We’re at a pivotal moment in American history. Never in our lifetimes have the consequences of liberal big government been on such ubiquitous display, not only here, but everywhere we look. The socialist democracies of Western Europe stand at the precipice of complete downfall. Many of our own liberal states are facing the same bankrupt status. Our own federal debt is choking the life out of any hope for quick recovery. A president in so far over his head that he is drowning in his own useless rhetoric has become an embarrassment to the nation. And plenty of enemy states are just chomping at the bit ready to pounce at our weakness.

Many who stay conscientiously involved in politics on a daily basis seem ready to throw in the proverbial towel on America and go down in ignominious defeat like the Europeans. Just follow them off the cliff because nothing can be done to stop it. It’s too late. The socialists’ march through our institutions has gone too far; it can’t be reversed. I’ve heard and read this sentiment over and over again of late. Our grand Republic, say the defeatists, is just one step shy of the historical grave.

Sure, I’ll be the first to admit that things are very grave. But grave, as in buried? I don’t think so. And I’ll be darned if I want to be on the same team with anyone else who does think this way. Because defeatism is like a deadly virus. It spreads by word of mouth. If left unchecked, defeatism eventually chokes the very life out of human free will.

I’ve never seen — outside of real war — a moment when we Americans more needed to get back in touch with our inner Patriot.

Who were those people that risked all in their fight for liberty? They were people just like us. They had families to support. They had lived a certain way all their lives, and just like us, probably saw life continuing on in much the same way for their children.

Until it finally dawned on them that it wasn’t going to work out that way. Things were growing worse in the colonies, just as they are now nearly 300 years later. Tyranny is a beast never satiated, after all. But the colonists didn’t want to believe that any more than we have wanted to believe it, simply because once they saw the truth, they would have to choose. And that choosing inevitably meant real suffering. Real risk.

Our patriot ancestors didn’t just wake up one morning and preemptively realize that if they were willing, as a generation, to sacrifice the lives of about 5,000 men, agree to get another 10,000 or so wounded, let a finite number of homes be burned to the ground and so many fortunes lost, then they could usher in a fundamentally different era in the annals of civilization. No, they were just like us, suddenly so caught in a tyranny of taxation and over-bearing law they could no longer endure it.

And what did they do about it, our patriot ancestors?

The very first thing they did was to get out of their comfort zones and into their meeting places — their taverns and churches and offices and homes. There they confronted their more complacent, loyalist-bent friends, neighbors and co-workers. Our patriot ancestors did not buckle under in cowardice and shy from the verbal confrontations so necessary to change minds and hearts.

The very first rule of revolution — and of counter-revolution, which is what we are in now — is that thoughts and words must precede all other actions. The return to our American brand of common sense will come one person at a time. Discounting the impact one individual can have is the silver bullet that can kill a resistance movement with a single shot.

It is now time for all good patriots to get a grip and confront a liberal today.

We all know at least one liberal. And we all know, too, that while there are indeed a group of diehard revolutionaries running the show on the left, most — yes, most — liberals are minding their own business, going to work, raising kids, helping out at church or synagogue, leading the PTA and the myriad other things that we Americans do. Many liberals may seem brainwashed to us but most have just stopped thinking much beyond the platitudes they heard in school or from the liberal MSM, or vote Democrat because their parents did or haven’t yet hit their own heads into the brick wall of tyranny that our federal government has become.

It’s vital at this very opportune teaching moment, when the Obama they saw as a political savior is standing proverbially naked on the Gulf, to confront them with the choice they made. To call them out. To ask the hard questions: Are you sure you voted wisely? Are you happy with the change we’ve gotten? Do you still have hope in liberal big government to solve all the world’s problems?

Many conservatives now seem to believe that our liberal brothers, sisters, cousins, neighbors and co-workers are simply too far round the bend to bother with. That we would only be wasting both breath and energy to try to engage with them. That we would end up on the rhetorically bloody end of a racist jab to our throats or a swastika painted on our homes. And that, after suffering such abuse, we would still have nothing whatsoever to show for the effort.

I’m well aware, perhaps more than most, of the Alinsky influence on the entirety of our civil discourse. I’ve been studying the tactic of political ridicule for a few years now, and I think we can all admit that even the most nitwit liberal follower — who hasn’t got a lick of real fact to back up a single taunt he hurls — has, at least, got ridicule down pat. Now, Alinsky may have considered ridicule to be man’s most potent weapon but he was flat-out wrong.

Ridicule only wins when its opponent bows down before it and gets just as low-down dirty, or when its opponent retreats into cowardly silence.

Contrary to the Alinsky doctrines, truth is man’s most potent weapon.

And confronting a liberal with the truth about the ineptitude of big government — no matter what “savior” is in charge — ought not be that difficult at the moment. The Gulf debacle is blowing all liberal claims of Obama’s extraordinary presidential prowess and the competency assertions of federal bureaucracy to kingdom come.

The latest Rasmussen polling, taken just before president know-nothing gave his big speech Tuesday night, shows the glow is not only off that rose, but the stink of decay is already setting in. The President got a strongly-approve rating from only 26%, while those strongly disapproving hit a whopping 46%, giving him an indexed rating of negative 20 points. The most important index to follow, in my mind, is among independents, of whom a full 52% disapprove of the way Obama is handling his whole job as president. With numbers like those, there are millions of Americans ready to be confronted.

It should not matter whether an Obama voter changes his mind on the spot, when confronted with the truth regarding the ramifications of his vote. It’s pretty much human nature for all of us to become somewhat defensive when confronted with evidence that goes against our thinking bent. But none of us can know whether the liberal so confronted, who slams back at us in defensive anger, does not go home and in privacy there, really give the matter some thought. At pivotal moments such as these, when lies are exposed as transparently as they are now, that’s the time to charge in with truth.

Neither you nor I can take responsibility for what a liberal does with the truth we foist upon him. Only he can take accountability for that. But not knowing how our confrontation will turn out, whether for good or naught, should not deter us from our mission to save America - one voter at a time.

A single verbal confrontation, using truth as a weapon, is like one bullet fired at the enemy in war. One shot of confrontation may not kill all the liberal lies in a voter’s mind, but it may wound enough lies seriously enough that time and events will take care of the rest.

At a time such as this - when our Republic is on the line — no wise patriot can afford to be silent. A few words of truth might actually begin the chain reaction of common sense regained that’s heard around the world.

For the past three weeks, I’ve been on vacation, purposely avoiding news of any kind as I sought to refresh my soul. The very first thing I read upon resuming my vigil on the world’s affairs was a report describing those despicable Israelis cold-bloodedly murdering a group of innocent peace activists bringing much-needed aid and comfort to the Israeli-victimized Gazans and a companion piece filled with the world’s condemnation of Israel.

Having followed Middle East events rather conscientiously for a number of years, I immediately suspected that there was a great deal more to this story. Having watched a Western press grow more and more willfully blind and downright anti-Semitic over three decades greatly increased my skepticism. Seeing my American president blink, blink, and blink again while blathering more inanity about irrelevancies, unable to discern right from wrong, brought me to the brink of gut-wrenching nausea.

What has happened to us? The West, I mean, and more specifically, America?

The Israeli Defense Forces are not stupid, for one thing. They had clear video of individual soldiers legally enforcing a two-nation naval blockade for purely defensive purposes. The boat boarded by the IDF had multiple warnings and were peacefully informed that the ship would need to be boarded and inspected for weapons before it could pass to deliver the aid purportedly on board. All perfectly in accordance with international law. Instead of “peace activists,” the soldiers — not drones or missiles or mechanized artillery, mind you, but real men, sons, brothers, husbands, fathers — were met by an army of savages wielding steel pipes, who overwhelmed the soldiers and beat them without mercy.

The savage gang was fired upon, and nine of them were killed. It was called an Israeli-perpetrated massacre.

And I daresay there is not a single American adult who would not defend the actions of the IDF if the men being beaten were among their own sons, brothers, husbands, or fathers.

A Chicago police officer attempting to inspect a car trunk for illegal drugs who is surrounded by a gang and beaten with steel pipes certainly has the right to use his gun and depend upon his partner to do so. An American soldier disarming people by law in the wake of Katrina, if met by a gang wielding clubs against him, would fire in self-defense. Would we have the same difficulty condemning the real law-breakers? I don’t think so.

Figuring out who is right and who is wrong in this situation is not hard stuff. It’s not the kind of moral dilemma which anyone over the age of twelve ought to have difficulty resolving. No, it isn’t Auschwitz, at least not yet. It isn’t the blueprints for massive “ovens,” at least not yet, but the leaders of Israel’s enemy states have publicly declared over and over again their intentions to perpetrate Holocaust II at the first opportunity.

No, understanding the Israeli position as the only morally defensible one in the region is not difficult. It’s the kind of elementary morality that any good parent hopes to have instilled in his children before they reach middle school.

So again, I ask myself, what has happened to us as a civilization?

Why are the Israelis having to spend precious time and energy trying to convince the rest of the world of the justness of their cause? A cause that is simply about surviving in peace while surrounded by historical throwbacks to the 7th century?

When the Israelis finally bent to world pressure in 2005 and left Gaza — forcefully uprooting their own people, and even being so thorough as to take the dead Jews from their cemeteries — they were acting in good faith, attempting to trade land for peace. The Palestinians could have become good neighbors, could have asked for the helping hand of do-gooders around the world for rebuilding moneys and assistance. The world would have been generous. The Israelis themselves offered such assistance.

Instead, the Palestinians took to using Gaza exactly as they had before the Israeli occupation: to perpetrate war. Nearly ten thousand rockets have rained down on innocent Israelis since the land-for-peace deal was made. Those rockets have killed hundreds of Israelis, nearly all civilians. And, in fact, the Israelis do send food and medicine daily into the Gaza that assaults them without mercy.

Now, if peace is really the only objective, the Israelis could have peace by this time tomorrow, and the only thing they would need to do to achieve it is to march quietly into an Iranian-built “oven.” The Arabs would all be happy. The Muslim world would rejoice immediately, and all would be well in the entire region. All American troops could come home from the Middle East. President Obama could bow as much as he pleased and play golf the rest of the time.

About a year ago, I shamelessly berated a dear Jewish friend for becoming paranoid about unfolding events — not in Israel, but right here in America. She, naturally, sees things differently from how I do. She was noticing the telltales in American foreign policy under the new administration. She was calling my attention to signs I couldn’t then read. Perhaps a part of me simply wanted to believe — with all my heart and soul — that nothing whatsoever similar to the Holocaust could ever happen again because we good Americans would never, ever, ever permit such a horror on our watch. I argued this point with my friend vehemently. For a while, we were so passionately at odds on the “Jewish question” that we stopped corresponding and talking on the phone. Now I shake with guilt and shame over my callous insensitivity, and I wonder where I found such faith in the American people and such naïve blindness about human evil.

We have clearly elected an anti-Semitic president. I say this with due trepidation; I take the charge as seriously as any I know. Barack Obama’s anti-Semitism is so transparent that I tremble to consider that it may not even be merely an intellectual Israel-vs.-Arab-nation prejudice, but may actually be racist, or even a soul-disordered hate for all things deigned by God.

Consider Obama’s presidential record on judging events. When lawyer Obama heard only scant details of Professor Gates’ arrest, he didn’t bat an eyelash before publicly declaring that the police “acted stupidly.” When President Obama learned of Chávez-wannabe Zelaya being exiled from Honduras, he took the side of Zelaya without even the slightest hesitation, and he even threw the weight of the entire U.S. government against the tiny, struggling Honduran democracy. When Eric Holder announced that he intended to grant the 9/11 terrorists civilian trials in the heart of NYC, President Obama needed no time to study the issue, gather all the facts, or hold any public investigations on the matter. President Obama seems to have no difficulty whatsoever taking sides.

Yet whenever the president is confronted with events in which Jews or Muslims are concerned, we encounter an altogether different Obama persona. We see the dodger. We see the presumed thinker. We see the lawyer calling for all the facts, all the wider ramifications, all the possible contingencies. In every instance of terrorist killing or foiled killing since taking office, President Obama has dodged the one word that fits: “Muslim.” He has removed every mention of Islam from all intelligence material on terrorism. Since day one of his presidency, we have seen a man seemingly going out of his way to soothe the hurt feelings of Muslims, all the while publicly insulting and humiliating the Jewish Prime Minister of Israel. Now, with clear film showing soldiers mercilessly beaten by a savage gang and firing in self-defense, the president dithers, joins an immoral U.N. condemnation of the Israelis, and continues to “gather facts.”

Remembering the fears of my Jewish friend, I must now ask whether Barack Obama is signaling to the entire Muslim world that Israel is theirs for the taking, that America will stand aside and twiddle our collective thumbs while Iran and her Muslim neighbors finally get to carry out Holocaust II.

And for the very first time in my life, I am ashamed of my country.

The only thing I can add is that I now declare myself, a devout Catholic, Jewish too. And it would seem the only moral thing any of us can do is to proclaim this as loudly and as furiously as we can. When Helen Thomas says the Jews need to go back to Poland and Germany, and those on a “peace flotilla” tell an Israeli soldier to “go back to Auschwitz,” and a president looks the other way while evil parades as good right under his nose, then the time for silence has passed. There is a quirky verse in the book of Genesis which any God-fearing person ought now heed, in my opinion. Speaking of the Jews, His chosen people, God told Abraham: “I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse.”

I say again, shouldn’t we all be Israelis now? Yes, we should.

Well, here we are just a few days after the latest Islamic terror plot failed to kill a lot of Americans in Times Square.  Reporters are delving.  Many are dodging the obvious; yes the terrorist was a Muslim.  Keyboards are spinning.  The president is squirming a bit but shows no evidence that he might be wising up on fighting terrorists.

Since Obama was elected, he has done just about all he could to hold the hands of Muslims and to ease their bruised feelings over that nasty Bush habit of using terms like, “Global War on Terror,” or “IslamoFascist terror” or even “Islamic radicals” or just the little word, “Jihad.”

And here we sit wondering if one day soon, Barack Obama will grow up and decide he really does want to be president.

But we must keep our sense of humor about all this.

So, here’s a little ditty that sizes up the situation.   Your reaction to it will show you whether you are still in charge of your own senses, or whether you’ve swallowed whole hog the la-la land, see no Islamic evil rhetoric of Barack Obama.

The Obama Terror Ditty

Obama coddled;

Muslims toddled

wherever they wanted to go.

My Muslim neighbor used his garage

to build a lovely bomb barrage.

He took it to a shopping mall

where fun was had by one and all.

He blew some kids to kingdom come

and surely got his job well done.

Obama talked;

Obama balked

while one by one Americans died.

But from the Islamic profile we all still shied.

Obama grinned;

Obama spinned.

And America bit the dust.

————————————–

It’s a nightmare all right.  The only question is whether we’ll wake up before it is really too late.

Now that General Jim Jones, the current national security adviser to the president of the United States, has apologized (sort of) for his blatantly anti-Semitic joke, told to an audience including many Jews, the matter is supposed to be closed. End of discussion.

Hold on just a gosh-darned minute.

Read the joke here, dear readers, so you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

This supposedly all-in-good-fun “joke” has extremely - yes, extremely - dangerous undertones, especially in this current age and especially under this current administration. And I, for one, am not going to just blithely accept General Jones’ up-against-the-wall, sorry-that-some-were-offended “apology” and let this get swept under the media’s protect-Obama-at-all-costs rug.

Depicting Jewish merchants in of all places, Afghanistan, turning away a bedraggled, dangerously dehydrated, fleeing Taliban fighter, Jones employed one of the oldest, crudest Jewish stereotypes in the world - “greedy Jewish merchant.” In not seeing the obvious to even the densest ninnies on the planet regarding his adaptation of the old joke, General Jones would seem to be following the rewritten history template of this administration regarding Islam. Hear no Islamic evil; see no Islamic evil; wish all Islamic evil away.

For one thing, the only really funny item within this so-called joke was the appearance of two Jewish merchants doing unmolested business in a radical Islamic stronghold. Now, that is a real joke.

For the record, there is only one Jew left in all of Afghanistan. Because of his single-Jew-in-Afghanistan status, Ishaq Levin has become quite the international celebrity. He remains despite his family having immigrated to Israel and is continuing his one-man demand that the Taliban return the Torah confiscated from the last remaining synagogue in Afghanistan. This last remaining synagogue is the building which Levin, the last remaining Jew in Afghanistan, now guards day and night, depending on the charity of neighbors and good Samaritans around the world.

But leave it to a high-ranking member of this administration to imply that the overwhelming number of prosperous Jews in Afghanistan are taking advantage of the impoverished, fighting-only-for-justice Taliban.

As for me, I believe that this “joke” was intended as a thinly veiled metaphor for Israeli-Palestinian relations. This “joke” seems to meld perfectly with the long-cherished Palestinian whoppers about Jews prospering on Palestinian misery, about Jews never being satisfied and always wanting more, about Jews perpetrating “Israeli apartheid” against them. Isn’t this the story line of every Palestinian-support group of the last 50 years?

The implications of this story line coming from a national security adviser to the president are even more ominous in light of the Obama administration’s moves towards Israel over the past 16 months. Both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have given signal after signal that they believe this Palestinians-as-victims-of-Jews story line.

President Obama has seemingly gone out of his way to snub Prime Minister Netanyahu and to humiliate him publicly. And everyone has noticed. Everyone has noticed, also, that President Obama has gone just as far in the other direction to sanitize every decidedly Islam-inspired act of terror, even going so far as to make no mention of Islam in the report on the Ft. Hood terrorist act.

The media looked the other way when disturbing anti-Semitic associations turned up in Barack Obama’s past. They ignored his chosen church’s close ties to Louis Farrakhan, the most well-known Jew hater in America. They ignored Barack Obama’s decades-long choice of a black liberation theology “church,” among whose tenets is an undeniable anti-Semitism. They ignored Barack Obama’s links to Rashid Khalidi, known promoter of the Palestinians-as-victims story line.

Just as now the mainstream media expect all Jews and supporters of Israel to just get over this blatantly anti-Semitic joke, told by a very high ranking member of this administration.

Now, all of this reminds me sadly of a conversation I had with a Jewish friend from New York in 2007. At that time, it looked as though Hillary Clinton was the likely Democrat nominee for ‘08 and I asked my friend whether she would vote for Hillary knowing about the disturbingly anti-Semitic features of her past. My friend was shocked.

She was evidently completely unaware that Hillary and Bill’s most frequent guest to the White House during their tenure there was Yasser Arafat, the late-great leader of the PLO. My friend was also in the dark about the infamous Hillary sympathy-kiss to Arafat’s wife when she accused Israelis of, among other things, using poison gas on Palestinians. My friend seemed never to have even heard the charges made by a good many close associates of the Clintons that the harshly derogatory phrases, “Jew Motherf***er” and “f***ing Jew bastard,” were among Hillary’s favorite epithets.

In fact, my Jewish friend from New York accused me of making it all up and insisted vehemently that “all Democrats support Israel and all Democrats love the Jews.” End of discussion.

And General Jones didn’t really mean a single nasty thing by this blatantly anti-Semitic, full-of-logical-holes “joke.”

Sweep it all under the protect-Obama-at-all-costs rug, folks.

As for my Jewish friend, I implore her to refrain from saying “never again” in my vicinity as long as she and so many like her keep voting for these people. It gives me the vapors and I’m running low on smelling salts these days.

If there is a single thing that Barack Obama has proved to the American people - beyond any reasonable doubt - it is that he is not smart. And neither are those so-called brilliant folks surrounding him, aiding him, advising him, and egging him on against the will of the people.

Barack Obama is charismatic. Or at least he was until mainstream Americans figured out he was a habitual liar and stopped listening to him.

From his whoppers about small things on the campaign trail (his uncle helped liberate Auschwitz; his parents married because of Selma; his father got a scholarship to America from the Kennedy’s) to his lies about very big things (his health care plan will reduce employer insurance premiums by 3000 percent, or $3,000 - still a lie), this president is now only allowed in polite company because he is the president. In any real-world company, inveterate liars are shunned as utterly untrustworthy, unreliable, unwelcome guests. (Unless their last name is “Clinton,” we shouldn’t forget.)

The still-blind sucker crowd that elected this charlatan to the most powerful CEO position in the world, on the strength of his skin color and a resume fit for the back of a postage stamp, cling to the hollow claim that their guy is just too smart for the rest of us commoners to understand him. And that whopper is just as believable to any sentient person as the president’s 3000 percent rate-reduction claim about his health care bill.

The proof that Barack Obama is not smart lies in his actions over the past year.

Never has so much goodwill been so thoroughly wasted and abused.

President Obama came into office riding a wave of well-wishes that was truly unprecedented. He also faced grave problems. He did not face unprecedented problems, as he so likes to pretend.

If President Obama were really the smartest guy of his generation, then he would have done the following:

He would have, first and foremost, surrounded himself with unimpeachable, morally sound, and experienced cabinet members. Instead he filled his cabinet with Clinton retreads, tax cheats, polarizing ideologues, and unfit-for-the-real-world academics.

Dumb. Really dumb.

Second, President Obama - if he were really smart - would have told his Chicago intimates, especially Desiree Rogers and his wife, Michelle, that until the economy was in full - very full - rebound, there would be no expensive, vulgar partying in the people’s house. Knowing full well that he had come into the presidency on his own rhetoric that we were facing the worst “economic crisis since the Great Depression,” Barack Obama would have known better - if he were really smart - than to order up gala parties with imported Wagu beef at $100 per pound, while he was speaking out the other side of his mouth about the disgusting nature of executive retreats to Las Vegas. A smart man would have known the people would see him as a hypocrite.

Instead, the Obamas partied hardy to the thralls of every society page in the country, quickly making themselves the butt of jokes from coast to coast.

Third, President Obama - if he were really smart - would have turned serious executive instead of media addict. He would not have appeared on a late-night comedy show. He would not have spent more time in front of a camera’s glow than he spent at his desk. He would have rolled up his sleeves and gotten down to the hard work of governing instead of hamming it up in public 24/7, which any truly smart person knows is not only bound to get old very fast, but also sends out the message loud and clear that no one is actually acting as president.

And if Obama were really intelligent, he would have hired a speech coach for the express purpose of weaning him from those confounded teleprompters. A man, who had just captured the presidency as the intellectual elite from Harvard, should have been smart enough to know that teleprompters malfunction and that camera phones take pictures of teleprompters and that when the people think they’ve elected a smart man, they should not be so easily disabused of that notion. It’s not good for the image one has worked so tirelessly to create.

Which brings us to the matter of foreign policy. A man who, apparently, confuses “smart diplomacy” with kicking all our friends in the shins and sucking up to our enemies, in the belief that this will make us new friends, is nothing short of mentally challenged - direly so. (Rahm would use the word “retarded,” but this is too kind, certainly.) In fact, knowing a number of folks affected by Down syndrome as I have, I am inclined to say that a committee of Special Olympians would have done far, far better in the realm of foreign policy than Obama & Company. At the very least, they would surely not have alienated our friends.

At every step, since taking office, Barack Obama has kicked our allies to the curb and emboldened our enemies, and he doesn’t even have a foreign chum to his name. Weren’t we supposed to be more popular with Obama as president? Well, yes, we were. Instead, Israeli-American relations are at their worst in 35 years, Iran is chomping at the A-bomb bit, China is sitting threateningly in the creditor’s driving seat, Russia is quickly becoming re-Sovietized, and Eric Holder unintelligibly prattles on about the civil rights of foreign terrorists to a shocked and confounded public. Anyone who can find this foreign policy “smart” has to be fit for the Tiger Woods’ mistress lineup.

Ask yourself this: What smart man goes on international TV backing his Attorney General’s half-witted plan to hold civilian trials for 9/11 foreign terrorists a few blocks from the WTC ruins, before getting everyone involved fully on board? Any man with an ounce of real sense knows he had better get the 100% backing of every New York politician and steadfast agreements from Congress check-writers before he makes such an announcement. Did anyone in this “smart” administration even bother looking at New York’s budget problems before stamping approval on this cockamamie scheme? Did anyone in this “smart” administration even bother to poll how the public would react? Honey, this is the kind of stuff pure idiots try to do.

Which brings us to the real cake-taker in Obama’s growing realm of stupid stuff. The crisis-that-isn’t-a-crisis governing plan.

Anyone - and I mean, anyone - with an ounce of real sense knows that if Obama had simply rolled up his sleeves and put everyone in his administration to work on the economy, ignoring all other domestic agenda items until we were humming back to prosperity, then this man would be on his way to becoming the hero of American hearts. Instead, due only to stupid lunges aimed at pushing through the long-stalled leftist agenda of bringing back the era of big government, this president is becoming an embarrassing laughingstock. It is painful to watch, even for those of us who hate big government. Seeing a grown man make this big a fool of himself - especially the one who carries the banner for the entire American citizenry - is no pleasure. It is pure pain.

The health care reforms, if they had been put on the back burner, patiently awaiting a strongly recovering economy, would have been far more guaranteed to see fruition. Of course, the bill is so horrible that we must now be happy for this administration’s lack of smarts. Even though the bill narrowly passed - via the Chicago way of bribing, threatening and cheating - it has served to rally opposition to big government in a way that nothing else could have. Tea, anyone?

Yes, we have a highly educated, Ivy League president. Yes, we have a whole flock of back-patting, self-congratulating, fully credentialed staff.

But smart?

Oh, please.

So what will the campaign slogan of the other party be for 2012?

I’ll have a whack at it:

Obama lied; hope died.

The Iranians got the A-bomb, the Russians got their jive back, and the Chinese own everything.

Vote for the un-cool, work-experienced, good-without-a-teleprompter guy or gal who knows a friend from a foe and can add 2 + 2 and get 4 every single time.