Columnist.
We are in a war for the survival of the nation as we know it -- as the greatest, freest, strongest, most prosperous nation in history. This is why we fight. When we step over the line, we apologize for having done so. But we do not apologize for the causes we are fighting for, and we must redouble our efforts to stay in this battle with all that is in us.
Now hear this: No Republicans on the national political scene, including Rick Santorum, threaten our religious liberty. Many Democrats, including President Obama and Senate Democrats, do. And they've struck again with the Senate's defeat of the Blunt amendment. President Obama, who seems to spend as much time community organizing as he does attending to his executive duties, doubtlessly conspired with his crack opposition research trolls and the liberal media to shoehorn the contraception issue into the 2012 presidential campaign.
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution contains two clauses addressing religious liberty: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." It's a shame that in their modern misguided zeal to read the first clause as mandating a complete separation of church and state, liberals do great damage to the second clause and defeat the overarching purpose of both: ensuring religious liberty.
So we should all be grateful that President Obama is just now coming out for a corporate tax rate cut? But does anyone really believe he's had a supply-side epiphany? That this is an election year surely wouldn't have anything to do with his apparent change of heart, would it? He's been president for more than three years, and Republicans have been clamoring all that time for a reduction in the world's second-highest corporate tax rate. So don't you think that if Obama truly favored this, it would have happened long ago?
A strong move is on to demonize and marginalize social conservatives, a move that originates from the political left but is being aided by some on the right, a move that is based on assumptions that better describe the leftist accusers than they do their targets. Obama, by rewriting the Bush rules to protect health care providers who objected on moral grounds to abortion, has breached his repeated promise to preserve them and has dealt a significant blow to religious liberties, yet he is painting people of faith as the extremists.
President Obama is nothing if not an incorrigible spendaholic, as his new budget reconfirms in spades. While the nation drowns in debt, Obama wants to buy new expensive Tinkertoys to indulge his utopian fantasies. Legend has it that prior to embarking on his mission to conquer the known world, Alexander the Great, who had not yet established his greatness, visited the oracle at Delphi seeking a good omen. The oracle was actually a priestess who sat on a stool in the crypt of Apollo's Temple above a fissure in the earth that emitted vapors and put her into a trance, wherein she would channel messages from Apollo.
As God's instrument, Moses parted the Red Sea. Well, it appears President Obama has a different idea. With a wave of his hand, he's going to reunite our bitterly divided political waters on the hottest of hot-button issues. Don't get me wrong; Obama's conscious effort to divide Americans on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion and wealth for political purposes is alive and thriving. That's a separate phenomenon.
President Obama told NBC's Matt Lauer in an interview Sunday, "I deserve a second term." Well, let's see. He had the courage to tell the Supreme Court off for daring to defy him in its campaign finance law ruling. And he did it during his State of the Union speech, when they weren't in a position to object, showing just what a marvelous tactician he is.
Obama's latest homeowner mortgage relief plan is perfect for him: It both is consistent with his ideology -- duh -- and allows him to buy more votes with someone else's money, all the while pretending there is in fact such a thing as a free lunch. The painfully superficial liberal approach to poverty gets old, as does its corollary tenet that conservatives who reject liberals' failed ideas lack compassion. Indeed, Obama seemed to devote half the words in his prayer breakfast speech to proving that Scripture compels liberal policies.
In the intense heat of the present, it is easy to forget even the relatively recent past, but it seems to me that this GOP primary season is more acrimonious than the past few, probably because the stakes are so high.
Only a president long shielded from criticism and accountability could make the kind of State of the Union speech President Obama did Tuesday night. It's hard to know where to begin, given his repetition of tired ideas from his previous SOTUs, his taking credit for successful policies he resisted and omitting failed ones he promoted, his numerous misrepresentations on issues big and small, and his glaring refusal to address the main issues that threaten the nation. Let me touch on just a few highlights in this brief space. Excessive spending is the primary threat to our nation's and Americans' financial future, yet Obama glossed over it and distorted his record.
Republican internecine squabbles this primary season seem to turn on the vying candidates' respective electability against incumbent Barack Obama. But if even uber-liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has finally awakened to President Obama's arrogance, what does it say about his electability? It's understandable that a lib would take so long to turn on the messiah, having invested so much in his presidency. But I wonder whether these people ever realize how late they are to the party and how utterly devoid of profundity their belated epiphanies are.
I wish Republican politicians would have faith in the largely conservative electorate and not behave as though they'll make themselves unelectable unless they pander to Generic Moderate. Who is that guy, anyway? Have you ever met him? Recently, we've seen a few examples of the liberal narrative's rearing its oppressive head and starkly different reactions to it. The first was Mitt Romney's reportedly telling The Wall Street Journal that as a wealthy person, he thinks he lacks the credibility to aggressively push tax cuts. Mitt is also looking timid about releasing his tax returns. He needs to fight back -- consistently -- instead of surrendering to the liberal narrative that success is evil. Mitt should take a lesson from Newt Gingrich on counterpunching against false liberal charges and innuendo.
Mark Levin's hard work in researching, organizing and writing his new book, "Ameritopia," will be a blessing for all who read it. Countless books chronicle the forward march of the liberal agenda and attempt to deconstruct the fallacies in modern leftist thinking. Many critique the statist policies the left has imposed on us the past half-century and their disastrous effects on our culture, our economy and our national security. Few modern books, however, direct our attention to first principles, perhaps assuming people implicitly understand the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of conservative thinking, and even fewer truly explore the anatomy of the liberal vision.
On this we can agree with President Obama: Everything he stands for is at stake in 2012. Obama told 500 fawning sycophants in Chicago that he is unrepentant about his policy agenda and intends to treat us to more of the same, much more, in a second term. Obama said, "Everything that we fought for is now at stake in this election." Lest there be no mistake, he repeated the message in the smaller settings of private homes.
We've been dealing with liberal media bias for years, but George Stephanopoulos' performance in the Republican presidential debate Saturday night in New Hampshire was particularly egregious. In many of these MSM-moderated debates, liberal moderators have tried to stir up personal fights between candidates, which diverts our focus from more important issues and, before national television audiences, shifts attention far away from Barack Obama and his disastrous agenda. Yes, these are debates among Republicans and designed to bring out distinctions among the candidates, but it should be up to the candidates to initiate and define those distinctions, and it is improper for the moderators to continually steer the debate away from substance and into the personal. With the moderators constantly stirring up catfights, liberal ends are served, both in placing Republican candidates in the worst light and in creating the illusion that their primary differences are with one another rather than Obama.
President Obama is calling for dramatic defense cuts that could threaten our national survival while obstructing structural reforms to our entitlement programs that are essential for our national financial survival. It just doesn't get much worse than this. President George W. Bush attempted in good faith to reform Social Security, and Democrats savaged him. Rep. Paul Ryan proposed a comprehensive financial plan that would, as painlessly as possible, restore national fiscal sanity, and Obama and his Democrats have misrepresented the plan (saying it would end Medicare) and used class warfare and fear-mongering to kill it in the cradle.
I think it's very difficult for any of us to be objective about any subject, especially something we care deeply about, but my objective observation is that liberals tend to be less aware of and less willing to admit their biases. We see this often, which I'll get to, but first, let me relate how this phenomenon most recently came to my attention. In a conversation with a saleswoman for online college courses, I expressed my disappointment that the professor of a religion course I was considering for purchase is an avowed atheist. I said that if I were going to spend time studying the subject, I'd prefer the professor share my Christian worldview.
There seems to be a common line of demarcation separating two basic factions on the political right in the various skirmishes we have fought against Barack Obama, from their markedly different approaches to the budget battles to their differences in sizing up the GOP presidential candidates. On one side we have the more moderate group, which is more cautious, less risk averse, less excitable, self-consciously pragmatic and more tolerant toward an establishment ruling class, even if not per se establishment itself. On the other side are those who perceive more urgency in our current national condition, are more adamant about adhering to conservative principles to reverse this catastrophe and reject the charge that they are recklessly purist.
President Obama led us to believe that he would be a post-racial president who would bring the races together, but it's gotten to where you can't criticize this most leftist administration in American history without someone accusing you of racism. The most recent example involves criticism of Attorney General Eric Holder over Fast and Furious, an operation conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which was overseen by the Justice Department. It involved the indirect sale of weapons to Mexican drug cartels, which resulted in some 300 killings in Mexico, including the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. Throughout, despite having received detailed memos from DOJ officials about it, Holder has denied he was aware of it.
