle Goldberg has done here.

The University of Iowa College Republicans’ Conservative Coming Out Week has a simple message—conservatives are people too, they aren’t alone, and they don’t need to fear discrimination on college campuses like liberal Iowa City. Leave it to faculty left-wingers, then, to demonstrate why conservative students need a little encouragement.

The Iowa Republican reports that Ellen Lewin, UI professor of—what else?—“Anthropology and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies,” didn’t take kindly to the CR’s campus-wide email announcing the event:

Lewin responded to email by writing, “#*@% [F-Word] YOU, REPUBLICANS” from her official university email account.

Natalie Ginty, a University of Iowa Student and Chairwoman of the Iowa Federation of College Republicans, demanded an apology from Lewin’s supervisors.  “We understand that as a faculty member she has the right to express her political opinion, but by leaving her credentials at the bottom of the email she was representing the University of Iowa, not herself alone,” Ginty wrote to James Enloe, the head of the Department of Anthropology.

“Vile responses like Ellen’s need to end. Demonizing the other party through name-calling only further entrenches feelings of disdain for the other side. I am sure you understand that nothing is ever accomplished by aimless screams of attack,” Ginty concluded.

In an email to the College Republicans, Professor Lewin wrote, “This is a time when political passions are inflamed, and when I received your unsolicited email, I had just finished reading some newspaper accounts of fresh outrages committed by Republicans in government.  I admit the language was inappropriate, and apologize for any affront to anyone’s delicate sensibilities.  I would really appreciate your not sending blanket emails to everyone on campus, especially in these difficult times.”

Lewin followed up on Tuesday with this gem:

I should note that several things in the original message were extremely offensive, nearly rising to the level of obscenity.  Despite the Republicans’ general disdain for LGBT rights you called your upcoming event “conservative coming out day,” appropriating the language of the LGBT right movement.   Your reference to the Wisconsin protests suggested that they were frivolous attempts to avoid work.  And the “Animal Rights BBQ” is extremely insensitive to those who consider animal rights an important cause.  Then, in the email that Ms. Ginty sent complaining about my language, she referred to me as Ellen, not Professor Lewin, which is the correct way for a student to address a faculty member, or indeed, for anyone to refer to an adult with whom they are not acquainted.  I do apologize for my intemperate language, but the message you all sent out was extremely disturbing and offensive.

And, of course, UI President Sally Mason weighed in with a pitifully noncommittal statement about celebrating diversity and respecting differing viewpoints…without naming anyone who may have failed to display that respect. Let’s hear it for leadership.

So to summarize, it takes “delicate sensibilities” to be offended by a “F*** YOU, REPUBLICANS” from a professor in response to an perfectly respectable email announcing a college-approved group’s events. And no, the email’s content wasn’t “extremely disturbing and offensive.” Let’s look at the obscenity-worthy offenses.

Appropriated LGBT language:

Conservatives in Iowa City: it is time to come out of the closet! I know at times it feels like you are the only person that disagrees with this liberal town, but you are not alone! […] Wear RED Day! Come out of the closet and show your true colors!

Translation: only left-wing gay activists are allowed to come clean about who they really are, or take pride in their lifestyles and beliefs. You think it’s occurred to Ellen—excuse me, Professor Lewin—that by practically declaring it a hate crime for Republicans to talk about discrimination against themselves in the same way homosexuals do, she’s given the world a perfect example of why right-of-center college students need coming-out weeks of their own?

The Wisconsin protests reference:

Wednesday: Come pick up your Doctors Notice to miss class for “sick of stress” just like the Wisconsin public employees during the union protests from 11 to 1 on the Pentacrest.

Actually, odds are that many of the pilgrimages to Madison were “frivolous attempts to avoid work” (or worse). Just watch the flippancy with which teachers describe how “sick” and “anguished” Governor Scott Walker made them, justifying their unethical engagement in medical fraud, which closed down schools and cost Wisconsin taxpayers millions (all to protest, it bears repeating, benefit reductions which still leave them with a better deal than private-sector workers).

Insensitivity to animal rights:

Stick around for an Animal Rights BBQ at 6pm.

Last time I checked, animal-rights activists weren’t exactly known for being shrinking violets, considering their use of Holocaust imagery, buckets of blood, et cetera. I wonder if Professor Lewin has ever dropped an F-bomb on PETA?

In a better time, books on education carried teachers’ oaths, like this one written by Robert DeBruyn. Professor Lewin and her superiors would do well to reflect upon some of its passages:

I will practice my profession with conscience and dignity; the well-being of my students will be my primary concern always.

I will honor the position of parents and uphold public trust.

I will maintain by all the means in my power the honor of my profession.

I will not permit considerations of religion, nationality, race, party politics, social standing, or the monetary rewards received from my labors to intervene between my duty and my students.

We’re all used to the zeal with which leftists conjure ugly smears of conservatives, but when conservatives prove the stereotype wrong, it takes serious chutzpa to then make a controversy out of that. Such is the spectacle on display in Terry Greene Sterling’s latest Daily Beast report, which tries to make sense out of recent decisions by Arizona Republican Governor Jan Brewer which don’t exactly fit the MO of a right-wing extremist:

A year ago, incumbent Republican Gov. Jan Brewer was trailing her Democratic rival Terry Goddard in the Arizona gubernatorial race. Then Brewer signed SB 1070, the state’s notorious immigration law, and further pandered to her Republican Tea Party base by touting her proud membership in the NRA, labeling unauthorized migrants drug mules, and scaring the daylights out of Arizonans with false tales of “beheadings” in the desert. Despite an agonizingly embarrassing senior moment in televised pre-election debates, Brewer rode a wave of conservative sentiment into the governor’s office, and achieved iconic status among her supporters.

(Since you bring it up, our friends at NewsBusters actually did find confirmation that at least one immigration-related beheading took place. But I digress)

A year later, incredibly, that iconic status hasn’t diminished, even though Brewer, 66, appears to be changing her political stripes. She reversed a cold-hearted decision to deprive poor people of state-funded transplants in Arizona (after three patients on the transplant list died) and stunned Arizonans on Monday when she vetoed two Tea Party pet measures that had sailed through the state house. Her apparent tick toward the right-of-center comes on the heels of a highly successful Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry campaign to kill five proposed state immigration laws that Brewer likely would have supported a year ago.

In her sudden about-face, Brewer axed a “birther” bill that required federal and state candidates to submit to the Arizona secretary of state a “circumcision certificate” or a “baptismal” certificate absent a “long form” birth certificate. In a letter to House Speaker Kirk Adams, Brewer implied that the circumcision language was tacky and claimed the bill went “too far” while doing nothing “constructive” for the state. And she told Greta Van Susteren on Fox News that the bill was a “distraction.”

She also vetoed a measure that would allow guns on vaguely defined “public pathways” close to state schools. In a letter to her political ally, Senate Majority Leader Russell Pearce, Brewer huffed that the gun measure was “poorly written” and could be construed to mean that people could pack guns on “public pathways” meandering through grammar schools and kindergartens.

“So what gives?” Sterling asks. Why the “shocking” transformation? Why, despite Brewer supposedly having re-invented herself as the second coming of Charlie Crist, aren’t “Tea Party Republicans furious at Brewer?”

It’s all part of a plan, insists State Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat. Republican lawmakers who don’t support the bills vote for them anyway. They do this to appease extremist voters who will shape future primary elections, she says. Brewer, who is not facing re-election due to term limits, then vetoes the bills.

“The legislators knew she would veto the birther bill, and that’s why they passed it,” says Sinema. “Same with the gun bill. I actually had a Republican legislator give me a high-five when Brewer vetoed the birther bill.”

“I don’t think one should give Jan Brewer credit for stepping away from extremism,” adds Andrei Cherny, chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party.

Could be. Then again, it could be that Brewer simply disagreed with the bills, and that her supporters don’t think the occasional disagreement makes them enemies. Brewer regards the chase for Barack Obama’s “real” birthplace as a dead end and a distraction from the challenges facing Arizona as well as the rest of the country. As for the other measures, I’ll leave it for Arizonans to determine whether they’re just cases of “poorly written” bills, or if Brewer really has caved, but it’s worth noting that none of what Sterling references seems to violate the standard conservative litmus tests. It’s not as if Brewer suddenly announced she’s pro-choice, moved to appease unions, or came out in favor of cap-and-trade.

Fortunately, the Left has that base covered, too, as Sterling reminds us that impartially reports on someone else reminding us that Brewer’s still pretty darn extreme:

Brewer’s already done considerable damage, Cherny and other Democrats say. Brewer signed the embarrassing, costly, and ineffective SB 1070.

Embarrassing? To whom? Costly? Illegal immigration isn’t exactly cheap, either. And ineffective? Think that might have something to do with, in Sterling’s own words, the law being “partially stayed by federal courts”?

She signed a law that allowed Arizonans to pack concealed guns without permits.

Ah yes, because we all know that guns always lead to evil and never to good.

She approved draconian cuts to state education and health care.

I hope you’ll forgive me for somehow doubting that state education and healthcare bureaucrats have been spending the cut money wisely.

She signed a measure that would give priority in adoptions to heterosexual married parents over gay or single parents.

Translation: Brewer thinks the state should prefer that orphaned children have both a mother and a father when possible, while still allowing gays and singles to adopt when not. What a nut!

When someone acts contrary to a stereotype assigned to her, normal people usually react by questioning the stereotype and those pushing it. Leftists, however, react by salvaging the smear in any way they can, in this case twisting Jan Brewer’s prudence into evidence that she’s even more sinister than before. If only they could put that ingenuity to less malevolent uses.

Here’s all you need to know about Canada:

When Canadian author Mordecai Richler died a few years ago, the crusty, controversial author of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Barney’s Version was duly eulogized on the front page of the nation’s newest paper, the National Post. (It didn’t hurt that the Post employed three — count ‘em! — of Richler’s talented children — but his death was a no-brainer A1 headline at every other Canadian newspaper, too.)

The next day, a different, equally glowing obit also praised Mordecai Richler — on the front page of the New York Times.

The day after that? News of that almost unheard of hono(u)r — a Canadian writer, memorialized on page one of The Paper of Record! — was breathlessly reported…

On the front page of the National Post.

And that is the only story you ever need to know, to completely understand Canada, your neighbor to the north (with a “u”.)

Oh, and one other thing:

Last night, the country’s first “conservative” 24-hour news channel, the Sun News Network, went on the air at 5PM sharp.

I’m obliged to note that I’m friendly with a few of the folks who host programs on the new network.

That said: I’m guessing I wasn’t the only one who got a little thrill watching Sun News’ “countdown clock” tick-tick-tick yesterday. (Yes, some folks videotaped the countdown clock for posterity. What can I say? That’s how desperate Canadians were for change, and how thrilled they were that it was on its way.)

When  5:00PM finally arrived and Ezra Levant greeted his viewers, I was delighted. Americans who remember the days before Fox News and the internet can probably identify with that feeling.

Our state-sponsored TV channel, the CBC, is supported by my tax dollars, rabidly anti-American and anti-Israel — and, a blessing of sorts, extremely low rated.

Other stations range from left-middle to left-left. Often this is more a case of self-selection than ideology; Canada’s media centers are our big cities, and people in big cities are typically “progressive. Their passion for “Earth Hour” and Cuban vacations and “mulitculturalism” is simply “normal.” Chances are, they’ve never met a gun owner, a climate “skeptic,” a practicing Christian, an opponent of “gay marriage” — or a Conservative Party voter.

Having said that, watching Sun News the first day still felt a bit like dutifully showing up to a pal’s new “little theatre” production of The Music Man, or your child’s Christmas pageant. You’re kind of pre-cringing, waiting for part of the set to fall over.

Yet I’m betting many of us were pleasantly surprised. Much of the on-air talent comes from the world of print; sometimes it shows (guys, they’re called “haircuts”…) but, delightfully, sometimes it doesn’t. Everyone deserves a medal just for going on TV live, to a national audience, in a recently constructed studio on its very first day.

Wow!

As the show biz bible Variety reminded us this morning, not everybody is happy with the very existence of Sun News.

As I reported here months back, Canada’s self-appointed guardians of the nation’s “values” — Establishment elites like Margaret Atwood and major newspaper columnists — tried to keep Sun News off the air before it even launched.

They didn’t succeed, obviously. And I predict that after about a week of cursing on Twitter, most of them will forget all about it and go back to fretting about the upcoming national election and the latest made-up quote attributed to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Those of us who remain tuned in, meanwhile, are happy to hear phrases like “free market economics” and “low taxes” uttered on Canadian TV without eye-rolling and sarcasm.

Of everything I saw last night, nothing moved me more than Charles Adler’s opening monologue. Adler is one of our biggest talk radio hosts. He’s a TV veteran from way back, though (with the local Emmy to prove it). I’ve been sending everyone over to the Sun News website to see his stirring welcome to his new audience, in which he shares the story of his father smuggling him, as a baby, out of Communist Hungary in a knapsack:

We took a risk for freedom, for democracy… for Canada.

It’s a moving meditation on common sense values, success, risk taking and being part of a challenging (ad)venture in a new era. Hope you’ll give it a few minutes of your time.

Naturally, the channel’s first real “controversy” came at the instigation of host Ezra Levant.

At the behest of a foreign-born imam, Levant was famously prosecuted by the Alberta government in 2006 for publishing the so-called “Mohammed cartoons.” Yesterday, by way of introduction, he showed them on his program.

And — you’ll never guess — an imam complained!

The imam, a convert named Stephen Rockwell, issued a bizarre statement invoking the Holocaust, making soap out of Jews, and the n-word.

Plus — you’ll never guess — he declined Ezra’s invitation to appear on the show today. Levant informed viewers tonight that he was going to put up a photograph of Rockwell for their benefit, but “didn’t want to frighten” them.

As a self-described troublemaker and media veteran going back to his college days, Ezra Levant is in his element. Other on-air folks aren’t as seasoned, but they’re — for lack of a gentler word — ideologically sound. Sun News scooped up almost all the nation’s openly conservative commentators in print and radio. I predict veteran Parliament Hill reporter Brian Lilley and hyperarticulate high finance expert (and children’s author!) Theo Caldwell will be the channel’s breakout stars.

So, American readers: please congratulate us, and keep your fingers crossed. If you catch clips from Sun News on the internet, do cut us some slack; we don’t have the economies of scale, and sheer capital, to launch something as visually fancy as Fox. But Sun’s heart and mind is in the right place. Millions of us are thrilled and relieved.

As my fellow Canadian blogger, Kate McMillan posted triumphantly this morning:

April 18th, 2011: The day a whole new stratum of Canadian society learned what it’s like to yell at the TV

Before I sat down to write this article, I pinched myself just to make sure I was awake and today’s subject wasn’t some weird dream. But alas, talking heads on both sides of the political spectrum really are seriously entertaining the possibility of President Donald Trump.

At the Daily Beast, Jim DeFede reports on why several Florida Tea Partiers have said they’re backing the Donald:

“We need a real businessman,” said Linda Kogelman, 63, a retired postal worker. “The lawyers don’t know how to run the country. They bow down to too many people.” Kogelman said no one else in the Republican field excites her.

“There is no one there,” she continued. “Romney is old hat. Newt is old hat. It’s just the same old same old. We need new blood.”

Her husband, Ken, 64, who closed his crane business in 2009 because of the downturn in the economy, nodded in agreement.

“They’ve destroyed this country,” he spit. Who?

“The Democrats.”

Standing nearby, 78-year-old Richard Walters was holding on to a letter he had written. He was hoping to be able to hand it to Trump.

“I used to be the Rolls Royce dealer in Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach,” said Walters, who is now retired. “And he was one of my customers.”

Fond memories of The Donald?

“I didn’t like him,” Walters said. “He was an arrogant bastard. But I love him now. He is the only person in this country who can right the ship.”

Lest you think DeFede has cherry-picked some outliers to exaggerate Trump’s popularity, note that The Donald has some formidable poll numbers in the Republican primary field (he fares worse, however, in general election match-ups). Among the conservative punditocracy, the reaction is more mixed—Sean Hannity has been giving Trump substantial interview time, while Mark Levin has been intensely critical, and with good reason—Trump has flip-flopped on abortion, healthcare, and his party affiliation, used to be far more favorable to Barack Obama (calling George W. Bush “evil” in the process), and has donated substantially to Democrats. Given that record, it’s hard to conclude his recent professions of religiosity, shots about Obama’s birth certificate, and brazen talk of taking Iraq’s oil and charging the Arab League $5 billion to topple Gaddafi, are anything more than political pandering.

Some supporters, though, admit as much—and support him anyway:

This year on the Celebrity Apprentice, Hochfelsen explained, Gary Busey is on the show and he has just been acting like a lunatic, saying all sorts of crazy things. “Everyone on the show keeps telling Trump to fire Gary Busey and to get rid of him,” Hochfelsen added. “But he knows he can get more miles from Gary Busey by having him on the show. So he keeps him. And now everyone watches. The birther thing is his Gary Busey.” (Trump finally fired Busey Sunday night.)

But isn’t that pretty crass politically?

“What,” Hochfelsen snapped with incredulity. “Is he going to hurt the feelings of Obama’s grandmother in Kenya? It’s just business.”

What are we to make of all this? Why are disgruntled conservatives so receptive to the notion of putting a two-faced celebrity in the White House? One word: desperation.

You can see it in the comments above—people understand that we’re living in perilous times, and they rightly sense that most of GOP “good guys,” so to speak, either don’t know the right thing to do or lack the guts necessary to see it through. They remember how many times conventional Republicans have burned them. They know better than to take easy platitudes about loving Reagan and freedom as certificates of authenticity. As John Ziegler explains, many are so fed up with the milquetoast that, just like disgruntled college conservatives, they’re willing to try their luck with a wild card that presents himself with the guts, candor, and aggressiveness of a warrior.

As David Swindle points out, that’s a dangerous bet—moral clarity should be the first quality we seek in a candidate, and “it doesn’t help the conservative cause to get someone in who will get impeached or sabotage us in some other stupid way.” I hope voters think long and hard about character before casting their ballots, but I also hope the rest of the candidates recognize why Donald Trump is catching on, and assess their own claims to be presidential material accordingly.

To love your country is to hate red ink.

Sounds like a Tea Party slogan, doesn’t it? This concise declaration of fiscal responsibility would look at home on many a conservative bumper or amid a sea of protest signs, but incredibly, it was uttered by Boston University history professor Andrew Bacevich as—I kid you not—a glowing endorsement of President Barack Obama’s April 13 speech on the federal budget. On the Daily Beast, Bacevich declares that the 44^th president has “expanded the operative definition of patriotism to encompass belief in balanced budgets”:

This is surely a good thing. So too is the president’s willingness to finger the essence of the problem: a widespread desire for an endless free lunch—people coveting government benefits without a willingness to pay for them.

Obama also performed a useful service in pointing out that any serious effort at deficit reduction will have to target the Big Four: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and national security.

Regarding that last category, the president promises to reassess not only military missions and capabilities, but also America’s role in the world. In our post-unipolar moment, such a reassessment is long overdue. Yet to have more than cosmetic results, Obama will have to take on some very sacred cows and some very powerful interests.

I defy you to find a more surreal reaction to Obama’s remarks. We’ve previously discussed how Diamond Barry’s proposed budgets have been so bloated they call for new taxes by the trillions to sustain them. The president might have said on Wednesday that he wants to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next twelve years, but as Mark Knoller of noted right-wing mouthpiece CBS News reports:

Budget totals issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in February project 10 years of deficits totaling $7.2 trillion between 2012 and 2021. Another two years at that rate would bring the 12 year total to $8.6 trillion.

The Obama 12-year plan would cut the projected deficit total in half, but would leave another $4 trillion in deficits that would be added to the National Debt, which now stands at $14.27 trillion.

Separately, OMB expects the Debt to double over the next ten years to a mind-boggling total of $26.3-trillion in 2021. It’s estimated the Debt that year would cost U.S. taxpayers $928-billion in interest payments. Four trillion dollars in deficit reduction would reduce the Debt to just over $22-trillion, and still inflict $700-billion in interest on the federal budget.

If budget-balancing really is the new patriotism, then Obama falls short of the good, solid B plus range right out of the gate. By the way, Obama has decided signing statements aren’t evil anymore, and is using one to declare that he simply won’t abide by Congress’s vote to de-fund his czars. I don’t see how unilaterally disregarding spending cuts enacted by the legislative branch gets you points as a fiscal hawk. This is what Professor Bacevich considers visionary leadership aimed at cleaning up the mess we’re in?

If we assess Obama’s approach to “sacred cows” (and no, it’s not bold for a leftist to say we’re spending too much on defense, which isn’t the problem area anyway), then the grade drops further still. Consider his reaction to the substantive (if imperfect) plan proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), which attempts to address Medicaid and Medicare. Did the Uniter-in-Chief applaud Ryan’s willingness to make tough decisions? Did our first post-partisan president offer to reach across the aisle to find common ground between their plans, while offering substantive, good-faith critiques of particulars he disagreed with? Er, not exactly:

But the way this plan achieves those goals would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known throughout most of our history […] These are the kind of cuts that tell us we can’t afford the America we believe in.  And they paint a vision of our future that’s deeply pessimistic […]

Worst of all, this is a vision that says even though America can’t afford to invest in education or clean energy; even though we can’t afford to care for seniors and poor children, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy […] their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.  As Ronald Reagan’s own budget director said, there’s nothing “serious” or “courageous” about this plan.  There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.  There’s nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.

The demagoguery is so thick you could cut it with a knife. The fact is, the Ryan budget returns discretionary spending to not-exactly stingy 2008 levels. And as the Wall Street Journal writes, his Medicare “cuts” are cuts “only in the sense of slowing the rate of growth,” and his healthcare proposals are meant to address government-distortion of the incentive structure: “By capping the Medicare subsidy, seniors would pay for the marginal costs of their care, promoting competitive insurance. That would in turn incrementally change how doctors and hospitals provide care, encouraging competition in price and quality.” And the tax cuts for the rich?

The Ryan budget outline by design does not provide many tax specifics, aside from an instruction to the Ways and Means Committee to propose a reform plan that would swap lower rates for fewer loopholes and special exclusions. This overhaul is not even a net tax cut—the instructions are to design a reform that is revenue neutral. It would hold tax receipts to their post-World War II average of between 18% to 19% as a share of the economy.

The liberal claim that this means a tax cut for the wealthy is based entirely on the fact that marginal tax rates would decline, even though the loopholes primarily benefit higher-income taxpayers. At any rate, Mr. Obama’s own deficit commission also favored lowering the rates and broadening the base for a more efficient and competitive tax code.

Mr. President, the only thing that embodies “a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known throughout most of our history” is your vision. Your talk of what “we” can afford, what “we’ve” promised to this or that slice of the population, betrays your ignorance of a simple, quintessentially American truth: the people are not the government. Yes, we the people have a moral obligation to lend a hand to our young, our sick, and our downtrodden, but the role of our federal government is to protect our individual rights so we don’t have to watch our backs all the time, so we can focus on other pursuits, such as bettering ourselves and the world around us.

To recognize that the government can’t afford all the collective charity work our liberal betters think it should undertake is not to reject the individual’s obligations to his countrymen. Mr. President, you accuse conservatives of “changing the basic social compact in America.” America’s social compact is the United States Constitution, and we’re not changing a word of it—we’re simply reasserting it’s original, true meaning.

President Obama likes to talk about “winning the future.” His version of ”winning” is not even as credible as Charlie Sheen’s. Case in point was Obama’s speech on the deficit yesterday.  Obama invoked his “winning the future” mantra yet again, while offering a re-packaged, partisan version of his deeply flawed deficit-reduction plan and resorting to fear-mongering and exploitation of emotions in place of reasoned analysis.

President Obama’s response to the serious deficit reduction proposals put forth by House Republicans, led by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), was nothing more than a petulant variation on two tired themes – class warfare  and blaming George W. Bush for virtually every problem confronting Obama today — including the growing national debt. In fact, Vice president Joe Biden had heard this boring nonsense so many times before that he actually dozed off.

The New York Times, on the other hand, loved what its lead editorial today called the “reinvigorated” Obama. The Times will never get bored of trying to paint the Republicans as monsters trying to crush seniors and the poor,

while giving the rich $1 trillion in tax cuts

Let’s start with Obama’s attempt to blame his predecessors, most notably George W. Bush, for the deficits he is forced to tackle. Obama has racked up more deficits in his first two years in office than Bush did during his entire 8 years. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is a graph depicting the Bush and Obama years, as well as Obama’s own projections for future trillion dollar deficits:

Next, let’s consider Obama’s class warfare arguments. He wants to crush the nation’s job creators with higher taxes. Even the left-wing Media Matters does not dispute that 50% of Americans have paid virtually no federal income taxes at all.

Here is data based on the 2008 tax year compiled by the National Tax Union from the Internal Revenue Service:

Tax Year 2008

Yet Obama wants to require small business owners and others earning more than $200,000 a year (or $250,000 for married couples  filing jointly) to pay even more of their earned income in taxes, rather than use that income to plow into their businesses or investments and help create more jobs.

If Obama is so concerned about “the wealthiest Americans” not paying their fair share, why doesn’t he go after his friends at General Electric? Obama’s favorite company, whose CEO Jeffrey Immelt was selected to serve as chairman of the Obama administration’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness , earned $14.2 billion in profits in 2010, but paid absolutely no federal income taxes. GE’s untaxed profits included more than $5 billion from U.S. operations.

By the way, Obama’s choice to head his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness has overseen GE’s layoff of 21,000 American workers and closure of 20 factories. Despite all this, Obama’s spokesman said just recently that the president continues to have faith in his pal Immelt to run the council. I guess Obama is only interested in selective class warfare while protecting his rich buddies.

Obama talked about spending cuts in his speech but offered only generalities. Without proposing any serious structural reform to entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid in order to save them from bankruptcy and ensure that future generations of seniors and the poor will be able to receive federal assistance, Obama fell back on vague promises to cut spending and touted his discredited Obamacare program as an important contribution to that effort.

Obama did show his cards on one cost-reducing technique he is relying on to trim Medicare expenses – a federal panel that will substitute its judgment for the judgment of the patient and his or her own doctor as to what constitutes appropriate medical care for the patient:

we will slow the growth of Medicare costs by strengthening an independent commission of doctors, nurses, medical experts and consumers who will look at all the evidence and recommend the best ways to reduce unnecessary spending while protecting access to the services seniors need.

“Need” by whose definition? The federal government’s expert panels, of course.

Class warfare may play well to Obama’s base, and he may temporarily bump his poll numbers as he exploits populist sentiments. But if Obama’s job crushing tax increases and centralized government power over individuals’ medical treatments should ever become a reality, we will all be losers.

Joseph Klein is the author of a recent book entitled Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations and Radical Islam

We can’t expect to defeat the Left if we don’t take the time to reflect on the state of the Right. One of conservatism’s biggest inter-movement issues, the race between mainstream conservatives and the radical paleo-libertarian alliance represented by Ron Paul, recently caught the attention of Keith William Neely, a Vanderbilt University student who wrote a Huffington Post article identifying the “Radical Right” as the “real threat to conservatives on college campuses.”

Don’t let that headline fool you; it may sound like the start of another by-the-numbers HuffPo hit piece, but Neely’s piece is really a substantive take on a serious problem facing the Right:

Radical organizations on the right, in hopes of garnering more attention for their ideas, have resorted to increasingly provocative tactics to spread their message on America’s college campuses. And to some degree, it’s been effective. Polling at the latest CPAC suggests that nearly half of its attendees were between the ages of 18 and 25, temporarily dispelling the old political adage that a conservative at 25 has no heart and a liberal at 35 no brain […]

At Vanderbilt for example, a local chapter of the radical libertarian organization Young Americans for Liberty has found limited success in putting on large events like the one on March 26th, where they prominently displayed the ‘National Debt Clock’ alongside photocopied images of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to illustrate the need for disbanding the Federal Reserve. At public events, they wear Guy Fawkes masks to advertise their presence, and have even been known to target conservatives with their extremist ire. At the recent IMPACT Symposium, members of the organization passed out leaflets pejoratively branding both Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty and Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol as ‘neo-cons’.

Remember YAL? I had a run-in with them last year, in which YAL writer Wesley Messamore wrote a crappy rebuttal to one of my Ron Paul takedowns and couldn’t defend it, so he instead demanded a video debate and declared victory when I said I wasn’t interested. YAL also shills for anti-American cyber anarchist Julian Assange, dislikes copyright laws, and writes insipid, self-worshipping poetry, so I’m glad to see someone else calling out these pretenders to the conservative mantle. Neely’s examples are hit and miss, though—I’ve also noticed the Paulestinians’ creepy interest in Guy Fawkes imagery, but opposing the Federal Reserve, however misguided they may be (an issue I readily admit I haven’t studied enough to pontificate on) doesn’t strike me as manifestly insane.

Of course calling them “conservatives” is a little inaccurate. A conservative, in the words of Russell Kirk, is simply “one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night”. They hold structured liberty and order to be invaluable bastions of defense for free society, and that the responsibility of navigating the tenuous balance between the two falls to a State deriving its authority from the consent of the governed. Conservatism, by its very nature, opposes radicalism.

Neely is right—as I’ve written before, one of the key temperamental differences between conservatives and libertarians is the latter’s deficit of prudence—they fail to recognize that, given human nature, even the best governments and societies will be imperfect, and that at some point, common sense has to kick in, and people need to recognize the difference between doing the right thing and counterproductively obsessing over minutiae.

The danger Neely sees is that these groups’ “provocative presentation” overshadows more serious conservatives while discouraging much-needed “exchange of ideas”:

On politically apathetic college campuses, the outrageous certainly garners its fair share of attention. While YAL has no trouble attracting large crowds with their antics, traditional organizations like College Republicans have difficulty pulling in similar crowds for notable speakers like moderate Republican Governor Bill Haslam. In a perverted twist on reality, public apathy allows these radical organizations to set the agenda for public discourse, oftentimes with alarming consequences.

In this alternate reality, the inability or unwillingness of true college conservatives to engage their base leaves an atmosphere in which radicalized conservatism is allowed to flourish. As these radical organizations grow in number and membership, the conservative voice on college campuses begins to disappear. If anything, college campuses provide a startling microcosm for a world in which political dialogue between opposing views gives way to entrenched extremism; a world in which the exchange of ideas succumbs to political isolationism.

Neely calls on college conservatives to “take ownership of conservative ideas away from these radical groups,” but he doesn’t say how. Allow me to suggest that the key reason radical groups flourish where traditional ones falter isn’t a matter of flashy handouts, posters, or masks—which aren’t intrinsically bad, by the way; they’re no more radical and no less conservative than whatever point they’re making. In fact, turning up your nose at such “provocative” tactics doesn’t make you a better Kirk adherent; it just makes you a lousy salesman.

No, the Paulites’ real advantage is that, for all their other faults, they do a much better job than many conservative and Republican groups of conveying a sense of urgency for their cause, a sense that they get the stakes. Put yourself in the shoes of a busy, stressed-out college student concerned about the country’s future. You’re introduced to two conservative organizations.

The first one emphasizes dry, academic-type discussion, frames politics as simply a contest between better ideas and worse ideas, has a few signature events every semester but never really rocks the boat, and maybe even formally identifies with a political party that has let conservatives down time and time again.

The second one is dynamic, energized, always looking for new ideas. It frames politics as a battle for the nation’s survival, bluntly declaring that freedom hangs in the balance. It seems to care more about ideas than decorum or offending the wrong people. It doesn’t let the Republican National Committee define who they are, and in fact frequently rakes politicians on its own side over the coals for doing the wrong thing.

Now ask: which one of those sounds more worthy of your time?

Complain about fringe right-wingers giving the rest of us a bad name all you like (Lord knows I have!), but recognize that the problem isn’t simply a bunch of bullies stealing the helpless good guys’ thunder. At least part of the Paulites’ success comes from being an alternative to the impotent, out-of-touch establishment. If serious conservatives want to retake their campuses from the radicals, they’ll have to prove they’re not just present to comprise the right-wing half of politics as usual, but that they’re genuine reformers who deserve students’ support.

This popular post was originally published April 8, 2011.

In a stunning development, a clerical error in Wisconsin has transformed what many expected to be a long, ugly legal battle favoring the Left into an almost certain victory for the Right, outraging leftists like Michael Moore, to the point where the radical “documentarian” has stopped bothering to hide his disdain for the democratic process.

The intense Wisconsin Supreme Court race between the incumbent Republican, Justice David Prosser, and his Democrat challenger, state DNR enforcer JoAnn Kloppenburg, ended Wednesday with the latter declaring victory based on the Associated Press’s calculation of a 204-vote lead. Prosser didn’t budge, and most predicted an onslaught of recounts and vote fraud litigation to ensue.

But on Thursday evening we learned that Waukesha county clerk Kathy Nickolaus had erroneously passed on the county’s data to the AP without the numbers from the city of Brookfield, which shifted the lead to Prosser by more than 7,000 votes. Leftists are predictably outraged that hijacking the judiciary to thwart Governor Scott Walker’s public-sector union reforms won’t work after all, though none have topped the overreaction of Moore, who tweeted last night:

Republicans created the rule: “Whoever declares victory first, wins!” When will Obama Justice Dept impound ballots and stop the shenanigans?

Much has been said about the totalitarian impulse and anti-constitutionalism behind modern leftism, but rarely is it expressed so overtly by one of their own. Moore wants the federal government to forcibly prevent the certification of a state election and give the office to someone based strictly on her own, premature and entirely unofficial, declaration of victory?

Wow. I don’t think I even need to say anything more to explain how mind-blowingly horrendous his position is.

Moore’s man-of-the-people act has never quite rung true, but after this he can’t even pretend to value such niceties as democracy, the rule of law, or ensuring that every vote is counted. He has truly and irrevocably dropped the pretense of being anything other than a would-be tyrant.

As for Nickolaus and allegations of pro-Prosser funny business: yes, Nickolaus has been rightly criticized for blunders in the past, but the imaginative lefties crying foul right now are bound to be disappointed for several reasons.

Leftist Rule for Engaging Conservative Ideas #1: conservatives’ motives are never what they claim. It must be rigorously asserted that right-wingers are invariably driven by impulses more sinister than making people better off or trying to find solutions to the problems we face. New Republic senior editor Jonathan Chait knows that lesson by heart—on the Daily Beast, he argues that from the lowliest Tea Partier all the way up to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the Right is animated by a view of “the poor as parasites” and “the rich as our rightful rulers,” a dogma we’ve picked up from philosopher Ayn Rand:

Ayn Rand, of course, was a kind of politicized L. Ron Hubbard—a novelist-philosopher who inspired a cult of acolytes who deem her the greatest human being who ever lived. The enduring heart of Rand’s totalistic philosophy was Marxism flipped upside down. Rand viewed the capitalists, not the workers, as the producers of all wealth, and the workers, not the capitalists, as useless parasites.

John Galt, the protagonist of her iconic novel Atlas Shrugged, expressed Rand’s inverted Marxism: “The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains.”

In 2009 Rand began popping up all over the Tea Party movement. Sales of her books skyrocketed, and signs quoting her ideas appeared constantly at rallies. Conservatives asserted that the events of the Obama administration eerily paralleled the plot of Atlas Shrugged, in which a liberal government precipitates economic collapse.

To be sure, Rand’s ultra-capitalist works have enjoyed a surge in popularity recently, a predicable response to our leaders overreaching in the opposite direction. But it’s not quite true to suggest Rand is universally embraced on the Right; for instance, consider National Review’s March 2009 symposium on Rand, which on the whole takes a dim view of the author (in fairness, she’s much more popular at Big Hollywood).

I haven’t read her, and have no strong opinions about her philosophy either way, but I can certainly tell when mainstream conservative thought is subjected to class-warfare caricatures:

When Ryan warns of the specter of collapse, he is not merely referring to the alarming gap between government outlays and receipts, as his admirers in the media assume. (Every policy change of the last decade that increased the deficit—the Bush tax cuts, the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—Ryan voted for.) He is also invoking Rand’s almost theological certainty that when a government punishes the strong to reward the weak, it must invariably collapse […]

Ryan casts these cuts as an incentive for the poor to get off their lazy butts. He insists that we “ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.” It’s worth translating what Ryan means here. Welfare reform was premised on the tough but persuasive argument that providing long-term cash payments to people who don’t work encourages long-term dependency. Ryan is saying that the poor should not only be denied cash income but also food and health care.

The class tinge of Ryan’s Path to Prosperity is striking. The poorest Americans would suffer immediate, explicit budget cuts. Middle-class Americans would face distant, uncertain reductions in benefits. And the richest Americans would enjoy an immediate windfall. Santelli, in his original rant, demanded that we “reward people [who can] carry the water instead of drink the water.” Ryan won’t say so, but that’s exactly what he’s doing.

Two main fallacies sink Chait’s argument. First, have and have-not doesn’t have to be an either-or contest. Leftists speak as if one person simply having more constitutes stealing from another, as if there’s only so much wealth to go around. But that’s nonsense for the basic fact that most people, once they have money, don’t just stuff it in a safe and forget about it; we constantly spend it on all sorts of necessities and entertainment, at which point the people we bought from spend it on all sorts of necessities and entertainment, and so on, and so on. This is particularly important when it comes to people in a position to spend their money on creating jobs—you might recognize them as “the rich,” the perennial villains of liberal mythology.

As Rob Port points out regarding the “idea that there is a static amount of wealth in the world”:

If you believe that this is true, I hope you don’t own a business. Otherwise, every dollar you make is actually serving to move your customers closer to poverty. You have to believe that a company like Microsoft or Nike or Target has consigned millions (if not billions) of people to poverty by growing so large.

The second fallacy is in talking about government “rewarding” and “punishing” people. To believe that a tax cut is a “reward” for the recipient, you have to believe the money he’s getting back wasn’t his to begin with, but is basically a gift from Uncle Sam. Likewise, stopping the flow of subsidies is only a “punishment” if the government is taking away money that already rightfully belonged to the beneficiary. But as we’ve discussed before, this understanding of money is bogus. What money the government has, it takes primarily from we the people through taxation. It has no “stash” of its own to draw money from.

Again, I don’t presume to know the genius-to-gibberish ratio of Atlas Shrugged or Ayn Rand’s other works, but when I survey the Right, I certainly don’t see any epidemic of greedy Tea Partiers who want the poor to die in the streets. Kudos to Jonathan Chait for finding a line of attack more original than “racist!,” but if the fruits of Rand’s labors are anything to go by, Chait might have to look for another club to beat us with.

In a stunning development, a clerical error in Wisconsin has transformed what many expected to be a long, ugly legal battle favoring the Left into an almost certain victory for the Right, outraging leftists like Michael Moore, to the point where the radical “documentarian” has stopped bothering to hide his disdain for the democratic process.

The intense Wisconsin Supreme Court race between the incumbent Republican, Justice David Prosser, and his Democrat challenger, state DNR enforcer JoAnn Kloppenburg, ended Wednesday with the latter declaring victory based on the Associated Press’s calculation of a 204-vote lead. Prosser didn’t budge, and most predicted an onslaught of recounts and vote fraud litigation to ensue.

But on Thursday evening we learned that Waukesha county clerk Kathy Nickolaus had erroneously passed on the county’s data to the AP without the numbers from the city of Brookfield, which shifted the lead to Prosser by more than 7,000 votes. Leftists are predictably outraged that hijacking the judiciary to thwart Governor Scott Walker’s public-sector union reforms won’t work after all, though none have topped the overreaction of Moore, who tweeted last night:

Republicans created the rule: “Whoever declares victory first, wins!” When will Obama Justice Dept impound ballots and stop the shenanigans?

Much has been said about the totalitarian impulse and anti-constitutionalism behind modern leftism, but rarely is it expressed so overtly by one of their own. Moore wants the federal government to forcibly prevent the certification of a state election and give the office to someone based strictly on her own, premature and entirely unofficial, declaration of victory?

Wow. I don’t think I even need to say anything more to explain how mind-blowingly horrendous his position is.

Moore’s man-of-the-people act has never quite rung true, but after this he can’t even pretend to value such niceties as democracy, the rule of law, or ensuring that every vote is counted. He has truly and irrevocably dropped the pretense of being anything other than a would-be tyrant.

As for Nickolaus and allegations of pro-Prosser funny business: yes, Nickolaus has been rightly criticized for blunders in the past, but the imaginative lefties crying foul right now are bound to be disappointed for several reasons.

Last Tuesday, Senator Charles Schumer of New York inadvertently gave the public a political backstage tour. Before a conference call with members of the press, Schumer was briefing fellow Democrats on specific talking points concerning the current budget negotiations. What he did not know was that some of the reporters were already patched into the call, and the discussion was caught on tape.

“The only way we can avoid a shut down is for Boehner to come up with a reasonable compromise and not just listen to what the Tea Party wants because the Tea Party wants to stick to HR1 with its draconian, extreme -I always use the word extreme, that is what the caucus instructed me to do the other week- extreme cuts and all these riders, and Boehner’s in a box, but if he supports the Tea Party, there’s going to inevitably [be] a shut down. What we are trying to do here . . .”

At that point, the call was muted. When the official conference began, Schumer’s colleagues,  Benjamin L. Cardin, Richard Blumenthal, Thomas R. Carper, and Barbara Boxer, all advanced the Tea Party-as-extremist position. Later, Senator Schumer’s spokesman, Brian Fallon, released this statement:

“There’s nothing wrong with reporters overhearing him calling the House Republicans extreme, because that’s what it is. He had just given a speech on the Senate floor saying the same thing. The sooner Speaker Boehner abandons the Tea Party’s extreme demands, the sooner there can be a bipartisan deal on the budget.”

The fact that political parties issue talking points of this sort is not a surprise. What is revealing about the Schumer gaff is that it exposes the use of a subtle technique that the Left has been employing for many years. By labeling center-right organizations extreme, what the Left is attempting to do is push those groups to the fringe in the public’s perceptions. Once it becomes established that a mainstream movement, such as the Tea Party, resides on the far right of the political spectrum, it has the effect of shifting the ideological scale: ostensibly placing the radical Left near the center.

This technique of shifting the center takes different forms. For instance, when Glenn Beck held a rally that was largely viewed as a Tea Party gathering in Washington, D.C., the left-leaning Jon Stewart felt compelled to hold a similar rally. Stewart’s rally was called the “Rally to Restore Sanity,” and he also referred to it as the “Million Moderate March.” By holding a counter rally that claimed to be the voice of moderation and sanity, Stewart was purposely working to brand Beck’s audience as extreme while establishing his mostly liberal audience as the commonsense center.

Organizations can also be used to achieve this perceptional shift. Dave Foreman, the environmental activist that founded EarthFirst! has claimed that he formed the radical organization to make the Sierra Club appear more reasonable. In an interview for Smithsonian magazine, Foreman states:

“We thought it would have been useful to have a group to take a tougher position than the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society. It could be sort of secretly controlled by the mainstream and trotted out at hearings to make the Sierra Club or Wilderness Society look moderate.”

By forming an extremely radical environmental group, Foreman was pushing groups such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Wilderness Society toward the center in the public’s perceptions.

Another recent example where the center-shift technique has been employed was in a March 26 piece written by John Avlon. Avlon, a co-founder of the faux-centrist group No Labels who is best known for labeling opponents as “wingnuts,” penned an article for The Daily Beast called “Minnesota’s Bachmannization.” In the editorial, Avlon paints all conservative positions as radical ideology while simultaneously positioning the Left as the commonsense middle:

“Minnesota is a swing state, and its pendulum has swung heavily—from the liberal era of Humphrey and Mondale, past center-right figures like Norm Coleman, and right on to Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann . . . The Minnesota Republican Party has undergone a “Bachmannization” in recent years, lurching to the right on social issues, with the prerequisite purging of centrists and elevation of ideological absolutists . . . In recent weeks, the Republican-controlled state legislature has clashed with liberal Democratic Governor Mark Dayton. Among their headline grabbing and eyebrow-raising legislative efforts have included trying to ban all abortions in the state after 20 weeks and forbidding anyone on public assistance from withdrawing more than $20 cash per month.”

How dare those Republicans clash with a liberal Democratic Governor. How dare they defend the life of a half-formed human being. Observe the language: lurching, purging, clashing, banning, forbidding. One wonders how this article would have read if it had been written by a true centrist.

Avlon, whose ties to the Clinton administration have recently been scrubbed from his Wikipedia biography, works tirelessly to position himself as a centrist, but one can see that when Avlon speaks of the center, he really means the Left. For instance, in his article, the definition of “Minnesota Nice” means liberal:

“The point is that these are not isolated incidents, but indicative of an intra-party atmosphere that is starkly inconsistent with the state’s justified reputation for “Minnesota Nice.” This is, after all, the state that gave us Bob Dylan, Garrison Keillor and the Coen brothers.”

The political beliefs of the Coen brothers are unknown, but Bob Dylan and Garrison Keillor are hardly known as ideological centrists. After showing evidence that the Minnesota Republican Party is implementing a conservative social agenda, Avlon concludes:

“ . . . Pawlenty and Bachmann are going to have to answer for the increasing extremism of their home-state Republican Party.”

Conservatives are going to have to answer for their agenda to whom: the Left? Notice how Avlon works to shift the center. By labeling Bachmann and the conservative social agenda as extreme, he is establishing the Left’s social agenda as the default position from where the political debate begins.

It is a well-established fact that the United States is a center-right nation, yet over the last fifty years, the country’s laws and policies have slowly drifted leftward. One reason for this is that the Right has passively accepted the premise that the Left holds the middle ground. By labeling conservative ideas as extreme, the Left is laying claim to a default position in the center. The only thing extreme about a 60 billion dollar budget cut is that the cuts are extremely inconsequential. The only thing extreme about a law that blocks abortions after 20 weeks is the necessity of such a law. The Right needs to reassert itself as the true center in American politics.

Alas, Andrea Mitchell still hasn’t gotten the memo. NewsBusters’ Alex Fitzsimmons reports that the MSNBC host and her Democrat guest see the specter of bigotry behind Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) 2012 budget proposal:

“Representative Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget, released today, includes reforms, what they call reforms, and also big cuts in housing assistance, job training, and food stamps,” warned Mitchell. “All of which would have a very big impact on particularly poor and minority communities, some say.”

Mitchell was mum as Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) bandied ludicrous assertions about the 2012 Republican budget, which would slash spending by nearly $6 trillion over 10 years mostly by reforming unsustainable health care entitlement programs.

“It’s clearly a nervous breakdown on paper and it will do enormous damage, I think, to the vulnerable populations of this country,” predicted the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, who added that the House Budget Chairman’s proposed cuts to non-defense discretionary spending would “devastate the poor,” particularly in America’s racial minority groups.

Citing a concise Jennifer Rubin piece, Fitzsimmons points out that the Ryan plan’s welfare reductions are modest by historical standards, and that it in fact merely “pare[s] back such programs to 2008 levels.” If anything, it sounds like the Ryan plan can be best described as a welcome opening act, but not enough to escape the hole we’ve dug for ourselves. CATO’s Michael Tanner writes that it “cuts spending by $6.2 trillion over the next ten years” yet “still adds $6 trillion to the national debt.”

Whatever the merits or shortcomings may be, crying discrimination about attempts to seriously address the problem are as unserious and irresponsible as they are dishonest and malevolent. Of course the many people who are currently getting money from Uncle Sam would like to keep it coming, but if we can’t afford it, we can’t afford it. Do Mitchell and Cleaver not believe balancing the budget is a necessity? If so, then please, show us where else to come up with the money (and no, “tax the rich” is neither more noble nor more practical). That they instead choose the tired, worn route of casting privileged white Republicans against downtrodden minorities suggests that they simply don’t care. No wonder a whopping 25% of the country has confidence in our media.

Fortunately, this is where leftists collide with the law of diminishing returns. The first few times you allege racism, you’ll turn heads. But new acts of “racism” popping up every day? There are that many outright bigots thriving in government, on TV and radio, and in the newspapers, and enough Americans are okay with it to sustain their careers? That’s harder to swallow. It becomes increasingly obvious that all the label really means is “I hate you and what you stand for.” The more people realize that the accusers don’t take the label seriously, the more they’ll stop taking it seriously, as well. If everything is racist, nothing is.

The top headlines this morning read (and I paraphrase):  Obama performs ultimate act of redistributing your wealth-donate now! Followed by:  Obama wants a billion?  WE can give YOU 4 TRILLION in 2012!

The political attitude towards money is priceless–until it involves your dwindling bank balance.  The Obama Campaign’s “official introduction” into the 2012 campaign (a race that some would say he’s been running since November 3, 2008) makes no official statements, yet illustrates his political platform very clearly: “All of you who are still unemployed, those of you who are now in the midst of fighting a third Middle Eastern war without Congressional approval, and all of you who sent an overwhelming majority of Republicans to Congress in November because you didn’t like my NCAA draft picks: Give me your money so that I can have the biggest campaign bankroll EVER.”  No wonder Obama viewed former Press Secretary Gibbs’s $172,000/year salary as “modest”: This President needs One BILLION Dollars to raise his self-esteem.

You can’t totally blame the guy.  After all, his Presidency has been an abject failure in the eyes of anyone whose politics are right-of-socialist.  The Administration has been busy waiving the white flag of truce when it comes to the illegitimacy of their firstborn son, Obamacare.  After being ”shellacked” in the 2010 mid-terms, Obama and his press team worked hard to reform his image; in 2008, it was Lincoln, but 2010′s election results clearly proved that the first Republican was old news.  It was time for someone newer, hipper, fresher.  And, all of a sudden, the MSM covered Obama’s reclamation of the Bush-Era Tax Cuts like white on rice while his team refashioned our most left-wing President to date into the most Conservative of political figures, President Ronald Reagan.  Their staunch efforts even garnered Obama a Photoshopped pose with Reagan on the cover of TIME.

Going into 2011, it seemed as if Obama would be in the clear.  He may have stunk at listening to the will of the people when it came to health care, but hey, all you Republican-loving Independents out there:  This man found his inner-Reagan!  It’s smooth-sailing from here …straight into Libyan territory.  If Obama’s tacit support of the Egyptian socialist rebels wasn’t enough, the tipping point came with everyone’s favorite African dictator: Moammar Gadhafi.

You can almost hear the Obama team’s situation-room discussion now: Reagan had a pivotal Gadhafi moment during his Presidency!  This is sweet!  This is our Pearl Harbor moment!  Forget two-terms — amendments are outdated anyway — this is going to seal us in the White House for life!  True to their postmodernism, the Obama team got the players right, but the game very, very wrong.  Reagan’s quarrel with Libya involved one key element that our current conflict does not:  A “sense of direction and confident purpose.”  We have yet to know who these anti-Gadhafi rebels are, let alone what their goals for the new Libyan government might be.  Moreover, if we’re trying to use oil as an excuse to engage in international military action, why is President Obama trying so desperately to re-focus the American eye on “green job” production and consuming less oil?

Try as his new Press Secretary might, he can’t distract the MSM from the fact of Libya and the reality that, as gas prices rise to $4/gallon, telling Americans to cut their oil consumption doesn’t really cut it.  Especially not when you’re spending your days playing golf, charting your March Madness picks, and flying to Brazil in your diesel-fueled jet in order to encourage a foreign nation to reap the benefits of their natural resources while curtailing America’s ability to do just that.  But it’s ok: While Brazilians are awash in the billions of dollars environmental distaster that is offshore drilling, the American economy will be booming thanks to green jobs.

That’s right: The President’s biggest move towards job creation this year so far has been to sink $2.3 billion deficit-dollars into jobs that revolve around, as Glenn Beck so aptly put it: Wind, Solar, and cow farts.  Moreover, as Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute points out, governments don’t “create jobs”:

“All the government can do is subsidize some industries while jacking up costs for others. In the green case, it is destroying jobs in the conventional energy sector—and most likely in other industrial sectors—through taxes and subsidies to new green companies that will use taxpayer dollars to undercut the competition. The subsidized jobs ‘created’ are, by definition, less efficient uses of capital than market-created jobs.”

That’s right, America: The President that has redistributed your jobs overseas (and sent you overseas to fight someone else’s battle for the sake of the “international community”) needs your money.  Why?  Because he’s taken billions of your dollars already and that’s just not enough.  2008′s slogan was all about hope and change — and, quite frankly, I don’t think we need much re-wording.  In 2012 I, for one, am hoping for some more change, and for a change, I’d like to put it in my own pocket.