Right Wing Nut House

The passing of a great man is sometimes accompanied by the end of an historical epoch. This is usually due to the titanic effect the man had on his times as well as a recognition that with his death, the world will change and that what transpired during the time he walked the earth can never be recaptured.

So it is with the passing of William F. Buckley, Jr. who died while at work at his home in Stamford, Connecticut. He was 82 years old.

It is impossible to exaggerate the influence of Mr. Buckley on conservatism, on politics, on political writing, on television and mass communications, and on America herself. That’s why it will be so easy to write this obituary.

The bare bones outline of his life includes his birth in 1925 to a wealthy family of ten children, educated at Yale, a stint in the army and the CIA, a 57 year marriage to a beautiful woman who gave him a son Christopher, also famous in literary circles.

A fierce Catholic, Buckley never allowed his faith and politics to mix but rather had his religious beliefs inform his character and ideology. The only book he ever wrote about religion - Nearer my God - a truly original work that defended Christianity and the Catholic faith by using arguments gleaned largely from ex-protestants who had converted to Catholicism:

Though Buckley quotes large numbers of Protestants in this book, they are mostly Protestants who ”poped” (converted to Catholicism), like Cardinal Newman, Ronald Knox, Richard John Neuhaus and Arnold Lunn, and whose ”poping” stemmed more from thoughtful consideration than any sudden access of irresistible grace. The few unconverted Protestants who seem to play a part are Bishop Butler, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King Jr., Charles Colson, Charlton Heston and Buckley’s wife, Pat. Repeating the medieval saw that ”nothing contrary to reason” is required by true religion, Buckley uses a panel of the ”poped” to examine in their own words questions Buckley thinks important. These range from the oldest and most fundamental (the existence of God, the unique historicity of Jesus) to the most current and pragmatic (divorce, priestly celibacy, the ordination of women).

Only someone supremely confident in their own beliefs could use Charlton Heston and Reinhold Niebuhr to explain the mysteries of faith.

But this only demonstrates the extraordinary suppleness and depth of Buckley’s intellect. A man fascinated with language, he would use both the spoken and written word to elevate political dialogue, devastate his political foes, inspire legions of political acolytes, and invent, nurture, expand, and explain a political movement that when he started was moribund and something of a national joke.

The chronology of the rise of conservatism in the last half of the 20th century mirrors the growth in popularity of Buckley and his ideas. There simply is no other way to put it; Bill Buckley made it respectable to be a conservative again. The dominant American left in the 1950’s couldn’t dismiss this man and the movement he was building as his writings sparked interest in classic conservative ideas on college campuses across the country.

What Buckley sought to do was unite the traditionalist conservatives with libertarians - a marriage that today is strained beyond measure largely as a result of conservatism’s flirtation with big government and a curious desire to employ moral dogma as a club to try and tell people how to run their private lives. He succeeded in this unity of strange bedfellows by the force of his own vibrant personality reflected in his writings and by inventing a logical coherence that tied together the libertarian ideals of self sufficiency and unbridled personal freedom with the conservative belief in personal responsibility and a just moral order informed by Christian theology. He added a healthy dose of American exceptionalism and beliefs based on natural law to cement the marriage.

His first book, God and Man at Yale,, shocked the literary establishment by daring to criticize the stifling conformity of thought that had captured students and faculty at Yale University. In arguing for freedom of thought on campuses, Buckley was tarred by many critics as a “crypto-fascist,” a klansman, or worse. He shrugged it off and continued his efforts.

In 1955, he, along with another great conservative thinker Frank Meyer, founded The National Review, a conservative publication whose influence always far exceeded the number of subscribers. For the next 53 years and counting, the writings in that publication shaped and animated the conservative movement. Fearless, controversial, never boring, the best conservative writers of each succeeding generation always seemed to have gotten their start at TNR. Some notable contributors over the years have included Whittaker Chambers, George Will, Gary Wills, Russell Kirk, Joan Didion, Ann Coulter, and James Burnham.

Buckley mentored and encouraged several generations of writers and philosophers who argued, explained, and illuminated what conservatism was and what it stood for. In effect, he gave “word to the flesh,” inspiring debate at bull sessions on campus, across kitchen tables in American homes, all the way to the highest councils of government.

Buckley proved that ideas can spread like the plague with a virulence that can overcome powerful opposing forces that seek to stifle or marginalize them. We forget how overwhelmingly dominant liberalism was through the 1960’s. Conservatives were considered kooks - Birchers or Kluxers at worst. Rich, stuffed shirt, Babbitts at best. Buckley’s insurgency against this conformity struck a chord with large numbers of young people who joined the campaign to nominate Barry Goldwater.

Although a disaster, the election of 1964 saw the emergence of Reagan and more importantly, blooded a new generation of conservative activists who continued to be inspired and, in a very real way led, by Buckley and his writings.

To say that Buckley was a prolific writer would be to miss the point. He breathed projects into existence with a seeming ease born of a literary flair and a quick, penetrating mind. It is said he could write one of his 3500 “On the Right” columns in 20 minutes. His more than 50 books revealed a restless intellect as he wrote not only about politics but also culture, sailing, and his always fascinating personal experiences on the stump or on television.

He didn’t preach. He rarely tried to persuade overtly. Rather his writings shone a spotlight on an issue or a cause and forced the reader to evaluate and compare his own arguments against those of a master dialectition. In the end, persuaded or not, there was always a feeling of being uplifted by the arguments themselves.

This description of Buckley comes pretty close to capturing his public personae:

Editor, columnist, novelist, debater, TV talk show star of “Firing Line,” harpsichordist, transoceanic sailor and even a good-natured loser in a New York mayor’s race, Buckley worked at a daunting pace, taking as little as 20 minutes to write a column for his magazine, the National Review.

Yet on the platform, he was all handsome, reptilian languor, flexing his imposing vocabulary ever so slowly, accenting each point with an arched brow or rolling tongue and savoring an opponent’s discomfort with wide-eyed glee.

“I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition,” he wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1986. “I asked myself the other day, ‘Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?’ I couldn’t think of anyone.”

In 1991, he had a falling out with long time friend and TNR contributor Joseph Sobran whose anti-Israeli columns Buckley felt crossed the line and became anti-Semitic. But Sobran never lost his affection for Buckley. This was written last year when Sobran heard the news that Buckley had been diagnosed with emphysema:

Over the years I came to know another side of Bill. When I had serious troubles, he was a generous friend who did everything he could to help me without being asked. And I wasn’t the only one. I gradually learned of many others he’d quietly rescued from adversity. He’d supported a once-noted libertarian in his destitute old age, when others had forgotten him. He’d helped two pals of mine out of financial difficulties. And on and on. Everyone seemed to have a story of Bill’s solicitude. When you told your own story to a friend, you’d hear one from him. It was as if we were all Bill Buckley’s children.

It went far beyond sharing his money. One of Bill’s best friends was Hugh Kenner, the great critic who died two years ago. Hugh was hard of hearing, and once, after a 1964 dinner with Hugh and Charlie Chaplin, Bill scolded Hugh for being too stubborn to use a hearing aid. Here were the greatest comedian of the age and the greatest student of comedy, and Hugh had missed much of the conversation! Later Hugh’s wife told me how grateful Hugh had been for that scolding. Nobody else would have dared speak to her husband that way. Only a true friend would. If Bill saw you needed a little hard truth, he’d tell you, even if it pained him to say it.

I once spent a long evening with one of Bill’s old friends from Yale, whose name I won’t mention. He told me movingly how Bill stayed with him to comfort him when his little girl died of brain cancer. If Bill was your friend, he’d share your suffering when others just couldn’t bear to. What a great heart — eager to spread joy, and ready to share grief!

Compared with all this, the political differences that finally drove us apart seem trivial now. I saw the same graciousness in his relations with everyone from presidents to menials. I learned a lot of things from Bill Buckley, but the best thing he taught me was how to be a Christian. May Jesus comfort him now.

A great light in the firmament of American letters has been dimmed today. Buckley leaves a conservative movement in turmoil, a victim largely of its own success - a success for which he was largely responsible. We must make our own way now, climbing on the shoulders of greats like William Buckley to reach ever higher, bettering ourselves and the human condition while being inspired by the irrepressible and indomitable spirit who passed into legend today.

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I was born with every advantage known to America in the 1950’s. I had two white parents who created a loving, nurturing environment in a happy suburban home that never saw hunger or want. The fact that both parents were bibliophiles who fostered a love of learning and a reverence for education sets me apart even further from the vast majority of kids from my generation.

But I knew a lot of kids less well off than I who far surpassed me in academic achievement and in knowledge. This was a consequence of being educated at superior schools - private, Catholic schools - where inculcating a hunger for knowledge in students was seen as a teacher’s duty.

I am not an expert in what is wrong with schools today nor do I pretend to have any answers. I just know that the ignorance of our children as revealed in this study by Common Core is not only appalling but has me fearing for the future of American democracy:

A new survey of 17-year-olds reveals that, to many, the paragraph above sounds only slightly strange. Almost 20 percent of 1,200 respondents to a national telephone survey do not know who our enemy was in World War II, and more than a quarter think Columbus sailed after 1750. Half do not know whom Sen. McCarthy investigated or what the Renaissance was.

It is easy to make light of such ignorance. In reality, however, a deep lack of knowledge is neither humorous nor trivial. What we know helps to determine how successful we are likely to be in life, and how many career paths we can choose from. It also affects our contribution as democratic citizens.

Unfortunately, too many young Americans do not possess the kind of basic knowledge they need. When asked fundamental questions about U.S. history and culture, they score a D and exhibit stunning knowledge gaps.

“Gaps” is an understatement in the knowledge of these 17 year olds:

• Nearly a quarter of those surveyedcould not identify Adolf Hitler; 10 percent think he was a munitions manufacturer

• Fewer than half can place the Civil War in the correct half-century

• Only 45 percent can identify Oedipus

• A third do not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees the freedom of speech and religion

• 44 percent think that The Scarlet Letter was either about a witch trial or a piece of correspondence

Unfortunately, that’s not the half of it. It gets worse:

* 38% knew that Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales, a poem written in Middle English and containing stories told by people on a pilgrimage.

* 50% knew that In the Bible, Job is known for his patience in suffering.

* 57% knew that Dickens’ novel ATale of Two Cities took place during the French Revolution.

* 50% knew that the controversy surrounding Senator Joseph McCarthy focused on Communism.

* Only 60% knew that the First World War was between 1900 and 1950.

There is a chasm opening up between the old and the young as far as common cultural touchstones that allow us to share national experiences as well as communicate with each other.

If a politician makes the charge that an individual is engaging in “McCarthyism,” how is someone who doesn’t have a clue who Joe McCarthy was figure out what the politician is saying? How is someone who never heard of Oedipus to to understand a host of cultural references that the rest of us acknowledge without thinking?

It isn’t just being ignorant of the Bill of Rights and Constitution that threatens the future. Our national discussions frequently use these shared touchstones as a means of communicating at a deeper level. And, of course, these cultural references are the essence of the shared values of western civilization.

How did this disastrous turn of events come about? The study has some specific causes:

Americans in almost every demographic group are reading less than they were 10 or 20 years ago. The percentage of 17- year-olds who report reading for fun daily declined from one in three in 1984 to one in five in 2004. In 2006, 15- to 24-year olds on the whole reported reading an average of seven minutes a day on weekdays and 10 minutes a day on weekends.7 Meanwhile, in the past decade, the amount of time that teens and preteens devote to television, video games, and computers has increased steadily.8 In a culture suffused by instant messaging and YouTube, leisure reading has increasingly become an anachronism— a bit like polka or bowling leagues.

Another culprit is one of those things in education that is initiated with the very best of intentions and ends up hurting more than helping; standardized testing:

Testing is important, of that we have no doubt. But tests are not the be-all and end-all of education. They are an important indicator, but they are only one indicator of educational progress. Some districts are now spending many weeks of the school year preparing their students to take high-stakes tests. This, we believe, is time that could be better spent reading and discussing exciting historical controversies, scientific discoveries, and literary works. Indeed, reading in content areas, especially if guided by a knowledge-rich, coherent curriculum, would, we expect, produce higher test scores than endless test preparation activities.

I am supporter of testing. But when schools abandon academics in favor of teaching kids how to test well rather than absorb what is being tested, something is amiss. Are so many tests necessary? Would less intrusion by the federal government improve the situation? Those are questions I would ask if I had a kid in public schools today.

Finally, the study makes an eloquent case for establishing “deep knowledge” and “rich curriculum” schools:

Testing is important, of that we have no doubt. But tests are not the be-all and end-all of education. They are an important indicator, but they are only one indicator of educational progress. Some districts are now spending many weeks of the school year preparing their students to take high-stakes tests. This, we believe, is time that could be better spent reading and discussing exciting historical controversies, scientific discoveries, and literary works. Indeed, reading in content areas, especially if guided by a knowledge-rich, coherent curriculum, would, we expect, produce higher test scores than endless test preparation activities.

Thirty years from now those 17 year olds will be in charge of the country. I wonder what it will look like? Some variation of the 26th century in Idiocracy? More likely a less colorful, more conformist society would emerge with little to connect people to a shared past.

One last interesting tidbit from the study; kids who had one parent who attended college scored much better than kids who didn’t. This points up the fact that more than ever, the role of the teacher is vital in inspiring students to move beyond the textbook, beyond the tests and realize that the most rewarding and joyful part of the educational experience is gathering knowledge for knowledge sake; learning for the sheer joy knowing. A teacher who can do that deserves a salary equal to Barry Bonds, Shaq O’Neal, and Tom Brady all rolled into one - a most valuable member of society.

Where is the wisdom of Mike Royko when you need it?

Royko was by far Chicago’s most beloved political columnist. His scathingly brilliant, uproariously funny writings on the Chicago political machine not only shone a light in the dark corners of corruption, favoritism, and mobbed up businesses of Richard J. Daley’s City Hall, he had fun doing it.

A small sample:

Several theories have arisen as to what Mayor Daley really meant a few days ago when he said:

“If they don’t like it, they can kiss my ass.”

On the surface, it appeared that the mayor was merely admonishing those who would dare question the royal favors he has bestowed upon his sons, Prince Curly, Prince Larry, and Prince Moe.

But it can be a mistake to accept the superficial meaning of anything the mayor says.

The mayor can be a subtle man. And as Earl Bush, his press secretary, once put it after the mayor was quoted correctly:

“Don’t print what he said. Print what he meant.”

So many observers believe the true meaning of the mayor’s remarkable kissing invitation may be more than skin deep.

One theory is that he would like to become sort of the Blarney Stone of Chicago.

As the stone’s legend goes, if a person kisses Ireland’s famous Blarney Stone, which actually exists, he will be endowed with the gift of oratory.

And City Hall insiders have long known that the kind of kiss Daley suggested can result in the gift of wealth.

People from all over the world visit Blarney Castle so they can kiss the chunk of old limestone and thus become glib, convincing talkers.

So, too, might people flock to Chicago in hopes that kissing “The Daley” might bring them unearned wealth. Daley, or at least his bottom, might become one of the great tourist attractions of the nation.

Royko thrived during a time when Chicago had two daily newspapers; the rather staid and conservative morning Tribune and the afternoon liberal Daily News where Royko would hold forth much to the delight of homeward bound train commuters. He was fearless, honest, and disdainful of politicians.

And he would have ripped Barack Obama to shreds over stuff like this:

A British-Iraqi billionaire lent millions of dollars to Barack Obama’s fundraiser just weeks before an imprudent land deal that has returned to haunt the presidential contender, an investigation by The Times discloses.

The money transfer raises the question of whether funds from Nadhmi Auchi, one of Britain’s wealthiest men, helped Mr Obama buy his mock Georgian mansion in Chicago.

A company related to Mr Auchi, who has a conviction for corruption in France, registered the loan to Mr Obama’s bagman Antoin “Tony” Rezko on May 23 2005. Mr Auchi says the loan, through the Panamanian company Fintrade Services SA, was for $3.5 million.

Three weeks later, Mr Obama bought a house on the city’s South Side while Mr Rezko’s wife bought the garden plot next door from the same seller on the same day, June 15.

Mr Obama says he never used Mrs Rezko’s still-empty lot, which could only be accessed through his property. But he admits he paid his gardener to mow the lawn.

It should be mentioned that Obama got around a $300,000 discount on the $2 million plus house. The sellers deny there was any quid pro quo with the two buyers - that there is no connection between Mrs. Rezko paying full price for the lot next door and the bargain they gave the Obamas.

That may be so but the question is, where did Mrs. Rezko get the money?

It is unclear how Mrs Rezko could have afforded the downpayment of $125,000 and a $500,000 mortgage for the original $625,000 purchase of the garden plot at 5050 South Greenwood Ave.

In a sworn statement a year later, Mrs Rezko said she got by on a salary of $37,000 and had $35,000 assets. Mr Rezko told a court he had “no income, negative cash flow, no liquid assets, no unencumbered assets [and] is significantly in arrears on many of his obligations.”

Auchi is emerging as a key figure in the corruption trial of Rezko and also played a part in one of Rezko’s attempts to exploit his relationship with Obama. Obama denies he ever did any favors for Rezko or his associates but the crooked Obama fundraiser told prosecutors that after Auchi gave him another “loan,” he asked Obama to intervene with the State Department in order to get a visa for Auchi who was being denied entry into the US:

Prosecutors say that, after Mr Auchi was unable to enter the United States in 2005, Mr Rezko approached the US State Department to get him a visa and apparently asked “certain Illinois government officials to do the same.” Mr Obama denies he was approached. Mr Auchi’s lawyer has emphasised to The Times that it would be entirely false to imply that money had been lent by GMH to Mr Rezko in return for Mr Rezko seeking to assist Mr Auchi to obtain a visa. The two men’s relationship, the lawyer stressed, was a busines s one.

Just who is this guy Auchi?

Allow me to introduce you to Nadhmi Auchi. He was charged in the 1950s with being an accomplice of Saddam Hussein, when the future tyrant was acquiring his taste for blood. He was investigated in the 1980s for his part in alleged bribes to the fabulously corrupt leaders of post-war Italy. In the 1990s, the Belgium Ambassador to Luxembourg claimed that Auchi’s bank held money Saddam and Colonel Gadaffi had stolen from their luckless peoples. In 2002, officers from the Serious Fraud Squad raided the offices of one of Auchi’s drug companies as part of an investigation of what is alleged to be the biggest swindle ever of the NHS. With allegations, albeit unproven, like these hanging over him, wouldn’t you think that British MPs would have the sense to stay away?

Perhaps you would, but I forgot to add a final fact about Mr Auchi: he is the thirteenth-richest man in Britain, and he has been able to collect British politicians the way other people collect stamps.

First of all, his business dealings make Rezko’s kickback schemes for political contributions look like the minor leagues of sleaze. Auchi had a hand in the biggest political and corporate scandal in post war Europe, the so-called “Elf Affair” where $2 billion francs up and disappeared from the French state oil company Elf.

In a fantastically complex scheme, oil company execs used the state owned company as their own piggy bank, loading up on goodies:

The Auchi case confirms that the political class is attracted to the sleaziest characters in capitalism. Auchi’s conviction was a part of the gigantic investigation into the corruption of the Elf oil company, the biggest fraud inquiry in Europe since the Second World War. Elf became a private bank for its executives who spent £200 million on political favours, mistresses, jewellery, fine art, villas and apartments. By any definition, this was news.

It was only due to the persistence of the French investigating magistrates that Auchi got to Paris. They issued an international arrest warrant in 2000. For three years, the Home Office refused to deport him. Two MPs, Vaz and an unnamed politician, made inquiries. Renaud van Ruymbeke, the French magistrate leading the investigation into the Elf scandal, all but accused Britain of sheltering fugitives. Only after his protests, and pressure from this newspaper did the Home Office relent. Then there were Auchi’s relations with Iraq which have a certain topicality.

What are those connections to Iraq? Nothing less than being an early and enthusiastic supporter of Saddam Hussein. He has admitted to taking part in the assassination attempt on former Iraqi prime minister Qasim which Saddam also took part. He must have realized the nature of Saddam because he left Iraq but kept doing business with the regime:

Auchi’s brother was among the many Baathists killed by Saddam, but the execution did not inhibit Auchi’s business dealings with Iraq which, he says, didn’t stop until the Gulf war of 1991. His first coup in the West was to broker a deal to sell Italian frigates to the Iraqi Defence Ministry, for which he received $17m in commission. Italian investigators claimed that a Panamanian company owned by Auchi was used to funnel allegedly illegal payments. Auchi denied he had done anything wrong.

In the mid-1980s he got to know Pierfrancesco Pacini Battaglia, a man whose role in directing money to politicians led Italians to call him ‘the one below God’. Saddam Hussein had ordered the construction of a pipeline from Iraq to Saudi Arabia. Battaglia and Auchi secured the contract for a Franco-Italian consortium. In a statement to New York lawyers Battaglia alleged he knew how. ‘To acquire the contract it was necessary, as is usual, especially in Middle Eastern countries, to pay commission to characters close to the Iraqi government… In this case, the international intermediary who dealt with this matter was the Iraqi, Nadhmi Auchi.’ Auchi has denied any wrong-doing.

Truly. Elegant. Sleaze.

Rezko was into Auchi for upwards of $27 million - monies that curiously never got paid back. But what Rezko had was a stake in a big land development project that he was only too happy to give Auchi a piece:

According to court documents, Mr Rezko’s lawyer said his client had “longstanding indebtedness” to Mr Auchi’s GMH. By June 2007 he owed it $27.9 million.

Under a Loan Forgiveness Agreement described in court, Mr Auchi lent Mr Rezko $3.5 million in April 2005 and $11 million in September 2005, as well as the $3.5 million transferred in April 2007.

That agreement provided for the outstanding loans to be “forgiven” in return for a stake in the 62-acre Riverside Park development.

The Obama-Rezko relationship must be understood in the context of the influence peddling, the casual corruption, the cronysm, the favoritism shown in less than open bidding - all part of a city and state political culture where the politician, the businessman, and the crook frequently rub elbows and sometimes wear each other’s hats. Obama hiring the daughter of a Rezko associate to work in his office (after Rezko had helped raise tens of thousands of dollars for his campaign) is no big deal. But this kind of “favor” done for Rezko is a different story:

The Chicago Tribune: “On June 13, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that as a state senator, Obama wrote letters to city and state officials supporting Rezko’s successful bid to get more than $14 million from taxpayers to build apartments for senior citizens. The Sun-Times said the deal included $855,000 in development fees for Rezko and his partner, Allison S. Davis, Obama’s former boss, according to records from the project, which was four blocks outside Obama’s state Senate district.

Obama now regrets his association with Rezko and has given $150,000 to charity in order to atone for his sins.

Sorry Barry but it don’t work that way.

In the course of a 17 year relationship with Rezko, it is impossible to quantify the amount in contributions funnelled to Obama by Rezko using his ill gotten gains. Nor can it be ascertained at this time if the favors done by Obama for Rezko - large and small - involve him in illegal activities. It certainly has him enmeshed with some extremely shady characters in Rezko and Auchi.

At this point, unless there is a deliberate, concerted effort by the large media outlets to allow this story to die once Rezko is convicted, I find it probable that other revelations are yet to come that will show Obama to be just another machine politician, skirting the edge of ethics and the law - perhaps even going over the line and engaging in criminal activities.

Obama is not the Agent of Change. He is a calculating politician who plays the game the same way politicians have been playing it for hundreds of years - receiving money in exchange for favors from government for his friends and cronies. And if Mike Royko were alive, one has to believe that despite agreeing with his politics, Royko would have been relentless in taking Obama down, hammering away in his own inimitable style at the influence selling, the sweetheart deals, the pay for favors, and all the rest of this sleazy mess.

No Royko today. But we have an army of bloggers who can push this story into the mainstream and force the media to expend the resources necessary to get to the bottom of the Rezko-Obama enterprise. True, like Whitewater it is a very complex story and there is very little ease in the telling. But given the stakes, an effort should be made nonetheless.

It is almost exactly a year since I wrote a post speculating about the “assassination factor” in Obama’s candidacy. And while I may have been one of the first to weigh in on the issue, many since who have written about this potential cataclysm have highlighted aspects of the problem that never occurred to me.

For instance, this New York Times piece raises the question of whether black voters would be so worried about losing Obama that they wouldn’t vote for him:

Not long ago, his advisers worried that some black voters might not support his candidacy out of a fierce desire to protect him. It was a particular concern in South Carolina, but Mr. Obama said he believed the worry was also rooted in “a fear of failure.”

Now that he has won a string of primaries and caucuses in all corners of the country, and built a coalition of black and white voters, failure would seem to be less of an issue. The fears, however, remain.

Having had their hopes raised time and time again only to see them dashed by an assassin’s bullet, black Americans have proven themselves to be resilient enough to embrace Obama while still harboring an unease that the rest of us feel about his safety.

Is that unease justified? Obama himself doesn’t think so:

“I’ve got the best protection in the world,” Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said in an interview, reprising a line he tells supporters who raise the issue with him. “So stop worrying.”

[snip]

“It’s not something that I’m spending time thinking about day to day,” said Mr. Obama, who has been given the Secret Service nickname Renegade, a way for agents to quickly identify him. “I made a decision to get into this race. I think anybody who decides to run for president recognizes that there are some risks involved, just like there are risks in anything.”

The Secret Service is probably one of the top three protection outfits in the world. Their strength is in taking pro-active steps to protect their charges. Their intelligence gathering and threat assessment departments are by far their strongest areas of protection.

It is the “face in the crowd” or the “lone nut with a gun” that could turn an Obama candidacy from a triumph of American society to an unspeakable tragedy. And as the last line of defense, Obama’s personal protection teams are ready to lay down their own lives in defense of his. Agent Tim McCarthy proved that during the attempted assassination on Reagan in 1981 when he stood directly in the line of fire from John Hinkley’s gun, arms akimbo, and then took a bullet in the gut meant for the President. Obama knows this and is satisfied that the Service is doing all that it can.

Just recently in Dallas, there was some concern raised that the Secret Service had experienced a security lapse at an Obama rally when they reportedly failed to search for weapons among attendees. Indeed, reports from the arena where the rally was held (as well as other reports from other venues across the country) indicate that as the time approached for Obama to speak, the huge crowd still waiting out side to get in were allowed into the arena without going through the metal detector.

In a statement, the Secret Service does not deny this but insist that they were sticking with a plan for the candidate’s security:

There were no security lapses at that venue,” said Eric Zahren, a spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington. He added there was “no deviation” from the “comprehensive and layered” security plan, implemented in “very close cooperation with our law enforcement partners.”

Zahren rebutted suggestions by several Dallas police officers at the rally who thought the Secret Service ordered a halt to the time-consuming weapons check because long lines were moving slowly, and many seats remained empty as time neared for Obama to appear.

“It was never a part of the plan at this particular venue to have each and every person in the crowd pass through the Magnetometer,” said Zahren, referring to the device used to detect metal in clothing and bags.

He declined to give the reason for checking people for weapons at the front of the lines and letting those farther back go in without inspection.

“We would not want, by providing those details, to have people trying to derive ways in which they could defeat the security at any particular venue,” Zahren said.

I am not buying this explanation. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the campaign itself put pressure on the Secret Service to get the people moving into these venues. It would not be shocking if this were so simply because there is always this tension between the needs of the candidate/President and the needs of security. The next time Obama works a rope line, watch the 8-10 agents around him and not the candidate. Each is responsible for a particular portion of the crowd while the agents behind him are always prepared to yank him away and cover his body with theirs. If the Secret Service had their druthers, there would be no rope line at all. But the needs of the candidate to press the flesh outweigh the common sense needs of security.

And the reason they may not be checking the last several hundred people is because anyone wanting to take a shot at Obama will probably do so where he is most vulnerable - at the rope line. In order to get that close, an assassin would have to get their early enough to be one of the first one’s in. Someone several hundred feet away, unless they are a world class marksman with a pistol, would have little chance of hitting the candidate.

The Secret Service won’t say this for obvious reasons. But it is one of the tradeoffs made between security and democracy. And it makes the candidate or President that much more open for the plan of an assassin.

But perhaps we worry too much. As I point out in my post from a year ago, what has yet to occur in a likely assassination scenario is the atmosphere of hate that has been the hallmark of past tragedies:

[D]allas seemed to be the capitol city of the unhinged in America at that time. Birchers, Kluxers, radical anti-communists, race baiters, all made Dallas a place that worried many of Kennedy’s close supporters, many of whom strongly urged him not to make the trip at all.

How much of that atmosphere rubbed off on Oswald? According to Ruth Paine, who put up Oswald’s wife Marina following several brutal beatings by her husband, Lee read the News everyday. And Oswald could hardly have been unaware of the Birchers since he took at shot at General Edwin Walker, a notorious extremist just months prior to his killing the President.

But it wasn’t just the Kennedy assassination where we see this hatred explode into violence. Many have pointed to the atmosphere of hate in Memphis when Martin Luther King came to support the garbage workers in their strike for a decent wage and better working conditions. And in 1968, the recent Arab-Israeli conflict and the outrage in the Palestinian community that was felt as a consequence of American support for Israel apparently contributed to the rage of Sirhan Sirhan and his desire to strike back at America by killing Robert Kennedy.

Even John Hinckley, Ronald Reagan’s would be assassin, may have been affected by the unhinged nature of much of the criticism being directed against the President for his budget and tax proposals and most especially for his stated desire to confront the Soviet Union. I distinctly remember commenting to friends at the time that at this rate, Reagan wouldn’t survive; that some nut with a gun would get the idea they were doing the world a favor and kill the President.

So far, Obama’s candidacy has generated a lot of good feelings and none of the unhinged partisanship that marked the Clinton-Bush years. But this could change once the battle is joined during the general election. And it will almost certainly change if Obama is elected president and titanic struggles occur over Iraq, the War on Terror, and national health insurance.

Meanwhile, the candidate himself soldiers on:

That afternoon, Mr. Obama’s motorcade passed Dealey Plaza and the Texas Book Depository building, where the fatal shot was fired at President Kennedy in 1963. Several campaign aides looked out their windows, silently absorbing the scene.

Not so for Mr. Obama, who later said he had not realized he was passing the site. And no one in his car pointed it out.

“I’ve got to admit, that’s not what I was thinking about,” he said. “I was thinking about how I was starting to get a head cold and needed to make sure that I cleared up my nose before I got to the arena.”

If this studied indifference to danger is an act, it’s a good one.

I am usually quite proud of being a conservative. I know in my heart that the only way to enjoying liberty under the law AND equality of justice is through the application of conservative principles to government and society. And I am usually proud of the rational, reasonable basis on which most conservatives see the world and evaluate people and events.

That’s why it embarrasses me to no end to see fellow conservatives who actually believe that Barack Obama is some kind of “Manchurian Candidate” sent by Muslims to undermine American society. Or that Obama is a closet Muslim just waiting to take power before unmasking himself. Or perhaps most bizarrely, since Obama was born to a Muslim father, he is a Muslim whether he wants to be or not and that Muslims elsewhere will not let him forget his heritage.

There are other permutations to this theme involving Obama’s middle name of Hussein which to some of my fellow conservatives is a dead giveaway that he is Muslim. And there are no end of theories, rumors, tall tales, and outright lies about Obama’s Muslim childhood spent at this madrass or that mosque which “proves” him to be a son of Islam.

Most of this idiocy takes place in comment sections of blogs and conservative boards where new Vince Foster murder theories still generate excitement. Occassionally, one of these stories goes mainstream and for a brief period, conservative are made to look like paranoid loons who believe Barack Obama is a cross between the anti-Christ and Osama bin Laden’s long lost brother.

Well, today conservative stupidity regarding Obama and his supposed ties to Islam hit paydirt - as in generating a ten on the laugh-o-meter. Evidently, the probable next president of the United States was caught in flagrante dilecto, dressed to the nines in what appears to be some kind of native garb (probably Kenyan) and with a (gasp!) turban on his head. To some of my unschooled, ignorant conservative friends, this is further proof that if we elect Obama president, there will be a department of Sharia Affairs.

The truth as Jim Hoft (via Sweetness and Light) shows, is a little less dramatic. The costume is that of a Kenyan tribal elder.

Now Obama already has some problematic connections to Kenya including his appearances for presidential candidate Raila Odinga, a distant cousin and someone whose recent actions in fomenting violence in Kenya following a crooked presidential election are extremely troublesome. (There have also been rumors of a deal between Odinga and the small Islamist party in Kenya that he would, if elected, establish Sharia law - a dubious proposition and almost certainly a lie that has been picked up by some conservatives in this country and passed off as the truth.)

But the idea that Obama in traditional Kenyan garb proves he’s some kind of closet Muslim or Islamic sympathizer is absurd. Kenya is 70% Christian and only 10% Muslim. To extrapolate that Obama’s dress denotes anything other than acknowledging his birthright not to mention playing the gracious guest by donning the clothing of his hosts is irrational, stupid, ignorant, and totally without foundation.

But that doesn’t stop some from allowing imagination to trump rational thought:

Over at Islamica magazine, they are acknowledging what the few of us fighting the great fight have been saying all along. Hussein Obama is Islam’s candidate. They call it a wink and a nod but shhhhhh don’t let on to the fat, lazy infidels.

Expect the fantasy mongerers in the mainstream media to continue to scrub and whitewash (no pun) Hussein Obama’s Islamic bonafides. The rabid fervor by the leftarded lemmings is Hitleresque.

A former Associate Publisher of The New York Observer should know better.

While writing this post, I received a comment on my article from yesterday about Obama’s radical friends. The wildly off base nature of most of the charges made almost make me believe I’m living on a planet full of escapees from the loony bin:

Rick, check out these other Obama ’soulmates”:

Cousin Raila Odinga, the losing Presidential Candidate in Kenya, whom Obama supposedly has almost daily conversations, has been linked to religous violence, burning of churches ( with parishioners in them), and other violence following his loss in the elections. Odinga was accused of making a secret pact with a Kenyan national muslim group to install sharia law in Kenya if he won the election. Oh by the way, check out the picture of Obama in Kenyaa tribal Muslim garb in 2006 at Sweetness and Light.

“Tony” Rezko, corrupt Syrian-Amerioan slumlord/ businessman and heavy poitical contributor to Chicago area democrats, who will be inducted this week I believe for corruption. This is the character, with a nineteen year relationship to Obama and his law firm, who put up the money for a portion of Obama’s lot so Obama could purchase his $2.1 million home. Rezko it seems also has ties to politically connected types in Syria and the former Saddam regime.

It seems that it was true that Obama was reaching out in bi-partisan way- it just was to the parties of the Islamic radicals and not to the Republicans.

This is a guy who:

• Won’t say the pledge of allegience
• Won’t wear an American flag pin.
• Whose wife has never been proud of American before her husband’s campaign.
• Who belongs to a racist anti-white church in Chicago.
• Who was enrolled as a muslim in Indoneisa’s schools and studied the Koran in afterschool clubs.
• Whose middle name is named after Ali Hussein, grandson of Mohammad and the founder of Shia d’ Islam. Incidentally, “Barrack” is awfully close to the name “Buraq”, the winged steed that Mohammad rode to heaven on.

This apostate muslim is the one who is to lead us on the War on Terror?

Pray tell, how is Barrack going to make peace between the Shia , Sunni and the Sufi, much less those other people of the Book, those infidel Jews and Chistians? The muslim Takfiri have only been waging war on the insufficiently pious muslims and infidel for over thirteen hundred years, or did’nt Barrack learn that studying the Koran as a teenager?

We as voters really need to hear from Barrack, how studying the Koran as a teenager affected and shaped his political outlook and worldview.

I receive these kinds of comments all the time and read them constantly on other blogs. What the commenter and other conservatives don’t take into account about Obama is that he is much more of a calculating man than anyone generally gives him credit for. He attends a church in Chicago whose pastor is admiring of black racist Louis Farrakahn. But I doubt whether Obama’s Christianity goes much deeper than his devotion to Islam - which is to say his religiosity is a calculated element of his political personae. His attendance at Trinity United Church Of Christ in Chicago establishes his authenticity as an African American more than fulfilling any spiritual need the candidate may have.

And that’s why I find charges that Obama is some kind of closet Muslim so absurd. The candidate may have been trained as a grass roots organizer using the playbook written by radical Saul Alinsky. And he may have been involved in radical lefist politics early in his career. But a man who has so carefully crafted a political resume by conveniently being absent for key votes or voting “Present” on controversial bills - all the better to obscure how far left his politics go or what his true politics are - it is not beyond imagining that whatever his religious beliefs, they are calculated to effortlessly merge with the rest of this image Obama is presenting to the world. There is no room for Islam in this image nor is there anything in the public record that would indicate Obama has even given his Muslim heritage - if indeed his father was a member of the Islamic faith - a second thought as an adult.

I would say to my conservative friends who continue to insist that this is a rich vein to mine that you are so off base as to be a laughingstock. Just because my middle name is David doesn’t mean I’m a Jew despite a long, illustrious connection of that name to the history and faith of the Hebrews. Hence, this nonsense about Obama’s middle name being “proof” that he is a Muslim has got to stop. There’s no evidence that name was given to him for any other reason except the given one - it was his father’s middle name as well.

Nor does Obama dressing up in local garb make him a Kenyan elder or a shadow Muslim. The fact that he is wearing a traditional headress is irrelevant to what he believes. When Calvin Coolidge was photographed wearing a Lakotan headdress, no one came out and said Coolidge was a devotee of The Great Spirit. Politicians wear all sorts of funny hats and clothes. It’s part of Americana. For Obama to be singled out for honoring his hosts by dressing in traditional garb is the height of stupidity and my conservative bretheren should be ashamed of themselves.

I really wish this meme would stop. There is so much else to criticize Obama for that to start tilting at windmills by claiming he’s a danger to our Judeo-Christian society is a waste of time, effort, and resources. I would imagine the candidate himself rather than being hurt by these accusations probably gets a good laugh out of them, so silly they are and so revealing of the stupidity that permeates a large subset of the right.

Get a grip, friends.

UPDATE

Good to see even most of my conservative readers agree with me - at least judging from the comments and the nearly dozen emails I’ve gotten already.

One good point made by an emailer is that even if he isn’t a Muslim, Obama may be more sympathetic to Muslims than any other candidate.

I hope so. Someone sympathetic to Muslims wouldn’t use the word “Crusade” when talking about the war in Afghanistan. That utterance by Bush did more to harm US-Muslim relations than anything except possibly the war in Iraq which most Muslims refuse to acknowledge freed 25 million of their co-religionists from one of the most brutal regimes in the world.

But would he be more accomodating of radical Islamists? Would he seek some kind of truce with al-Qaeda or other radical groups? Would he believe the Iranians if they told him face to face that they had no interest in building a nuclear bomb?

This, I don’t know. But given his past associations with radical leftists whose myopic belief in the goodness of our enemies (since it is we who are the ogres of the world) is one of their most endearing qualities, that fact might make any foriegn policy initiative possible.

Some believe it is inevitable that the west will negotiate with Bin Laden - at least about Afghanistan. God knows what these next years will bring but if there would be an American President who might consider it, I would finger Obama before McCain any day of the week.

I love Sunday newspapers. There always seem to be columns and stories that sum up the past week’s news on a given subject and try to glean some essential truth that a single day’s coverage failed to do.

This Sunday, when it comes to Hillary Clinton and the state of her campaign, there are a lot of these summary pieces but there doesn’t seem to be a consensus. Across the country, pundits are either making the case that she’s still got a shot (a long one) or that her campaign is toast.

By far, the best summation of the state of the Clinton campaign from an inside perspective comes from the New York Times which is reporting that most of the staff apparently believes the end is nigh but that the candidate is soldiering on valiantly all the way to the end:

To her longtime friends, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton sounds unusually philosophical on the phone these days. She rarely uses phrases like “when I’m president” anymore. Somber at times, determined at others, she talks to aides and confidants about the importance of focusing on a good day’s work. No drapes are being measured in her mind’s eye, they say.

And Mrs. Clinton has begun thanking some of her major supporters for helping her run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“When this is all over, I’m really looking forward to seeing you,” she told one of those supporters by phone the other day.

Mrs. Clinton has not given up, in her head or her heart, her quest to return to the White House, advisers say. But as resolute as she is, she no longer exudes the supreme confidence that was her trademark before the first defeat, in Iowa in January. And then there were more humbling blows, aides say: replacing her campaign manager on Feb. 10, then losing the Wisconsin primary and her hold on the women’s vote there last Tuesday.

[snip]

Morale is low. After 13 months of dawn-to-dark seven-day weeks, the staff is exhausted. Some have taken to going home early — 9 p.m. — turning off their BlackBerrys, and polishing off bottles of wine, several senior staff members said.

Some advisers have been heard yelling at close friends and colleagues. In a much-reported incident, Mr. Penn and the campaign advertising chief, Mandy Grunwald, had a screaming match over strategy recently that prompted another senior aide, Guy Cecil, to leave the room. “I have work to do — you’re acting like kids,” Mr. Cecil said, according to three people in the room.

Others have taken several days off, despite it being crunch time. Some have grown depressed, be it over Mr. Obama’s momentum, the attacks on the campaign’s management from outside critics or their view that the news media has been much rougher on Mrs. Clinton than on Mr. Obama.

The polls in Texas and Ohio continue to narrow. Clinton enjoyed a double digit lead in both states as recently as 2 weeks ago. But Obamamentum appears to be working its magic and Texas is now a dead heat in the latest polls while Hillary’s lead in Ohio has shrunk to an average of 8 points, down from 14 just days ago.

The staff of a national campaign is finely tuned to how a particular race is going and can read the writing on the wall probably better than the candidate herself. Many of them probably have access to data which suggests that she has lost her edge among women, among working class Democrats, and among seniors. Losing any of those core Clinton groups on election day in either Texas or Ohio probably means that she will go down to defeat.

The Times piece isn’t exactly a post-mortem but it does bring out some of the criticisms of the campaign that have dogged Clinton for weeks - ever since Super Tuesday:

Over take-out meals and late-night drinks, some regrets and recriminations have set in, and top aides have begun to face up to the campaign’s possible end after the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4. Engaging in hindsight, several advisers have now concluded that they were not smart to use former President Bill Clinton as much as they did, that “his presence, aura and legacy caused national fatigue with the Clintons,” in the words of one senior adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity to assess the campaign candidly.

The campaign’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, and its communications director, Howard Wolfson, have expressed frustration with the difficulty of “running against a phenomenon” in Senator Barack Obama; their attacks have not stopped Mr. Obama from winning the last 11 contests. Some aides said Mr. Penn and the former campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, had conceived and executed a terribly flawed campaign, something Ms. Solis Doyle disputes. Both she and Mr. Penn have been especially criticized as not planning a political strategy to compete in the primaries after Feb. 5.

They will probably be even more frustrated in another month or so as Obama is beginning to be torn down from his lofty perch by a suddenly curious media who are looking much closer at his record and associations in the past, revealing traits of radicalism and far left advocacy that proves to be the antithesis of his stump speech. (Expect his association with domestic terrorists William Ayers and Patricia Dohrn to make the jump from blogs to the mainstream any day.) And the gaffes of Mrs. Obama are going to resonate with voters long after the media coverage of them ends.

In short, eventually Obama’s bubble is going to burst. And when it does, I’m sure the Clinton’s will be kicking themselves in the rear end if they weren’t there to take advantage of it.

Or will they? There are also several pieces floating around the internet today that still give Hillary Clinton a shot at the nomination. To my eye, they look like wishful thinking rather than long shot scenarios. But if this campaign season has proven anything, it is that the most unlikely of scenarios has a shot at becoming plausible.

And there are 9 long days left before voters go to the polls in Texas and Ohio.

Victor Davis Hansen outlines a winning scenario for Hillary that, to my mind, would probably hurt the Democratic party egregiously:

I still maintain that the Clintons (if she can squeak by in the next two primaries) will use every means to find a way to challenge, seat, or sway delegates to win the nomination, regardless of the aggregate popular vote or ongoing delegate count. While that may not work, I still think she will try if she wins Texas; and if she wins the last three states, it will work. Apparently Peter wants to suggest that the people of Florida and Michigan should be “disenfranchised” or that “undemocratic” caucuses in the night should weigh the same as the results of plebiscites, or that time-tested and loyal super-delegates should have their traditional roles neutered, or that tiny states that will not be in play or won’t matter in the fall should count the same as CA, Fl, MI, NJ, NW, OH, TX, and PN.

This is the “scorched earth” scenario where the Clintons prove every bad and nasty thing people have been saying about them and try and ride roughshod over the process in order to win at all costs.

It may surprise you when I say I don’t think this scenario likely. Hillary is still a Democratic senator and must work with the party in order to get things done for New York. And Bill Clinton would shrivel up and die if their tactics resulted in him being frozen out of the limelight. Besides, if on the off chance Obama loses in the fall, Hillary could make another run in 2012.

Would it be different next time?

It is in such moments of defeat that the Clintons display their remarkable ability to pick up the pieces. After the 1980 loss, they set about reinventing themselves as centrists. An early makeover target was their image as a couple. Hillary dropped her last name, Rodham, and became a public cheerleader for her husband’s policies. A decade later, when the couple’s White House agenda was rejected in the midterm elections of 1994, they took a similar approach, ending their “co-presidency” and diminishing Hillary’s public role. “She viewed ‘94 as a rejection of her,” says one Clinton administration official who declined to discuss the Clinton marriage on the record. “She knew she had to disappear for a while.”

Losing, in other words, has taught Hillary that sometimes she must sacrifice herself for the Clintons’ greater good. It is a lesson that may be worth remembering if she fails to reverse Obama’s momentum on March 4. A protracted, nasty fight for the nomination would tarnish the Clinton name and might endanger the party Bill and Hillary have spent three decades trying to build. The Clintons’ place in history is too valuable to them for Hillary to take that risk. In the history books, after all, she can be the woman who conceded gracefully—and the woman who never quit.

But what about a scenario where she outduels Obama strategically? John J. DiIulio has another, less plausible but a little more party-friendly path to victory for Hillary:

Obama has had some stirring, even brave, things to say: most notably concerning how public education has failed too many low-income children in urban America. Organizationally, the teachers’ unions are the Democratic party’s throbbing heart. Obama, to his credit, was not on their Valentine’s Day list. They will lean against him in several upcoming big-state primaries, and as a super-delegate bloc too.

And Clinton can deflate Obama’s “change” balloon by relentlessly asking him why he decries the “politics” of the “past 15 years.” Does he dislike the Clinton-era presidential politics that expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, widely regarded as the single most successful anti-poverty initiative of that period? Does he mean the bipartisan bills of the 1990s that led to work-based welfare reform? Does he mean the politics of the “past” that yielded the State Children’s Health Insurance Program? Or maybe he means rolling back post-1993 expansions in Medicare coverage or college loans or spending on low-income (Title I) schools.

Older Democrats, respectful of legislative accomplishments, particularly may not like that Obama often voted “present” as an Illinois legislator, or that his state and federal records seem so thin. Blue collar voters who earn $50,000 a year or less defected from Clinton in the Potomac primaries and again in Wisconsin. But in Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania she may hold voters who can’t cut work the way college kids can cut class to attend midday campaign rallies.

Indeed, with big Latino turnouts expected in Texas, older working-class Ohio voters sticking to her like rust, and friends in Pennsylvania like Governor Edward Rendell and Philly’s popular new mayor Michael Nutter, Clinton can still nab the nomination. Fence-sitting super-delegates would quickly warm to a three-state sweep.

In DiIulio’s scenario, both Michigan and Florida delegates would be seated based on the issue of “fairness” and Hillary makes her case to wavering Super Delegates using the big state motif - that she can win those states and Obama cannot. The campaign for Supers is carried out in a low key manner so as not to offend the Obamaites any more than necessary.

What cracks this scenario in half is that Obama isn’t waiting. He is going after the Super Delegates now, striking while the iron is still hot from his string of 11 in a row contests won:

Aides to Barack Obama are putting the squeeze on Democratic officials, urging them to get aboard the campaign “sooner rather than later,” The Post has learned.

Obama supporters have also approached members of Congress and state legislators who face re-election and argued they stand a better chance with Obama heading the ticket than with Hillary Rodham Clinton, sources said.

One Clinton supporter said Obama’s quest goes beyond the battle for “superdelegates,” party big shots who serve as delegates at the Democratic convention. His campaign has reportedly begun reaching out to lower party officials in an effort to put an end to the divisive primary battle.

In effect, Obama is setting the table for March 4. If he wins one or both primaries, expect to see a lot of Super Delegates climb aboard his bandwagon and a huge outpouring of calls for Hillary to surrender. If that were to occur, I would expect Hillary to take the opportunity to retire gracefully, believing it possible that she can come back and fight another day.

I have waxed both seriously and clownishly on this site about Barack Obama’s “Cotton Candy Candidacy” and the fact that his nebulously formed ideas make him something of an empty suit when it comes to trying to figure out where he stands on many issues.

I have also pointed out that this is deliberate obfuscation on his part, done in order to hide his liberal past. Indeed, there is no candidate in recent memory who has taken such pains to see that his political philosophy remains a cipher - a razor thin record in the Illinois Senate along with almost as invisible US Senate votes are carefully hidden away in the campaign’s attic, gone and mostly forgotten in the rush to proclaim the candidate The Agent of Change.

A slippery fish, this fellow Obama. Controversial votes when he was a state senator were avoided by voting “present” or claiming later that he erred by pressing the wrong button and didn’t really mean to take that position. Seen in the context of the “Great Game” the left plays with the American people in trying to mask their liberalism for fear of rejection by the voter, Obama, it turns out, is a master of “post partisan problem solving” - hiding his liberalism under an avalanche of platitudes and feel-good bromides that have his supporters swooning and the media eating out of his hand.

But the closet Obama may be in the process of being revealed. This is the Obama that voted to make a criminal out of a homeowner who was forced to use a gun in his own defense in his own home. This is the Obama that voted against making it a criminal offense for convicts on probation or on bail to have contact with a street gang. Indeed, Obama’s record on anti-gang legislation is simple; because gang members are more often people of color, they shouldn’t be singled out for increased attention or special penalties by the law.

But beyond his clearly liberal voting record in the state senate and his being named the most liberal senator in the US Senate by National Journal there is an issue just starting to bubble and froth below the media radar that may or may not become a huge issue depending on how protective the national media wants to be of Obama.

I am talking about the extent of the candidate’s ties to domestic terrorists from the 1960’s and how the American people might feel about their future president paling around with someone who set off bombs as a member of the group Weather Underground and to this day refuses to apologize for it. William Ayers told his followers back then:

“Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.” This earns Ayers at least some spiritual kinship to Osama Bin Laden. (In last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, which of course went to press before Sept. 11, Ayers maintains that this was “a joke.” In a more serious vein, Ayers was quoted by another Times interviewer as saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

The earliest known contact between Obama and Ayers was a “meet and greet” at Ayers house in Hyde Park - an upper middle class neighborhood on Chicago’s south side. Ben Smith at Politico gives an overview of the time and circumstance of the meeting:

In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious — and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.

Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from a man in the Hyde Park left to one closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president.

In fact, Ayers - unrepentant about bombing his own country as he claims - is an establishment figure in the unreconstructed liberal circles in Hyde Park - a hero to many of the University of Chicago faculty and other leftists who reside there. This is the district Obama ran successfully for state senate.

Ayers and Dohrn are simply the most visible of the far left supporters who propelled Barack Obama’s early political career. The woman who touted Obama at the Ayers meeting, Alice Palmer, was herself a far left activist who was into community organizing like Obama. There was Dr. Quentin Young, a radical physician who was quoted in USA Today in 2005 saying “”national health insurance is no longer the best solution, it’s the only solution: All other alternatives have been proven disastrous failures.” According to Ben Smith, Dr. Young describes Ayers and Obama as “friends:”

Neither Ayers nor the Obama campaign would describe the relationship between the two men. Dr. Young described Obama and Ayers as “friends,” but there’s no evidence their relationship is more than the casual friendship of two men who occupy overlapping Chicago political circles and who served together on the board of a Chicago foundation.

But Obama’s relationship with Ayers is an especially vivid milepost on his rise, in record time, from a local official who unabashedly reflected a very liberal district to the leader of national movement based largely on the claim that he can transcend ideological divides.

There were other “encounters” with Ayers over the years, including the fact that both men served on a far left foundation as board members:

Wondering whether the three may have crossed paths is not speculation. It is a fact that they have. Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama have appeared together at a number of gatherings and academic events.

In November 1997, Ayers and Obama participated in a panel at the University of Chicago entitled Should a child ever be called a “super predator?” to debate “the merits of the juvenile justice system”.

In April 2002, Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama, then an Illinois State Senator, participated together at a conference entitled “Intellectuals: Who Needs Them?” sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals and the University of Illinois-Chicago. Ayers and Obama were two of the six members of the “Intellectuals in Times of Crisis” panel.

Ayers, “who in the 1960s was a member of the terrorist group Weatherman and a wanted fugitive for over a decade as a result of the group’s bombing campaign,” is currently the Board Chairman of the Woods Fund of Chicago and Obama is a former Board member.

Just what does the Woods Fund seek to do with its $68 million in assets?

This new Fund focused on welfare reform, affordable housing, the quality of public schools, race and class disparities in the juvenile justice system, and tax policy as a tool in reducing poverty. The Fund supported the concept of an expanding welfare state allocating ever-increasing amounts of money to the public school system, and the redistribution of wealth via taxes.

“Unreconstructed” liberals indeed.

There have been many articles written the last few weeks asking just how liberal Obama truly is? How far to the left are his true politics? Since his record is so unrevealing of where he stands, one must go to his life, his associates, and his supporters to fill in the blanks.

And what comes to the fore is clear evidence that Barack Obama isn’t just an ordinary liberal like a Kennedy or a Clinton. Obama’s associations and associates reveal someone who has courted far left activists, participated in far left forums, and belonged to far left organizations.

On top of that, his stint as a community organizer was marked by his training in radical organizing. My colleague at American Thinker Kyle-Anne Shriver delved into this aspect of Obama’s early adulthood:

Barack Obama had just graduated from Columbia and was looking for a job. Some white leftists were looking for someone who could recruit in a black neighborhood in the south side of Chicago.

Obama answered a help-wanted ad for a position as a community organizer for the Developing Communities Project (DCP) of the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) in Chicago. Obama was 24 years old, unmarried, very accustomed to a vagabond existence, and according to his memoir, searching for a genuine African-American community.

Both the CCRC and the DCP were built on the Alinsky model of community agitation, wherein paid organizers learned how to “rub raw the sores of discontent,” in Alinsky’s words.

And Alinsky’s writings on radicalism and social change should chill the bones of not only conservatives, but more moderate liberals:

Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families - more than seventy million people - whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971].”

If this doesn’t sound like the way Obama is running his stealth campaign, I don’t know what does.

I should add that I don’t believe Obama is a dangerous man in the sense he would overturn the government and turn the US into some gigantic gulag. But if the voters knew the half of it, Obama would have been marginalized as a far left liberal as surely as Dennis Kucinich. Instead, Obama has successfully used his oratorical skills to say very little about what he plans to do if elected while inspiring people with a message of hope and change.

Will the media expose Obama? Will they criticize Senator McCain if he tries to paint Obama as a radical? Will they dig deep into Obama’s associations and associates to discover the truth?

Taylor Marsh is perplexed:

This is the vein in the Democratic party I will never understand, cannot accept on any level. What is it about some people who just don’t get the problems with our Democratic nominee being friendly, even taking a contribution (however small), as well as having a meeting as recently as 1995 with an unrepentant domestic terrorist like William Ayers? It reveals a lack of seriousness about the issue of terrorism and the dangerously immature judgment of anyone who is going to associate with a man, at the very least, that Republicans will use to beat us over the head with, having the bonus of hitting a spot the public loves to drink up, which is that our party is not serious about the dangers we face in this world.

It’s the same impulse among those Democrats who think Castro is cool and Chavez is a hero. And in Obama’s case, if the American voter ever gets the full story, the party could be facing a defeat in a year where all the stars were aligned in their favor.

I am beginning to wonder how the authors of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran who wrote that the regime had given up on its weapons program in 2003 are feeling these last few weeks. It isn’t just war mongering right wing fanatics who think that they’re full of bull cookies and their analysis had a political motivation.

Good Lord! Even the French and Germans still think Iran is a danger. And did you see what the Russians said yesterday?

Iran’s ballistic missile tests last week have sparked unusually harsh criticism from Russia. According to the BBC, Russian officials have said the tests

raised suspicion over the true aim of [Iran’s] nuclear programme.

This is remarkable coming from Moscow, and the latest sign of a potentially significant shift in Russia’s stance on Iran. Through 2007, Russia was the main obstacle in UNSC efforts to tighten the thumb screws on Iran, preferring bilateral diplomacy with Tehran over the international sanctions route.

This January, however, Russia finally agreed to a third sanctions resolution. Moscow also opposes the efforts of South Africa to delay the resolution. South Africa, which holds a non-permanent UNSC seat and is an influential member of the Non-Aligned Movement of developing countries, wants to wait until IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei finishes his meddlesome freelance diplomacy with Iran before proceeding—presumably in the hopes that ElBaradei gives Iran a clean bill of health, which could undermine the prospects for a unanimous or near-unanimous UNSC vote. The Russians, however, want the resolution to move forward sooner rather than later.

Not so our intrepid liberal friends here in the United States. They’re still acting like Neville Chamberlain, waving the piece of paper containing the NIE report above their heads and proclaiming that they have brought us peace in our time - at least with those cuddly fanatics in Tehran.

To their mind, simply putting their head in the sand and ignoring the Iranian threat solves the problem. The NIE Report on Iran has become their bible, an object of veneration and belief. Like the other bible (the one they think is silly and people who believe in it are goober chewing yahoos), it contains rules to live by. The first commandment “Thou Shalt Not Attack Iran” automatically leads to the second commandment “Thou shalt not act beastly towards the mullahs.”

For that reason, sanctions are a no-no and any utterance by that madcap, mystical mayhem loving midget Ahmadinejad should be taken at face value - except when he says he wants to wipe Israel off the map which he really doesn’t want to do and besides he never said that anyway. Otherwise, when the President of Iran says he has no nukes, that they never had no nukes, that they don’t want no nukes and that anyone who thinks they want nukes is a war mongering puppet of the USA, we should believe him.

But now the left has a slight problem. That timid, confrontation-avoiding Nobel Prize winning peace merchant who runs the International Atomic Energy Agency toddled over to Iran this past week and “confronted” the Iranians with evidence that they had been very, very interested in building the ultimate defense against slandering Mohmammed cartoons. Mohammed ElBaradei whipped out some evidence that the US obtained via an Iranian scientist’s laptop and froze the socks off the Iranians. They didn’t quite know what to say so they said nothing - or at least nothing that only the truly deranged and self deluded on the left in this country would believe.

The Iranians claimed that the evidence was “baseless and fabricated:”

It was the evidence that Iran was secretly working on such a design for many years that is now at the heart of the confrontation between Iran and the nuclear agency, which is based in Vienna.

Since 2005, the I.A.E.A. has urged the United States and other countries to allow the agency to confront Iran with evidence obtained on a laptop computer that once belonged to an Iranian technician with access to the country’s nuclear program. But the U.S. refused until a few weeks ago, and only agreed on Feb. 15, the report said, to allow original documents to be shown to the Iranians. In the report issued Friday, the agency described some of that evidence in public for the first time, “all of which the Agency believes would be relevant to nuclear weapon R & D.”

The most suspicious-looking document in the collection turned over to the I.A.E.A. was a schematic diagram showing what appeared to be the development of a warhead, with a layout of internal components. “This layout has been assessed by the agency as quite likely to be able to accommodate a nuclear device,” the I.A.E.A. wrote. But that does not prove it was a nuclear warhead, and Iran argued that its missile program used “conventional warheads only.”

The report referred to other documents drawn from the laptop — though the source of the material was never mentioned — that included documents describing how to test “high-voltage detonator firing equipment” and technology to fire multiple detonators at one time, which is required to trigger a nuclear reaction by forcing a nuclear core to implode. The report also described work on whether a detonation could be triggered in a 400-meter-deep shaft from a distance of 10 kilometers, or about six miles, leading to suspicions that the Iranian scientists were already thinking about nuclear testing. But it is unclear whether the shaft would have been wide enough for a nuclear weapon.

Yep. Sounds pretty baseless and fabricated to me. The Iranians had a logical explanation for all of that stuff - the US are a bunch of meanies and simply manufactured the evidence. What self respecting lefty won’t take that as the gospel truth?

One such lefty is Dr. Andrew Grotto. Dr. Grotto, an arms control and national security specialist with no patience for the Bush Administration’s non-proliferation efforts not to mention looking with a jaundiced eye at US Iran policy, nevertheless is nearly speechless with regards to Iran’s response:

Iran continues to refuse to address evidence of activities that have a much more clear-cut weapons purpose, such as the green salt project, high explosive testing and the design of a missile re-entry vehicle. The IAEA report says much of the evidence comes from an unnamed “Member State,” probably the United States. Iran asserts that the evidence is fabricated and, according to the report, has made it abundantly clear that it has no intention of entertaining these matters any further.

There is a clear pattern here. For activities that have a colorable civilian rationale, Iran is suddenly happy to offer one. Since the IAEA is not in the business of second-guessing the sincerity of its member states in the absence of a technical rationale, it must accept these explanations unless and until new data comes along that calls the original rationale into question. And for activities that only have a weapons purpose, Iran plays the “How can you trust the Americans?’ card and simply refuses to engage the evidence.

It is hard to see what happens next in this process. There are a few lingering issues that the report suggests could be resolved, such as the uranium metal document (the report says that Pakistan is the roadblock). But on the most sensitive issues relating to alleged weapons-related activities, this report makes it clear that Iran has no interest in addressing them.

The problem becomes immediately apparent. The IAEA is “not in the business of second-guessing the sincerity of its member states in the absence of a technical rationale…” So any “confrontation” with Iran over their weapons program is necessarily short and sweet. If the IAEA asks a provocative question about some evidence and the Iranians have a convincing enough explanation - even if its a lie - the IAEA is forced to drop the issue and move on.

And for evidence that they have no rationale for? All they have to do is whine about the beastly Americans making stuff up and they have a phalanx of support here in America and the west among the ostrich class of lefties backing them up to the hilt.

This report is being delivered as the European Union weighed in with a study showing Iran could be a nuclear power by the end of the year. This could only happen if the Iranian centrifuges at Nantanz operated at near 100% efficiency.

Since the Iranians have never come close to that - more like 25% for short periods of time - it is next to impossible they would have a weapon by year’s end. And with the IAEA breathing down their necks, it is extremely unlikely they would be able to enrich uranium beyond the 5% required for civilian use. If they attempted to enrich their small stock of 5% uranium to the 85-90% necessary to build a bomb, it would be very difficult (at this point) for them to escape detection. (The Iranians have only now explained how traces of some 90% enriched uranium ended up on some equipment that the IAEA detected two years ago.)

The bottom line is as long as Iran continues to enrich uranium for any purpose, they are in violation of Security Council resolutions and are defying the bulk of the international community. The proposed sanctions are extremely limited and won’t harm the regime except at the margins. But it is the principle that is important - that most of the world wants Iran to come clean and stop their enrichment program. Ineffective or not, it is progress. And it lays the groundwork for future sanctions that may have a little more bite.

The votes are in from this week’s Watchers Council and the winner in the Council category was yours truly for my post “Mandate Me, Baby.” Finishing second was “Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and McCain Derangement Syndrome” by Wolf Howling.

Coming out on top in the non Council category was “Are We At War? And What Is the Political Consequence of That For Conservatives In This Election?” by Beldarblog.

If you would like to participate in the weekly Watchers vote, go here and follow instructions.