Once an African American secured a major party's presidential nomination, did you think religion and not race would dominate the national conversation? From Reverend Wright to a "What He Believes" Newsweek cover to crude rumors of a Muslim upbringing to an upcoming appearance with John McCain at Rick Warren's megachurch, Barack Obama's run for the presidency has been chased by religion at every turn. I'm a believer, Obama professes. But a believer in what? In my article featured on TakiMag (read it: articles > blog posts), I show how the presumptive Democratic nominee's belief in the social gospel, federalizing local charitable initiatives, and, yes, immanentizing the eschaton makes his faith as much a political as a religious creed.

If Barack Obama is able to preside over a U.S. government that, in his words, pays "reparations" in "deeds" and not just "words," would he receive or make payment? Obama, after all, is the descendant of an African father and a white, Kansas-born mother. His paternal line experienced no slavery in America and his maternal line owned no slaves.

Our genealogies, like Senator Obama's, are complex. One can neither assume that the ancestors of blacks were slaves nor the ancestors of whites were slavers. My ancestors came to Massachusetts long after slavery had been abolished here. Should I, a northerner and a descendant of non-slaveholding immigrants, have to pay reparations? Should Obama, a descendant of a non-slave African, benefit from reparations payments?

More to the point, should people who weren't slaveholders pay reparations to people who weren't slaves? The Bible answers this question in Ezechiel: "the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, and the father shall not bear the iniquity of the son." Americans would not suffer a caste system, where the distant progeny of great men are considered great. Why should we suffer a reverse caste system, where the distant progeny of slaveholders suffer because of their ancestors' misdeeds and the distant progeny of slaves reap rewards because of the ancestors' ordeals? Bloodlines don't transmit virtue or vice. The people who owe reparations are as long dead as the people who are owed them.

There is a statute of limitations on theft, but no such time-limit on reparations. Indeed, should this generation of African Americans receive reparations, would it not follow that every sucessive generation get paid as well? After all, their forbears were slaves too. History is permanent, and so are its ugly tribal grudges.

There is, aside from all this, a much more controversial question. By virtue of living in America and not Africa, do not the descendants of slaves enjoy a reparation of sorts? Blacks in America live longer, freer, better lives than blacks in Africa. The annual per-capita income in Guinea, whence many abducted Africans were sent into New World slavery, stands at about $1,100. The annual per-capita income of African Americans is about 20 times that amount. Life expectancy in Guinea is about 50 years. In the United States, African Americans can expect to live an average of 73 years. In other words, people who did not endure slavery's hardships but experience residual benefits from their ancestors' suffering want additional benefits through massive government checks.

Should that happen, will it do anything to right an historical wrong? Will recipients no longer harbor grievances against the payers? Will it eradicate the irrational skin guilt so many whites suffer from? If so, I'd gladly pay.

Liberals and conservatives generally see American history differently. Note Barack Obama's speech to a group of minority journalists where he called for government "deeds" on "reparations." "I personally would want to see our tragic history, or the tragic elements of our history, acknowledged," Obama opined. The first clause is Obama the liberal speaking; the second, Obama the liberal recovering and remembering that he is running for the presidency of the United States and not for the presidency of that cheering convention. Sensible conservatives acknowledge the tragic elements in American history. Sensible liberals don't see the American past as "our tragic history." What's tragic about being the world's oldest continuing republic, wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, the invention of the airplane, the lightbulb, and the Internet, and a vaccine for polio?

On one side are people obsessed with holding power over other people. On the other side are people protective of their freedom from the power exerted by other people. In between, there is no common ground. Nancy Pelosi, as the title of her new book, "Know Your Power" (sounds like an S&M workshop or a Pantera song), suggests, is not a friend of liberty. In grandiose terms, she explained her ambitions to Politico.com: "I'm trying to save the planet; I'm trying to save the planet." If you really believed you were saving the planet, how would you view your political opponents? What measures wouldn't be justified to save the planet? My advice to Ms. Pelosi is "Know Your Power." You can neither save the planet nor does the planet need saving. You are not Christ. You are not Wonder Woman. Somebody save us from the people who want to save us.

Why isn't John Kerry president? How unjust is a world where Radio America doesn't beat Rush Limbaugh in the ratings? Can you figure out how anyone could have possibly objected to the Equal Rights Amendment? This is the smug attitude that motivates the recent questions by liberals about Barack Obama's inability to open up a meaningful lead over John McCain. Despite one-sided media coverage and an overseas visit to his most enthusiastic supporters, Barack Obama is in a neck-and-neck race. Among likely voters, McCain actually leads in the most recent Gallup survey. There's a liberal sense of entitlement in the coronation of Obama 100 days before Election Day, yes, but also the parochialism of cosmopolitans. Pauline Kael summed up this paridoxical phenomenon best in 1972, "How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him." Abroad, Europeans act as if Barack Obama were already president. At home, liberals will experience short-circuiting in their already fragile mental wiring should he not become president. This is the best reason yet to vote for John McCain.

"Community leaders" in the Southside of Chicago--hey, didn't Barack Obama used to be one of those guys--are encouraging students to protest poorly-performing schools by playing hookey. Perhaps the guy who came up with the burn-down-your-own-neighborhood protest came up with this idea too. It at least stems from the same idiotic logic. There is apparently an affluent suburban community--New Trier Township--that spends more per pupil than Chicago does. The reaction of community leaders to other people's money--Let's take it!--is not unlike the reaction of other, less respected ne'er-do-wells who are also ruining their neighborhoods. Unfortunately for the Chicagoans, more money doesn't equal smarter kids--if only it were that easy. If Chicagoans are entitled to the education funds of people in New Trier, are New Hampshirites entitled to the education funds of Chicago? You see, although there may be inequality in funding between Chicago and New Trier, Chicago spends more per pupil than the national average. Yet, their schools are still horrible. One problem is that many people in Chicago don't raise their own kids. Upwards of 70 percent of the school children in the districts in question were born out of wedlock. Their current guardians, and the political leaders who mislead them, expect schools to perform miracles with children who haven't been taught by their parent--the plural rarely can be used accurately here--the alphabet, how to count, or to even look both ways before crossing the street. All the money in the world can't take the place of two good parents.

Like Clubber Lang, I could predict that this Saturday's pay-per-view fight would end in pain. Did you catch the exciting, action-packed slugfest between Puerto Rican Miguel Cotto and Mexican Antonio Margarito? Apart from the fact that the antagonists are more fighters than boxers, the contest had going for it the tribal element that puts fans in the seats (and often jumping out of them) to cheer on their ethnic superhero. It was a bigtime fight that lived up to the hype. What the fight didn't have, and no fight sanctioned by any of the major boxing organizations has had since 1988, was fifteen rounds. Watching Margarito, an iron-chinned, plodding, slower fighter who stalks and ultimately wears down his opponents, made me think that here is an evil hombre who has suffered from the evolution of the unified rules of boxing. Opponents don't beat Margarito, they survive. I began watching Cotto-Margarito without allegiance. Margarito won me over. I could see that his early body work and ability to take the best that Cotto dished out--and he dished out some pain--would eventually work in his favor. But perhaps his strategy was better suited for fifteen and not twelve rounds? Margarito didn't so much knock out Cotto as he made him submit. Literally, Cotto took a knee. And then, after getting sent to the canvas again, his uncle threw in the towel. On this night, not the better boxer or even the better puncher but the tougher man won.

The concept is called "moral hazard." It's the idea that people act more responsibly when they know that they will endure the fallout from the risks they take and act more irresponsibly when they know the burdens that result from their risks will be endured by others. The federal government is rewarding recklessness by subsidizing the mistakes of lenders and borrowers. The Federal Housing Authority, for instance, will get up to $300 billion to rescue the reckless. One Republican who gets it is Arizona's Jeff Flake: "This bill has moral hazard written all over it: we are letting a monster loose." One Republican who doesn't is George W. Bush, who will sign the legislation today.

I am not interested in John Edwards' whereabouts at 2:40 a.m. I would not chase him into a bathroom to uncover his reasons for being in a hotel with a woman rumored to be his mistress and a child rumored to be his spawn. I don't blame the mainstream media for not conducting an in-depth investigation into Edwards's affairs. I do blame them for employing another standard when the politician in question is John McCain. In February, The New York Times ran a trashy story implying that John McCain was having an affair with a lobbyist. Now that the subject of a trashy inquiry is a Democrat instead of a Republican, the Times balks at even mentioning it within its pages. The Los Angeles Times has even enforced a blackout on the story among its bloggers. Politics rather than ethics explains the holier-than-thou stance on the Edwards story.

The fact that the National Enquirer apparently caught John Edwards meeting with his mistress/baby mamma as his wife suffered from cancer back in North Carolina merely confirms what most people sensed all along: John Edwards is a cad. It's a National Enquirer story because of the seediness involved, but, increasingly, other news outlets resemble the National Enquirer. It's just that they do so selectively. The supermarket checkout line has drifted to the newsstand. That serious news outlets devote time to Britney and KFed, Madonna and Guy, and Angelina'a babies demonstrates this. Get a life, losers. Stop vicariously living someone else's.

There are two rules in media. 1. All cable television networks not explicitly anti-E! Channel will become the E! Channel. All news outlets not committed to not being the National Enquirer will become the National Enquirer.

Political coverage has become like a high school gossip session. Talking heads inform us of who is popular and who isn't by constant reference to polls. Another favorite pastime, of high school girls and cable news anchormen, is who is hooking up with who: Bill and Monica, Gary and Donna, Elliot and Ashley. Speculating on another's finances, personal and campaign--who's rich, who's poor--is another obsession. Lost amid it all is the all-important discussion of the candidates' issues and ideas.

If you wonder why the throngs react to a politician as though he were a rock star, watch how political coverage has taken celebrity coverage as its model and it all begins to make sense.

The Seattle Supersonics move to Oklahoma City for the upcoming NBA season. I'm glad their nickname doesn't move with them. Migrant franchises, particularly in basketball, have made poor decisions in moving their names. I understand why Minnesota, land of 10,000 lakes, hosted a team called the Minneapolis Lakers. The Los Angeles Lakers? Come again? I suppose it's not as bad as the Utah Jazz. Could there be a more stark contrast in cities from New Orleans to Salt Lake City? Anyhow, ESPN.com reports: "The NBA has filed for trademark rights to six nicknames for the league's new Oklahoma City franchise: Barons, Bison, Energy, Marshalls, Thunder and Wind." It's interesting that four of six nicknames are in the singular. This is the equivalent of bands dropping the obligatory "The" prior to their names--REM, 10,000 Maniacs, Guns n Roses, etc. The NHL and NBA have been particularly hot on the singular nickname: Tampa Bay Lightning, Miami Heat, Orlando Magic. This ain't soccer, winter sports gods. Perhaps it's an unwritten rule among the hockey and basketball gods that Florida hosts such strangely named teams. Among the names for the new team in the OC, that's Oklahoma City and not Orange County, I prefer Bison, which, I suppose, is singular and plural. It's the best of both worlds. Also, should the team move again, I would like it if the NBA is stuck with the shame of yet another inappropriate nickname: e.g., the Newark Bison. If players can no longer stay in one city, at least the leagues can do more to keep the teams in one place. Devils belong in New Jersey, '76ers belong in Philadelphia, Brewers belong in Milwaukee, and Steelers belong in Pittsburgh.

Barack Obama declared his world citizenship yesterday. If I am a "citizen of the world" merely by living on the planet, I renounce my citizenship. As a citizen of the United States, I am entitled to certain rights--freedom of speech, religion, gun ownership, trial by jury, a representative government, etc. So far as I can tell, "citizens of the world" have the right to get the bag beaten out of them by their own governments. Most people, at least outside of Western Civilization, aren't entitled to the rights I have. No doubt they would renounce their "world citizenship" for a chance at U.S. citizenship. It's only delusional Western liberals who engage in such nonsense talk as proclaiming themselves "citizens of the world."

I liked presidential contests better when candidates stood rather than ran for election. William McKinley campaigned for the presidency from his front porch in 1896. Now, 112 years later, Barack Obama campaigns in foreign nations. (I got all the foreign policy experience I need on my summer vacation!) Obama, the voters are in Berlin, New Hampshire, not Berlin, Germany; Jerusalem, Ohio, not Jerusalem, Israel; and New London, Connecticut, not London, England. It's bad enough that what once took a few months now takes a few years. It's even worse that limits of place span the globe. How long until a candidate gives a stump speech upon the moon?

"If his pride mount up even to heaven, and his head touch the clouds: In the end he shall be destroyed like a dunghill; and they that had seen him, shall say: Where is he?"
--Job 20:6-7

What if the people of the United States held a vote on the greatest American and Charles Manson were the leading vote getter? Cathy Young has a disturbing piece on an Internet vote called "Name of Russia" sponsored by Russian state television on the greatest Russian. In first place is a man who was neither great nor Russian: Joseph Stalin. Whereas an outraged German recently swiped the head off a wax figurine of Adolf Hitler, Russians continue to lionize their mass murderer. This says less about Russian history than it says about Russia today. Tchaikovsky? Solzhenitzen? Gagarin? Dostoevsky?

After crashing into a sign off of I-95, Stanley Kobierowski allegedly blew a .489 on a breathalyzer. Rhode Island state police, perhaps disbelieving the reading, administered a second test, in which they say Kobierowski blew a .491--an Ocean State record for a living person. Do you think the cops considered giving him a warning and letting him walk home? The Boston Herald item on the dubious record noted that "Kobierowski was taken to a Rhode Island Hospital and was scheduled to be arraigned later Tuesday on charges of drunken driving and resisting arrest." How does one with a .491 blood-alcohol content make it the arraignment, let alone operate a motor vehicle and resist arrest?

On the eve of The X-Files movie, I Want to Believe, Tom Piatak makes the case in a well-written article at TakiMag that The X-Files show actually promoted a conservative message. It's a thought provoking piece that makes some valid points, but the idea that The X-Files offered "a worldview far closer to paleoconservatism than is generally found in anything emanating from Hollywood" is a "truth" that is out there.

He writes, "Rather than guiding the way to a brighter tomorrow, Mulder and Scully face the same fundamental problems human beings have always faced, including the persistence of evil. The aliens and monsters who appeared in so many episodes were not benevolent or even misunderstood but implacable foes who needed to be stopped. There was no hint of moral relativism: The serial killer Donnie Pfaster is shown morphing into a demon or other serial killers as he goes about his work, and those who misunderstand the nature of evil get what they deserve. In the first season episode 'Tooms,' a social worker accepts a serial killer's claim that Mulder had brutalized him, and then attempts to befriend him, only to become the killer's next victim. And almost every episode featured the tagline 'The Truth Is Out There,' meaning not only that the truth might be found in unusual places but that there was in fact an objective truth that could be found, despite what the postmodernists want us to believe."

I've recently taken to watching The X-Files, and my immediate response to Piatak's thesis was, like the upcoming movie title, Piatak "wants to believe." So many conservatives find political rationalizations to explain why they enjoy a particular show. Can't something just be good without having a consistent or coherent political message that meshes with your own? After reading the article, I must say he makes his case well, noting the respectful treatment of Scully's Catholicism, the absence of non sequitur leftist spiels that strangely get dropped into so many television scripts, the "reactionary" subtitle of "Fight the Future" for the first X-Files movie, and the anti-government theme of the show.

On this last point, The X-Files seems to mirror not the conservative distrust of state institutions but the paranoia of 9/11 "truthers," Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists, and other weirdos. This works as fantasy, which is what The X-Files is, but not as a guiding political idea. Rather than generally anti-government, the show is specifically anti-military, often depicting men in uniform as murderers for hire. It's not as if the Internal Revenue Service or the National Endowment for the Arts is bashed. It's the national security apparatus, not the government in general. Piatak says The X-Files virtually ignored sex, but this ignores the ongoing joke regarding Mulder's obsession with pornography (which, as Sam Francis once reminded, is an obsession for many paleoconservatives as well). There is also the consistent depiction of local law enforcement as bumblers unable to solve any case without the help of the feds.

My biggest pet peeve regarding the show intertwines with my biggest gripe with Piatak's piece. Though Piatak spends several paragraphs praising The X-Files for paying homage to patriotism and its willingness to defy multiculturalism by ocassionally portraying foreigners in an unfavorable light, he ignores the fact that The X-Files outsourced its operations to Canada for the first five seasons (the only episodes I have watched). This is not a political but an aesthetic point. It's bad enough when episodes, such as the third-season opener The Blessing Way, attempt to trick the viewer into believing that the Canadian northwest, with evergreens intruding into the picture, is actually the American southwest. What is really horrible is when the show purports to be in Pennsyltucky or the Florida Panhandle and all of the bit-part actors exhibit heavy Canadian accents. The "aboots," hard "Rs," and clipped cadences are inescapable. It mars the show. Nothing against the greatness of the Great White North, but I want actors playing Americans to sound like Americans--not like Bob and Doug McKenzie from Strange Brew. It's distracting otherwise.

Nevertheless, I like Piatak's article. I like The X-Files. It's okay to admire articles with which you disagree. It's okay to be entertained by shows that don't make a point of flattering your politics.

What does it say about the state of pop culture that an entertainer feels compelled to deny his days as a law-enforcement officer and play up his time, perhaps a deception too, as a narcotics peddler? There has never been a genre more full with imposters than rap music. Keep on keepin' it real, fakers.

Good writing keeps you reading. Remin Setoodeh's fascinating cover story in Newsweek kept me reading. The question implied by the piece is whether school policies regarding "diversity," "tolerance," and "sensitivity" backfired so horribly in Oxnard, California that a young homosexual was murdered as an indirect result of them. Like the Matthew Shepard case, Newsweek's cover story would be an item of local interest had the victim not been a homosexual. Leaving aside the obvious agenda of those pushing this murder as opposed to any of the 17,000 others that will occur (and won't make it into even a blurb in Newsweek) in the U.S. this year, it is still the case that this story is heartbreaking and engrossing.

On February 12, fourteen-year-old Brandon McInerney shot fifteen-year-old Larry King in the back of the head in history class following a series of unwanted advances by King, including a courtside plea from King to McInerney to "be his valentine" during a pickup basketball game. The embarassment continued for McInerney, as his friends taunted him that he and King would make "gay babies."

Faculty encouraged King's flamboyant behavior. To junior high, he wore stiletto heels and glittery makeup, signed papers as "Leticia," and made sexually suggestive comments to male students. Although a teacher ordered Larry to remove a Playboy-bunny necklace because she deemed it offensive to women, administrators did little to discourage King's bizarre dress, conduct, and appearance. When one teacher told King to wash off his eyeliner and lipstick, the school's assistant principlal overruled him. "She started to confuse her role as a junior-high principal," King's adoptive father contends. "I think that she was asserting her beliefs for gay rights." Another assistant principal emailed staff: "We have a student on campus who has chosen to express his sexuality by wearing make-up. It is his right to do so. Some kids are finding it amusing, others are bothered by it. As long as it does not cause classroom disruptions he is within his rights. We are asking that you talk to your students about being civil and non-judgmental. They don't have to like it but they need to give him his space. We are also asking you to watch for possible problems. If you wish to talk further about it please see me or Ms. Epstein." One English teacher actually bought Larry a green evening dress.

Why is it the right of a junior high student "to express his sexuality" in school? There are ways of teaching tolerance of our differences. This school didn't do that. The school encouraged a troubled boy to flaunt his sexuality around other boys, a few of them troubled as well, in a manner that only someone completely devoid of common sense would not envision leading to conflict. Sex is a powerful thing--too powerful for students in junior high. Boys dressing as girls is a classroom distraction. Every day is not Halloween. Students have rights, but schools should have rules and responsibilities as well. The notion that aggressively pushing a lifestyle as controversial as homosexuality or transvestitism to junior high students will suddenly transform confused and hormonally-charged teenagers into paragons of tolerance is faulty. They are too young to handle this as maturely as their teachers wish and student bodies are too diverse--in the accurate sense, not the newspeak sense--to uniformly accept such lifestyles. It creates a false sense of security within kids like Larry King and injects issues too difficult to handle for troubled teens like Brandon McInerney. By serving an agenda rather than kids, then, this junior high failed two of its students.

E.O. Green Junior High didn't murder Larry King. Brandon McInerney did. And even had Larry King come to school in a woman's bikini every day, he would not be deserving of a shove or a punch, let alone two bullets to the back of the head. Alas, the school was educating several hundred teenagers and not a group as respectful of quirks as a Libertarian Party convention. It was utopian for school administration to allow their wishes for how teenage boys should act (and react), rather than the reality of how teenage boys do act, to dictate school policy.

Following King's murder, California assemblyman Mike Eng introduced a bill mandating diversity training in public schools. "We need to teach young people that there's a curriculum called tolerance education that should be in every school," Eng explained. "We should teach young people that diversity is not something to be assaulted, but diversity is something that needs to be embraced because diversity makes California the great state that it is." Eng, as liberals are wont to do, gleaned the wrong lesson. Aggressively pushing sexuality in middle schools leads to trouble, not tolerance. Larry King, rest in peace.

If Keith Richards tells you that you drink too much. Good luck to Rolling Stones' guitarist Ron Wood on his timeout from toxins in rehabilitation. Better luck with your teenage Russian girlfriend. Beware, Ron: she's not dating you for your movie-star good looks. Ronnie Wood, heed the advice of Ronnie Wood, whose sagacious counsel regarding "women's ways" in his most famous song would make a good point of reflection in evaluating the May-December romance.

Why doesn't the "conservative press" act as docile and compliant as the mainsteam media, Barack Obama asked, not in those precise words, yesterday. CNN's Jack Cafferty wonders why all of the network news anchors will tag along on Obama's upcoming trip abroad while they all stayed at home when John McCain went overseas. Cafferty points out that there may be something to the complaints of bias: "The three broadcast network newscasts, which have 20 million viewers combined, spent about 114 minutes covering Obama since June, compared to 48 minutes for McCain. Obama has been on the cover of Time and Newsweek magazines 12 times in the last 3 years, compared with 5 for McCain. And in the last few weeks, Obama has also landed on the cover of Rolling Stone and US Weekly, along with interview of his family by 'Access Hollywood.'' As Cafferty points out, there are some reasons for the unbalanced coverage: McCain is a known commodity while Obama is a fresh face, the historic nature of Obama's run, and the fact that the Democrats' primary battle didn't end until last month. But atop all of those innocent explanations there is another one that calls into question the commitment of journalists to their craft: some journalists allow their politics to guide their coverage.

Wake me up in November when this--yawn--alleged presidential campaign is over. Investigative journalism has become a story on a candidate's exercise schedule. After an exciting primary season that awarded political junkies a potent fix, the general election has proven a tough hangover to shake. The one-party media has been hypnotized by Barack Obama, who, to judge by the coverage, is the only candidate running. John McCain, never wanting to offend the journalists who created his "maverick" image, cooperates to the hilt. Rather than go on the attack--against either George W. Bush or Barack Obama--he prefers to go down as a gentleman--and go down in November because of it.

Card Shark: "I'll give you a Sparky Lyle and a Kent Tekulve for a Mickey Mantle rookie card." Minnow: "Sure. Sounds like a good deal to me." Hezbollah: "I'll give you two decomposed bodies. You give me four militants who want to erase your country from the map and a man who bludgeoned to death a four-year-old girl." Israel: "Sure. Sounds like a good deal to me."

"Now it is very right to rebuke our own race or religion for falling short of our own standards and ideals. But it is absurd to pretend that they fell lower than the other races and religions that professed the very opposite standards and ideals. There is a very real sense in which the Christian is worse than the heathen, the Spaniard worse than the Red Indian, or even the Roman potentially worse than the Carthaginian. But there is only one sense in which he is worse; and that is not in being positively better. The Christian is only worse because it is his business to be better."
--G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925

Lawyer Dennis Edney labels his client a "young, most vulnerable boy." The U.S. government more accurately describes him as a terrorist. Did you catch the highlight reel of the teenaged-terrorist Omar Khadr crying in a Guantanamo Bay interrogation room? The occupational hazzards of jihad include death, lifelong injury, years in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and YouTube videos of you acting like a wuss. These very real risks negate those illusory 72 virgins, no? As Khadr lifts his arms above his head, he complains to a befuddled Canadian interrogator that he can no longer use his arms. "I lost my eyes," the woe-is-me act continued. "I lost my feet. Everything!" "No," the Canadian official responds, "you still have your eyes and your feet are still at the end of your legs." Do you think Khadr has weeped for 1st Sgt. Christopher Speer, the medic he allegedly killed with a grenade, as much as he has weeped for himself?

Why does Newsweek continue to peddle the fiction that Barack Obama didn't go to a Muslim school when Obama's autobiography insists that he did? First Jonathan Darman ridiculed the "39 percent [who] believe he attended an Islamic school as a child growing up in Indonesia." Now Jonathan Alter writes: "His stepfather sent him to a Muslim school. False. When Obama lived in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, his mother and stepfather sent him for a time to a Catholic school, and for a time to an Indonesian public elementary school, where he had a class in Islamic studies (as required by the state)." There is certainly malicious gossip and false rumours trailing Obama. But this doesn't mean everything said about him that is potentially damaging to his campaign--and I'm not sure attending an Islamic school while living in an Islamic country is particularly damaging--is false. Alas, for the ideologue everything that is damaging becomes false. My advice to Newsweek? Do what I did. Walk into a Borders, pay $30 for a copy of Obama's autobiography, and then read it. On page 154 you will find the source of the "rumour" that Obama attended an Islamic school: "In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school, two years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies."

Have you ever been hassled for reading a book? I have. For The Real Anita Hill and The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, two must-reads from my days as a collegiate conservative, I received mere dirty looks (And a menacing phone call for a positive review of the former book.). Holding a volume of Jefferson Davis's Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government in a DC Burger King elicited a barrage of snide comments from a Whoppers but not of the Confederacy. Reading Will & Ariel Durant's final volume in The Story of Civilization in a DC bar brought unwanted attention from a lunatic further fueled by alcohol. Spotting a chapter entitled "The German People," the unhinged barfly launched into a tirade about Nazism and accused me, based on no conversation save the one he had in his had with another of his personalities, of secretly harboring the belief that "Hitler was the George Washington of the German people." For about five minutes, I was horrified that others in the bar actually believed what this angry man had said about me. Fortunately for me, unfortunately for a young couple, he accosted them, issuing similar charges, in an extremely loud manner, without provocation. He disappeared into the night, with the second outburst restoring my reputation among the strangers in the bar and allowing me to read next to the juke box in peace.

Strangely, after reading about 400 books by and about the American Left from 2003 to 2007, not a single person uttered an unkind word. There were no angry outbursts in fast-food restaurants and no tirades in dive bars. The moral? Team Tolerance isn't so tolerant.

I can empathize with John Sampson, a 58-year-old janitor that had been charged by his employer with--gulp!--reading a book on his break. That his employer is a university, Indiana University-Purdue University of Indianapolis, makes the accusation particularly outrageous. "You used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your black co-workers," reprimanded his union representative, Lillian Charleston, in a letter to Sampson. The school's affirmative action officer informed Sampson that reading the book, "Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan," constituted racial harrasment. Not only is the book a sympathetic account of how Catholics repelled attacks by the KKK, but Sampson actually checked it out from IUPUI's library.

Well, a few months after informing Sampson that he would be disciplined for his insensitivity, the school has apologized. That it comes after a spate of negative media attention makes it a rather self-serving apology. The situation is so idiotic, why couldn't the university's president have said sorry and dismissed the matter six months ago? Why won't he fire the affirmative action officer whose judgment is borderline insane? Why isn't Sampson's complaining coworker reprimanded for being a nuisance?

"A Conservative History of the American Left is perhaps most of all a story about the failure and resilience of utopian schemes," James Antle writes at EnterStageRight.com. "The new and radical ideas aren't new after all. Flynn has seen the future, and it is the past." Read the full review, and if you haven't already please read my book. And if you have read it, get somebody else to do so.

Saturday night I drank a six-pack of Bud. Sunday night I read that Belgium-based InBev had purchased Anheuser-Busch. I think I'm going to be sick.

One is tempted to say that it's as bad as when "the beer that made Milwaukee famous" shut down its Milwaukee brewery. But it's worse than that. Can I sue the company for false advertising when they conclude their Super Bowl commercials by saying, "Anheuser Busch, St. Louis, Missouri"?

It's not that I am a nationalist when it comes to drinking. It's just that it hurts my pride of country to know that Pabst is now the largest American-owned beer company. The beers I consistently drink--1. Busch, 2. Labatt, 3. Budweiser--are all North American beers, but I venture into such territory as Harp and Heineken on ocassion. I have several beers I enjoy in Central Europe--Krusovice in the Czech Republic, Zywiec in Poland. Alas, those affordable beers alchemize themselves into high-end snob brews when they enter the American market. I like them, but not $15-a-six-pack like them.

Beer snobs incessantly put down Bud, and to a lesser extent, all mass-made American beer. It's as if any beer designed to allow you to drink ten of them, and not one with dinner, is a disgrace. Beer isn't wine, fops. As one poster on a beer message board put it, "What can I say Budweiser is absolutely disgusting (average by American standards) but it continues to sell in disgraceful numbers mostly to image conscious -----." The anti-Bud animus, as one can see by reading between the lines, is linked to an anti-American animus. Perhaps now that Belgians own it Europeans will have a continental epiphany on Budweiser.

Although I am not a beer nationalist, I discovered on my most recent trip to Europe than some Europeans are. Upon stopping at a neighborhood dive bar in Salzburg, Austria--ironically on my way to a monastic brewery on the edge of town to drink the best beer I would ever drink--I was regaled with whining by a local about how evil Budweiser was for getting exclusive rights to beer sales at all World Cup events in Germany. The local yokel blamed the American megacorporation for this turn of events, he blamed George W. Bush, he half blamed me I sensed--he blamed everybody save his fellow Germans for taking Bud's money for this monopolistic business venture. As I looked up from my glass after painfully listening to, and then gleefully zoning out from, this harangue, I noticed the bar decorations included pictures of Karl Marx and a small Soviet flag. It figured.

I am no commie, so I don't begrudge foreign capitalists for buying an American company. American capitalists buy foreign companies all the time, and only the ilk of that man in the Salzburg retread bar try to stop them. It's also becoming clear that national identity with regard to beer, sadly, is becoming a thing of the past. None of my favorite beers listed above is owned by the natives. Krusovice is a Czech beer once owned by royalty, expropriated by the Communists in 1945, and now owned by the Dutch. Zywiec has a similar history, with ownership shifting from Hapsburgs, to Communists, to Belgians. It's a Polish beer, but in one sense it never was a Polish beer. It gets pretty confusing. With Miller and Coors (Miller-Coors?) owned by South Africans and Anheuser-Busch owned by Belgians, what's a patriotic beer drinker to do? Drink Pabst? Some sacrifices, even for country, ask too much.

When a Republican says the conservative he most admires is named Roosevelt it's time to cue that robot whose body is a quarter-barrel keg: "Danger, Will Robinson!" I don't care if it's Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, or Roosevelt Franklin, Roosevelts are just bad news. John McCain is telling you something when he bypasses the names of Calvin Coolidge, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan and instead selects Theodore Roosevelt as "conservative" that he wishes to emulate. George W. Bush's way of telling the hearing conservatives that he wasn't really a conservative was by prefixing "conservative" with "compassionate"; John McCain's manner of communicating this is to call himself a "Theodore Roosevelt conservative." Much of the out-of-control, i.e., unelected, regulatory state started under Theodore Roosevelt, as did the unconstitutional practice of the federal government seizing millions of acres of land for "protection." At least Teddy Roosevelt was honest enough to call himself a "progressive." Please stop calling yourself a conservative, Senator McCain.

The Barack-Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim internet rumour is one of the stupidest ideas going, which is why I suspect many journalists keep it going--to make Obama's opponents appear stupid. But the hoax is about what you would expect from anonymous people operating on the outer limits of the world wide web. More disturbing is the zeal with which actual journalists, working for reputable publications, operate to expunge any potentially damaging bit of information, even if true, from Obama's biography. Here's Newsweek's Jonathan Darman offering up theories explaining why Obama's support has declined in recent weeks: "Some of Obama's lag in white support may be explained by continual confusion over his religious identity. Twelve percent of voters surveyed said that Obama was sworn in as a United States senator on a Qur'an, while 26 percent believe the Democratic candidate was raised as a Muslim and 39 percent believe he attended an Islamic school as a child growing up in Indonesia. None of these things is true." I've tracked down the source of the damnable lie that Barack Obama attended an Islamic school in Indonesia. It's a book called Dreams from My Father. On page 154 it reads: "In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school, two years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies."

Terrorists hijack a plane? The federal government takes over airport security. Bear Stearns makes bad loans? The federal government rewards their idiocy with $29 billion. The biggest voting bloc hits old-age? The federal government decides to pay for their prescription drugs. The Bush administration's socialism, generally seeing the federal government as a safety net for corporations and the middle class, is disturbing. Now the Bush administration is debating whether to put Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, two companies already too tied in with government, into a conservatorship. In other words, what took more than thirty years to accomplish--the semi-privatization of the New Deal relic Fannie Mae in 1970--George W. Bush is contemplating reversing. Perversely, companies that partake in reckless business practices get rewarded with billions of federal dollars--undoubtedly encouraging future recklessness. As the New York Times puts it, "Under a conservatorship, the shares of Fannie and Freddie would be worth little or nothing, and any losses on mortgages they own or guarantee--which could be staggering--would be paid by taxpayers." A bad deal, not for Fannie and Freddie, but for Fannie and Freddie Taxpayer.

What's more politically correct? Atlanta's decision to reward a feminist vandal, who prefixed "Men at Work" signs with a spraypainted "Wo," by replacing the offending signs with ones that say "Workers Ahead"? Or, the demands for an apology from a Dallas county commissioner and a judge because of an observation from a white commissioner that the traffic-ticket collections office "has become a black hole" for paperwork. "Excuse me!," an offended commissioner retorted. The inefficient bureaucracy had become a "white hole." One is tempted to chalk it up to PC hysteria, if only the word hysteria wasn't so offensive to the gods of political correctness.

Barack Obama told an audience in Georgia, "I don't understand when people say 'We want English only.' Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English--they'll learn English--you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish!" Would the senator from Illinois ever be so bold as to tell an audience in East Los Angeles that they need to learn English?

It would be nice if Russians reacted to their shameful 20th century in the manner Germans react to wax figurines of Hitler. In contrast to the healthy revulsion in Germany toward the Nazi regime, Russian leaders exhibit an unhealthy amnesia to the colossal crimes committed by their predecessors. Forty summers ago, Russian tanks rolled into Prague to crush a spirit of freedom that had spread in Czechoslovakia during 1968's Prague Spring. Whereas idiotic American students rallied in support of Communist tyrants in 1968, their Czech counterparts bravely rallied against them. Several dozen Czechs and Slovaks got killed in the process. Today, to the prospect of a U.S. missle shield guarding the Czech Republic from future aggression, the Russian foreign ministry reacts: "We will be forced to react not with diplomatic, but with military-technical methods." The Cold War is over, and it may not be in America's interests to antagonize the weakened Russian bear, but can you blame Czech leaders for desiring protection against the people who imposed tyranny upon them as recently as two decades ago?

In the bizarro world of liberals, discriminating against a job applicant because of the color of his skin isn't racist. Issuing a political advertisement objecting to this vile practice is. In 1990, Jesse Helms ran an advertisement pointing out that his opponent, Harvey Gantt, supported racial preferences, and he, opposed them. Liberals expected Gantt to win the race. He didn't, and the ad had much to do with the outcome. They still haven't forgiven Helms--not for running the ad, but for winning. Andrew Sullivan calls Helms a "racist" because of the ad and describes it as the five-term senator's "most famous racist ad." Let me second NRO's Roger Clegg, who opines: "Sorry, but the ad looked perfectly legit to me then, and still does. It's become accepted in liberal circles that it was somehow racist, but it was not, and it's wrong to suggest that Helms was wrong in running it." View the ad here and draw your own conclusion before revisionists draw it for you.

"I wish for a world free from tyranny: the tyranny of hunger, disease; and free from tyrannical governments," George W. Bush wrote on a note placed upon a Japanese "wishing tree" at the G8 summit. "I wish for a world in which the universal desire for liberty is realized." Is liberty a universal desire? The need for governments to protect liberty by the writ of law suggests that it is not. Far more common than the desire to leave other people alone, unfortunately, is the compulsion to tell other people what to do. However scarce tyranny is in George W. Bush's imagined future, in experienced history it is not tyranny but liberty that has been scarce. Like hunger and disease, tyranny has always been with us. Its eradication is the stuff of wishing trees, not national policy.

A long time ago, it wasn't all that unusual for Democrats to out-conservative their Republican opponents. New York Republican Vito Marcantonio was a fellow traveller of the Communists and Georgia Democrat Larry McDonald was the chairman of the John Birch Society. Politics was more interesting when voters had to look at more than just party label to determine which candidate better represented their interests. As late as 1990 here in Massachusetts, for instance, the Democratic candidate for governor, John Silber, ran as the conservative and the Republican, William Weld, ran as the liberal. James Antle in today's American Spectator writes of the return of this phenomenon in South Carolina. Antle writes of "Flat-Top Bob" Conley, a Democrat challenging Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, "He opposes abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control, and amnesty for illegal immigrants, repeatedly referring to the incumbent senator as 'Grahamnesty.'" Graham, a supporter of amnesty for illegal aliens, a member of the Senate's "Gang of 14," and a backer of the anti-free speech McCain-Feingold law, acknowledges that Conley runs to his right: "From what I can tell, he doesn't represent moderation. I represent a brand of conservatism that you will feel comfortable with." Moderation? In South Carolina?

Jesse Helms casts a longer shadow in today's senate than he did during the thirty years when he served. Who among Senate Republicans goes after the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or the United Nations with the fervor that Senator Helms did? In the era of President Yes, America would have benefitted from Senator No. "Goodbye Jesse, say hello to Lucifer for me," quipped a blogger at MyDD. Over at the Daily Kos, an obit's headline simply read: "Jesse Helms, You Rat Bastard, Burn in Hell." It's narcissism to believe that merely sharing your political views ensures a place in heaven, and rejecting them relegates one to hell. That such assessments come from those who normally ridicule notions of heaven and hell make them of even greater interest to armchair psychologists. What makes me suspect that Jesse Helms will enjoy a beautiful reward in the afterlife has nothing to do with politics. Prior to a career in politics, Jesse Helms ironically worked as a journalist. Coming across a newspaper story of a young disabled orphan who wanted a mom and dad for Christmas, Helms and his wife were overcome with emotion. From the version that I remember, and I am certain I am getting something wrong, they took the boy out and gave him the time of his life at a baseball game. In the process, Helms bought the boy a cap. At the end of the day, Helms put the nine-year-old cerebral palsy victim to bed in the Helms house. If you don't decide to keep me, can I still keep the hat, the boy plaintively asked. It's not a question of us wanting to keep you, but rather will you keep us, Helms responded. The boy received his Christmas wish of a mom and a dad. I didn't know Jesse Helms, but it's hard to imagine the man in that story in the same fiery company as Lucifer.

To millions of Americans, the Fourth of July symbolizes freedom. But for Senator John Warner the holiday weekend was an ocassion to cart out an idea that increases the federal government's control at the expense of individual liberty. Warner seeks to go back to the bad old days when the federal government set 55-miles-per-hour speed limits on local roads and highways. It isn't the federal government's business and isn't among their delegated powers, but, alas, Big Brother knows best.

Happy real Independence Day! On this date in 1776, the American colonists seceded from the British Empire. Who can say for sure why people several hundred years ago did what they did? Nevertheless, the best historians contend that their bold actions against the mighty imperialists had something to do with hot dogs, the beach, and made-in-China fireworks. I'm off to celebrate the way the Founding Fathers intended me to. An alternative explanation for their motives, issued two days after independence, is offered here.

"Ben Freeth did not expect to be alive today," reads a harrowing piece in Newsweek about the racist henchmen of Zimbabwe strongman Robert Mugabe brutalizing white farmers. "Just after midnight this morning, the white farmer was lying face down next to a bonfire, beside Mike and Angela Campbell, his wife's parents. He had no idea where his own three small children and his wife, Laura, were, only that a marauding band of loyalists from the ruling ZANU-PF party was hitting all the white farms in their district near the town of Chegutu, about 60 miles southwest of Harare. The three had been abducted from their farm by an armed gang and brought to their base. By midnight, they had been beaten for seven hours, while their tormentors danced around the bonfire and told them they'd kill them." Three cheers for Newsweek for covering this ongoing tragedy. If the farmers were black rather than white, if the place were called Rhodesia rather than Zimbabwe, if the perpetrator were Ian Smith rather than Robert Mugabe, the media coverage would be inescapable. Alas, the villains and victims don't fit the script.

"It's for the children" is one of those Orwellian phrases that generally masks an agenda contrary to the interests of children. Its usage surrounding issues of teacher pay and treatment are a case in point. I much preferred the honesty of the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker, who once blurted, "When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children." As the Associated Press points out, New York City fired just 10 teachers out of 55,000 last year. Los Angeles, which employs 43,000 teachers, fires about 11 per year. Rounding to the nearest 1/100th of a percentile, teachers in New York and Los Angeles have a zero percent chance of getting fired. Are they uniformly that good? The shameful statistics have come to light in relation to a state law in New York that will make it easier to fire teachers who have been convicted of sex crimes against students. No doubt the defenders of molestors, who have landed dream jobs in education, will attempt to convince skeptics that retaining such miscreants is "for the children."