From The Corner: Brilliant, sobering analysis from Levin.
The Obama Temptation
Mark R. Levin

I've been thinking this for a while so I might as well air it here. I honestly never thought we'd see such a thing in our country - not yet anyway - but I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places.

I can't help but observe that even some conservatives are caught in the moment as their attempts at explaining their support for Barack Obama are unpersuasive and even illogical. And the pull appears to be rather strong. Ken Adelman, Doug Kmiec, and others, reach for the usual platitudes in explaining themselves but are utterly incoherent. Even non-conservatives with significant public policy and real world experiences, such as Colin Powell and Charles Fried, find Obama alluring but can't explain themselves in an intelligent way.

There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama's name on it, which adorns everything from Obama's plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama's name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world. I dare say, this is ominous stuff.

Even the media are drawn to the allure that is Obama. Yes, the media are liberal. Even so, it is obvious that this election is different. The media are open and brazen in their attempts to influence the outcome of this election. I've never seen anything like it. Virtually all evidence of Obama's past influences and radicalism — from Jeremiah Wright to William Ayers — have been raised by non-traditional news sources. The media's role has been to ignore it as long as possible, then mention it if they must, and finally dismiss it and those who raise it in the first place. It's as if the media use the Obama campaign's talking points — its preposterous assertions that Obama didn't hear Wright from the pulpit railing about black liberation, whites, Jews, etc., that Obama had no idea Ayers was a domestic terrorist despite their close political, social, and working relationship, etc. — to protect Obama from legitimate and routine scrutiny. And because journalists have also become commentators, it is hard to miss their almost uniform admiration for Obama and excitement about an Obama presidency.

So in the tank are the media for Obama that for months we've read news stories and opinion pieces insisting that if Obama is not elected president it will be due to white racism. And, of course, while experience is crucial in assessing Sarah Palin's qualifications for vice president, no such standard is applied to Obama's qualifications for president. (No longer is it acceptable to minimize the work of a community organizer.) Charles Gibson and Katie Couric sought to humiliate Palin. They would never and have never tried such an approach with Obama.

But beyond the elites and the media, my greatest concern is whether this election will show a majority of the voters susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue. This may seem a harsh term to some, and no doubt will to Obama supporters, but it is a perfectly appropriate characterization.

Obama's entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The "change" he peddles is not new. We've seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism. It is a populist appeal that disguises government mandated wealth redistribution as tax cuts for the middle class, falsely blames capitalism for the social policies and government corruption (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that led to the current turmoil in our financial markets, fuels contempt for commerce and trade by stigmatizing those who run successful small and large businesses, and exploits human imperfection as a justification for a massive expansion of centralized government.

Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us — today it's $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals. If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he's now officially "rich." The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class). And so it is that the middle class, the birth-child of capitalism, is both celebrated and enslaved — for its own good and the greater good.

The "hope" Obama represents, therefore, is not hope at all. It is the misery of his utopianism imposed on the individual. Unlike past Democrat presidential candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue. He's not interested in playing around the edges. He seeks "fundamental change," i.e., to remake society. And if the Democrats control Congress with super-majorities led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he will get much of what he demands. The question is whether enough Americans understand what's at stake in this election and, if they do, whether they care. Is the allure of a charismatic demagogue so strong that the usually sober American people are willing to risk an Obama presidency? After all, it ensnared Adelman, Kmiec, Powell, Fried, and numerous others. And while America will certainly survive, it will do so, in many respects, as a different place.

McCain Gets My Vote
I’m for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.
By Charles Krauthammer

Contrarian that I am, I’m voting for John McCain. I’m not talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it’s over before it’s over. I’m talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they’re left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years.

I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe — neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) — yelling “Stop!” I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I’d rather lose an election than lose my bearings.

First, I’ll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory. The “erratic” temperament issue, for example. As if McCain’s risky and unsuccessful but in no way irrational attempt to tactically maneuver his way through the economic tsunami that came crashing down a month ago renders unfit for office a man who demonstrated the most admirable equanimity and courage in the face of unimaginable pressures as a prisoner of war, and who later steadily navigated innumerable challenges and setbacks, not the least of which was the collapse of his campaign just a year ago.

McCain the “erratic” is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record testifies to McCain the stalwart.

Nor will I countenance the “dirty campaign” pretense. The double standard here is stunning. Obama ran a scurrilous Spanish-language ad falsely associating McCain with anti-Hispanic slurs. Another ad falsely claimed McCain supports “cutting Social Security benefits in half.” And for months Democrats insisted that McCain sought 100 years of war in Iraq.

McCain’s critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What’s astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.

Moreover, the most remarkable of all tactical choices of this election season is the attack that never was. Out of extreme (and unnecessary) conscientiousness, McCain refused to raise the legitimate issue of Obama’s most egregious association — with the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Dirty campaigning, indeed.

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic, soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who’s been cramming on these issues for the last year, who’s never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign-policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of “a world that stands as one”), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as “the tragedy of 9/11,” a term more appropriate for a bus accident?

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign-policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts, but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?

There’s just no comparison. Obama’s own running mate warned this week that Obama’s youth and inexperience will invite a crisis — indeed a crisis “generated” precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security and vote on November 4 to invite that test?

And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he’s been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it, and — finally — deny its success.

The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.

Today’s economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I’m for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.

From hotair.com:
Obama to Tanning Bed Media:
You must tithe before worshipping me
by Ed Morrissey

After everything the Tanning Bed Media has done for Barack Obama, they must believe that they’re owed at least some free access to The One on Election Night. Instead, the TBM has discovered that they’re SOL unless they cough up some Dough-Re-Mi:

The best-funded political campaign in American history says news organizations will have to pay—in some cases almost $2,000 each—if they want to cover Barack Obama’s election-night celebration in Chicago.

Well, that’s only fair. If Obama winds up getting elected because of the cheerleading of the national media –who vetted a plumber more harshly than a major-party candidate for President — they should start paying before the rest of us pony up.

A memo sent to news organizations on Tuesday by the Obama campaign says credentials will cost $715 to $1,815, depending on whether electrical and phone lines are needed and whether an indoor or outdoor seat is requested for the event, which is expected to be held outside the evening of Nov. 4 in Grant Park.

A little advice for my colleagues in the Tanning Bed Media: think of it as spreading the wealth. Yes, I know it will go to Obama and his team, but that’s where the rest of the wealth will go, too, if Obama wins.

The only free admissions are for a “general media” area. But, the memo says, “Please note that the general media area is outdoors, unassigned and may have obstructed views . . . standing room only.”

The area also does not include access to top Obama campaign officials, whose statements likely are to be in hot demand on Election Night. They apparently will be available only in the “press file” tent, to which an additional admission fee of $935 per person is being imposed.

Sounds a lot like how government will treat its citizens in the Age of Obama. If you want access to officials, be prepared to pay, just like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did with Obama, Chris Dodd, and Barney Frank. Otherwise, get used to “obstructions” for the next four years.

Obama aides declined to answer questions about why a campaign that raised $150 million in the month of September is demanding such payments. But the memo already is drawing some protest.

Not only did they decline to answer questions, but right now they’re busy investigating anyone who still had the testicular fortitude to ask them after what happened to Joe the Plumber. Expect to see information about tax liens, divorce records, and licensing appear in the papers by Thursday.

Don’t expect too much sympathy from us for the Tanning Bed Media. The only reason why Obama’s in a position to demand tithes from the worshipping media is because journalists and editors didn’t do their jobs in the first place.

Update: I’ve explained Tanning Bed Media, but I don’t mind explaining it again. When Sarah Palin got picked by John McCain for his running mate, the national media sent dozens of reporters to Wasilla and Juneau to dig up dirt on her — and only came away with the second-hand tanning bed she bought with her own money and put in the governor’s mansion. The national media never bothered to put forth anywhere near that kind of effort to investigate Barack Obama or his connections to the New Party, Tony Rezko, the Daley Machine, the Strogers, William Ayers, or ACORN, and they had two years to do it.

From Real Clear Politics:
The Birth of the Me-Too Conservative
By Tony Blankley

With the rise to enduring power of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in 1933, a new type of Republican emerged in reaction to FDR's attractive and overawing power: the me-too Republican. Until the election of President Reagan five decades later, these me-too Republicans supported, rather than opposed, Democratic Party policies but claimed they would administer them better. Of course, this led to a half-century of Democratic dominance of American government and politics.

FDR himself cruelly mocked this pathetic breed of spineless, protect-your-career-at-any-cost Republican politicians:

"Let me warn the nation against the smooth evasion which says: 'Of course we believe all these things. We believe in Social Security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things; but we do not like the way the present administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them; we will do more of them; we will do them better; and best of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.'"

Now, on the cusp of what some think will be a major Obama victory, we are beginning to see emerge what I will call "me-too conservatives" -- initially among conservative commentators (politicians to follow). I have in mind, among others: Peggy Noonan, David Brooks, Chris Buckley, David Frum and Kathleen Parker.

Of course, they are not quite saying they are giving up conservatism for whatever it is Obama would bring. They are initially focusing on style or, in the newly arrived cliché, temperament -- a term made famous, interestingly, to describe FDR as possessing a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament.

The hopelessly enthralled David Brooks wrote recently:
"(Obama) doesn't seem to need the audience's love. But they need his. The audiences hunger for his affection, while he is calm, appreciative and didactic.

"He doesn't have F.D.R.'s joyful nature or Reagan's happy outlook, but he is analytical. His family is bourgeois. His instinct is to flee the revolutionary gesture in favor of the six-point plan." That is, amusingly, almost exactly what Vladimir Lenin's admirers, such as John Reed in "Ten Days That Shook the World," used to say in contrasting Lenin's style to the fierier Leon Trotsky. (Note: I am making a style point, not a substance point.)

But they all cast their admiration for Obama in contrast with Sarah Palin -- whom they mischaracterize through a process of intellectual and historic dishonesty tempered by cultural snobbery and fear.

For example, Peggy Noonan charges that Palin's "political decisions seem untethered to a political philosophy. . She does not speak seriously but attempts to excite sensation -- 'palling around with terrorists.' . But it's unclear whether she is Bushian or Reaganite. . She has spent her time throwing out tinny lines to crowds she doesn't, really, understand. This is not a leader, this is a follower. . She could reinspire and reinspirit; she chooses merely to excite. She doesn't seem to understand the implications of her own thoughts."

Oh, my. Has Peggy been napping up there on Mount Olympus through the past several generations of American politics? She accuses Palin of not engaging America in a Socratic dialogue, of using phrases untethered to a political philosophy. Exactly what philosophy are the slogans "change" and "hope" tethered to? American presidential campaigns, with very few exceptions, have been little more than slogans shouted in the hopes that crowds will be excited by them. The much-admired Obama campaign has been the greatest exemplar of style over substance. However, it is Peggy Noonan's completely unsupported sneer at Palin's mental capacities that is most revealing.

I think that Peggy may have unconsciously touched on what really is going on here when she accuses Palin -- who is attracting crowds as big, if not bigger than any Reagan ever drew -- of being a "follower not a leader."

Peggy's unconscious fear may be that it will be precisely Sarah Palin (and others like her) who will be among the leaders of the about-to-be-reborn conservative movement. I suspect that the conservative movement we start rebuilding on the ashes of Nov. 4 (even if McCain wins) will have little use for overwritten, over-delicate commentary. The new movement will be plain-spoken and socially networked up from the Interneted streets, suburbs and small towns of America. It certainly will not listen very attentively to those conservatives who idolatrize Obama and collaborate in heralding his arrival. They may call their commentary "honesty." I would call it -- at the minimum -- blindness.

The new conservative movement will be facing a political opponent that will reveal itself soon to be both multiculturalist and Eurosocialist. We will be engaged in a struggle to the political death for the soul of the country. As I did at the beginning of and throughout the Buckley/Goldwater/Reagan/Gingrich conservative movement, I will try to lend my hand. I certainly will do what I can to make it a big-tent conservative movement. But just as it does in every great cause, one question has to be answered correctly: Whose side are you on, comrade?

From New York Daily News:
Who are left-wing haters
to point fingers at John McCain?
BY JAMES KIRCHICK

Tuesday, October 21st 2008, 9:06 PM

In his endorsement of Barack Obama last week, former Bush administration Secretary of State Colin Powell said that "I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, 'He's a Muslim and he might be associated [with] terrorists.' "

This is a serious accusation to level, and Powell ought to have had the courage to name names.

Nonetheless, the notion that the McCain campaign, and conservatives more broadly, have stooped to an unprecedented level of "sleaziness" with negative, nasty and mendacious campaign tactics has become the accepted media narrative over the past several weeks. "Smear" is the word you most often hear nowadays next to "Republican." But while it may be true that some in the conservative fever swamps have resorted to ugly tactics, they don't hold a candle to the left's rhetoric over the past eight years.

Liberal pundits are attempting to outdo one another in describing just how unscrupulous conservatives have become. In The New Yorker last week, Hendrik Hertzberg referred to McCain-Palin rallies as "blood-curdling hate-fests." Frank Rich went one step further in The New York Times, decrying the "Weimar-like rage" of the Republican Party base, evidenced by a few attendees at a Sarah Palin rally who shouted "terrorist" and "off with his head" when she mentioned Barack Obama. Rich's fellow Times columnist Paul Krugman remarked that attendees at GOP gatherings have been "gripped by insane rage" at the prospect of an Obama presidency. Ascribing the oafish behavior of a handful to an entire political party, The Nation magazine slams the "GOP's machinery of hate" in an editorial patronizingly entitled, "Waiting for the Barbarians."

If my inbox is to be believed, there are certainly people on the right who believe that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim lying in wait to foist jihad upon the United States. And there are people who oppose him because of his name or his race. But one has to have been asleep during the Bush years to think that nuttery is exclusively a conservative phenomenon.

What about the left's conspiracy theories? A not insignificant portion of liberals in this country believe that a small group of Jews, er, the "neocons," took control of the government following 9/11 to fight wars on behalf of Israel. Is not this slander as odious as the Internet rumors about Barack Obama?

Time columnist Joe Klein fits the profile of the liberal hypocrite beset with disappointment over McCain's alleged degradation. He recently apologized to readers for writing earlier that John McCain was "honorable." This from a man who just a few months ago alleged that "Jewish neoconservatives" were disloyal Americans because their "plump[ing]" for war in Iraq and now Iran "raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel."

Rich's use of the term "Weimar-like rage," ironically in a column decrying Republican scare tactics, is but one example of the left's careless usage of Nazi allegories to describe people and policies they don't like. Since 9/11, major anti-war rallies have included people holding signs and puppets comparing President Bush to Adolf Hitler. Leftist writer Naomi Wolf, who has expressed fears that the feds were monitoring her children's letters from summer camp, recently published a book titled, "The End of America," which likens the Bush administration to a fascist junta.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann spews over-the-top, hateful rhetoric in his "Special Comments" on a regular basis. He has said that the Bush administration threatens America with a "new type of fascism," referred to the GOP as the "leading terrorist group in this country" on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, and has said that Fox News is "worse than Al Qaeda" and "as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan ever was."

Have the journalists now bemoaning the low tactics of the McCain campaign and its supporters never set eyes upon the wildly popular Huffington Post? That Web site hosts countless angry rants, many examples of which are too vulgar to document in a family newspaper. In 2004, Nicholson Baker wrote a novel imagining the assassination of President Bush. Last week, Fox's "Family Guy" depicted Nazis donning McCain-Palin buttons.

If these fringe (and most of them are hardly fringe) individuals don't speak for American liberalism writ large - as most "respectable" liberals will tell us when confronted by the examples enumerated above - then the stray hecklers at McCain-Palin rallies cannot represent American conservatism.

By imputing the crazy views of a few right-wing extremists to all conservatives, Obama supporters cut off legitimate concerns about their candidate's positions and qualifications for office. Anyone troubled by the Democratic presidential candidate's years-long association with unrepentant terrorist William Ayers and his dismissal of that individual as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood" becomes a right-wing lunatic. Anyone who raises the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is answered with an eye roll.

To be sure, the McCain campaign has made its fair share of exaggerations and distortions about its opponent's record. But nothing he or his surrogates have done is any more egregious than the lies, hysteria and ad hominem attacks that have poured from the mouths and keyboards of the left. So pardon me for being a little skeptical about the pundit class' selective indignation over gutter-ball campaign tactics. It would have been nice if they paid attention the last eight years.

Kirchick is an assistant editor at The New Republic.

From Pajamas Media:
The Real Threat Posed by Bill Ayers
by Ron Radosh

October 20, 2008 -

Paul Berman, one of the most influential political intellectuals writing today, has penned a searing indictment of former Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers. His essay is no surprise. Berman was the first activist/writer to tie SDS’s drift towards Leninism with its cadre’s decision at the Port Huron conference to admit to its ranks representatives of the American Communist Party. At its very start, SDS took the pose of “no enemies on the Left.” Writing at [1] TheDailyBeast.com, Tina’s Brown’s new website, Berman correctly calls Ayers “the stupidest man in America” who “has learned nothing” since the 1960’s when he sought to launch guerrilla warfare against the United States through his now well-known bombing campaign.

Berman continues to note that Obama “is saddled with Ayers” not only because of his past associations with him, but because of what Berman calls “a culture of mendacity on the far left in America, …that allows Ayers to go on proclaiming his own nobility and ideals, quite as if his own principles were those of any liberal-minded person, which they are not.” Berman is rightfully angry that over 3000 people have now signed a [2] petition of support to Ayers, that depicts the unrepentant terrorist as a victim of McCarthyite slander. The petition’s writers are furious that Ayers has been described as a “lunatic leftist.” As Berman writes, “if this phrase does not apply to Ayers, it applies to no one.”

It is a great shock to find that among those who signed the support Ayers petition are two editors of the social democratic magazine Dissent, educator Debbie Meier and the journal’s co-editor, Mitch Cohen. Meier signed, she explains, because her own conversations with him convinced her that Ayers “has fundamentally changed his mind” since his Weatherman days. Either Meier is disingenuous, or she has failed to read most of his recent political statements.

Their signatures are especially disheartening because the magazine, founded by the late Irving Howe in the 1950s, was once the stalwart of anti-Communist socialism as well as an opponent of the emerging New Left’s anarchism and proto-communism. Back then, Howe wrote a seminal and later suppressed essay, “New Styles in Leftism,” in which he had the honor being the very first figure on the Left to attack head on the new youthful leftists and their illusions. Years before Ayers even conceived of breaking away from SDS and founding the Weathermen, Howe pointed to the new “kamikaze radicalism, …white Malcolmism,” that he saw emerging. This New Left, he noted, castigated everything American, and thought that any talk “about Communist totalitarianism were simply…a bogey to frighten infants.”

This group according to Howe, was neo-Stalinist, authoritarian at its core, espoused black nationalism and racism, favored guerrilla warfare, and rejected the intellectual heritage of the West and a commitment to democracy. They had a “vicarious indulgence in violence,” Howe wrote, and even when merely theoretical, was still “all the more irresponsible.”

Howe might just as well have been talking about Bill Ayers today, which is why it is such a shock that some of his old associates now sing Ayers’ praises. On these points, Berman stands true to Howe’s old argument. But even Berman, who so accurately describes Ayers’ real legacy, begins by calling Ayers “a good and decent educator” whose old pre-school center in Manhattan was “first-rate,” and whose post Weather Underground educational work as a professor has been carried out with “admirable sincerity and skill.” The old Ayers:bad- the educator Ayers:good. The disjunction between proclaiming Ayers still stupid and yet a good educator today does not seem to strike Berman as strange.

Berman’s misjudgment of Ayers goes to the heart of the actual threat posed by him today. It is not that 40 years ago he was a terrorist, and that Barack Obama still associates with him. Even if Obama did not know about Ayers’ past as he now asserts, a response that is actually more than difficult to believe, he did know- and did fund through the Annenberg Challenge, Ayers’ extremely radical educational projects. All one has to do is read the many articles and critiques of Ayers written by Sol Stern for The City Journal and [3] The Wall Street Journal,to see what Ayers’ “educational” work is all about.

Stern points out, rather than being a school reformer, Ayers is “a school destroyer” who hopes “for a revolutionary upheaval that will finally bring down American capitalism and imperialism.” Rather than see public schools as a way of assimilating children, especially immigrants, into a common civic and democratic culture, Ayers sees education as the mechanism to destroy “capitalist hegemony.” One has only to look at the course outline for his UIC course on Urban Education: “Homelessness, crime, racism, oppression- we have the resources and knowledge to fight and overcome these things…We cannot be child advocates…in Chicago or New York and ignore the web that links us with the children of India or Palestine.”

Stern documents Ayers’ favored curriculum elsewhere. [4] Here he cites sections of books Ayers and Maxine Greene have edited on social justice teaching, published by Teachers College Press. Education schools are rushing to implement such a curriculum. Science, for example, is heralded as a medium that is essentially a “political activity” that can be used to transform “institutional and interpersonal power structures” that play a role in student’s lives. Math too has to be politicized. One must teach percentages and fractions by using charts of income distribution, to show students how wealth is concentrated at the top in America and benefits mainly the superrich. One has to show, for example, how military budgets for Iraq deprive Americans of their fair share of the nation’s resources.(They do not have to go into history; there the option for the radical educator is simple: assign the works of Howard Zinn.)

All these themes appear in Ayers most recent writings. In the newspaper [5] Revolution, the organ of The Revolutionary Communist Party USA, a split off from the old SDS, Ayers defines the progressive education he advocates as an education that works to promote student opposition to “the most reactionary cabal of ideologues” that control the federal government and the media. To create a genuine democratic education, teachers have to work to overturn the repressive, racist and imperialist system that he believes is the United States. Education cannot be separated from the politics of “social justice and liberation,” Ayers writes, since urban classrooms were at present merely preparing students “for prison, for unemployment and for war.” Even if Republicans lose the White House, Ayers argues that the ruling class will remain irritated by education- the one area that they cannot control. To keep education out of their hands, he argues that one has to fight to stop proposals favoring charter schools and vouchers. Ayers does not seem to realize, or care, that such reforms gain access to good education for precisely the poor whose interests he claims to represent.

Ayers, it seems, is still searching for a Latin American revolutionary hero to carry on Fidel’s cause.In a [6] speech he delivered at Hugo Chavez’s side in Venezuela in 2006. Ayers sounded like he was reliving those glory days of the Cuban revolution. Standing by Chavez’s side, he ended with “Viva Presidente Chavez!Viva La Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta La Victoria Siempre!” You get the idea.Education, he told the assembled revolutionaries, “is the motor-force of revolution,” and Venezuela shows the path of how “to overcome the failings of capitalist education.” If anyone has any doubt about how education has replaced bomb-throwing as the way to attain his old goals, reading Bill Ayers relieves one of all doubt. Against the words of those he calls “everyday liberals” and other “radicals and armchair intellectuals,” in Venezuela Ayers has found the new revolutionary paradise. Echoing Hellen Keller in the 1920’s, Ayers endorses her cry: “Let us try revolution and see what it will do now.” Venezuela, he assures us, proves that “the failings of capitalist schooling can be resisted and overcome.”

To call Bill Ayers an educational reformer, in other words, is reminiscent of the 1950’s, when old China hands called Mao “an agrarian reformer.” Yet, the Left- even some of the so-called moderate Left- continues to uphold Bill Ayers as a model. Writing in [7] The Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank penned a column “My Friend Bill Ayers.” Frank, like Obama, says that he too became Ayers’ friend when he met him in the neighborhood. Trust Mr. Frank, who also knows what’s wrong with Kansas, where regular people vote against their economic interests by regularly supporting those reactionary Republicans. And trust him about Bill Ayers, whom he calls “a dedicated servant of those less fortunate than himself.” Perhaps Frank is whom Paul Berman was thinking when he talks of “respectable” people who sing Ayers’ phrases. Not only is Ayers a good man, Frank writes, he should be “an honorary Eagle Scout.” Doesn’t Frank realize that Bill Ayers probably perceives the Boy Scouts as a homophobic and imperialist organization? After all, when the revolution comes, they would not be in the streets with Ayers’ cadre, but would probably be supporting the police and trying to pick up the nails the Ayers group would be throwing on the streets to break police car tires.

Whatever the actual exact nature of a tie between Obama and Bill Ayers there is; we can at least now be thankful for one thing. In the last debate, Obama promised that in his administration, he would not be taking advice from or consulting with Bill Ayers. Without this publicity, for all one knows, he might have considered appointing Ayers Secretary of Education. One might recall that Bill Clinton almost gave that position in his first administration to Johnetta Cole, only to pull back when he found out from David Twersky’s expose in Seth Lipsky’s Forward that Cole was associated with major American Communist front groups. Now, at least, Ayers’ nasty work will continue to be important only in education schools and in the tragic following he has created in scores of our nation’s future teachers.

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Article printed from Ron Radosh: http://pajamasmedia.com/ronradosh

Tribal Politics

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Was race a factor in the decision of Colin Powell to repudiate his party's nominee and friend of 25 years, Sen. John McCain, two weeks before Election Day, and to endorse Barack Obama?

Gen. Powell does not deny it, contending only that race was not the only or decisive factor. "If I had only that fact in mind," he told Tom Brokaw, "I could have done this six, eight, ten months ago."

Yet, in hailing Barack as a "transformational figure" whose election would "electrify our country ... (and) the world," Powell seems to testify to the centrality of Barack's ethnicity to his decision.

For what else is there about this freshman senator, who has no significant legislative accomplishment, to transform our politics and to electrify the world, other than the fact that he would be the nation's first African-American president?

Powell's endorsement follows that of another African-American icon, Congressman John Lewis of Selma Bridge fame, who switched allegiance from Hillary to Barack, while Clinton still had a fighting chance to win.

When Lewis deserted her in February, he, too, claimed a Road-to-Damascus experience, to have seen a transformational figure:

"Something's happening in America, something some of us did not see coming ... Barack Obama has tapped into something that is extraordinary. ... It's a movement. It's a spiritual event."

Lewis' desertion, however, was not unrelated to a primary challenge in his Atlanta district and angry constituent demands to know why he was not backing the first black with a real chance at winning the White House.

Powell was under no such pressure. Hence, what he did, and why, are subjects of media and political speculation.

Understandably, Powell is being hailed by the Obama media as a profile in courage. Equally understandably, his endorsement of Obama is said by Republicans to smack of ingratitude, opportunism, and even vindictiveness toward a party to which he owes his fame and career.

Here was a man who was rendered extraordinary honors by three Republican presidents. Reagan raised him from Army colonel to national security adviser, the first African-American in the post. George H. W. Bush named him chairman of the Joint Chiefs, over hundreds of more senior officers. George W. Bush made him the first African-American secretary of state.

While he may have gotten well with the capital elite with this decision, Powell has wounded his party's nominee at a point of maximum vulnerability, a friend who supported him on the war, and agreed with Powell on the need for a larger invasion force. And Powell has embraced a liberal Democrat who owes his nomination to his fierce opposition to the war Powell sold the nation, a war Obama calls the worst blunder in U.S. history and a manifestation of a lack of judgment by those, like Colin Powell, who launched it.

Joe Biden, who voted to authorize the war, now calls his vote a mistake. Yet, Powell endorses him, too, while repudiating a McCain-Palin ticket that continues to defend his war.

And the scatter-gun attack Powell launched on the GOP ticket -- hitting McCain for fumbling the financial crisis, choosing Sarah Palin, pressing Barack's association with William Ayers, and not defending Obama's Christianity -- suggests a man with scores to settle with the party of George W. Bush.

Yet, what kind of Republican can Powell be when he professes deep concern that McCain might choose Supreme Court justices like John Roberts and Sam Alito? Every Republican in the Senate voted for Roberts. All but one voted for Alito.

Does Colin Powell have a problem with Antonin Scalia? Is the general a Ruth Bader Ginsberg Republican?

There is speculation Powell feels badly used by the neocons who cherry-picked and hyped the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction he presented at the U.N., and that he harbors a distrust of the neocons now reassembling around McCain.

If so, he surely has a case, and should have made it.

But in the last analysis, one comes back to the forbidden issue of ethnicity. For example, would Powell have endorsed Hillary, had she won the nomination? After all, her views on Iraq -- having supported the war and never apologized -- are even closer to Powell's than Obama's.

The issue cannot be avoided.

After all, we are in a year where Obama defeated the wife of "our first black president," Bill Clinton, 90-10 in the black wards of Philly, and African-Americans, in one poll, are going 94-1 for Barack. And a Republican ticket that is hammering Barack on his ties to William Ayers fears to bring up his far closer ties to the Afro-racist anti-American Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Organizing a fundraiser last year for New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, an Hispanic Democrat, Lionel Sosa of San Antonio, a political strategist for Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II, said, "Blood runs thicker than politics."

Mr. Sosa is perhaps more candid about his motives than folks in D.C.

From Meridian Magazine:
www.ldsmag.com:
Would the Last Honest Reporter
Please Turn On the Lights?
By Orson Scott Card

Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

This article first appeared in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina.

From Pajamas Media:
Made My Obama Friends List,
Now Checking It Twice
by Kyle-Anne Shiver

October 20, 2008 -

When a man of so little verifiable background and experience presents himself as a candidate for what is unarguably the most powerful political position in the entire world, every scrap of detail regarding his life, beliefs, associations, and accomplishments is of extreme importance. They are all we have, especially in light of Barack Obama’s refusal to release and make public the following:

• A certified, authenticated birth certificate
• College transcripts from Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard
• Senior thesis written at Columbia
• Writings from Harvard
• Full medical records

In light of these gaping holes in his resume — holes that could be easily filled in by Barack Obama, but have not been — it becomes the duty of every voter to examine the peripheral areas of Obama’s life with utmost care, giving special attention to patterns of association that point to matters of judgment, character, and true intent.

Obama’s associations

“When you know who his friend is, you know who he is.”

— African proverb

The most problematic quality of Barack Obama’s run for the presidency at this time is that we do not really know him. Obama has repeatedly deflected curiosity about his associations with glib responses from “[1] This is not the man I knew,” to “[2] Can I just eat my waffle?” When Obama was still on the campaign trail without his [3] teleprompter, he regularly created [4] relatives and [5] events out of whole cloth, only to later issue campaign statements declaring he “[6] misspoke,” “[7] spoke inartfully,” or was “[8] mistaken.”

From these actions, what are voters to conclude? One might conclude that this not-even-through-his-first-term senator does not want Americans to know who he really is. He has not been forthcoming. We have been forced to dig for information and draw our own conclusions as the African proverb above suggests. If we see who Obama’s friends are, we will see who he is.

Friend #1: Jeremiah Wright

Obama clearly lied about his relationship with Jeremiah Wright at his last April press conference. When Obama declared that this Jeremiah Wright, revealed by widely circulated videos, was not the man he knew and declared that they had never been close, he was not telling the truth.

David Mendell wrote a favorable-to-Obama book, [9] From Promise to Power, for which he had wide access to Obama, his family members, Jeremiah Wright, and a number of other close associates of the candidate. Throughout this book, Jeremiah Wright plays a prominent role as mentor and counselor. At every decisive juncture of Obama’s rise from Trinity congregation member to the United States Senate, Jeremiah Wright provides counsel and mentorship to the rising Barack.

In a recent Newsweek article, “[10] Finding His Faith,” Obama answers questions regarding his attendance at Trinity. He now says he and Michelle really didn’t attend Trinity very often at all. “At the beginning, we went fairly frequently . . . probably went two or three times a month. When we had Malia, our first child, we went less frequently, and that probably continued for a couple of years, just because — I don’t know if you’ve had the experience of taking young, squirming children to church, but it’s not easy . . . As they got older, we would go back a little more frequently, probably twice a month.”

Unfortunately, Senator Obama gave a vastly different answer to the same question when he was running for his U.S. Senate seat. Here’s what he told Cathleen Falsani, in a face-to-face interview for the Chicago Sun-Times. In [11] March 2004, Obama said this about his church attendance:

FALSANI: Do you still attend Trinity?

OBAMA: Yep. Every week. 11 o’clock service. Ever been there? Good service. I actually wrote a book called Dreams from My Father; it’s kind of a meditation on race. There’s a whole chapter on the church in that, and my first visits to Trinity.

Friend #2: Tony Rezko

Consider this telling fragment from the Obama timeline, offered by David Freddoso in his new book, [12] The Case Against Barack Obama:

July 31, 1995 — Tony Rezko makes his first political donation to Obama.

January 14, 1997 — Tony Rezko, while claiming he cannot afford to turn on the heat in one of his slums, writes a $1,000 check to Barack Obama’s campaign.

February 1997 — Obama co-sponsors a bill that creates affordable local housing funds in order to subsidize private developers.

August 23, 2001 — A bill is co-sponsored by Obama, giving special tax credits to donors to private developers of “affordable housing.”

May 21, 2003 — Obama votes for the Affordable Housing Planning and Appeal Act, creating demand for at least 7,000 new “affordable housing” units and letting private developers circumvent local ordinances.

August 14, 2003 — Stuart Levine and Tony Rezko steer $50 million in teachers’ retirement money to an investment firm and receive a $250,000 kickback from the “finder.”

March 4, 2004 — Obama co-sponsors a bill to move forward deadlines of a developer-friendly housing bill.

June 15, 2005 — Obama and Tony Rezko close on adjacent properties in Hyde Park.

May 26, 2005 — The Chicago Tribune profiles Tony Rezko, noting that he has been subpoenaed in a criminal investigation.

January 2006 — Obama purchases part of neighbor Tony Rezko’s lot.

Those quality, affordable housing units for the poor residents of Chicago? They are now mostly [13] condemned as uninhabitable by human beings. A really super terrific use of taxpayer money.

Syrian-born Tony Rezko is now in [14] prison, after having been convicted by a federal jury on 16 of 24 counts of corruption charges. Last week, Rezko reportedly made a [15] deal with prosecutors to talk about others steeped in Chicago and greater Illinois political corruption. His “talking” may or may not lead to an indictment against Barack Obama.

As for me, what I already know is enough. This one association alone tells us voters that Barack Obama has neither the character nor judgment to be president.

Friend #3: Bill Ayers

Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers was first raised in the presidential primary [16] debates between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Obama employed his habitual deflection technique, saying only that “Bill Ayers is a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and everything he did against America was when “I was eight years old.”

Since then, Obama has been [17] forced to admit a little more here and a little more there about the real relationship he has had with him over at least 15 years. Thanks to the steadfast, persistent efforts of Stanley Kurtz at National Review, we now have more of the Annenberg Challenge [18] records that show clearly Ayers is not just some unknown guy who lives down the street from Obama, but is in fact someone much, much closer.

As Kurtz detailed for the [19] Wall Street Journal in September, Obama’s only executive experience — period — has been working with Bill Ayers on the Annenberg Challenge and its radical education/indoctrination programs:

Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama’s first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers’ home.

Of course, to those on the far political left, from the 1960s onward, Bill Ayers and his radical wife, Bernardine Dohrn, have been heroes, not despicable domestic terrorists. It isn’t hard for me to understand why Obama’s alliance with this pair isn’t problematic for any of the blame-America-first crowd. But for those of us who still love America and believe in our Constitution, a working relationship with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers is enough to disqualify Obama from our votes.

Since Barack Obama has played a game of dodge-ball rhetoric concerning these associations of his — and since they are really all we know about him, his judgment, his character, and his patriotism — he has left us little choice but to vote against him in November.

Early in the year, I wrote that this election would break on the lines of those who still love America and those who clearly don’t. I still believe I’m right and that McCain will win — by a sizable percentage.

From Pajamas Media:
The Third Jihad
Will Make Cultural Islamists Squirm
by Patrick Poole

October 20, 2008

A few weeks ago Bridget Johnson [1] reported here at Pajamas Media about the jihad against free speech being waged by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) against the national DVD distribution of copies of the documentary [2] Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, in more than 70 papers. Not only has CAIR filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission against the group sponsoring the campaign, the [3] Clarion Fund, but they have also demanded that the IRS investigate the organization’s tax-exempt status, claiming that the Clarion Fund is a front group for an Israeli organization. The evidence they have provided, however, is little more than the guilt-by-association variety.

I will only pause momentarily to note the outrageous hypocrisy of CAIR calling anyone else a front for foreign organizations, especially after an FBI agent testified two weeks ago in a federal terrorism finance trial in Dallas, [4] identifying CAIR as a front group for the terrorist organization HAMAS and the international Muslim Brotherhood.

But if Obsession gave CAIR heartburn, a new documentary by the same director, [5] The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America, will undoubtedly give them kidney stones.

There are two cardinal reasons why CAIR and other Islamic extremist groups will find The Third Jihad even more deplorable than its predecessor.

The first is that the film directly challenges their claim to speak on behalf of all American Muslims. In fact, the film is narrated by Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout American-born Muslim physician, a former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander, and president of the [6] American Islamic Forum for Democracy. Jasser has been one of the most outspoken American Muslim leaders against the agenda of radical Islam in the U.S. and the organizations that actively work to advance the jihadist cause against our country. And he has done this through numerous television appearances on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and many other outlets, in print through articles and editorials, and speaking regularly on the national lecture circuit.

To have a mainstream Muslim leader — who is unashamedly pro-American and anti-jihadist; who cites his military induction oath to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, as a personal fundamental commitment; who is not tainted with multiple ties to foreign jihadist groups and Islamic terrorist organizations; whose parents came to the U.S. from Syria fleeing the very oppression and religious extremism that typifies the Muslim world; who rejects the constant grievance-mongering and endless claims of victimization of Islamic extremists; and who is willing to publicly call out groups like CAIR for their extremist agenda to undermine the very liberties that make us Americans — leading this charge might be one of the most serious challenges that these groups have ever faced.

In the person of Zuhdi Jasser, American Muslim families can find a leader that represents their values and concerns, which presumably differ not at all from the concerns of non-Muslim families — children, jobs, making ends meet. No doubt they are eager for representatives of their community who can speak for them without screeching about Zionists, Palestine, the Crusades, Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and the seemingly endless list of Western iniquities.

In The Third Jihad, Jasser pointedly attacks the central elements to the public narrative advanced by radical Islamic groups — that there is no problem within Islam, that there is no religious element to Islamic terrorism, and that any expressions of fear about the spread of Islamic extremism and terrorism are merely reflections of latent bigotry and Islamophobia of those concerned.

The threat identified by Jasser is the result of two converging trends: first, an inherent militarism within Islam itself, and second, the highly politicized and violent approach to Islam that developed throughout most of the 20th century. The three jihads referred to in the film’s title are the initial wars of Islamic conquest; the Ottoman wars that overtook the Byzantine Empire, capturing Constantinople, and pushed into the heart of Christian Europe during the 15th-17th centuries; and the final phase of jihad that we now find ourselves in, where those embracing the violent and militaristic elements of Islam seek to spread their holy war across the globe with the ultimate goal of establishing a global Islamic state governed by Sharia.

As Jasser observes, the chief obstacle to those advocating this global Islamic state through jihad is America itself.

What they have done to challenge American power is to leverage the wealth obtained through oil imperialism to generously finance Islamic extremism all over the world. Many American Muslim organizations have directly benefited from oil imperialism and ensured that radical Islam has taken root, such that what is being taught in many mosques in the U.S. is diametrically opposed to the fundamental American values of religious disestablishment, equality before the law, and the limits on the exercise of governmental power.

These breeding grounds for political Islam, financed through the riches of oil imperialism, are a direct danger to American security. The film notes that more than three dozen homegrown terrorist attacks targeting Americans have been discovered and disrupted since the 9/11 attacks.

This brings us to the second cardinal reason why CAIR will find The Third Jihad even more deplorable than Obsession: it reveals in stark terms the cultural insurgency that is taking place alongside jihadist terrorism. The film examines how the violent jihad and the cultural jihad are working in tandem to soften up the American culture to prevent any substantive response or defense against radical Islam and terrorism.

But this cultural insurgency is not the product of dark fantasies of notorious Islamophobes or part of the global Zionist conspiracy against Islam. Rather, we know about their plans for waging jihad through culture, politics, education, and law as a result of their own documents.

In the past two years, more material has been made public about the origins of CAIR and its network of allied Islamic organizations than ever before. And these [7] strategic documents calling for a “civilization-jihadist process” dedicated to “a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within” have been recovered through court-approved warrants and made public by federal law enforcement authorities. These documents have been submitted by federal prosecutors and entered into evidence in ongoing terrorism finance trials. (I must recommend the comprehensive intelligence [8] assessment of these documents and their national security implications by my friend and colleague LTC Joseph Myers.)

Thus for CAIR, The Third Jihad poses the gravest of threats — a mainstream Muslim leader possessing unquestioned pro-American sentiments issuing a clarion call about the dangers of radical Islam, who cites their own internal strategic plans exposing their intent to subvert the American system as part of “a grand jihad” in concert with the forces of violent jihad.

The message of The Third Jihad is directed at all Americans, but admittedly most Americans aren’t prepared to listen to, let alone respond to, the stark warning issued by Zuhdi Jasser. The challenge of this film is that we are already in the midst of the third jihad, whether we like it or not. The question it asks of us is the same self-examination expressed by Jasser at the beginning of the movie:

I’ve got a wonderful family that I love and a practice that I’m so proud of, and medicine has been my life. But you know the struggle of the 21st century against radical Islam is about my family; it’s about the country that I love and my ability to practice. If I don’t try to fix this and talk about an Islam that is different than the violence and the radicalism of the Islamists and the jihadists, I will leave nothing for my children and my family in the future. And that’s what I want to leave behind.

His dilemma is our dilemma: what do we want to leave behind for our children and our families in the face of the third jihad — and what are we prepared to do about it?

The Third Jihad is currently playing in limited release in theaters across the U.S. The DVD will ship on October 20 and can be ordered directly on the movie’s website. A trailer and other video clips can be viewed there as well.

From Pajamas Media:
Is Obama a “transformational figure”?
You don’t know the half of it!
By Roger Kimball

Should we even bother to have the election November 4? If Nancy Pelosi is right, Barack Obama’s chances of winning are “100 percent.” Why don’t we skip the election and move directly to the coronation–er, I mean, the inauguration–ball? Every month, it seems, Obama smashes his record of the previous month for the amount of month his campaign has raised. Last month it was an eye-popping $150 million. (Where’s all that the dough coming from? Ask Mr. Good Will or Ms. Doodad Pro.) Acorn–the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now–will help assure that Obama gets the needed votes in battleground states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. (In Lake County, Indiana, for example, 2,100 of 5,000 registrations that Acorn submitted right before the deadline were fraudulent. “All the signatures looked exactly the same,” said a county election board official: imagine that!) Meanwhile, the ducks keep lining up in a very neat row. Yesterday, Gen. Colin Powell, former Republican Secretary of State, waddled forth on Meet the Press to criticize his former boss and announce his support for Obama. The election of Obama, said Gen. Powell, would “electrify the world.”

I agree with Gen. Powell that Obama would be a “transformational figure.” But what sort of transformation are we talking about? The United States is the richest, freest, most powerful nation in history. What would it look like after Obama, abetted by a Pelosi-Reid Congress, got done with their transformation?

Yes, that’s right, Virginia, it would be poorer, markedly less free, and less powerful.

How exactly?

In a recent editorial, The Wall Street Journal toted up some of the ways the country would be likely to change were Obama elected with the expected left-wing filibuster-proof super-majority. Caveat emptor: this election is no ordinary choice-among-basically-similar political moderates. It is a choice between a liberal, idiosyncratic Republican and an activist left-wing crusader. As the Journal noted,

“this would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven’t since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s.”

Some particulars:

* On health care: you could look forward to HillaryCare with a vengeance. Think socialized medicine. Worse care for a higher price. Think Canada: 6 months to schedule an operation, more bureaucracy, worse nursing, more incompetent doctors.

* On the economy: Say hello to more, and more onerous, regulation. “The danger,” the Journal noted, “is that Democrats could cause the economic downturn to last longer than it otherwise will by enacting regulatory overkill like Sarbanes-Oxley. Something more punitive is likely as well, for instance a windfall profits tax on oil, and maybe other industries.”

* Unions: Look for a big resurgence in economy-blighting unions.

* Taxes. Say hello to taxes, taxes, and more taxes. “Taxes,” according to the Journal, “will rise substantially, the only question being how high.” We know for starters that Obama wants to raise:

–The top income tax rate
–Dividend taxes
–Capital gains taxes

And he wants to abolish the cap on the money the government takes from you for Medicare and Social Security

All of this would not only drastically increase the cost of new business initiatives in the United States, it would also put a huge burden on millions of ordinary taxpayers.

* Free speech. Remember that? We’ve already had a taste of how Obama deals with speech he doesn’t like: he tries to shut it down. When Stanley Kurtz went on Milt Rosenberg’s Extension 720 radio show in Chicago, Obama’s minions followed Obama’s order to “get in [the] face” of opponents and flooded the phone lines with protests.

There have been a lot of disgusting things about this campaign. The hysterical attack on Sarah Palin and her family was a new low. But for my money the very worst episode (so far) has been the attack on Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher. Joe asked Obama an embarrassing question. More to the point, he elicited a momentary lapse into candor from Obama, a moment, moreover, that was caught on tape, broadcast and rebroadcast, and that John McCain seized (or at least maneuvered with rhetorical paws) in his last debate with Obama: It’s not that I want to punish you for your success, Obama said, it’s just that I want to spread the wealth around. Joe the Plumber assumed that the money he made was his money. That was hist first mistake. Obama-Pelosi-Reid do not like private property (except their own): they think the government should take more and more of it and spread it around.

Poor Joe. Talk about “the politics of personal destruction”! Turns out the Clintons were rank amateurs at that game. The roof fell in on Joe. The Obama smear machine went to work. Did you know that when he lived in Arizona in 2000, his driver’s license was suspended? Did you know that he isn’t a licensed plumber? (What? He works for a licensed plumber and doesn’t need a license for the sort of residential work he does? Don’t confuse the story!) Did you know that he owes back taxes (OK, it’s a pittance, but, hey, we’re trying to assassinate someone’s character here). Joe isn’t running for anything. He is an ordinary working stiff. He was throwing a football around in his yard with his son when Obama walked by and he took the opportunity to ask a sharp question. The candidate gave an answer that was just a little too candid. Result: Joe must be publicly pilloried and the focus must be moved firmly from Obama’s answer to Joe’s alleged misdemeanors. A few days ago, Joe spoke to Mike Huckabee on Fox TV. “I asked a question. When you can’t ask a question to your leaders anymore, that gets scary. That bothers me.” As well it should. It should bother you, Dear Reader, too.

* Voting Rights. See Acorn. Think same-day, ID-free voter registration. “Can you make an X? Terrific: here’s a ballot.” In essence, an Obama administration would do for voter registration what Barney Frank and Fannie Mae did for the housing market. Gall alert: if there were a geiger counter for chutzpah, Obama’s reading would be off the chart. There has been a lot of damaging news about Acorn’s activities recently–damaging, I mean, to Obama, since the organization is essentially a shill for the left-flank of the Democratic party. Obama’s response? Ask that a special prosecutor investigate the McCain campaign and the Bush administration to discovery where these “smears” are coming from! Andrew McCarthy has the whole sorry story here.

All of this should make me unhappy, and it does. But I have not yet despaired. For one thing, as James Piereson put it in the current Weekly Standard, “It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over.” If you trust the celebrity buzz, Michelle should be over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue right now measuring the curtains and talking to the chef about stocking up on lobster and caviar. But the President of the United States is not–not yet–appointed by acclamation. Even now, he is elected by (more or less) democratic franchise. And therein glows the proverbial silver lining. As Piereson points out, while the buzz is Obama-philic, the polls tells a different story, and so does history. Yes, Obama is ahead in the polls–but modestly so: 4-7 points. Piereson reminds us of how Humphrey and Ford fought against much larger leads in 1968 and 1976 and came within an ace of winning the White House. And even more telling was the 1948 election in which Thomas Dewey was the sure thing and Harry S Truman came from behind and cinched the race.

Will McCain pull off a Truman surprise? I hope so. As I say, I think Colin Powell was right to call Obama a “transformational figure.” He, together with a large left-wing majority in Congress, would transform America from the land of the free and the home of the brave into another socialist swamp: the land of the taxed and the home of regulated.

To the extent that they are really understood, I believe, Obama’s announced policies would frighten most Americans. They are just the sort of thing that the unrepentant bomber William Ayers looks forward to. They are fine and dandy with Rev. Jeremiah “God damn America” Wright, Obama’s pastor for twenty years. They are exactly the sort of socialist polices that organizations like Acorn applaud. But what about the rest of us?

Obama represents the union of two distinct radicalisms: the old-style socialist radicalism of the 1930s and the cultural-radicalism of the 1960s. One emphasizes increased government control of business, increased government intrusion into family life, health care, education, higher taxes more regulation. The other emphasizes the agenda of multiculturalism and political correctness and the politics of redress. Obamas’s greatest triumph has been to amalgamate these different radicalisms into a smiling rhetorical mantra called “Change.”

Will it sell? In an earlier post, I said that “Whatever else it is, this election is a referendum on two very different visions of America. Obama’s vision is of country crippled by sin; McCain and Palin’s vision is of a country fired by high ideals and expansive opportunity.” Which has more traction? To a large extent, it depends on how successful the left’s “long march through the institutions” has been. In my book The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, I wrote that

The Age of Aquarius did not end when the last electric guitar was unplugged at Woodstock. It lives on in our values and habits, in our tastes, pleasures, and aspirations. It lives on especially in our educational and cultural institutions, and in the degraded pop culture that permeates our lives like a corrosive fog. . . . .

The question is how far outside the precincts of elite opinion that fog has penetrated. I suspect most Americans side with John McCain and Sarah Palin and Joe the plumber against the socialist mandarins who have plotted out a socialist future for America, and one that is inflected, moreover, by the antinomianism of class warriors like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. If I am right, you should not be surprised to wake up on November 5 and find that John McCain has been elected the forty-fourth president of the United States.

From New York Post:
AMERICA THE WEAK
US RISKS TURMOIL UNDER PREZ O
By Ralph Peters

IF Sen. Barack Obama is elected president, our republic will survive, but our international strategy and some of our allies may not. His first year in office would conjure globe-spanning challenges as our enemies piled on to exploit his weakness.

Add in Sen. Joe Biden - with his track record of calling every major foreign-policy crisis wrong for 35 years - as vice president and de facto secretary of State, and we'd face a formula for strategic disaster.

Where would the avalanche of confrontations come from?

* Al Qaeda. Pandering to his extreme base, Obama has projected an image of being soft on terror. Toss in his promise to abandon Iraq, and you can be sure that al Qaeda will pull out all the stops to kill as many Americans as possible - in Iraq, Afghanistan and, if they can, here at home - hoping that America will throw away the victories our troops bought with their blood.

* Pakistan. As this nuclear-armed country of 170 million anti-American Muslims grows more fragile by the day, the save-the-Taliban elements in the Pakistani intelligence services and body politic will avoid taking serious action against "their" terrorists (while theatrically annoying Taliban elements they can't control). The Pakistanis think Obama would lose Afghanistan - and they believe they can reap the subsequent whirlwind.

* Iran. Got nukes? If the Iranians are as far along with their nuclear program as some reports insist, expect a mushroom cloud above an Iranian test range next year. Even without nukes, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would try the new administration's temper in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf.

* Israel. In the Middle East, Obama's election would be read as the end of staunch US support for Israel. Backed by Syria and Iran, Hezbollah would provoke another, far-bloodier war with Israel. Lebanon would disintegrate.

* Saudi Arabia. Post-9/11 attention to poisonous Saudi proselytizing forced the kingdom to be more discreet in fomenting terrorism and religious hatred abroad. Convinced that Obama will be more "tolerant" toward militant Islam, the Saudis would redouble their funding of bigotry and butchery-for-Allah - in the US, too.

* Russia. Got Ukraine? Not for long, slabiye Amerikantsi. Russia's new czar, Vladimir Putin, intends to gobble Ukraine next year, assured that NATO will be divided and the US can be derided. Aided by the treasonous Kiev politico Yulia Timoshenko - a patriot when it suited her ambition, but now a Russian collaborator - the Kremlin is set to reclaim the most important state it still regards as its property. Overall, 2009 may see the starkest repression of freedom since Stalin seized Eastern Europe.

* Georgia. Our Georgian allies should dust off their Russian dictionaries.

* Venezuela. Hugo Chavez will intensify the rape of his country's hemorrhaging democracy and, despite any drop in oil revenue, he'll do all he can to export his megalomaniacal version of gun-barrel socialism. He'll seek a hug-for-the-cameras meet with President Obama as early as possible.

* Bolivia. Chavez client President Evo Morales could order his military to seize control of his country's dissident eastern provinces, whose citizens resist his repression, extortion and semi-literate Leninism. President Obama would do nothing as yet another democracy toppled and bled.

* North Korea. North Korea will expect a much more generous deal from the West for annulling its pursuit of nuclear weapons. And it will regard an Obama administration as a green light to cheat.

* NATO. The brave young democracies of Central and Eastern Europe will be gravely discouraged, while the appeasers in Western Europe will again have the upper hand. Putin will be allowed to do what he wants.

* The Kurds. An Obama administration will abandon our only true allies between Tel Aviv and Tokyo.

* Democracy activists. Around the world, regressive regimes will intensify their suppression - and outright murder - of dissidents who risk their lives for freedom and justice. An Obama administration will say all the right things, but do nothing.

* Women's rights. If you can't vote in US elections, sister, you're screwed. Being stoned to death or buried alive is just a cultural thing.

* Journalists. American journalists who've done everything they can to elect Barack Obama can watch as regimes around the world imprison, torture and murder their foreign colleagues, confident that the US has entered an era of impotence. The crocodile tears in newsrooms will provide drought relief to the entire southeastern US.

Sen. John McCain's campaign has allowed a great man to be maligned as a mere successor to George W. Bush. The truth is that an Obama administration would be a second Carter presidency - only far worse.

Think Bush weakened America? Just wait.

Ralph Peters' latest book is "Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World."