Personal Asides: The Fire Bug Who Torched a Race Battle Presides Over the Beer-Summit “Teaching Moment.”…the Martin Bashir ABC Documentary.

Fire Bug.

Well, isn’t it nice to know that Barack Obama has some skill beyond the reading of pretty words from a teleprompter. He might have some future as a world poker-player, after all…having shrewdly capitalized on a racial firestorm he himself torched as polemical fire-bug to become the eyes-raised-to-heaven pseudo Jesus presiding over a “teaching moment.”

Sitting at a lawn table in the Rose Garden, the group totaled four. Let’s see, in that group of four you have two certifiable racists…or at the least, race-obsessives—Henry (Skip) Gates whose view of equanimity as played on C-SPAN a few years ago echoes anything Jeremiah Wright ever wrote or spewed from a pulpit—and who introduced the specter of CPD racial profiling into the controversy where it didn’t belong…and Obama who chose Wright’s church and stayed with it til things got hot after which he quit, indicted America for racism and included in the condemnation his own white grandmother while exempting himself, of course….that’s two racists.

Lemmeesee : As I said, that’s two racists/race obsessives however you want it. Then add one legit non-racist saint. That would be Sergeant Jim Crowley of the Cambridge Police who had the backing of the entire multi-raced department because of his leadership of race sensitivity classes at its Academy and who tried to resuscitate mouth-to-mouth Reggie Lewis, the Boston Celtic player who died of cardiac arrest. He would probably be the one receiving his own racial sensitivity course from the two Harvards—racists Gates and Obama.

Okay: two racists or race-obsessives plus one non-racist saint. Finally you have Joe Biden whom they awakened from a doze at his desk in the West Wing and who had nothing to do that afternoon…so they hustled him into the picture. Biden is of course well known as a resume embroiderer which ties him with Obama who has done Joe one better: he not only embroidered his resume but turned it into a page-turning faux “autobiography” as in his entirely fictionalized account in Dreams from My Father. As the scene opens we find Obama at his first job after college—and what a nice job it is:

Eventually a consulting house in multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe. As far as I could tell, I was the only black man I the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable pride for the company’s secretarial pool. They treated me like a son, those black ladies; they told me how they expected me to run the company one day…

The company promoted me to the position of financial write. I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. Sometimes coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond-traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors---see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand—and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.

We’re indebted to the website Sweetness & Light for this dogged research on this glorious phraseology (which I admit when I first read autobiography No. 1 had influenced me). 1. Obama did not work at “a consulting house to multinational corporations” but to a small company that published newsletters on international business, founded in fact by Orville Freeman, former Minnesota governor and JFK agriculture secretary. 2. He wasn’t the only black man in the company. 3. He didn’t have an office. 4. He didn’t have a secretary. 5. He didn’t conduct interviews with Japanese financiers and German bond traders.

Which shows that the fourth man at the table—Joe Biden—is a truth-teller extraordinare to his hustler boss on the make. So the box tally: two racists (including one inveterate liar), one near-saint and one blowhard but who occasionally blurts out the truth.

While Crowley is too much a gentleman and patriot to tell the truth of what probably was an insufferable conversation in self-righteous hypocrisy…and the two racists will certainly not…perhaps we can count on old Joe to let the facts out.

The ABC Documentary.

The fact that much of the nation preferred to “honor” Moonwalker Michael Jackson rather than the original moonwalker, Neil Armstrong whose anniversary came at about the same time, does not detract from the superbly revelatory replay of the historic ABC-TV documentary on Jackson narrated by Martin Bashir. In the interview with Jackson, the ravaged man-boy was so demonstrably shaken by his experiences as a child with his father that he was shaking…and watching it, I was tearful. I have never seen any documentary that related a child’s experience of being beaten savagely and repeatedly by his father. It answered for me that horrible molestation that had been inhumanely meted out by an adult animal who was benefiting hugely from the talent of his son and who was beating the living hell out of the boy time after time.

Watching Jackson talking about his father, made me wish I could get alone with that disreputable savage and one baseball bat…the implement needed as I would not want to soil my hands by touching that repulsive old toad. It showed me more than anything else the tragedy of Michael Jackson…and Jackson’s kids’ good fortune in not being turned over to the gentle mercies of that monster to be “reared.”

Personal Aside: Gates’ Cambridge Arrest a “Teaching Moment”? You Bet!

Dr. Henry Louis Gates’ remark that his being arrested for belligerent and disorderly conduct provides this nation with a “teaching moment” was right on the money—but not in the way he thinks.

Indeed, the episode that may well linger long with the public long after it forgets Barack Obama’s futile efforts to square the circle by promising higher quality health care and more of it at no additional cost—in fact with savings. In fact there is not just one teaching moment but several.

The first is that we have found out definitively that we have a president able to go around the world apologizing for our faults…but also a president who cannot bring himself to apologize personally when he has committed a fault. He studiously involves in making an apology any decent man would be constrained to make having been found to be short in the ethics department…having said the Cambridge police department “acted stupidly” when he hadn’t even read the police report. Obama slides around to be about as close to a formal apology as to kiss it, groans, sweats but can’t bring himself to self-condemnation. He says “I think I, unfortunately, gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department…” Gave an impression? What does it mean to say the police acted stupidly when you knew nothing about the case. He was wrong and he isn’t man enough…is too proud, arrogant and stiff-necked…to apologize.

The second: He allowed himself to play racial politics when he campaigned as one who would move us to a post-racial era, bringing up the concept of racial profiling that has nothing to do when police are called to protect the home of a black person. His promise not to stir the racist cauldron is in fact itself racist: just as when he delivered the so-called racial healing speech in Philadelphia which was to set forth his views after the controversy involving Jeremiah Wright but in which he did not renounce Wright and blamed all sides for racism—black, white, his own grandmother—but exempted himself. He tricked himself into showing the nation what a charlatan he really is: the event occurring in a state where the governor is black, a nation where the president is black and where the leading participant, Gates, is black—he decides to play the race card against the Cambridge Police Department.

The Sweet Question.

The third: How the story came to national attention was due to Lynn Sweet of the Sun-Times. Originally it was a race story; somewhat regional in nature until Sweet with the last question of the news conference brought it up, the question being “what does this incident say to you and what does it say about race relations in America?” Obama’s answer opened race to the fiery furnace it once was in the `60s and `70s.

Gee, why would a journalist for a Chicago paper when given the opportunity to ask the president a question simply decide to pick the arrest of Gates in Cambridge and so artfully throw a low, slow, fat softball—asking what does this say about race relations in America--to the president to make of it what he will? Sweet has answered it in her stagy “who, me?” way. His answer made the news, not my question. True enough.

When I started reporting in the `50s the tenor of the working media was definitely liberal. By the `60s with Vietnam, Watergate and the social revolution some elements broke free from the liberal line and became instead, radicals, participants in advocacy journalism. By the time Obama came along he gathered at his feet a cadre of Enabler journalists…those who not only shared his ideas but want to enable him to succeed.

Those who qualify as Enabler journalists are many national big names. One is a white network TV host who says that when he sees Obama he gets a thrill running down his leg (and he’s straight). Another is a white female daily TV host who told her audience of mega millions her panties got damp with zeal for him on inauguration day. Others are too numerous to mention. But they don’t just support Obama because he’s liberal, or black. They support him because of what they perceive as his radicality…at wide departure from ordinary liberal candidates…to crack open all the bad things that have, in their estimation, come to become festered in America—oppression of non-whites, oppression of women, oppression of gays, the exultance of capitalism, the forays of America into world spheres to smite terrorism but which they believe is a shield for imposing U. S. global power.

Some have become annoyed and restive at Obama’s perceived sense of compromise. There have been critics of his speech at the NAACP the week preceding as giving a kind of “tough love” to those blacks who want to keep the tensions taut. There has been some concern at the White House as some of the radicals have been turning away.

To radicals within the party, the question about Cambridge was heaven-sent as was his answer. Obama swung to the answer without hesitation. Was he expecting it? Sweet says no and we must accept that. The answer was direct, not full of ums-ums-ums.

Was the question good news for pro-Obama-ites? Definitely not. It spun the entire conference from universal health care…now called “health insurance reform.” In a very real sense, it did as much harm to Obama as if it came from the lips of a Fox News reporter. But the question itself was inoffensive. It was his answer that detonated the explosion…an answer that seemed to be waiting for the right question.

Was Obama betrayed by the question asked by one who would be expected to be an Obama supporter—fellow Chicagoan, close intimate to his key staffers…so betrayed he overcame his natural reflexes and swung for the fence? Was he not surprised by the question and wanted to use it to re-identify with the radicality for which he was earlier noted?

Remember in today’s Washington we have many liberal journalists; we have a few doughty Enabler journalists concerned with radical social change, believing that when a president is in power he should be impelled to achieve radical ends; we have very-very few conservative journalists.

Obama’s career may have been maimed by his answer. It can be argued his answer helped conservative critics of the president; it helped Enablers who want to see radical social change in America; it can be said to have hurt standard liberals who want to smooth ruptures to get him reelected in 2012. Calibrate…oh how I love that word since he has used it…what effect it has. Interesting. And don’t count on me to write more.

Make up your own mind as to which group benefited from the question.

Personal Aside: The Disgusting Tribune.

What do you think of an institution which, having sold out its soul, now laughs at an early editor-publisher who built it virtually from the ground up into an international force? An institution that exists today because of what he did? Not much, I’d dare say. To stand by one’s forebears takes character—but there is no character whatever…save one columnist…at The Trib because it is a hollow rag with pretense but no depth. The Sun-Times is a slimy whore but at least does not pretend to be anything else…and it regularly outproduces its rival in city news 2 to 1. It has residual vestiges of what once made it a great newspaper: Fran Spielman, Abdon Pallasch, Lynn Sweet. But the Tribune: when I pick it up I want to throw up.

What brings this to the fore is the absurd little sketch of Col. Robert R. McCormick that occasionally appears in the paper that exists because of his prescience and courage. It is that of an old man in a paper warrior’s hat. McCormick, by the way, was not just editor and publisher of a middling paper who made it an international force: he made his newspaper stand for something…American nationalism…as a fortress of the Midwest. In addition he (and his cousin Joe Patterson) personally selected comic strips that became legend for years—Dick Tracy…Little Orphan Annie…Andy Gump which at one time ran in more papers than any other competitor whose character is honored with a stature in a Lake Geneva, Wis. park.

Not long ago, a Tribune story told of a grant by the DesPlaines city council to save the signboard of a desolated old ice cream parlor known as The Sugar Bowl. The guy who wrote the story…probably a 27-year-old as bereft of the history of the paper he writes for as they come… said those who wanted to save the signboard wished to do so because it had been a part of the suburb’s main street for years. End of story. See—that’s the Trib now. But The Sugar Bowl was the main gathering place for kids in the comic strip “Harold Teen,” which was introduced to the Trib’s circle of exclusive strips on May 4, 1919. The strip became an instant hit because lasting as it did for 30 years it dramatized the nutty Jazz Era of the United States through the largely innocent gaze of a teener—Harold Teen. He and his girlfriend Lillums would swig sodas at The Sugar Bowl run by friendly old Pop Jenks. Their sidekick was Shadow.



At its height Harold Teen was one of the greatest strips in the world ever launched by The Tribune. Its creator was Carl Ed…pronounced”eeed”. He thought that the phenomenon of roaring 20s youth should be characterized somewhere—and The Trib under McCormick did it. The strip lasted throughout the 20s, 30s and 40s…saw Harold Teen go to war and return. It died when its originator did—in 1959.

1919 to 1959 is a stretch of 40 years. Wouldn’t you think a feature writer directed to write a story on saving the Sugar Bowl signboard would have been able to research it enough to credit his own newspaper with the phenomenon of Harold Teen? You would—but the indolence, sloppiness, smart-guy insouciance with no understanding of his company’s history nor a willingness to learn…the same that led an editor to produce a caricature of the paper’s greatest editor…shows there is no pride whatsoever in that paper anymore. Its empty editorial wheelhouse has a tiller swinging to and fro undirected by a cipher employee who wouldn’t understand character if it rapped him in the nose who listens to the black woman who edited the paper’s cookbook.

Pray for one of two things: either that someone with conviction buys the paper from the bald red-rimmed motorcycling little runt who is CEO…or that it goes under with a solid kerplunk.

By the way, the Colonel McCormick the paper has allowed its hirling cartoonist to hideously caricature was the founder of a major law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, leader of the Chicago Sanitary Commission and as editor fought strenuously against Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal including our entrance into World War II joining with such far-right disreputables on the America First committee as John F. Kennedy (chairman, Massachusetts), Chester Bowles, Alice Roosevelt Longworth and other crazies the current Trib would want to be associated with.

If they had a sense of history…or a soul…of which they have neither. An institution can transcend greatness by living too long where it is consigned to a battalion of midgets.

Personal Aside: The Audacity of Arrogance: Obama at 6 Months.

With Barack Obama floundering in his unsuccessful attempt to get his program passed to transfer this republic to a variant of a European social democracy (Deo gratias) the time is ripe for reviewing what he has done wrong.

Seeds of this failure began with his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention. There he superimposed a hugely expensive package of health-care, energy and education initiatives on top of everything else including an exorbitant multi-billion “stimulus” package that has not stimulated.

Six observations.

First, he should have followed the course set by Franklin Roosevelt who saw as his first task his remedying the depression…which, in fact, he never did until the coming of World War II… and who delayed ambitious transfer of a free economy into a government-related one with Social Security until 1935, two years into his administration. Even Lyndon Johnson didn’t begin to push his hideously expensive, coercive and anti-societal Great Society until 1965 when he had sufficient tax revenues with which to pay for his follies. When he discovered in mid-1967 that the budget deficit would hit what to him was an unacceptable $28 billion (think of that!), twice the original projection, he went to the Congress and said he would have to trim his spending sails unless he was given a tax hike. So enamored was the Democratic congress of the promised spending goodies, they gave him his tax increase. But the important thing was that both FDR and LBJ were remarkably cognizant of placing overload on the economy—something Obama has not concerned himself with.

Second, he should have discarded the Clinton re-treads he gathered around him: Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, Carol Browner and other hangers-on from permanent liberal campaigns which he had promised to avoid. They hail from another era when the deficit was tolerable by modern standards and catchy-sounding spending programs were in vogue. The unfortunate crack by Emanuel to the effect that the economic catastrophe should not be allowed to go to waste and offers a great opportunity was not just a slyly cynical one—but showed the intellectual depravity of the Clinton re-treads. If that crack had been made by an FDR, JFK, Johnson or even Clinton staffer, he’d be out on the street before nightfall.

Third, obnoxious know-it-alls Emanuel and David Axelrod have repeatedly invoked insolence and the arrogant gesture of the uplifted index finger toward Republicans by saying pompously, “After all, we won the election.” Democratic congressional majorities were higher in 1933 and 1965 than they were in 2008. But there was ample bipartisan consultation. James Farley, FDR’s guru and Harry McPherson, LBJ’s confidant, were deeply solicitous to receive Republican support and their acting nice paid off. With FDR and LBJ, congressional leaders of both political parries were consulted at early stages: because Roosevelt had the benefit of Farley, a political genius and Johnson had been himself the most effective Senate leader since Henry Clay.

Fourth, Obama’s style has been to make glorious sounding speeches for health-care and energy programs but buck the details to the Democratic congressional committee chairmen—which was Emanuel’s idea. By that means he let the unscrupulous pragmatist Nancy Pelosi craft a Christmas Tree full of goodies, satisfying every Democrats’ needs in his district, with little regard for stimulus which left Obama bereft of control over direction of his $787 billion program. Accordingly no House Republicans supported it , certifying Democrats own the misnamed stimulus, which won’t kick in til 2010 at the earliest—for which they will deservedly pay a steep political price.

Fifth, people are getting tired of the rush act to pass Obama’s stuff,,,born of Dems’ realization that voters shouldn’t waste time perusing what it costs or lawmakers what’s in the bill. This is what happened with the misnamed “stimulus.” Obama said: “If we move swiftly to sign the [stimulus] into law, an economy that is already in crisis will be faced with catastrophe…Millions more Americans will lose their jobs. Homes will be lost. Families will go without health care.” Then came the siren words of Democrats to boast what they had done. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) trumpeted that its passage “will give the economy an immediate jolt!” Larry Summers, Clinton old treasury secretary now in the White House: “You’ll see the effects almost immediately!” Well, not really. Unemployment has reached 9.5 percent; everybody acknowledges it will hit 10% and economists generally believe it will rise further.

The rush act to pass “stimulus” came immediately in Ms. Pelosi’s House contradicting Obama’s campaign pledge to work in spirit of bipartisanship and to give the public 48 hours to consider the 1,071-page “stimulus” in time for the vote. The package was unveiled to the House at 1 a.m. Feb. 13 and passed later that day after a total of one hour of substantive debate.

The only “negotiations” with Republicans on the “stimulus” came in the Senate when in the scramble to get the needed 60 votes to forestall a filibuster, three of the usual liberal suspects defected, one, Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), desperate to save his job, switched to become a Democrat since he faced a conservative primary opponent, as well as having received Obama’s pledge to campaign for him. The other two Republicans —gargoyle duennas Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins (Me.)—are always scared of tough Dem opposition since their northeastern state is filled to overflowing with new residents with liberal Bronx and Brooklyn wiseguy New York city-accented refugees. And of course there are ample goodies for liberal Dems with dollars have been channeled to state and local governments to deflect public employee unions from the ravages of the recession.

But on Cap and Trade, another big Obama push which passed the House by only a handful of votes, House Democrats were cannily prescient. They knew how leery the voters are of big ticket items and were scheming to beat some of their members, so they recruited a handful of Republicans including Cong. Mark Kirk (Ill.) to vote for it—calculating just enough defections to pass it and subtract Democrats and giving Dems cover with permission to vote against it to spare recrimination at the polls. Kirk was worried about Dem opposition in his liberal North Shore district and so Rahm Emanuel, like the ever-slithering Iago in Othello, assured him that if he voted for it, Emanuel’d see to it a weak Democratic candidate emerged. Kirk cast a predictably liberal North Shore vote. As it turns out, Emanuel’s promise was unverifiable…and Kirk’s next door neighbor, in Denny Hastert’s district got a pass to vote against it. Kirk decided to plump for the U.S. Senate…but he’ll have to live with his pro-Cap and Trade vote which will likely destroy him with his Republican base.

Again the rush act was clamped on. The 2,000-plus page which would put a ceiling on greenhouse gas emissions was delivered to the House June 28. Then came a crucial 300-page amendment presented at 3 a.m. When House Republican Leader John Boehner scheduled a one-hour speech in opposition, Dem attack-dog Henry Waxman, the personification of what it is to look porcine objected that it was too long. That kind of autocracy has apparently crushed any hope that Cap and Trade will be given much even-handed consideration in the Senate. For example, already some senators, notably John Kyl (R-Ariz) are demanding the “stimulus” be repealed. This isn’t as wildly unpopular as one might suppose: polls show voters are worried about the specter of the national debt spiraling 40% to about 80% of GDP and a popular argument runs that it would be folly to entrust our economic future to those who wrote the “stimulus” package.

These five points have contributed to joblessness and Obama’s sharply declining approval rates, spurring panic in Democratic ranks. Cap and Trade has been put off to Fall; card check dear to the hearts of union bosses has been shuffled off to Buffalo but liberals are crafting another substitute called “Fast Track.”. But the point that follows is very important for Obama.

Don’t Fudge the Numbers.

Sixth, don’t get crosswise with your own Democratic Congress by fudging the numbers on how much you universal health care will cost. Along with all other of his programs, Obama has put the rush act on passage of health care…first insisting it be passed before the August congressional recess, then amending the do-pass date to year’s end. But deadlines won’t do it. What little chance remained of passage, popped like a kid’s birthday party balloon last week when Obama’s cost estimates were shot down not by Republicans but by the Democratic-appointed head of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf who must be one very brave guy coming under inexorable pressure from Congressional Democratic leaders and from the White House when he testified that no way can the figures Obama has submitted for health care costs will be attained—in fact the numbers cannot reasonably be reconciled.

Questioning Obama’s numbers have been rife since he unveiled his plan but they…and the mainstream liberal media…generally ignored it akin to the Emperor’s New Clothes saga. No one aside from the Republicans have questioned his premise that as rising health care costs will bankrupt the treasury the solution is to pile atop of everything else a new hugely expensive entitlement: a suggestion that should have been ridiculed off the lot as incredibly insane. And for proof that The New York Times has officially abdicated any claim to reporting the news, consider this: most national newspapers reported Elmendorf’s shattering statement that he can’t justify Obama’s statistics: even The Washington Post Post put it on page 1. But The Times buried it on page 15, sandwiched in a few sentences with other news. Who says we don’t have a Pravda or Izvestia in this country?

At the same time, a key Democratic Senator, Max Baucus of Montana, chairman of the Senate Budget committee, complained out loud to the press. He wants to tax health care benefits and was asked about it. This is what he said: “The President is not helping us. He does not want the exclusion. That’s making it difficult with these taxes moved off the table. It is still difficult to come up with the revenue measures and other saving measures”said Baucus.

Slipping FOCA Through.

While the nationally liberal media bury the issue of abortion coverage in Obama’s health care bill, abortion will be a major issue because it’s clear from the House legislation that outpatient hospital clinics and clinic services would be funded. The legislation provides that a board at Health and Human Services named by Obama and the secretary of HHS, a pro-abortion Catholic, will decide whether abortion should be covered. That came clear with an exchange between pro-life Mormon Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) a pro-abortion Catholic. The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions rejected four pro-life amendments including one by Hatch barring the government health plan from abortion coverage, and two more by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), one to add an abortion conscience clause for medical personnel and the other to prevent the massive bill from being used to overturn state abortion restrictions.

One pro-life measure was adopted by voice-vote was by Coburn to provide a conscience clause for medical personnel who object to assisted suicide which Connecticut pro-abort Catholic Dem Chris Dodd amended to require medical providers to object in writing invoking religious beliefs but excluding protection from those who involve conscientious objection. And of course the Dodd amendment includes a broad provision for “emergency” situations. As it stands now, Obama’s health care provision is a sneaky way to incorporate the FOCA [Freedom of Choice Act].

But the Obama bill which has no numbers, has little or no chance of passage. What could happen in order to give Obama a fig-leaf is to pass an aspirational bill which will continue to have no numbers and which revenue will be decided later.

One additional point that might be considered by Obama and his followers if they wish to heighten his persuasive powers. Here I’ll address this message just to him cognizant that I was the first radio correspondent to interview him substantively after he got elected to the legislature on ABC Chicago although he won’t read it anyhow:

Barack, everybody massages your ego as an orator but you’re not THAT good. You’re outdoing Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson and even the garrulous Bill Clinton with the multiplicity of your speeches and prime time news conferences in Washington and around the country. Cool it; put the teleprompter in the closet and resolve to be photographed at your desk working, writing, with your mouth closed. In fact, trim back your grandiose proposals—and see how that works.

At least three eminently screwball things happened to the Democratic party last week—countered by the one candid performance by Sarah Palin early in July. As the national so-called mainstream media largely refused to analyze them correctly, I’ve decided

Dems Punching Themselves Silly.

Understand (as I’m sure you do) that the Democrats control all the levers of power in Washington: the presidency, both houses of Congress, all federal agencies. With that in mind and with the generic vote between the two parties very close and a tough race for them coming up next year, why, I ask you, would they want to probe their own CIA and shatter its effectiveness before the world…embarrass the agency and its director and weaken the Democratic party’s already shaky reputation on national security with the voters?

But that’s what’s happening. It all started with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s charge that she was lied to by the agency on the issue of waterboarding in 2002 when George W. Bush was in power. CIA Director Leon Panetta—a former California House Dem colleague of Pelosi’s—responded curtly that the CIA doesn’t lie to Congress. Whether she was or not, to bring the charge up caused a rupture between the agency which is a vital part of our defense and the Speaker.

When challenged to definitively charge the agency with lying or risk the charge of lying herself, Pelosi quickly fell back and immediately scheduled a foreign trip so she would be out of the line of fire. Then the Republicans seized the opportunity shrewdly and said that there should be a House investigation and that Pelosi should testify under oath…the implication being that if she should be proven to lie under oath she’d be censured and expelled from the Speakership. Then with looming problems on the economy and all, the issue seemed to die.

Okay. There’s an old political axiom that says when you goof up, let sleeping dogs lie (pun intended). But then the Democrats exacerbated the problem. Seven Dem members of the House Intelligence Committee have sent a letter to CIA Director Leon Panetta…who once was chief of staff to President Bill Clinton… claiming that the agency has been lying to members of Congress and Panetta should retract his earlier statement to the committee. Why would the House Dems want to embarrass their own former fellow House Dem colleague by bringing this up now? Panetta all but did in order to keep peace with the Congress but his underlings are furious at the House Dems. With the original Pelosi charge all but forgotten, why did the seven Dems stir up the pot?

The answer: behind the scenes, Mme. Pelosi demanded an eye for an eye--a device to get the Speaker off the hook from her own previous charge. Result: they’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest at the CIA. It’s a very vindictive agency with a long memory for those who charge it with lying to Congress which is antithetical to its charter. My old boss in the House who was ranking member of House Foreign Affairs used to tell me that there are two government agencies a House member should not alienate: the IRS and the CIA which have permanent career staffs whose reputation is guarded jealously—both with investigative resources that can be easily turned loose with destructive leaking to the media on a moment’s notice.

Continuing their war with the CIA, the Dems leaked a story last week against the agency’s permanent staff to their favorite left-wing outlet, The New York Times, that the CIA with the blessing of then Vice President Dick Cheney developed a secret counterterrorism program, a classified initiative to kill or capture al Qaaeda operatives. Cheney was said to have ordered the CIA to keep it secret from Congress.



Old CIA hands respond by saying truthfully there is no reason why the agency should keep plans from the Congress which funds it. The “kill or capture al Qaaeda operatives” was loosely discussed in the agency and never finalized. (Note: My personal view is why since 3,000 plus Americans died at 9/11 weren’t such plans finalized, approved and carried out?).

Why the Dems’ fight now with the CIA which they control? The only advantage would be to blacken the Bush administration—but the Bushies are history, the campaign is over and further Dem obsession with attacking them is valueless for three reasons: (a) if another attack on our shores comes up with mass killings as per the 3,000-plus who were killed on 9/11, public outrage will consume the Dems for weakening our intelligence; (b) further slurring the Bush administration which is out of power is redundant; and (c) riling the CIA to a war with Pelosi would play directly into the hands of Republicans in the 2010 off-year, stirring up old charges that the Democrats are soft on national security and anti-terrorism, animosity the Democratic congress doesn’t need right now. It should be remembered that the CIA was unofficially aligned against the Bushies because the agency opposed the war in Iraq. Yet the Dems now are driving the agency into the hands of its Republican enemies.

To make matters worse, House Intelligence Democrats are demanding that the policy of informing the House be expanded to include their entire committee instead of to the two bipartisan leaders… which would gravely risk disclosure since congressional committees are sieves that leak secrets at will. They are insisting the new rules be contained in the defense appropriation bill…causing a response from the Obama administration that were this to occur, Obama would veto the entire intelligence appropriation—an historic first.

Nevertheless it’s now official House Democratic policy that the CIA has made a long practice of lying to Congress—leading to the possibility of a full rupture between the Obama administration and the Democratic congress with possible veto of defense appropriations, running the risk of political disaster in the future if we are attacked once more by terrorists…all to save Nancy Pelosi and to justify themselves with the San Francisco-style Left who are her allies.

Thus the Democratic Left in Congress is doing more possible harm to the Dem majority and the party’s national security reputation than Republicans could possibly do.

Found at Last: A Non-Charismatic Kennedy.

With Illinois Democrat Roland Burris announcing that he will not run for election to the Senate seat in 2010 to which he was appointed by impeached and discredited Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, the good news at first for the party seemed to be that another Kennedy might be interested in running for the seat—which would mean that just as fatally ill Ted Kennedy, 77, is ready to cash in his chips after 47 years of unstinting service to liberalism, another Kennedy (his nephew) has been found to replace him.

Sounds good but it isn’t. The Kennedy who has announced his interest in running is Christopher, 46, number eight of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy’s eleven children. I have known Chris Kennedy for many years because he is president of Merchandise Mart Properties which for many years was the headquarters of Quaker Oats (which I served as vice president), the largest wholesale trade center in the United States (6.2 million square feet). The Mart was sold by the Kennedy family to New Jersey-based Vomado Realty Trust but Kennedy continues as its president. He lives in suburban Chicago with his wife Sheila Berner Kennedy and their four children.

What I always liked about Chris Kennedy was that he is totally unlike the other Kennedys: uncharismatic, unassuming, gentle, a regular guy. Never much for politics, he has a bachelors in business from Boston College and an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg school where I once part-time taught. He has the requisite shaggy hair but has his mama’s rather toothy visage rather than that of Kennedy pere. If he decides to run (which he hasn’t officially yet) he will have to undergo rigid theatrical training to imitate his Kennedy predecessors. He is already pencil-thin which is good but he will have to affect jabbing his right hand in his jacket pocket ala Uncle Jack, jabbing with forefinger when he makes a speech like his daddy Bobby while he says in staccato in imitation of his Uncle Ted: “Let me, ah, say this, ah, about that.”

His ideology is unknown but he is a director of the Catholic Theological Union here which is decidedly liberal. I’ve never talked with him about religion but Illinois Dems pray he’s not like his big sister Kathleen Kennedy Townsend who last week wrote in Newsweek that Barack Obama better reflects the values of American Catholics than does Pope Benedict XVI: “Polls bear out that American Catholics do not want to be told by the Vatican how to think…[T]he Vatican holds disdain (if not disgust) toward gays. But 54% of American Catholics find gay relationships to be morally acceptable…[T]he pope claims that condoms aggravate the spread of AIDS. Seventy-nine percent of American Catholics disagree, according to a 2007 poll by Catholics for Choice [sic].” Catholics for Choice is a feeble letterhead committee that exists to maim the Church.

Townsend, now 58, was lieutenant governor when she was decisively defeated for governor of Maryland in 2002 in a Democratic year and a heavily Democratic state, 48% to 52%, her opponent becoming the first Republican governor of the state in 27 years…the reason being she turned off thousands of blue-collar Dems in a state where its 23% Catholics are usually regarded as safe Democratic voters.

After her article appeared last week, one respondent said she was bootlegging a false variant of Catholicism. She heatedly objected to being called a bootlegger. I don’t know why when her grandfather made much of his fortune bootlegging scotch whiskey to this country where he stored it in secret in warehouses in Chicago, waiting for Prohibition to end.

But hey, at week’s end it looked like Chris Kennedy’s not going for the Senate anyhow.

Obama’s Version of the Cold War.

If you want to fathom Barack Obama you must remember that he is the product of Lefty parents, educated in Ivy League universities Columbia and Harvard Law and hired as a lecturer at the University of Chicago law school (U of C law being far different than its business school which is modeled largely on Milton Friedman’s free market principles). The law school is dedicated to the 1930s “legal realism” doctrine which prizes results (asking “is it fair?) over the rule of law. Faculty lounge radicalism has dominated this thinking. Nothing has so demonstrated this than his talk…largely unreported…to a group of students in Moscow during his recent trip there where he rewrote the history of the Cold War.

“The Cold War reached a conclusion,” he said, “because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided its end would be peaceful.”

Not a word about the fact that the then USSR ran a brutal autocratic regime, killing millions and sending millions of dissenters off to the Gulags. Not a word about the U. S. reaction carried on valiantly through nine presidencies, Republican and Democrat.

No mention of the Korean War begun by Harry Truman to deter growth of communism and ended by Dwight Eisenhower, the Berlin blockade which Truman overcame with the air lift, the Berlin Wall raised by the USSR to challenge John Kennedy, the Cuban missile crisis faced by Kennedy, the buildup of U.S. troops in Vietnam to 16,000 by Kennedy, the full-length Vietnam engagement under Lyndon Johnson, the successful approach to China by Richard Nixon, the Helsinki Agreement reached under Gerald Ford.

Continuing: Nor any reference to the Carter Doctrine warning the Russians not to exploit Iran under Jimmy Carter, the climactic Reykjavik summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev where Gorbachev accepted Reagan’s “zero option” elimination of all nuclear missiles in Europe, the signing of the mutual non-aggression pact between NATO and Warsaw Pact nations between George H. W. Bush and Gorbachev and the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Which leads to the question: Is Obama uneducated, dumb or what? The answer: He’s not uneducated but mal-educated similar to what you find in many Ivy League faculty lounges: a Third Worlder, unfeeling and disengaged from America’s past—more interested in making a name for himself as a pseudo socialist Messiah eager to placate our critics rather than appreciating how under U. S. leadership the West overcame deadly threat from the East.

In short that’s what you get when you elect a president with radical parentage, abandoned by two fathers, whose likely birth was in Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya, when his mother’s late pregnancy interfered with her boarding a plane to enable her to return to her Hawaii home—the place of his birth making him ineligible to hold his office under the Constitution, an issue about which his staff and mass media continually obfuscate, refusing to produce his original birth certificate. And then giving him an Ivy League education where U. S. patriotism is frowned upon—after which he organized radical communities in Chicago using as his Bible Saul Alinsky’s precepts.

Sarah’s Style.

Political speechmaking has changed drastically through the years. For example, try reading William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech which he delivered at the old Chicago Coliseum on a scaldingly hot (101 degrees) July 9, 1896 with my Irish marble-layer grandfather Thomas F. Cleary cheering him on. It’s brimming with inflated rhetoric.

Even FDR was too oracular in his formal speeches by today’s standards (not so his Fireside Chats). Ronald Reagan turned things around with lower and less histrionic style, delivering his speeches in warm conversational tones. Now comes Sarah Palin who has taken political speechmaking to the zenith of folksiness—which I like very much…one of many reasons I think Palin, who’s only 45, will be with us for a long time to come, and maybe…just maybe…will become our first woman president (I kid you not).

Get this paragraph from her extemporaneous talk in which she announced her retirement. As an old political speech-writer I love it. Read the paragraph and tell me if she doesn’t grab every average Joe and Jill with plain-speaking. She lays out the scenario on how she made the decision:

“In fact, this decision comes after much consideration and finally polling the most important people in my life—my children where the count was unanimous…the question being “Want me to make a positive difference and fight for ALL our children’s future from OUTSIDE the Governor’s office?” It was four `yes’s’ and one `hell yeah!’ The `hell yeah!’ sealed it and someday I’ll talk about the details of that…I think much of it had to do with the kids seeing their baby brother Trig mocked by some pretty mean-spirited adults recently. Um, by the way, sure wish folks could ever, ever understand that we ALL could learn so much from someone like Trig—I know he needs me but I need him even more…what a child can offer to set priorities RIGHT—that time is precious. The world needs more Trigs not fewer.”

No speech-writer, no script, just speaking from the heart. That’s why I think we’ll hear more from Sarah Palin in the future.



Much more.

Personal Aside: Obama’s News Conference a Harvard Lecture. Smooth…Elegant…Making the Right Liberal Sounds but Not Answering the Tough Questions.

The Harvard Lecture.

Every so often when I was a teaching Fellow at Harvard (1977) I’d audit John Kenneth Galbraith’s course on the social economy. It was a fastidious performance, brimming with enticements to level the playing field, tax the rich, the need of government to enter the fray and rectify the imbalance on Wall Street. The students sat transfixed because Galbraith was the university’s foremost rhetorican. And when the hour was completed you decided you have partaken of a seven course dinner…but when you left the lecture hall you found that you weren’t left with anything substantive at all, rather like having partaken of a Chinese meal where you immediately wanted something solid to chew on afterward.

The news conference was filled with starry-eyed visionaries as did our Galbraith class…and no one—utterly no one—asked difficult questions that contradicted the dazzling Harvard lecturer who allowed his answers to expand with dreamy liberal rhetoric. As the conference was held last night we’re running out of time to pass health care on a schedule which was set by Obama himself. The House has two more weeks, the Senate three more weeks if they are going to make that deadline which the president himself has acknowledged can slip,.

Much of his answers were rhetorical. As they sat transfixed, he said he wants the IMAC commission, very important to the Blue Dogs, an independent commission that is to take away from Congress the power to set Medicare reimbursement rates. But that doesn’t even meet the problem of paying for the plan and making it revenue neutral—but it would keep the costs down. But that’s a very minor part of it. The problem of paying for the plan is hat the House presented a way of paying for it—raise taxes on those people making over $280,000. But that caused a lot of Democrats to object to that so Nancy Pelosi says, OK we’ll just raise taxes on those making $1 million. The question is: where are you going to get the rest of the money?

Just as the socialist Galbraith painted a scenario where the rich…very rich…would assume the burdens for the middle class—Obama is doing the same thing but as with Galbraith the numbers don’t compute. He denies the health plan is about him. Wrong: it’s all about him. It’s not about cost controls because the controls are going to raise the costs. Nor is it about improving quality because this enlarged bureaucracy is going to decrease the quality of health care. Nor is it about efficiency because his plan is going to introduce a myriad of bewildering new commissions and complex regulations. This is a variant of a John Kenneth Galbraith Harvard lecture—beautifully concocted. What will likely happen is nothing. Oh there’ll be a shell bill which will be labeled “health care” but which it will be harmless, impotent and the media will dress it up as vital first step.

But it is very similar to the economics lectures that John Kenneth Galbraith delivered to us in 1977. Starry-eyed students looked like they had just seen the Beatific Vision…but it was the dream of socialism that has never been redeemed…a dream reincarnated last night by a charlatan who hopes he can generate a little more steam in it to get passed. For a reincarnation of the old Galbraithan flavor, get his book The Age of UnCertainty. Beautiful whipped cream frosting, angel food texture and no substance.

He can’t. It won’t.

Personal Aside: The Most Trusted Man in America? Hah!

Note: For the past two days the blog has been out of action due to mechanical failure. Sorry. Here goes.

Such is American “mainstream media’s” preoccupation with fact-free labeling is that when pompous old phony Walter Cronkite died at 92 last week the canard floated freely from the news agencies that here was “the most trusted man in America.” Ironically by trusting this egocentric faux sage, Americans and its president were misled to lose America’s first war. True one would hope a president would be resolute enough not to be swung to and fro by someone like Cronkite…or to base the act of winning a war on public sentiment and to pursue through to the end…but such was the case with Lyndon Johnson in the late 1960s. And also with the media where in an era of no cable, no internet, no talk radio the biggest megaphones were held by CBS, ABC and NBC along with the unflaggingly liberal big urban dailies and newsmagazines.

Up to 1968 Cronkite had an honorable career covering wars and assassinations. He was a firm supporter of the Vietnam war until Tet. Then, after a trip to Vietnam in early 1968, he…as the ranking CBS anchor…more than anyone else convinced Americans to toss in the chips on the Vietnam war—making the 58,209 American lives lost in that engagement all but in vain since they were albeit honorably engaged in a war that America lost via public opinion…through his inaccurate reporting swayed by liberal ideology by Cronkite and other media types of the Tet Offensive.

The men and women who lost their lives were thus betrayed by a portly avuncular anchor who gloried in his own celebrity and ratings in acclamation of his pronouncements, having earlier supported the war as essential to defeating Communism. His switch led Lyndon Johnson to say “if I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, then I’ve lost everything.” That tells one a lot about Johnson but polls and media were his nemesis. Johnson’s utter weakness was matched by that of Robert McNamara and the so-called “wise men” who gathered around him. If leaders were to gauge winning wars on public support, George Washington would have capitulated, James Madison would have surrendered having been forced to flee the Capitol, Lincoln would have surrendered after Bull Run and George W. Bush would have tossed up his hands when the Iraq insurgents began to take a toll of American lives.

American lives spent to win the Vietnam War were not wasted but they were entitled to have a president not give up in the face of their glorious sacrifice. As it was, largely due to Cronkite…and the influence this relativist had over our institutions basis his ratings…their lives were sacrificed as magnificently as those soldiers of other wars, but because of the media which swayed Johnson from his perch…led largely by Cronkite…the hallowed dead were denied their sacred right—to have participated in a winning phase of what John Kennedy called “the long twilight struggle” in this chapter of the Cold War to attain victory. Always adept at wiping away a tear when a liberal icon died, Cronkite’s ego began to be enlarged by his celebrity. But the worst was to come.

Rather than the media calling Cronkite’s dereliction to national attention, short-hand myth instead of factual labeling has canonized a newsman who for whatever reason had more to do with America losing the war than any other single American.

For those who want the unvarnished facts, here they are. On the evening of the last day of January, 1968 during the Tet holiday Vietnamese communist armies launched attacks on dozens of towns and U.S. bases in South Vietnam. Long before that, shrinking national media correspondents such as David Halberstam of The New York Times became convinced we should get out. They formed an emotional chord with the unshaven, un-bathed (and that’s before we consider the men) ill-educated students, the children of affluence, at Ivy League universities. Forgotten was the need to stress patriotism. Arthur (Punch) Sulzberger the published of The New York Times asked his son Pinch who was at Harvard if he could muster up at least fraternal regard for an American soldier killed by the Viet Cong. Pinch Sulzberger, now the publisher, told his father “not a chance. Matter of fact I would welcome it since we are the invaders of their land.” This self-same Pinch who would cheer the death of an American soldier runs the bankrupt New York Times today—talk about an index of decadence.

Up to that time the American people were behind Johnson and his prosecution of the war. But the avalanche of news media and Cronkite’s commentary that we were defeated at Tet changed public opinion…despite the fact that it later it became known that Tet was an enormous Communist defeat. No correction ever came from Cronkite for he was on the glory-road to personal adulation, fatal for a newsman. Johnson of course was uncertain and as soon as public support melted, he melted. For comparison, let us see how George W. Bush endured the most savage criticism and saw it through to victory in Iraq.

Cronkite’s pronouncement changed the U. S. by making a false sloppily judged news perception reality…as it happened many times since but not with as disastrous a result. Liberals canonized Cronkite for his pronouncement and he luxuriated in their warm glow. Larded with acclamations, he was seen as an intellectually honest savior. Johnson who was never buttressed in certainty beyond his own poll numbers, saw his ratings decline and tossed in the chips. Robert McNamara his weak-willed numbers defense secretary was shattered and literally wept himself to dissolution in his office. A ruined man, bereft of any confidence, he was sacked and a canny opportunist lobbyist-lawyer Clark Clifford came in with a history of placating Johnson who was his client. With Gene McCarthy entering the presidential primary in New Hampshire…in a display of savagery because McCarthy was passed over for vice president in favor of Hubert Humphrey… and Bobby Kennedy coming in afterward, Johnson was transformed into a ruined old man who refused to continue the war with aggressiveness.

Thanks to the media and largely to Cronkite a surprising comment came from Leslie Gelb, then a key operative at the Pentagon. Gelb said “Vietnam passed the bounds of reasonable debate and fair discussion. What was important was not so much what was going on in Vietnam but what was happening in America…The war could e lost only if the American public turned sour on it. American public opinion was the essential domino. U. S. leaders knew it. Hanoi’s leaders knew it.”

Thus the North Vietnamese were secure in going on fighting with the conviction that even if they lost on the battlefield—as they did at Tet which once the Americans regained the initiative mowed down 47.627 of the enemy in that offensive alone (falling just less than America lost in the whole war)…a horrific Communist cost for which there was no decent reportage…American public opinion would follow the French public opinion and give them victory. Suffused with acclamations and honorary degrees from the Left, Cronkite went on to embrace a whole panoply of liberal causes, each gathering more applause from the so-called establishment than preceding.

So now we “honor” the old codger who called the war he once supported “immoral.” What is more immoral than one who betrays his country for liberal applause and acclaim by telling it we had lost the war while withholding the real facts that Tet was a destructive failure for the North Vietnamese. Cronkite continued prattling his “news” with altered statistics…never, ever reciting the facts of ultimate victory… convincing it that all is lost…rendering its president that he could not go on? In private life, Cronkite turned out to be Old Uncle Wackadoodle, endorsing many liberal political and social ideas. Cronkite’s followers in the media persecuted George W. Bush faced when he stood firm for the Surge. Indeed, Cronkite’s prime legatee is Barack Obama who prattled that the Surge wasn’t working and still cannot bring himself to admit its success.

Now we are asked to stand in hushed reverence before the bier of duplicitous old Walter…on the pretext that he was “the most trusted man in America”? Most trusted at that time, yes because he was an agent of duplicity. Unfortunately with which he sold out that trust to urge surrender…and for which he bears major responsibility for desecrating the nation’s honor and the young people who gave their lives for their country to win. Not me, my friends.

Walter Cronkite indeed! Had this man held an important media post of influence during in the Civil War when the Confederate campfires could be seen by Abraham Lincoln from the White House portico…we would have sundered the Union. Spare me your tears for this wicked old relativist who savored Standing Tall in Georgetown.

Personal Aside: The Secret to Gun Violence No One Wants to Divulge—Marriage Supplanted by Puppy Dog Coupling with the Underclass.

Chicago Police Superintendent Jody Weis said yesterday “For the month of July we’ve had about almost an incident a day where someone has tried to murder a police officer. If they’ll do that to a uniformed officer, what will they do to civilians and innocent people on the street? That’s why we need the entire community to get together. Because if the bad guys are willing to shoot uniformed officers, the citizens in this city are in very grave danger.”

He made the statement after two veteran officers, wearing full body armor and yelling “Police! Search warrant!” were shot when a 22-year-old black male shot at them through a closed bedroom door in a house at 112th Place and State. Several other people were holed up in the bedroom when the shooting occurred and a 3-year-old child was also in the house.

It was the third shooting involving police in 24 hours.

Incidents like this always produce the same response. Tearful neighbors rush outside and tell the cameras, sobbing, that the number of guns on the street is intolerable and that violence in their neighborhood is also intolerable.

The TV cameras switch over to a portly black minister who talks with a backdrop of tearful black men and women behind him. He pledges that this must stop “or our community will be devastated” and everybody behind him—just as they do in church—say “amen! Amen! Amen, brother!”And downtown Mayor Daley calls a news conference and says the violence is intolerable and the number of guns is intolerable. And at St. Sabina’s parish, blond whitey Rev. Michael Pfleger announces he will lead a march against violence and tells the media when his march will take place and where so they will be sure to cover it. TV anchors report this in tones of sadness (they somehow know how to lower their voices to produce the right tone: a tone of resignation and despair). Editorials appear in the two papers saying these incidents of violence must stop and that guns must be taken away.

Does this have an eerily familiar ring? Of course it does—because it happens virtually every other day during the summer. Why does it have no effect? Because the authorities, the media and the black neighborhood clergy of the neighborhood…and the largely white bishopric clergy downtown in the cathedrals and stately near Michigan avenue churches…have nothing to say except that more guns must be taken off the street.

Actually, the long-range solution to this starts with the clergy—the black clergy in the neighborhoods…the gesticulating clergy at Operation PUSH…the rhyming heroic-couplet black orators at community organizations…the cowardly Catholic clergy downtown. Essentially they have forsaken their mission.

And the mission should be to return to the precepts of Judeo-Christianity and campaign…stump as in a political campaign…for the black poor to get married. How long will it take for these people…and the media…to understand that the family—married couples with father and mother—are the foundation of society…and that without it, with fathers scattering their seed and disappearing…with teen-aged black girls themselves without a family who importune males to impregnate them so they will have a cuddlesome little bundle to love…is the source of the problem?

I stress black here because largely that’s where the crime is. Also there’s a vital distinction between blacks and whites on the marriage issue. Yes, assuredly, as Kay Hymowitz says in a brilliant article in City Journal, it is politically unpopular to say it but “first and foremost, marital breakdown is not rampant across the land. It is concentrated among low-income and black couples. Americans seem to have a lot of trouble grasping this fact, probably because so much public space is taken up by politicians, celebrities and journalists with marriages on the skids.” The John Edwards, Bristol Palin, Mark Sanford stories are banner-line everywhere. But while given Superbowl publicity, they are not the reality. The divorce rate among college-educated women has been declining since 1980.

Out of wedlock child-bearing among wealthier classes remains rare. Writes Ms. Hymowitz: “The bottom line is that higher-income, college-educated couples are far more likely top get married and stay married than their less-educated and lower-income peers.” The problem with getting this through lies with cowardice—cowardice with clergy who shirk from being unpopular or seeming to sound racist by this truth…cowardice with our left-leaning journalists who profess they “feel” for the poor and so they cannot report the facts about broken families the huge number of female-headed families in the ghettoes. And it doesn’t only concentrate with the poor. Yesterday the papers carried almost as routine the story of Bears linebacker Lance Briggs, unmarried, who impregnated two women and is being charged with fathering another child with a third. He has a $36 million, six-year contract with the Bears.

Why is it so hard for our society to understand what has been commonplace for 5,000 years? That there are vital differences between men and women and the only way to tame the savage male beast is with an enduring relationship through marriage with a woman…that the male’s link with the chain of nature, his life energy, his connection with social grace is dependent and contingent on a woman’s durable love and on her sexual discipline?

It may sound in this piece that I’m tough on blacks…but that’s where a huge chunk of the problem is, ladies and gentlemen…on blacks and on their clergy which has substituted grievance against whitey for moral training. And it’s not just black clergy that misses the boat…or black wanna-be clergy like Fr. Pfleger who shouts the popular things from his pulpit. It’s the big white churches downtown including my own Catholic. How many times do we see priests, archbishops with prominent gold chains testifying to their belonging to the hierarchy who never, ever mention the need for marriage to the underclass? I cannot remember once when any archbishop in my church…and I’ve been around long enough to qualify as a octogenarian…who has the fortitude to bring this up.

The popular wimpering liberals in journalism…which in shorthand I will say the Carol Marins of this city…cannot bring themselves to say this but instead prattle for more federal and state money, more alms, more philanthropic dollars. If they do it they link whitey’s problems…Mark Sanford, Bristol Palin, John Ensign…as a kind of soft and easy pro-and-con. But the numbers show that the poor…the blacks…are being devoured by fatherless couplings…and are producing what may well be a permanent underclass. But, gee, don’t bring it up in public because it may sound racist!

Murders by the score each week, shot cops, tons of black kids running the streets until 2 in the morning, drugs, sauntering insouciant black males who are used as sperm donors importuned by young teen aged black women. This is the problem which the clergy…Protestant faiths…Catholic clergy…Jewish rabbis…can’t muster the spiritual strength to mention. Small wonder the editorial boards and the politicians can’t either.

There has been only one gutsy public policy official with the courage to tackle this in my lifetime. That was Daniel Patrick Moynihan who as an assistant Labor secretary in LBJ’s administration produced the shameful record of disintegration of the black family…and the fact that Aid to Dependent Children had a “man out of the house rule.” Everyone climbed on him as a racist and he shut up. The opprobrium that happened to Pat Moynihan from Jesse Jackson and others…the slurs that he was a racist…carried through to everybody and everybody…the media, the two parties…the churches were cowed and silenced. But without contradicting himself, without falling back on political correctness, Pat Moynihan went on to become a good U. S. Senator from New York.

Where, I ask, will the next Pat Moynihan come from? He doesn’t have to come from government or politics. Ideally he should come from the churches. But the churches are too weak. They’d rather kick in dollars to “feed the children of the poor” rather than muster the moral strength to advance the truth and the lesson for real change.

Read Kay Hymowitz’s book “Marriage and Caste in America” or her article in The Wall Street Journal weekend edition July 3-5. And for God’s sake kick that gushy “we’re all guilty” liberal bleating. The churches…yours and mine…are guilty, damn it.

Personal Aside: Obama’s Endorsement of Homosexual Rights

Obama the First Real Pro-Gay President.

Not content with working overtime to change the economy from one at least based on free enterprise to a variant of democratic socialism ala Europe, Barack Obama has pledged a revolutionary change in morals by endorsing specifically and in detail a culture at odds with traditional Judeo Christianity that has been in effect for 5,000 years.

Largely skipped by the news media was his speech June 29 commemorating a date that homosexual activists have marked with solemn dedication—the 40th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots by gay activists in New York. Stonewall was a bar in Greenwich Village serving liquor without a license owned by the Mafia which was a gathering place for homosexuals. The police raided it continually but gay leaders determined that what was needed was an event to commemorate martyrdom. They were correct from a marketing point of view because there’s nothing like martyrdom to spur a movement. Nobody was killed but the Stonewall raid by the police triggered a series of outbreaks in New York…and has been designated as the gays’ Battle of Lexington and Concord.

The civil rights people have a number of such dates—starting with December 1 (1955) when Rosa Parks declined an order to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger…March 11, the date of the march at Selma…March 26 (1939), Marian Anderson’s performance at the Lincoln Memorial after she was denied to appear at Constitution Hall owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution…April 4 (1968), the date Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed…June 11, (1969) the date Medgar Evers was killed…even June 11 (1963) the date Alabama Gov. George Wallace kept his pledge to stand in the schoolhouse door to prevent the federal government from integrating the University of Alabama.

Every mass movement has seized upon anniversaries for marketing purposes (such as our July 4)…and not just in this country. Probably the most dramatic in Europe at the time was in Nazi Germany when Feb. 3 (1930) was designated as a memorial for the slaying of 23-year-old Nazi activist Horst Ludwig Wessel in Berlin purportedly by a Communist. When his cortege was carried in the streets of Berlin March 1 roughly 30,000 marched behind it. The marketing device also featured a song Wessel purportedly wrote, “Die Fahne Hoch!” (“Raise High the Flag”) known as the Horst Wessel Song.

When I was visiting Germany in 1938 at the age of 10 with my parents, we were strolling in Berlin…a week after we had witnessed Hitler’s takeover of Austria (the Anschluss) in Vienna… when a detachment of Nazi youth in brown-shirted uniforms…some of the boys no older than I… marched in goose-step down Unter den Linden boulevard to that song and my father, proficient in German, scribbled notes (as he did from a balcony in Vienna during that country’s takeover). Four years later I discovered why: while he was an officer of the North German Lloyd steamship company and general secretary of the Germania Club in Chicago, he had been recruited on the side as a special agent of the FBI in which capacity he served until the end of World War II. Whether my mother knew his job at the time I do not know (I think not) but I didn’t find out until 1942 when the head of the Chicago office of the FBI visited our home for the express purpose of informing us of Father’s role.

Obama’s Pledge.

In commemoration of the Stonewall anniversary at the first-ever LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) Pride Month at the White House—a veritable carnival of decadence--Obama said:

“We must continue to do our part to make progress—step by step, law by law, mind by changing mind. And I want you to know that in this task I will not only be your friend; I will continue to be an ally and a champion and a president who fights with you and for you.”

An adroit panderer, he presented a detailed shopping list of the specific actions he has made or intends to make to accommodate the demands of the homosexual lobby…including embracing hate-crime laws, supporting civil unions and federal rights for LGBTQ couples, outlawing discrimination in the workplace, ensuring adoption rights and ending the existing “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

His enthusiasm for appealing to the LGBTQ gathering …unmatched by the last liberal president, Bill Clinton…would normally be subject to an examination as to what Obama’s own sexual orientation is. There is no doubt as to his heterosexuality—although watching him throw out the first ball at the All Star Game could, if considered solely, lead one to think otherwise. But disregard that, please. His motivation can be classified as utter capitulation to personal partisan advantage, generated by no shame due to lack of moral and intellectual discipline or decline in necessary moral traditions.

In many ways, Obama’s ignorance of what it is to be decadent has led him to obliviousness of the nature of demographic and moral decay. Remember he was born to a rootless 1960s morally relativist atheist Hippie white mother who was abandoned by not one but two black husbands and was propelled into the disadvantage of two culturally barren Ivy League universities at the height of their disintegration—from which both have partially been repaired. His dissimulation in politics comes from an inherent gift of duplicity, yes—but it is heightened by the fact he has utterly no compass for religion or truth, no understanding of the virtuous life, patriotism and pride of country. It is accompanied by elevation of self-indulgence, narcissism and histrionic pretension which reject absolutes such as truth-telling or pricking of conscience. In a very real sense he is tabula rasa, a tablet empty of anything but self-promotion.

In U. S. history his accession will likely be compared to the succession of unstable emperors beginning with Nero, Caligua and Commodus. While they ruled two centuries before the fall of Rome they were popular with the lower classes and their reigns indubitably played a role in Rome’s decline and fall. If the Age of Obama is not checked the same will come to us—but fortunately there are signs of Americans getting wise to this moral eunuch.

Marxist theory relies on a theory of decadence that separates one from religion, the work ethic leading to man’s gradual decrease in his capacity to provide for his needs—leading to the probability of socialist revolution in the West. This is his vision. Insofar as we have vision, there is an opportunity for us to shuck it off. A private agnostic-cum-atheist, he wouldn’t understand the nature of prayer which is why we have an advantage over him. We can beat this thing yet.

Personal Aside: Liberal Political Shorthand Has Corrupted Our History.

Liberal political shorthand, invariably aiding the Democrats, has corrupted our schools, youth, media and has led to total misapprehension of U. S. history. They are one-sentence shorties that, were you to test them on Lexis-Nexis you will see these descriptives appended to their names…all to the great disadvantage of authentic history. Of course Ivy League historians have cooperated, notably the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. who was a courtier to the Kennedys, treating with cosmetic pancake makeup and rouge on the portraits of very mediocre individuals and punishing enemies of liberalism with charcoal mustaches to their visages.

Sample: Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.). Shorthand: “Reckless demagogue and destroyer of innocent reputations.” Truth: Fifty years of vilification will never be repaired but the Verona Project under which cryptographers have analyzed Soviet cables proved McCarthy was indubitably right when he said the U. S. government was serious infiltrated by Russian spies and agents, stealing technical info from atomic, military, radar, aerospace and rocket programs. (McCarthy’s real sin was linking traitors to the liberal Democratic party for which he had to pay the price).

Another sample: President Harry S. Truman. Shorthand: “Gutsy, tough, scrupulously honest Cold War hero.” Truth: Gutsy and tough, yes. More corruption occurred under his administration than in all administrations from Warren Harding onward. One hundred sixty were fired from the Internal Revenue Service for corruption alone and an assistant treasury secretary was fired for involvement in seeing that wealthy Democrats skipped IRS enforcement. To clean it up Truman has his attorney general hire a special prosecutor. When the special prosecutor turned up material embarrassing to the AG, the AG fired him. Then Truman fired the AG. Bitterly stubborn under attacks that he coddled Communists, Truman refused to fire Harry Dexter White from his undersecretary post at Treasury but allowed him to go to the World Bank. The Venona Report certifies that White was a Soviet agent and that Truman knew it.

Cold war hero? He sponsored the Marshall Plan, yes. But on his watch and largely because of his State Department’s ineffectiveness, aid to Chiang kai Shek was inexplicably cut off allowing the Communists to win and conquer China which has remained in Communist hands ever since.

More soon.

Personal Aside: Will Everything be All Right? Yes, Ma’am! But No Thanks to Obama.

Two Sundays ago as I left St. John Cantius church after Mass (this city’s mother church of authentic Catholicism), a lady came up to me and said, “I’m so worried about the future of our country and I’ve been crying a lot lately. Your Wanderer articles seem to have an optimistic flavor. Tell me—are things going to be all right despite Obama and all?”

Yes, ma’am—we will be all right but no thanks to Barack Obama. Understand he has political skills and a quiet charm equal to Ronald Reagan’s. Understand, too, that you should not pay much attention to what he says but what he does. . And important: Appreciate that he came to Washington not to merely be president of the United States—but to change the system from capitalism to a variant of European socialism.

Believe, too, that when he told Joe the Plumber he wants “to spread the wealth around,” he intends to do so with staggeringly high taxes that mandate redistribution of income; that he means to dismantle capitalism insofar as he is able; that he is heedless of the fact that cap and trade will stifle growth, that he is determined to provide free college education for all; that he means to impose control on three major elements of our lives: health care, energy and public education; that with health care it will send costs through the roof and necessitate a Medicare-style single-payer system from which the only recourse to control costs will be rationing as in Canada.

Perceive that in Moscow he was so eager to announce sizable cuts in nuclear weapons that he disregards the fact the Russians have insisted on linking offensive and defensive weaponry. We can knock a missile out of the sky and the Russian’s can’t. For 25 years, beginning at Reykjavik, the Russians tried to hoodwink us out of our missile defense which Reagan blocked, Bush blocked, Clinton blocked and Bush II blocked and on which Obama is wavering because he wants the Russians to like us more. Then, too, there’s the strange disjointedness between Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden…Obama saying on Israel that we’re not giving it the green light to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and Biden saying on the same day that we mustn’t tell Israel how to protect itself against Iran. Figure that out. Beyond that, the president’s strategy to placate America’s enemies by charm hasn’t worked with Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Vladimir Putin.

Recognize also that Obama does not believe in furtherance of Judeo-Christian America; nor that he believes as did our forefathers that our country is exceptional.

And finally…and most importantly… that he intends to rid society of any instinct to protect unborn life and substitute for laws preventing euthanasia a new “doctrine of merciful release” where the elderly and terminally ill are not continued in life so as to be a burden on the remainder of us.

In these goals he is assisted by major broadcast media because of two reasons: first its executives as products of largely relativistic Ivy League universities feel as secularly as he does; and second by featuring Obama on their programs for very little cost the networks get strong ratings at time slots they would have to fight for if they aired commercial programs. Examples: CBS’ “Face the Nation” got its biggest ratings of 2009 thus far when he appeared on the program last March 29; the most watched segments of its “60 Minutes” last season were when he was on and no fewer than 25.1 millions watched its first post-election interview with him last November. While ABC’s prime-time show on health care with him was disappointing, it still topped anything the network had shown for the prior six weeks.

Why then did I tell the lady in front of St. John Cantius that I’m optimistic? Five reasons…most of which show Obama is governing by fiat like the Daley administration does in Chicago.

People Fear California May Become Us.

First, Obama’s telegenic charm aside, the American people, including Democrats, are wising up when they look at the waste of the stimulus package and unemployment. Support for the stimulus is at 29% now where a few months ago it stood at 57%. Obama himself stands now at 36% favorable and 33% unfavorable in the Rasmussen poll and the same poll shows heavy negatives on a second stimulus package. The initial Obama stimulus was designed to keep unemployment down during what has turned out to be the longest recession since the 1930s. Yet the June jobless rate hit 9.5% and is still climbing. And the budget deficit is prompting many to be concerned with Obama. The most recent Wall Street Journal/ NBC News poll shows unemployment is the first worry of the American people (35%) and the deficit second (24%). Americans favor the Republicans over the Democrats in handling the economy in the future by six points (Rasmussen).

Nor has his government takeover of GM and Chrysler to bail out the United Auto Workers won favor. And he has employed a Chicago-style governance—assuming that the private sector can support all the spending he desires, transferring greater chunks of the American economy to the public domain than ever before, threatening those who expose wrongdoing with firing as he did the AmeriCorps inspector general. That’s really Mayor Daley style Big Man “leadership.”

Second, more Americans are looking at what’s happening to California and calculate it may happen to the rest of the nation. Don’t kid yourself that they’re not. The state plans to issue $3.3 billion in IOUs in July alone—instead of cash, those who do business with the state will get slips of paper. It led one state wag to say “we’ve discovered that the state of California will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” Fear that California is in our future is the reason why Obama can’t get his program passed; the reason why unemployment refuses to go down but is going up. Ronald Reagan took a riverboat gamble that his tax cuts would pay for themselves with economic growth—and he was right. Reagan had what economists say is a “story”—a rationale with which to tell citizens that his plan would come out all right. It did. But Obama has no story. He doesn’t even try to say his welfare state is going to pay for itself; that’s why the Democrats themselves are starting to block his way.

Third, Senate Democrats are moving away from Obama economics quickly. Look at the next door state to Illinois, Indiana where Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh was elected and reelected as a moderate. Today Bayh has aligned himself with 15 Democrats in the Senate who are putting the brakes on spending. Cap and trade which would cost the average American nearly $3,000 per year according to the Heritage Foundation and which by Obama’s own statement would cause electricity rates “to necessarily skyrocket,” passed by only a handful of votes in the heavily Democratic House—and is sure not to go anywhere in the Senate. Nowhere. And on health care? Democratic Senators Mary Landrieu (La.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) and Tom Carper (Del.) have linked arms opposing the public—or government—option. Everybody except the most radical in the Democratic party (e.g. Ted Kennedy and Chuck Schumer) are so scared they want to jump off a cliff when they see costs that will exceed more than $1 trillion.

Fourth, the Obama health care proposal is crashing of its own weight and Senate Democrats will have to craft a cosmetic bill that purports to be about health care but which is innocuous. And the arrival of the so-called 60th Senate Democratic vote with ex-comic Al Franken (Minn.) is not conclusive no matter what the media say. The longstanding absences of Ted Kennedy (Mass.) and 91-year-old Robert Byrd (W. Va.) for health reasons have cut down their majority and the above-named Bayh, Landrieu, Nelson, Lincoln and Carper make it worse (of course we’ve got prime defectors on our side: Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe (Me.). But the odds still weigh heavily against the Dems. Last week a key Democratic senator said the public is so opposed to taxing high-end benefits on health care that some other way will have to be found to pay for the program.

Fifth and finally, Gallup’s hard numbers that Americans are becoming more conservative despite Obama: 40% conservative, 35% moderate and 21% liberal as of the poll of June 15, a growth in conservative affiliation of 3% in the public at large, conservative outweighing liberalism among both genders. There’s bound to be a big GOP pickup in the 2010 off-year congressionals. Obama who helped Dems greatly in Ohio last year has suffered a 13-point drop in the past two months there—and Republicans lead in all three Virginia statewide contests as of now.

Sarah Palin Makes a Good Decision.

Additionally, the lady in front of St. John Cantius was worried to death about the fall-off of Republican presidential hopefuls: the decision of evangelical Protestant Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to resign and the fall from grace of Episcopalian South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford to a love affair with a former TV reporter in Argentina, and evangelical Protestants Nevada Sen. John Ensign and Louisiana’s Sen. David Vitter, a Catholic, with affairs. Let’s take Palin first.

Palin’s decision was the correct one which does not remove her from presidential contention now or in the future. The first thing to remember about her is that she is a veritable baby as the ages of presidential candidates go. She is 45 which is the gummy teething age for national candidates. She will be 47 in 2012, only 52 in 2016, 56 in 2020. She has wisely decided that this media-obsessed age can only be turned around by media themselves and will devote her formidable “retirement” to expressing her views forcefully where she does best—writing, speaking and television appearances. A Fox TV show could well be in her future. She has the most important thing any politician can have: a loyal base with 68% of Republicans viewing her favorably stemming from the valiant job she did in the vice presidential debate where she took on Joe Biden, a 36-year member of the Senate and came out favorably.

Palin can’t move on up the political ladder by neglecting her formidable family responsibilities as she would have to were she to continue in the governorship. In the 46 days on the vice presidential campaign trail she built a national reputation—which when she is in private life she can only expand.

Going to the media which is very smart for her to do. In the game of influencing people to conservative thought, media are where it’s at. Even my one-city ABC radio show in Chicago reaches 100,000 people, substantially larger than the capacity of Soldier Field (61,000 tops). Fox News where private citizen Palin may land, reaches 102 million households. You can see the difference between one governorship and the full-throated media.

Now we go to Sanford, 49: His problem is more than a fall from moral grace: it is obviously one of severe emotional stability for which he needs psychiatric as well as spiritual counseling. Anyone who by his own testimony spends ten days in Argentina crying…telling the media he has found a “soul-mate” in Maria Beten Chapur (a 43-year-old divorced Catholic mother of two, living in the upscale district of Palermo where she is a broker for the international agriculture firm of Bunge & Born, whom he met at a dance in Uruguay in 2006 and with whom he has been involved since 2008)…is in dire need of treatment.

Ensign, 51, was a very long shot for president. He admitted to an affair with the wife of a Senate aide after her husband, reportedly, tried to collect compensatory payment to keep the affair quiet. He has no ties to any important GOP constitutency in Republican politics nor has he sponsored any major legislation. His rating fell precipitously in Nevada where he was reelected in 2006—but still higher than his colleague Democrat Harry Reid, the majority leader, who could well lose reelection next year in that state. Vitter, 48, was found to be a patron of a D. C. madam; he’s running for reelection anyhow after his wife says she’s forgiven him.



Liberals are chortling over Sanford’s, Ensign’s and Vitter’s difficulties —but no sexual imbroglio has come close to equaling the Democrats’. That includes John Edwards’ affair with a TV consultant where he was caught sneaking in the Beverly Hills Hilton to see her and her baby (which may be his), the affair conducted during the illness of his cancer-stricken wife. Bill Clinton becoming only the second president to be impeached. He lied with a sworn deposition denying his trysts in a room off the Oval Office with a 22-year-old White House intern, the liaisons of Gov. Eliot Spitzer with prostitutes where he sought to transfer $10,000 via an offshore shell corporation prompting an IRS criminal probe.

And not to forget 63-year-old House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.), a Baptist, whose 1974 drunken assignation with his own Argentine soul-mate at a sleazy Polynesian restaurant in Washington called the Junkanoo wound up with Mills’ companion, Fanne Fox, a 38-year-old stripper known as “the Argentine Firecracker,” jumping into the Tidal Basin and thrashing around in waist-deep water while TV cameras recorded the lovely scene…followed by Mills, well saturated with booze, going on stage at Boston’s Pilgrim Theatre in her behalf and conducting a news conference with her and her tolerant husband backstage.

Of all the offenders, Bill Clinton, shrewd guy that he is, successfully finessed it before he ran for president in 1991 and insulated himself against further rumors during the `92 campaign. He called a press breakfast with his wife Hillary after the Gennifer Flowers matter and with his best Good Little Boy face on let it be known that their marriage had problems in the past but now was solid…so as to anticipate divulgences that could come out in the future. He said he had strayed off the path in the past but now was a changed man. We saw how he kept his word.

Do Democrats want to continue the conversation about sexual improprieties now?

The Likelihood for 2010, 2012.

The winnowing down of presidential contenders in the Republican party for 2012 (Sanford and likely Palin) means that the likely frontrunner will be former Gov. Mitt Romney of Michigan, who is one of the few adults in both parties in the process. Assuredly there will be more contenders…Minnesota’s Gov. Tim Pawlenty among them… but the Republicans have a habit of nominating “the eldest son,” which usually is the second-running survivor of previous runs, e.g. John McCain in 2008 who ran second to George W. Bush in 2000; George H. W. Bush who ran second to Ronald Reagan in 1980; and Reagan who ran second to Gerald Ford in 1976. I would imagine—indeed hope—that a contender…maybe more than one… would seek the office carrying the Ron Paul flag of much smaller government, much lessened international involvement (Paul will be 77 at the next presidential election).

There! I hope I satisfactorily answered the lady at St. John Cantius.

Wipe your tears, ma’am. We’re not going to play taps for the Republicans just yet—or any time soon.

Personal Asides: Another Shake of the GOP Ticket Kaleidoscope…Justice Ginsberg on “Populations We Don’t Want to Have Too Many of.”

GOP Kaleidoscope.

The other day I started inventing what I thought would be a winning state ticket for the Republicans. It somehow caught on. Mail came in with other suggestions and hence I give you another shake of the kaleidoscope to show other 2010 ticket possibilities…these suggestions coming from both professional pols and movement people who want to the see Grand Old Party progress. To my surprise, many readers are keenly interested in GOP ticket-building. They have sent their ideas at “Reader’s Comments” on this blog and/or on my personal email at thomasfroeser@sbcglobal.net. Feel free to comment and join the fray. This is not a poll or in any way a barometer of sentiment…just suggestions.

For Senator—A new listing: Ron Gidwitz. Also Andrew McKenna and Rep. Mark Kirk whose name is accompanied by some criticism because of Kirk’s hapless vote for Cap `n Trade and his lip-synch of liberals in hate crimes support et al.

For Governor—Sen. Kirk Dillard, Hinsdale, my personal choice because he is rock-solid on key issues, social policies, 2nd amendment and curtailed spending, has matchless credentials in governance experience.

For Lt. Governor—Everyone seems to agree: This should be a woman. Kathy Salvi, has dropped off the list because she is a personal injury attorney. She’s replaced by two downstaters, State Rep. Jill Tracy, Quincy, a formidable lawmaker who at first blush is catching up to Demetra Demonte, Pekin, Republican national committeewoman and popular grassroots movement leader. Both Tracy and Demonte are social conservatives.

For Attorney General—Fervent support that Joe Birkett will elect to stay as a candidate against Lisa Madigan. …but also Kathy Salvi of Lake county, a social conservative favorite who ran earlier for 8th district congress. It doesn’t seem to bother people that Salvi is a personal injury lawyer when she is placed in the AG slot, although that may change.

For Secretary of State—Eric Wallace, Ph.D a young, vigorous conservative African-American with a free market economic philosophy who can out-talk and out-perform the incumbent, an old-fashioned machine regular who’s getting long in the tooth, Jesse White.

For Comptroller—Adam Andrzejewski (“an-GEE-EFF-ski”), Wheaton, self-made brilliantly successful entrepreneur who parlayed local phone books into multi-millions and who is making grassroots conservatives sit up and take notice with his formidable campaign as a newcomer. The incumbent, Dan Hynes, is dropping out, conceivably to run for governor.

For Treasurer—State Sen. Dan Rutherford, Pontiac. State Sen. Alexi Giannoulias of Chicago wants to be the next Democratic U. S. Senator and is vacating the position.

For President of the Cook county Board—State Sen. Matt Murphy, Palatine, young, vigorous lawmaker who tops an earlier suggestion of Judy Baar Topinka for the post (people feel she’s a re-tread), Murphy to face the winner of a hot primary between Todd Stroger, Rep. Danny Davis and Alderman Toni Preckwinkle , Chicagoans.

Ethnic Purity, Race Cleansing from the High Bench.

Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine…abstemiously politically correct as it always has… features a full-dress syphocantic interview brimming with servile flattery with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by one Emily Bazelon, listed as “a founding editor of Double X, Slate’s new Web site for women and the Truman Capote fellow at Yale Law School.”

Yes, that’s right: the Truman Capote fellow at Yale Law School! It’s rather confounding when you wonder what possible legacy left by the deceased flaming gay libertine writer Capote would ever appertain to a law fellowship at Yale except that it might be what he willed as a postmortem put-on. Anyone holding the Truman Capote fellowship would have to live down the name of the legendarily bizarre perpetrator of the outrageous Masked Black and White Ball who died an inconsolable alcoholic and drug addict after his patron Babe Paley cut him adrift from New York’s east side society because he had been caught lisping outrageous lies about her sexual habits and those of ex-friends Jacqueline Kennedy and her sister Lee Radziwell. How about the Perez Hilton Chair for the Truman Capote Fellowship? Oh well, that’s decadent Ivy League education for you.

Reading the interview with Ginsburg you are almost droned to sleep with run-of-the-mill liberal pablum…quite unremarkable stuff…until you come to the question concerning Roe v. Wade and bewailing the clichéd tragedy of “the lack of Medicaid for abortions for poor women.” Ginsburg purred an entirely liberally palatable answer citing the ruling Harris v. McRae the 1980 ruling where the court upheld the Hyde amendment which forbade use of Medicaid for abortions…. but then stumbled into this horrifying Buchenwald-like palaver:

“Frankly I had thought at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in population that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.”

Ginsburg doesn’t think for a second of the phenomenal irony of a Jew citing racial cleansing. And of course the distinguished Truman Capote Fellow of Yale Law School doesn’t either. Of course the genre of population controllers is indebted to the patroness of abortion, Margaret Sanger of Planned Parenthood who wrote--

“Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need. We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock.”

And “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.”

And “Today eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.”

And “We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”

Followed by this word of caution to her allies:

“We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”

At least Sanger feared the consequences of her Hitlerian approach. It never occurs to Ginsburg nor to Bazelon nor to the editor of The New York Times magazine. Or The New York Times itself.

Chilling isn’t it? But it would warm Rudolph Heydrich’s dead heart.