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

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

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

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

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

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

Before getting into the full litany of the president’s “oh well” approach to friends and allies, let’s stay with the Afridi situation for a moment. First, on its face, this is a travesty of justice—even according to Pakistani law. After all, if this man is guilty of treason for collaborating with the CIA, what about the Pakistani military’s on-again-off-again collaboration with the CIA and DoD? Are Pakistan’s president and generals going to be jailed for decades for their cooperation—albeit halfhearted or perhaps quarter-hearted—with Washington?

More importantly, we shouldn’t lose sight of the central fact that Afridi helped bring the world’s most notorious, most wanted, most infamous mass-murderer to justice. The trial of Afridi and the verdict reveal just how broken Pakistan is—something many observers, including myself, have pointed out for many years (here, here, here and here). If the best we can hope for is a transactional, interests-only relationship with Islamabad, then someone in the Obama administration needs to ask—amid Pakistan’s treatment of Afridi, sheltering of bin Laden, aiding of the Haqqani network and Taliban, outing of U.S. operatives, blockading of Afghanistan-bound equipment, firing on U.S. forces across the AfPak border—what exactly the United States is getting in the exchange.

If Washington had a sense of honor, it would demand Afridi’s release by a date certain and allow Islamabad to contemplate the consequences of not complying—a cutoff in aid, an expulsion of Pakistan’s diplomatic corps, a public unveiling and shaming of Pakistan’s duplicitous military-intelligence apparatus, another U.S. raid into the country.

On the issue of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s defenders attempt to make you feel insane. How could you bring up the Rev. Jeremiah Wright?! It “injects race” into the contest! Obama supporters warn, “After four years, how dare you ‘re-litigate’ the matter!”

In fact, it was never “litigated” in the first place.

2008 Republican candidate John McCain feared being accused of playing the race card. But Wright is not about “race.” It is much, much bigger than that. Wright is about Obama’s character, beliefs and policies. The question remains the same one that should have been addressed four years ago: Do Obama and Wright share the same view of “social injustice,” a perspective that reveals Obama’s character and beliefs — and reflects his current and future policies?

Obama, in 2007, described the 20-year father/son-like relationship this way: “What I value most about Pastor Wright is not his day-to-day political advice. He’s much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible and that I’m not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that’s involved in national politics.”

But Wright is off-limits.

Obama was probably the most surprised politician in America when McCain refused to jam Wright down Obama’s throat — as Obama would most assuredly have if the situation were reversed. Reluctant to “inject race”? Obama’s hand-picked chair of the Democratic National Committee routinely accuses the Republicans of wanting “to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws.” People forget the bare-knuckled way Obama got every serious opponent kicked off the ballot in his first Illinois state Senate race — and was therefore elected with no serious opposition.

But Wright, who described himself as a “second father” to Obama, is off-limits.

Obama selected Trinity United. He selected the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Wright married Barack and Michelle. He blessed their home in Hyde Park.

He baptized the Obamas’ daughters. Obama initially wanted Wright to deliver the invocation when Obama announced his run for the presidency.

One of the two front-running candidates (along with Amr Moussa, 75, a former foreign minister under Mubarak and most recently secretary-general of the Arab League), Fotouh, 61, is a doctor and former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose political party took nearly 50 percent of the seats in parliamentary elections and is the best-organized political force in the country. He served for 25 years in the Brotherhood’s leadership body before being expelled last year when he defied the group’s leaders to run for the presidency.

Fotouh is described as a reformist member of the organization, and as such has received support from younger Brothers, even though the Brotherhood is putting forth its own candidate, Mohammed Morsi. Fotouh is viewed as more liberal than the other Islamists in the race, prompting comparisons to Turkey’s Recep Erdogan. That would be the same Erdogan who proclaimed that “there is no moderate Islam,” who advised Turkish immigrants in Europe that “assimilation is a crime against humanity,” who has taken an increasingly bellicose stance toward Israel – and who is a favorite of Obama in the Middle East.

“Aboul Fotouh has said that he wants to be the Erdogan of Egypt, and I think that U.S. relations with Turkey may be a good example of what we could expect,” says Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy. In that case, what we can expect is an increasingly militant fundamentalist regime hostile to Israel.

In addition to some Muslim Brothers, Fotouh has also received support from ultra-fundamentalist Salafis, who are competing with the Brotherhood. Since the Arab Spring revolution, the Salafis won nearly a quarter of the parliamentary seats, surprising the unprepared Brothers with their strong showing.

Now, in response to the success of Fotouh’s campaign and his Salafi backing, the Brotherhood has ramped up its religious rhetoric to draw Salafis to Morsi’s support. At a recent rally near Cairo University, speaker after speaker cast Morsi as the only true Islamist candidate and the one who would ensure the implementation of sharia. The clear message is that Fotouh is not Islamic enough.

They need not be concerned about that. An avowed radical in his youth, Fatouh helped found the terrorist organization Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiyya, which now endorses his candidacy, and spent five years in Mubarak’s prisons alongside such figures as al Qaeda’s Dr. al-Zawahiri. Newsweek points out that some Egyptians are casting a suspicious eye on his split from the Brotherhood, and are accusing Fotouh of downplaying his Islamist tendencies.

The Washington Institute’s Eric Trager, who interviewed him last year, said that “the notion that Aboul Fotouh is some kind of progressive is farcical.” Said Sadek, a political sociologist at the American University in Cairo, says electing Fotouh would be the equivalent of establishing a theocratic state. “He didn’t renounce the ideas of the Moslem Brotherhood even when he was jailed by Mubarak,” says Sadek . “You’re telling me he’s different now?”

GLORIA Center Middle East expert Barry Rubin notes that the Obama administration is unconcerned about Aboul Fotouh’s aggressively Islamist comments – for example, that Israel is racist, an enemy of Egypt, and an illegitimate occupier – as mere “campaign rhetoric.” The assumption is that the reality of governance will make a moderate out of  Fotouh, as it does for American politicians. Rubin points out that similar wishful thinking about extremists has never played out that way historically in the real world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most recent call to formally label the Pakistan-based Haqqani an FTO came from a bi-partisan coalition of leading lawmakers, whose ranks included Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Republican Representative Mike Rogers, chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

In a letter to President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, the lawmakers said the Haqqani Network — named after its leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani –is “continuing to launch sensational and indiscriminate attacks against US interests in Afghanistan,” and, therefore, had more than met the FTO threshold.

To be fair, however, the Haqqani Network had long ago exceeded the threshold for indiscriminate terrorist violence, barbarism that has escalated in intensity ever since the group fled Afghanistan to Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal region following the Taliban’s ouster from power in 2001.

Since then, the Haqqani Network, with an estimated 15,000 fighters — many who gained experience fighting Soviet occupation troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s — has developed a well earned reputation as the most lethal and treacherous of the insurgent groups.

For starters, despite just being one of several insurgent factions that have been fighting American-led NATO and Afghan government forces, the Haqqani Network has been responsible for at least 90 percent of all attacks against Coalition forces in eastern Afghanistan.

Moreover, many of these attacks have come via suicide bombing, a tactic that the Haqqani is said to have introduced into the Afghanistan conflict.

A short list of these Haqqani suicide attacks on American-led NATO troops include a March 2009 truck bombing in Khowst Province, which killed three American soldiers; a May 2010 bus bombing that killed 5 American soldiers and a Canadian colonel; and an October 2011 car bombing that killed 13 American, British and Canadian soldiers.

In addition to targeting Coalition forces, the Haqqani has been equally adept at terrorizing both the Afghan populace and its government through focused campaigns of suicide bombings and assassinations.

Those campaigns of terror have been abetted by the Haqqani’s use of death squads, the largest of which is the Khurasan, responsible for at least 250 assassinations and public executions, including mass beheadings.

Unfortunately, the Haqqani’s ability to carry out these atrocities has come with the direct assistance of the Pakistani army’s intelligence wing, the Inter Services Intelligence directorate (ISI).

Aided by the ISI, the Haqqani, according to recent a Pentagon report, has been able to flourish in North Waziristan, using the mountainous territory to establish training camps and bases from which to launch raids into Afghanistan against Coalition forces by Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents

In fact, in September 2011 after heavily-armed Haqqani fighters attacked both the US Embassy and the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul, then Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, was prompted to label the Haqqani “a veritable arm” of the ISI.

Not surprisingly then, the familial closeness between the Haqqani and the ISI has led Pakistan’s military to refuse repeated requests from American military commanders to launch major offensives in North Waziristan to root out the Haqqanis.

Yet, even though the State Department has acknowledged the Haqqani as being at the “forefront of insurgent activity in Afghanistan, responsible for many high-profile attacks,” it has steadfastly balked at requests to label the Haqqani Network an FTO.

Instead, the State Department has felt it sufficient enough to limit its activities to targeting individual Haqqani Network commanders as global terrorists,deferring any future decision against the entire terrorist organization to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Unfortunately, Clinton still remains undecided as to a course of action, despite having been engaged since November 2011 in what the State Department then called the “final formal review” of the Haqqani.

Clinton’s reluctance to render a judgment against the Haqqani has been attributed in part to concerns that listing the Haqqani as an FTO will furtherdamage American relations with Pakistan.

Those relations have been rapidly disintegrating since the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden by US Special Forces in Abottabad, Pakistan, where bin Laden had been reportedly living for years under the watchful protection of elements within the ISI.

While one American analyst asked, “Once you designate the Haqqani Network, how do you not designate Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism,”given the ISI’s continuous support of the Haqqani, that ship has already sailed.

Russia recently announced that it seized 10 caches of arms on May 4 and 5 in Abkhazia which were to be used in dramatic terrorist attacks in Sochi, where the 2014 Winter Olympics are to take place. The stockpiles included: 10,000 rounds of ammunition; 15 kilograms of TNT; 50 grenade fuses; 39 hand grenades; 36 mortar shells; 29 grenade launchers; 15 landmines; 12 improvised explosive devices; 3 surface-to-air missiles; 2 anti-tank missiles; 2 assault rifles and a sniper rifle, mortar and flamethrower.

The Russian government says that the man responsible for the planned wave of attacks is Doku Umarov, a Chechen terrorist leader involved with Al-Qaeda. He ordered an end to attacks on Russian civilians earlier this year. Georgian intelligence helped Umarov’s terrorists smuggle the weapons through Georgian territory from Turkey, the Russians claim. Georgia dismisses the accusations as “absolutely absurd.” The accusation provides a clear rationale to remove Saakashvili from power.

This development comes while Russia is preparing for a possible strike on Iran. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin explained, “Iran is our neighbor. If Iran is involved in any military action, it’s a direct threat to our security.” Reportedly, Russia has drawn up plans to send forces to Armenia in such an event, which requires going through Georgia, toppling Saakashvili on the way.

In 2008, Russia’s annual Kavkaz exercises were used as a cover to deploy and train the forces that invaded Georgia the next month. This year’s exercises are to take place in September. Russia announced that Spetsnaz units will be sent to the North Caucasus region for the exercises and airborne assault forces and attack helicopters will deploy to Base 102 in Gyumri, Armenia. One report claims that the families of soldiers at the base have already been evacuated.

It is quite possible that Russia will provide assistance to the Iranian regime from Armenia in the event of a conflict. After all, Saddam Hussein awarded medals to former Soviet advisors for helping him to prepare for the 2003 invasion. Russian Spetsnaz units were deployed to Iraq and are suspected of having helped cleanse the country of documents and incriminating materials. The Russians also gave Saddam Hussein details about the U.S. war plan, retrieved through a spy at CENTCOM. Russia continues to arm Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and deployed an “anti-terror” unit to assist him in March.

Born James Waller in Birmingham, Alabama, he drifted into the orbit of the Nation of Islam, changed his name, and moved up through the ranks in the organization. Today his Coalition for the Remembrance of The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad is one of the fragmented organizations, squabbling over the vicious legacy of the Nation of Islam.

The Nation of Islam, one of the country’s oldest hate groups, has an ugly fratricidal history. Along with its violent attacks on those outside its circle of race and religion, fueled by a belief that white people are subhumans created by a black mad scientist, it has carried on an equally violent campaign against its own. The list of Nation of Islam dissidents murdered or assaulted by their own people stretches back nearly eighty years. Despite the call to racial solidarity, there is little unity even within the ranks of the Nation of Islam, whose management often resembles that of a gang, rather than a religious group.

The difference between the Nation of Islam and most hate groups is that NOI members and groups can receive government contracts and plum posts from the Democratic Party. Munir Muhammad, who has spent the last nine years sitting on the Illinois Human Rights Commission, with a nearly fifty thousand dollar salary, is proof of the problem. How does the business manager for a hate group get appointed by two Illinois governors to a human rights commission? It’s surprisingly easy. It’s just a matter of knowing the right people.

On the website for CROE-TV, the Coalition for the Remembrance of The Most Honorable Elijah, Muhammad’s broadcasting arm, which puts out several television shows featuring Munir Muhammad, such as Muhammad and Friends, former listed guests include Valerie Jarrett, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Barack Obama.

There are also lesser lights like former Chicago mayor and brother of the former Chief of Staff, Richard M Daley and Senator Dick Durbin, alongside Louis Farrakhan; powerful men and women who have in their time come to sit down and chat with Muhammad Munir, opposite the red and white crescent flag of the Nation of Islam leaning against the wall in the corner of the studio.

When Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan wanted to get rid of one of his critics, he just swapped him out with Munir Muhammad, who became Vice-Chairman of the Board of Corrections, not to mention also serving on the Cook County Sheriff’s Committee on Religious Tolerance and the Chicago Police Department’s Multicultural Forum.

Illinois politicians didn’t just give Munir Muhammad lucrative policy gigs, they donated thousands of dollars directly to his organization. An organization whose reason for existence is promoting the ideas of a bigot, whose views, aside from skin color, have little to distinguish them from those of Aryan Identity groups.

Governor Blagojevich had doled out some 50,000 dollars in state money to Munir’s hate group and even proclaimed February 12, 2006 to be “Coalition for the Remembrance of Elijah Muhammad Day” and encouraged citizens of the state to recognize the organization for its “ongoing commitment to ensuring the legacy of this influential African-American leader”—an influential leader who had described white people as devils and “born murderers”.

Yet we didn’t need the past three years to learn the truth about Obama. The evidence was all there from the start. What allowed the fantasy Obama to gain the White House was the collusion of a corrupt mainstream media that failed to ask the hard questions or follow through on stories that had managed to get the nation’s attention. The recent revelation from the Breitbart outfit that a publisher’s promotional booklet in 1991 bragged that Obama had been “born in Kenya” is just the latest evidence of how stubbornly and willfully indifferent the media have been to asking the penetrating questions of the sort that have dogged every president, especially those since Lyndon Johnson. The media’s dereliction of duty has allowed Obama to construct ad hoc identities that suit his political agenda and obscure his unsavory past and ideology.

For example, the continuing questions about Obama’s birth-country renewed by the Breitbart discovery are significant for exposing his long history of fabricating an identity to suit his careerist needs. The Hawaii prep-schooled, white-raised Barry Dunham discovered on getting to college that the exotic name Barack Hussein Obama, like the Indonesian childhood, was more useful for sending a diversity thrill down the leg of liberal white professors and admissions committees. So too with publishers, eager to display their multi-culti bona fides by promoting a Third-World author “born in Kenya,” who would chronicle his struggles against neo-colonial racism. Like many other hustlers “of color,” Obama was no doubt happy to oblige and collude in the deception––until national political ambitions required that he tone down the “other” vibe, at least until after the election.

So too with the unasked questions about Obama’s radical past. The media saw nothing to report about Obama starting his political career in the living room of ex-terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. You remember Ayers, the ex-Weatherman who bragged in his memoirs about getting away with his terrorist violence and being “free as a bird.” Obama assured us that Ayers was “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” despite serving on two foundation boards and appearing at conferences with him. As is the media’s wont, perfunctory “investigations” revealed that there was nothing to the stories, taking on faith Obama’s incredible assertion that there was no significance to the fact that one of America’s most notorious terrorists was a part of his life and political development. The same media that ran with a hit-piece on George Bush supported only by an obviously fabricated letter, and that currently is intensely picking over the past history of Bain Capital, Romney’s treatment of the family dog, and his alleged high-school bullying––that same media four years ago didn’t think there was anything newsworthy in the Democratic candidate for president having ties with an unrepentant left-wing terrorist. Instead, they helped construct Obama’s new identity as a pragmatic centrist beyond partisan politics.

The real question is this: What took black church leaders so long to reconsider their near blind support for the Democratic Party?

The historical strength of black churches has been that of a moral and spiritual refuge in a once-hostile country of legalized slavery and Jim Crow. This explains why so many civil rights leaders came out of the church. The moral cause was just and clear: Equal rights mean equal rights — for everyone.

But equal rights and equal results are two very different things. The modern civil rights movement lost its way by failing to appreciate the difference. To achieve “equal results,” the Democratic Party, among other things, demands redistribution of wealth, a government response to the “gap” between the rich and poor, higher minimum wages and higher taxes on the so-called rich.

The Democratic Party opposes education vouchers, despite polls showing that black and Hispanic inner-city parents want them. The Democratic Party is the party of race-based preferences and also opposes privatization of Social Security.

The Democratic Party is the party of the welfare state — a neutron bomb dropped on the intact nuclear family. Author/editor/professor Marvin Olasky, in his book “The Tragedy of American Compassion,” traces the growth of welfare. During a mere three-year period in the 1960s, welfare rolls increased nearly 110 percent. President Johnson established “neighborhood centers” whose workers went door-to-door, apprising people of their welfare “rights and benefits.”

Until the so-called “War on Poverty,” the poverty rate declined steadily. At the turn of the century, nearly 70 percent of Americans were poor. But by the time of the “War on Poverty,” the rate stood at approximately 13 or 14 percent. What happened? Welfare created dependency and decreased the incentive of the welfare recipient.

That now-famous mental block apart, Perry’s most notable contribution during his brief time in the running was to target Romney’s tenure at Bain. In a series of ill-fated snipes, Perry condemned venture capital firms like Bain as “vultures” who wait for companies to “get sick and then they swoop in, they eat the carcass. They leave with that and they leave the skeleton.” The populist line earned Perry some deserved scorn from critics, who pointed out that venture capital takeovers of the kind Bain specialized in frequently offered a lifeline to moribund companies that would have gone out of business absent outside investment.

If Perry’s untimely political demise serves as an object lesson about the perils of crude populism and anti-capitalist demagoguery, the Obama administration seems determined to ignore it. This week, the Obama reelection campaign unrolled a television ad to run in five swing states that essentially recycles Perry’s attacks on Romney and Bain. The ad, called “Steel,” features interviews with former employees at GST Steel, a Kansas City, Missouri, steel mill that was taken over by Bain in the 1990s and filed for bankruptcy in 2001. The employees in the ad unanimously condemn Romney and Bain for causing job losses at the mill. “It was like a vampire,” one worker laments, referring to Bain. “They came in and sucked the life out of us.” Rick Perry would have approved.

Whether voters will is far from certain. Among other flaws, the ad is in desperate need of fact checking. For instance, the ad suggests that Romney was in charge when GST Steel filed for bankruptcy, when in fact he had left Bain two years earlier, in 1999, to oversee the Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. That’s not to say that no one in Bain’s leadership from the time is relevant to the election. The current managing director and chief investment officer at Bain is one Jonathan Lavine, who joined Bain in 1993. But Lavine has another distinction, as well: According to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks federal campaign contributions, Lavine is a leading bundler of campaign contributions for Obama’s campaign and has raised between $100,000 and $200,000 for Obama’s reelection effort. Conveniently, the “Steel” ad omits that detail.

The bigger flaw in the ad is the false premise that Bain was primarily responsible for the job losses at GST Steel. Obama’s ad makes the charge directly, through a negotiator for the workers at GST Steel who says, “Bain Capital was the majority owner. They were responsible.” That might be a damning criticism if it were true, but it isn’t. The fact is that GST Steel was already going out of business, which is why it was taken over by Bain in the first place. At worst, Bain delayed the mill’s day of reckoning.

“It can be said that within the last 60 years, this is the first time that the Zionist regime, since its illegal inception, has had to endure rejection by the West over its vision and interest in the region,” wrote Sadollah Zarei, according to a translation by Reza Kahlili.

It’s easy to see why Iran has picked up on this fact, which Democrats have desperately tried to deny throughout Obama’s tenure. Headline after headline is about the U.S. trying to hold Israel back. In March, an anonymous administration official told the Washington Post, “We’re trying to make the decision to attack as hard as possible for Israel.”

There’s been a steady stream of leaks from administration officials potentially damaging Israel. On March 28, Foreign Policy reported on the alleged existence of a secret agreement between Israel and Azerbaijan making the latter’s airbases available for a potential strike on Iran. The results of a classified war game simulating a conflict between Israel and Iran that showed hundreds of U.S. casualties made its way into the press. Another report claimed that Israel is using members of the MEK Iranian opposition group to target Iran’s nuclear scientists.

The author attributes the change in U.S. policy to recognition of Iranian strength because of the Arab Spring, which he refers to as the “Islamic Awakening.” He specifically mentions the removal of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the subsequent takeover of the country by Islamist forces. Zarei also claims that the U.S. is “on the verge of accepting the Iranian nuclear program” and points to statements by Israeli officials that Iran is “rational” as proof that the Israeli government is weakening.

Don’t let the fact that Iran is Shiite and the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists are Sunni fool you. The two forces may be battling in Syria, but the Iranian regime still believes that its rise is a fulfillment of Islamic End Times prophecy. Last year, Ahmadinejad’s office produced a documentary titled The Coming Is Upon Us. It outlined how it views its role in Islamic prophecy and plainly states that the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascendance is “in accordance with the Hadith.”

In February, Khamenei declared, “From now on, in any place, if any nation or any group confronts the Zionist regime, we will endorse and we will help.” This should be seen as an overture to the Muslim Brotherhood. The film states that the destruction of Israel is preceded by the creation of an anti-Western Arab coalition.

Arguably the most important line in Zarei’s column is this: “With diminishing support for Israel and with the (upcoming) collapse of the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, there won’t be any obstacles left facing Iran with its policy of annihilation of Israel.”

This statement echoes what the apocalyptic documentary said. In The Coming Is Upon Us, the regime teaches that the death of Saudi King Abdullah will be a fulfillment of prophecy and one of the last precursors to Israel’s destruction. Saudi Arabia will be consumed with internal turmoil until the Mahdi appears to vanquish Islam’s enemies. King Abdullah is at least 87 years old.

Obama’s presidency and reelection campaign have already produced an abundance of examples. Take the looming fiscal crisis of unfunded social welfare entitlements, run-away federal spending, and accelerating debt and deficits. Even with the monitory example of a rapidly disintegrating Europe before our eyes, the Democrats still can’t do the math. The “Buffett rule” taxes on the “rich” that the president has been touting amount to the equivalent of couch-cushion change compared to our debt and unfunded liabilities. Indeed, confiscating outright all the wealth of the richest 400 Americans would barely cover one year of Obama deficits.  The economic history of the past half-century backs up the math: only by reducing spending can we get our fiscal house in order, and raising taxes on the productive stifles economic growth and reduces tax revenues, thus hastening the downward spiral. The fundamental wisdom known by every village explainer––spend more than you earn and you’ll go broke, give people something for nothing and they will expect something for nothing forever, there is no free lunch, if something can’t go on forever it won’t––doesn’t seem to penetrate the minds of the self-styled “genius” party.

Yet despite this crisis, all the liberals can do is recycle old class-warfare bromides. Repeating the juvenile slogans of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Democrats decry the “1%”  and the President shrieks about the rich “paying their fair share.” The fact that among advanced economies the U.S. already has the most progressive income taxes and the highest corporate taxes––even as nearly half of taxpayers pay nothing while an equal number receive some sort of government largesse––can’t penetrate the fog of clichés befuddling the liberal brain. No, stale Hollywood scripts about “Wall Street” pirates and evil oil corporations are recycled into government policy, and jeremiads against “greed” and “materialism” abound. The President even invokes Jesus Christ in support of his redistributionist schemes, his liberal supporters conveniently forgoing their usual hysteria about the theocratic camel’s nose poking into the political tent.

Nothing in any of this has anything to do with the reality of our economic sickness or its cures. Worse yet, we’ve heard it all before over a century ago. In the late 19^th century, increasing immigration from Russia, Poland, southern Italy, and other non-Teutonic countries, along with the growing wealth, social mobility, and economic opportunity created by industrial capitalism, agitated the well-born and well-educated elites worried about racial “degeneration” and the weakening of the American order. Impressed by Karl Marx, they saw industrial capitalism and corporations, and the increasing materialism, amoral greed, civic corruption, and crass competition these fostered, as the force that would destroy the American moral order and empower the lesser breeds who thought of nothing but greed and selfish gain, no matter the future costs to society. The reformers’ answer was to turn over government rule to a “natural aristocracy” created by breeding and education, the denizens of the “best class” who could restore order to a disintegrating society and rein in the “incorporated power and greed,” as Brooks Adams put it, of “robber barons” like the Rockefellers and Morgans and the other “malefactors of great wealth” criticized by T.R. Roosevelt.

Let’s start with this year’s summit agenda. The over-arching theme is NATO’s new “Smart Defense” program. NATO describes Smart Defense as “a renewed culture of cooperation that encourages Allies to cooperate in developing, acquiring and maintaining military capabilities” by “pooling and sharing capabilities, setting priorities and coordinating efforts better.” Under Smart Defense, alliance members will identify a goal and then designate a member to take the lead in shepherding other interested members toward that goal. One report notes that the Chicago Summit will launch Smart Defense efforts in logistics; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; and force protection. In addition, there are mine-clearing, helicopter-training and maritime-patrol projects on the Smart Defense to-do list.

In other words, Smart Defense is a low-impact, low-yield program for a NATO with lowered sights and lowered expectations. The president’s fingerprints are all over NATO’s un-ambitious 2012 summit. Not only is the summit being held in the president’s old stomping grounds of Chicago; it reflects his discomfort with American power and with America’s global leadership role (NATO being a vehicle for both).

Just compare the smallish plans of the Chicago Summit’s Smart Defense agenda with earlier summits.

In 1999, NATO pledged to make “full use of every opportunity to build an undivided continent by promoting and fostering the vision of a Europe whole and free,” underscoring its commitment to that goal by inviting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the alliance. The Prague Summit in 2002 committed the alliance to the global fight against terrorism and WMDs—and invited seven new members into the fold. The headlines from NATO’s 2008 Bucharest Summit included formal membership invitations to Croatia and Albania, a promise of membership to Georgia and Ukraine and a unanimous endorsement of the U.S. missile defense system.

But in 2012 in Chicago, NATO’s 28 heads of state will focus on “a renewed culture of cooperation that encourages Allies to cooperate.” Gone are those heady promises of using NATO’s unique political-military capabilities to expand the zone of democracy, build the scaffolding of security, erase the lines of Moscow’s old empire and fight terror at its source.

The spinners will argue that NATO is focusing on low-key, process-type goals because so many big-picture goals are already being pursued. In truth, there are several strategic items NATO needs to address now—items that are far more important than mine-clearing or maritime patrols:

• Making sure Article 5 is credible. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is the heart and soul of the alliance, committing all members to the defense of a member that has been attacked. Yet Norwegian Minister of Defense Espen Barth Eide recently expressed worries about NATO’s ability “to deliver if something happens in the transatlantic theater of a more classical type of aggression.”—and understandably so. Even as Russia conducts provocative war games against a Polish “aggressor,” buzzes North American airspace and builds up its military, the alliance is slashing spending and deterrent commitments.
• Making missile defense a reality. To mollify Moscow, the Obama administration unilaterally scrapped the Bush administration’s missile-defense plans for Europe—plans that had been approved by all of NATO. So, instead of planting a permanent ground-based defense in Poland and support radars in the Czech Republic, the Obama administration chose to deploy extra missile-defense warships to the Mediterranean and land-based variants of the sea-based system in Eastern Europe. One Czech official angrily rejected President Obama’s plans as “a consolation prize.”A spokesperson for Poland’s Ministry of Defense called the Obama administration’s reversal “catastrophic for Poland.” Just as bad, Washington has allowed Turkey to get away with warning that it will not allow U.S. missile-defense radars that are deployed on Turkish soil to share info with Israel. Neither policy—deploying a watered-down version of missile defense to placate Russia or allowing Turkey to dictate what America can do with its technology—makes any sense, serves the wider interests of the alliance or helps protect America and it allies from Iran’s growing missile arsenal.
• Defining NATO’s long-term relationship with Afghanistan. With NATO members heading for the exits, the relationship is anything but clear.Washington just signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) with Kabul that raises more questions than it answers. For example, the SPA calls on NATO member states “to sustain and improve Afghan security capabilities beyond 2014.” That seems unlikely as NATO nations shrink their militaries. The SPA views “any external aggression against Afghanistan” with “grave concern.” Yet in this same document, the United States “pledges not to use Afghan territory or facilities as a launching point for attacks against other countries.” The document states that the U.S.and Afghanistan “reaffirm” their commitment to “defeating al Qaeda and its affiliates.” Yet NATO plans to reduce Afghan troop strength from 352,000 to 230,000 after 2014.
• Reaching the 2-percent-of-GDP threshold on defense spending. The alliance wants to use Smart Defense as a vehicle for “rebalancing defense spending between the European nations and the United States”—and for good reason. Two years ago, just five NATO members—the United States, Britain, France, Greece and Albania—met the alliance’s 2-percent standard. According to NATO’s latest report on financial and economic data, only three meet that standard today. Not surprisingly, the United States now accounts for 75 percent of NATO’s defense spending, exceeding the U.S. share of 50 percent during the Cold War. The consequences are already on display. In Libya, with the U.S.leading from behind, NATO was found woefully lacking in munitions, targeting and jamming capabilities, mid-air refueling planes, reconnaissance platforms, drones, and command-and-control assets—nearly everything needed to conduct a 21st-century air war. In Afghanistan, the United States is contributing 71 percent of all forces, and non-NATO members Australia, Georgia and Sweden have more troops deployed than several founding members of the alliance.
• • Growing the alliance. Even though it was invited into the alliance years ago, Macedonia has been left on the outside looking in because Greece refuses to accept Macedonia’s name. Whether it enters as Macedonia, FYROM or Big Mac, Macedonia has done more than enough to accommodate Athens and to show its commitment to the alliance. So has Georgia. It’s time to offer this tiny shard of the former Soviet Union a NATO membership action plan, the next step toward full membership.

“The United States should not expect others to deliver much,” former NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner once counseled. “They are waiting for the Americans.” In other words, everything that happens—or doesn’t happen—within NATO depends on U.S. leadership. When it comes to NATO, American presidents don’t lead from behind. They either lead, or the alliance flounders and frays—as it is today.

Maya Wiley of the Center for Social Inclusion

George Soros is behind a newly uncovered effort to teach Democratic congressmen how to smear their opponents as racist.

Last week House Democrats invited the radical, left-wing, Soros-financed group called the Center for Social Inclusion “to address the issue of race to defend government programs,” according to documentation reviewed by Joel Gehrke of the Washington Examiner.

“The prepared content of a Tuesday presentation to the House Democratic Caucus and staff indicates that Democrats will seek to portray apparently neutral free-market rhetoric as being charged with racial bias, conscious or unconscious,” Gehrke writes.

According to Gehrke, trainer Maya Wiley of the Center for Social Inclusion blasted “conservative messages [that are] racially ‘coded’ and had images of people of color that we commonly see used” and suggested ways to combat Republicans’ supposedly racially-coded rhetoric.

Facts don’t matter in Wiley’s estimation. “It’s emotional connection, not rational connection that we need,” she said.

Wiley offered that Newt Gingrich calling Obama a “food stamp president,” cannot be “a race-neutral statement, even if Newt Gingrich did not intend racism.” In other words, all criticism of Obama is rooted in racism.

Wiley, a so-called civil rights attorney, is the daughter of the late George Wiley, the leader of the now-defunct National Welfare Rights Organization. NWRO created ACORN in 1970 and President Obama worked for ACORN in his community organizing days, as I note in my book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

Maya Wiley also did consulting work for two of Soros’s philanthropies, the Open Society Institute and the Open Society Foundation, and now chairs the board of the Tides network of nonprofits.

The radicalism of Wiley shines brightly on the website of the Center for Social Inclusion. “For more than a quarter century, right-wing rhetoric has dominated debates of racial justice – undermining efforts to create a more equal society, and tearing apart the social safety net in the process,” the propaganda portal opines. Of course only a Marxist with an agenda would argue that “right-wing rhetoric” has somehow torn apart the ever-expanding social safety net. About $16 trillion has been spent on the doomed War on Poverty since it was launched in the mid-1960s and President Obama wants to waste another $10 trillion more.

The Center for Social Inclusion, an Orwellian name if ever there was one, practices the same pathological mixture of Marxism and identity politics that President Obama was raised on. The group was founded based on the assumption that America is an evil structurally racist country that systematically oppresses everyone who is not Caucasian.

Tyler’s assessment of the current president is spot on. Moreover, one need not go back almost five decades to underscore that reality. As recently as April 26th, the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel revealed that one of the Obama re-election campaign websites, “The Truth Team,” published “Behind the curtain: A brief history of Romney’s donors.” It was an ugly attempt to slur and intimidate donors to Mitt Romney’s election campaign. Eight private citizens were described as having “less-than-reputable records,” being “on the wrong side of the law” and making themselves successful at “the expense of so many Americans.”

“These are people like Paul Schorr and Sam and Jeffrey Fox, investors who the site outed for the crime of having ‘outsourced’ jobs,” writes Strassel. “T. Martin Fiorentino is scored for his work for a firm that forecloses on homes. Louis Bacon (a hedge-fund manager), Kent Burton (a ‘lobbyist’) and Thomas O’Malley (an energy CEO) stand accused of profiting from oil. Frank VanderSloot, the CEO of a home-products firm, is slimed as a ‘bitter foe of the gay rights movement.’”

One of those men, Frank VanderSloot, did an interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren, expressing what it was like to be on a presidential “enemies list.” ”Sure enough then the attacks started coming I really thought I’d made a mistake,” he told Susteren. “As I thought about it, I thought, ‘this is America and we can’t let these tactics intimidate us,’ and so I remain undeterred.” Yet VanderSloot also noted that the media “have lodged all kinds of innuendo in my direction, accused me of all kinds of bad things. People have called my children. They’ve been surfing their LinkedIn sites. They’ve been asking interviews of my kids.” VanderSloot also revealed that a “former U.S. Senate investigator” and “member of the sub-committee on Homeland Security” is doing an investigation of him and his family, which “worried him a lot.”

Strassel confirmed that outrage, noting that “a man named Michael Wolf contacted the Bonneville County Courthouse in Idaho Falls in search of court records regarding Mr. VanderSloot. Specifically, Mr. Wolf wanted all the documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot’s divorces, as well as a case involving a dispute with a former Melaleuca employee.” She further revealed that “Mr. Wolf was, until a few months ago, a law clerk on the Democratic side of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.”

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New internal e-mails disclosed by the House Natural Resources Committee this week show that a supposedly exculpatory report on the administration’s doctored drilling moratorium analysis — issued by the Department of Interior’s Inspector General’s office — was itself incomplete, misleading and unsubstantiated. Even more damning, the documents reveal that the White House actively blocked investigators and refuses to comply with subpoenas.

Now, as one senior IG agent warned his bosses, “the chickens may be coming home to roost.”

A quick refresher: After the BP oil spill in 2010, the White House imposed a radical six-month moratorium on America’s entire deepwater drilling industry. The overbroad ban — inserted into a technical safety document in the middle of the night by Obama’s green extremists — cost an estimated 19,000 jobs and $1.1 billion in lost wages.

The anti-drilling administration based its draconian order on recommendations from an expert oil spill panel. But that panel’s own members (along with the federal judiciary) called out then-eco czar Carol Browner for misleading the public about the scientific evidence and “contributing to the perception that the government’s findings were more exact than they actually were.” Browner and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar oversaw the false rewriting of the drilling ban report to completely misrepresent the Obama-appointed panel’s own overwhelming scientific objections to the job-killing edict.

Federal judge Martin Feldman in Louisiana blasted the Obama Interior Department for defying his May 2010 order to lift its fraudulent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. He called out the administration’s culture of contempt and “determined disregard” for the law.

Ever since, GOP watchdogs have attempted to hold administration officials accountable for the drilling ban fraud.

At an international conference on Thursday, May 3, organized at Russia’s initiative, the Russian delegates showed computer-generated images of a hypothetical Russian pre-emptive missile attack on segments of a missile defense shield and early warning system that the US and NATO want to put in place in Turkey, Rumania and Poland.  Quite a scary threat from the former USSR’s 900-pound gorilla and one-time global nuclear super-power.

NATO says that the missile defense system is meant to counter Iran’s threats of a WMD Shi’ite Armageddon.  However, the Russians are not comforted, because they fear that the NATO anti-missile missiles could also be used to shoot down Russian nuclear-armed missiles aimed at the West; and such a potential threat from the west could “undermine their country’s nuclear deterrent[.]”

The Russians organized the Thursday conference in order to place their threat on the table, loud and clear, and make public their demand that they get a written agreement that the West will never use its missiles against Russia.  Currently, the USA and NATO have refused to put such a promise in writing, although Russia-NATO agreements on missile defense cooperation date back to 2010.  The timing of this meeting is important. It comes shortly before a NATO conference due to take place in Chicago later this month at which NATO will publicize its success in getting its missile-defense system up and running.  Russia’s pre-emptive threat of a missile war against the West if the West does not agree to its demands puts a big kink in the Chicago conference.

But according to the Wall Street Journal article, Russia’s alarming saber-rattling is really a façade to hide a “tacit agreement to put off serious talks until next year,” by which time Obama, if re-elected, could “clear the way for a deal” and work on Russia’s behalf against NATO to find ways to accommodate the Russian demands.  The Russian presenter on Thursday was direct and unambiguous that Russia prefers to work with Obama as a second-term president, and to cooperate with his vision of a “reset” in the USA- Russia relationship, rather than to joust with Romney whose election they feel will make things “surely … more difficult.”

So what the Russians have actually said is: if you want to keep the Russian bear from getting aggressive, elect Obama, not Romney.  This is an unusually overt attempt by a foreign power to influence American elections, but it is not surprising since Romney has been harshly critical of Obama’s “reset” vision.

Part I:

Part II:

Part III:

To watch the dynamics between Tommi Trudeau, Nonie Darwish and Evan Sayet on last week’s show, click here.

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