David Limbaugh

New Column: Obama Is the Extremist, Not Conservative Talkers

Some conservatives believe that other conservatives, on talk radio and Fox News Channel, are damaging the cause of conservatism by dishonestly overstating their case against President Obama to increase their ratings and profits.

More reasonable Republican politicians, they argue, would like to cooperate with Obama on bipartisan solutions but don't have the power to resist these extremists with the megaphones and so have buckled in lock step to their demands and become the party of "no" and the purveyors of gridlock.

The problem is that the presuppositions underlying those allegations are wrong. There may be some exceptions, but the large majority of leading conservative voices are doing their very best to save this nation from Obama's policies, which they believe are leading to the nation's financial, cultural and national security ruin. Obama is a leftist, very extreme by historical standards. To compromise with his positions would not be in the best interest of the nation but would advance the cause of leftism, so any pressure conservatives can bring to bear on Republican politicians to strongly oppose his agenda is laudable.

I can't conceive of too many situations in which splitting the difference with Obama has advanced or would advance the cause of conservatism or constitutional liberty. We wouldn't reduce our debt, for example, by agreeing to reduce the levels of increases in spending. We couldn't improve the quality, cost and availability of health care by agreeing to more government intervention when we believe in free market solutions. We couldn't prudently agree to a half-measure stimulus package when we believe stimulus spending not only doesn't stimulate the economy but does further increase the debt. We couldn't agree to some compromise reductions in our nuclear and conventional forces if we believe that even these lesser cuts would jeopardize our national security. We couldn't agree to meet Obama halfway on energy policy by signing on to policies that punish conventional energy only half as much and waste just half as many billions on quixotic green energy debacles.

We can get mired in a semantic argument over whether Obama is a card-carrying communist, a European socialist, an admirer of Hugo Chavez's and Daniel Ortega's or, as he says, a fierce advocate of the free market, but such quibbling is more misleading than the labels themselves.

]]> Perhaps Obama doesn't technically favor ushering in Karl Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat" en route to the "withering away of the state" and the promised utopia. But the issue isn't whether Obama subscribes to this or that brand of socialism -- Marxism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, Leninism, democratic socialism or whatever. The point is that he's a radical leftist who subscribes to the radical leftist worldview, and many of us believe that if left unchecked, he would go much further than he's gone to undermine our Constitution and our freedom tradition. Considering the degree to which he has thwarted and circumvented the Constitution and the rule of law -- and otherwise abused his executive authority during his first term -- despite facing re-election in 2012, there is no telling how radical he might become with four more years in lame duck status.

I do think a strong case can be made that he has Marxist leanings and thus believe the term is warranted as a general descriptor. For 20 years, he belonged to a church that emphasized race and materialism more than it did Christian theology. He appointed radical czars, some of whom self-identify as Marxists, and others support Chavez's track record in oppressing media freedom. He constantly demonizes the "wealthy," business and "excess profits." He obsesses over redistributing wealth. He seems to subscribe to the Marxist theory of surplus value, believing labor never receives its fair share and often abusing his executive authority to remedy that perceived injustice. He is in favor of ever-increasing government control of business and industry -- not just health care -- and has a manifest distrust of the market.

Call him what you want, but don't tell me he isn't an extreme leftist by American standards. He might be a moderate in Europe, but not here.

If not for strong conservative voices opposing his radical agenda, he would have gone much further: larger and more stimuli, much greater deficits and debt, even higher percentages of people on the welfare rolls and not paying income taxes, an even more lawless Justice Department, a single-payer health care system, the consummation of the war on conventional energy and further wasteful green energy experiments, a more progressive income tax code, a possible value-added tax, more liberal activist judges, greater unilateral disarmament, further relaxation of border control, more government control over business -- and more.

Thank God for conservative talkers and other voices on the right who aren't deterred from doing what is right for fear of being called extremists themselves.

New Column: Time for Republicans To Take the Offensive

Two very important things happened in politics this week. First, the elections underscored just how fed up mainstream America is with extreme liberalism. Second, President Obama, with his formal endorsement of same-sex marriage, is openly casting his lot with his extremist base.

The question is: How will putative GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney interpret and respond to these events? Will he fall into the usual Republican trap of thinking he has to follow his Democratic opponent leftward to appear more moderate? Or will he show his confidence in the reasonableness of conservatism and in the American people to embrace him if he clearly articulates it?

To some extent, we are all products of our environments. We get our sense of what is "normal" from those with whom we most frequently associate, which at least partially explains liberal media figures believing that their minority views are mainstream.

They uniformly ridicule traditional American values on national TV as if they are held only by flyover throwbacks who haven't yet been exposed to the enlightened wisdom of the coasts. How else do you explain Chris Matthews' brazen characterization of the GOP as the "grand wizard" party and as flat-earthers and those who don't believe in science? Or candidate Obama's derisive portrayal of small-town Americans as bitter clingers, apparently clueless that the statement would reveal him, not those he described, as extreme?

There are countless other examples, including liberals and ex-liberals who've said that until they reached a certain age, they'd never met a Republican or conservative in their lives. And we've all seen the statistics on the staggeringly high percentage of atheism among Beltway journalists and media figures compared with the rest of the American people.

]]> Yet with their megaphones, these liberals have been preaching that their worldview is the majority position and that those not subscribing to it are wrongheaded, immoral and standing athwart the progress of history.

On top of these pressures, Romney has doubtlessly been conditioned by Massachusetts voters to some degree to think that center-left is center and that mainstream right is extreme right. I just hope he realizes the significance of polling data showing that for decades, twice as many Americans have identified themselves as conservatives, as well as the significance of state elections consistently rejecting same-sex marriage despite enormous media and leftist cultural pressure to shame states into legalizing it.

Romney is not alone. Even many center-right pundits seem vulnerable to mainstream media, Hollywood and other cultural propaganda bombarding us with the message that liberalism is morally superior. Is it not amazing that during the budget ceiling debates between President Obama and House Republicans, it was the Republicans -- you know, the ones who merely wanted to reduce the rate of increase in federal spending -- who were painted as the extremists? Couldn't you feel the palpable fear -- even among many a right-wing pundit -- that if House Republicans held their ground, they would make Obama look like the reasonable party and increase his chances for re-election?

What I'm saying is that Romney and other Republicans need to show a little more confidence in the reasonableness of conservative policies and in the American people to support them when they are plainly explained. Romney does not need to apologize for his monetary success; he doesn't need to strip high-income earners of legitimate tax deductions; he doesn't need to throw bones to the global warming zealots; and he doesn't need to pander to Democrats on student loan extensions.

If Republican candidates insist on allowing Democrats to make this election a contest over which party cares more about the American people, then perhaps they ought to make the case that compassion means we quit spending the nation and our children into bankruptcy and that we should re-establish economic policies that history has proved lead to economic growth.

But they mustn't stop there. They must also take the offensive and show that it is the Democratic Party and its left-wing media echo chamber that have been taken over not merely by liberals but by extremist liberals, most notably typified by President Barack Obama. They no longer have to rely on his past radical associations. They can point to his record of extremism in office across the board.

Obama's record is as radical as it gets (given the center-right beliefs of the electorate), and his policies have manifestly failed -- unarguably. It's imperative that Republicans make that case aggressively and unapologetically. If they do so, they'll have to spend much less time agonizing over whether they look extreme themselves.

Stop the navel gazing and read the tea leaves, GOP. Shine the spotlight on Obama and his unacceptable extremism.

New Column: Truth Is Major Obstacle to Obama's Re-election

President Obama formally kicked off his re-election campaign in Richmond, Va., and Columbus, Ohio, Saturday, and his theme was certainly not, shall we say, "it's morning again in America" -- President Ronald Reagan's optimistic re-election slogan in 1984.

Obama's central message was more like: "Hey, I realize things look bad, and I'm not going to pretend you want four more years of this. But just think how much worse it would have been without me and how much worse it's going to get if you get rid of me."

Interestingly, mainstream media journalists Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake were certain enough that Obama wasn't sufficiently forthcoming in his speech that they co-wrote a piece for The Washington Post "parsing" it. Without a whiff of disapproval, they said, "This being politics, Obama said less than what he meant. But, that's where we come in." The two then set out Obama's "most quotable lines" and followed each with their "translation of the message he was trying to send."

The writers are obviously sympathetic to Obama's agenda and, as fellow liberals, share his end-justifies-the-means sleight of hand -- whatever it takes to keep this federal juggernaut barreling along. Let's look at just a few of the quotes they highlighted.

Obama said: "I don't care how many ways you try to explain it: Corporations aren't people. People are people." The writers said Obama was responding to Mitt Romney's earlier remark that "corporations are people," and they said Obama intended to send this message: "Romney is the business candidate. I am the people's candidate."

]]> Well, Romney is right. Most corporations (excepting holding companies and the like) are owned and operated by people. But Obama must depersonalize them because it makes his attacks on business seem less personal, which brings us to another point. Obama has denied he is anti-business, but everything about him screams otherwise, and even many of his liberal defenders, from these two writers to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to Fareed Zakaria, have been hard-pressed to deny that he either is anti-business or sends unmistakable signals that he is.

Notice also how Obama framed the issue, which is revealing both as to his attitude toward business (mildly adversarial to hostile) and as to his general political worldview (us against them). He gratuitously drew a line of demarcation between corporations (read: business) and people. This is a false choice. Why can't we be pro-corporation and pro-people? Shouldn't an American president be bullish on both? The answer is yes, but Obama can't be; his class-conscious ideology forbids it, and electoral imperatives demand that he demonize his political opponents, which is why his hype about all of us coming together as one rings so hollow and disingenuous.

If you still doubt Obama's mindset, you should consider another quote: "We came together because we believe that in America, your success shouldn't be determined by the circumstances of your birth." Is there any way to read this statement apart from the drippingly bellicose class warfare resentment it connotes?

Obama also said, "Osama bin Laden is no longer a threat to this country." Not to dabble in ancient Greek philosophy, but I dare say that the influence of a human being, especially one who has been as pivotally important to al-Qaida's ongoing jihad against the United States and its allies, can live well beyond the grave.

What's more naive and even dangerous about the statement is that it implies that bin Laden's death justifies the false hope that the enemy is less determined to destroy us than before and that we may now relax our guard. Yes, we get that Obama wants to keep reminding us that he issued the kill order for bin Laden, but let's not give him the further leeway of overblowing the significance of the kill to the war on terror.

This whole issue is a bit spooky when you consider Obama's double-minded approach to the war. On the one hand, he would have us believe it's darn near over; he's replaced our so-called jingoistic rhetoric with such gems as kinetic military actions and overseas contingency operations, and he seems to believe his overt efforts to reach out to the Muslim world, including flowery panegyrics to Muslim culture and the construction of Gitmo basketball courts, have mitigated Islamist hatred toward America and the West. (Polls emphatically say otherwise.) On the other hand, he's operating assassination drones like a repressed schoolboy with new toys and indulging in indefinite detentions of enemy combatants, as if wholly unaware of what the other half of his split personality has been preaching.

I've just scratched the surface, but the inescapable conclusion is that Obama cannot spin his domestic and foreign policy records enough to conceal the truth of his actual record. Indeed, the stubborn truth will be his greatest obstacle in November.

New Column: Piers Morgan Slays Himself in Goldberg Interview

There was a silver lining for Jonah Goldberg in Piers Morgan's ambush interview of him allegedly concerning his new book, "The Tyranny of Cliches." Jonah couldn't have written a better script to illustrate his book's theme.

Someone really should explain to Morgan that when a host invites a guest to discuss the guest's book, the host ought to at least make a good-faith effort to pretend he has the slightest interest in allowing the author to expound on the book's contents -- as opposed to using the author as a prop to indulge the interviewer's own arguments against conservatives and their toxic opinions.

That someone might also inform Morgan that it's a perversion of the Socratic method for an interviewer to badger a guest into admitting the rhetorical premises of the interviewer's opinions rather than lead him through carefully constructed logical arguments to those conclusions -- never allowing the guest fully to answer his questions, never listening to his responses, making every one of his follow-up questions a classic non sequitur and putting words in the guest's mouth for the purpose of constructing and then demolishing various straw men.

The central theme of Jonah's book, which he explained in response to the only germane question Morgan posed in the interview, is that though pretty much everyone is ideological, conservatives are honest about it, and liberals are not. Liberals lie about their own ideological proclivities, mostly to themselves but also to others.

Let me briefly unpack the interview to illustrate precisely how accurate Goldberg is and how, during the interview, Morgan became a personification of the book's theme -- all without having the slightest clue he was doing so.

]]> Early in the interview, Morgan launched into an accusatory tirade about conservatives' unfair criticism of President Obama for his decision to take out Osama bin Laden. As Goldberg pointed out -- in between Morgan's interruptions -- most conservative criticism has been directed not at Obama's decision but at his unpresidential gloating about it after promising he wouldn't "spike the football" and at Obama's ad suggesting that Mitt Romney wouldn't have made a similar decision.

But Morgan seemed hellbent on proving Goldberg's thesis by showing he couldn't get beyond his cliched thinking to deal with the arguments Goldberg was making instead of those he was projecting on to him. Morgan insisted on mischaracterizing Goldberg's beef with Obama's decision as a knee-jerk ideological Republican reaction. (Morgan refused to grasp that the criticism was over the ad.) "I can't understand how any Republican can genuinely criticize (the decision)," pleaded Morgan.

When he finally did belatedly address Goldberg's actual point, Morgan noted that Obama's ad was fair game because Romney would have done the same to Obama had the tables been turned. Goldberg explained that the ad unfairly took Romney's remark out of context because Romney was comparing the importance of capturing a major figurehead (bin Laden) with otherwise successfully prosecuting the overall war on terror. Of course Romney would have given the kill order against bin Laden had he been presented with it.

When Morgan claimed that Romney's earlier statements implied he wouldn't have spent the necessary money to capture bin Laden, Goldberg shot back that it was a relatively cheap operation. Morgan, visibly shellshocked, demanded to know how much Goldberg thought it cost.

After being waterboarded into answering, Jonah ventured a guess of $50 million, after which Morgan spent the next several minutes sputtering indignantly about how a Republican such as Goldberg could think $50 million is pocket change. "Wow, and that's cheap in the Republican world? ... No wonder the country got into the mess it did," said Morgan, the exasperated fiscal hawk. Voila, Goldberg's nuanced argument about Romney's actual position was transmogrified by the ideologically cliched liberal Morgan into some bizarre class-warfare screed.

At one point in the interview, the prey (Goldberg) captured the hunter (Morgan), with Morgan exclaiming, "I'm not batting for Democrats or Republicans," to which Goldberg replied during one of Morgan's rare pauses for oxygen, "If you're not batting for Democrats, it's a wonderful approximation of it." Game, set, match.

You see, Morgan obviously doesn't believe he's displaying a liberal bias. He is, undeniably, lying to himself -- again, vindicating Goldberg's argument.

But Morgan wasn't finished. He said, "No, I like to deal with reality." Goldberg may have been thinking to himself, "Wow, he has no idea how thoroughly he is validating my book." For on Page 14, Goldberg described this very liberal mindset: "They hide their ideological agenda within Trojan Horse cliches and smug assertions that they are simply pragmatists, fact finders, and empiricists who are clearheaded slaves to 'what works.'"

Perhaps Morgan didn't get past Page 13 of the book, but you should; it's a fabulous, trenchant, insightful read, about which I shall have more to say later.

New Column: Obama Is Headed Anywhere but Forward

You have to hand it to President Obama and his cabal of re-election strategists; they are masters of illusion. Their newly released Web video and its accompanying campaign slogan, "Forward," are science fiction-level fantastical.

We're all familiar with Obama's penchant for deflecting responsibility and blaming his policy failures on George W. Bush, but after more than three years in office for Obama, it has gone from childish mischief to juvenile delinquency. This is a question for Guinness: Has any other president run for re-election against the record of his retired predecessor?

Indeed, Obama is still feeding us this dodge years beyond its spoil date, apparently hoping we won't realize we have salmonella until he's safely voted in to his second term.

Watch the video. In the words of The Hill's John Easley, "it blames GOP policies for the still-sluggish economy."

It attempts to draw a clear dichotomy between the dark days of the last year of Bush's term and the glorious remedial reign of President Obama, which began in January 2009.

]]> The first period is depicted as one of excessive job losses, the housing and foreclosure crisis, the stock market free fall, and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, with ominous images of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the sinister masterminds of these disasters, strategically placed throughout, for maximum effect.

The second period begins with the inauguration of President Obama, underscoring his heroic agenda -- the one Obama has cited in placing himself among the greatest American presidents -- the stimulus, the GM and Chrysler bailouts, financial reform, the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," bringing the Iraq War to a close and, of course, the killing of Osama bin Laden. Before the video ends, the video dutifully boasts about Obama's signature "accomplishment," Obamacare, going so far as to include the controversial birth control mandate in his plus column. Likewise with his green energy policies.

According to the video, the most polarizing chief executive in the history of the American presidency is not the cause of our current dreadful economic conditions, about which, in any event, the White House is mostly in denial, as we'll see. Nor is Obama to blame for our nearly unprecedented partisan acrimony. No, the root of our problems is obstructionist GOP Republicans, who -- along with their evil media mouthpieces Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck -- "instead of working together to lift America up ... (have waged) a campaign to tear the president down."

But despite the pernicious efforts of the GOP and its loudmouth conservative co-conspirators to thwart President Obama's salutary agenda, Obama has persevered and triumphed. That's right; his record is not one of failure but one of extraordinary achievement against this right-wing hydra and the multifaceted adversity it has hurled at him.

In fact, the White House would have us believe the economy is doing pretty well. "The president's stimulus plan saved up to 4.2 million jobs" and has given us steady economic growth, and the manufacturing sector is going gangbusters.

What this little clip doesn't tell you -- apart from the meaningless and immeasurable metric of "saved jobs," which has now been further diluted to the ludicrous rendering "saved up to" -- is how much these possibly or possibly not saved jobs cost the American taxpayer. It doesn't reveal Obama's miserable record in creating new private-sector jobs or that overall, he has delivered us a net loss of millions of jobs and unemployment at levels consistently 60 percent higher than what economists consider normal.

It doesn't report that taxpayers lost billions on his vaunted auto bailouts or that through his abuses of power, secured creditors were literally cheated out of their money.

The video conveniently fails to mention that Obama has rightfully earned his nickname "The Food Stamp President" with the objectively measurable skyrocketing increases in government dependency payouts during his term, a great portion of which cannot be blamed on the recession, which his policies grossly worsened anyway. It doesn't disclose that Obamacare will cost nearly twice what Obama promised or that Dodd-Frank is likely to exacerbate the very problems it is ostensibly designed to prevent.

The video casually glosses over Obama's real record on green jobs, the wasted billions and the shameless corporatist corruption. It doesn't showcase his gutting of the military or his plans for radical nuclear disarmament.

But the most gaping hole in this propaganda piece is its glaring omission of the debt crisis Obama has engineered, his abdication of leadership in failing to pressure his party's Senate majority to produce a budget -- even a phony, superficial one -- in more than 1,000 days, and his egregious refusal to work on entitlement reform and balancing the budget.

Team Obama is gifted in community organizing, but not even these wizards can re-create reality to make Obama's record appear anywhere north of calamitous failure. This "progressive" president is headed anywhere but forward.

New Column: Obama Administration's Repeated Abuses Are Extension of Extreme Liberalism

Every day, we get a new kick in the gut from the Obama administration. Most recently, Environmental Protection Agency Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz was caught on video articulating his view of the agency's role in enforcing its regulations.

Aremendariz said: "It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean. They'd go into a little Turkish town somewhere; they'd find the first five guys they saw, and they'd crucify them. Then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years. ... It's a deterrent factor."

This man should be fired -- yesterday. White House press secretary Jay Carney risibly says Aremendariz wasn't articulating the attitude of the administration. Sadly, that's precisely what he was articulating.

Indeed, we've seen this attitude by the administration in countless examples, from Obama's handling of the Obamacare legislation and restructuring of the GM loans to the administration's New Black Panther voter intimidation case to Solyndra to Fast and Furious to -- oh, never mind; I have to keep this to less than 20,000 words.

None of this should surprise us. Obama is the quintessential liberal, and his administration's recurring abuses are simply the logical extension of liberal hubris born of a self-righteous certainty of the superiority of leftist ideas. This inevitably leads to dictatorial usurpations and lawlessness from the liberal ruling class.

]]> These liberals are sure not only that their ideas and policies are more effective but also that they are morally imperative -- and that conservative ideas and policies are not just ineffective but also woefully immoral.

I don't deny that, to a point, the same could be said of many conservatives, but there are major differences, only one of which I have room to go into here.

Though conservatives are just as convinced of the superiority of their ideas and policies, they do not subscribe to the maxim that the end justifies the means. Their first allegiance, in terms of politics and statecraft, is to the Constitution and the rule of law. They don't believe they have the right to thwart or circumvent the Constitution or rewrite it judicially to advance their ideas and policies, no matter how important they are.

This is not merely because they are adherents of the rule of law but also because of the high value they place on the Constitution. Their reverence for the Constitution is not a matter of idolatry or some romantic abstraction; it flows from their conviction that it is the indispensable foundation of our political and economic liberties, such that safeguarding its integrity is paramount.

Leftists -- not fully appreciating the essential link between our Constitution and our liberties or maybe just not valuing either to the extent conservatives do -- are much more willing to subordinate and undermine the Constitution when it serves their ends, all the while paying lip service to their undying allegiance to it. Further, the left, not comprehending conservatives' commitment to these principles, tends to believe, through projection, that conservatives operate the same way -- that we, too, would casually throw the Constitution under the bus to achieve our ends.

But it simply isn't true. We don't advocate using the courts to make policies that are the constitutional prerogative of the legislative and executive branches. Nor do we condone abuses of executive authority by the president himself, his unaccountable czars or his rogue administrative agencies to achieve our political ends. We understand that for a court to judicially legislate conservative policy is just as dangerous to the Constitution -- and thus, ultimately, to our liberties -- as it is for it to legislate liberalism. We realize that for a conservative administration to do end runs around the legislative branch or the Constitution is as damaging to our liberties as similar abuses by a liberal administration.

So please understand that when liberals abuse their power in these ways, it won't do for them to throw out cynical claims of moral equivalence, as in "conservatives are every bit as guilty of these abuses as we are." That might fool their fellow cynics and the uninformed, but it's fantasy. This is not because we are morally superior but because a vital component of our commitment to the bilateral social contract is that we protect and defend the Constitution.

So every time the Obama administration abuses its power in furtherance of its political ends, we conservatives are not just upset that the destructive liberal agenda is being advanced. We aren't just outraged at its lawlessness. More importantly, we are horrified that it is thereby removing more and more bricks from our nation's constitutional foundation, our republic and our liberties.

New Column: Romney Should Choose Bold Colors, Not Pale Pastels

Mitt Romney's presidential run could turn out to be a test case to resolve the long-running debate inside the Republican Party as to whether the GOP presidential nominee should run as a conservative or more of a centrist.

How often have we heard both Democratic and Republican political "experts" reciting the conventional wisdom that during primary contests, candidates of both parties must play to their respective base voters and then shift toward the center during the general election campaign? Does anyone even challenge this edict?

The first problem with this is that it implicitly suggests that all presidential candidates are first and foremost politicians who will cater their policy agenda to whatever extent necessary to win their party's nomination and the general election. Perhaps I'm somewhat Pollyannaish, but I reject the cynical view that all politicians are, in the end, political prostitutes.

I am not saying that candidates shouldn't do their best to package their messages in the most palatable and attractive form to voters; that goes without saying. But what about their substantive message -- what they really stand for?

Well, that depends on what they stand for.

Exit polling consistently shows that nearly twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservative than as liberal. Even without that data, we know that Democrats must be convinced this is true, because most of them run as moderates in national elections.

]]> Even President Obama, who is anything but a moderate, attempts to package his radicalism in conservative language. He doesn't, for example, admit his contempt for the free market; he goes out of his way to redefine capitalism to encompass his socialistic leanings and his fondness for government and business partnerships. And, to shift attention from the unpopularity (and failure) of his ideas, he demonizes people and groups to make it a contest between good and evil (as he defines those) rather than between competing ideas.

Ronald Reagan decisively won his two presidential elections by being himself -- a conservative -- not by pretending to be something he was not. Yes, that was three decades ago, but Republican presidential candidates can still successfully run as mainstream conservatives; they can better afford to be honest about who they are than can Democrats because of Americans' general conservatism.

This is not to say there aren't problems with this approach. Most candidates today happen to be veteran politicians who have been constantly bombarded with conventional political wisdom, which just so happens to be conventional liberal wisdom. That conventional wisdom dictates that the American people abhor fighting between the parties, prefer bipartisanship and glorify compromise and diluted centrism.

Further, Republican politicians have been so conditioned by form-over-substance political strategists to believe they must present themselves as compromising moderates that it's hard for them to believe otherwise.

To the contrary, Republican candidates dare not take their conservative base for granted. Energizing the base toward voter intensity and turnout is what is most important. They don't need to be wild-eyed radicals to do this; then again, mainstream conservatism is not radical or extreme -- another myth born of the liberal conventional wisdom.

I believe that people care more about what is good for the nation than whether politicians get along well enough to share cocktails at night after beating one another up all day. They care more about the sausage than they do the chaos and stench of the sausage factory.

This brings me to Mitt Romney. Among the many reasons I supported Rick Santorum is that I am confident he is more conservative and that he could be counted on to remain true to his conservative convictions despite pressure to moderate his positions. Obama has gotten us into such a mess that we can't afford much moderation if we are to turn this country around sufficiently to avert national bankruptcy, let alone a unilateral relinquishment of our status as the world's lone superpower.

I pray that Romney is as conservative as his strong supporters insist he is. And if so, I further pray that he will not be afraid to market himself as a conservative in the general election campaign.

Certain preliminary signs are troubling in that regard. Like candidate George W. Bush in the 2000 election, Romney already appears to be striving to prove that he's not a detached, uncompassionate rich elitist by further whittling away the tax deductions of the wealthy. He also seems to be gravitating toward adopting the liberal template of balkanizing, identity politics -- appealing to people as disparate, competing groups rather than as individuals who should be united as Americans.

To enhance his chances of winning, Romney must vigorously avoid "pale pastels," enthusiastically and conspicuously embrace mainstream conservatism and draw, in "bold colors," as sharp a contrast as he's capable of drawing between his blueprint for America and President Obama's disastrous record. Anything less would be a gift to Obama.

New Column: Katie Pavlich's 'Fast and Furious'

Of all the myriad scandals of the Obama administration, there is one, largely ignored by the mainstream media, that could actually be its worst.

That scandal is the operation run from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, under the Justice Department, known as "Fast and Furious," through which the federal government actually encouraged and even ordered American gun shops to sell guns -- against the store owners' better judgment -- to "straw" purchasers who were funneling guns to Mexican drug gangs while the ATF sat back and watched and did nothing.

As Katie Pavlich shows in her remarkable and eye-opening new book, "Fast and Furious: Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-Up," the whole scheme was either absolutely harebrained or, as some have more ominously theorized, intentionally designed to manufacture "evidence" for tightening gun control legislation.

Pavlich exposes how extreme gun control measures have been a top political goal for President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and other important leaders within the administration -- and she draws the lines that link this goal directly to the implementation of Fast and Furious. Just as importantly, she shows how the administration has shamelessly tried to obscure those links.

The operation resulted in the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and the murder or wounding of some 200 Mexican citizens.

]]> In the operation, there was no attempt to track the weapons sold, and some agents who tried to follow the purchasers were told to stand down. Not only that, but our government kept Mexican authorities wholly in the dark about the operation. Allowing these guns to "walk" into Mexico without surveillance and behind the backs of Mexican authorities guaranteed they would end up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels and only be recovered after crimes had been committed, which is exactly what occurred.

As one ATF agent testified to Congress, "you can't allow thousands of guns to go south of the border without an expectation that they are going to be recovered eventually in crimes and people are going to die."

In their reports on Fast and Furious, congressional investigators concluded that the Department of Justice "had much greater knowledge of, and involvement in, Fast and Furious than it has previously acknowledged." Indeed, Attorney General Holder claimed that he had been unaware of Fast and Furious until a few weeks before May 3, 2011, but it was shown that he had received numerous memos about it much earlier, which he later insisted he had not read.

Rep. Darrell Issa has said that the DOJ has spent more time and resources trying to protect the careers of its officials who knew about the operation than in holding accountable those who were involved. In fact, the evidence shows that the only ones who have been punished are those who blew the whistle on the operation, while those who were engaged in wrongdoing have been rewarded -- reassigned or promoted with their pensions still intact.

Meanwhile, the DOJ, according to the committee report, "has blamed everyone except for its political appointees for Fast and Furious." Ken Melson, then the ATF's acting director, said that the DOJ is "circling the wagons to protect its political appointees."

Though Holder told the House Judiciary Committee his office was working "tirelessly to identify, locate and provide relevant information" to Congress, Republican representatives and senators say he and his department have been stonewalling their investigation. Sen. Charles Grassley said that Justice was withholding some 74,000 pages of relevant documents from the investigators.

The ongoing investigation also reveals a disturbing lack of coordination and cooperation among the ATF, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI, all of which are under the domain of Holder's DOJ. One deputy attorney general, upon being confronted with this issue, just casually replied, "We will look into it."

The committee's report said that everyone involved was blaming others: The ATF pointed the finger at the Justice Department for encouraging the operation, and Justice blamed the U.S. attorney's office in Arizona for implementing it. DOJ officials who could have stopped the operation blamed their staffs for not bringing critical facts to their attention. Making matters worse, U.S. attorney's office personnel have taken the Fifth Amendment in refusing to testify before Congress, or the DOJ has prohibited them from appearing before Congress at all.

Katie's book is a real reporter's book, loaded with interviews with inside sources, including conscience-stricken government agents who are appalled by the politicization of the ATF. She quotes ATF agent John Dodson, who says, "I have never heard an explanation from anyone involved in Operation Fast and Furious that I believe would justify what we did."

This book, which is the best reporting yet on the Obama administration's bloodiest scandal -- and its most unconscionable one -- will make your blood boil. You should purchase and read it.

New Column: Thank You, Ms. Rosen

Though everyone is talking about Democratic strategist and Obama confidant Hilary Rosen's insolent remarks about Ann Romney, I want to discuss them, too, because they reveal her leftist mindset.

Rosen didn't misspeak; she spoke deliberately and with passion. And when given a chance to retract or soften her remarks, she doubled down -- at least initially.

Her comments came in a segment on CNN with Anderson Cooper. Cooper pointed out that in the current economy, "women are seeing jobs come back much more slowly than men are," and he asked Rosen, essentially, whether there was anything wrong with the Romney campaign's highlighting that fact and "reaching out to women on an issue that they care about, on the economy."

"Guess what?" asked Rosen. "His wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and why we worry about their future."

Though Rosen's next comment hasn't received as much attention, it exposes liberal thinking. She said: "There's something much more fundamental about Mitt Romney, because he seems so old-fashioned when it comes to women. And I think that comes across. ... He just doesn't really see us as equal."

]]> Ann Romney responded in her newly launched Twitter account, "I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work."

Back on CNN the next day, Rosen protested that she loves stay-at-home moms. "This is not about Ann Romney," she said. "This is about the waitress in a diner someplace in Nevada who has two kids whose day care funding is being cut off because of the Romney-Ryan budget and she doesn't know what to do."

Rosen's remarks, taken together, tell us that like many of today's leftists, she sees America not as a melting pot, but as a Balkanized land of categorized groups, warring against one another. She sees people as blacks, women or gays, not as individuals.

From Rosen's leftist perspective, Republicans don't care about these groups but consider them inferior; "he just doesn't really see us as equal."

As usual with leftists, she's projecting. Who's not seeing women as equals, Ms. Rosen? Deny it as you now must, but you are the one dissing stay-at-home moms, diminishing their role and its worth and dignity, and implying they are somehow inferior.

That's not the way conservative women see it; they respect women whether they stay at home or work. As Ann Romney told Martha MacCallum on Fox News Channel: "My career choice was to be a mother. ... We need to respect choices that women make." She said that Mitt had always told her that her job was more important because it would make a permanent difference.

But we must understand that Rosen's comments also transcend her opinion of stay-at-home moms. She's articulating the narrow, intolerant leftist view that if you are a member of a particular group, you must adopt the attitudes of the left, or you won't measure up. If you are black, a woman or gay and don't subscribe to liberalism and embrace its hostile identity politics, you are not an authentic black person, woman or gay person. If you are a pro-life woman, you can't fully identify with real women.

Rosen's view that the "Romney-Ryan" budget victimizes waitresses further displays the left's habit of seeing everything through the prism of identity politics. Like President Obama, she places people in economic classes, too -- the haves and the have-nots -- and the only solution they offer the "have-nots" is government assistance, not the hope of advancement through greater opportunity.

Ann Romney served up a delicious smack-down on this argument, as well, saying that she's been on the campaign trail for a year and what women are talking about are "jobs and ... the legacy of debt that we're leaving our children." She gave no quarter to Rosen's implication that the Romneys' wealth makes them insensitive to the less fortunate -- again mouthing the noxious view that unless you're part of a group, you can't relate to that group. "Mitt and I have compassion for people that are struggling, and that's why we're running."

Sorry to break it to Ms. Rosen, but the question isn't whether a president is poor -- none of them is; Obama's not -- but whether he would implement pro-growth and anti-debt policies.

Truth be told, conservatives, generally speaking, have more compassion than those leftists who relegate people to dehumanizing groups. Compassion is a very human phenomenon, not sterile political advocacy ostensibly on behalf of categories of people ripe for political exploitation.

The left's manufactured GOP "war on women" is backfiring. Thank you, Hilary Rosen, and thank you, Ann Romney.

New Column: Holder's Corrupt Opposition to Voter ID Laws

Can anyone think of an innocuous reason that President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder oppose state voter ID laws?

Obama and Holder appear to view almost everything through the prism of race or, at the very least, use race as an excuse to justify otherwise very dubious policies, from immigration enforcement to voter intimidation actions to strong-arming banks to make loans via allegations of racism.

In December, along these lines, Holder criticized redistricting maps that had been drawn by the Texas Legislature and used the opportunity to call for an aggressive federal review of voter identification laws in not just Texas but other states.

But what does all this have to do with voter ID laws? Well, Republicans have been engaged in lobbying for state voter ID laws throughout the nation as an effort to enhance fair and lawful elections and prevent voter fraud. These laws are simple and transparent; they would require voters to present a government-issued form of identification as a condition to voting.

Predictably, Democrats -- led by Obama and Holder -- claim that the move is a GOP ruse to suppress minority voting. Holder called on the parties "to resist the temptation to suppress certain votes in the hope of attaining electoral success and, instead, achieve success by appealing to more voters."

]]> Notice the automatic assumption and, in turn, barely veiled accusation of GOP racism. Notice further how utterly patronizing Holder's attitude is to minorities.

Is Holder's position that minorities are incapable of or ill-equipped at obtaining identification to vote? Why shouldn't people be required to prove they are who they say they are in order to participate in the electoral process?

I would think minorities would be offended at the suggestion that laws requiring them to prove their identity as a prerequisite to voting would somehow disadvantage them. I would think they would have every bit as much interest in ensuring fair, fraud-free elections as non-minorities.

It is sheer common sense that our election authorities should demand proof of the identity of all voters before allowing them to cast votes that will ultimately determine critical decisions affecting the future of their state and nation. I don't remember ever being allowed to vote, by the way, without presenting an ID, even though the precinct workers know me and I know them. This isn't the least bit offensive, but even if it were, it wouldn't justify jeopardizing the integrity of elections.

Political correctness causes people to adopt absurd and indefensible positions, which is precisely how we should characterize efforts to resist voter ID laws.

Obama, Holder and the Democratic Party establishment don't even bother to counter the irrefutable argument that proof of ID is essential to reduce voter fraud. Instead, they just throw out the slanderous allegation that the GOP is trying to suppress the minority vote, which itself is born of the same type of categorical judgment about groups of people that lies at the heart of the sin of racism.

I am not a big fan of so-called bipartisanship, because I think it's a one-way street for Democrats, who only demand it when they want Republicans to cater to their demands, and not the other way around. I'm also realistic enough to recognize that today the parties are so far apart in their goals for the nation and the means to achieve them that we're just better off presenting our alternative cases to the people and letting them decide. But if there were ever an issue that screams out for bipartisanship, ensuring fair elections by verifying the identity of voters would have to be at the top of the list.

The administration's cavalier dismissiveness about the need for voter identification to improve ballot security has been exposed as the cynical fraud it is with the recent release of a video from filmmaker James O'Keefe. The video showed how easy it was for O'Keefe's associate to check in as Eric Holder in Holder's polling. The video showed how easy it was for an associate of O'Keefe's to check in as Eric Holder in Holder's polling place without presenting identification, though he neither signed the poll book nor proceeded to cast a ballot. The poll worker, who obviously didn't know O'Keefe, much less Eric Holder, didn't even want to be bothered with the presentation of an ID. "As long as you're in here and you're on our list and that's who you say you are, we're OK," he said.

It's outrageous that Holder is accusing Republicans of wanting to suppress the minority vote through these laws. But it's not outrageous to suggest that Holder and his party, through their specious invocation of the race card to oppose these laws, have no legitimate basis to oppose them and indeed must have an ulterior reason for doing so -- one that involves rigging the election process in their favor.

New Column: Obama Has It Backward; Striking Down Obamacare Would Protect Our Republic

Is President Obama such a die-hard leftist ideologue that he can't get it right on judicial review, despite having time to reflect and regroup after his impertinent comments designed to intimidate the court?

As everyone knows, Obama said Monday, "Ultimately, I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress." That, he said, would be "judicial activism."

For a man who promised to upgrade the dignity of the office and held himself out as a model of bipartisanship, this president manages to insinuate himself into every imaginable issue and incident on which he has a strong opinion, from the Cambridge police to Trayvon Martin to Las Vegas tourism. If he wants his administration to engage in Chicago-style political street fighting, couldn't he at least delegate the task to one of his surrogates?

What business does he have calling out the Supreme Court while a major case is pending before it (the Affordable Care Act) and issuing an implied threat that the justices had better not defy him?

Please don't protest that I'm making an unwarranted inference. It's not as if he hasn't done something like this before.

]]> Do you remember when he looked down on members of the Supreme Court at a joint session of Congress to rebuke and ridicule them for their decision in the Citizens United case to lift limits on corporate spending on campaigns? He said, "The Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests -- including foreign corporations -- to spend without limit in our elections."

In his weekly radio address, he said that the court "handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists" and that "this ruling strikes at our democracy itself."

This public assault was so outrageous that the normally unflappable Chief Justice John Roberts told University of Alabama law students, "The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court -- according to the requirements of protocol -- has to sit there expressionless, I think, is very troubling."

Obama has received similar blowback from his remarks on the Obamacare case, though not directly from any member of the court. While acknowledging the court's power to declare laws unconstitutional in theory, he remains defiant about the impropriety of the court's doing so in this case.

It seems that when the court overturns a law liberals like or upholds a law they oppose -- irrespective of whether it conforms to the Constitution -- they cry judicial activism.

Thus, Obama and liberals go berserk when the court, exercising its constitutional prerogative to pass on the constitutionality of laws, properly strikes down laws that are incompatible with our fundamental law -- when liberals support those laws. But that's not judicial activism; it's upholding the integrity of our structure of representative government.

Judicial activism is when courts uphold laws inconsistent with the Constitution or overturn laws that are consistent with it -- mostly to achieve a certain policy result. It's when courts act as super-legislatures, making up their own laws or substituting their political judgment for that of the democratically elected legislative branch in cases in which neither statutory nor constitutional interpretation warrants it.

Judicial activism is objectionable because it strikes at the very foundation of our government, which is not a "democracy" as Obama said, but a constitutional republic. If the court upholds or rejects laws based on nothing but its own political preferences, we have a government not of laws, but of nine robed men.

If the Supreme Court were to overturn Obamacare, it would not be engaging in judicial activism; it would be reining in a renegade president and Congress from their lawless power grab and reinforcing the integrity of the Constitution -- and thus our very republican form of government and its attendant liberties.

If the court were to uphold Obamacare, it would be thrusting another long knife in our ailing Constitution and, once again, violating the Constitution's scheme of limited government, which grants expressly enumerated powers to the legislative branch -- which do not include, even when coupled with the necessary and proper clause, the right to force people to purchase health insurance.

The irony is that ordinarily, liberals don't have any problem with true judicial activism; they've long been saying that the Constitution is a living and breathing document and that the court must often rewrite it to keep it in step with our "enlightened" modernity.

If President Obama wants to prevent assaults on what he inaccurately calls our "democracy," he should refrain from efforts to intimidate the court.

New Column: Obama Touts His Record

In his excellent daily Web news summary, "The Transom," Ben Domenech says that President Obama's speech at the Portland Museum of Art on Saturday "is likely to be Obama's campaign speech from here on out." He's probably correct, so let's take a look, with an eye to whether it's likely to work.

Obama's template is nothing new. He first repeats his claim as to the catastrophic conditions he inherited from President Bush. "It's hard to remember sometimes how perilous things were when I was sworn in."

So Obama took immediate action "to save the auto industry, to get the banks lending again" and to make sure state and local governments didn't lay off teachers and first responders. Indeed, he moved so fast that "people didn't fully appreciate the scope and magnitude of what got done in those first six months, that first year."

He acknowledged he destroyed millions of jobs and presided over the worst unemployment rates in modern times, which at their best are still more than 60 percent higher than the norm and much worse when you factor in people who have quit looking for work. I mean he said that he "created almost 4 million jobs" and that "we have seen the unemployment rate start ticking down." Companies, he said, "are hiring and investing again."

Obama related that after the inconvenient distraction of saving America from President Bush, he then got about the business of fulfilling his campaign promises. He noted that he unleashed his economy-destroying, pie-in-the-sky green energy projects and war on domestic energy, er, I mean he "followed through on commitments to invest in clean energy and doubled fuel efficiency standards on cars -- and trucks -- in an unprecedented fashion."

]]> I'll say "unprecedented." The standards were not only Draconian and utopian but also imposed through administrative orders when he couldn't get enough votes in Congress to do it democratically.

Moreover, he passed Obamacare, which Americans were obviously clamoring for and remain enraptured by. And, lest we forget despite his incessant reminders, he killed Osama bin Laden, just as surely as if he'd fired the kill shot himself.

He also boasted that he made college more affordable. Perhaps, but not for the people who will actually pay, including the taxpayers, who will have to bear the cost of more unpaid student loans and the higher tuition he's ensured through government subsidies of those loans.

He reminded us that he's thrown a record amount of federal money at education with no positive results. Scratch that; he's "reformed" education.

He allowed as how he ushered in a new era of enlightenment with a new respect for science, by which I'm sure he didn't mean that his administration would a) examine all the scientific evidence on so-called man-made global warming, b) discontinue government subsidies for morally controversial and scientifically dubious embryonic stem cell research and ramp up support for the noncontroversial and already successful adult stem cell research, or c) encourage his soul mates at Planned Parenthood to examine recent peer-reviewed studies showing that significant numbers of women who undergo an abortion suffer mental health problems.

He contrasted his record and vision with those of Republicans. He said that unlike him, Republicans have actually presented a plan that would deal with our deficit and debt crises by implementing economic policies to unleash market forces and stimulate private-sector growth, as well as enacting structural entitlement reforms -- as opposed to smothering the private sector, spending borrowed money in failed efforts to artificially boost aggregate demand through yet more reckless government spending, and utterly ignoring the deficits and debt, with particular emphasis on shunning entitlement reform on the spurious basis that it would harm seniors and the poor.

Excuse my fantasies; he actually said the Republicans have "one message, and that is (they're) going to make sure that we cut people's taxes even more so that by every objective measure our deficit is worse and ... slash government investments that have made this country great, not because it's going to balance the budget, but because it's driven by (their) ideological vision about how government should be."

Wrong again. Republicans want lower tax rates -- income and capital gains -- to help grow the economy, not to steal from the poor, which, in saner times, would be understood as a logical contradiction. And they sure wish he would quit calling income redistribution schemes and reckless Keynesian larks "government investments." What is it with Democratic politicians and the English language?

But if he insists on calling government expenditures for stimulus projects, Obamacare, green energy and education "investments," I'm sure the GOP would ask that we evaluate our return on those investments using empirical -- scientific -- evidence.

President Obama's precious government "investments" are not what has made this country great, but they are helping to destroy those things that have, especially its political and economic freedoms.

So by all means, let's have this debate as we approach November.

New Column: Obama Doubling Down on His Leftist Radicalism

You can't even casually surf the Internet on any given day without numerous reminders of just how radical President Obama is -- and this is during an election year, when it should be in his political interest to mask his radicalism.

Minding my own business, I happened on an article by Jacob Laksin on FrontPageMag.com, titled "Obama's Pick for World Bank Hates Capitalism." I'd heard a bit about this before but hadn't yet studied it. I'm so used to Obama's extremism that such revelations hardly move me, much less surprise me. I know where he stands; I just wish everyone else did.

Obama has nominated Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim to head the World Bank. In 2000, Kim edited a collection of studies under the title "Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor."

The "book's radical central premise," writes Laksin, is that "capitalism and economic growth (are) bad for the poor across the world." Kim co-wrote the introduction, which includes the claim that the book shows "that the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and men." It says that even in those instances in which free trade and free markets have led to economic growth, they've done so without benefiting "those living in 'dire poverty,' one-fourth of the world's population." Can't you just hear Obama himself in those words?

One thing that helps the plight of the very poor, according to one chapter, is a socialized health care system, such as the one in Communist Cuba. The chapter's author touts that system because of the Cuban government's "commitment not only to health in the narrow sense but to social equality and social justice." As we opponents of Obamacare have said repeatedly, Obamacare is hardly just about making health care more affordable or more accessible, neither of which it will do in the end, but is a stealth vehicle to greatly expand governmental control over limitless aspects of our lives to enable the leftist central planners to effectuate "social equality and social justice" under the innocuous guise of providing health care.

]]> As with so many of its ideas, the left is wrong about the record of free markets on the poor, notes Laksin, who points to "overwhelming evidence" that economic growth raises income levels and reduces global poverty. But again, leftist ideologues aren't motivated by a desire to improve the lot of the downtrodden, domestically or globally, but by a burning passion for statism.

This book is right out of Obama's playbook. Can you not see the common thread running through these alleged glories of the Cuban system and Obama's approach to health care and his war on oil, coal and gas, along with his corresponding commitment to green energy and his various stimulus bills, all of which increase our national deficits, debt and unemployment but greatly increase governmental control?

Obama's nomination of Kim should be no surprise to anyone, considering his consistent record of radical associations and appointments, from Van Jones to transnationalist Harold Koh. For Obama, one's radicalism is not a deterrent to one's resume, but an enhancement. His appointment of Van Jones was not a mistake owing to the administration's failure to vet him as Obama's defenders later claimed once Jones' radicalism was exposed. Obama appointed Jones precisely because his administration was intimately familiar with Jones' views; indeed, the White House carved out a new position -- green energy czar -- specifically tailored for his worldview and then happily placed him in it.

Tearing myself away from this uplifting article, I next encountered one detailing Obama's ongoing fulfillment of his promise to bankrupt the coal industry -- with his Environmental Protection Agency's issuance of new proposed rules on carbon emissions, which will please the goddess Gaia but won't do much for the production of energy, economic growth, jobs or the poor, for that matter. This was after watching a report on Fox News earlier that morning highlighting Obama's obstruction of oil shale production based on other dubious environmental doom-saying.

Next, I saw John Fund's piece on National Review Online outlining Obama's background in the sordid community organizing tactics of famed leftist radical Saul Alinsky and Obama's close ties with the now fallen ACORN. According to New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor -- in her new book on Obama -- Obama still thought of himself as a community organizer when he was senator. He still does today, and, Fund warns, conservatives should be prepared for his Alinsky tactics in the 2012 campaign.

Maybe this all wouldn't be so exasperating if Obama didn't hold himself out as a uniter, but he is the furthest thing from it, as he, if anything, is doubling down on his polarizing radicalism and his unswerving commitment to a statist agenda for America.

New Column: Obamacare: Will the Court Vindicate Itself?

If there has ever been a case that could vindicate the Supreme Court as a guardian of liberty or incriminate it as freedom's thief, it is the court's present consideration of the Affordable Care Act.

At the founding of the republic, the Anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution warned that to grant the power to declare laws unconstitutional to an unelected and life-tenured Supreme Court could subvert the democratic republic and threaten our liberties.

In the Anti-Federalist papers, "Brutus" argued that though there would be strong checks on the other two branches of government, the power of judicial review would give the court the final say in overturning laws enacted by the people's elected representatives in Congress and make the unaccountable judicial branch superior to the elected legislative branch.

Brutus wrote: "The supreme court under this constitution would be exalted above all other power in the government, and subject to no control. ... The judges in England are under the control of the legislature ... but the judges under this constitution will control the legislature, for the supreme court are authorised in the last resort, to determine what is the extent of the powers of the Congress. They are to give the constitution an explanation, and there is no power above them to set aside their judgment. ... (The authors of the constitution) have made the judges independent, in the fullest sense of the word. There is no power above them, to control any of their decisions."

This was particularly dangerous, argued Brutus, because "when great and extraordinary powers are vested in any man, or body of men, which in their exercise, may operate to the oppression of the people, it is of high importance that powerful checks should be formed to prevent the abuse of it." And "this responsibility, he said, "should ultimately rest with the people."

]]> But under the proposed constitution, he noted, the court would be "independent of the people, of the legislature, and of every power under heaven." Anticipating Lord Acton's now-famous maxim that "absolute power corrupts absolutely," Brutus continued, "Men placed in this situation will generally soon feel themselves independent of heaven itself." Indeed, Brutus observed that judges could only be removed for improper conduct or "high crimes and misdemeanors"; they could not be impeached for errors in their judgment.

Alexander Hamilton fought back in Federalist No. 78, pointing out that the judicial branch would "always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the constitution," because it would "be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them." By this, he meant that the judicial scope and function was much more narrowly prescribed than those of the other two branches. "The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever."

To reinforce the idea that the judiciary was to be a weaker, passive branch -- only empowered to hear cases brought to it -- he wrote, "It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments." In fact, he said, "the judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments."

Hamilton argued that contrary to assertions that judicial review would dilute republican government -- divesting elected representatives of their authority -- it actually would strengthen it, because the court would ensure that the Constitution, which is the ultimate expression of the people's will, would remain superior to mere acts of legislation. He also anticipated that scholarly men of virtue, independent of political pressures, would render their decisions based on the law and facts.

It can hardly be denied that some of Brutus' fears have been realized through the years. The courts have hardly remained as limited in scope or as passive as theory suggested they would be. The court has, in many areas, become a super-legislature of expansive scope and, as a practical matter, is not always a passive body, because activist groups have become so mobilized, organized and manipulative that they can manufacture a "case or controversy" on almost any important issue at the drop of a hat. Plus, though most Supreme Court justices have indeed been learned, many have long since abdicated their duty to interpret the Constitution dispassionately and have adopted an activist, results-oriented approach to jurisprudence, which has systematically corrupted the integrity of the Constitution and, thus, of the rule of law and republican government.

The question is whether the court will strike down the manifestly unconstitutional Affordable Care Act and vindicate Alexander Hamilton or uphold it and thereby hammer yet one more nail in the coffin of this nation's precious liberty.

New Column: Liberal Opposition to Ryan Plan Is Delusional Demagoguery

It's one thing for good-faith conservative Republicans to challenge the Ryan plan from the right if they believe its cuts are too small and too slow, but these liberal attacks are something else again.

How catastrophic would the nation's fiscal condition have to be before liberals recognized its urgency? Is there any scenario under which they'd consider setting aside their partisan populism to come to the nation's rescue? Are they capable of even temporarily setting aside their redistributionist myopia long enough meaningfully to address the main drivers of the national debt?

As we know, President Obama hasn't addressed and won't address our financial problems. He has never presented a budget plan that even pretends to rein in entitlement spending or comes anywhere close to reducing our annual deficits to less than shocking numbers, much less reversing the debt picture.

When Paul Ryan presented his plan in April 2011, Obama mocked, ridiculed and demonized him and Republicans as wanting to inflict pain on the elderly and autistic, among other sympathetic groups. Yet when Obama's treasury secretary appeared before the House and the Senate, he admitted the administration's plan wholly fails to address the long-term debt issue and said only that the administration doesn't like the way Ryan's plan approaches it.

We are witnessing the end results of liberal policies on a wide variety of issues -- from health care to the economy to the national debt -- yet liberals can't give them up. Instead of acknowledging that their utopian dreams haven't delivered, they are shaking their fists at Republicans and conservatives, as if it were our fault that reality doesn't conform to their fantasies. They'd be much better off reading Mark Levin's "Ameritopia," but I won't hold my breath.

]]> In The New Republic, Jonathan Cohn rails against "the stunning immorality of Paul Ryan's budget." The Washington Post's editorial board denounces "Paul Ryan's dangerous, and intentionally vague, budget plan."

Cohn, obviously not given to hyperbole, suggests that no politician would ever boast about a plan that would rob health insurance from tens of millions and "effectively eliminate the federal government except for entitlements and defense spending" -- "except Paul Ryan just did."

It's not as though "tens of millions" have anything desirable with Obamacare, and whatever they do have costs multiples of what it was advertised and will also wreck the quality of our health care and greatly diminish our freedoms. So how about instead of the cherry-picking we get a little more of the whole picture?

Cohn obviously resents any proposals that would deprive liberals of the Monopoly money they use to effectuate their social planning schemes, even though extending the status quo would guarantee national insolvency and the disastrous consequences it would bring. How do they figure government dependents would fare if that were to occur?

Instead of contributing something -- anything -- toward long-term solutions to the problems they largely caused, Cohn and his fellow liberal finger-pointers are scapegoating Ryan and Republicans for offering a reasonable plan to navigate us out of this mess.

The Washington Post's editors are no better. They lead with what they pretend is a self-evident truth but what is no more accurate than their Keynesian maxim that deficit spending stimulates the economy. "There is no credible path to deficit reduction," they write, "without a combination of spending cuts and revenue increases."

Sorry, but after a certain point, tax rate increases yield diminishing marginal returns for the revenue ledger, which we've seen throughout our history at both the macro (entire economy) and micro (luxury tax) levels. No matter how high they jack up the tax rates, they're not going to produce a significant fraction of the additional revenue needed to balance the budget, let alone begin to reduce the national debt.

Try a simple exercise: Compare the Bush budgets with the Obama budgets, and see the startling amount of difference economic growth makes on the generation of revenue. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars.

I don't believe that Ryan is proposing tax cuts primarily because he believes we pay too much in taxes. I think he did so because of the practical reality that we can't ultimately balance the budget -- even with substantial spending cuts -- unless we have a growing economy that yields a bigger pie to generate sufficient revenue.

The painful truth is that Ryan's plan is modest and moderate, not grandiose and extreme. If you want to criticize it, do so on the basis that the country could use an even bigger fiscal diet, not that it is too severe.

Democrats and their liberal helpmates are stoking the flames of the fire that threatens the republic; Ryan and others are driving the firetrucks and are merely debating over how big the hoses should be.

In a saner and less polarized nation, Obama would be ousted in a historic landslide in November. He very well may be.