Rather than ask, "Why doesn't Hillary Clinton just drop out?," isn't the more apt question, "Why can't Barack Obama finish off Hillary Clinton?" The race is supposedly over, but Hillary Clinton keeps winning primaries. She will win in West Virginia and Kentucky. Had Florida and Michigan not violated Democratic Party rules, it's likely that she would be in the position Obama is in now. Obama backers incessantly remind that Clinton cannot win the nomination without the help of superdelegates. They omit the inconvenient fact that neither can Obama. Ironically, what's fueling Obama is what fueled Hillary before the primaries started: the inevitability factor. Voters are asked to back not the candidate they prefer, but the candidate who will win. If Obama, the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, can't win Democratic primaries, then he has nobody to blame but himself for Hillary Clinton continuing her campaign until the convention chooses a nominee.

Blogging will be light this weekend. I got summoned to central Texas to dance at a bachelorette party on Friday night. It got wild--Girls Gone Wild to be precise. To make a long story short, I don't think the wedding is going to happen. Some dudes, perhaps the groom's friends, were none too happy about this. Dressed in dark suits and darker shades, and all sporting those annoying communications devices on their lapels (and in their ears), they took several shots at me. This is crazy. I'm now trying to evade them. I'm in some one-stop-light town called Crawford. If you're in the area, and see a guy in a purple g-string, a Lone Ranger mask, and a cowboy hat, please pick him up.

UPDATE: The wedding proceeded as planned. The bride's father is apparently a very powerful man, and those well-dressed men wearing sunglasses and sporting very powerful automatic weapons were his praetorian guard or something.

Hillary Clinton, by all accounts, is a bitter, vindictive, self-righteous lesbian with a castration fetish. Okay. Okay. By some accounts--actually just the ones I heard while working within the VRWC. Way back in the 1990s, when you wore flannels and sported a goatee, Hillary Clinton blamed her husband's, uh, problems on that VRWC--the "vast, right-wing conspiracy." With the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton battle a family affair--save for Rush Limbaugh's hilarious "operation chaos"--Hillary can't blame the VRWC for her current misfortune. So, my question, dear readers, is: who will be the target of presidential loser Hillary Clinton's venom? Who, within the vast left-wing conspiracy was out to get Hillary Clinton? Who will be seen as Villain Number One? There's no G. Gordon Liddy, R. Emmitt Tyrrell, Richard Mellon Scaife, or Reed Irvine to kick around, and, of course, Hillary Clinton isn't to blame for her choke job. So, sleuths, whodunnit? Who from the vast left-wing conspiracy tops Hillary's updated enemies list?

Those clamoring to shut down the Guantanamo Bay facility housing jihadists clothe their rhetoric in the language of "human rights." Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi, who spent four years at Gitmo after trying to enter Pakistan from Afghanistan after U.S. forces dispersed the Taliban, blew up six people in a suicide-bomb attack in Iraq last month. It's a crime against humanity to let such people out, not to keep them in.

Bad timing, Arianna. Revealing that John McCain didn't vote for George W. Bush in 2000 is about as damaging to the Arizona Republican's presidential campaign as exposing him for loving his mother. Not only are the Republican primaries over, but the man the McCains supposedly refrained from casting ballots for now stretches to grasp a 30 percent approval rating. If Arianna Huffington really wanted to damage McCain's presidential chances, she might have remained mute and let the rest of us go on thinking that McCain had pulled the lever for Bush. But has Arianna ever been one to keep quiet about anything?

"The fact that this man was so angry at what George Bush had done to him, and at what Bush represented for their party, that he did not even vote for him in 2000 shows just how far he has fallen since then in his hunger for the presidency," Huffington contends. "By abandoning his core principles and embracing Bush--both literally and metaphorically--he has morphed into an older and crankier version of the man he couldn't stomach voting for in 2000." The ostensibly scandalized Arianna doth protest too much. It's not as if John McCain is the New-Age-futurist-turned-Gingrich-Republican-turned-Bill-Maher-camp-follower.

I don't know whether Arianna Huffington tells the truth about John McCain. But I hope so. I didn't vote for George W. Bush in 2000, either.

Author Bill Kauffman finds A Conservative History of the American Left "a well-written, pugnaciously argued, and consistently interesting account of the American Left." Former Reader's Digest editor Christopher Willcox labels my book "a formidable piece of work--a synthesizing popular history that deserves an audience wider than its polemical title suggests." Nevertheless, both critics, as critics are wont to do, find points to criticize in their generally positive reviews. The reviews, appearing in ISI's First Principles and the New York Sun respectively, interestingly criticize me on (nearly) the same point from opposite angles. Willcox, a former Bush II Pentagon spokesman who believes America's role in the Cold War to be praiseworthy, faults me for not highlighting "the significant role played by some liberal Democrats in exposing and opposing Soviet Communism." He strangely cites the American Federation of Labor--a group whose opposition to radicalism and Communism I repeatedly address (see pp. 187-89)--as an example butressing his point. Kauffman, contra Willcox, finds the Cold War an ignoble pursuit. "[Flynn] throws in with, or at least excuses, the obsessive red hunters," Kauffman writes. "Elevating anticommunism to a central principle of the American Right wrecked the Right by crushing its most decent and humane aspects: respect for home, for place, for decentralized liberty, for local tradition." As the author of the book reviewed, I don't mind criticisms reflecting the reviewer's ideological quirks as readers are generally smart enough to see them as just that. In other words, some criticisms say more about the critic than the criticized. Unfortunately, that idea may also apply to the complaining guy whose book is being criticized, too!

"This title does Daniel J. Flynn's fine new history a disservice," Ronald Radosh writes of A Conservative History of the American Left in the current issue of the Weekly Standard. "Some readers seeking a thorough and critical history of the left in America are likely to ignore it because of its claim to be a 'conservative history.' Flynn is certainly a conservative, as some of his candid and pithy judgments indicate, but what he gives readers is a well-rounded history of the left that should be read by anyone interested in the subject--and that includes those who call themselves left or liberal." This is an important review for my book both in terms of the influence of the journal in which it appears and the authority its author has on the subject matter. Ron Radosh is a red-diaper baby turned critic of the Left, who literally, then, knows the Left from the inside out. He has written on the Left as a memoirist in Commies: The Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left and as an historian in The Rosenberg File, the best book on the case of Soviet spy Julius Rosenberg and his wife-accomplice Ethel. "A Conservative History of the American Left could not have come at a better moment," Radosh writes. Ditto for his positive review.

UPDATE: Read the full review here.

America has not always been the most dominant nation on the globe. Its military, culture, and economy have not always been the most powerful, popular, and rich. But it has been this way for all of our lives. Some people foolishly take this as evidence that it will be as it was. It won't. Someday, America will be a fading power.

In a provocative cover story, Newsweek posits that that day has come. The good news? With America no longer at the top, there won't be so much anti-Americanism. The bad news? Well, at least according to Newsweek, there isn't any. "The post-American world is naturally an unsettling prospect for Americans, but it should not be," writer Fareed Zakaria posits. "This will not be a world defined by the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else."

The piece is must reading, but the glee with which Mr. Zakaria dots every "i" and crosses every "t" is unseemly. The writer betrays the tone of a prophet desirous of the truth of his prophecy, as if putting to paper his hopes and wishes will make them true. Its hubris is most glaring when Zakaria tells us how historians one hundred years from now will judge us or perhaps when he tells from his myopic vantagepoint of the present in which imaginary stage of history we are living. Its sermonizing is most annoying when Zakaria says shame on you to Americans from refraining from using the metric system. Its applause most insulting when it finds America's greatest strength its rapid demographic transformation that has coincided with the demise of its strength. America's greatness, in other words, is proportional to the greatness of the demographic change to America.

Such post-mortems for the American Century were common in the 1970s, a decade that ours so closely resembles in rising oil prices, declining prestige abroad, and economic maladies. But America emerged stronger than ever after seventies hard times, reasserting its economic might and peacefully vanquishing its Cold War foe. Reports of the death of America--yeah, that 900-foot-tall Uncle Sam America--may be once again greatly exaggerated. Or, then again, they may not be. Newsweek could be right and still be wrong: America could be fading as a global power and the relative rise of other powers could prove a terrible development.

I purchased tickets, in anticipation of the financial windfall that is A Conservative History of the American Left, for this summer's best tour. REM headlines, with Modest Mouse (Johnny Marr on guitar!) and The National opening (click to listen). It's like a boxing card that is solid top to bottom. All killer, no filler.

Anyhow, I was psyched to see the ticket prices in my local "summer shed" venue at a meager $25 a pop. I can do that, I thought. I repeated Algebra in high school, but I never realized that my math skills are as bad as I discovered. $25X4=$100, right? Wrong. In ticketmaster math, $25X4=$206.50.

You see, the market rate for parking in rural Massachusetts apparently is $40. I'm not sure if that charge covers those guys who go around in golf carts to save me from any dangerous beverages I might attempt to imbibe in the parking lot, but I do know that they don't get paid merely in the free beer that they expropriate. Somebody has to pay the people tasked with saving me from me. Why not me? Then there's the convenience charge of $7.60 per ticket, which docks me for the "convenience" of saving ticketmaster the cost of postage and paper by printing the tickets myself. There are an additional $7 in charges per ticket. I'm not sure for what service those "service charges" go, but I'm sure Ticketmaster has mastered some justification for it. To make a long story short, I paid $51.37 for my ticket that Ticketmaster advertised for $25--and I don't even get a seat but instead a square foot of lawn to stand atop.

I don't blame the bands. God knows Pearl Jam and other acts, possessing foresight that I lacked, attempted to avert such false advertising by Ticketmaster more than a decade ago. The corporate behemoth that is Ticketmaster, probably earning more per ticket than the actual performers for the show that I will see, was just too powerful and monopolistic for Eddie Vedder and company to defeat in the legal arena. If you can't beat em, join em, I guess. So the people still pay the money. The bands still take the money. And, ah yes, Ticketmaster still gets its cut.

I am bothered nonetheless. First, there is something fundamentally dishonest about advertising a product for a certain price and then charging double. When will movie theaters start demanding a "service charge"? One-hundred-years ago, shopkeepers who employed the digit "9" as the last number in advertising a price were considered hucksters. Nowadays, capitalists broadcast one price and then charge another price significantly higher. This is dishonest. Second, the war against scalpers by Ticketmaster and the venues they serve--limiting numbers of tickets per buyer, arresting private sellers, coaxing legislatures to pass anti-free-market laws against middlemen sellers that do not apply to Ticketmaster or the venues they serve--is an effective way for unethical businessmen to eliminate competition.

That's right, ticket sellers are in the ticket scalping business and they seek not to protect the consumer but to protect themselves from the competition that comes from middlemen providers. To point to but one instance of this lawbreaking by the "scalping" monopolists, I direct you to ESPN, which reported last year: "The Cubs set up a sham firm, Wrigley Field Premium Tickets, which was owned by the same people who owned the Cubs, run by a Cubs VP, and even had the Cubs do their accounting. The Cubs would then funnel them face-value tickets before they were available to anyone else, which the sham company would scalp." Of course, the Cubs have a zero-tolerance policy against independent profit-seeking ticket providers, which they contemptuously, and more efficiently, refer to as "scalpers." Just don't call the Chicago Cubs scalpers.

At least those dudes outside the ballpark and concert shed usually have some powerful addiction to feed. What excuse can the owners of a Major League Baseball team offer?

I confess, in high school I charged above face value--even to friends--for tickets I purchased with the intent of making a profit. I got the idea from the so-called scalpers I saw every day that I worked at Fenway Park. Walking from the Kenmore Square station to Yawkey Way, I was bombarded with hoodlums asking, "Buying? Selling?" A lightbulb clicked on over my head.

I worked, had the capital to buy, and took the risk of eating unused tickets. I even organized interesting transportation and parking-lot options, in one case renting a UHaul and using the back as a living room in the Sullivan Stadium parking lot. Why shouldn't I have been rewarded? No one bailed me out in the instances, rare, when I lost money on the deal. U2, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, The Rolling Stones, and The Who were among the acts that I saw for free in the late '80s/early '90s because I invested in large quantities of tickets and sold them for a markup. Ocassionally, I capitalized on the fears of holders of unused tickets ("You want some salt and pepper with those tickets?") only to turn around and capitalize on the fears of last-minute ticket buyers ("I hope the concert sounds as good from the parking lot as it will from inside the stadium."). I was out to make a buck. They were out to see a concert. Our interests coincided, and that was that.

Everybody needs to earn a living. I strenuously object to those who "earn" it by force or fraud. In the case of the ticket monopoly, it gets money by both. Agree to their stated price for a ticket, and they will shortly inform you that the price is actually double. Infringe on their territory of ticket markups, and they will sic the police on you. There are rackets everywhere. The most successful ones are those that convince the authorities to protect their turf and eliminate the competition. That's Ticketmaster.

I'm honored that Young America's Foundation is holding an essay contest on A Conservative History of the American Left. If you are an undergraduate or a high school student, consider submitting an entry. There are $20,000 in cash and prizes available, including a $5,000 Grand Prize for the winning entry. Judges include new-media mogul Andrew Breitbart and talk-radio host Kirby Wilbur.

Here are the rules and here is the essay question:

"Can there be an American Left? Since Robert Owen made his July 4, 1826, Declaration of Mental Independence from the "trinity of the most monstrous evils"--private property, traditional religion, and marriage--the Left has crusaded against numerous American cultural markers. Freedom, faith, family, and flag seem essential to the American experience but are often under attack by the Left. Using examples from Daniel J. Flynn's A Conservative History of the American Left, craft a 1,200 word essay outlining ways that American leftists have at times sought to conform to the surrounding culture and at other times rebel against it, ultimately answering the question: Can there be an American Left, or must radicals--by virtue of an alien ideology--be forever consigned to operating outside of the American mainstream?"

Jamie Glazov interviews me on Frontpagemag. The discussion covers several of the major themes of A Conservative History of the American Left, including the transition from a Religious Left to an Irreligious Left, the tension between the Force Left and the Freedom Left, and the problem of a Left that denigrates family, faith, freedom, and flag appealing to the inhabitants of a nation that seems to stand for family, faith, freedom, and flag. Read the Frontpagemag interview here.

At least former Weatherman and current Friend of Barack Bill Ayers has the restraint to shut up. FOB Jeremiah Wright would rather capitalize on media interest in his politician parishioner at the risk of derailing his campaign than keep quiet and help elect America's first African American president.

"Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls," Wright remarked at the National Press Club, implying, as reporter Byron York has observed, "that Obama agrees with him but can't say so publicly for political reasons. Put another way, if voters believe that Obama fundamentally rejects Wright's views, they might question Obama's judgment in remaining close to Wright for 20 years. But if voters believe that Obama secretly agrees with Wright but is putting on another face to win an election, then all is lost." That's what is so damaging about Wright's continued visibility. It not only reminds voters that Obama sat in this crackpot's pews for twenty years, but that his disavowals of Wright's views come at too convenient a time to be genuine. In other words, it's an honesty issue atop a judgment issue.

Obama, after all, talks in his memoirs of purchasing copies of the Nation of Islam newspaper The Final Call, reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X to profound effect, and immersing himself in a college crowd of "politically active black students" and other leftists who stayed up late discussing "neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy." Most relevant for this debate, Dreams from My Father sees the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's "Black Values System" as a "sensible, heartfelt list." In fact, it's a separatist document that becomes quite obviously racist when the word "white" is substituted for every use of the word "black." Does Obama still find that "sensible" as he is running for president?

One can move away from ideas. It is harder to move away from personal history. Jeremiah Wright married the Obamas. He baptized their kids. He preached to them every Sunday. His sermons even provided the title for one of Obama's books. The senator, even after this campaign had started, referred to Wright as a "sounding board."

Barack Obama is learning in this campaign that human beings are often judged by the company that they keep. Did Obama really think that the preacher who hijacked God's hour with tales of the government creating AIDS would somehow become the model of temperence once he declared for president? As his National Press Club appearance and other media availabilities demonstrate, it's all about Jeremiah Wright. Obama can demonstrate amazing loyalty in announcing to the world in Philadelphia last month that he could not "disown" Wright, but for the narcissistic reverend even that was not enough. So he pays Obama back by criticizing him, appearing with Nation of Islam body guards, standing by his idiotic 9/11 comments, and spouting conspiracy theories about AIDS and the U.S. government.

The minister who basked in his congregants attention every Sunday can't get enough of the nation's attention. He is an egomaniac who certainly lives by the maxim that any press is good press. If Jeremiah Wright couldn't show respect for God on Sunday, why did Obama think he would show respect for him every other day of the week?

Chiggity-check me out on the amplitude modulation airwaves talking about my new book. I appear as a guest tonight at 9 p.m. (eastern) on NightSide with Dan Rea, which the 50,000-watt powerhouse WBZ (1030 on the a.m. band) can broadcast into 38 states on a clear night. On Sunday at 4:30 p.m. (eastern), a shorter segment on the book will occur on the John Batchelor Show, which appears on New York's WABC and Los Angeles's KFI. On Tuesday, May 6, I talk about A Conservative History of the American Left on the Howie Carr Show on Boston's WRKO at 4:30 p.m. (eastern). On Thursday, May 8, I make my return to the KSFO Morning Show at 7:05 a.m.(pacific).

A Conservative History of the American Left (buy it here) is published today by Crown Forum. I encourage my web readers to purchase the book and read it. If you like A Conservative History of the American Left, would you please tell someone about it? Word of mouth is the best viral marketing. If you have a blog, would you please link to the book and write about it? With media appearances and reviews forthcoming, and the mention of this site's name on the dust jacket, there are bound to be some newcomers to FlynnFiles. Please welcome them. I've been working on this book since 2003, so today is a day I have been looking forward to for some time.

Jack Reed and Louise Bryant passionately argued for free love. Their diseased genitals offered a convincing rebuttal. In the American Spectator Online, I break a story more than ninety years in the making--how historians and Hollywood whitewashed the consequences of two left-wing icons practicing the liberal principles that they preached. Eighty-eight years ago, the Bolsheviks buried Jack Reed in the shadows of the Kremlin. For nearly that long, American admirers of Reed's have buried evidence--open to the world at Harvard University's Houghton Library--that demonstrates not only the pitfalls of free love, but the mendacity of one of the most nominated films in the history of the Academy Awards.