David Limbaugh

New Column: Obama Says He Deserves a Second Term; Let's Consider

President Obama told NBC's Matt Lauer in an interview Sunday, "I deserve a second term." Well, let's see.

He had the courage to tell the Supreme Court off for daring to defy him in its campaign finance law ruling. And he did it during his State of the Union speech, when they weren't in a position to object, showing just what a marvelous tactician he is.

He was not about to be stymied by an obstructionist Republican House that didn't buy into his Euro-fashionable idea that we're all going to die from catastrophic man-made global warming. So when those knuckleheads wouldn't pass cap and trade, his Environmental Protection Agency lawlessly imposed its own emission standards. He showed those Republicans.

He was sick and tired of our being in Iraq, an action approved by a joint resolution of Congress, so he telegraphed a date certain to withdraw. But he wasn't going to let Republicans think he couldn't flex his own muscles in the nominal cause of freedom, so he one-upped those dolts again by intervening in Libya without consulting Congress at all, much less getting its approval.

When he crammed through Obamacare against the people's will, he adroitly claimed he was acting on our behalf. Every year he's been in office, his deficits have greatly exceeded $1 trillion, and he is on course to double the national debt in five years and triple it in 10. How many presidents could pull that off?

]]> Though he has driven us to within a molecule's width of national bankruptcy and achieved -- like none of his inferior predecessors -- a downgrading of our national credit rating, he deftly managed to deflect the blame for this on Republican opposition to his wholly reckless budget plan. Not too shabby.

His Democratic-controlled Senate has failed to pass a budget in more than 1,000 days, and he has declined to exercise leadership on this but somehow managed to shift equal blame to Republicans for their inaction. Then again, what do you expect from a man who can straight-facedly blame his predecessor for his own policy failures three years hence?

He's convinced many that Republicans' only driving force is to protect unfair tax advantages for the wealthy when in fact these "wealthy" pay significantly more than middle- and lower-income earners and pay a higher rate, as well. It's not just any old Joe who without any experience can ride a perfect economic storm into the presidency and convince people against all the evidence, common sense and reason that Warren Buffett is paying a lower income tax rate than America's secretaries. That takes skills.

How many presidents have you known who could pass policies to exacerbate our national debt crisis, refuse even to negotiate on entitlement reform, mischaracterize Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan as robbing seniors of their Medicare benefits, form a bipartisan deficit commission and ignore its findings, and implement an $868 billion wasteful, corrupt stimulus bill with phantom ZIP codes and no shovel-ready jobs that he promised yet boldly insist on more "stimulus" spending?

How about Obama's ingenious exploitation of the Gulf oil spill to impose a Draconian drilling moratorium on the evil oil industry while encouraging drilling in Cuba and Brazil and his brilliant end run around a federal district judge and an appellate court by lawlessly rewriting the rule? Or his public relations coup in announcing the end of the moratorium while silently imposing a de facto moratorium through onerous rules for drilling permits, all while fibbing that he has opened more land for drilling than an Arab sheik? This, my friends, is no lightweight we're dealing with here.

Some of you barbershop political quarterbacks might think you are savvy, but how many of you could have marshaled the requisite executive prowess to prevent a major corporation from relocating one of its plants to another state to help your union friends and simultaneously claim you were acting in the national interest? Or how about killing the Keystone XL pipeline project -- with all the jobs and economic activity it would have generated -- while holding yourself out as focused on job creation? Or incinerating $535 million in Solyndra despite being warned it wouldn't work and then bragging about your courage in forging ahead with other such projects? Could you have committed homicide on the coal, oil and natural gas industries while insisting you were pursuing all options? I didn't think so.

Are you sharp enough to accuse the Chamber of Commerce of taking foreign contributions and, when called upon to prove it, masterfully claiming it is up to the chamber to prove a negative? Have you ever taken separate taxpayer jets on vacation for you, your wife and your dog while contemporaneously savaging the private jet industry?

Some of you still won't get it, probably because, like most Americans, you have "become too soft and lost (your) competitive edge." If you don't have the sense to re-elect Obama, that's your own -- I mean Bush's -- fault.

New Column: What Is It About 'No Free Lunch' That Obama Doesn't Understand?

Obama's latest homeowner mortgage relief plan is perfect for him: It both is consistent with his ideology -- duh -- and allows him to buy more votes with someone else's money, all the while pretending there is in fact such a thing as a free lunch.

The painfully superficial liberal approach to poverty gets old, as does its corollary tenet that conservatives who reject liberals' failed ideas lack compassion. Indeed, Obama seemed to devote half the words in his prayer breakfast speech to proving that Scripture compels liberal policies.

Obama's latest proof that he cares more than we do is his proposal to "give every responsible homeowner in America a chance to save about $3,000 a year on their mortgage by refinancing at historically low rates. No more red tape. No more runaround from the banks."

This has all the elements. He frames the program as applying only to responsible mortgagors; he personally gets credit for handing out this money from his legendary "stash"; government, not the market, dictates what the interest rate will be; government will wave its magic wand forbidding "red tape" and bureaucratic obstacles; and banks, one of his favorite targets, are demonized and lined up to be punished.

But haven't we had enough of this man's top-down manipulation of the market in the guise of helping people? Is he ever to be held accountable for similar failed programs he's already tried? How about that $75 billion mortgage relief plan he implemented in 2009? You know, the one he said would "give millions of families resigned to financial ruin a chance to rebuild"? The one he said would save 7 million to 9 million mortgages.

]]> Well, The New York Times reported in January 2010 that the plan had "been widely pronounced a disappointment." And "some economists and real estate experts," the Times went on, "now contend it has done more harm than good." By June 2010, more than a third of the 1.24 million borrowers who had enrolled in the mortgage bailout program had already dropped out. Nevertheless, the administration pressed forward, in complete denial that the program was failing and that the administration should be accountable. It cared, after all.

But if you buy your kid a car or give him a sweetheart loan to help him purchase one and he gets drunk and wrecks it, do you immediately buy him a new, more expensive one?

Moreover, is Obama ever to be held accountable for his entire range of economic policies that have grossly exacerbated our economic malaise and suppressed any chance of a real recovery?

If he would just get his Keynesian boot off the accelerator, quit spending money as if he were a perpetual lottery winner, stop enacting regulations to punish businesses, get behind capital gains and corporate income tax relief, stop showering recklessly wasteful "renewable and clean" energy projects with money as if he were a bitter spouse trying to bankrupt her cheating husband, and end his crusade against tried-and-tested domestic sources of energy, the economy would recover and we wouldn't have so many homeowners with upside-down mortgages to worry about. But why do all that when you can still blame Bush?

Did Obama accept responsibility for his 2009 mortgage relief plan? Of course not. He brags about it. He fails to mention his promise to save 7 million to 9 million mortgages and boasts that he's helped nearly 1 million of them, itself a dubious figure. There's no "I'm sorry it was a miserable failure," but rather "trust me to throw something else against the wall" -- reminiscent of his high-speed rail mantra.

His new plan is terribly flawed. It'll probably win him votes, but it wouldn't do anything for the ailing housing market or the overall economy and would probably hurt them. The Cato Institute's Mark Calabria debunks the idea that reducing homeowners' mortgage payments would be "a no-cost stimulus." It might give homeowners more money to spend, but it would drive down payments on mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, so mortgage investors would reduce their spending, making the net effect a wash. It would also redistribute money, regressively, from some taxpayers to homeowners and from retirees to younger homeowners. Nor would the arbitrary fee to be imposed on the evil banks be without consequences because it would reduce bank equity and thus new lending, hurting potential borrowers by reducing available credit. The plan could also reduce future home prices.

So we have a cavalier president proposing, again (remember the GM and Chrysler restructurings), to alter the terms of existing contracts to the detriment of one of the contracting parties, illegally and unconstitutionally, as if lawmakers' allegedly good intentions exempt them.

This plan moves beyond class warfare rhetoric into class warfare policy. The administration is not teaching people to fish but is stealing fish from others and giving it to them. It will not work, and it will further damage our hopes for a sustained recovery.

New Column: Let's Honor, Not Stretch, the Buckley Rule

In the intense heat of the present, it is easy to forget even the relatively recent past, but it seems to me that this GOP primary season is more acrimonious than the past few, probably because the stakes are so high.

When I've noted that this is the most important presidential election of our lifetimes, a few excitability-resistant conservative friends have said, "They have been saying that about every election for more than a generation." My response to that is:

"Yes, and it's probably been true every time. As we march inexorably toward socialism by incremental steps, the need to elect political leaders to take steps to reverse it increases on a linear plane. But with President Obama, we're advancing not by incremental steps, but by giant leaps, hurtling toward statism with alarming alacrity. Every day that passes before we implement entitlement reform, for example, the geometric accumulation of vested benefits makes reform more imperative -- and more difficult. So yes, every national election of the past generation or so has probably been more important than the immediately preceding one, but 2012 is dramatically more urgent. Based on the cavalier manner with which Obama is lawlessly thwarting the Constitution and the people's will, it is hard to imagine what kind of tyrannical executive power grabs he'd try (and accomplish) if re-elected, even with an opposing Congress. We are already on autopilot to national bankruptcy, and if we don't
ram it into reverse soon, America as we have known it could be gone, at least for many years."

Conservatives are fighting among themselves about not just who the best candidate would be but also who is most electable. Sure, electability has always been an issue, but now some are saying that to support someone, it's essential not only that we show he is electable but also that he is the most electable. This amounts to replacing the "Buckley rule" -- that "we should support the most conservative candidate who is electable" -- with "we should support the most electable candidate, provided he is at least marginally conservative."

]]> We saw a similar political calculus at work during the debt ceiling negotiations. Some argued that we couldn't buck Obama on his specious smoke-and-mirrors cuts, because to draw a line in the sand, even though correct in principle, could have been interpreted by the electorate as uncompromising and enhanced Obama's re-election efforts. Everything had to be focused on 2012.

Now many of the same people are telling us that we have to compromise on 2012, as well, that we can't support a candidate who is more conservative, even during the primary, because it would reduce our chances of defeating Obama.

I appreciate the concern, but the logical extension of this kind of thinking is that we all have to become mini political operatives, always engaging first in strategic political calculations and never voting our hearts. Such is the formula for sacrificing one's dreams and aspirations; such is the avenue toward fatalistic resignation, compromise and settling for less without even trying to push for your real goals; such is the formula for guaranteeing that we never elect another Ronald Reagan conservative.

I am the first to say that once the GOP nominee is chosen, we must unite around the candidate to defeat Barack Obama. Until then, I refuse to surrender to pressure to abandon my passion for true, reliable conservatism, especially from those whose idea of electability is highly debatable and from others whose assessment is hopelessly skewed by their own preferences.

In this volatile season, dark horses have skyrocketed to lead the field, and some might have remained there but for alleged scandals or other factors. I don't believe that the science of electability is as certain as those promoting it would have us believe. We can't even agree on whether the key is wooing the center or igniting the base. It is complex and fluid and largely unknowable. Even current polls hypothetically matching Obama against different candidates tell us very little, because the Democratic attack machine has yet to unleash its $1 billion assault on, say, Mitt Romney.

I reject the conventional wisdom that Rick Santorum could not win the general election, because I believe he represents the best contrast to Obama and is the least vulnerable to attack, among other reasons. I have varying concerns about the other candidates, but I respect their respective supporters and realize that some of them even believe their candidate is the most conservative of the group, though I disagree. I will support whoever emerges as the Republican nominee, but I do not apologize for supporting Rick Santorum.

New Column: Obama's Misstatements on the Union

Only a president long shielded from criticism and accountability could make the kind of State of the Union speech President Obama did Tuesday night. It's hard to know where to begin, given his repetition of tired ideas from his previous SOTUs, his taking credit for successful policies he resisted and omitting failed ones he promoted, his numerous misrepresentations on issues big and small, and his glaring refusal to address the main issues that threaten the nation.

Let me touch on just a few highlights in this brief space.

Excessive spending is the primary threat to our nation's and Americans' financial future, yet Obama glossed over it and distorted his record.

He said, "We've already agreed to more than $2 trillion in cuts and savings. But we need to do more." But everyone knows he's had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the cutting table. His unrelenting passion is spending. Even The Washington Post said, "Obama does not mention that Republicans forced him to accept $2 trillion in budget cuts during the debt-ceiling impasse."

Obama said, "I'm prepared to make more reforms that rein in the long-term costs of Medicare and Medicaid and strengthen Social Security, so long as those programs remain a guarantee of security for seniors." Well, that's mighty magnanimous of him, but why is he so grudging about it? As president, he should be singularly focused on entitlement reform. Yet he has obstructed and demagogued such reforms. His condition that the "programs remain a guarantee of security for seniors" is completely dishonest, because Paul Ryan's plan did just that and he rejected it while ridiculing and demonizing Ryan.

]]> Obama said, again, that to avoid Warren Buffett's secretary's paying a higher tax rate than her boss, we should adopt the "Buffett rule," prescribing that "if you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes." The Heritage Foundation tells us that according to Congressional Budget Office data, the top 1 percent of income earners already pay 30 percent of their income in all federal taxes. In addition, when wealthy people pay a lower effective income tax rate, it's a result either of lawful deductions (often charitable) or of capital gains and dividends on property they've acquired with money that has already been taxed. Also, before the wealthy realize many of these gains, the businesses that produce these gains have already paid a corporate income tax rate of 35 percent (the highest in the world). This means that Buffett, on much of this income, pays an effective rate of 50 percent (35 percent corporate plus 15 percent capital gains). Indeed,
99.4 percent of millionaires and billionaires pay far more in taxes in actual and relative terms than middle- and low-income earners, and for Obama to suggest otherwise is not only deeply deceitful but also damaging -- because of the class envy he constantly stokes -- to the social fabric of this country.

Obama said he wants to lure American companies home yet has steadfastly refused, notwithstanding his SOTU rhetoric, to agree to rectify the primary reasons they leave: punitive corporate income tax rates and onerous regulations.

Obama suggested that he is not only a pioneer in clean energy but also bullish on domestic energy. His record on the former is disgraceful, and both his claim and record on the latter are insulting. He has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars on quixotic green-energy programs with Solyndra and its cousins, spending $5 million for every single "renewable energy" job he has created. He has defiantly refused to take responsibility and is continuing to pursue more. He has waged war on domestic coal, natural gas and oil. He not only imposed a punitive moratorium on offshore drilling in the Gulf but also lawlessly reinstituted another one after federal district and appellate courts shot down his initial moratorium. When he lifted this revised moratorium, drilling remained in limbo because of the administrative obstacles his administration had imposed on drilling permits. His actions caused devastating losses to the Gulf economy and jobs, which rippled throughout the nation's economy. Most
recently, to placate his environmental extremist base, he blocked the job-producing Keystone XL pipeline for no legitimate reason.

Obama threatened to withhold federal subsidies to colleges unless they hold tuition costs down without recognizing that one of the main reasons they've skyrocketed is the profligate subsidies he continues to increase.

He railed against bailouts after having established a record as President Bailout. He blamed banks again for causing the housing crisis and economic meltdown by making loans to people who couldn't afford them, without admitting that government, mainly his party, was the primary culprit.

He said he'd established the closest military cooperation with Israel in history, but he has bullied that nation for three years, and our relationship has rarely been more strained.

Believe me, I could go on.

New Column: The Question Is Not 'Electability,' but 'Re-electability'

Republican internecine squabbles this primary season seem to turn on the vying candidates' respective electability against incumbent Barack Obama. But if even uber-liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has finally awakened to President Obama's arrogance, what does it say about his electability?

It's understandable that a lib would take so long to turn on the messiah, having invested so much in his presidency. But I wonder whether these people ever realize how late they are to the party and how utterly devoid of profundity their belated epiphanies are.

Dowd starts off her latest column describing Obama's opening appearance at a fundraiser at the Apollo in Harlem: "For eight seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected."

Unless you are a liberal utopian, such as my friend Mark Levin describes in his latest masterpiece, "Ameritopia," you wouldn't place so much faith in one deliberately mysterious man to usher in a new, unspecified era, and you especially wouldn't hold on to the painfully unrealistic hope that after three years, this man will finally present himself to be someone he has never been.

Savor a few of the tardy revelations Dowd has now come to see with pungent clarity:

]]> "The man who became famous with a speech declaring that we were one America, not opposing teams of red and blue states, presides over an America more riven by blue and red than ever."

"The man who came to Washington on a wave of euphoria has had the presidency with all the joy of a root canal."

Dowd quotes Obama's lament to CNN's Fareed Zakaria that he is only seen as "cool and aloof" because he stays at home with his daughters instead of going "to a lot of Washington parties." Dowd will have none of this, saying that Reagan didn't socialize with the press, either, "but he knew that to transcend, you can't condescend."

Dowd cites Jodi Kantor's new book, "The Obamas," in which Kantor paints a portrait of "the first couple" as people who feel aggrieved and misunderstood and who, in Dowd's words, "do believe in American exceptionalism -- their own, and they feel overassaulted and underappreciated."

Twisting the knife further, Dowd says that the Obamas, in their minds, haven't disappointed Americans. "We disappointed them."

Dowd quotes Michelle Obama, who apparently spoke too soon when she said she was proud of America for the first time when her husband was elected. The first lady said: "The question isn't whether Barack Obama is ready to be president. The question is whether we're ready. And that continues to be the question we have to ask ourselves." The Obamas, according to Dowd, are still convinced that presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett is correct that Obama is "just too talented to do what ordinary people do."

Dowd, again citing Kantor, reports that when Democrats took a shellacking in the 2010 midterm elections, Obama "did not seem to comprehend the anxiety that had spawned the Tea Party, or feel any regret," and that he told one Democratic congressman defeated in that anti-Obama wave that his loss was "for the greater good of the country."

No offense, Maureen, but we could have spared you three years of pining, even four if you care to go back to the campaign. From the beginning, for those not blinded by messianic delusions, Obama revealed himself as singularly divisive, narcissistic, cool and aloof, and dictatorial and as one who believes he is a gift to America rather than the other way around.

When Obama gave a bizarre shoutout to Dr. Joe Medicine Crow as a preamble to what was supposed to be a somber memorial to the victims of the Fort Hood shooter, British journalist Toby Harnden observed that he exhibited "curiously bloodless" behavior and a "strange disconnectedness." After his agenda was repudiated in the election for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, Obama said he wanted the American people to take another look at his plan. When Democrats lost the 2010 congressional elections, he didn't show the slightest recognition that he had anything to do with it. The American people, he said, just wanted the parties to work together.

We've known that those in Obama's extreme leftist base are discontented with him because, amazingly, they don't believe he's been liberal enough. But now we have a prominent media liberal in Maureen Dowd acknowledging that he is an empty shell. With that in mind, how about the vaunted independents?

Think about it, folks. Next time you hear someone telling you how unelectable this or that potential Republican candidate is, consider how un-reelectable Obama is. His messianic image is gone; he has a disastrous record; and even liberals are discovering that he is insufferably arrogant and contemptuous of the American people.

New Column: Middle America Longs for Conservatives To Stand Up To Liberal Bullying

I wish Republican politicians would have faith in the largely conservative electorate and not behave as though they'll make themselves unelectable unless they pander to Generic Moderate. Who is that guy, anyway? Have you ever met him?

Recently, we've seen a few examples of the liberal narrative's rearing its oppressive head and starkly different reactions to it. The first was Mitt Romney's reportedly telling The Wall Street Journal that as a wealthy person, he thinks he lacks the credibility to aggressively push tax cuts. Mitt is also looking timid about releasing his tax returns. He needs to fight back -- consistently -- instead of surrendering to the liberal narrative that success is evil. Mitt should take a lesson from Newt Gingrich on counterpunching against false liberal charges and innuendo.

Newt put on a clinic in his defiant response to moderator Juan Williams' racially charged questions during the Fox News GOP debate in South Carolina.

I honestly like Juan Williams and believe, based on observing him over the years, that he's a decent human being with a good heart. But for whatever reason, regrettably, he was wearing race on his sleeve that evening, and his race-baiting line of questions, in my opinion, was indefensible.

Juan first tried to lay a race trap for Rick Santorum when asking him whether the time "has come to take special steps to deal with the extraordinary level of poverty afflicting one race of Americans."

]]> Santorum hit it out of the park, unapologetically answering, "If Americans do three things, they can avoid poverty ... work, graduate from high school and get married before you have children."

Perhaps Santorum was not Juan's intended prey, for he chose not to follow up by suggesting that Santorum's answer contained racist code. But if Juan believes that politicians should specifically tailor remedial policies to certain races, why doesn't he condemn President Obama for reversing welfare reform when the evidence proves that it reduced black poverty, black childhood poverty and black illegitimacy?

Juan showed no similar restraint with Newt, suggesting that his recent statements that black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps, and that poor kids could work as janitors in their schools were insulting, particularly to black Americans. Juan said his email and Twitter accounts have "been inundated with people of all races who are asking if your comments are not intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities." Juan said Newt sounded as if he were trying to belittle people (read: blacks) when calling Obama "the food stamp president."

Newt refused to yield an inch, which was exhilaratingly refreshing, not just to me but to a great number of people in the audience who are sick and tired of being accused, in so many words, of being racist purely by virtue of the race-neutral policies they support.

Not only did Newt reject the loaded premise of the question; he even responded in race-neutral terms, offering a powerful defense of the old-fashioned work ethic and infusing it with an example from his own personal experience. Then he looked Juan right in the eye and said, "The fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history." Newt then capped it off with an encore affirmation of his belief that every American, irrespective of his background, is endowed by God with the right to pursue happiness and that he is going to continue to help poor people get jobs, even if that makes liberals unhappy.

This, in my words, is what Newt was also telling Juan: "Juan, along with other Americans, I am sick and tired -- do you hear me, Juan? -- sick and tired of not being able to give voice to America's founding principles without being accused by sanctimonious liberals of bigotry or lacking compassion. Read my lips, Juan: Conservatism is not racism; conservatism is more compassionate than liberalism; conservatism brings real results rather than peaking, like liberalism, at the point of allegedly good intentions. Look at this audience, Juan. Like me, they're fed up with the finger-pointing. If you want to point fingers, look no further than President Obama, who, in the name of helping Americans, is bankrupting this nation and whose policies are destroying the economy, with minorities being hardest hit. So please spare me the lectures, Juan."

Newt demonstrated how conservatives should communicate truths and respond to slanderous attacks in the public arena. It's time all conservatives learned to overcome this morbid fear of their own shadows when it comes to articulating conservative principles. It's past time that they stand up to the liberal and PC bullying. There is a strong, aching hunger in Middle America for our side, our leaders, to fight back. Newt's subsequent surge in no small part is a resounding reflection of that. Let's take back the narrative.

New Column: Mark Levin's 'Ameritopia'

Mark Levin's hard work in researching, organizing and writing his new book, "Ameritopia," will be a blessing for all who read it.

Countless books chronicle the forward march of the liberal agenda and attempt to deconstruct the fallacies in modern leftist thinking. Many critique the statist policies the left has imposed on us the past half-century and their disastrous effects on our culture, our economy and our national security.

Few modern books, however, direct our attention to first principles, perhaps assuming people implicitly understand the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of conservative thinking, and even fewer truly explore the anatomy of the liberal vision.

In "Liberty and Tyranny," Levin laid out the conservative vision and contrasted it with the liberal vision. But "Ameritopia" examines more deeply the historical and philosophical roots of the utopian ideal, for it is that ideal that has always animated the liberal worldview.

Levin takes us through the seminal thoughts of some of the most noted political philosophers and writers who laid out the utopian vision -- from Plato to Thomas More, Thomas Hobbes and Karl Marx -- and then unpacks the contrasting vision of John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu and others whose ideas greatly influenced America's founders.

]]> Liberal utopianism is a fantasy of arrogant philosophers and philosopher kings who believe their vision is superior to those of other lowly mortals. Levin calls them the "masterminds" -- the latest and most prominent being President Barack Obama and his cadre of utopian elitists. They believe they are proponents of enlightenment thinking and rationalism who could construct the ideal society if deniers and other obstructionists would just get out of their way.

In reality, however, they couldn't be more irrational, as they reject human nature, history and all empirical evidence that contradicts their vision. Indeed, writes Levin, "utopianism is regressive, irrational, and pre-Enlightenment."

History and the whole of human experience be damned; utopians can achieve the ideal society even if all similar utopians who preceded them failed. As Levin says, they always believe that "what went before them" was "piecemeal and therefore inadequate. The steps necessary to achieve true utopianism have yet to be tried."

As modern examples, consider the American left's refusal to accept that the welfare state has failed despite $5 trillion being thrown at it, that federal money and control are not a panacea for education (there will never be enough to satisfy leftists) and that our health care system has been severely damaged by federal intermeddlers and enemies of the market. The left doesn't even believe that the colossally wasteful trillion-dollar stimulus package was big enough.

As Plato argued in his "Republic," utopians believe the individual must subordinate his will to the state. They must destroy individuality and individual liberty because those stand in opposition to the conformity their utopian vision demands.

Standing in stark contrast are America's constitutional framers, who rejected the folly that certain superior representatives of the species could change the entire species' intrinsic nature. They believed in man's natural rights and cherished the individual liberty flowing from those rights. As students of history, philosophy and human nature, they refused to follow the path of utopians who rejected the realities not only of human nature but also of the evidence of its outworkings in history, especially in man's endless experiments in statecraft. With wide-eyed recognition of human nature, they crafted the American Constitution to maximize individual liberties, despite the natural tendency of man toward absolutism.

As the Constitution established that essential balance between governmental power and individual liberties by sufficiently empowering but also limiting governmental power, it is essential that its structure be maintained if our freedom is to be preserved.

Utopian leftists view the Constitution not as a structural safeguard for our liberties, but as an obstacle to their utopian goal of concentrating power in the central government to empower them to implement their grand vision. They only champion the Constitution as a matter of political expedience, when it serves their larger ends. In Levin's words: "For the mastermind, the Constitution's words are undeserving of respect as the rest of history. They will be used to muddle and disarrange, not inform and clarify."

The left has succeeded in dismantling much of the American freedom tradition -- through legislative, executive and judicial assaults on the Constitution -- all in the name of advancing a seductive form of equality that denies and seeks to neutralize human nature and leaves tyranny in its wake.

We are in a war for the survival of the republic, and no modern writer has better articulated what is at stake or laid out with such accessible clarity the competing visions and their respective consequences for America.

Everything Is At Stake, All Right

On this we can agree with President Obama: Everything he stands for is at stake in 2012.

Obama told 500 fawning sycophants in Chicago that he is unrepentant about his policy agenda and intends to treat us to more of the same, much more, in a second term.

Obama said, "Everything that we fought for is now at stake in this election." Lest there be no mistake, he repeated the message in the smaller settings of private homes.

We can endlessly debate whether he is such a devoted ideologue that he's blind to his policy failures, whether he's willing to sacrifice the economy and the fiscal integrity of the United States for his perceived higher good of radical redistribution, or whether he really intends to do harm, but these are moot questions anymore. Under any of these possibilities, the fact remains that he is hellbent on accelerating his present course, not reversing it, on dictating, not working within his constitutional constraints, much less building a bipartisan consensus.

Hubris and defiance are his trademarks, not humility. He said, "If you're willing to work even harder in this election than you did in the last election, I promise you, change will come."

This should send cold chills up our spines. By "change," he means more of his unpopular, failed agenda. He has repeatedly indicated that he is frustrated with the process of republican government and that he would be much more comfortable as a dictator.

]]> He has also said many times that he believes his goals are so important that he intends to implement them with or without Congress, through executive or administrative usurpations. He has done more than talk; he has acted in contravention of the Constitution and intends to continue in that vein.

What he might do in a second term is frightening to those who believe in freedom and equality of opportunity, that our current pattern of discretionary and entitlement spending is not just unsustainable but also guaranteed to destroy the country, and that we cannot preserve our freedom if we persist on a course of unilateral disarmament.

Just consider how brazenly Obama has pursued his unpopular agenda even while facing re-election. Think how he joked about having made a hollow promise of shovel-ready jobs when there is no such thing and how he is unchastened by the colossal waste of Solyndra and pursuing more of the same. Consider how he cavalierly refuses to account for his promise to keep unemployment capped at 8 percent and how he assured us, on his honor, that his designated stimulus cop, Vice President Joe Biden, wouldn't allow a dollar of waste to go unpunished in his stimulus plan. Chew on his refusal to listen to the public when it resoundingly rejected Obamacare, rebuffing his agenda in the U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts and again in the 2010 congressional elections. Ponder his petty partisanship, bullying, demonizing and class warfare and his frequent invocation of the race card. Can you conceive of how he'd act as a four-year lame duck?

You all surely heard Obama, thinking he was speaking only to friends, boast that he was for a single-payer plan but that it might take 15 years to implement it. Remember this when his supporters tell you Obamacare won't degenerate into socialized medicine. Those waivers he unilaterally issued to buy off companies now won't be available next time around when the full force of Obamacare rains down its dark waters.

Think about his Independent Payment Advisory Board, which will have 15 bureaucrats once Obamacare is up and running, when he won't have to worry about 2016. Before you pooh-pooh this, you'd better do your research on his health care mentors' (e.g., Tom Daschle, Donald Berwick) philosophy about the macabre rationing of health care for the aged.

So, call me an alarmist if you will, but I think it's almost irrational not to be very concerned about an Obama second term. Even if you don't subscribe to some of the horror scenarios of death panels and the like, how about his intention to continue to press forward with his radical green agenda despite the fact that it won't work to reduce global temperatures and despite the public's opposition to it?

More importantly, how about his absolute refusal to restructure entitlements or his refusal to lead his party's Senate to pass a budget after 1,000 days? Or his insistence on another stimulus package when unemployment -- even using the distorted metrics the administration is now using -- is still at 8.5 percent and it would add another half-trillion dollars to the national debt?

By rights, Obama shouldn't get 10 percent of the vote in November. Even those who want to punish the "wealthy" should understand that once you completely gnaw off the hand that feeds you, you will starve, too.

This Week's MSM Bias Award Goes to George Stephanopoulos

We've been dealing with liberal media bias for years, but George Stephanopoulos' performance in the Republican presidential debate Saturday night in New Hampshire was particularly egregious.

In many of these MSM-moderated debates, liberal moderators have tried to stir up personal fights between candidates, which diverts our focus from more important issues and, before national television audiences, shifts attention far away from Barack Obama and his disastrous agenda.

Yes, these are debates among Republicans and designed to bring out distinctions among the candidates, but it should be up to the candidates to initiate and define those distinctions, and it is improper for the moderators to continually steer the debate away from substance and into the personal. With the moderators constantly stirring up catfights, liberal ends are served, both in placing Republican candidates in the worst light and in creating the illusion that their primary differences are with one another rather than Obama.

If you doubt this, then ask yourself how often in Saturday night's debate the candidates were given an opportunity -- instead of showing how corrupt, immoral or inexperienced their GOP rivals are -- to distinguish their policy proposals from the others in the context of the Obama record. The narrative in these debates ought to be how each of the candidates is better-equipped than the others to reverse Obama's agenda.

In addition to misdirecting the debates substantively, the liberal moderators have also, too often, injected themselves into the debates as if they were either driven by their irrepressible egos to make themselves players rather than facilitators or so ideologically revolted by the GOP's policies that they were compelled to argue Obama's side in his absence. The moderators shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways. If they are going to direct the debate solely toward differences among the GOP candidates, they shouldn't present Obama's side for him, giving him and the liberal position a free ride.

]]> As for stirring up personal and nasty issues, ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Rep. Ron Paul whether he would stand by charges in one of his South Carolina ads that former Sen. Rick Santorum is "corrupt -- a corporate lobbyist, a Washington insider with a record of betrayal." As if to ensure Paul wouldn't sidestep the corruptness charge, Stephanopoulos repeated, "You also call him corrupt in that ad."

This kind of baiting would never happen in a Democratic debate, even if Fox News furnished the moderators. After an extensive back-and-forth on this issue, Stephanopoulos tried to keep it going by turning the ball over to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, nudging him to pile on both Santorum and Paul. Why settle for a back-and-forth when you can have a three-way?

Before Stephanopoulos' next turn, for good measure, moderator Josh McElveen, as if trying to perpetuate a gossip chain in a schoolyard, asked former House Speaker Newt Gingrich how he would respond to Paul's calling him a "chicken hawk."

But the evening's award performance goes to Stephanopoulos, for his next round of questions to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Completely out of the blue, manufacturing an issue out of whole cloth, Stephanopoulos asked, "Gov. Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?"

To his credit, Romney called him on it: "George, this is an unusual topic that you're raising."

When Romney wouldn't take the bait, Stephanopoulos argued with him, derisively reminding Romney that Romney had attended Harvard Law School and therefore couldn't pretend not to understand the issue -- as if Romney's understanding of the issue, as opposed to its stunning irrelevance, were what Romney was reacting to.

But Stephanopoulos held on to the question like a rabid terrier, petulantly making himself and his asinine line of questioning the issue. Perhaps Stephanopoulos, in a most convoluted way, was trying to get Romney to denounce the Supreme Court's judicial establishment of a Ninth Amendment right to privacy, ultimately culminating in the infamous abortion decision, Roe v. Wade.

More likely, Stephanopoulos was angling, via a pathetic effort at Socratic questioning, to lay a trap for Romney that would expose him as the flip-flopper he's reputed to be and knock him down a peg or three. For Stephanopoulos next said, "But you've given two answers to the question."

Romney obviously didn't even know what Stephanopoulos was talking about. He had invoked an irrelevant issue and tried to trick Romney into answering it the way he wanted him to so he could pounce, and when Romney didn't, he supplied Romney's answer(s) anyway because he was determined to ensnare him, even if the ghost of Socrates wasn't cooperating.

With a half-century of experience as a witness to liberal media bias, I'm not easily shocked or outraged by current displays of it, but George Stephanopoulos deserves special notoriety for his disgraceful performance Saturday night.

Obama's Motto

President Obama is calling for dramatic defense cuts that could threaten our national survival while obstructing structural reforms to our entitlement programs that are essential for our national financial survival. It just doesn't get much worse than this.

President George W. Bush attempted in good faith to reform Social Security, and Democrats savaged him. Rep. Paul Ryan proposed a comprehensive financial plan that would, as painlessly as possible, restore national fiscal sanity, and Obama and his Democrats have misrepresented the plan (saying it would end Medicare) and used class warfare and fear-mongering to kill it in the cradle.

Indeed, Republicans have repeatedly submitted and passed comprehensive and detailed budget plans to restore our financial solvency, and Senate Democrats have blocked every one of them. Meanwhile, the Democratic Senate hasn't produced a budget in almost three years. Three years!

It is undeniable, undebatable, irrefutable, inarguable and certain that the United States is spending at a level that will destroy it. It is equally indisputable that Democrats have shown no willingness to join Americans in tackling the problem.

Every time you confront a liberal with these incontrovertible facts, his response is not: "You are simply wrong." It is, "Bush started this." Well, Bush did spend too much, but he was a piker compared with Obama. But it doesn't much matter who caused it anymore, does it?

]]> If your family is facing a serious problem, is your first instinct to blame the culprit -- other than to identify it for purposes of devising a solution -- or to address the problem?

If Democrats truly believe Bush spent too much, then shouldn't they cooperate to bring spending under control rather than use Bush's spending as an excuse to up the ante? While Bush spent too much, including on education and his prescription drug entitlement, Democrats thought he didn't spend nearly enough on education (Ted Kennedy constantly derided Bush over it), and part of the reason Bush advanced prescription drugs was to prevent Democrats from implementing a far costlier package.

If Democrats had any concern about spending, they wouldn't have crammed through Obamacare, which will increase the federal health care budget obscenely. If they had the slightest concern about our upside-down national balance sheet, they wouldn't have spent $900 billion in a worthless, corrupt, ineffectual "stimulus" program and be clamoring for another one. They wouldn't urinate federal money into dead-end green projects, such as Solyndra. They wouldn't have desperately tried to pass a monumentally wasteful cap-and-trade bill that wouldn't have made a dent in global temperature in a hundred years, even if you blindly accept all the superstitious nonsense the environmentalists propagate.

Seriously, people, let Democrats and Obama defenders obfuscate all they want, but have you seen the charts? Have you noticed the dramatic acceleration in spending and deficits since Obama took office? Have you seen the side-by-side comparisons of America's financial future under the Ryan plan and Obama's current spending trajectory? Democrats cannot make Obama's financial path sustainable simply by blaming Bush for what happened before. We have to get about the business of cutting spending and reforming entitlements now because every year we wait, our problems are compounded and become that much more difficult to reverse.

We must come to terms with the fact that Democrats are trying not to control domestic spending -- and growth-stifling tax hikes won't substantially reduce the deficit, much less the debt. Everything they are about depends on continually increasing spending, and you see it in their every budget. The only plans that even hint at spending cuts (actually reductions in spending increases using baseline budgeting) are the unspecified ones Obama outlines in his speeches. His actual budgets show no appreciable cuts in the deficits as far as the eye can see. Why aren't people, even Democrats, freaking out over this? I'll never understand this.

Obama is now proposing drastic cuts in our defense budget at a time when global terrorism is on the rise and other nations -- from China to Russia to Iran to North Korea, most of whom mean us harm -- are aggressively increasing their defense budgets. We are sharing nuclear secrets with Russia and sending technology to China that can be used for military purposes. Our war game projections show we might lose a conventional war against China over a disputed Taiwan Strait. We have killed our F-22 Raptor, while China and Russia are ramping up their next-generation fighters.

Obama's motto seems to be this: If spending is called for by the Constitution, bleed it dry; if the Constitution forbids it, no holds barred. Gut nation-saving defense spending; increase nation-destroying domestic spending.

When will the whole nation wake up to this madness?

Blind to Their Liberal Biases

I think it's very difficult for any of us to be objective about any subject, especially something we care deeply about, but my objective observation is that liberals tend to be less aware of and less willing to admit their biases.

We see this often, which I'll get to, but first, let me relate how this phenomenon most recently came to my attention.

In a conversation with a saleswoman for online college courses, I expressed my disappointment that the professor of a religion course I was considering for purchase is an avowed atheist. I said that if I were going to spend time studying the subject, I'd prefer the professor share my Christian worldview.

Don't misunderstand. I think it can be profitable to learn what nonbelieving "scholars" teach about the Bible, but the point I want to discuss here is the woman's response.

She maintained that it is preferable, for this largely secular course on the Bible, to have a professor who can approach the subject from an objective, critical and historical perspective, as if a believing professor would be incapable of that approach. But is that true?

]]> Her error is assuming that nonbelief equates to objectivity. In fact, every human being -- and thus every professor -- has a worldview, and that worldview will inevitably influence his perception of the material. Every professor will have made critical intellectual decisions on a multitude of issues in the material, all of which will be influenced by his worldview.

For example, if you don't believe in miracles, you'd be more inclined to discount those verses of Scripture describing miraculous events, from the Virgin Birth to Jesus' converting water into wine to the bedrock Christian belief: the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Nonbelievers might be more receptive to "higher criticism" and the "documentary hypothesis" and thus less skeptical of the theory that Moses didn't write the first five books of the Old Testament. They might be quicker to focus on apparent contradictions in Scripture that critical examination often reveals are not contradictions at all.

A believer in the divine inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture will certainly bring his biases into biblical exegesis, but so will a nonbeliever. We cannot escape our biases.

But the woman insisted the secular professor is only interested in presenting the material from a critical and historical perspective. A noble aspiration, I concede, should the professor actually possess it, but nevertheless unattainable. Historians and critical readers have biases, too. They can't help it.

It's just wrong to assume that a nonbelieving worldview is more objective than a believing one. We are all blessed (or burdened) with our presuppositions, and they accompany us wherever we go.

It occurred to me that the woman's argument is analogous to the political liberals' legendary denial of bias. Indeed, many liberals don't even view themselves as liberals. Rather, they are reality- and fact-based creatures. Only conservatives allow their biases to taint their objectivity. Liberals will admit that some conservatives are rational, but to be both rational and conservative, they must be evil. They know the policies they support are wrong, objectively, but they choose to do so anyway -- or something like that.

Evidence abounds: Scholarly studies show that mainstream journalists are overwhelmingly liberal, yet many deny it, and many honestly don't even see the biases they bring to their selection and reporting of the "news." ABC's Christiane Amanpour, for example, denies her liberal biases, saying she "remains in the realm of fact." The Bush haters who deceived themselves about Bush's alleged WMD lies claimed they were reality-based when in "reality" their hatred made them stark-raving mad on the subject. A liberal college professor touting open academic inquiry banned "conservative" materials from class because she refused "to tolerate the intolerable." Members of the man-made global warming cult dogmatically proclaim a consensus despite strong dissent. Environmentalists extrapolate this mindset in their approach to scores of issues, traveling utterly quixotic paths and pursuing devastatingly expensive larks while dismissing skeptics as flat-earthers. Obama constantly refers to his ideas
as self-evidently reasonable and Republicans' as driven solely by partisanship, because how could they possibly oppose his reality-based proposals?

As a conservative, I believe that many liberals proceed from good intentions, though I think their consistently horrendous results entitle us to some skepticism after a while even as to their intentions -- or at least to their ability to see past their oppressive biases. I don't believe, for example, that they are racists because their policies harm minorities, though they often do. I don't believe they automatically lack compassion just because their policies spread misery.

Yet many liberals do believe that conservatives are evil, uncompassionate racists because our policies don't fit their self-serving, narrow, shallow parameters of "good intentions." Many leftists are so possessed by a need to be morally superior that they can't abide the possibility that conservatives also have noble intentions. So it is that many who believe they are objective, fair and reality-based are far less so than the objects of their scorn.

Sometimes Caution Can Backfire

There seems to be a common line of demarcation separating two basic factions on the political right in the various skirmishes we have fought against Barack Obama, from their markedly different approaches to the budget battles to their differences in sizing up the GOP presidential candidates.

On one side we have the more moderate group, which is more cautious, less risk averse, less excitable, self-consciously pragmatic and more tolerant toward an establishment ruling class, even if not per se establishment itself. On the other side are those who perceive more urgency in our current national condition, are more adamant about adhering to conservative principles to reverse this catastrophe and reject the charge that they are recklessly purist.

Many from the first group have urged restraint and pragmatism in the budget negotiations, insisting it was too risky to force a government shutdown with Obama, that the big prize is 2012 and the best way to secure it is to avoid taking a hard line, which would hand Obama 2012 propaganda ammunition.

In each round of budget battles, with a spirit of defeatism and resignation, they warned against Republican brinksmanship, because they were convinced Obama would automatically win every PR victory. It was as though they had forgotten who’d won the 2010 congressional elections.

Obviously, they didn’t believe Republicans could convince the electorate that they had the better argument, even though they were the ones drawing a line in the sand on spending, which was what caused the crisis. Also, they had no confidence that Republicans could persuade voters that Democrats were lying when they said that the government would actually default on its major obligations.

]]> The first group seemed less outraged that the entire ruling class, including our GOP guys, allowed mere reductions in spending increases to be called spending cuts. Nor were they as troubled when our guys, instead of saying, “Sorry, folks, this is the best we can do under a dishonest socialist president,” came closer to saying, “Hey, we’ve achieved a pretty good deal here in real terms.”

This group assured us it was holding its major firepower for the 2012 elections. Yet 2012 is here, and they still seem reluctant to bring out the heavy artillery. They are giving their full-throated support to Mr. Caution himself, Mitt Romney, once again saying we can’t afford the risk of putting our support behind someone more conservative.

It appears they believe that national elections are a zero-sum game with a fixed number of voters in both the Democrat and Republican camps, and that whichever candidate attracts more independents (who are always presumed, in this static analysis, to constitute 20 percent of the electorate) will win.

This reasoning strikes me as flawed because: a) twice as many people self-identify as conservatives than as liberals (this is different from party ID, but still); b) history invalidates the theory, --e.g., Reagan; c) no one really knows what the amorphous term “independent” means; d) with a president as extremist and destructive as Obama, independents are much less likely to fall his way, and more likely to be receptive to conservative ideas, because they represent the opposite of Obama’s failed policies, and e) it discounts the various aspects of voter intensity: 1) certain candidates will energize their base more, 2) certain ones might alienate some in their base so badly they stay home, and 3) certain ones may scare the otherwise apathetic independents and even members of the opposite party to vote for the other guy.

The first group, generally speaking, is falling into Romney’s camp, arguing that he is the safest bet and that we can’t afford any risks, given the enormity of the stakes. I’m just not so sure. So many number-crunching Republican analysts said he was a shoe-in for the nomination in 2008, but their static analysis failed. Romney does not energize the base, especially the tea party, or anyone else for that matter. His appeal is not that he inspires, but that he supposedly doesn’t repel. But in fact, to the contrary, he does repel a good number of conservatives, because they don’t trust him in general and/or don’t trust he’s a conservative.

Ironically, many who’ve laid claim to sober, adult political analyses the past few years and have scolded others for their alleged harshness in attacking Obama are the very ones who have thrown caution overboard in their relentless, unmeasured scorched-earth savagery of Newt Gingrich.

Though recognizing his weaknesses, I prefer Newt Gingrich over Mitt, and Rick Santorum and maybe Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann over both. But without hesitation, I’ll vote for Romney should he get the nomination. Can the Romney supporters say the same about Newt?

Obama and Holder Should Put the Race Card back in the Deck

President Obama led us to believe that he would be a post-racial president who would bring the races together, but it's gotten to where you can't criticize this most leftist administration in American history without someone accusing you of racism.

The most recent example involves criticism of Attorney General Eric Holder over Fast and Furious, an operation conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which was overseen by the Justice Department. It involved the indirect sale of weapons to Mexican drug cartels, which resulted in some 300 killings in Mexico, including the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. Throughout, despite having received detailed memos from DOJ officials about it, Holder has denied he was aware of it.

The scandal and Holder's stonewalling have led to some 60 congressmen demanding his resignation, and 75 cosponsoring a House resolution calling for a "no-confidence" vote on his performance as attorney general.

Holder has defiantly denied culpability, and President Obama, without betraying the slightest concern, has proclaimed his complete confidence in Holder. In a New York Times interview, Holder suggested race was partially driving a "more extreme segment" against him and Obama.

Holder said, "This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him, both due to the nature of our relationship, and, you know, the fact that we're both African-American." When pressed for some proof to support Holder's allegation, the Justice Department did not respond. Nor has the White House distanced itself from Holder's comments.

]]> Georgia Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson had earlier played the race card regarding Fast and Furious, calling it "another manufactured controversy by the Second Amendment, NRA Republican tea party movement." He said, "Now, how many firearms are sold to al-Qaida terrorists, to other convicted felons, to domestic violence perpetrators, to convicted felons, to white supremacists?"

Nor was this the first time Holder had invoked the issue of race. During a speech commemorating Black History Month shortly after he became attorney general, Holder said the American people are "essentially a nation of cowards when it comes to racial matters."

This seemed to many a curious way to celebrate the election of an African-American president, not to mention reflecting Holder's sizable preoccupation with race and his apparent perception of societal problems through a racial lens. It could also help to explain his Justice Department's indefensible dismissal of an already won voter intimidation case against New Black Panther Party members using the specious excuse that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.

None of this comes as any surprise, however, because President Obama had telegraphed his race-oriented mindset in his book, in his church association and in his projecting statement that small-town people "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." He has worn race on his sleeve numerous times as president.

When a white police officer in Cambridge, Mass., arrested Harvard professor Henry Gates, an African-American, Obama, without having heard both sides of the case, publicly injected himself into the local matter and gratuitously smeared the entire police department as having "acted stupidly." In addition, Obama told guests at a private dinner at the White House that race was probably a key component in the rising opposition to his presidency, especially among tea party members.

Not only has Obama made these viscerally charged racial statements, he has also consciously appealed to minority groups with specific reference to their race. In a Democratic National Committee video in April 2010, he urged "young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women ... to stand together once again." Shortly before the November 2010 congressional elections, he told an audience that Republicans "are counting on black folks staying home." Separately, he appealed to Latino voters not to stay home at election time but to "punish our enemies" and not go along with the Republicans' "cynical attempt to discourage Latinos from voting."

These developments are most disturbing and discouraging. There exists a "reat ideological divide in this nation over which of two primary sets of policy prescriptions ought to be adopted to rescue America from its economic malaise, its bankrupting debt and a host of other major issues.

Conservative opposition to Obama isn't about race, and I'm confident this administration is well aware of that but is using the race card anyway, out of political desperation, to the destruction of the nation, and to racial relations. It's disgraceful and unconscionable.

About Those Self-Evident Truths

"We hold these Truths to be self-evident..." What truths? What has happened to our passion for liberty? I am concerned that we conservatives, instead of making our case as fearless champions of liberty, are too often on the defensive, preoccupied with trying to prove we aren't the demons the left says we are.

In the GOP primary contest, you'll hear one candidate scolding the others for lacking compassion, another demagoguing a rival for advocating essential entitlement reform, and another shaming an opponent for being too wealthy.

Shouldn't our side do a better job of proudly proclaiming our case for what we believe in rather than have our tails tucked between our legs, apologizing for conservatism and all too often neglecting our first principles?

Because we face an existential threat to the nation in our exploding discretionary and entitlement spending, we rightly aim our rhetoric against the deficits and the debt. That's critically important, but in the process, do we forget to explain that we favor smaller government also as a matter of principle? Do we make the case that we oppose a bigger and more intrusive government because a) it is incompatible with what we stand for -- robust political liberty -- and b) other than metastasizing and swallowing up the private sector and our individual liberties, government does only a few things well?

Likewise, do we connect the dots between our confiscatory tax policies and the diminution of our liberties, demonstrating a nexus between oppressive taxes and serfdom? Do we protest that we are already overtaxed and that an onerous tax system, enforced by a menacing federal agency, devours our political liberty?

]]> To the contrary, instead of communicating our passion for liberty -- the bedrock principle upon which the nation was founded, lest we forget -- we spend too much time defending against the false charge that we are evil elitists protecting a tax structure that is tilted in favor of the wealthy. It's not.

We say we can't support tax cuts during tough economic times, but are we tacitly conceding that it will be just fine to tax ourselves further into oblivion once the economy turns around? How about saying, "We are taxed too much at every level, and our government's financial problems are a result of overspending, not of under-taxation, and they will be solved not by increasing liberty-choking taxes, but by cutting spending"?

We conservatives constantly complain -- and rightly so -- about the chilling effect overregulation has on the economy. But do we emphasize that this frightening explosion of power in mostly independent and largely unreviewable federal agencies represents a grave threat to our individual liberties?

Do we conservatives inspire the American people to reach for the sky, saying that a rising tide lifts all boats and that they should aspire to be the best they can be? Or do we spend too much time apologizing for inequitable distributions of the wealth?

Do we affirmatively champion the virtues of the free market and point out that greater liberty produces greater prosperity and greater prosperity means greater liberty?

When the left incites covetousness and greed by demonizing the "rich" and scoffing at capitalism's allegedly false promise that the prosperity will "trickle down," we should remind these socialists that a) it is absurd that we measure material prosperity based on how much more the other guy has instead of how much we have in absolute terms, b) a free market system, by definition, means some will do better than others, c) the idea isn't for meat scraps to trickle down from the more affluent in a zero-sum economy, but to expand the economic pie with more people producing and succeeding on their own, free of dependence on the government and retaining their dignity, d) our capitalistic system, undergirded by the Constitution and the rule of law, has produced the most prosperous society in world history, and e) the coercive command-control system they champion in the name of equalizing outcomes is antithetical to liberty and thus to America's founding principles and inevitably leads to
less for everyone except for the ruling class and its cronies.

Have we gotten to the point that we can no longer preach the work ethic? Rugged individualism? Thrift? Individual responsibility?

Let's passionately attest that America is the only nation in the history of the world founded on a set of principles -- the most important of which is that we have God-given, inalienable rights centered in political liberty -- that the preservation of our liberty is not on autopilot, and that if we abandon our commitment to liberty, liberty will just as surely abandon us.

Obama's '60 Minutes' Interview Gives Grading on a Curve New Meaning

The most disturbing aspect of President Obama's "60 Minutes" interview is how sincere he sounded when misrepresenting his record. I'm not sure whether I would prefer that he be lying or self-deluded, but there's plenty of each to go around.

Obama is a left-wing ideologue, a true believer, who is convinced that his agenda is mandated by a superior moral imperative (from who knows where) and that it must be advanced irrespective of the consequences, because no matter how bad they might be, they would have been worse without his agenda.

Indeed, such is his blind faith that his policy failures reinforce rather than shatter his belief system, and he becomes more delusional the more he fails and has to rationalize those failures.

The upshot of his message to his interviewer, Steve Kroft, was that he deserves the highest marks for all "things that don't have to do with the economy and don't have to do with Congress."

So despite his muddled, ad hoc approach to foreign policy: his mistreatment of Israel, his pattern of insulting foreign leaders, his fair-weather support for some democratic movements and betrayal of others (Iran, Honduras), his manifest unpopularity in the Muslim world, and his gutting of our military defenses (F-22, our missile defenses and Europe's, and our nuclear arsenal) while China, Russia, Iran and others augment theirs, he claims that we are now respected again around the world and that we are stronger.

]]> How about the economy? Well, he thinks that the people will come to see he's turned things around and saved us from a depression but that it's going to take a long time for a complete recovery because it took so long to get "us into this mess." So he believes he's even performed well on the economy, except a) he would have done even better had it not been for congressional Republicans, b) the people don't realize how well he's done because too many are still hurting, c) even if things are bad, it's Bush's fault or, if you prefer, it's because we're going through an economic disruption that occurs every 75 years, and d) whatever economic problems remain could be solved by pouring yet more money into education, green technology and the infrastructure. (I realize "d" makes less sense than any of them, but that's what his programmed mind always spits out, no matter the evidence.)

He insists he didn't overpromise, never mind his promises to find "good jobs for the jobless," to lower the oceans and keep unemployment at less than 8 percent. He takes credit for bending our health care cost curve down when it is now indisputable already -- even before the bulk of it has been implemented -- that Obamacare is greatly increasing health care costs.

He said he has offered a "very specific" and "very detailed" deficit reduction plan when everyone paying attention knows he offered generalities, with no real, concrete proposals for actually reducing spending, especially entitlement spending.

He said we could balance the budget by increasing taxes on the wealthy alone. Actually, his statement was more ludicrous than that. He said: "We ended up asking the wealthiest Americans to do a little bit more in terms of taxes. Going back to rates that would still be lower than they were under Ronald Reagan, our deficit problems would be solved." What? How is it possible we ended up with a chief executive who can make such preposterous assertions? Apart from the Reagan comparison, letting the Bush cuts for the highest income bracket expire would generate only about $70 billion a year (assuming a static economy), which is less than 5 percent of the deficit.

Amazingly, Obama admitted that his party and his base opposed entitlement reforms but that in his magnanimity, he agreed to work on them anyway. Well, that's big of him, but the truth is that he has steadfastly obstructed such reforms, which means he has steadfastly obstructed any possibility of balancing the budget and getting the national debt under control.

But there's an explanation for that, which is even more alarming. He doesn't think the deficit (or debt) is a major problem. He said, "The truth is that compared to other countries around the world, our deficit problems are completely manageable." That's why he wants another half-trillion-dollar stimulus.

Lest we think these anomalies are solely because of Obama's being a true believer rather than a hyper-partisan purveyor of falsehoods, note that he also told Kroft that Republicans are for "rolling back clean air and clean water laws," want to kill entitlements for seniors, and are focused on scoring political points rather than helping him solve problems; that only a handful of people are succeeding in this "you're-on-your-own economy"; that he is for broadening the tax base; and that he fully intends to proceed with his agenda through executive and administrative orders in contravention of Congress and the Constitution.

You just can't make this stuff up.