Leaked classified documents reveal Iran fired on U.S. drone...last week

By Kate Hicks
http://www.townhall.com
November 8, 2012


The presidential election is barely over, and yet already, U.S. relations with Iran appear to be rockier than ever. Indeed, CNN reports that fighter jets belonging to the rogue state fired on an unarmed American drone back on November 1 -- an incident just seeing daylight today. 

The drone was in international airspace east of Kuwait, U.S. officials said, adding it was engaged in routine maritime surveillance. 

Although the drone was not hit, the Pentagon is concerned. 

Two U.S. officials explained the jets were part of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps force, which has been more confrontational than regular Iranian military forces. 

The drone's still and video cameras captured the incident showing two [Iranian] SU-25s approaching the [U.S.] Predator and firing its onboard guns. 

The Iranian pilots continued to fire shots that went beneath the Predator but were never successful in hitting it, according to the officials. 

U.S. military intelligence analysts are still not sure if the Iranian pilots simply were unable to hit the drone due to lack of combat skill, or whether they deliberately were missing and had no intention of bringing down the drone. But as one of the officials said, "it doesn't matter, they fired on us." 

The official confirmed the United States protested the incident but has not heard back from Iran.

The likelihood of a hot confrontation seems to increase by the day, and it's hard to imagine that an incident like this -- which is essentially muscle-flexing on Iran's part -- won't escalate into something deadlier in the years ahead. And the fact that the Pentagon kept this from the public for a week indicates that we can probably expect more of the same from the Most Transparent Administration Ever. His first term added Libya, and now, unfortunately, it's looking like Iran is unavoidable in the second. But this incident indicates it's only a matter of time before their guns aim a little higher, and their fire is more than symbolic.

The Long Game

By Andrew Klavan
City Journal
http://www.city-journal.org

7 November 2012

Life is short, said Hippocrates, but art is long. There is a practical corollary to that great truth: elections are won and lost in the politics of the moment, but it’s the culture that makes the nation.
In the aftermath of President Obama’s victory, conservative political thinkers will have to ask themselves some hard questions. How much of our defeat was due to strategy and how much to structure? How can we reach out to struggling workers without sacrificing our commitment to free enterprise and individual liberty? How can we speak to single women without losing voters committed to family values and the lives of the unborn? How can we welcome the children of illegal immigrants without compromising our belief in the rule of law?
The smartest political writers in the country, all of whom are conservative, will now be addressing those questions. I’m an artist; I play the long game.
To win that game, to create an electorate more deeply committed to true liberty and resistant to the sort of cultural scare tactics the president’s campaign team used so effectively, there are three areas to which conservatives need to commit intellectual and financial resources—three areas that our intelligentsia and funders, in their impractical practicality, too often ignore.
The mainstream news media. Major news outlets, like ABC, NBC, CBS, and the still influential New York Times have now become so ideologically corrupt that they are engaging in the sort of Nixonian cover-ups they once prided themselves on exposing. Their studied creation of non-scandal scandals and non-gaffe gaffes on the right and their active suppression of such true scandals as Fast and Furious and Benghazi on the left amount to journalistic malpractice on behalf of the state. The late Andrew Breitbart understood the depth and extent of the problem better than the cooler establishment heads who wrinkled their noses at him. He declared a guerrilla war on the media in the name of truth.
While Breitbart disciples like John Nolte, Ben Shapiro, and Joel Pollak continue that underground fight, it is long past time for conservative minds and money to take the battle to the mainstream. How is it possible that the mind-boggling success of Fox News has failed to spawn half a dozen imitators at least—especially venues for the libertarian young with their antic sense of political incorrectness? Rupert Murdoch, God love him, can’t live forever. It’s time for others to step up.
The entertainment industry. Conservatives think when they have won an argument in the newspapers, the fight is over. Leftists know their Hippocrates. They know they can rewrite history in novels, on TV, and in the movies, and a generation later, their false versions will be accepted as truth. As former ambassador Joseph Wilson said, when his questionable actions were rendered heroic in the dishonest movie Fair Game: “For people who have short memories or don’t read, this is the only way they will remember the period.” It’s not that conservative ideas don’t make their way into popular entertainment; it’s that they always come in disguise. Even leftists love deeply conservative films like theLord of the Rings and Dark Knight trilogies, because they recognize good values when they’re not forced to apply them to real life. But conservatives themselves quail when conservatives speak their values plainly in the arts. Too preachy, they cry, too much propaganda, too much . . . too much . . . conservatism! We don’t need more conservative artists. We need an infrastructure to support them: more funding, more distribution, sympathetic review venues, grants and awards for arts that speak the truth out loud.
Religion for intellectuals. Normally, I would have said number three was “reforming the academy,” but I believe this is where the fight for the academy is centered. Recently, a number of books by secular intellectuals have noted the disaster that is postmodern relativism—the nihilist philosophy that has corrupted and gutted Western liberal education. Education’s End, by Anthony T. Kronman, Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians, by Marcello Pera, and What Ever Happened to Modernism?, by Gabriel Josipovici, come to mind. All lament the abandonment of our commitment to the Great Conversation—the intellectual’s belief that the creative tension of the uniquely brilliant Western literary and philosophical canon can lead us in the direction of moral truth.
But the authors cannot fully grasp the nettle of the solution. Many assume that the Great Conversation depended on the sort of open mind only secularism can provide. As Kronman puts it: “Every religion insists, at the end of the day, that there is only one right answer to the question of life’s meaning,” thus rendering the pluralism of the Great Conversation impossible. I would contend the opposite: only the existence of a God in whose image we are created can support the notion of moral truth at all. It was always Judeo-Christianity, and that alone, that made the Great Conversation possible. Pera understands this intellectually, but cannot really plunk for faith. And therein lies the problem. The triumph of science, the comfort of Western life, and a sophisticated elite virulently hostile to religion have all contributed to an intellectual atmosphere of unbelief—a sense that atheism should be the default mode of reasonable, thinking people. That is a mere prejudice and needs to be answered in the culture, not with Bible-thumping literalism and small-minded judgmentalism—nor with banal happy-talk optimism—but by sound argument made publicly, unabashedly, and without fear. John Adams and the other Founders were right about this: an irreligious people cannot be free. Liberty lives in the palace of moral truth, and you can’t build that palace on the empty air.
In the aftermath of a crushing electoral defeat, all this may seem a distant business, an airy conversation for another day. It isn’t. The demography of the country is changing, but demography is not destiny. Ideas are. We must retake the culture and begin speaking truth to a new America.

Andrew Klavan’s new suspense novel for young adults is entitled If We Survive.

Les mots justes

By Mark Steyn

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner 

November 7, 2012 10:00 A.M.

Comments

83

I appreciate the sterling if pitiful efforts of my comrades to clutch at straws these last few hours, but, on this grim morning after, I fear the most salient analysis comes from Sir Richard Mottram, Her Britannic Majesty’s former Permanent Secretary for the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, albeit speaking in another context:

“We’re all f***ed. I’m f***ed. You’re f***ed. The whole department’s f***ed. It’s been the biggest c**k-up ever and we’re all completely f***ed.”

Words to ponder.

Obama gets his "revenge" but conservatives must stand tall

By Michelle Malkin
http://www.michellemalkin.com
November 7, 2012





Ohio has been called for Barack Obama. Iowa went for Obama. Colorado went for Obama. Florida and Virginia have not been called yet, but those don't look good, either. The Romney camp is disputing the Ohio call. Karl Rove on Fox News says it's not over. But the numbers don't add up for Romney. He was close. Valiantly close. But not close enough. (Update 12:57am - Romney called Obama to concede and delivered a gracious concession speech.)

The Romney/Ryan team fought well and hard, inspiring Republicans and conservatives across the country to get out the vote and fight for restoration of our founding principles and free enterprise.

We have so much to be proud of tonight:

*Diligent Tea Party activists grew the limited government movement and organized -- producing winning candidates across the country at the local, state, and national levels.

*A new generation of citizen activists online helped contribute to the vigilant policing of media bias and White House lies on everything from Fast and Furious to Solyndra to Benghazi.

*Conservative women pushed back more forcefully than ever against Democrat femme-a-gogues and Planned Parenthood promoters.

*Small business owners, Republican blue-collar workers, minority conservatives, young conservatives, religious liberty advocates, and growing numbers of Hollywood conservatives all stood up and made their voices heard.

Once again, we have our work cut out for us. We lost this election, but we still live in the greatest country on the planet and we still have many ways to fight for and defend it.

My counsel to you tonight: Please, do not be bitter. Do not fall prey to the Beltway blame game. Do not get mired in small things. Do not become vengeful creatures like our political opponents who voted out of spite instead of love of country.



We still have boundless blessings to count -- and to secure.



I remain a proud, unrepentant believer in the American Dream. And I know you do, too. Freedom will endure because we will keep fighting for it. We can't afford not to, friends.



Earlier this evening, when many conservatives on Twitter started despairing, I quoted from Psalm 46:10. Elections come and go. Faith endures:



He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.”

Chins up. Stand tall. We'll fight again tomorrow.

What Does a Second Obama Term Mean for Gun Owners?

By Katie Pavlich
http://www.townhall.com
November 6, 2012

During the second presidential debate of 2012, President Barack Obama said, “What I’m trying to do is get a broader conversation about how we reduce the violence generally. Part of it, is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced.”

You can bet he meant what he said. Obama has a long history of holding anti-Second Amendment views, despite portraying himself as pro-hunter and reasonable about gun control. A second term spells trouble for law-abiding citizens wanting to exercise their right to keep and bear arms: Obama is strongly opposed to concealed carry, has supported gun owner licensing and gun registration and voted to ban semi-automatic rifles, handguns and ammunition during his time in the Illinois State Senate. He even voted for the criminal prosecution of those who use a firearm in self-defense.

“I don’t believe that people should be able to own guns,” Obama told author and economist John Lott, according to an interview Lott did on the Michael Medved Show in 2008.

The effects of a second Obama term will reach far beyond the next four years and will have grave consequences for gun owners. If re-elected, Obama will have as many as three opportunities to place more anti-Second Amendment judges on the Supreme Court… for life. During his first term, he appointed Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, both of whom, as you might expect, have staunch anti-Second Amendment records.

First Lady Michelle Obama understands the power her husband holds should he receive another four years.

“We’re going to make a choice that will impact our lives for decades to come… let’s not forget what it meant when my husband appointed those two brilliant Supreme Court justices… let’s not forget the impact that their decisions will have on our lives for decades to come,” she said during a February 2012 campaign event in Beverly Hills, California.

With the possibility of an Obama re-election and tipping of the Supreme Court in favor of anti-Second Amendment legislation, crucial decisions like Heller and McDonald will be seriously threatened with being overturned. Remember, these cases were both decided with a majority of only 5-4 in favor of upholding the Second Amendment rights of Americans.

But Obama’s anti-Second Amendment agenda won’t stop at the Supreme Court. He’ll have the opportunity to flood the federal courts by filling over half of all federal judgeships with anti-gun fanatics who will rule in favor of Obama’s anti-gun ideology. This will then allow anti-gun interest groups to flood the court system with lawsuits to infringe upon rights of law abiding gun owners.

In Obama’s first term, we’ve already seen more gun regulations and registration requirements in Southwest border states, requiring gun dealers to report the sale of any law abiding citizen purchasing more than one semi-automatic rifle at a time. This new regulation was implemented through the Department of Justice headed by anti-gun zealot Eric Holder, whose minions ran the lethal Fast and Furious operation and still blame law abiding gun dealers for the violence that resulted from the program in Mexico and the United States. In the 1995, Holder suggested we “brainwash people” against guns and his current Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer supports the registration of all firearms.

“I’ll also ask the school board to make a part of every day some kind of anti-violence, anti-gun message,” then U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C. Holder said in 1995. “We need to do this every day of the week and just really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way.”

On top of having a friend in Holder, Obama has loyalists positioned across the country actively interested in taking away the Second Amendment rights of Americans. New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg endorsed President Obama last week citing climate change, but the two also have an anti-gun ideology in common. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel adds more danger to a second Obama term and all three will work together to severely restrict the types of firearms citizens can buy. We’ve already seen the Obama administration block the importation of M1 Garand rifles into the United States and a second term only opens the door for the ban of the majority of imported firearms, including guns popular with hunters, sport shooters and collectors.

Finally, we can classify the first four years of the Obama administration as an imperial presidency. Scandal after scandal, including Fast and Furious, it is clear President Obama and his cronies believe they are above the law. In 2011, President Obama ignored a provision in the 2012 omnibus spending bill banning him from using taxpayer money to advocate for more gun control.  Regulation is how Obama gets things done and a second term will allow him to achieve his gun control dream of infringing upon Americans’ Second Amendment rights.  In an election in which voters are understandably focused on economic issues, it's important to remember the underhanded methods at the president's executive disposal. Based on his record, it is likely he will choose to implement those methods in a second term.

Another Drug War Nightmare

By Debra J. Saunders
San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com
November 5, 2012

The government has the power to seize your assets for a crime you did not commit. That's essentially the argument being made in a Boston federal court this week as the U.S. Department of Justice and Tewksbury (Mass.) Police Department work to take Motel Caswell away from its owner, Russ Caswell.

The libertarian-leaning legal team Institute for Justice took on Caswell's case pro bono, attorney Scott Bullock told me, because this case "is really taking civil forfeiture where it has not gone in the past."

The government wants to take Caswell's motel, not because Caswell is guilty of dealing drugs or other crimes, but because some of his guests broke the law. A legal brief cites 15 drug crimes, including distributing heroin and manufacturing methamphetamine, that prompted police to arrest Caswell guests from 1994 to 2008.

"We're trying to make the property and the location safe," said Christina DiIorio-Sterling, spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz.

Trip Advisor reviews make Motel Caswell sound like the place I stayed at when I covered the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. One cab driver heard the name and insisted I pay cash.

DiIorio-Sterling noted that the government had pushed for a settlement that would have required Caswell to pay $167,500 and agree to sell or shutter the property. He refused.

Bullock assures me that the Main Street motel isn't seedy, just the cheapest room in town. "We get a cross-section of society," Caswell told me.

The legal point, said Bullock: An innkeeper should not be held responsible for "transient guests that occasionally use the motel for illicit drug activity behind closed doors."

The Institute for Justice has experience with governments going after the property of people without the means to fight back. The institute represented working-class homeowner Susette Kelo after the town of New London, Conn., tried to seize her house under eminent domain for a private waterfront development project. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court infamously ruled 5-4 for New London.

In a righteous dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, wrote that if governments can kick people out of their homes for economic development, "The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. 

Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory."

Voila. Caswell's father built the one-story, 56-room motel in 1955. Because it's family run with no mortgage, said Bullock, a seizure would deliver "pure profit for law enforcement." The Tewksbury police stand to pocket 80 percent of the $1 million or more Caswell believes the property is worth.

The government doesn't have to prove Caswell was a party to or even knew what was going on in guests' $56 rooms.

In 1999, Congress passed a law to curb civil asset forfeiture abuses, citing a Houston Chronicle editorial that argued, "Good people should not have to fear property seizure because they operate business in high-crime areas. Nor should they forfeit their property because they have failed to do the work of law enforcement."

And yet, it's happening all over again. Quoth Bullock, "I think it's fair to say they expected Mr. Caswell not to fight this all the way."

Debra J. Saunders is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. E-mail: dsaunders@sfchronicle.com

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/saunders/article/Another-drug-war-nightmare-4010675.php#ixzz2BSQyDsOx

Bam's Benghazi Lies

By Ralph Peters
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
November 5, 2012

To get to the truth, connect the lies. Do what intel analysts and detectives do: Build a scenario from the facts and watch the lies blink red. And when anyone tells as many lies as this administration has told about its Benghazi debacle, you get a Christmas tree.

A three-act drama emerges from the facts that have leaked out. It starts ugly and turns hideous.

Act One:Our personnel in Libya worried for months about security, repeatedly petitioning the State Department for enhanced protection, especially for Benghazi. Requests denied.

Why? In Iraq, the State Department played tough guy, hiring mercenaries who gunned down innocent locals to “protect their packages” (our diplomats were the least diplomatic people we had in Baghdad). When Secretary Hillary Clinton took over, she moved, to her credit, to dump the psychos.

But the pendulum swung to the other extreme. Security issues became the preserve of soft-power lefties who despise our military. Putting more trust in local gunmen than in the US Marines, they got Ambassador Chris Stevens killed. “Small footprint,” indeed.

The White House bears no blame for this stage. Security for diplomatic posts doesn’t makeanypresident’s briefing calendar. Blame State and Mrs. Clinton.

Act Two:We now know, almost minute by minute, what happened in Benghazi. We know (as the White House knewimmediately) that there was no riot. The attack had nothing to do with that goofball video.

What matters isn’t just what happened in Benghazi, tragic though it was. What matters to our country is what happened in the White HousethisSept. 11: All the president’s men panicked.

Instead of asking themselves what they coulddoin Benghazi, their priority was what they couldsayin Washington.

Obama had campaigned as the great bin Laden-slayer. Now he faced a major terror attack on the 11th anniversary of 9/11. The “tough-on-terror” president had let down the nation’s guard on the one day of every year when an Islamist terror attack is most likely.

His “White House plumbers” didn’t think about the danger over there, but about the election over here. They flailed about for a way to blame the security lapse on anything but their policies. And somebody said,Hey, that Cairo demonstration was about, like, this video thing. Just say the Benghazi stuff was, like, the same and it got out of hand.

The words may not be exact, but I’d bet you a falafel sandwich they nail the essence. And the coverup began, focused not on strategic needs, but on political expediency.

Why no attempt at a military rescue? I don’t think one could have gotten there in time — this was hard — but, jeez, we should havetried. Yet the White House feared escalating the situation and elevating the story (great work, guys!). A Benghazi rescue mission was less important than rescuing the election.

The panicked decision to tell that first big lie precipitated all the other lies that followed (and the media’s disgraceful collusion). That near-sighted, self-absorbed decision to promote an obscure video as the cause of the attack also gave the video global publicity — whichdidlead to widespread rioting and deaths.

The second act ends with that shameless White House whopper: “The video did it.”

Act Three:It’s the old “hubby did something really dumb and lied to the wife about it” scenario. One lie is never enough. Other lies must be told to defend the first lie.

If the strategic shenanigans were inept, this White House showed its Chicago side when it came to shielding the president. The director of National Intelligence and the CIA director may have been pressured to support the lies told to Congress and the American people about the Benghazi debacle.

Let me be clear:Nointelligence professional could have believed that a complex attack with accurate mortar fire, heavy weapons, a detailed scheme of maneuver and well-placed roadblocks popped out of a flash mob.

But the professionals were silenced as intel-community political appointees toed the “blame the video” line until it became clear that the emperor not only lacked clothes, but hadn’t bathed in a while. Now the finger-pointing has begun (note to former four-star generals: You aren’t tough enough for this brand of politics).

This White House has several protective rings. The president fills the innermost ring, defended at all costs. His morning-after remarks (before he flew off to a Las Vegas fund-raiser) were beautifully crafted to commit him to nothing at all. Hillary’s in the second ring, with a few others. She has to be protected, too (at least until Bill does his part for the campaign).

Everybody else is disposable, even Obama pal Susan Rice, our UN ambassador, who was shoved out on the world stage to lie.

The administration ruthlessly pursued two goals: Stonewall until America votes, then drag things out until the story withers. The political hacks have gotten away with the first one.

The lies continue, although they twist and turn as facts emerge — White House spokesman Jay Carney’s so shameless he’s bound to end up with his own reality show. And the president, while refusing to risk a press conference, won’t associate the attack with Islamist extremism (“workplace violence,” perhaps?).

Watergate’s starting to look small-time. Now we’re only waiting for “Son of Deep Throat.” Meanwhile, Congress must put our top intelligence-agency political appointees under oath and ask them, “What did you know and when did you know it?”

Expect a “Saturday Night Massacre” if this president is re-elected. Heads are going to roll. The wrong heads. But as a better president learned, the lies don’t go away when you dump the bodies.

Barack Hussein Nixon?

Ralph Peters is Fox News' Strategic Analyst and a former Military Intelligence officer with tactical and strategic experience.

Read more:http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/bam_benghazi_lies_U8R3y5iHVbs3uurhjsiMjO#ixzz2BMapHqlG

Nancy Pelosi's secret CAIR fundraiser

By Robert Spencer
http://frontpagemag.com
November 5, 2012

Neil Munro at The Daily Caller reported Friday that “Democratic leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi headlined a high-dollar fundraiser in May that was attended by U.S.-based Islamist groups and individuals linked by the U.S. government to the Hamas jihad group and to the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood movement. The donors at the undisclosed May 16 event included Nihad Awad, the co-founder of the Council on American Islamic Relations, according to data provided by the nonpartisan Investigative Project on Terrorism.”

For Pelosi to appear at a fundraiser with Nihad Awad is as revolting, and should be as newsworthy, as if she had appeared at a fundraiser with David Duke or Bull Connor. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements. ItsCalifornia chapter distributed posters telling Muslims not to talk to the FBI.

With a rap sheet like that, every self-respecting politician on both sides of the aisle should shun CAIR. Yet the political Left is so corrupt and willfully blind about the threat of the global jihad and Islamic supremacism that it is unlikely Pelosi hesitated even for a moment to appear at the fundraiser. And if she did, her suspicions would likely have been assuaged by the fact that, from her perspective, Awad and Hamas-linked CAIR had all the right enemies: “right-wing extremists,” Christians, Zionists, even Christian Zionists. The mainstream media likewise treat this Hamas-tainted group as if it were the respectable civil rights organization it portrays itself to be in its propaganda – and since they also portray Pelosi as if she were a political figure worthy of respect, it is not surprising that she would subscribe to the same view of CAIR that they have.

And Pelosi is by no means alone among Democrats in her dalliances with Hamas-linked CAIR. As long ago as 2006, the close relationship between Keith Ellison, who in 2007 became the nation’s first Muslim congressman (D-MN), and Awad was a matter of public record. Awad, who notoriously said in 1994 that he was “in support of the Hamas movement,” spoke at fundraisers for Ellison, raising considerable sums for his first congressional race. According to investigative journalist Patrick Poole, Ellison has appeared frequently at CAIR events since then. Poole also explained that “according to Justice Department, Awad is a longtime Hamas operative. Multiple statements made by federal prosecutors identify Awad as one of the attendees at a 1993 meeting of US Muslim Brotherhood Palestine Committee leaders in Philadelphia that was wiretapped by the FBI under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant. The topic of discussion during that 1993 meeting was how to help Hamas by working in the U.S. to help sabotage the Oslo Peace Accords.” But none of that fazed Ellison, or Pelosi.

Nonetheless, there is one small hopeful sign that even a figure as thoroughly compromised as Nancy Pelosi realizes that there is something not quite kosher about fundraising with Nihad Awad: the fact that the event was secret, held back in May, and only coming to light now. Apparently even the most politically correct liberal Democrats realize that collaborating too publicly with as unsavory a group as Hamas-linked CAIR could be, if not political suicide for Leftists, then at least liable to lead to a firestorm that they would rather not have to endure.

This phenomenon is akin to Barack Obama posing as a convinced and enthusiastic supporter of Israel during his third debate with Mitt Romney, as outrageous as his stance was after nearly four years of contempt for our only reliable ally in the Middle East. Leftists clearly know that they can only hang on to power by concealing their most egregious collaborations with and capitulations to the forces of the jihad, whether violent or stealthy.
This is not a hopeful sign unless the defenders of freedom against that jihad can learn to capitalize upon it, which so far they have not been able to do. But it does at least indicate that, even in these dark days, all is not lost, not yet, and not by a longshot.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

Danny DeVito's Union Thugs and Tuesday's Vote

By J. Christian Adams
PJ Media
November 3, 2012

We can learn a lot from Democrats by what they oppose. While Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings tells us there is no vote fraud, fellow Maryland congressional candidate Wendy Rosen is committing federal felonies by voting both in Maryland and Florida. While the NAACP is leading the charge against photo voter identification, Lessadolla Sowers from the NAACP heads off to prison for voting for dead voters. While Brian Moran, Virginia’s Democrat chair, rails againstvoter integrity, his nephew Pat is caught on camera plotting the use of forged documents at the polls to help President Obama.

Indeed, we learn much by what they oppose. It certainly explains their existential opposition to True the Vote’straining of the poll-watching army on Tuesday.

But this year, their hypocrisy has reached a diabolical crescendo. The Obama campaign has sought to unleash law enforcement officials across the United States against law-abiding citizens who exercised state and federal laws to clean up the voter rolls and monitor the polls.

It is bad enough when Eric Holder refuses to enforce laws to maintain the voter rolls. It is even worse when his political buddies like Obama campaign lawyer Robert Bauer try to intimidate people who clean up Holder’s mess by badgering state election officials.

As Michael Barone aptly identified this crowd years ago – Obama runs a thugocracy. For that reason alone, in a land that loves liberty, they must be removed from power on Tuesday.

The Obama thugs have infiltrated every corner of the nation – from Sowers at civil rights groups like the NAACP, to the spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler at the Justice Department who smoothed over the bloody Fast and Furious mayhem; from Malik Zulu Shabazz getting a pass on voter intimidation, to the petty, small, impersonal lifelong bureaucrat Steve Rosenbaum at the DOJ who made it happen. Each person plays a small part in making the thugocracy function.

Rosenbaum, Sowers, Schmaler and Shabazz

Because America is a land with chords of memory which find thuggery anathema, Obama will lose on Tuesday.

I first experienced the rising thugocracy watching a famous Hollywood celebrity lead a rally where Republican voters were intimidated from entering the polls to vote. I was in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 2004 at the early voting site on Military Trail. There, a giant purple SEIU rally stood in front of the single entrance. Danny DeVito led the mob.

I watched Bush voter after Bush voter (known by bumperstickers) at DeVito’s rally suffer identification by a SEIU member posted in the parking lot. As each voter exited their car, the SEIU thug pointed and followed the person, announcing to the mob that they were a voter for Bush.  The mob made passage difficult to impossible.

I was not alone in watching DeVito’s SEIU mob block the polls. National Review had this to say at the time:

We’re already witnessing the organized bullying of voters in the hotly contested swing state of Florida. According to a disturbing report in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel: “With early voting taking place in busy public places like City Halls and libraries, voters are voicing complaints of being blocked by political mobs, or being singled out for their political views. Others say they have been grabbed, screamed at and cursed by political partisans of all stripes.”

“Special-interest groups are trying to whip everybody into a frenzy and get everybody upset,” LePore said. “Campaigns and their observers are confronting the workers and the voters. Things have gotten nasty and ugly.”   “LePore said campaign workers followed voters into polling places and handed out literature next to the voting machines. Other voters standing in line were told the machines don’t work and that they should vote absentee.”

Actors Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman led a rally at the entrance to another polling location, prompting poll watcher Lawrence Gottfried to intervene. “I said, ‘Look Mr. DeVito, I’m a big fan of yours and Rhea’s, but you are blocking the entrance.

I was there. The account in National Review is accurate. Danny DeVito egged on union thugs who were preventing Republicans from entering the polls.

Did the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights care about “election protection” then? Did the NAACP issue statements condemning the use of purple-shirt muscle from blocking the polls? Did Demos, Common Cause, or the League of Women Voters issue a report in 2004 about “Bullies at the Ballot Box”?

Of course not. Because every last one of these rotted groups exist to help Democrats, period. They have lost the moral high ground they held a generation ago and are now partisan tools and officers in Obama’s thugocracy.

The SEIU folks, the foot soldiers in the thugocracy who were blocking voters in Florida, are not only silent in 2012, they are now sending threatening letters to True the Vote. The SEIU is suddenly concerned about people feeling intimidated at the polls by elderly poll watchers with clipboards trained by True the Vote.

That’s what thugs do: engage in thuggery, and then claim your opponent is doing it.

America take note. These are the hard cold facts. A vast Machine exists to push the election outcome in one direction. The Machine includes partisan organizations masquerading as civil rights groups. It champions an attorney general and president schooled in the hard arts of racial community organizing. It benefits from election bureaucrats who turn a blind eye toward lawbreakers and polluted voter rolls. Hollywood stars like Danny DeVito and Cher lead the attack on law-abiding Americans who stand up for the Rule of Law. And stooges in the media gobble up the narrative of the law breakers.

The only thing left to oppose this Machine, this corrosion of law and liberty, is you. Tuesday is the day you get to decide whether America is a land where a thugocracy can flourish, or whether freedom’s holy light will thrive. The founders of this great land foresaw a day like November 6, 2012. Every patriot who came before you acted. Now it is your turn.

More: Vote for ‘Love of Country’ Not Revenge

Book Review: 'Bruce' by Peter Ames Carlin

Bruce Springsteen in performance in Los Angeles in 1985.

Meet the new Boss, not the same as the old Boss

ROBERT WIERSEMA

The Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Oct. 26, 2012 04:00PM EDT

Last updated Friday, Oct. 26, 2012 01:53PM EDT

When it comes to Bruce Springsteen, I honestly thought I was well past the point of being surprised. It’s not a function of age (God forbid), so much as one of exposure.
Having been a fan for almost three decades, I have, at various points, completely immersed myself in Springsteen culture and scholarship. From Dave Marsh’s essential, if hagiographic, Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story in 1984 to Robert Coles’s intensely cerebral Bruce Springsteen’s America to Christopher Sandford’s prurient Springsteen: Point Blank, along with dozens of other books, hundreds of articles and more music than I could listen to in a solid year, I thought I had the bases more than covered.
As a result, my expectations for Bruce, the new biography by rock writer Peter Ames Carlin (author previously of biographies of Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson), were fairly low. Within the first couple of chapters, though, my understanding of Springsteen’s work, his life and his psychology were utterly upended. I devoured the rest of the book with renewed enthusiasm, a passion and vigour I don’t recall feeling since those days of 1984 when Springsteen was a promising mystery to a small-town 13-year-old.
It’s not just that Bruce is the first Springsteen biography written with the support of and access to Springsteen, his family, bandmates and business associates since Marsh’s follow-up to Born to Run, Glory Days, in 1987, though of course that access shapes the whole. (The book, it should be noted, is not an authorized biography; given some of the content, Carlin clearly had free rein.)
More significantly, Carlin comes at the Springsteen story fresh, taking none of the accepted gospel for granted. This emerges most strikingly in his approach to the story. Rather than beginning with Springsteen’s birth or the start of his career, Carlin goes back a generation. The book opens with the death of five-year-old Virginia Springsteen, elder sister to then-two-year-old Douglas. Had she lived, Virginia would have been Bruce’s aunt. Instead, her loss created a fissure in the Springsteen family, and her mother in particular, an emotional rent inflicted on Doug, “whose DNA [already] came richly entwined with darker threads,” which would in turn be visited upon his son.
The relationship between Springsteen and his father, Doug, has – in most recountings – formed the axis around which the narrative of Springsteen’s life and art turn. It has always been depicted largely as one of animosity and anger, a lack of understanding on the father’s part, a desperate desire to connect with him on the part of the son, and an eventual conciliation once Bruce became a father himself in the 1990s. Carlin, with nothing invested in this approach (and with, remember, unprecedented access ), takes a different tack, depicting a family haunted by loss and by internal ghosts, a father suffering and struggling himself (rather than judgmental and scornful) and a son burdened with the same darkness finding his own way free. It’s a nuanced, sympathetic approach, genuinely surprising but utterly convincing.
That nuance extends to other father figures in the book, most particularly Springsteen’s first manager, Mike Appel, from whom Springsteen separated in an infamous, acrimonious legal confrontation after the release ofBorn to Run. Appel emerges as a rounded, conflicted character, rather than as the straightforward villain as the traditional, simplistic Springsteen narrative often characterizes him. The approach feels revelatory rather than mythic.
Carlin isn’t inherently opposed to mythmaking, however. In depicting the epochal first meeting between Springsteen and his future saxman and onstage foil Clarence Clemons, he acknowledges both the myth – that the towering Clemons pulled the door of the Student Prince off its hinges on a stormy night, walking into legend, saxophone case in hand – and its detractors. “Asked directly, and only a few months after Clemons’s death, about the Student Prince door question, Bruce turns solemn. ‘It did. That’s for certain.’ And what of the people – the band members – who insist it didn’t? ‘They would be wrong.’”
In addition to the power of its approach, Bruce impresses simply for its scholarship. The chronicle of Springsteen’s developmental years in the Jersey shore scene, for example, are more richly detailed than any I have read previously, and Carlin’s account of Springsteen writing Born to Run (as distinct from the oft-told saga of recording the song) is electrifying, worth the cost of the book on its own.
As one might expect, Bruce doesn’t maintain this level of insight and cohesion for its entire length. The time period covered by the book ends earlier this year, but the analysis of the past decade is fairly superficial. Nowhere is this clearer than in one of the last chapters of Bruce, which focuses on the author’s conversations with Clarence Clemons in early 2011. The saxman’s perspective – his love of playing, his obvious love of Springsteen, his lingering anger over the firing of the E Street Band in the 1980s and his rancour at the band not being named to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – are underpinned by the knowledge that this interview is one of the last Clemons gave before his death, from complications following a stroke, in June, 2011.
Bruce will, of course, be of interest to Springsteen fans (who will no doubt flinch, as I did, when Carlin botches the occasional lyric, or fails to hit some of the obvious touchstones), but its appeal should be wider than that. Bruce Springsteen is one of the most significant artistic and cultural forces of the past four decades: Carlin’s insightful, powerful biography is for anyone who wonders why.
Robert Wiersema’s books include Walk Like a Man: Coming of Age with the Music of Bruce Springsteen.

Biggest Big Government Can't Keep Lights On

By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com
November 2, 2012

In political terms, Hurricane Sandy and the Benghazi consulate debacle exemplify at home and abroad the fundamental unseriousness of the United States in the Obama era. In the days after Sandy hit, Barack Obama was generally agreed to have performed well. He had himself photographed in the White House Situation Room, nodding thoughtfully to bureaucrats ("John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; Tony Blinken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; David Agnew, Director for Intergovernmental Affairs") and Tweeted it to his 3.2 million followers. He appeared in New Jersey wearing a bomber jacket rather than a suit to demonstrate that when the going gets tough the tough get out a monogrammed Air Force One bomber jacket. He announced that he'd instructed his officials to answer all calls within 15 minutes because in America "we leave nobody behind." By doing all this, the president "shows" he "cares" – which is true in the sense that in Benghazi he was willing to leave the entire consulate staff behind, and nobody had their calls answered within seven hours, because presumably he didn't care. So John Brennan, the Counterterrorism guy, and Tony Blinken, the National Security honcho, briefed the president on the stiff breeze, but on Sept. 11, 2012, when a little counterterrorism was called for, nobody bothered calling the Counterterrorism Security Group, the senior U.S. counterterrorism bureaucracy.

POLITICAL CARTOONS

45 cartoons on Christie and Obama, the shifting polls, Hurricane Sandy and more

Meanwhile, FEMA rumbles on, the "emergency management agency" that manages emergencies, very expensively, rather than preventing them. Late on the night Sandy made landfall, I heard on the local news that my state's governor had asked the president to declare a federal emergency in every New Hampshire county so that federal funds could be "unlocked." A quarter-million people in the Granite State were out of power. It was reported that, beyond our borders, 8 million people in a dozen states were out of power.

But that's not an "emergency." No hurricane hit my county. Indeed, no hurricane hit New Hampshire. No hurricane hit "17 states," the number of states supposedly "affected" by Sandy at its peak. A hurricane hit a few coastal counties of New Jersey, New York and a couple of other states, and that's it. Everyone else had slightly windier-than-usual wind – and yet they were out of power for days. In a county entirely untouched by Sandy, my office manager had no electricity for a week. Not because of an "emergency" but because of a decrepit and vulnerable above-the-ground electrical distribution system that ought to be a national embarrassment to any developed society. A few weeks ago, I chanced to be in St. Pierre and Miquelon, a French colony of 6,000 people on a couple of treeless rocks in the North Atlantic. Every electric line is underground. Indeed, the droll demoiselle who leads tours of the islands makes a point of amusingly drawing American visitors' attention to this local feature.

If you're saying, "Whoa, that sounds expensive," well, our government is more expensive than any government in history – and we have nothing to show for it. Imagine if Obama's 2009 stimulus had been spent burying every electric pole on the Eastern Seaboard. Instead, just that one Obama bill spent a little shy of a trillion dollars, and no one can point to a single thing it built. "A big storm requires Big Government," pronounced The New York Times. But Washington is so big-hearted with Big Government it spends $188 million an hour that it doesn't have – 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including Thanksgiving, Christmas and Ramadan. And yet, mysteriously, multitrillion-dollar Big Government Obama-style can't do anything except sluice food stamps to the dependent class, lavish benefits and early retirement packages to the bureaucrats that service them, and so-called government "investment" to approved Obama cronies.

So you can have Big Government bigger (or, anyway, more expensive) than any government's ever been, and the lights still go out in 17 states – because your president spent 6 trillion bucks, and all the country got was a lousy Air Force One bomber jacket for him to wear while posing for a Twitpic answering the phone with his concerned expression.

Even in those few parts of the Northeast that can legitimately claim to have been clobbered by Sandy, Big Government made it worse. Last week, Nanny Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, rivaled his own personal best for worst mayoral performance since that snowstorm a couple of years back. This is a man who spends his days micromanaging the amount of soda New Yorkers are allowed to have in their beverage containers rather than, say, the amount of ocean New Yorkers are allowed to have in their subway system – just as, in the previous crisis, the municipal titan who can regulate the salt out of your cheeseburger proved utterly incapable of regulating any salt on to Sixth Avenue. Imagine if this preening buffoon had expended as much executive energy on flood protection for the electrical grid and transit system as he does on approved quantities of carbonated beverages. But that's leadership 21^st-century style: When the going gets tough, the tough ban trans fats.

Back in Benghazi, the president who looks so cool in a bomber jacket declined to answer his beleaguered diplomats' calls for help – even though he had aircraft and Special Forces in the region. Too bad. He's all jacket and no bombers. This, too, is an example of America's uniquely profligate impotence. When something goes screwy at a ramshackle consulate halfway round the globe, very few governments have the technological capacity to watch it unfold in real time. Even fewer have deployable military assets only a couple of hours away. What is the point of unmanned drones, of military bases around the planet, of elite Special Forces trained to the peak of perfection if the president and the vast bloated federal bureaucracy cannot rouse themselves to action? What is the point of outspending Russia, Britain, France, China, Germany and every middle-rank military power combined if, when it matters, America cannot urge into the air one plane with a couple of dozen commandoes? In Iraq, al-Qaida is running training camps in the western desert. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are all but certain to return most of the country to its pre-9/11 glories. But in Washington the head of the world's biggest "counterterrorism" bureaucracy briefs the president on flood damage and downed trees.

I don't know whether Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan can fix things, but I do know that Barack Obama and Joe Biden won't even try – and that therefore a vote for Obama is a vote for the certainty of national collapse. Look at Lower Manhattan in the dark, and try to imagine what America might look like after the rest of the planet decides it no longer needs the dollar as global reserve currency. For four years, we have had a president who can spend everything but build nothing. Nothing but debt, dependency, and decay. As I said at the beginning, in different ways the response to Hurricane Sandy and Benghazi exemplify the fundamental unseriousness of the superpower at twilight. Whether or not to get serious is the choice facing the electorate Tuesday.

But let him keep the bomber jacket.

©MARK STEYN

EDITORIAL - Benghazi blunder: Obama unworthy commander-in-chief

The Las Vegas Review-Journal
November 1, 2012

U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans died in a well-planned military assault on their diplomatic mission in Benghazi seven weeks ago, the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. So why are details surfacing, piecemeal, only now?

The Obama administration sat by doing nothing for seven hours that night, ignoring calls to dispatch help from our bases in Italy, less than two hours away. It has spent the past seven weeks stretching the story out, engaging in misdirection and deception involving supposed indigenous outrage over an obscure anti-Muslim video, confident that with the aid of a docile press corps this infamous climax to four years of misguided foreign policy can be swept under the rug, at least until after Tuesday's election.

Charles Woods, father of former Navy SEAL and Henderson resident Tyrone Woods, 41, says his son died slumped over his machine gun after he and fellow ex-SEAL Glen Doherty - not the two locals who were the only bodyguards Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration would authorize - held off the enemy for seven hours.

The Obama administration was warned. They received an embassy cable June 25 expressing concern over rising Islamic extremism in Benghazi, noting the black flag of al-Qaida "has been spotted several times flying over government buildings and training facilities." The Obama administration removed a well-armed, 16-member security detail from Libya in August, The Wall Street Journal reported last month, replacing it with a couple of locals. Mr. Stevens sent a cable Aug. 2 requesting 11 additional body guards, noting "Host nation security support is lacking and cannot be depended on," reports Peter Ferrara at Forbes.com. But these requests were denied, officials testified before the House Oversight Committee earlier this month.

Based on documents released by the committee, on the day of the attack the Pentagon dispatched a drone with a video camera so everyone in Washington could see what was happening in real time. The drone documented no crowds protesting any video. But around 4 p.m. Washington received an email from the Benghazi mission saying it was under a military-style attack. The White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA were able to watch the live video feed. An email sent later that day reported "Ansar al-Sharia claims responsibility for Benghazi attack."

Not only did the White House do nothing, there are now reports that a counterterrorism team ready to launch a rescue mission was ordered to stand down.

The official explanation for the inadequate security? This administration didn't want to "offend the sensibilities" of the new radical Islamic regime which American and British arms had so recently helped install in Libya.

The official explanation for why Obama administration officials watched the attack unfold for seven hours, refusing repeated requests to send the air support and relief forces that sat less than two hours away in Italy? Silence.

An open discussion of these issues, of course, would lead to difficult questions about the wisdom of underwriting and celebrating the so-called Arab Spring revolts in the first place. While the removal of tyrants can be laudable, the results show a disturbing pattern of merely installing new tyrannies - theocracies of medieval mullahs who immediately start savaging the rights of women (including the basic right to education) and who are openly hostile to American interests.

When Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney promptly criticized the security failures in Benghazi, the White House and its lapdog media jumped all over him for another "gaffe," for speaking out too promptly and too strongly. Prompt and strong action from the White House on Sept. 11 might have saved American lives, as well as America's reputation as a nation not to be messed with. Weakness and dithering and flying to Las Vegas the next day for celebrity fund-raising parties are somehow better?

This administration is an embarrassment on foreign policy and incompetent at best on the economy - though a more careful analysis shows what can only be a perverse and willful attempt to destroy our prosperity. Back in January 2008, Barack Obama told the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle that under his cap-and-trade plan, "If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them." He added, "Under my plan ... electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket." It was also in 2008 that Mr. Obama's future Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, famously said it would be necessary to "figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe" - $9 a gallon.

Yet the president now claims he's in favor of oil development and pipelines, taking credit for increased oil production on private lands where he's powerless to block it, after he halted the Keystone XL Pipeline and oversaw a 50 percent reduction in oil leases on public lands.

These behaviors go far beyond "spin." They amount to a pack of lies. To return to office a narcissistic amateur who seeks to ride this nation's economy and international esteem to oblivion, like Slim Pickens riding the nuclear bomb to its target at the end of the movie "Dr. Strangelove," would be disastrous.

Candidate Obama said if he couldn't fix the economy in four years, his would be a one-term presidency.

Mitt Romney is moral, capable and responsible man. Just this once, it's time to hold Barack Obama to his word. Maybe we can all do something about that, come Tuesday.

Help From Alabama Workers Being Denied in New Jersey Because They're Non-Union

By Katie Pavlich
http://www.townhall.com
November 2, 2012


Utility crews from Alabama ready to help hurricane stricken and desperate people in New Jersey without power have been told to "stand down" and some are already headed back home. Why? Because they're non-union workers. Keep in mind there are still millions of people in New Jersey without power and many who have been stranded for days as a result. The crews drove 900 miles to reach the area effected by Sandy and this is how they were received:

Crews from Huntsville, as well as Decatur Utilities and Joe Wheeler out of Trinity headed up there this week, but Derrick Moore, one of the Decatur workers, said they were told by crews in New Jersey that they can't do any work there since they're not union employees.

The crews that are in Roanoke, Virginia say they are just watching and waiting even though they originally received a call asking for help from Seaside Heights, New Jersey.

The crews were told to stand down. In fact, Moore said the crew from Trinity is already headed back home.

Understandably, Moore said they're frustrated being told "thanks, but no thanks."

WAFF-TV: News, Weather and Sports for Huntsville, AL

The good news? Not all has been lost. Some crews from Alabama will be doing work to help hurricane victims in New York.

The Choice

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: November 1

The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com

“Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” That was Barack Obama in 2008. And he was right. Reagan was an ideological inflection point, ending a 50-year liberal ascendancy and beginning a 30-year conservative ascendancy.

It is common for one party to take control and enact its ideological agenda. Ascendancy, however, occurs only when the opposition inevitably regains power and then proceeds to accept the basic premises of the preceding revolution.

Thus, Republicans railed for 20 years against the New Deal. Yet when they regained the White House in 1953, they kept the New Deal intact.

And when Nixon followed LBJ’s Great Society — liberalism’s second wave — he didn’t repeal it. He actually expanded it. Nixon created theEnvironmental Protection Agency (EPA), gave teeth to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and institutionalized affirmative action — major adornments of contemporary liberalism.

Until Reagan. Ten minutes into his presidency, Reagan declares that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Having thus rhetorically rejected the very premise of the New Deal/Great Society, he sets about attacking its foundations — with radical tax reduction, major deregulation, a frontal challenge to unionism (breaking the air traffic controllers for striking illegally) and an (only partially successful) attempt at restraining government growth.

Reaganism’s ascendancy was confirmed when the other guys came to power and their leader, Bill Clinton, declared (in his 1996 State of the Union address) that “the era of big government is over” — and then abolished welfare, the centerpiece “relief” program of modern liberalism.

In Britain, the same phenomenon: Tony Blair did to Thatcherism what Clinton did to Reaganism. He made it the norm.

Obama’s intention has always been to re-normalize, to reverse ideological course, to be the anti-Reagan — the author of a new liberal ascendancy. Nor did he hide his ambition. In his February 2009 address to Congress he declared his intention to transform America. This was no abstraction. He would do it in three areas: health care, education and energy.

Think about that. Health care is one-sixth of the economy. Education is the future. And energy is the lifeblood of any advanced country — control pricing and production, and you’ve controlled the industrial economy.

And it wasn’t just rhetoric. He enacted liberalism’s holy grail: the nationalization of health care. His $830 billion stimulus, by far the largest spending bill in U.S. history, massively injected government into the free market — lavishing immense amounts of tax dollars on favored companies and industries in a naked display of industrial policy.

And what Obama failed to pass through Congress, he enacted unilaterally by executive action. He could not pass cap-and-trade, but his EPA is killing coal. (No new coal-fired power plant would ever be built.) In 2006, liberals failed legislatively to gut welfare’s work requirement. Obama’s new Health and Human Services rule does that by fiat. Continued in a second term, it would abolish welfare reform as we know it — just as in a second term, natural gas will follow coal, as Obama’s EPA regulates fracking into noncompetitiveness.

Government grows in size and power as the individual shrinks into dependency. Until the tipping point where dependency becomes the new norm — as it is in Europe, where even minor retrenchment of the entitlement state has led to despair and, for the more energetic, rioting.

An Obama second term means that the movement toward European-style social democracy continues, in part by legislation, in part by executive decree. The American experiment — the more individualistic, energetic, innovative, risk-taking model of democratic governance — continues to recede, yielding to the supervised life of the entitlement state.
If Obama loses, however, his presidency becomes a historical parenthesis, a passing interlude of overreaching hyper-liberalism, rejected by a center-right country that is 80 percent nonliberal.
Should they summon the skill and dexterity, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan could guide the country to the restoration of a more austere and modest government with more restrained entitlements and a more equitable and efficient tax code. Those achievements alone would mark a new trajectory — a return to what Reagan started three decades ago.
Every four years we are told that the coming election is the most important of one’s life. This time it might actually be true. At stake is the relation between citizen and state, the very nature of the American social contract.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com