The midterm elections are coming up, and they spell defeat for the Democrats. All that's left to be decided is just how bad that defeat will be. Poll after poll shows an American public that stolidly rejects their agenda and no matter how many stories the media churns out about Republican extremism, they view Obama and his agenda as radical and extreme. Obama's magic is gone and the axis of change has turned away from the Democrats. Meanwhile an insurgent Republican wave is sweeping across Capitol Hill. But what does all that means for Obama's next two years?

Obama and his backers counted on having a decisive majority on their side in order to ram through their agenda. Now they will have to rely on bipartisanship, on building coalitions with Republicans to get the legislation he wants through. And while the Republican party lacks a Newt Gingrich to negotiate terms as it did in 1994, it does have the Tea Party movement looking over the shoulders of Republican representatives and senators who might be tempted to jump on the bandwagon. When the Dems can't even get a Maine Republican Senator to help them with repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, even the most optimistic of them has to get a sinking feeling about what the next two years are going to be like.

The national mood in general, combined with insurgent populism has rattled politicians on both sides of the aisle. Republicans are afraid, but so are many Democrats who have to run in actual elections, rather than farcical gerrymandered districts where elections are decided by community leaders, democratic clubs or union bosses. So while Charlie Rangel isn't going anywhere no matter what he does or who runs against him, parts of the West and Midwest, areas that helped give the Democrats control of congress have turned into hostile territory.

After making a last stand on ObamaCare, a defiant middle finger to Middle America, their courage has failed because it is clear to them that trying to fight this, the way the Japanese fought WW2 will just end in disaster. The DREAM Act and Don't Ask, Don't Tell show how the same politicians who had been determined to ram through ObamaCare at any cost, don't have the stomach for it anymore. Instead they threw them up as political gestures to elements of their base, before running for cover. And no one is fooled by it at all. But once the lame duck sessions are gone, it will be time to talk turkey.

The Democrats faced this same dilemma in 1994. And the show remains the same. So do the talking points. Declaring the recession over, over and over again. Blaming the Republicans for legislative gridlock. Calling the voters spoiled children. We're seeing it all come back again. But this time it's a slipperier problem. Because the most recognizable Republican in the opposition is Sarah Palin, who doesn't hold any elected office. Clinton was able to successfully turn Gingrich into the face of Republican stonewalling. But it's hard to assign blame to Palin for anything that happens in congress. And trying to turn John Boehner into the next Gingrich is a losing proposition. Palin has become associated with the insurgent populism of the Tea Party, and while she may well have plans to run for President, that just gives her a lock on the "Change" brand, without any of the responsibility.

Obama's people know that without an actual economic recovery that they can experience as fact, rather than take on faith, he is almost certainly doomed. And his own visibility, combined with the viability of a populist opposition, will make it hard to shift the blame. Democrats are still stuck on labeling their opponents as extremists, but that's just another way of giving up the "Change" brand. The new Democratic slogan, "The Change that Matters" tries to fix their brand as that of moderate and reasonable change. Which is exactly the wrong slogan when the public is angry and frustrated with the arrogance blowing out of Capitol Hill.

Soros and his ilk could buy Obama the election, but all the liberal billionaires in the world can't buy him every election. Just like we couldn't refight WW2 every decade. Especially when Obama and his supermajority didn't have much to show for it. That means Obama has to switch gears or resign himself to one long vacation while he prepares for 2012. The latter is not an impossibility. Obama's egoism and childishness are difficult to underestimate. He has very little patience for people who don't agree with him. And unlike LBJ or Clinton, he lacks the wheeling and dealing skills of a good horse trader. With Reid out, and Pelosi cracking up, and no one all that eager to take their place as the public face of failure, it's possible that we will have real gridlock.

On the other hand if Obama does listen to his advisers, what we may have is Faust and the Devil instead, with Republicans auditioning for the Faust spot. For all that the Tea Party may be a power, once congressional Republicans have a sense of power again, all bets are off. It was easy enough to be the Party of No, back when they were out of power. But it's much harder to be the Party of No, when getting power means having to say, Yes. The Tea Party may have terrorized some liberal Republicans, it may have even lost some seats, but the gain is preventing another bipartisan sellout, which without a Contract with America and firm positions by a committed Republican leadership would be almost a certainty.

In the next session there will be Republicans in the Senate and the House of Representatives of a type that the Democrats never seriously thought they would have to deal with, whose positions predate Bush and Reagan, and go back all the way to Goldwater. It's a brand of politics that hasn't been seen in D.C. much, because it's hostile to D.C. and what it stands for. And their presence alone will shift the balance of the Republican party, making former conservatives seem positively liberal by comparison. And this time the definition of the center will change in a new direction, sliding right for the first time since the early days of the Bush Administration.

Obama's old economic advisers are being thrown out, as everyone predicted. This may mean a ramping up of the anti-corporate rhetoric that is the closes the Dems can come to populism. But corporations are already tried of being Obama's fire hydrant, and he needs their money for 2012. Or it may mean an attempt to actually pull back, akin to Lenin's "two steps forward, one step back", and go business friendly. Pushing domestic protectionism, taking on NAFTA and cutting some of the crap out of ObamaCare that they put in there, could win Obama and the Democrats some points in the swing states. But that would require junking carbon emissions regulation, and pull back on the coal bashing, and a lot of their legislative agenda.

With few good choices, Obama may just decide to stay out of it. His ability to craft legislation is non-existent, he's a bad diplomat and gets frustrated easily. And when it's on the outs with the public, the White House usually turns to foreign policy to shore up its occupant's credentials.

But Obama doesn't have much of a menu when it comes to foreign policy either. The public has already seen him do a world tour, what more is there to offer. He could try tackling one of the world's crisis regions, but that would just make him look like one of the ex's, Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, who have tried to stay relevant with conferences and charity work, in the hopes that people will forget their actual terms in office. Bush already did Africa, but Obama's brand was supposed to be the Muslim world. With just one problem. The Muslim world doesn't much care about Obama.

Obama's weakness means that his only leverage is over American allies. Which is why countries like Israel, Columbia or the UK are afraid of Obama-- while America's enemies laugh in his face. Something Russia has been done openly of late. That means aside from photo ops, all Obama can do is badger and weaken our allies. But to what end?

Obama can pick another economic fight with the UK, over tariffs or oil spills, but it's the international equivalent of a cafeteria food fight. A tariffs fight might play okay in the rust belt, but it's not going to be much of a home run. Obama has been aggressively pushing Turkey's entry into the EU, but that only sets European teeth on edge. When Obama and Cameron champion Turkey's entry into the EU, France and Germany stiffen up. And whatever does happen there, the odds of Obama being able to take the credit are negligible. And even if he did get to pose as the man who got Turkey into the EU, this wouldn't exactly score points with many Americans.

There is the War on Terror, but that's not something Obama wants to be too associated with. It's something he tolerates, because he doesn't want to face the political consequences of shutting it down completely. So he lets the former Clinton people play out the old "Smart War" game, using drone attacks and intel, while letting the Afghan war run down, because it was Biden's idea for winning points on national security, by focusing on the key war in Afghanistan, rather than Iraq. And beyond his own insecurity with the military, Obama believes that appearing to be the man behind the war machine, would trash his appeal for the Muslim world.

That doesn't leave much, except the old standby, Israel. That country has been the longtime whipping boy of leaders who want to look like Gandhi, while looting like Attila. Pressuring Israel into appeasing terrorists is supposed to score valuable points with the Muslim world, and peace conferences make for good photo ops. A White House occupant is less likely to get called out for a peace with conference with a few rounds of golf thrown in, than for just the golf alone. Of course when the economy is bad, tinkering with another peace agreement won't win much applause, but it will keep Obama above the fray and looking like an international leader, instead of a lazy lame duck.

Even many liberal Jews got their backs up over Obama's unprovoked assault on Israel earlier this year, but even conservative Jews have generally been conditioned to accept some amount of pressure in the context of a peace agreement. Which means that what earned Obama a backlash when done outside the context of negotiations, when it just looked like bullying, will instead be made to look like statesmanship now.

But even there Obama is letting his chips ride, letting Hillary Clinton have her moment in the middle eastern sun, but always ready to snatch the credit from her, if there is any to be had. The Peace Process is a longer shot than ever, because despite having the most Anti-Israel Administration in the White House, since Sadat was organizing Egyptian Muslims to pray for Jimmy Carter's hemorrhoids after Camp David, there isn't a whole lot to work with here. No one is under the illusion that Abbas can offer a final status agreement that means anything, which means the negotiations become just another chance to bully Israel, with no serious hope of gain. The PLO state that Clinton backed no longer exists, in its place is Hamas run Gaza, and rabbit run militias in Ramallah. Israel can be forced to cede more territory, even parts of Jerusalem, but it can't cede governance, where there isn't any.

So what's left for Obama, but more of the same. More speeches, golfing, vacations, globe-trotting tours, pressure on Israel, blame the Republicans, rinse and repeat all over again. Yet despite the rumors, Obama isn't prepared to walk out in 2012. There's too much at stake for the left, and for himself personally. Charity work and penning your memoirs is fine for Carter and Clinton, but Obama is too detached for the former, and he's already written more memoirs than most rock stars. His next two years will be a compromise between fighting for popularity and fighting for his radical agenda. Which way the compromise will swing, will help determine if Obama gets shown the door in 2012 or not.


(Please note, due to the final days of Sukkot, I will not be updating this blog until Saturday night.) 

If you believe the newspapers, a kindergarten in a town built by Jewish refugees from Yemen is about to doom all hopes for peace in the Middle East. Forget the fact that there was never any peace long before a few dozen Jews who fled Yemen built themselves a small town where they could raise their families, without being murdered for their faith or driven into ghettos-- as is the fate of the last remaining Jews of Yemen. Forget a thousand years of Muslim bigotry, which time and time again have exploded into orgies of violence, pogroms of hate and terrorist atrocities. No, it is the kindergarten at Kiryat Netafim that is at fault here.

The very same headline scribblers who chastised Americans as hopelessly racist, for not wanting a mosque to be built where thousands of people had been murdered in the name of Islam, are united in denouncing the terrible evil of this kindergarten. If it were not for this kindergarten, doves would be flying overhead with olive branches. And everyone would be dancing and singing "Kumbaya." If it weren't for that specter of that terrible kindergarten ruining it all.

There is of course no objection to Muslims building things anywhere they want. Oil money from the gulf states is pouring in to finance Muslim construction without a word from the White House. While Jewish homes, barns and kindergartens are denounced as "obstacles to peace", Muslim construction is not even a topic of discussion. The underlying bias behind this attitude is rather blatant. A Jewish home is illegitimate. A Muslim home is unquestionably legitimate. Just as a mosque near Ground Zero gets wrapped up in the flag, and a church gets tossed aside. The rights and wrongs always manage to come up star and crescent for Muslims, and snake eyes for everyone else.

Through that distorted lens, a kindergarten can become a threat to peace and a mosque at Ground Zero, an act of tolerance.

So the US State Department announced that it was "disappointed". The British Foreign Minister topped that by announcing that he was "very disappointed". Not just disappointed, very disappointed. Moscow is reportedly "concerned". Sarkozy stated that the construction must stop and invited everyone to a summit in Paris to talk about it, a proposal that seems to have more to do with helping promote tourism and his own popularity, than with peace. Ireland's extremist Foreign Minister, Micheál Martin, who had already pandered to Castro and Hamas, used his UN speech to berate Israel. Baroness Ashton of the EU, who often makes Martin look like a moderate, announced that she "strongly regrets" Israel's decision to allow people who happen to be Jewish to build kindergartens for their children.

But will there be peace if Jewish families in Kiryat Netafim are deprived of a kindergarten? A brief history of the last thousand years, or even the last seventeen years during which Israel has bent over backward to a coalition of terrorist groups run by Yasser Arafat, would suggest otherwise. The media assures us that the fate of peace hangs on negotiations with the illegitimate leader of a declining terrorist group who doesn't even control Gaza anymore. Negotiations which Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat's successor, has already turned into a farce by refusing to even recognize Israel as the Jewish state.

While Israelis continue to be murdered by terrorists, the Obama Administration and its media lackeys insist that the real barrier to peace is at the kindergarten. But yet with no kindergartens under the settlement freeze, there was still no peace. There were hardly even any negotiations.

Israel's Druze-Arab Deputy Minister, Ayoob Kara, put it bluntly; "The game in the Middle East is strong. Kill or be killed." The Obama Administration and the European Union have been insisting that Israelis should allow themselves to be killed, rather than kill. To concede on everywhere in the hopes that if Israel humiliates itself enough, then its Muslim enemies will finally feel good enough about themselves to make a lasting peace. That was Kissinger's strategy in the 70's, which cost thousands of lives and nearly destroyed Israel. And it has been the theme of the latest stage of the "Peace Process."

That is why there can never be any serious talk of "Peace for Peace". It isn't a matter of meeting around a table, shaking hands and deciding to make war no more. No, the poor bruised Muslim ego must be soothed at the expense of the infidels.

For Muslims to be able to live in peace with non-Muslims, they must be able to assert their sense of superiority, to put their boot on the infidel's neck, claim the traditional privileges of a racist and bigoted majority, ruling over irritating minorities who must be taught their place. Otherwise they will pout and whine, and declare Fatwas and Jihads, give their support to terrorist groups promising them a brand new Caliphate and anything else that will nurture their sense of grievance at the loss of their former status.

So there must be a mosque erected at Ground Zero, and NASA's chief mission must be to make Muslims feel good about their scientific accomplishments. And Israel must stop building homes in a part of Jerusalem, from which invading Muslim armies ethnically cleansed Jews, only a few years after the Holocaust. Europeans must be forbidden from eating during Ramadan and 9/11 memorials must incorporate Muslim themes. We ban burning the Koran and censor cartoons that offend Muslims, the only religion to receive such privileges. And when all that groveling is said and done, will there be peace?

In a pig's eye.

Israel achieved its peace treaties through war. Had it not shown that it could defend itself, endure the worst that the Arab Socialist dictatorships could throw at it, and still survive-- then there would have never been any peace treaties to sign. That is why the Cold Peace with Egypt and Jordan holds, while the Peace Process with the PLO has failed badly. Israel almost defeated terrorism, but it gave into it in the end. And that was a fatal mistake.

It was not goodwill or a trickle of the milk of human kindness that brought Sadat to Jerusalem, but the recognition that further war was a doomed course. That understanding has never trickled down to the average Egyptian, which is why the peace remains only a Cold Peace. Regime change will send it tumbling down, in Egypt and in Jordan. Because until the average Arab Muslim matures enough to set aside his arrogant sense of superiority over the non-Arab and the non-Muslim, there can be no peace.

Pandering to people who want to kill you, only wins you a place at their feet. At best. The spot of the Dhimmi, the house slave and the serf. It does not bring peace, only the peace of submission that Mohammed offered to the Jews of his day, before exterminating and enslaving them anyway. That is the way business has been done in the desert long before Mohammed. It is likely the way business will be done there long after the sands have buried Mecca over, as they have buried over so many ancient cities amid the dunes.

Western diplomats know enough of the Muslim mind to pander to it. To soothe it with deep bows and kowtows. With flattery and praise. But rather than soothing it, such antics only feed the worst of it.

Whatever small hope for peace there ever was, went into the rubbish basket of history, once the pandering began, and it was clear that Muslim terrorists would never be held accountable for anything they did. Similarly once American troops stopped being the goliaths in the helicopters raining down death on Taliban and Republican Guard alike, and became smiling faces eager to help rebuild, the tables were turned. Muslims once again felt themselves to be superior to the vulnerable infidels. And the violence really took off.

When we measure offense not by the deed, but by the need to appease the violent tempers of murderers, then what we have is not the basis for peace, but the terms of surrender. Muslims who have grown too used to a history in which they were the rulers, the enslavers and the conquerors, must adapt to a history in which they are not the master race, but only another group in a large global tapestry of them. If they cannot do so, then the war and the violence that they habitually spawn will continue.

We can blame the cartoonists, the kindergartens and anything else that offends the Muslim ego-- but that will not bring peace. Only when we place the responsibility on Muslims to embrace change and abandon hate, can there ever be peace.

5. Multiculturalism - If you haven't seen the billboards yet, liberals love multiculturalism, they embrace all races and religions because they believe in diversity. True? Nope.

Liberals follow the left's paradigm of waging class warfare. Their interest in minorities extends only to enlisting some disenfranchised groups in their class warfare. Contrary to all the multicultural billboards, liberals are primarily interested in unsuccessful minorities, because they can frighten them, exploit them and farm them as voting blocks. Successful minorities such as Asians, Indians and Jews are wanted only as window dressing. And get the short end of the stick when a real issue comes up.

Multiculturalism is really only class warfare disguised as opposition to bigotry. Take away all the historical revisionism about the Democratic party's ugly civil rights history and the empty slogans about diversity, and what you have left is naked political opportunism. The Democratic party trafficked in racism when it suited them (and still does) and dons the halo of tolerance when it suits them now. The left was equally at home working both sides of the street, and the views of great socialists from Jack London to Karl Marx on race, differed little from those of the Nazi party.

Multiculturalism isn't a philosophy, it's a political organization tactic to bring the groups they consider part of the working class under one umbrella. It's the same old class warfare organizational tactics applied to race and ethnicity. The goal of these tactics is not empowerment, but to create a voting bloc of people who have been convinced that they're doomed to helplessness, without the leadership of the left "fighting" on their behalf.

Liberals can still be and often are bigots. Their bigotry is just informed by political necessity. As a bonus, having the "diversity" brand allows them to describe the opposition as bigots, without ever being called out for their own bigotry.



4. Feminism - We all know of course that liberals are the biggest feminists out there, except when they're running against a woman. Or when a woman accuses their candidate of rape or sexual harassment.

Like multiculturalism, owning the feminist brand has been convenient. And it was easy enough to manage once feminism became a wholly owned product of academia, funded by liberal groups like the Ford Foundation. This brand of feminism has as much to do with equal rights for women, as African Studies have to do with equal rights for African-Americans. They're basically little more than ways to repackage the agenda politics of the far left in identity colors. That way socialism can be dressed up as a civil rights agenda, and opposition to it becomes racism or sexism.

That leads us to the absurd spectacle of academic feminists declaring that successful female candidates who don't share their politics are not feminists, but male candidates who do, are. Dig down to their real definition of feminism, and it turns out to be liberalism.

None of this has anything to do with women, just as multiculturalism has nothing to do with race. Take away the disguises, and you end up with the same old ideology marketed to target groups as a political organizing tactic. It's no different than selling cereal, except the cereal is red and comes with a few dozen textbooks.

Liberals are not interested in empowering women, except to work for them or vote for them. There is no philosophical commitment here to equality for women, only a sales pitch for liberalism.



3. Friends of the Poor - We know liberals are against poverty, right? Otherwise why all that talk of making the rich pay their fair share. But if you actually look at socialist countries, the poor aren't exactly coming out ahead. What's the problem?

The problem is that liberals are not into enriching the poor, but removing what they consider the upper class, and turning over control of the economy to themselves. But a centrally planned economy leads to more poverty, not less. Take away the ability to go up the economic ladder, and how can poverty end?

It can't. But ending poverty was never the idea. Wealth redistribution is a neat catchphrase, but the reality is that the rich and the middle class are purged to make way for a new rich and middle class composed of party members. Their brand of equality is not about helping the poor, but putting themselves in charge and imposing an artificial standard of fairness in order to build a perfect society. Before Communism came to Russia, the poor begged on the street. After Communism, begging was illegal and the poor were deported to labor camps as parasites. Because once society is made equal, anyone who's still unequal must be an exploiter or a parasite.

You can't end poverty, except through opportunity, and that's the one thing their social system doesn't offer. It's why America under Obama is poorer than ever. Jobs aren't created by confiscating wealth, but by encouraging free enterprise. But when the goal isn't to create jobs, but to create a static society where everyone knows their place, then their way is best. All totalitarian movements are at their heart, reactionary. Even if they're cloaked in red t-shirts and rock concerts. And reactionary movements are often spearheaded by an upper class trying to deny social mobility to the working class. And when you take a magnifying glass to liberalism, that's exactly what it looks like.

Of course this isn't an original observation. Orwell's Oceania in 1984 worked on the same exact principle. Orwell was warning about the rise of a totalitarian left with no regard for human rights. But it's already here.



2. Pro-Peace - The left is peaceful in the same way that active volcanoes are gentle, and tsuanmis are a good way to cool off after a long summer day.

Look around the world at the left of center regimes, and you come away with a horror show of constant conflicts. (The left explains this as the result of vast conspiracies by reactionary forces against the freedom loving peoples of the world and their friendly dictators.) And then count how many liberals wear t-shirts with King or Gandhi on them, and how many wear t-shirts with Che on them.

If you read the official talking points, you would have no idea that America fought most of its wars in the 20th century under Democratic Presidents. Or that the enthusiastic revolutionaries of the USSR and China between them accounted for more dead, than would have been produced by a nuclear war.

But being pro-peace is yet another talking point. The left is not pro-peace, it's against wars being fought by their political opponents. Take a measure of how much coverage anti-war protests received under Bush, and how much coverage they receive under Obama. The war hasn't gone away, even the protests haven't entirely gone away (mostly by the same Marxist-Trotskyist groups that were running them all along) but the coverage has gone down the rabbit hole.

Then let's take a walk back to WW2, when American liberals went from being anti-war when Hitler invaded Poland, to being pro-war when he invaded the Soviet Union. The Trotskyists of the era remained anti-war and the Communist party in the United States helped the authorities deal with them. Because suddenly war was in their interest.

The liberal position on war is that they are against it, unless they are for it. And then when it's over, they are against it, because it didn't accomplish all their goals. Liberals were against WW2, before they were for it, but then they were against it, once those GI's weren't wearing down German tanks anymore, but blocking Soviet tanks from "liberating" the rest of Europe. Liberals were for Israel, when England was against Israel, but they were against Israel, when Arab tanks forwarded from the Soviet Union were being blown up by the damned Israelis.

An easy way to sketch out the liberal position on a war, is to check the political ideology of the government fighting it and how it accords with their own politics, the political ideology of the enemy they are fighting against, and the effect on any left wing regimes. Add all that up and you get the liberal position on the war. The further left you go, the higher the bar goes.

Liberals will support wars by liberal governments against developed countries they consider reactionary. They will generally oppose all wars by conservative governments. They will generally oppose wars by liberal governments against undeveloped countries, sometimes even when those countries are reactionary, unless the government conducting the war is far to the left.

There are ideological complications and rivalries in the mix. There's also the human factor. Some American liberals did support the American invasion of Afghanistan initially, but the left never did. A handful of liberals actually thought the American program was within their own ideology, but they were primarily British, and were quickly ostracized for it. On the other hand, George Galloway, who openly supported Saddam, is still considered a hero of the people. Because as bad as Saddam worse, the general agreement is that America was worse, because it represents capitalism and people with jobs. Which are not things the left likes.

And there you have it. The left's commitment to peace. Or rather a commitment to anti-war rallies, when the war in question doesn't seem to be in their interest, and isn't being waged to protect a left-wing country, or a group that the left is allied with.



1. Patriotic - Every now and then liberals like to claim that they're patriotic. Usually around an election. Of course they're not patriotic in the "wear a flag on your lapel" kind of way. They're more patriotic in the "point out everything wrong with your country and then threaten to move to Canada if you don't win the election" way. Which is fine. America has seen patriots like that before. They used to wear green coats and moved to Canada, right around the time the last British troops left New York on Evacuation Day.

Occasionally when in power liberals will actually try to brand their opponents as traitors or unpatriotic, but like a dog trying to talk, it never sounds right. Mostly they have to defend themselves against charges of being unpatriotic, particularly when they've been caught attending a church whose rousing hymn is "God Damn America".

It's a challenge being patriotic, when you don't believe in American Exceptionalism, or even the value of the Nation-State. When you think that the world would run better if everyone just listened to what the UN tells them to do. When you think that its history is the story of how rich Europeans murdered all the natives and built smokestacks over their graves in order to plunder South America of its fruit-- being patriotic really requires contortionism that would put any circus acrobat to shame.

That's probably why liberals don't do the patriotism thing very well. It's hard to spit in someone's face one day and then hug them the next. For liberal politicians, patriotism is one of those unfortunate election season things they try to get through as quickly as possible. And hope no one asks them if they believe in the Constitution.

When they're forced to, they will say something vague about America's heritage of tolerance, and imply that the WW2 GI's were fighting for socialism, civilian trials for terrorists and opposition to tort reform. They're most comfortable around the Civil War and WW2. Anything outside that comfort zone makes them itchy. They will pose next to Old Glory when they have to, if they have a relative who fought in a war, they will bring him up. If he's not dead, they will drag him out. If he is dead, they will dig him up. But just don't ask them any questions about the application of their vaunted patriotism. Or why if they're so patriotic, they can't actually get behind their country in wartime.

Of course they will answer that true patriotism means undermining your country in wartime. Which means that Benedict Arnold was the original patriot.



Take away these 5 and what do you have left? Nothing but a political ideology that seeks power and will use any rhetoric and trick to get it. And that is the real face of modern day liberalism.

Prime Minister Haji Abdul Razak of Malaysia has offered to help Obama overcome "Islamophobia" by sending "experts in Islamic studies" to America in order to correct misconceptions about Islam. Malaysia's Deputy Education Minister, Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah, stated, "We qualify to send our experts as we have the experience of administering a country which is multi-ethnic, multicultural and multi-religious like the US."

Of course by multi-religious, he means Malaysia is an Islamic state which pervasively discriminates against non-Muslims. Malays are automatically treated as Muslims and subject to Sharia law. They are not allowed to become members of another faith, without applying to an Islamic Sharia court. And without official recognition, the law forbids them from marrying Christians or Buddhists. The Lina Joy case is an example of how non-Muslims can remain in limbo under a legal system which is based on Islamic law, and denies equal rights to non-Muslims.

And then there's the case of Revathi Massosai, a true example of what Muslim tolerance holds for the kind of "multi-religious" society that those "experts in Islamic studies" would love to inflict on us.

Revathi Massosai, a Hindu whose parents had converted to Islam, was considered a Muslim under Malaysian law, despite the fact that she had been raised and was a Hindu. When she tried to get the government to recognize that fact, the Islamic authorities put her into an "Islamic Re-education Camp". There she was forced to wear a burqa, read Muslim prayers and eat beef. Since then she has been prevented from living with her husband and her daughter has no birth certificate. Nor is her case unique. Families have been broken up, children have been seized, even bodies have been dragged out of funeral homes because of Malaysia's Islamic law.

Under Malaysian law, only Muslims were permitted to use the word, "Allah". (This incidentally puts the lie to the common Muslim claim, that Allah is the universal word for God, rather than for the Muslim deity alone.) When in response to a Catholic lawsuit, the Malaysian court struck down the law, Malaysian Muslims responded in their usual tolerant fashion by firebombing churches. All of this without any protest from the same useful idiots, who go mad at the latest news from Gaza, and tramp down to Ground Zero in their Keffiyahs in support of Religious Freedom for the Ground Zero Mosque backed by a man with his own extensive ties to Malaysia.

But what will Malaysia's "experts in Islamic studies" tell us to defuse our horrible Islamophobia? Perhaps they will tell us how Malaysia broke up and criminalized the Sky Kingdom compound and charged with practicing a "deviant religion". Will they tell us whether Revathi Massosai has finally been allowed to see her daughter, and maybe explain to us how Islam's famous religious tolerance accords with forcing a Hindu woman to eat beef. And maybe fill us in on how, if there is "no compulsion in religion" under Islam, why do there have to be Islamic Reeducation Camps? Can we also discuss Malaysia's destruction of Hindu temples and how this differs from the behavior of the Taliban?

But of course we are not going to talk about any of that. Instead we are going to get lectures on Islam from a country where Muslim rule has produced tyranny, brutality and oppression. And we are going to get it in order to check our "Islamophobia". Naturally there will be no Hindu or Christian lecturers headed to Malaysia to check their phobias toward other human beings.

Islamic Cartoon-O-Phobia leads to Declaration of War

Even a brief look at Malaysia, makes it rather clear that its Muslims suffer from a common problem in their religion-- Equalityphobia, the fear of treating non-Muslims as equals. Since the Koran explicitly forbids friendships with non-Muslims and mandates legal inferiority for them, Equalityphobia is sadly grounded in the teachings of Mohammed and his successors. And until a cure for Equalityphobia is found in the Muslim world, perhaps the Malaysian "Islamic Experts" should stay home and help their fellow Muslims "misunderstand" the teachings of the Koran a little better.

But keep in mind after all this-- Malaysia is actually one of the more tolerant Muslim countries in the world. Yes that's right, all this... is tolerant. By the standards of the Muslim world. And that is the true horror of Islamic law.

Meanwhile Zunar, a Malaysian cartoonist, was arrested and had a book containing his cartoons seized. The book's title was "Cartoon-O-Phobia" and the reason for the arrest, was that his cartoons touched on the "Allah" issue. Maybe a delegation of international cartoonists should be dispatched to Malaysia to lecture them on "Cartoon-O-Phobia". But of course we know that unlike a delegation of Muslim experts to America, such a delegation to a Muslim country would survive for about as long as it would take them to disembark from the plane.

When even in Western countries with Muslim minorities, cartoonists like Kurt Westergaard and Molly Norris have been forced to go into hiding, what hope is there for treating Cartoon-O-Phobia in the Muslim world. But that is the price we pay for the Muslim phobia of everything non-Muslim. In Malaysia that means smashing teapots and terrorizing Hindus. In America, that means blowing up buildings and then trying to build mosques as a thumb in the eye to a grieving nation.

But while Malaysia, like the rest of the Muslim world, may fail horribly at interacting with non-Muslims-- they do have one last hope, space aliens.

The United Nations has just appointed the former head of Malaysia's space program to head its Office for Outer Space Affairs, which would be in charge of talking any little green men who happen to land on our planet. Mazlan Othman had formerly been in charge of such vital issues as figuring out how to practice Islam in space (spin counterclockwise before beheading the individual to the left, then rotate and turn to complete the maneuver) will now be the person to represent the human race in the event a UFO shows up on the White House lawn.

Appointing a representative from a country and a religion that has still not learned to treat other human beings as equals, to deal with aliens, is probably not the best idea. But we can probably assume that it's part of Obama's strategy to prioritize boosting Muslim self-esteem over space exploration. Still it might have been better if Malaysia focused more on learning how to deal with people on earth, before aiming for the skies. Especially when Malaysia's Religious Peace are likely to burst into the Office for Outer Space Affairs and drag the doctor on suspicion of immoral affairs with non-Muslim aliens. A fate that happens often enough to female professionals who work with non-Muslims in the Muslim world.

All this is particularly unwise, as Muslims have already declared a Jihad against "space aliens". Sheikh Omar Bakri has declared that, "We are obliged as Muslims to make the whole galaxy subservient to almighty Allah". Say what you will about Muslims, you can't accuse them of thinking small. At least not when it comes to genocide. Forget conquering and enslaving the whole world, when there's a whole galaxy out there. And a chance to force ET to wear a Burqa.

But Mazlan Othman has already said that in the event the spaceships do show up, "we should have in place a co-ordinated response that takes into account all the sensitivities related to the subject". Since Muslims are habitually only concerned with "sensitivities" when it comes to their own beliefs, the aliens will probably be greeted with a copy of the Koran, which hopefully for all our sakes, they won't mistake for a snack or a cigar, and an explanation of how Islam is the light of the universe.

And when that day comes, let's just hope the aliens don't bring any cartoons with them.

"I said, ‘Natan, what is the deal [about not supporting the peace deal. He said, ‘I can't vote for this, I'm Russian... I come from one of the biggest countries in the world to one of the smallest. You want me to cut it in half. No, thank you.'"

I responded, "Don't give me this, you came here from a jail cell. It's a lot bigger than your jail cell."

                                                                                                              President Bill Clinton

It is truly astounding that Bill Clinton, who in the 1970's was visiting Moscow and conducting Anti-American rallies on behalf of the Kremlin, had the gall to tell, Sharansky, who had risked his life as a political dissident during the 1970's fighting the Kremlin, that he should be satisfied that his new country is bigger than the old jail cell where the Soviet authorities had stuck him.

Just be happy that we're allowing you to keep half of the 8,500 square miles, instead of a few meters in a prison cell. That was the message from the red-faced leader of the free world. And under it, the subtext that if you don't like it, a prison cell might still be waiting for you. Perhaps somewhere under the Hague by the diktat of the ICC.

This isn't the first time that Sharansky had heard that particular message. In 1978, while Bill Clinton was starting his political career, Sharansky was being sentenced by a Soviet court to 13 years of forced labor in the Siberian Gulag. In his response to the court, Sharansky declared; "For more that two thousand years the Jewish people, my people, have been dispersed. But wherever they are, wherever Jews are found, every year they have repeated,'Next year in Jerusalem.' Now, when I am further than ever from my people... facing many arduous years of imprisonment, I say, turning to my people... 'Next year in Jerusalem.'"

According to Clinton, Russian Jews are the biggest obstacles to peace, followed by Mizrahi Jews who escaped Muslim rule. Naturally these are the groups in Israel who are the least naive about what happens when you surrender to tyrants. While many of the Israeli lefties, the grand-children and great-grandchildren of native Israelis whom Clinton interacts with, the cultural elite who live in Tel Aviv and rarely set foot outside it unless they're paying a visit to Paris or Brussels, have forgotten the reality that lurks in the hills of the Shomron.

And what of the country that Clinton and his successors have tried to reduce until it is hardly more than a jail cell.

Israel is already tiny. At 8500 square miles, it is smaller than all but 3 US states, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island. Compared to its Muslim neighbors, it's even smaller than that. It's barely 2 percent of Egypt, which it nevertheless defeated in several wars. It's 1/4th the size of Jordan and 1/8th the size of Syria. Compared to Turkey or Iran, it hardly even appears on the map.

Under the Palestine Mandate, Israel's territory would have been six times as large as it is now. Since 1967, Israel has ceded territory 3 times its own size. This would be astonishing even if Israel were a larger country. Instead it's one of the world's smaller countries, with one of the world's highest population densities. And still the Muslim world and its Western backers continue demanding that Israel continue giving up land even though over 7 million Israelis live on a piece of land smaller than New Hampshire with a population density that is the 37th largest in the world, barely behind Japan at 32nd, Rwanda at 37th and denser than Haiti at 42nd. When eliminating islands, city states and principalities from the list, Israel actually has the 10th highest population density in the world behind India, Japan and Rwanda.

And it gets even worse from there. Because Israel's width at its narrowest point is less than 10 miles (15 kilometers). Considering that Israel is surrounded by Muslim countries whose populations still consider Israel the enemy, despite whatever territory was already conceded in order to sign peace agreements with them, it means that hostile armies from both sides could cut Israel in half in only a matter of miles. Just to make matters worse still, that narrow point intersects Israel's capital, the seat of its government and its largest city-- Jerusalem. And finally to put it all into perspective, that is exactly the territory that every "peacemaker" from Clinton to Blair to Obama want to slice into. And not just "slice into", but turn into a geographically contiguous state for Hamas and Fatah terrorists that would cut Israel in two at its must vulnerable point.

We are not talking about the Negev where there is some land to spare. The Jerusalem region is already painfully overpopulated with housing hard to come by. Reporters who make snide remarks about "settlements" around Jerusalem, need to visit the city itself and try to find a place to live for a working class family on a limited budget. This is no revelation to the men in charge. In response to the Jerusalem housing crisis, former US Ambassador Richard H. Jones snidely remarked, "Sometimes people do have to move to a different location. They cannot always stay close to their families". But when they do try to move to someplace like Ariel, they're also denounced for it by the usual Saudi stooges like Jones as well as NGO's funded by the EU.

The territory being targeted for concessions is in the heartland of Israel, the core of its history and its population. And we are also dealing with an area that served as the last stand for a Jewish state under siege for thousands of years. Besieged by everyone from Nebuchadnezzar to Titus to Heraclius to the Arab Legion, this was where so many last stands were made and broken throughout Jewish history. Except now the besieging army comes in the form of political pressure to surrender the area to the terrorists before the battle has even been fought and won.

Bill Clinton warns us about terrorists using GPS guided missiles if there is no peace, but the peace proposals would only move those same missiles closer and closer to Israel's population centers. The "Peace Pushers" have always argued that cutting a deal is the only way to stop terrorism. But Israel has been cutting deals for 18 years now, and not only is there no peace, but the violence has hit a whole new threat level. Israeli towns and villages are now being shelled on a regular basis, the way that Egypt and Jordan used to, but now the shelling is being carried out by terrorist groups whom Israel allowed into the country, and whom Clinton and his successors financed and trained.  

Nor does Clinton even seriously address the Hamas presence, except to claim that this time around Gazans would vote for Mahmoud Abbas and Salaam Fayyad, the good and moderate terrorists. But considering that Fayyad has never come close to winning anything remotely resembling an election in his life, (unless you count pulling in 2 percent a victory) and Abbas refuses to hold elections, this is almost as believable as a proposal to bring peace by finding a Djinn's bottle and making a wish.

Yet even if Abbas could actually win an election, and if Hamas would actually surrender power based on election results without a war (about as likely pigs flying over Mecca, especially when you consider how their backers in Iran dealt with a problematic election) all this would mean is that the final phase of the peace process would lead to a state perpetually on the verge of attacking Israel, the moment the US backed moderates lose an election. Imagine living in a Germany where the Nazi party was always a year or two away from coming to power. You couldn't live for very long near such a country. Would there ever have been anything resembling a normal way of life for a France or a Poland, living near a Germany where the Nazi Party was always waiting around to take power. Their foreign policy would be forever oscillating being preparing for war, or trying to appease the moderates in the hopes that the Nazis don't come to power.

And that is the best case scenario that Clinton has to offer us. And even that is based on a series of lies and illusions. That is the "dream" for which the "Peace Pushers" would like Israel to carve itself up and ethnically cleanse its own population. Not the reality of peace, but the dream of it. A dream based on lies and manipulation by terrorists and their enablers.

The truth is that the "moderate" terrorists we are supposed to negotiate with, were and still are terrorists. They're just terrorists that the State Department and the EU likes and finances. They have absolutely no democratic legitimacy because they refuse to hold elections. They refuse to even acknowledge Israel as a "Jewish State", rather than an entity they can invade and take over. The majority of Palestinian Arabs don't even support the state that Abbas is negotiating to create. The majority of Israeli Jews don't support any concessions on Jerusalem to create such a state. Jews, Muslims and even Americans in poll after poll, expect the talks to fail. No one outside of Washington D.C. and Brussels even sees any point to having them. The only way this process could have any less legitimacy, was if the negotiating panels were replaced  by kangaroos.

But the "Peace Pushers" keep on singing the siren song of "Somewhere over the rainbow, when we've invested enough billions into institutions, militias and training, then it'll all work out for the best." How and why, are questions that are best not asked, because there are no answers to them. To any of them.

The talks don't serve the cause of peace. They never did. Both sides are being marched to the table, because Obama desperately needs a photo op, and Europe thinks it can appease Muslim anger by bullying Israel into handing over parts of Jerusalem. The Arab Socialists whom Clinton and the EU backed have lost badly, they're nothing more than puppets now, and they know it. That is why Abbas is doing everything he can to throw the talks. The era of Arafat and his ilk is over. It's the Islamists' turn now and no amount of hot air out of Washington D.C. or Brussels will change that.

And in Jerusalem, a new siege of the city continues. The focus on the city continues to touch off new acts of Muslim violence and terror. As what began as a political siege may well end in actual war.

IN THE LATE 1930's A HARVARD STUDENT TRAVELED TO Europe to see its brutal dictatorships firsthand. He visited Mussolini's Italy, Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany. Writing in his diary, the young man confided that he had come "to the decision that Facism ((sic)) is the thing for Germany and Italy, Communism for Russia and Democracy for America and England." But when he ran for President in 1960, John F. Kennedy never had to explain that isolationist view. Nor would raising the issue have made much sense, because the mature Kennedy had long since outgrown the jottings of his impressionable youth.

Time Magazine in 1992, defending Bill Clinton

But of course it makes a lot of sense to raise O'Donnell's comments on Politically Incorrect about witchcraft today. Because JFK flirting with fascism or Bill Clinton with Communism were just "youthful indiscretions", but when it comes to O'Donnell, we're going full Salem here.

The hypocrisy is stunning, but that's only par for the course.

The media is not covering Coons' left wing thuggery.

This is about evil. It could be a lot worse. . . . But it’s evil enough in [its] own little way and the person currently causing our problems, New Castle County Executive Chris Coons, wants to be a United States Senator and apparently has the support of many people who don’t know what he really is.

A key point I want to make is that Coons, a rich boy with a law degree and a Master’s in Ethics from Yale Divinity School, is actually a much nastier, more manipulative, more dangerous, more special-interest-serving person than his thuggish predecessor Tom Gordon.

That by the way comes from a liberal who had personal experience with Coons. And he's not the only one.

There Coons is accused of leaking private medical information to silence an attorney. Again a far more serious allegation than quotes from Politically Incorrect. The same media which made bales of hay out of Troopergate, a story in which Sarah Palin supposedly got a state trooper fired for tasering his 11 year old stepson, of course isn't interested.

Again par for the course.

Not that it will change anything. The left is on the wrong side of the American people just now. They can invite Colbert as a witness on amnesty hearings, to make a circus out of what's left of Pelosi's term, but it won't save them.

For some context, let's take a look at some of the letters of former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the last great Democrats. Monyihan's replacement by Hillary Clinton was a profound insult to his legacy and the State of New York. And Monyihan's letters reveal just what a gap there is between him and the Democratic party of today.

Let's just glance at a few out of line statements by a man who was a United States Senator not all that long ago.

He described the Peace Corps as: “a rip-off by the upper middle classes. Fortunes spent to send Amherst boys for an interesting learning experience in Venezuela,” paid for by “men equally young pumping gas on the New Jersey Turnpike.”

...

Mr. Moynihan wrote to Mr. Johnson, perhaps invoking their shared upbringing: “You were born poor. You were brought up poor. Yet you came of age full of ambition, energy and ability. Because your mother and father gave it to you. The richest inheritance any child can have is a stable, loving, disciplined family life.”

...

He would later describe Mr. Johnson as “the first American president to be toppled by a mob. No matter that it was a mob of college professors, millionaires, flower children and Radcliffe girls.”

Monyihan warned about the rising power of the left, the elitism and arrogance that detaches them from their country, and the disenchantment of the ordinary American with a government run by such elites, and serves their whims.

But here is some of it unfiltered... from the man himself...and much of it is altogether relevant today.

There is a longer-term development contributing to the present chaos which bears mentioning. Since about 1840, the cultural elite in America have pretty generally rejected the values and activities of the larger society. It has been said of America that the culture will not approve that which the polity strives to provide. For a brief period, associated with the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, there was something of a truce in this protracted struggle.

That, I fear, is now over. The leading cultural figures are going—have gone—into opposition once again. This time they take with them a vastly more numerous following of educated, middle-class persons, especially young ones, who share their feelings and who do not need the “straight” world. It is their pleasure to cause trouble, to be against. And they are hell bent for a good time.


...


I think you are entirely right to have been disturbed by Pete Hamill’s article: “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class” [published in this magazine]. To be frank, I would have sent it to you myself, save that it seemed to me this is just what you were talking about during the campaign. “The Forgotten Americans.”

A new voice is being heard in America today. It is a voice that has been silent too long. It is a voice of people who have not taken to the streets before, who have not indulged in violence, who have not broken the law.

These forgotten Americans finally have become angry. They have not really found a voice in American politics, but they are indeed angry. And have reason to be. You ask, “What is our answer.” To which I suppose my first reaction would be to ask, “What is their question?” …

What is the question? It is this: How is the great mass of white working people to regain a sense of positive advantage from the operation of American government, and retain a steady loyalty to the processes of American society, at a time when those above and below them in the social hierarchy seem simultaneously to be robbing the system blind and contemptuously dismissing all its rules. …


...


To a degree that no one could have anticipated even three or four years ago, the educated elite of the American middle classes have come to detest their society, and their detestation is rapidly diffusing to youth in general. The effects of this profound movement of opinion will be with us for generations. It will, for example, drastically limit the role that the United States can play in world affairs—in contrast with the past three decades or so during which the national government has been really extraordinarily free to do what it thought best. There will be indirect effects. The movement of the American youth away from business will almost surely affect business. If it continues, I would imagine it almost certain, for example, that by the year 2000 the Japanese will have a higher per capita income than do the Americans. In one way or another, we are involved in a change of cultural dimensions that will be pervasive in its consequences …

… In the best universities, the best men are increasingly appalled by the authoritarian tendencies of the left. The inadequacies of traditional liberalism are equally unmistakable, while, not least important, the credulity, even the vulgarity of the supposed intellectual and social elite of the country has led increasing numbers of men and women of no especial political persuasion to realize that something is wrong somewhere.

On one point, Monyihan was not quite correct. There was not a tendency away from business, but rather a takeover of business, a move away from sound business models, and toward rent seeking behavior and speculation in every area, irresponsibility and contempt for concepts such as duty and accepting responsibility. Jobs were outsourced, the goal was to sell cheaply and never mind about the quality of the product. That was the impact on the American corporation of leadership by people without the values and discipline of hard work.

We don't know what he would have made of Obama, but I think he would have been horrified and repulsed, because while Clinton was the left with the mask on, Obama is the left with the mask mostly off. The revulsion toward America, its values and its history, its traditions and its laws, are out in the open now. The left is no longer satisfied being alienated from America, it insists on alienating Americans from America.

Finally this will be the last update before the holidays, until Saturday night. Since this is a several day gap, here are a few older articles you may find it worthwhile to reread.

The Republic of Fruitania - A Socialist Fairy Tale

(Fortunately this is only a fairy tale that could never ever happen in real life. Still it might be worth remembering that when you kill the golden apple of the free market, all that's left is moldy pears. And that "Fruit for Everyone" usually means "Fruit for No One")

Alfred Must Die so Mahmood Can Live: Why Socialized Medicine Makes Euthanasia Inevitable

The United States of Socialist Republics

America's Lost Frontier

America needs a new frontier. Not Kennedy's New Frontier of social justice, but a frontier where the Expansionistic force can redefine America again. Such frontiers are possible, some require technology, others imagination. But like most living things, America must grow or die. And while the Centralizing force offers a congealing cancerous growth in the middle, it is the Expansionistic force that America needs to revitalize itself once again.

Chag Sameach to those who celebrate

Three years ago Reverend Lennox Yearwood was comparing the captured Al Queda and Taliban terrorists to civil rights heroine Rosa Parks, and demanding the shutdown of Guantanamo Bay. But last year Reverend Yearwood was conducting a conference call on behalf of the Obama Administration laying out plans to turn the commemoration of the terrorist attacks of September 11th into a "National Day of Service".

While there is nothing wrong with giving blood, picking up trash off the sidewalks or serving as a volunteer dance instructor-- some of the projects listed by the official 911 Day of Service website, they are not what the commemoration of 9/11 is about. They are instead a deliberate attempt to drain the day of its meaning, to obscure the tragedy with feel good sentiments about the environment and community projects that do not address the meaning of September 11.

9/11 was indeed a Day of Service, but not the sort of generic service that the Obama Administration has in mind. It was a day when police officers and firefighters rushed up story after story, through thick choking smoke and weighed down by their equipment in the hopes of saving lives. Many died. Some are still dying now, year after year. That was their service.

It was a week when volunteers with little protection went to help sort through the rubble in the hopes of finding bodies under the melted steel and fallen ash. A week when people stood waiting with food and drink outstretched for the rescue workers. It was a year when New Yorkers who had never thought of serving joined the United States military to fight for their country. To fight against those who had carried out the attacks, and would carry out more if they were not stopped.

That is the service of 9/11. It is a service that the likes of Lennox Yearwood, who continues to campaign for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, or the rest of the anti-war radicals associated with the Obama Administration, want Americans to forget in favor of generic volunteerism. Forget the dead and clean up some trash, is the new motto of the day. Service without sacrifice and without meaning. A day when the nation was attacked, when a people rose to show their courage, robbed of its soul. A soul that belongs to all those whose eyes cloud, whose heart aches and whose fists clench over the memory of that day.

9/11 is not a day to pick up trash in the park. It is a day for remembering that we are at war and why we are at war. It is a time to recall that there are enemies around us who wish to kill us, and that there are soldiers and police officers who bravely stand between us and our killers. The demilitarization of 9/11 is part of the deliberate demilitarization of America. If 9/11 was a call to arms, the new 9/11 "Day of Service" is a call to recycle your soda cans. Because if a people forget what they are fighting for, they are already beaten.

The photos of cheerful grinning students on the 911 Day of Service website show off the new image of the day. Not a day when we mourn or grieve. Not a day when we look east in anger at those who murdered our friends and family. Not a day when we remember bodies falling from the upper stories as ordinary men and women whose only crime was going to work on the wrong day chose to jump, rather than burn to death. Not a day when we remember the ash coating downtown Manhattan, the scraps of burned paper that once used to be ordinary memos and letters, the ash that once used to be human skin.

The new 9/11 is to be a day full of smiles. A deep drink of the waters of Lethe, exchanging memory for upbeat forgetfulness. To return once again to 9/10, to a world in which our biggest challenges are trash in the park and the lack of dance instructors in Harlem. All of it dressed up in cheerful rhetoric about coming together to serve, but what are we serving besides suicidal pacifism stamped with a colorful logo.

George Santayana famously said, "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." The attempt to erase 9/11 from collective memory, particularly the memory of American schoolchildren, who are the key target of this project, that new generation of Americans who grew up in the shadow of the lost towers, will insure that this is a tragedy and an atrocity that will be repeated over and over again... until we not only remember, but actually understand what it is we are remembering.

The attacks of September 11th opened the eyes of many people, if only for a moment to the reality that America is not an island cut off from the rest of the world. That the ocean is no perfect defense against those who are jealous of people living in comfort and freedom. For too many on the left, that revelation became a call to universalization and internationalization, to diminish America in favor of some grand global perspective that blames America and Americans for the murdered and the death. But for those whose eyes truly opened, 9/11 was a wake up call that the tidal flood of violence and hate, of the Jihad that demands the blood of the infidel, knows no boundaries. That it will come here as surely as it has come to Israel and Europe and Asia. That it is already here.

That is the true lesson of 9/11. A lesson that the new Day of Service will do its best to blot out with rounds of progressive community service, as if those who wish to kill us can be made to go away by picking up bottles on the sidewalk or whitewashing fences.

And so a day of remembering, becomes a day of forgetting. Service becomes socialism. Sacrifice is trivialized. And a unique part of American history becomes a generic product with an approved message. But people still remember. Not enough time has gone by to blur history, to leech away its life and color, and turn it into a hollow lesson about how we're all the same, and we can all make the world a better place by recycling. To rewrite history, you must first wait until the people who remember it are gone or not listened to anymore. And even the youngest generation still grew up in the shadow of the lost towers. In a world where terror has become the norm.

The instinctive lesson of growing up in a world with evil, is to either fight against that evil, or submit and join with it. And we have seen both approaches practices. From the soldiers moving across Afghan provinces to anti-war activists in Keffiyahs chanting on the streets of Berkeley, from online activists monitoring terrorist activity to Americans who convert to Islam-- the choices are being made. And while only a minority are making them, the day is coming when no one will avoid being able to stand on one side or the other.

9/11 is the day we are all reminded of the illusion of the bystander, for whatever politics one may have, and however far from the front line they may think they are, no one can know the moment they will be plucked out and confronted with the reality of the evil that waits and plots, whether in the sky or on the ground. Apathy will not banish that lurking evil, our choice, as for so many victims of Islam over more than a millennium, is to submit or to resist.

There is no window between us and it. It is here. On 9/11 the war came home. And no amount of recycled soda cans will make it go away. That remembrance does not end on September 11th. Or when September ends. Even as September winds down, we must always remember, and we must work toward a world, not free of soda cans, but free of terrorists. That is our service and our sacrifice.

Back when Barack Obama was weighing down a bench Sundays at UCC, the very Reverend Jeremiah "God Damn America" Wright, was denouncing "middle-classness". Wright himself had skipped over the dreaded "middle-classness" all the way up to "upper-classness" by way of a successful father and a gullible congregation who were willing to build him a1.6 million dollar mansion. With a lifestyle like that, who needs "Middle-Classness" anyway, except the middle class?

Barack Obama, currently residing in a house worth a good deal more than a mere seven figures, certainly doesn't need it. But some of his supporters do. At the usually carefully screened town halls, one of his supporters expressed her disappointment by saying that she thought she was past "the hot dog and beans of our lives". But when you have an administration that chooses entitlements over jobs, hot dogs and beans all that remain for anything who isn't signing the welfare checks.

You can have a lot of jobs and some entitlements, or you can have a lot of entitlements, and only a handful of jobs, most of which will consist of distributing the entitlements. But you cannot have a lot of entitlements and a lot of jobs at the same time. Just like you can't have a lot of holes and a lot of water in a cup.

Liberals like to pretend that the American economy is the way it is, because a lot of big corporations monopolize everything, and if all the workers got together, the system would become magically fairer. But systems are not unfair, because there are corporations. Systems are unfair because people are unfair. Replace CEO's with Czars and managers with commissioners, and you have a system that is still unfair, but without even the remedy of being able to quit.

The free market provides a means of advancement into the middle class for the lower class, and into the upper class for the middle class. Wealth redistribution on the other hand chops up the ladder, and strands 90 percent of the population on the ground floor, while the other 10 percent toss down food and basic necessities to them, while what's left of the middle class now exists solely to manage the lives of everyone on the ground floor, convince them to get their shots, take training courses for jobs that don't exist, and navigates them through the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the social services system.

Take away the free market and you also take away the only system with a proven track record of helping the working class overcome social barriers and live a comfortable lifestyle. It was a growing economy, not a revolution, that ended the hegemony of the English aristocracy. It was that same economy which fueled anger by American merchants and farmers over exploitation and taxation and brought on the American Revolution. Compare the results to the French and Russian revolutions, which brought forth only blood, slaughter and tyranny.

The best rhetorical weapon that the demagogues of the left wields against the free market is that it is not magic, its results are not instantaneous. It is not perfect, it channels the flaws of human beings, rather than offering an immediate utopia where everyone is treated fairly and has everything they want, as soon as the enemies of the people get sent up north. It is easy enough to rant about the capitalist robber barons, Wall Street, speculators, profiteers and every other ghost and specter of greed summoned forth to be exorcised by the voodoo priests of socialism. But while the voodoo priests may exorcise the speculators and the capitalists, they can't exorcise human greed, rather they let it possess them. And the system that they oversee turns out to be far worse, than the one they fought against.

And now the American people are waking up to realize that the Hope and Change (Socialism and Wealth Redistribution Goes Hallmark) leaves them with the same choice. A revolution of radicals with a program to destroy the American Middle Class in order to finance a social revolution.

Since taking office, Obama has rolled out more massive projects than a Soviet Five Year Plan, with just as much success. Bailouts, takeovers, cash for clunkers, green energy, all of it adding up to nothing except more debt. The same things that a child could have learned from watching the decline and fall of the Soviet Union were absolutely lost on Chicago's most brilliant son. But Chicago's most brilliant son had nothing invested in promoting "middle-classness", like his mentor what he wanted was to get the poor suckers to redistribute some of that wealth his way and buy him a "house".

Obama invested in entitlements, not jobs, because the bottom line of government is to keep the money flowing to it. Entitlements accomplish that goal. Jobs do not. Once people have jobs, you have to start tearing the money away from them, and they have a way of putting up a struggle because of their foolish insistence that the money they earned and worked for is "theirs". And that kind of selfishness does not erect 1.6 million dollar mansions. No sir, it does not.

Entitlements can serve as a social safety net, when the government is flush with cash. But the cash is flushed by the people who are earning it. It does not come from the entitlements economy operating out of Washington D.C. and local state capitals. It comes from the free market. You can try to lock down the free market with union jobs, but the companies will leave. You can use those taxes to create more government jobs, but who's going to pay for those jobs? Besides the People's Republic of China, that is.

And what entitlements give you is the "hot dogs and beans" lifestyle. The cut rate medical care from doctors who are overworked, hate their jobs and hate you. And of course a chance to fill out more paperwork than a crossword puzzle addict. There's no way up the ladder, except to become one of the success stories who goes from collecting government checks to distributing them, in between attending supportive rallies for whoever is currently running the free market economy into the ground, in order to boost the entitlements economy. And that is not the American Dream. It's not even the Kenyan Dream. It's the dream of very rich men who think that everyone else should just divide up the pot to make the system work. Which is another way of saying, people who want to chop up the ladder so no one else can climb up it.

At a conference, Bill Gates mourned that people weren't willing to die 3 months earlier, in order to keep public school teachers employed. But why draw the line at only 3 months, NHS certainly hasn't. Think of how much you could save by not treating terminally ill patients at all. And what about babies born with birth defects. And the mentally retarded. Just imagine how many more union employees could featherbed to their heart's content, if only we killed every mentally retarded baby at birth. Forget eugenics in the name of genetic superiority, when we can have eugenics in the name of public sector unions. Because when there are no jobs someone has to pay, even if they're struggling for breath on a ventilator at the time.

But Socialism calls for these kinds of tough choices. If J.D. Rockefeller had stomped around hospital wards looking for patients to pull the plug on so he could hire ten more coal miners, there would be a movie about it. And you just know it would win a heap of Oscars. But when Bill Gates does it to make sure that New York City school teachers on permanent suspension for sexually harassing students still get their paycheck, even if we have to stuff a pillow over granny's face, it's downright noble.

Killing people for capitalism is evil, killing people for socialism is idealistic. Capitalism gets There Will Be Blood. Socialism gets The Motorcycle Diaries. But for all his faults, the old robber barons did a lot more to help people, than the socialists with all their red flags and their red hands did. And paradoxically, without the Rockefeller Foundation, plenty of graduates with a Masters in Philosophy and a Minor in Student Radicalism would never have gotten the chance to carve up the American educational system into a sham of a farce that mainly teaches how awful capitalism is.

Capitalism helped fund the worldview of people who believe that jobs are created by governments, rather than by employers who hire workers. And now capitalism is being destroyed by a government that thinks it can put the country deep into debt in order to create jobs, at a cost of some 50 million per job. But think of the overhead, the unions, the paperwork and all the committees who have to be paid, and all the bottled water they have to drink while meeting with the unions while looking at paperwork in order to decide how to create those jobs. And that's where the money really goes, to that top 10 percent who decide how to help that lower 90 percent get off unemployment. And then when they create jobs for a 100 people, while destroying a 10,000 other jobs, they expect applause. From the people standing around hoping to be one of the lucky 100, when they know they're more likely to be one of the unlucky 10,000.

Forget the fall of the Soviet Union, we could have taken a lesson from the EU, whose budget vanishes into unimaginable realms where it is never seen again. There are agricultural subsidies which compromise 40 percent of the EU budget that go to fund more vineyards than exist in a given country, or anywhere on earth. After spending billions subsidizing the furious wine growers of France, the EU will now improve things by instead allocating the money to "sustainable agriculture" and "biodiversity farming", which is a lot like pouring a bucket of money into a cesspool instead of a hole in the ground. The money is gone either way, but this way it goes to more interesting places.

But the only winner in the money throwing contest between Obama and the EU is China, and even that depends on the US repairing its economy, instead of going under, and taking much of China's own imaginary wealth and fortunes with it. The good news is that compared to the global catastrophe being trotted out for us, the worst deeds of Wall Street, and even a Bernie Madoff look like shoeshine boys pinching nickels. They may have bankrupted banks, but our leaders will bankrupt entire countries. We got the government into the banking business to protect us from Wall Street speculators, but who is going to protect us from Washington D.C. speculators, who think that once you go past 12 figures, you're dealing with strictly imaginary numbers.

The only note that Democrats seem to be able to play on the gilded flute of Hope and Change, is a promise to take away job creating powers from those rich people who run companies, and give it to those rich people who run countries. How the latter plan to create jobs is usually a mystery that involves a lot of paperwork, a lot of hand-waving and something distracting about creating sustainable biodiversity for the environment, as if job-seekers were looking to become a new species of tree frog.

And of course a lot of spending. Spending money that comes from jobs that don't exist, in the hope that when the jobs do exist, the people with those jobs will be able to pay back China. And if they can't, we can always borrow more to subsidize more social benefits for them. And that economic plan is a formula for the "the hot dog and beans" lifestyle.

True to form, liberal critics quickly rebounded against the woman who questioned Obama, demanding to know why she had two children in private school. Let her put her children in public school, where they can be taught how to text during classes and survive the hallways, drop her private health insurance for high class government health care, they suggest. Which is a roundabout way of saying, let her commit to "the hot dog and beans" lifestyle of government entitlements. Forget economic recovery, and embrace a Venezuelan hipster lifestyle of ration cards, bicycling to work and selling things on the black market.

And so now even those Americans who voted for Obama are waking up to realize that the only thing the government can offer them is that glamorous "hot dog and beans" lifestyle. Because you can have jobs or entitlements, but you can't have a whole lot of both at the same time.

The people of most nations have a natural tendency to believe themselves superior because of their culture, religion and way of life. Such a belief not only makes for a healthy dose of national pride, but also serves as an immune system rallying the people to fight off invasions and maintain their way of life against the winds of change.

Today in the First World however, liberals attack such beliefs in their own countries as reactionary and dangerous. Those who do believe that their country is better or that their culture is superior, are mocked as ignorant, stigmatized as bigoted and routinely compared to Nazis. This is the liberal reductio ad absurdum which reduces all forms of pride in one's group, any sense of cultural worth and national exceptionalism to jackboots and straight armed salutes. Pinning all the blame on the "National" half of National Socialist, while completely overlooking the "Socialist" part, which had a good deal to do with the economic problems that the Nazis decided to loot their way out of, not to mention the centuries of historical context that made Nazism what it was, was a convenient way for globalists to attack nationalists for reasons that had nothing to do with WW2. And everything to do with their ideological belief that the Nation-State was the great enemy of human progress.

But what happens when people who do believe that their culture, their nationality and their religion are superior immigrate into nations where the host population has been taught that they are no better than anyone else?

Contrary to liberal dogma, the result can never be tolerance. Only intolerance. And when the cultural and national sense of superiority of new immigrants is encouraged, while that of the native population is discouraged, conflict is inevitable. Under such conditions, assimilation and adaptation are out of the conquest. Why would you want to adapt to an inferior culture? Why would you respect people who don't respect themselves?

Violence by new immigrants is met by appeasement which only feeds an existing superiority complex. Liberals treat every act of violence as a response to discrimination by a racist host society, that must be remedied with more benefits, apologies and kowtowing. A process that only convinces the new immigrants that they really are superior. Because for all the talk of tolerance, they are entitled to special privileges, that the natives not. New immigrants who come from cultures where there is no notion of equality, and a wide gap between the high and the low, may accept tolerance from their betters, but not from their inferiors. Tolerance and charity from your inferiors is an insult that must be answered by showing them their place.

If liberals treated all cultures, all nations and their historical narratives of greatness as equally invalid, the results would still be disastrous, but less incompatible. But when for example, the American narrative of heroism in the Alamo is disparaged, but the Mexican narrative of heroism in the Mexican-American War is celebrated and affirmed-- then a clash of cultures is inevitable.

So too when European colonialism is depicted as evil, but Muslim colonialism as beneficial, there will be conflict, rather than peaceful co-existence. Rather than defanging nationalism, liberals only cripple the nationalism of their own home countries, while encouraging the nationalism of the new arrivals. Little wonder then that Europe looks the way it does, or that America is facing a critical conflict over its future. Sarkozy is being depicted as the embodiment of evil, because he's trying to evict illegal gypsies from encampments in France. Israel is being roasted over the coals domestically, because it wants to deport some of its migrant workers, who have managed to drop their own anchor babies in the country. Arizona's governor is being compared to Hitler for trying to check the immigration status of criminals. Cameron's immigration cap is meeting with Liberal Democratic hysteria.

The common denominator is that First World countries with very generous immigration policies are being depicted as monsters for trying to exercise some very limited authority over immigration. The United States is a country of immigrants, France and England are filled with refugees and their children, and their children's children. Israel has taken in everyone from Sudanese refugees to Vietnamese boat people. But somehow it's never enough. Because domestic liberals will always insist that immigrants from more backward parts of the world, have more rights than the country's own citizens, particularly than those citizens who used to be immigrants and actually paid their dues. Instead liberals prefer refugees, bordercrossers and migrant workers, often with shady backgrounds and little to contribute except social problems.

And their only real argument is the same old reductio ad absurdum. Deporting gypsies is bad, even if their presence is illegal, because the Nazis deported gypsies. Barak suggested that Israel deporting migrant workers with their children who were born in the country, would make Israel appear to be no different than the Nazis. Arizona checking immigration status, again no different than the Nazis. Going by such talking points, you might get the impression that the Nazis were bad because they deported illegal immigrants, not because they were genocidal mass murderers who tried to conquer the world.

Except of course virtually every country with a functioning government deports people who are in the country illegally. Sometimes it imprisons them. A country that does not control its own borders or make any distinction between citizens and people who just wander on in, is arguably no longer a functioning state.

And that is the central point of controversy. Whether nation states will continue to exist as entities with representative governments empowered to manage regions by their native populations, or whether they will give way to regional and global organizations that do not represent citizens, but the welfare of anyone and everyone in the area. The left favors accelerating the breakup of First World states using population transplantation. The less compatible the new immigrants are, the more social problems they bring with them, and the more hostile their disposition toward the natives-- so much the better. Because the goal is colonization, not integration.

In its day, the USSR deliberately mixed together population groups, deporting and transplanting different groups, where they would be perpetually in conflict with one another. Uzbeks and Koreans, Russians and Estonians, Chechens and Kazakhs, and so on and so forth. These policies bred a great deal of needless conflict, which still continues to this day. But this Divide and Conquer policy kept different groups at each other's throats where they weren't a threat. The Soviet Union did not invent this tactic, it was carried over from the Czars, and was an old tactic of empires. To break up the national resistance of a native population by colonizing it with foreigners.

But the tactics of empires have a way of turning on them. Today Russia's future is Muslim, a future that its Ex-KGB rulers embrace in order to keep the Chinese at bay. Europe's future is not the EU, not even Eurabia, but something closer to the Middle East, a squabbling mixture of angry peoples who are united loosely by Islam, but cannot stop fighting each other long enough to form the much heralded Caliphate. The future is no better for America, where Mexican nationalists will find themselves fighting African-Americans, Hmong and others who won't be nearly as enthusiastic about Reconquista once the multicultural facade comes off, revealing Mexican nationalism, and second class status for everyone else.

Liberals have been calculatedly trashing the free market social advancement and legal equality that made it possible for so many different peoples to call America home. On American shores, nationalities who couldn't stand each other at home, learned to get along. Not because they were forced to by the diktat of some committee, or an educational campaign on tolerance featuring celebrities, but because fighting no longer made sense. They did not for the most part cease to be French, Scottish, Italian, Irish, Jewish, Japanese and all those things, but they could be those things without having to fight each over them.

Legal equality and advancement through a free market, meant that fighting each other no longer offered any kind of advantage. Working hard and co-existing with others did. At least it didn't until the 1960's came along, and suddenly being a member of a victimized group and willingness to riot in the streets became very advantageous. The American experiment fragmented into a gang war, in which success was a badge of shame demonstrating that you were either one of the oppressors or their lackeys, and failure proved that you were the victim of the man. And the American middle class, that great engine of social change that had served as a firewall against socialism, began falling apart.

Being American used to mean a sense of optimism and confidence in the future. Now it has come to mean always being willing to say sorry. Americans are denounced for denying history, for refusing to admit their culpability and for not being sensitive enough to everyone else's feelings.

The great triumph of liberalism has been to hijack a formerly optimistic culture, and transform it into a pessimistic one, feeding it nightmares about nuclear war, global poverty, pollution and global warming. Snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory, they successfully turned the American dream into the American nightmare. Liberal culture took an America which had been the symbol of commercial triumph, and forced it to see itself as its enemies saw it, glutinous, barbarous, ignorant and violent. And that pattern has held true across the First World, from Australia to Israel to Italy. Only a handful of nations with a great deal of national integrity and resistance to outside influences, such as Japan, have been able to resist being force fed this mirror history of themselves, in which everything that they valued proved to be a crime of one sort or another.

But the greatest lie is the one that liberals tell themselves. In their self-deception they actually believe that Muslim immigrants will see the EU as a different breed of horse, from the nation states they are hard at work dismantling. They never stop to ask themselves, why in the world would Muslims regard the EU as any worthier of their respect and submission, than the governments of England and France? To Muslims, the EU is a means, not an end.

Having successfully discredited the histories and cultures of the countries that gave birth to the EU, the left has also discredited the EU itself. Within their ranks, a United Europe might be an event of almost religious significance, but to Muslims, it is nothing more than Europe squared. And if they are taught contempt for the countries and cultures of Europe, why should all of them piled together be any different? What the EU is to the Eurocrat, the Caliphate is to the Muslim. An inspired union that transcends the old laws and norms. And if they have to give their loyalty to something, it will be the Islamic Union of the Caliphate, rather than the secular European Union.

The situation is no better in America, where every value and tradition is being replaced by a vast bureaucracy and codes that no one knows or understands in their entirety. Without an American patriotism, or a history worthy of respect, there is no bond but that of a popular culture that is saturated with celebrity scandals and the ceaseless tabloid shriek of fame being offered fleetingly to ordinary people who manage to become elevated to a meme of their own. Without legal equality, ordinary people no longer have rights, but connections to people within the bureaucracy who can help them out. Without a free market, the best strategy is to employ those connections to make money off the government. And such a system naturally pits ethnicities and races against one another. Without law or mutual interests, such conflicts will eventually be settled with violence, as they were in urban areas during the seventies.

Without universally respected laws, the final argument is always force. And the more that argument is used successfully, the more it will be used in the future. The Tough on Crime eighties combined with the economic recovery of the nineties helped check the worst of it in America. But without economic prosperity, only force is left as a counterweight. And force requires that you be willing to use it. Meanwhile Europe is headed into the teeth of that same storm. Before the next decade is through there will be a lot more burning in Europe than cars, entire cities will burn. The left has empowered the use of violence as a tool of social change, over market economics. But their romanticism of revolutionary violence will lead to a revolution that will have more in common with Iran and Pakistan, than with the storming of the Bastille.

The left has fed the superiority complexes of refugees and migrant workers, even as it has marginalized and criminalized the superiority complex of the natives. It has done this in the name of tolerance, but the collision of two groups, one of whom has a superiority complex, will not lead to tolerance, until that latter group takes power. Then it may bestow some tolerance on those who were its former rulers, but are now its subjects.