R. Emmett Tyrrell: “Early in the Prophet Obama’s brief career from the Illinois senate to the White House, I read a poetic piece in The New Republic about young Barack Obama’s amazing ability as president of the Harvard Law Review to shape a sweet consensus from conflicting views expressed by his antagonistic colleagues on the left and the right. It sounded magical, and it was. It was in fact an exercise in the occult. If we have learned nothing else about President Obama through these dreary six years, it is that he is a stubborn left-wing ideologue. That piece in the Harvard Law Review was just the opposite of the truth. Yet it established a myth: Obama the conciliator. … At Columbia University, Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago Law School (where he was adjunct professor) he resided in the most rarefied environment imaginable, an environment that prides itself on disagreement while not allowing any disagreement whatsoever. Another word for this peculiar condition is hypocrisy, stupendous hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, according to La Rochefoucauld. It is also the tribute academic conformity pays to virtue.”