Let’s cut through the crap.  There is only one war fighting strategy worthy of America.  It is summed up by Reagan, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose.”  It is ideas like this, simply expressed that will make Reagan’s presidency a touchstone for the next century.

These ideas are not really new.  They are simple and, frankly, boring.  They hold no attraction to those who regard as profound the clutter of deconstruction that is oh so vogue  on our college campuses these days.  Usually, by some trendy Marxist professor spewing pseudo-pithy remarks with intent to look cool enough to bed some dewy-eyed coed.

Moreover, such ideas are based in reality right from the start of our Republic.  Benjamin Franklin didn’t just negotiate a cease fire with the British to end our war for independence.  He negotiated a country who’s western boundary would stretch to the Mississippi river.  Say what you want about Polk and Manifest Destiny, but he negotiated a peace with Mexico that expanded our country’s size by one-third.   And, note, no one seems to refer to the city of Houston (or Brownville) as sitting on the occupied north bank of the Rio Grand.

The Civil War ended on Lincoln’s terms; a united United States and no slavery.  The initials of General U. S. Grant were said to stand for unconditional surrender.

And, to the extent that World War II cleaved to the dictum of unconditional surrender as the U.S. saw it, it was a success.  Where it didn’t, well, we got the Iron Curtain.

The fundamental is that, as Commander-in-Chief, you have a moral obligation to the troops you command that stands out from and above all other obligations.  It is an awesome power to have people such as our soldiers who will serve at the pleasure of the president; even if that pleasure means charging into the jaws of death.  It is also a profound moral obligation that if you are going to ask such sacrifice, you owe it to those soldiers that their lives will be place at risk for only one goal.  ”We win, they lose.”

To the extent that Cold War strategy was mired in the policy of ‘containment,’ it was immoral since it more than tacitly endorsed the status quo of the mass enslavement of people in the bonds of that vicious ideology of communism.  This was the ultimate failing of our conflicts in Korea and Vietnam; moral failings that would bring down the presidencies of Truman and Johnson.  It had nothing to do with the performance of our armed forces; for our soldiers, sailors and airmen performed admirably.  Nor, it is not to say that the specific strategy or tactics specific to the execution of either war was suspect.  It was in the context that our leadership at the time, by not thinking beyond containment, ultimately mired their efforts (and the expenditure of American blood and treasure) in an immoral conundrum.

It was only when Reagan defined the Cold War in the clarity of victory did our efforts fall into a clear set of morally unambiguous constructs.  It was Reagan who would say this is evil and it will not stand.  And, the Soviet Empire would come crashing down in 1989; a mere eight years after Reagan’s inauguration.  ”We win, they lose.”

Obama will fail in Afghanistan for this very lack of moral purpose.  He, as noted by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews went to the “enemy camp” of West Point.  And, Matthews put into words what, I think, Obama really believes.  He, Obama, the ultimate Philosopher King, approaches the presidency and his duties as commander-in-chief as distractions beneath him.  His duties as President are beneath the man who is really the Prime Minister of the world; except when bowing and scraping before the king of Saudi Arabia and the emperor of Japan.

Obama will fail because he cannot bring himself to say the word victory.  He cannot fathom Americans winning in a contest of arms. Because, no, our soldiers will not  fail us.  Like in Korea, like in Vietnam, our soldiers will win on the ground.  They will put forth all manner of sacrifice.  They will bleed and die to bring victory.  But, their sacrifice will be for naught because Obama does not understand the concept “we win, they lose.”

The reason for failure is that Obama has more important things on his mind than his soldiers; ‘bitter’ yokels from red-state America at that.  He has to show that American Exceptionalism is dead.  And, he has to do only what is necessary to shore up a Chicago political machine recently transplanted to Washington.  Obama, with his nuanced ivy league sophistication cannot comprehend the simple truth and obligation to his troops; “we win, they lose.”

In the crush of the 2008 presidential election campaign, the MSM made a lot over Obama’s “cool” and “nuance.”  As opposed to McCain’s high stung temperament and “gut” reactions.

Now, with Iran, we can truly see what “cool” and “nuance” are really worth.  Because in the world of power politics where there is evil and real enemies.  Where there are people who will just as soon as kill you as look at you.  Where there are evil people who have the means to kill you; and a thousand times over.  You need the guts of a fighter pilot closing in at 400 knots.  The guts of a fighter who know you have one chance to get it right.  Someone who’s already thought through the complex permutations and can render judgement without hesitation.  Because at 400+ knots, if you hesitate, you’re dead.  You are now in the world of brutal black and white, where you need to make definitive yes and no decisions.  This is real executive decision making.  And, this is no longer the midnight dorm room bull session where you mixed pot, alcohol and trendy discussion on some vogue Marxist theory.

This is the world of Churchill, May 1940.  Dunkirk, France.  330,00 of your forces trapped on the beaches.  What do you do?  Sue for peace?   Become Vichy England?  There are historians that theorize that Hitler pulled his punches at Dunkirk to work out a peace deal.  Or, with little to hope for, evacuate, re-group and hope for better fortunes in battle; hope for eventual victory.  D-day, the 8th Air Force, V-E day with Britain as one of Berlin’s occupiers were, in 1940, dreams that would buy a ticket to a padded cell.

Yet, this is real history.  As Mark Steyn once pointed out, crucial decisions at crucial junctures of history are never clear distinctions between unalloyed good and unalloyed bad.  In many cases, in the maw of the circumstances of that decision, you have no idea that your decision will be the crucial tipping point.

So, what’s it going to be?  Yes or no?  Surrender to the Nazis or fight on?  Pick sides with the “street” that is literally dying in its challenge of the mad mullahs that run Iran or throw you lot with the power establishment–the ruling Mullahs?  The fact is that neither presidential candidate–Ahmadinejad or Mir Hussein Mousavi–is some paragon of Jeffersonian democracy.  Both have had active roles in setting policies that makes Iran the pariah it now is.

Both candidates are just two flavors of dung, take your pick.  Both required approval by the ruling mullahs to even run in the first place.  But, the significance is that the “street” is taking this debate beyond the a presidential election.  Now, the people are asking for accountability from the ruling mullahs.  And, in this respect, Obama’s been handed a gift.  Because there is a clear choice; to come down on the side of an electorate that wants accountability.  To come down on the side of true democracy.

Yet, all we get, after a week of waffling, is Obama steps up to the plate. And, we get a kumbaya response.  Let’s just all get along.  The folks on the street are dying so they don’t have to get along.  Instead of a response of solid and unequivocal support for the demands of accountability, Obama publicly urinates on the sacrifice of those protesters demanding that accountability; demanding the right to a vote equal to anyone else’s.

This is the 3 a.m. phone call; launch missiles or not?  As far as 3 a.m. phone calls go, this is a relatively simple choice.  You blow this choice and the next 3 a.m. phone call won’t be as easy.  Maybe an Israeli nuclear retaliation against an Iranian nuclear attack.  Standing on the side of democracy is generally the best default position you can take because democracies generally don’t make war on democracies.

But, Obama and many of his supporters have had little to do in the world of hard decision making.  In the brutal world of decision making were, you as president, have your options winnowed down to two, yea or nay.  Nuance has other words and synonyms.  Trying to have your cake and eat it.  Dithering.  Waffling.  Bullshitting.  Intellectual Masturbation.  Obama’s out of the bubble of unreality of Chicago machine politics where decisions are made by the bosses and “ratified” by bought elections to maintain the thin veneer of democracy–like Ahmadinejad’s election.  But, whereas Chicago machine politics has just run a city into the ground, here we have a high stakes nuclear game afoot, a game being run by a two-bit machine politician who’s idea of high negotiation is greasing the right palms.

With Senator Spector jumping to the Democratic brand, we will have the legislative and executive branch firmly in the hands of the Democrats.  Unless, the Democratic leadership cannot trust it’s rank and file, the trillion dollar agenda that will beggar our grandchildren can not proceed unobstructed.  Won’t even be a need for the charade of “reconciliation” to push this agenda through.  And, most of all, Obama can shed the pretense that he is president and revert to this true calling as prime minister (or secretary general).  

Have it all!  Canadian-style single payer health care.  Cap and trade.  And, the next time Obama meets the king of Saudi Arabia, he needs not stop at a bow; go on, go all the way, the royal crotch was only another six inches away.  Chavez, Castro, Kim, Ahmadinejad, your reservation at the Lincoln Bedrooms awaits.

Spread the wealth?  Spread away.  Why stop at 90% AIG-style tax rates?  If you making $250K per year, you’re rich enough.  Everything above that belongs to the feds (and by extension ACORN).

And, we can all be greener than Kermit.  The folks out in Pennsylvania will now really have a reason to be bitter when our carbon-free future throws them all out into the unemployment line when their coal mines are shut down.  All they will have, then, is their guns and religion to cling to.

Torture “truth” commissions?  Why stop there?  Call up Robespierre and the Committee for Public Safety.  Why stop with some DOJ lawyers who nobody can remember?  How about Rove?  Heck, why not Cheney or even W?

Hyperbole?  Hopefully no, but stripping away some of the sarcasm, everything in this post has happened.  Obama did bow to a king.  Obama talked about more than cap and trade.  He talked about bankrupting new coal fired generation plants.  He talked about checking your tire pressure as an alternative to drilling for more oil.Pelosi is pushing for a “truth” commission.  

Ninty percent tax rate?  Such a thing existed from the 1930’s until the 1960’s.  The top marginal rate then remained at 70 percent until the Reagan tax cut of 1981.  The Obama, Reid, Pelosi trioka are just testing the waters.  They’re getting us used to the word “trillion.”  And, to banana republic economics; the ones that issue paper money that has the feel of Monopoly money.  First it was taxing away the AIG bonuses.  Again testing the waters to see if we’re ready for settling for the mediocracy of “free” health care in exchange for having everything over $250,000 taxed away since that’s rich enough.

But, there is a silver lining to all of this.  Now, Obama and the Democrats will be in complete, and I mean complete, ownership of this mess.  The high taxes, prolonged recession (?depression) and the hyperinflation.

War and tortue should be subjects abhorrent to those who value the protections and benefits of a constitutional republic and the rights secured by the Bill of Rights.  We carefully parse the law to the nth degree in every capital punishment case.  It may take ten or more years to bring such a case to its conclusion with the execution of a criminal.  But, a single soldier with an automatic weapon or machine gun, a pilot releasing a cluster bomb, can kill more people in a mere instant than our criminal justice system will do in ten years of  executing criminals.

In like fashion, torture, or some enhanced interrogation technique, very rapidly crosses the line over the right to not self-incriminate.

It is why it is best to treat acts of war as such and not as criminal proceeding.  And, it is why it is best to conduct these acts of war far from our shores and our citizens.  There are some acts, forced by extreme necessity that need to be, in every respect, utterly circumscribed.

Our country is populated with millions of military veterans, all decent and honorable people, who would care not to reflect on some of their actions when in combat.  Actions made necessary by the desperation that is combat.

Yet, in this less than perfect world, evil people force otherwise peaceable people to undertake morally ambiguous actions.  Actions, regardless of the immediate circumstances, that good people will never be comfortable reflecting upon in more comfortable times.

 Further, in the hands of good people, these morally ambiguous actions are recognized as such.  Which is why there are only applied in the most extreme of circumstances.  The alleged “torture” of al Queda terrorists was not gratuitous sadism with the intent of coercing a “confession” for use in some propaganda show trial.  Rather, it was applied to specific persons with the reasonable expectation that they did indeed possess specific and critical information needed to stop further terror acts and thereby save lives of innocent people.  There simply is no moral equivalence between what the United States did with these interrogation techniques and the torture visited upon political prisoners in Stalin’s purges or Castro’s prisons.  Or, despite our humane treatment of prisoners of war in our custody, the torture visited on our POW’s in the hands of the Japanese, North Koreans or North Vietnamese.

Then, there are the specific factors of specific circumstances.  We’ve all, in taking Ethics 101 in college, debated the classic senario of a ticking atomic bomb in the middle of Manhattan, set to explode in one hour.  And, we debated the ethics of torturing a prisoner, who knows the whereabouts of said bomb.  Is it right to tortue?  To what degree?  Is it right to commit one atrocity to prevent an even greater atrocity?

I debated such in my own midnight dorm room bull sessions back in the late 1970’s.  Back when the nuclear club was indeed very exclusive and the senario of a terrorist organization capable of such a situation was indeed very hypotheticalal.  Today, this is no longer a hypotheticalal.  We have a death-cult ideology, that is Islam, that would do such a thing in a heart beat.  The death toll of 9/11 was only 3000 only because these terrorists could only commandeer civilian aircraft; not atom bombs.  Now, we have the Taliban making moves to entirely destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan and potentially gain excess to those very weapons. Millennials now with the means to really deliver.

If our Ethics 101 senario did indeed happen today (and, it’s very plausible),  would those charged with national security be morally obligated to even pull out every finger nail to find that bomb?  Or, would you be content to just inform that terrorist of his Miranda rights?

But, Obama, in his overweening sense of moral superiority and self-righteousness probably never gave the above the slightest thought.  That beyond the immediate bounds of the current debate on waterboarding, there is a bigger question to be answered.  That question is that there are times when good people must commit to morally ambiguous actions that they, in their worst nightmares, would never even dream of doing, because of pressing and real concerns that evil, even greater than their actions, must be stopped.  And, now people who were never directly in the maw of those front line decisions will, years later, second guess with the threat of criminal prosecutions.  

Additionally, along the lines of Monica Lewinsky, this controversy now becomes an issue that will so consume Washington as to consume Obama’s agenda.  Bill Clinton had an opportunity to create a durable center-left governing coalition.  But, Clinton along with his partisan fellow-travelers decided, in 1992, that the millennium arrived and decided to push as far left as possible.  And, that was before Clinton’s own proclivities intruded with his extra-curricular sexual appetites and escapades finally  ground down any agenda in the bonfire of the Lewinsky impeachment scandal.  

And, here is the “scandal” that will grind Obama’s agenda to a halt.  Releasing these so-called torture memos is an act of a narcissist so impressed with himself and his mission that he will sacrifice national security with a distraction of banana republic-style show trials.  It is yet another example as to Obama’s lack of executive experience and fitness to lead.  True executive experience would have informed Obama to pace and prioritize his agenda.  To build public confidence in his leadership by systematically building a record of accomplishment and then using the record to pitch further agendas to a public more confident and more reassured of his leadership capacity.  True leadership and executive experience would have also informed Obama that there are just some items that will distract you from the really big, important stuff.  There are items that you just let go; its just not worth it.  True leadership and executive experience means making choices and saying “no.”  

Getting through this economic meltdown should be his only priority.  He does that successfully, and he’s going to have the running room to put forth the rest of his agenda.

It is possible, at this late date, that if Obama gets in front of this problem and flat out says no to hearings, prosecutions, commissions or investigations that he could quell the firestorm he just touched off.  But, even then, there will be a residual of distrust.  As it stands, we have the makings of 41 GOP senate votes to make each and every filibuster now stand.  This issue, if not ended quickly and definitively, will indeed result in open warfare on the Senate floor with scorched parliamentary tactics that will freeze the entire Obama agenda.  Making, ultimately, Obama’s four years as president a mere asterisk as the first black president.  Even Senator Reid realizes that; which is why he’s trying to tamp down Speaker Pelosi’s “truth” commissions.  No, this is not (yet) a banana republic.  This is a constitutional republic of constrained powers.  Prime Minister Obama better start realizing that Alinsky is not a good governing role model.

There was a reason our founding fathers posited a requirement in the US Constitution that the President of the United States be a  natural born citizen.  And, Obama proves the point.  Only by luck of his American citizen unwed mother getting knocked up  in Hawaii did Obama make the grade.  But, while technically a natural born US citizen, Obama has displayed all of the characteristics of a third-world cabinet minister (and I mean that comparison is a very negative sense); an EU or UN grandee.  Moreover, this is not an affectation, but an ingrained, reflexive characteristic  of a man who simply knows nothing else.

And, like the “bitter” comments, Obama’s bow to the king of Saudi Arabia probably wasn’t planned.  Or, planned in a manner to specifically offend American audiences.  Rather, it was an act that came to Obama naturally; an act of a third world cabinet minister showing the obeisance due to such a potentiate such as the king of Saudi Arabia.  Moreover, it was beyond the incompetence of his staff that failed to brief Obama; probably not even imagining that Obama would be so unschooled in such etiquette that Americans do not bow to anyone.

Tens of thousands of Americans lie dead, having taken up arms to defend that very point.  Starting with the dead that lay upon the Lexington Green in April 1775, we fought for a concept of liberty and equality that recognized that no one before God and before the institutions of our Republic stands above another.  To hold an office of public trust only, temporarily, as the first among peers.  But, never your superior.  For, in reality, the electorate is ultimately your boss.

But, Obama never grew up in that environment.  From the ages of six to ten, those first formative years as an elementary school student, were spent in Indonesia.  A Muslim country, with a Muslim father where the young Obama was listed on governmental records as a Muslim.  This was not the usual issue where the children of, say, military personnel, are schooled in American schools with a sense of America even in that foreign land.  An island of America thousands of miles from home.  Obama even attended a madrass during this period.  I doubt that the young Obama, though technically a natural born US citizen, in those first ten years of life had any sense of  being American.

And, so, this foreigner comes of age in America.  He is attracted to socialism which is a truly foreign concept to America and American exceptionalism.  Socialism arose in Europe in an environment of rigid social stratifications of royalty.  Socialism was the disaffected’s answer, the rabble rouser’s answer to overturn that rigid social stratification.  But, to overturn that rigid stratification with a new one with the once rabble rouser securely now occupying those upper tiers of that new system.  Merely a coup to displace the old power structure with a new equally authoritarian power structure.  One, in an egalitarian veneer, dispenses with such labels as king, duke or count and now replaces is with “minister of” or “president.”

So, our young, impressionable Obama seeks the company of vogue Marxist professors and aging radicals such as Ayers.  He seeks a political system, the Chicago machine, that functions like a third-world banana republic.  He seek religious solace from the like of Reverend Wright; who’s anti-semitism and anti-Americanism is the closest “Christian” theology to Islam.  

But, along the way, Obama missed out on why those thousands of American now lie dead on countless battlefields; Lexington, Concord, Antietim, Gettysburg, Shiloh, Cantigny, Chateau-Thierry, Belleau Wood, Normandy, Bastogne.  Obama missed out on the concept of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness as being gifts of God (not Allah).  He missed out on the fundamental concept, reinforced by the conceit of an Ivy League education, that government is a servant of the people to create a framework of order and law to allow each individual to achieve his best.  That it is the efforts of millions of individuals that define the state and not the state that defines the individual.

But, for all of his life, Obama lived outside that experience.  And, instead of an American, an equal, with the authority of the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights behind him, prime minister Obama subordinated the greatness that is America.  Subordinated the blood of thousands of Americans who made our founding documents more than just parchment and prostrated himself to a king.

To those who cared to look beyond the MSM smokescreen of the last election, this comes as no surprise.  But, the evidence is all in that Barry’s nothing but a tax and spend liberal.  We’ve got a budget outline that approached four trillion dollars.  And, after congress gets through it will be four trillion since Barry on set a floor on his budget proposal and has a tacit understanding with Reid and Pelosi, to run the tab up even more since he’s going to sign anything.

Then, we have proposals for more than a trillion dollars in tax increases.  The combined wet dreams of FDR, LBJ, Carter and Clinton, combined could not imagine such a number.  Well, maybe Clinton.

And, then we have the other boiler plate to the standard liberal.  The slow pre-emptive surrender to Islamic imperialism.  In Iraq, all our enemies have to do is run the clock until August 2010.  How’s that for telegraphing your attentions.

And gun control.  It seems that his lacky at justice, Holder, is making noises about re-instating the so-called “assault-weapons” ban in part because assault weapons are flowing from the north into Mexico, supplying the drug lords in their civil war against the government.  Never mind that Mexico is just this side of being a failed state.  Of course, this stuff never came out of Obama himself.  But, he like Pelosi, Reid and Schumer are just waiting…

Bait and switch.  The true intentions covered up by a compliant press.

But, it is worse.  If only we could have the day’s of Jimmy Carter.  What we really have is not a president but the UN secretary general occupying the Oval Office.  This man is a natural born citizen by virtue of the technicality of being born over US soil.  But, he spent his first ten years of life abroad.  Not at a military brat, who lived with a sense that he was a part of America.  But, as a Muslim in Indonesia, including attendance to a madrass.  So, not only did he live physically away from America, his upbringing was in a Muslim world-view; an antithesis of individual liberty which is the root of Western Civilization.

And, though he didn’t wind up practicing Islam.  His choice of “Christianity” was the virulent anti-American, anti-semitic variant of the “Reverend” Wright.

So, to add to the cheap vote-buying ethics of a Chicago ward-heeler.  So, to add to the fact that this man’s enitre adult life was living off other peoples’ money, extorting other people’s money.  So, to add to the fact that this man never ran a business, hired employees or met a payroll.  This man is now engaging in a third-world mentality of reducing his fellow citizens to the status of serf and subject.  

Obama’s spending and tax proposals make a mockery of the notion of private property.  These are whole sale expropriations of property that place him squarely in the company of Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez.  No, the comparison isn’t meant as a compliment.

The patterns are coming clear about Obama’s world view and economic views.  His stimulus plan falls into the pattern.  No, Obama didn’t write it.  But, he didn’t care so long as it spent a lot of money.  And, it starts this nation down the past of big city machine politics.

What has been slowly metastizing from local, to state and now to the federal level is a model of governance that seeks to fleece some minority of taxpayers for the benefit of a given politician’s friends and allies.  This was the model that to some degree afflicts almost every large city in our country.  This has been the model of economic stagnation for the last century.  Big city machine politics creates a voting bloc of 51 percent to steal from the other 49 percent; economic justice and fairness don’t you know.  The 49 percent vote with their feet, leaving said city an economic wasteland.  So, since that city can control a significant block of representatives in the state legislature, this same city machine needs to go further afield to find that 49 percent to tax, but at the state level.  The net result is to saddle, at the state level, the same diastrous economic policies that now render that state an economic wasteland.

And, regions and states mimic stellar evolution going from the young blue-white star of economic vitality, to the to the aging red giant start of a state-wide economy where private sector economic activity is beginning to struggle to keep ahead of taxes and public spending.  Then, there’s the black hole; the where the citizen is just regarded as a sheep to be fleeced and flayed to generate revenue for the sake of the friends and dependents of the ruling political machine.  

And, this country is now littered with economic black holes.  Whole metropolitan areas, whole states where governmental entities lurch from budget crisis to budget crisis in search of tax revenue to make it another year.  States like New York, California or New Jersey.  New York used to be a veritable hot house of economic activity and innovation.  Corning, Kodak, Xerox, Westinghouse.  Out on Long Island, yes on the same island that now hosts the oh so politically correct Hamptons, was Grumman, grinding out Hellcats and Wildcats that helped on our march to victory in the Pacific against imperial Japan.  Victory, what a quaint term.  Now, economic news out of Rochester consists of how many more layoffs are coming out of Xerox or Kodak.  Meanwhile, back in Albany, you have the same set of buccaneers trying to figure how to pay off their constituencies by trying to find something else to tax.  New Jersey, speaking of innovation, was where Thomas Edison invented and innovated. 

California?  What’s to say. Other than the fact that California seems to be the harbinger of trends that sweep the nation.  Maybe, in the light of Hoover, when we are indeed thrown into a real depression, we can name our shantytowns Obamavilles or Pelosivilles.

But, after a century of this Ponzi scheme of creating coalitions of 51 percent to stick it to the other 49 percent, we only have one way to go.  Now you have to take city-wide extortion that metastasized to state wide extortion to a national scale.  And, somehow this model of economic extortion will now work on a federal level when it failed, over the long term, in various and sundry places at the local and state level.  And, internationally, wherever socialism has pushed out free-markets.

And, yet, the President of Cool, the President of “change” comes to Washington D.C. to promote an economic model that is failing or failed in so many diverse places by doubling down and trying to promote this last-century economic of political machine bossism (socialism, American style) on the country at large.  Yes, at this point, the productive 49 percent will no longer be able to vote with their feet, but they will vote with their cessation of productivity.

Sins of omission are venial; sins of commission are mortal.  Except the sin of omission that allowed Obama, with a knowing wink from the MSM, to hide the true ideologic identity of his impending presidency during the last campaign.  The omission was done wiht the intent to deceive; both Obama and the MSM knew that.

Change, change, change.  That was not fair warning because every presidental candidate has always projected himself as such an agent.  Seriously, when’s the last time a presidential candidate say “Vote for me because I’m a stick-in-the-mud like the guy I want to replace.”

No, this promise of “change” was purposely kept vague to hide an agenda that only now have become utterly manifest.  An agenda that amounts to transforming America into a EU social-welfare democracy.  To be sure the mask slipped a few times; the “spread the wealth” remark to Joe-the-plumber and Obama’s interview about bankrupting companies wanting to burn coal to generate electricity with “cap and trade.’

But, there was plenty of evidence that Obama was in the pocket of his socialist and Marxist mentors and professors.  There was no way that Obama didn’t know what Bill Ayers true views and background were.  He served as co-chair with Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to distribute some 100 million dollars of grant money.  There was evidence all over that Obama was an unreconstructed Marxist from the beginning.  But, like Carter, like Clinton, those embarrassing past fact were papered over by a compliant and fully knowing MSM.  We knew more about a pregnant 17 year-old, who couldn’t even vote, because she happened to be the daughter of a vice-presidential candidate.

Then came January 20th and the most expensive bait-and-switch in world history was unveiled–the economic “stimulus” bill.  This wasn’t creeping socialism; this was a full bore, in your face, coup d’etat.  Jefferson, Madison, take a hike, you’re history.  

So, now, the Democrats are trying to push this bill through before public opinion really trashes its chances of passage.  As I write, three Republicans have broken ranks and the Senate version will probably pass tomorrow.  I predict that the bill that will emerge from conference will merge the differences by authorizing spending for everything in the Senate and House versions; creating a bill that will almost definitely break a trillion dollars.

But, figures, especially one trillion, never lie and liars never figure.  The silver lining is that this bill, if it passes, will expend the good will and credibility, almost entirely, of Obama’s nascent administration.  All within the first month.  Bait-and-switch has a way of pissing people off.  

And, in the end, Obama will have been rolled, not by the GOP, but by his own party.  And, the credibility that will be needed to try to enact the rest of his agenda will no longer be present.

The socialist revolution planned by Obama and company may have been upended by hubris.  Hubris and the insularity of politicians that come from jurisdictions that sport one party rule and a whole lot of corruption on the side.

Let’s start with Pelosi.  She’s busily and bravely taking bullets for Obama in pushing a frankly socialist remake of America.  The results of her so-called stimulus plan is a grotesque caricature of the “tax and spend” liberal; so over the top that is will supply the likes of Jay Leno with jokes for the next century.   It is a spending plan that puts the US into the realm of financial stewardship reflective of a banana republic.  And, this, thankfully is its downfall; both of this particular piece of legislation and, hopefully, the rest of Obama’s agenda.  

But, this grotesque spending plan is the product of a congresswoman who inhabits a district from San Francisco where her chances of being picked off by a Republican challenger is somewhat less than zero.  This is the neighborhood of the Getty manse; the venue of Obama’s famous “bitter” remarks (except they really believe it there).  Further, she has plenty of personal wealth, to augment her congressional perks of power to easily insulate her from any of the economic hard times now rocking many of her fellow Americans.  The result is a completely tone deaf woman who thinks that cornering the condom market is economic stimulus.

The we have the exalted one; Obama.  As I type, he’s had four key nominations in serious ethical trouble; one for pay to play and three for taxes.  And, the grand solons of the MSM wring their hands as to how their exalted leader has such a flawed vetting process.  

The real answer is again the arrogance and insulation that comes from operating in the corrupt one-party rule of the Chicago Democrat political machine.  In Obama’s mind, there’s nothing wrong with his vetting because such vetting would be more than adequate in Chicago.  In Chicago, everyone has ethical skeletons in the closet.  To insist, in Chicago, on such things as being reasonable accurate with tax filing would amount to the pot calling the kettle black.  I suspect, so conditioned to ethical lapses, that the Obama team never even realized that people outside the bubble that is Chicago machine politics may actually object to failing to report and pay hundred of thousands of dollars in taxes.

Obama, like many of his fellow traveller in the Democrat caucus, have lived their entire lives using other people’s money.  Obama drew a salary as a ward heeler (the old fashioned term for “community organizer”).  And, his employer, ACORN made its mark by extorting  money for “free” home–the nidus of the sub prime meltdown.  Through these activities, Obama was deemed worthy to co-chair the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to distribute $100 million dollars to selected friends and do nothing to do the stated goal of the Challenge, improve public education.  This is the “executive” experience he now brings to the White House.  Then on to the Illinois State legislature, the US Senate and now President.  Obama’s a very wealthy man who never added one iota of wealth to the GDP.  

And, while in Chicago, his only experience with economic policy is Chicago economic policy.  The fine art of taxes and graft of the truly productive elements of the Northern Illinois economy; just enough squeeze but just short of the breaking point.  The result is a miserably expensive place to live.  Sales taxes hovering around ten percent.  Property taxes, as compared to my home town, that aren’t just a lot more but a lot more by almost an order of magnitude.

Obama’s vice-president, Biden, got himself elected to the US Senate two years out of law school.  Then kept getting re-elected and re-elected.  The job in the Senate is the only job Biden’s held and only paycheck he’s has drawn for his entire adult life.

Then’s there’s Daschle.  A man, since his exit from the Senate, who became a multi-millionaire trading in favors and connections.  Again, wealth without one iota of economic growth or innovation.  And, by the Biden’s standard of tax paying patriotism, Daschle is clearly un-American.  

Yet, Obama, with a knowing wink, hands his legacy over to Pelosi, to write a “stimulus” bill that is a Trojan Horse for the down payment on the new Socialist America.  To say the least, the gross excess is so excessive that it takes no effort to ridicule, it ridicules itself.  

In the process, we find Obama getting rolled by both parties.  First his “friends” in his party set him up with this “stimulus” and now the GOP is making him look like a fool for being within ten miles of this legislative dog.  Our enemies are very astutely weighing this sterling example of presidential leadership.  The real irony is that Obama is so bought into this “stimulus” that he’s practically committed to signing anything, including a pig with lipstick (couldn’t resist), that walks into the Oval Office with the word “stimulus” painted on it side.

Since his only “exeuctive” experience was giving money when chairiing the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, we have a man with none.  This was not an exercise in delegation, it was abdication of responsibility to Pelosi and the solons of the House Democratic Cacaus.  With similiar dithering on Gitmo, were going to just outsource torture.

At bottom, politics has rough principles of honesty.  Everything in politics consists of verbal agreements; you’re only as good as your word.  With fellow politicians and with the public.  Everyone knows to discount a certain amount of verbal hyperbole, but the bait-and-switch that is the Obama-Pelosi-Reid troika is the result of three politicians that don’t have the grounding that there are a lot of people who still value the fact that your word is your bond. 

In Chicago, there is essentially a breakdown of the rule of law.  A cynisicism governs all things public; born of a knowledge that everything is for sale.  And, it creates a seperation between those who nominally hold the public trust and those for whom they govern.  there exists a seperateness that politicians live in their own world and the subjects do what they can, after paying tribute, to keep government at arm’s length.  So inured is Chicago to this attitude that a politician like Obama can assume that this is just business as usual.  But, outside Chicago, outside safely Gerrymandered congressional districts are people who will look upon the lies of these insulated politicians and vote to counter these liars. 

When Obama arrived in the Senate and almost simultaneously started his run for President, he lived in a different world.  His was a world of essentially unbroken prosperity since the Reagan presidency starting in 1981.  Mr. Obama is part of that demographic in which people have spend most if not all of their adult lives, if not their entire lives, in an era of unbroken prosperity.  

In a similiar fashion, the high school class of 1972 was the last to face the prospect of the draft.  And, again we have a demographic that simply does not know war.  Not to in any denigrate the sacrifice of any of our servicemen, but the sum total of combat casualties from 1972 to the present was easily and tragically exceeded in a matter of days, if not a day, on many occasions in our countries military history.  Antietam.  Gettysburg.  Tarawa.  D-Day.  Ardennes, December 1944.  Iwo Jima.  Okinawa.  Again, a whole demographic has spent their lives, never contemporaneously, experiencing through their peers the combat experiences that other generations of Americans experienced.

So, we have a unique bubble in American history of peace and prosperity that probably has no parallel in American history; and probably in world history.  And, it bred a conceit that allowed many Americans to indulge in fantasies that the good times would roll on forever and we could always count on ever more and ever more.  We could engage in conceit of environmentalism that have us believe that we could regulate our carbon emissions and control our climate.  We could overthrow our hydrocarbon based economy and indulge in wind and solar power.  We could outsource all of our icky jobs, like drilling for oil, to some no-account third world country, expect cheap energy, and feel good about our environmental sensitivity because we swept that dirty activity under the rug and out of sight at our oh-so chic Starbucks.

Indeed, Obama sensed an opportunity to expand on these conceits in using discontent over the refusal to face up to the realities of our civilizational conflict with Islamic imperalism to gain the Oval Office.  But, to do so in a bait-and-switch fashion, to use the power of the office and the prosperity of Reagan’s economic policies, to create a European-style cradle-to-grave social democracy.  This was to be the culmination of the long march started by the 60’s radicals, like Ayers and Hillary Clinton, to finally put one of their own into the Oval Office.  We would finally do away with the evils of Reagan’s economic policies, our “Rambo” foreign policy, terminate the “war on terror” by abject dhimmhitude and deliver our national  sovereignty to the UN as its most loyal vassal.  But, this whole slight of hand would work in the era of good times and prosperity.  

But, on or about September 15, last year was the economic implosion caused by the sub-prime mortgage meltdown.  Courtesy, in part, by the corruption of his former employer, ACORN.  The economic crisis won him the presidential election that was to that point a toss-up.  But, the economic assumptions, the prosperity and the conceits that were Obama’s world and world view for all of his adult life were overturned.  The factor that won the election also gave Obama a radically altered world that he never experienced.

Now, the economic crisis, like war, has taken on a life of its own.  In doing so, this crisis is creating it own demands; demands that do not fit the agenda that existed prior to September 15th.

So, now Obama finds himself not in FDR’s shoes, but in Hoover’s shoes trying to operate in this new economic environment.  And, if he’s any student of history, it was Hoover, who spent three years of his presidency trying to do something that turned a recession into the depression.  And, like the Great Depression, this economic crisis and downturn has its roots in extremely injudicious governmental meddling. 

Obama’s spent his life using other people’s money.  So, he’s got exactly zero experience in what it takes to create wealth.  And, wealth creation is the only thing that will secure his legacy, a positive one that is.   But, he’s got people around him who know how.  His rich donors all know how or inherited wealth from ancestors who knew how.  Even his trust fund baby supporters should know that the size of those monthly trust fund checks are very dependent on the success of the underlying investments.

But, between those two giant ears buzzes a brain of a stone-cold socialist.  And, true to his baby boomer self, there remains a need to have it all–great legacy, peace on earth through surrender, socialist America, obeisance to the UN, world government.  An updated McGovernite world view of abortion, amnesty and acid.

So, while he needs to be paying off the 700 billion dollar TARP infusion of cash with economic growth policies, there is an internal conflict in Obama.  There is the inner Obama, the socialist Obama, that knows all the right answers and must have everyone marching lock-step to his patently and obviously correct world view.  There beats a heart that cannot trust that others actually have ideas of their own that are equally good.  Nor can he trust others to work out their own problems.  Yet, Obama’s legacy will hang in the balance on whether he can trust individual anonymous Americans, who through their own hard work, will lift up our economy again.  Or, will he place his legacy in the hands of people like Speaker Pelosi.  It simply runs against his Ivy-league roots to trust the entrepreneurial spirit of Joe-the-plumber over, say, our oh-so-polished oh-so-sophisticated tax-cheat Treasury Secretary.

Steven Chu, our new Energy Secretary, is symptomatic of the elite midnight dorm-room bull session governance we are going to be getting.  Here’s a guy who’s going to push energy policy into the arena of hair-brain and exorbitantly expensive alternatives in the name of the fraud that is man-made global warming.  Like the fraud of eugenics, global warming has become a political and social movement; because it factual, scientific basis is in tatters.  A century ago, eugenics was quite the rage.  It garnered support from the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow wilson, John Maynard Keynes, Margaret Sanger (a founder of Planned Parenthood) and Winston Churchill.  Funding from the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institute. And, now, history repeats with a new pseudo-scientific fraud that has as it principle argument support from the social register A-list.  

But, it goes further than that.  Like Obama, you’ve got a guys like Chu who know or is going to find the right answer.  Moreover, they have a monopoly on that right answer.

Wind power has been around  for centuries, since medieval Europe.  Solar power has been around for the better part of a century.  We’ve had steam cars and electric cars since the inception of the horseless carriage a century ago.  There’s nothing really new under the sun.  Every modern railroad locomotive is a diesel engine powering a generator to supply electricity to motor that turn the locomotive’s wheels.  Kinda like a Prius with steel wheels on rails.

But, in their conceit, Obama and his acolytes seem to think that they have an answer for our energy and transportation need that somehow has managed to elude thousands upon thousands of people who now work in our energy and transportation sectors.  The gasoline and diesel powered internal combustion engine dominates because it works the best.  If there were a better solution, someone, in the last century would have hit on it.  Would have hit on it long before the holy inspirational glow of  Obama shone forth from the Oval Office.

So, now we have a “stimulus” package that is going to run over Obama’s legacy like a freight train roaring along at 70 miles per hour.  It is a package that is so monstrous that it’s  a caricature of the tax-and-spend liberal.  It isn’t long before  the term ”welfare queen” comes back into common parlance. And, soon after that, the silent juxtaposition of the work “black.”  Obama, for the sake of his legacy better watch that one.

But, the silver lining is that this egregious overreach on the part of Pelosi will so damage the credibility of the Democrats that this bill is the only thing the Democrats are going to get past before inflationary pressures of loose money and trillions of federal spending ignite inflation the likes we haven’t seen since Carter.