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.

In 1964, Carl Oglesby was married with children, living in what he calls a "see-Spot-run" neighborhood, and working a white-collar job in the defense industry. In 1965, he was the president of Students for a Democratic Society, trading bourgeois tranquility for a life of protesting the Vietnam War, bedding movement sex symbols, cutting folk albums, and quixotically trying to forge an alliance between the New Left and the Old Right. Read my review of Carl Oglesby's Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement in the City Journal's online edition.

Movie star Wesley Snipes is going to jail for three years for the crime of keeping his own money. What's that Harry Reid said about taxation not being coercive? Had Wesley Snipes stolen the amount of money from his neighbor that he is accused of witholding from the government, he would not have been sentenced to prison for so long. Wesley: pay the protection money next time around. It's unjust, but this mob is well organized, armed to the teeth, and they run an efficient racket. Be glad you get to keep half.

It's the classic rock edition of FlynnFiles Radio, but with a twist. Rather than play the classic rock songs from the "classic" period of these classic acts of the sixties and seventies, I've selected tracks from '81-'83 when the critics abandoned, fans expected break-ups, and the bands fought to stay relevant. I think this a really overlooked period for these acts. Here are some of my favorite tracks from this era:

Pink Floyd--The Final Cut
The Who--It's Hard
George Harrison--All Those Years Ago
The Rolling Stones--Hang Fire
The Kinks--Come Dancing

Senator Joseph McCarthy did not correctly finger a single Communist, but a multitude of them, writes Stan Evans in his explosive book about the most controversial senator in the history of that august body. Read my review of M. Stanton Evans's Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies on ISI's new web journal, First Principles, and discover why Cold Warriors who took on domestic subversives in fact instead of in books fare poorly in the books written about the period.

I'm pretty sick of the argument that instructs conservatives to vote for Republican Candidate X because he's not Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, or some other liberal bogeyman. Conservatives should be more ambitious in their candidate wishes than merely settling for their votes going to a politician who is not a liberal. Cutting government, respecting federalism, adhering to the letter of the Constitution, defending America's borders, and protecting Americans from security threats are among the beliefs I want candidates to share. Yet, when I see what happened in the Senate yesterday, the "because they're not Democrats" argument starts to make a little bit of sense. "Senate Republicans blocked a bill Wednesday that would make it easier for people to sue over pay discrimination," reported CNN.com. Good. I know that's not the response they intended to elicit, but--good. Had the Republicans had a few less senators, the bill would have been passed and, who knows, even might have become law under the current chief executive. That law would be putty in the hands of creative judges and fuel for litigious employees looking to gain the raise they believe their employees owe them. There is already a remedy for employees upset over pay or work conditions: fire your boss and get a new job.

Hillary Clinton won the long-awaited Pennsylvania primary yesterday. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, I view Hillary Clinton as the Black Knight from Monty Python's Holy Grail. No matter how many limbs her opponent slices off, she still insists that he should be afraid of her and remains in a fight she has long since lost. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I view her as less pathetic than valiant. She's doing what any competitor does. She's fighting to the end. Her detractors insist she can't earn enough delegates in the caucuses and primaries to win a clean nomination. Newsflash! Neither can Barack Obama. On Sundays, I don't think about Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

"If one suffers under the delusion of 'social engineering,' the notion that man can consciously choose where he wants to go, it will not seem so important to discover how he reached his present situation."
--F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, 1988

I've fired hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ammunition. All of it I sent down range between 1994 and 2002. All of it was paid by U.S. taxdollars. I've never fired a weapon outside of the supervision of the United States Marine Corps. The weapons that I did fire were impressive--M60s, MK19s, Squad Assault Weapons, M25 canons. The targets focused upon were not: dog targets, WWII-era tanks, moving plastic GIs. I fired, thank God, at no actual human beings. No human beings, thank God, fired back. The weapon I enjoyed firing most was the simple M16A2 rifle.

The M16A2's progeny, the shorter, lighter M4 is under attack. This doesn't surprise. The M16A2's ancestor, the M16, came under attack from the beginning and its predecessor, the M14, came under attack too. Its enemies, aside from the Viet Cong, were military wonks who found much to criticize. In the M14, its wooden stock altered the bullet's trajectory in the soaked jungle environment. The kick that resulted from automatic ensured inaccuracy. The M16A2's "kick" is almost non existent. Because of the M14's inefficient use of rounds the M16A2 that I fired in the Marine Corps was not an automatic machine gun. It is the product of the "one shot, one kill" philosophy. The three-round burst is as Rambo as it gets with the M16A2, which, I think, leads to a rifleman concentrating on the target rather than on depressing the trigger. The former results in dead combatants; the latter, in wasted rounds.

But the M16A2 had complaints--mainly that it was too unweildy for urban and jungle environments--and so the shorter, lighter M4 was born. Alas, solutions to old problems bring new problems. I have read that the shorter barrel, for instance, results in overheating. I wonder if its stumpiness detracts from its accuracy and range, two outstanding attributes of the M16A2. Many of the other complaints lodged against the M16A2 are applied to the M4 as well. Its .556 round is too small. It jams too often. It is outdated. I have read that the jamming problems (Tap! Rack! Ba--I'm dead!) from the M16A2 have been bequeathed to the M4. This is a problem, particularly in the sandy conditions of Iraq.

"What we have is a fat contractor in Colt who's gotten very rich off our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," Senator Tom Coburn told the Associated Press. "The fact is, the American GI today doesn't have the best weapon. And they ought to." Colt's contract with the military ceases in 2009. Just as the M16 replaced an outdated M14 in the jungles of Vietnam, many are suggesting that the outdated M4 be replaced in the sands of Iraq. If the M4 isn't the best combat weapon for an infantryman, what is?

It it ain't broke, don't fix it. The M4 has its problems, but do you really want to switch horses midstream? In other words, the middle of a war is not the time for experimentation. Or is it? The M16 replaced the M14 in the midst of the Vietnam War. And its this last item that may spell the death of the M16 family of weapons: the basic rifle is more than forty years old. Wouldn't you find it strange if Chesty Puller in Korea used the same weapon that Sergeant York used in World War I? Given the rapid advance in technology, it strikes a lot of people as even stranger that the infantryman in Iraq is using essentially the same weapon that the infantryman in Vietnam used. Technology has changed more rapidly in those forty or so years than arguably at any time in history. Yet, soldiers and Marines still carry the same basic weapon their Vietnam Era-brethren did.

The Stealth Fighter first took off in the early 1980s and was grounded this year. The camouflage pattern--based as it was on the forests of Europe--that was used on the utility blouse and trousers that I wore in the Marine Corps for all of my eight years retired at the same time that I departed. But the M16 endures and evolves. Like the Marines who fire it, it has adapted and overcome.

But after more than forty years of sending tumbling .556 rounds into the bodies of the enemy, the M16/M16A2/M4 is taking heavy fire. After inflicting casualties in Vietnam, Panama, Kuwait, and points beyond, the M16 family of weapons may be one of the many casualties of the Iraq war.

I've been battling a nasty cold, and the nasty cold has been winning. I tried fighting it with Theraflu and other traditional medicines. It was all to no avail. Frustrated, I harkened back to the curative wisdom of my ancestors. In an effort to defeat this germinous foe, I picked up a case of Labatt's Blue, a four-pack of overpriced Red Bull, a bottle of Freixenet Brut, and a pack of Swisher Perfectos. This cold didn't stand a chance. I would puff and imbibe its demonic presence away.

I began Friday night with a Red Bull and Skyy Vodka, which quickly woke me up to do battle with evil microbes. This was a fight that had to be won, so I ignited a Swisher cigar too. Its soothing flavor is kryptonite to germy invaders. To ensure their destruction, I drank the medicine of my forefathers--eight Labatt's Blues to be precise--and exiled the villainous virus. To celebrate, I downed half a bottle of champaign--Freixenet (only the best), to be precise.

To aid and abet the herbal and natural medicines, I employed the electronic pulses of The Pogues, Hothouse Flowers, Travis, Big Country, and other sonic Celtic shamans. The senses needed to be bombarded. "I gave my love a goodnight kiss/I tried to take a late night piss/But the toilet moved so again I missed/Down on rain street." The germs fled at first listen. And can you blame them? These are the words of emergent barbarians coping with civilization.

The natural medicines made me feel good. Not only was my cold was gone, but I felt as though I could take on Mike Tyson, win Angelina Jolie's heart, and vanquish all-time Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings. Who could stand in my way? Certainly not the common cold. I didn't attempt to fly from my attic window, but only because my self-prescribed pharmacopia did not include PCP. This euphoria lasted, roughly, until I awoke this morning.

Not only did the cold return, but I felt worse than I had the day before. Apparently, this resulted from the cold bacteria rebelling against the strong antidotes employed against it the night before. They were mad, and fiercely battled back against my medicines. Seeing a weakness in my sleep, when the power of Labatt's, Swisher's, and Freixenet had waned, the toxins again went to work. The next morning, in addition to the cold, I had a splitting headache and my mouth tasted as dry as the Sahara. These were new tricks in the arsenal of acute viral nasopharyngitis.

But I had some tricks up my sleeve too. Tonight, I will repeat this amazingly effective process. John Labatt's Blue, Swisher Sweet Perfectos, Red Bull, Skyy Vodka, and other elixers will again bravely serve as my allies. So-called science has spent thousands of years trying to defeat the common cold only to be defeated by it. My homeopathic remedies, on the other hand, send a loud and clear message to the unwelcome virus: germs begone!

I have dealt with enough administrators at universities over the years to know that many of them lie with impunity. This is why, when everyone else was judging the Yale "abortion as art" story as a hoax, I hesitated. Why would people be so naive, I wondered, to take the word of a trio of administrators at Yale as the final word on this matter? Didn't they have a vested interest in the story's outcome being false? It turns out that the student whose "art" project of artificially inseminating herself and then taking abortifacients sticks by her story. She concedes that there's no way of her knowing how many unborn children she aborted, but that she artificially inseminated herself incessantly over a nine-month period and took abortion drugs toward the end of each cycle. She even saved physical evidence and videotaped herself. Is it a hoax? Evidence is lacking, but desire is abundant. What Yale's administrators say is not relevant. What does the student and her instructor say? Yale will display this callous project starting on Tuesday.

Is there something perverse about a former aide to Mario Cuomo and Daniel Patrick Moynihan serving as the "moderator" on NBC's Sunday politics program? How about Bill Clinton's communications director, who once threatened an embargo of Clinton officials appearing over ABC's airwaves if they allowed Gary Aldrich on, appearing as ABC's "moderator"? It never occurred to liberals to question such transgressions against journalistic ethics until now. George Stephanopoulos, who worked in the Clinton administration officially as communications director and unofficially as glutton for presidential abuse, moderated the debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Obamaniacs are fuming. One wrote the network, "ABC News has officially lost any semblance of credibility it ever had for me." Why now? Stephanopoulos, never a journalist until ABC News hired him, has worked at the network for almost a decade. He's not referred to as a "pundit" or "commentator," but as a "reporter" and "moderator." I can't imagine ABC News hiring Karl Rove, and I certainly can't imagine them having the audacity to call him a "reporter" or "moderator" if they did. And if Karl Rove worked for ABC News, it certainly wouldn't have taken liberal Obama supporters nearly a decade to cry foul.

The Communists of the 1930s and '40s decreed that "art is a weapon," bludgeoning any artist who dared utter the anathema "art for art's sake." An evil undergraduate from Yale University has taken the Communist slogan "art is a weapon" more literally than anyone thus far. From today's edition of the Yale Daily News: "Beginning next Tuesday, [art major Aliza] Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself 'as often as possible' while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process." As Tom Piatak notes on TakiMag, "Although Ms. Shvarts' view of art would have puzzled such as Michelangelo and Raphael, her thoughts are in line with those who defended taxpayer funding of such stellar examples of contemporary 'art' as 'Piss Christ' and the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe."

UPDATE: Yale says this story is a hoax. It may be, but I don't see why Yale, which has a vested interest here, declaring it a hoax makes it so. I would like the "artist," who apparently has been ducking media inquiries after initially soliciting them, to come out and say it is a hoax rather than a university, whose reputation and donations stand to suffer, declare it. In other words, when the Marlboro Man says cigarettes are healthier than apples skepticism is the right response. When Yale says its students don't have abortions for class credit, after one of its students claimed just that, it's appropriate to check with the student, too.

What does it say about our society that a pop star feels combelled to embellish his sins and crimes to gain credibility with fans?

I absolutely abhor violence. But if I didn't, the Mexican fad of beating up fans of Emo for the dual purpose of catharsis and knocking some sense into them might be something I could get into. But only if the recipients of the tough love were helped and not hurt by the experience, mind you. They riot in Mexico over Emo. Have you ever heard whinier, wimpier, crappier anti-rock rock music (listen here, or don't, for an example) in your life? Poseurs! You know Emo? Fall Out Boy? Panic at the Disco? The Mexicans really hate Emo, and I do too. "Instead of asking for tolerance, they should make a huge campaign with psychologists and psychiatrists to find out what is happening to these kids who call themselves emos," one Mexican opined. An anti-Emo video, playing off the faux-suicidal adolescent melodrama, announced: "Emos, why don't you just kill yourselves." One website not fond of Emo put it simply: "Parental Advisory: Emo Is Gay." And it's this last sentiment that has fueled the idea that the anti-Emo movement is homophobic and in some way political. Here in the United States, we've been there, done that. Remember the Disco Sucks movement that culminated in the Disco Demolition Night at Comisky Park? It was deemed racist, and given political connotations. But, like Mexico's anti-Emo riots, the Disco Sucks movement was ultimately a reaction against the airwaves being invaded by horrible music. Don't hurt anyone, my Mexican anti-Emo brothers. Just shut your ears and this too will pass.

Barack Obama's "Change We Can Believe In" is a euphemism for more of the same--the same big government, identity politics, paternalism, and anti-Americanism that the Left has been pushing for more than a century. Read my lengthy article on TakiMag, which explores the paralells between the biography of the man who would be president and the history of the movement that he represents. To perpetuate the man and the movement, much forgetting is in order.

"In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?"
--Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981

The Bush administration reportedly is gearing up to pressure Congress into passing a global-warming law. You may have voted for George Bush in 2000, but you're getting Al Gore policies in 2008.

President Bush relies on one of the oldest tricks in the phony conservatives' guidebook by citing the threat of radical legislation as the rationale for passing more "responsible" legislation still aimed at the radicals' irresponsible ends. Mitt Romney did this in his Hillarycare-style scheme in Massachusetts. Teddy Roosevelt was the king of the tactic of acting as the conservative steward of leftist legislation. "For those who want reasonable and responsible action," Bush mouthpiece Dana Perino told the Washington Times, "it is worthwhile to have a constructive conversation as we work to keep the developing nations in this process in a way that will work to solve the problem without harming the economy."

Bush's support of this liberal hobby horse is also consistent with his pattern of moving the Right toward the center rather than moving the center toward the Right. "This is an attempt to move the administration and the party closer to the center on global warming," noted an anonymous lackey to the Washington Times. "With these steps, it is hoped that the debate over this is over, and it is time to do something." Hope all you want, the environmentalists won't shut up about global warming just because you pushed a piece of legislation. No matter how far the law goes, it will never go far enough for them. Did the prescription drug giveaway, No Child Left Behind, and McCain-Feingold not teach the Bushies anything about converting foes into friends?

The president who so trusted government that he believed he could turn Middle Eastern Muhammedans into New England-style town-meeting members now believes a piece of legislation will cool the sun. Get real. No, just get.

I'm not surprised that historians consider the presidency of George W. Bush a failure. It is too early to tell, particularly in assessing his impact on the judiciary and how the war on terror works out, but my early verdict is that Bush is one of the worst presidents of my lifetime and I am a conservative Republican. I base my view primarily on the profligate spending, empowerment of the central government, and the disastrous Iraq war. What bothers me about the poll of historians is the uniformity, and severity, of opinion. A full 98 percent of historians polled consider the Bush presidency a failure and 61 percent believe him to be the worst president in history. This type of response says more about historians than Bush. It's not just the political conformity that is disturbing, but the obsession with the present by people who are supposed to be monomaniacs about the past.

I had a great weekend at Young America's Foundation's Club 100 retreat in Southern California. I witnessed Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge's homie, post a link on the Drudge Report from a campground equipped with wireless. I rode a horse--a 1400-pound beast named Leroy--for the first time. I ate at In-and-Out Burger. I met some current and future conservative leaders. But, greatest of all, I finally paid a visit to the Reagan Ranch.

Reagan's retreat, which sits atop mountains overlooking the Pacific, is tough to get to. Barely paved roads lead up a steep, winding incline for miles and miles. The first thing I noticed about the ranch house is how tiny it is. It's a one-story building with just 1500-square feet inside. Reagan's library interested me. His favorite authors, judging by the collection of books in his house, were novelists Louis L'Amour and Allen Drury. There was some dated non-fiction: Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and Charles Reich's Greening of America to name two. A dusty tome called Modern Single Wing Football seemed a contradiction in terms. Reagan had a thing for cowboy art, meaning paintings with cowboys in them (Do you now understand why Harvard and The New York Times hated him?). Cowboy pictures are everywhere. Nancy Reagan, oddly enough, owned a Suburu Brat with one of those hard plastic tops covering the truck's bed (Can I call it a truck?). Ron Jr. apparently liked bumper pool, as the house contained one of the smallest and worst bumper pool tables I have encountered. The bed the Reagans slept in was too short to accomodate Reagan's six-foot-one frame, so he added a stool for his feet at the end of the bed. The guide explained that Nancy Reagan liked the temperature inside the house at 80 degrees, which strikes me as a form of mental illness but, whatever, to each his own.

Outside is impressive. The ranch covers more than 600-breathtaking acres. At one end, you can look down into a valley and see Wonderland, the home of another eighties icon. There's a tiny, man-made pond in the back of the president's vaction house. And a long, ugly fence made of cut telephone polls encompasses part of the property. Best of all, just a few days ahead of the tax-filing deadline, was the lawn furniture--or at least a replica of the lawn furniture, where Ronald Reagan signed the 1981 bill reducing taxes. The top rates were at 70 percent. By the end of his term they were at 28 percent. That's a radical reduction, and one of the main reasons I, like so many others, are eager to visit the Reagan Ranch and not the Carter Peanut Patch.

I blog from Santa Barbara, California--in the office behind the fourth window from the right on the second floor of this building to be exact. I flew from Boston to Santa Barbara via LAX last night. It amazes me that my ticket across the country cost $400 while my cab fare across Santa Barbara cost more than a tenth of that. I'm also happily stunned that both of my American Airlines flights made it into the sky with all of the rigamarole surrounding the inspections that are grounding so many flights. Surely the aviation gods smile upon me. I am in Santa Barbara for a Young America's Foundation retreat with a couple dozen of their best activists. This marks the first time that I will give a talk on A Conservative History of the American Left. How does one compress hundreds of years of history in a twenty-five minute talk? One doesn't, I think is the right answer. This also marks my first trip to the Reagan Ranch, which has become a pilgrimage site for the American Right. I am excited. In my final days working for Young America's Foundation, the idea of purchasing the Reagan Ranch was floated. It sounded interesting, but I wondered to what end. Eleven years later, the Foundation, with the purchase and protection of this landmark, has elevated itself as the guardian of the Reagan legacy and an umbrella group on the Right. When I labored for the Foundation in mid-'90s, and I really did labor, their budget hovered around $5 million. They now boast an annual budget approaching $20 million. What changed? The two factors in the boon seem to be that I left and they bought the Reagan Ranch.

"[N]early all human beings have an extremely intermittent grasp on reality. Only a few things, which illustrate their own interests and ideas, are real to them; and other things, which are in fact equally real, appear to them as abstractions. Thus, when men have decided to pursue a course of action, everything which seems to support this seems vivid and real; everything which stands against it becomes abstraction. Your friends are allies and therefore real human beings with flesh and blood sympathies like yourself. Your opponents are just tiresome, unreasonable, unnecessary theses, whose lives are so many false statements which you would like to strike out with a lead bullet as you would put the stroke of a lead pencil through a bungled paragraph."
--Stephen Spender, in "The God That Failed," 1949

Who is to say homosexuality polygamy is wrong? Love makes a family. Hate is not a family value. Blah, blah, blah. An article's subtitle over at the American Spectator captured my eye: "Will Lawrence v. Texas protect the polygamists at the Yearning for Zion ranch?" If the state can't intervene when a man opts for a man, by what logic can it intervene when a man opts for many? "A government raid on a neighborhood in San Francisco--to pluck adopted children from the arms of gay couples lest their orgies corrupt them--would cause days of disquiet amongst reporters," George Neumayr writes at the American Spectator. "But this [Zion Ranch] raid feels right to them."

I received six hardbacks of A Conservative History of the American Left in the mail yesterday three weeks in advance of the on-sale date. Even for the third time, it is still exhilarating to see for the first time the finished product of years of work. Getting a new book is a little like opening presents on Christmas: you get older but it never gets old. An interesting rubbery texture embossed over the middle two-thirds of the cover gives it a strange feel. The color sceme is similar to Intellectual Morons, but the yellows and reds are bolder and brighter here. The book runs 455 pages with notes, index, and other back matter. It's almost as thick as Why the Left Hates America and Intellectual Morons combined. Two rows of tiny red men waving tiny red flags separate the title from cover pictures of the likes of Emma Goldman, Alger Hiss, and Hillary Clinton, who replaced Nancy Pelosi on the cover for the simple reason that Hillary is a character in the book and Pelosi isn't. My dust jacket photo, which had been the same for my last two books, is of the same guy just a decade or so older. You're only 26 once, but if you use the same promotional picture people will get the idea that you've been 26 for several decades. I'm 34, and so is the guy in my picture. Inside, an introduction and a conclusion surround 24 chapters. The text runs 374 pages and the endnotes go for more than 60. The chapters are separated into five "books"--"Backwoods Millennialists," "Radicals and Reformers," "The Old Left," "The New Left," and "The 9/12 Left." Want to know more? Buy the book, I won't let you down.

ABC News spoke to American soldiers in Iraq about the presidential race. ABC acknowledged that the military is generally "conservative." But all of the soldiers whose opinions made it into ABC's article noted a preference for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. None selected John McCain, a Naval Academy graduate and former prisoner of war. Are we to believe ABC News spoke to no active duty servicemen who support John McCain? Four years ago, in the midst of the same war, troops voted overwhelmingly for Bush over Kerry. Yet, judging from the ABC article alone, one gets the impression that members of the armed forces have abandoned their Republican leanings. The ABC piece is the type of article where the reader learns very little about the subject matter (the political opinions of soldiers) and quite a bit about the author.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says that taxation is voluntary. So why has a Wisconsin SWAT team surrounded a man's property after he did not pay $5,647 in taxes? Why did the IRS auction off Willie Nelson's property? Why did the IRS try to put Wesley Snipes in jail? When you hopefully pay your income taxes before next Tuesday, think about Harry Reid's tortuous logic in the above video and how such an argument--that taxation is voluntary--might go over with an IRS auditor.

The first review is in, and it's quite favorable. Fred Siegal of The City Journal writes that A Conservative History of the American Left is "highly readable," "engaging," "well written," and "a timely demonstration of some disturbing continuities in left-wing thought." Read The City Journal review here. If Mr. Siegal can pen a review of my book three weeks before it hits stores, surely you can camp out in front of your local Borders or Barnes & Noble in anticipation of A Conservative History of the American Left going on sale on April 29. Stop wasting your time. Get in line.

There was a media fury after Ronald Reagan left office. He had agreed to deliver a series of speeches in Japan, and in return, his hosts had agreed to pay him $2 million. It took Matt Drudge, not exactly Mr. Mainstream Media, to alert me that Bill Clinton has earned more than $50 million from honoraria since his presidential tenure ended. I don't begrudge the guy for making a buck, or two, or fifty million. But I have to laugh at the silence of liberal journalists, many of whom raised a firestorm in response to Reagan's Japanese lecture tour, over the largesse of ex-President Clinton's honoraria-filled bank account. Mr. Clinton, the author of a tome on philanthropy called "Giving," made all of his donations (along with his wife) last year to the Clinton Foundation. Giving tax exempt donations to, well, me? Sounds better than claiming donated underwear as a charitable contribution. Why, again, do we provide pensions to presidents?

Three years after its advisory vote to bar military recruiters from the city's public schools and colleges, San Francisco has finally come around to honoring the military--Stalin's, not America's. Last weekend, the city unveiled a monument venerating the so-called Abraham Lincoln Brigade who shipped out in the 1930s to inflict Communism on the Spanish. Read my piece at The American Spectator's website detailing the American Left's continued obsession with honoring the dishonorables who served Stalin.

Martin Luther King was murdered forty years ago today. That urban America's insulting eulogy was to riot and burn demonstrates the minister's waning influence. King had his faults, but in focusing on them--serial plagiarism, skirt chasing, crude partisanship--one seems to fall into the same trap that Jefferson historians who obsess over Sally Hemmings descend into. That is to say that King's significance was integrating African Americans into the American Dream, not copied speeches, sexcapades taped by government snoops, or comparisons of Republicans to Nazis. He should not be immune from criticism, as insist his hagiographers who successfully placed his name on a holiday alongside Washington, Columbus, and Christ. But his name and visage should not immediately bring to mind those small faults when greater goods outweigh them. This is especially true on the anniversary of his murder.

That it's national news when a nine-year-old rides a train alone says something about how frightened and weak Americans have become. A few weeks back, I blogged about parents not allowing children to be children, and instead infantalizing them by monitoring their play with other kids, shuttling them to and from school, making them don Evel Knievel-like protective gear before taking a simple bike ride, anesthatizing them with video games, etc. Ironically, this is a sure-fire way to raise a sucker ripe for exploitation by world-wise predators. Kudos to Lenore Skenazy, a mom who rebelled against this parental Big Brotherism by giving her nine-year-old son a Metro card at Bloomingdale's in Manhattan and telling him to find his way home. "It's safe to go on the subway," the New York Sun columnist explains. "It's safe to be a kid. It's safe to ride your bike on the streets. We're like brainwashed because of all the stories we hear that it isn't safe. But those are the exceptions. That's why they make it to the news. This is like, 'Boy boils egg.' He did something that any 9-year-old could do."

David Freddoso has an an excellent piece explaining the confusing matter of the Federal Reserve's unprecedented Bear Stearns bailout (or, perhaps more accurately, the J.P. Morgan subsidy). It makes simple a complicated subject. "In short, this is the mother of all government subsidies--a non-legislative appropriation that doubles the size of all this year's congressional pork projects combined," Freddoso writes on National Review Online. "Without so much as a vote of Congress, taxpayers are to buy securities of undetermined value for $29 billion--roughly Panama's GDP, or the Federal Reserve Bank's entire annual profit. They take this enormous risk so that JPM, a company worth $146 billion, has enough liquidity to make a major and profitable acquisition for next to nothing. JPM is more than happy to take on Bear's book of client and counterparty accounts--these were probably never in danger of being lost, and it's great business for JPM. The ones being rescued are Bear's bond-holders. They keep their shirts. The stockholders at least keep their socks. The profits from the good times are retained, and the losses are socialized." The complexities make my head spin. The illegalities make my stomach turn. A non-legislative appropriation?

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way."
--George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

Why couldn't the federal government let Bear Sterns fail? Why does President Bush offer "homeowner assistance" to people who can't pay back money that banks never should have lent them in the first place? Why does the president propose expanding the power of the Federal Reserve to enable it to infuse failing banks with cash? The free market works when it rewards success and punishes failure. The federal government, even when run by Republicans, seeks to skim from the rewards and lessen the punishments. When people know that the results of bad business are a bailout, then bad business is the result. This is what's known as "moral hazard." As Bloomberg notes, "So-called moral hazard is the notion that bailouts encourage financial companies to take risk because they assume the government will always come to the rescue." It does, which is why so many financial institutions have behaved so irresponsibly. The federal government's solution to all this, perversely, is further subsidy of failure. They never learn.

Demand for food stamps is up in 43 states. The cost to federal taxpayers is expected to climb to $36 billion for the next fiscal year. In Michigan, one in eight receives food stamps. In West Virginia, one in six uses food stamps. Nearly one in ten Ohioans are enrolled in the program. In Rhode Island, the rolls have grown by almost twenty percent in two years. It is a tragic irony of interventionist economics that the more government intrudes, the more it is compelled to intrude. In other words, burdening citizens with an inflated dollar, onerous regulations, and the tax burdens that go along with paying for such a gargantuan federal government--$3 trillion and growing--smothers the economy and rationalizes more government, more inflation, and more taxes. Please: no more of the "medicine" that got us sick in the first place.