The Moment of Truth for the Left has Arrived

By James Lewis, THE AMERICAN THINKER

If you haven't listened to Jeremiah Wright's hate sermons at Hugh Hewitt's website, you must do so.  Every American with open eyes and ears has to listen to the voice of racial hatred, coming not from the Klan but from a clergyman of the Christian Left. Reading his words isn't enough, because you won't hear the unmistakable meaning of his vocal intonations. If you are a person of good will you will feel upset. But it's of the utmost importance to understand this moment of truth.

Because Jeremiah Wright -- the respectful word "Reverend" seems grotesquely out of place now -- is shouting out the slander catechism of the Left. His sermons say exactly what other Leftists say in calm voices, over and over again. Mr. Wright just does it with real, raw hatred, and every new slam is cheered on by his jubilant congregation. His is not a lone voice. He just sings the music to fit the words.

We have been nursing a viper in our national bosom. Seven years after September 11, 2001, this is the moment of truth, when the Left must finally decide what side it's on. Wright's sermons may signal the end of the Obama campaign, and they may mean the breakup of the Democratic Party as we know it. I don't see how any centrist Democrat can still belong to this partyif Obama is its nominee. Jeremiah Wright may mean the historical end of the Civil Rights Era, because fifty years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,  the Left's presumption of victimhood and innocence is now gone.

The Rev is only the visible bulge of this lethal political tumor.  This is Saul Alinsky's sociopathic teachings on display,  and this is what Hillary Clinton learned back at Wellesley College.  It is the voice of feminists who hate all men, and of radicalized blacks who hate all whites.

Hate mongers collect injustices. If you and I did that, we could collect an endless laundry list about all the bad things somebody did to us. Maybe we have been hurt by men, or by women. Maybe we have been hurt by rich people, or by the angry poor. Maybe we have been hurt by Jews or blacks or whites, and we can put all our built-up rage on their heads. It's been done many times in the human past; that's exactly the psychology we see at work in Africa, the former Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka, and various Muslim nations (among others), when explosive massacres take place. Mob psychology has been manipulated by demagogues throughout history. This is simply the another version of the Kluxers and Jim Crow lynch mobs. Today I see that psychology clearly enough on the Left, but outside of the ranting rooms of verifiable paranoids I don't see it many other places in this country.

Selectively collected injustices can keep us on the boil for a lifetime, because we ruminate on and on in all our waking hours about all the terrible things people have done to us. That is what the Left feeds itself in an endless stream; it is not a healthy thing to do. But it's what Jeremiah Wright has done to himself and to his congregation -- and who knows to how many thousands of other people? -- for almost all of his adult life. This is the Grand Inquisitor's view of America, the enraged prosecution case, without even imagining the possibility of innocence. This is what demagogues and witchhunters have always done, but I had never thought I'd see it in my lifetime.

Most of us take a more balanced view on our lives; we've had undeserved good fortune some of the time, and we've suffered undeserved pain at other times. That's life. If you look at the facts of Jeremiah Wright's life, he has been a child of good fortune -- excellent schooling well into graduate school, privilege and money, the support of a community of believers, vast political clout in Chicago. But hate mongers don't think that way. They just collect more and more injustices as they go through life, and load it all onto some enemy. They are constantly reading the minds of the enemy -- whites and especially Jews, in the case of Mr. Wright -- and all they see there is malevolence. Evil is what evil sees.

For Jeremiah Wright, the enemy comes with a white skin. He has taken historical injustices and turned them into a lifelong call for vengeance. This is the official doctrine of Black Liberation Theology, and it is freely supported by powerful institutions on the religious Left. BLT's founder, Dr. Jim Cone, is a professor of systematic theology at the Union Theological Seminary. It's utterly bizarre but true.

So it's not just Senator Obama who is stuck with Mr. Wright today. We are all stuck with a rageful Left, which really wants to destroy rather than to build. They mentally rehearse perceived injustices over and over again, and they blame this country for all the evil in the world, including AIDS in the black community. They never look at another side. Many have no honest conception of other countries, other cultures, or other points of view. They are not balanced people.

So the entire American body politic has a festering sore on its hands. This will not go away by itself. It will not be bought off by more money. It must be repudiated by the sensible Left, if it is still there. Just as William F. Buckley denounced the anti-Semites on the right, and sensible Americans rejected segregation and the Klan, just as American unions expelled Stalinist unions from the AFL-CIO, the time has come for the decent Left to draw a bright line in the sand, and keep the hate mongers out.

The Democrats' cul-de-sac

By James Edmund Pennington

The current agony of the Democratic Party, which grows more acute every day, is laden with an unspoken truth. As the unending Clinton-Obama struggle drags on, the core unutterable reality for Democrats is simply this: because of the composition of the Party's domestic coalition, its continued electoral viability makes absolutely necessary perpetual capture of 90+% of the black vote.

Because of this grim fact -- of the Party's own making -- the Clinton/Obama fight is over. Obama has won, and every leading Democrat knows it. In short, because of his race, Obama must be awarded the Democratic nomination. So much for the myth of America's first major post-racial candidate.

Under no reasonably foreseeable set of future developments, including the possibility Obama's exposure as a fatally compromised candidate, can Obama be denied the nomination. Doing so would subject the Democratic Party to the unacceptable risk that it would alienate its most dependably monolithic voter bloc. Hence, the daily gnashing of teeth by Party elders and the demand, which grows more hysterical each day, that Clinton concede a contest that at present is nothing more than a hard fought stalemate.

Without keeping focused on the Democrats' self-chosen demographic cul-de-sac, the growing demands for Clinton's withdrawal would be inexplicable, indeed, outrageous. 

Imagine the current situation with identities reversed:  picture Clinton's having built up a small but, for nomination purposes, inadequate pledged delegate lead by winning states the vast majority of which she had no hope of carrying in November (e.g., Mississippi, Wyoming, South Carolina, Utah[!], Montana etc.); imagine further that Obama were nipping at her heels in pledged delegates because he had won practically every state which the Democrats will, or can reasonably hope to, win in November. Finally,  imagine that the media only recently had given serious attention to a potentially major political liability of Clinton's that called into question her electoral viability, and that a large test of that liability's weight was about to unfold in a key state for the Democrats: e.g., Pennsylvania.

Under this hypothetical scenario -- the perfect reverse of what the Party now faces -- does any even slightly knowledgeable observer of the US political scene not on drugs believe that the Party's VIPs and media sycophants would be demanding that Obama retire from the fight "for the good of the Party"? Inconceivable.

Rather than slink from the field, Obama would be rushing forward as the Party's savior, to rescue it from a candidate whose appeal is perversely concentrated in states which Democrats cannot win, and who may turn out to be terminally flawed by a recent revelation that is about to receive further critical testing in Pennsylvania. Calls for Obama's withdrawal from the fight by Clinton under these circumstances would be met with jeers and derision.

Why is it all so different in the real world set of facts? Why are the media and Party peasants, torches and pitchforks in hand, gathered at Clinton's door, and growing more menacing each day? The answer is race, race and race. Barack Obama, who risibly claims to be America's post-racial candidate, will one day be viewed as the most overtly racial candidate in the history of American presidential politics.

Obama's entire claim that he be awarded a nomination he has not yet won, and, by pledged delegates, cannot win, is based on the huge unstated racial premise that no black man who has fought to slightly better than a draw may be denied the Democratic Party presidential nomination. But the argument goes even further: that the very weighing process by Party leaders, called for where the primary contests produce no winner, cannot occur. 

Any other candidate with a slight but indecisive delegate lead permissibly could be denied the nomination, if, with all the facts in, the Party's leaders concluded he would be the weaker nominee. Indeed, the Party's nomination system was designed to create precisely this check on a democratically driven error. Obama's supporters (speaking for Obama, of course), in claiming that this result is impermissible, are arguing that the Democratic Party's existing presidential nomination system does not apply to blacks.    

That nomination process was designed to work just as it is now working, to afford Party seniors a final look, and the exercise of independent judgment, where two or more candidates fight to no decision in pledged delegates. In such circumstances, the Party's elders (its "superdelegates") weigh in, independently judging the candidates' qualifications, including their electability, and make the final choice. Unlike many of the primary and caucus voters, superdelegates don't have to exercise their judgment until the convention after the primary/caucus process and then the summer, with the benefit of all the information that has been revealed. Not a bad system for breaking ties, really. At any rate, that is the nomination system the Democrats created -- call it pure democracy, seasoned and improved where necessary, by the exercise of independent judgment from those who have devoted their lives to Party and the art of electoral politics.

But it would appear this is the nomination system of the Democratic Party in all instances save one: where one of the contestants to the stalemate is a black man. Then he, and not the other, must be awarded the nomination despite every other consideration that might disqualify him, were he a member of any other Party identity group. 

There can be no other justification for all of the following demands:

• that Clinton retire from the struggle before she is beaten;
  
• that the superdelegates not exercise independent judgment in circumstances plainly calling for such exercise after all the facts are in; and
  
• that the slimmest popular vote or delegate majorities, built up in large part before all the facts about both candidates were known, must be determinative (if that had been how the system was to work, why have superdelegates at all? They would not exist, and would have been replaced by the simple sentence: "Where neither candidate gains an absolute delegate majority from the primaries and caucuses, the nominee shall be the candidate receiving the greater number of delegates/popular votes.")

The word "audacity" comes to mind. All of these audacious claims by Obama's surrogates, supporters, and Democratic Party elders, are tenable only if Obama possesses some characteristic that trumps the Party's nomination system. And of course Obama does possess such a characteristic: he is the candidate of the only Democratic Party voter bloc whose near monolithic electoral loyalty allows it to dictate to the Party.

And so, no matter what comes tumbling out during the last phase of this increasingly bitter personal struggle, no matter what key voter demographic is conclusively revealed to be beyond Obama's reach, no matter what gross error of judgment Obama is shown to have committed, or lack of political courage he is justly seen to have exhibited and  to continue to exhibit, no matter how long and how closely he is shown to have been aligned with a  viciously lunatic and intensely anti-American race-hustler, the Party  cannot, and will not even engage in the weighing process called for by its rules, let alone deny Obama the nomination, after he has come this far. The risks of thereby fatally damaging its relationship with its most important and devoted coalition member are too great.

The Party leaders have thought this matter through and seen to the end with clear eyes. Assume the Clinton-Obama civil war shows the worst about Obama: that, after losing his umpteenth consecutive critical large state to Clinton (Pennsylvania), along with its white working class voters, Obama appears a likely November loser. Even then, the Party would prefer to go down to defeat with Obama than to endanger its mutually dependant and deleterious relationship with American blacks.

And so it is over... but not quite. Clinton, the politically undead,  staggers on, the wooden speeches,  the flat, grating voice, the forced humor, generating a mixture of pity, awe and vague nausea, as she vainly struggles against a foe she can neither name nor engage: her Party's devil's bargain with American blacks, a bargain that promises, in exchange for nearly all black votes all the time, fealty to certain imperatives, be it a continuation of social policies that are poisonous to blacks and the nation, silence and denial in the face of widespread destructive behavior patterns at the root of much of the black American dilemma, obsequious veneration of hate mongering, racial arsonist black "leaders", or,  as in the case of Obama, the nomination of  dangerously untested, thinly-resumed candidates who may be deeply flawed and unelectable. For forty years this has been the bargain and it must hold now.

And hold it will. No matter what the Clinton-Obama struggle reveals about the great unifier.

Look for Clinton to defeat Obama in Pennsylvania, particularly among the white working class, which saw the Wright videos but paid little attention to Obama's speech about them. Look also for continuing polls suggesting large defections of Clinton supporters to McCain in the event Clinton is rejected; and for revelations of previously unheard outrageous rantings by The Reverend Wright; and, possibly, for evidence placing Obama himself in the church on many pertinent days.

But none of this will matter. The devil's bargain trumps all. And so the continuing struggle between Clinton and Obama is merely a useless bloodletting, with casualties piling up, a gigantic battle of New Orleans, fought weeks after the war was decided.

If, as seems likely, the struggle continues until the last drop of good will between the combatants and their supporters is spilled, the wounds of the struggle so deepened as to be unhealable, and the faults of the inevitable winner laid bare for November to the Party's severe damage, can any injustice in this outcome be discerned?

Tragedy, by textbook definition, is the result of some enormous flaw in the one who suffers it. The  bargain the Democrats have made with American blacks - nearly all their votes in exchange for veto rights -- continues to perpetuate severe racial divisions in America, denies the reality of two generations'strenuous efforts by whites to behave fairly toward blacks, elevates racists and charlatans to positions of leadership among  blacks, perpetuates and intensifies blacks' negative feelings about whites while whites' behavior towards blacks steadily improves, and, worst of all, leaves large percentages of blacks in wretched conditions from which only honest discussion and honorable leadership could facilitate escape.

If this destructive bargain forces the Democratic Party to nominate a presidential candidate revealed deeply flawed by the Party's own nomination process, it would take the resurrected Bard himself to write the play.

Pastor Disaster: The Great Obama

By John H. Hinderaker, POWERLINE

America, and especially the America of our imagination, is the land of self-making and the self-made. Our presidential politics are far from the exclusive domain of the self-made, but our most interesting presidents (e.g., Johnson, Nixon, Clinton) tend to come from that category.

Barack Obama is the quintessential self-made man. He hails from the periphery, not just of our society but of our geographic boundaries. Lacking any relevant connections, he created his own -- with the Ivy League, with the legal elite, with community activists in a town where he was stranger, with black nationalists in that same town, and with rich backers there.

In literature, the connections the self-made man creates always come back to haunt him, and so it may now be with Obama. When this happens the question becomes: what lies at the core of the self-made man?

In literature, the answer often is, nothing other than the compulsion of self-making and the sum total of the connections and deals that this compulsion yielded. Who, at root, was Jay Gatsby?

But Obama is not a fictional character, nor does he seem superficial. Most of his connections may say nothing specific about his core, and in theory this could even be true about his church affiliation and his spiritual adviser. However, Obama's own writing suggests that his relationship with the Trinity Church and with Jeremiah Wright has been a deep one. He says he attended church regularly, except during specific periods such as after his first child was born. He says Rev. Wright had a significant influence on him and, in fact, played a major role in bringing him to Jesus.

If we take Obama at his word, his relationship with Wright was not pure opportunism. Rather there was an affinity. What was the nature of that affinity?

I think we should stipulate that it was not Wright's most extreme racist and anti-American pronouncements. But it also seems clear that it was not traditional Christian belief either. Obama was not looking for that -- indeed, he had rejected traditional Christianity before encountering Wright. As just noted, Wright brought him to Jesus. More precisely, Wright's brand of Christianity accomplished this.

What is that brand? According to Wright (for example, during his contentious interview with Sean Hannity last year), the brand is liberation theology. Liberation theology sees the Christian mission as bringing justice to oppressed people through political activism. In effect, it is a merger of Christianity with radical left-wing ideology. Black liberation theology, as articulated for example by James Cone who inspired Wright, emphasizes the racial aspect oppression.

It's easy to see why this brand of Christianity, and probably only this brand, could bring a left-wing political activist like Obama to Jesus.

How would the statements of Wright that have recently come to light be viewed in the context of liberation theology? In particular, employing the various terms Obama has used to describe Wrights statements, which ones would be "not particularly controversial," which would be "controversial" or "provocative," and which would be deplorable?

Comments about crimes against Palestinians would, I submit, fall within the mainstream of liberation theology, just as they do for most hard-leftists who don't put Christianity into the mix. Palestinians make the "A List" of oppressed victims of virtually every ideology that sees the world as divided into oppressors and the oppressed.

Comments about the U.S. treating some of its citizens as less than human, or bringing 9/11 on itself, or inflicting AIDs on black people would, I take it, be controversial and provocative even within the world of black liberation theology. One can believe that oppression is rampant and that the U.S. is heavily implicated, without going as far as Wright did in these remarks.

But Wright's remarks seem no worse than controversial and provocative within this framework. An oppressor will go to great lengths to oppress, and it is an open question just how far that imperative extends. Wright offers one possible answer to that question: there are virtually no limits. If that answer were beyond the pale of the black liberation theology of his congregation, Wright would not have survived and prospered there.

Moreover, certain comments of Michelle Obama are surely uncontroversial in the world of black liberation theology. It would, in fact, be most difficult to reconcile pride in America with that theology. The open question for its adherents is how low their estimation of America should be, and how low they think America would stoop. Pride in America would seem out of the question.

In sum, Barack Obama's close and longstanding affiliation with Wright and his church probably does tell us something important about the man. It doesn't tell us that he agrees with Wright's most extreme ravings, but it suggests that Obama is enough of a leftist to be attracted to, and comfortable at, a place where Wright's most extreme views, though controversial and provocative, are not outrageous.

Obama's current attempts to escape that inference likely have more to do self-making than with historical fact.

Nothing Left

By Michael Young

When Hezbollah official Imad Mughniyeh was assassinated earlier this month in Damascus, the collateral damage was felt in academic departments, newsrooms, think tanks, and cafes far and wide. That's because it quickly became apparent how wrong many of the alleged "experts" writing about the militant Shiite organization had been.

At Mughniyeh's funeral, Hezbollah leaders placed him in a trinity of party heroes "martyred" at Israeli hands. The secretary general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, vowed "open war" against Israel in retaliation. Tens of thousands of people attended the ceremony, and for days Hezbollah received condolences. Iranian officials stepped over each other to condemn the assassination, many of them affirming that Israel's demise was inevitable. In the midst of all this one thing was plain: Mughniyeh was a highly significant figure in Hezbollah, and the party didn't hide it.

And yet over the years, an embarrassing number of writers and academics with some access to Hezbollah dutifully relayed what party cadres had told them about Mughniyeh: He was unimportant and may even have been a figment of our imagination. It was understandable that Hezbollah would blur the trail of so vital an official, but how could those writing about the party swallow this line without pursuing the numerous sources that could confirm details of Mughniyeh's past? Their fault was laziness, and at times tendentiousness.

Hezbollah is adept at turning contacts with the party into valuable favors. Writers and scholars, particularly Westerners, who lay claim to Hezbollah sources, are regarded as special for penetrating so closed a society. That's why their writing is often edited with minimal rigor. Hezbollah always denied everything that was said about Mughniyeh, and few authors (or editors) showed the curiosity to push further than that. The mere fact of getting such a denial was considered an achievement in itself, a sign of rare access, and no one was about to jeopardize that access by calling Hezbollah liars.

But there was more here than just manipulation. The Mughniyeh affair highlights a deeper problem long obvious to those who follow Hezbollah: The party, though it is religious, autocratic, and armed to the teeth, often elicits approval from secular, liberal Westerners who otherwise share nothing of its values. This reaction, in its more extreme forms, is reflected in the way many on the far left have embraced Hezbollah's militancy, but also that of other Islamist groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad—thoroughly undermining their ideological principles in the process.

The primary emotion driving together the far-left and militant Islamists, but also frequently prompting secular liberals to applaud armed Islamic groups as well, is hostility toward the United States, toward Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, and, more broadly, toward what is seen as Western-dominated, capitalist-driven globalization.

Fred Halliday, himself a man of the left, wrote scathingly of the dangers in the accommodation between Islamists and the left based on a perception of shared anti-imperialism: "All of this is—at least to those with historical awareness, skeptical political intelligence, or merely a long memory—disturbing. This is because its effect is to reinforce one of the most pernicious and inaccurate of all political claims, and one made not by the left but by the imperialist right. It is also one that underlies the U.S.-declared ‘war on terror' and the policies that have resulted from 9/11: namely, that Islamism is a movement aimed against 'the west.'"

A bizarre offshoot of this trend has been the left's elevation of Islamist "resistance" to the level of a fetish. You know something has gone horribly wrong when the writer and academic Norman Finkelstein volunteers to interpret Hezbollah for you, before prefacing his comments with: "I don't care about Hezbollah as a political organization. I don't know much about their politics, and anyhow, it's irrelevant. I don't live in Lebanon."

In a recent interview on Lebanese television, Finkelstein made it a point of expressing his "solidarity" with Hezbollah, on the grounds that "there is a fundamental principle. People have the right to defend their country from foreign occupiers, and people have the right to defend their country from invaders who are destroying their country. That to me is a very basic, elementary and uncomplicated question."

It is indeed uncomplicated if you remain mulishly unwilling to move beyond the narrow parameters you've set for discussion. But the reality is that Hezbollah is an immensely complicated question in Lebanon, where a majority of people are at a loss about what to do with a heavily armed organization that has no patience for state authority, that refuses to hand its weapons over to the national army, that is advancing an Iranian and Syrian agenda against the legal Lebanese government, and that functions as a secretive Shiite paramilitary militia in a country where sectarian religious assertiveness often leads to conflict. That many Lebanese should have seen Finkelstein praise what they feel is Hezbollah's most dangerous attributes was surpassed in its capacity to irritate only by the fact that he lectured them on how armed resistance was the sole option against Israel, regardless of the anticipated destruction, "unless you choose to be [Israeli] slaves—and many people here have chosen that."

But Finkelstein is no worse than Noam Chomsky, or that clutter of "progressive" academics and intellectuals who, at the height of the carnage during the 2006 Lebanon war, signed on to a petition declaring their "conscious support for the Lebanese national resistance," described resistance as "an intellectual act par excellence" and condemned the Lebanese government for having distanced itself from Hezbollah, even though the party had unnecessarily provoked a devastating Israeli military onslaught that led to the death of over 1,200 people.

This behavior comes full circle especially for the revolutionary fringe on the left, which seems invariably to find its way back to violence. In the same way that Finkelstein can compare Hezbollah admiringly to the Soviet Red Army and the communist resistance during World War II ("it was brutal, it was ruthless"), he sees in resistance a quasi-religious act that brooks no challenge, even from its likely victims. What is so odd in Finkelstein and those like him is that the universalism and humanism at the heart of the left's view of itself has evaporated, to be replaced by categorical imperatives usually associated with the extreme right: blood; honor; solidarity; and the defense of near-hallowed land.

Blind faith in the service of total principle is what makes those like Finkelstein and Chomsky so vile. But their posturing is made possible because of the less ardent secular liberal publicists out there who surrender to the narratives that Islamists such as Hezbollah, Hamas, or others peddle to them—lending them legitimacy. That's because modern scholarship, like liberalism itself, refuses to impose Western cultural standards on non-Westerners. Fine. But as the Mughniyeh case shows, when Islamists dominate the debate affecting them, there are plenty of fools out there dying to be tossed a bone.

Reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

The Arabs and Obama

by Lee Smith

Last week Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Tamara Coffman Wittes reported from a conference in Qatar that Barack Obama's candidacy is all the rage in the Arab Gulf states.

A friend from the Gulf tells me her young relative was so excited about the Democratic candidate that he tried to donate money over the Internet, as he'd heard so many young Americans were doing. Then he found out he had to be a U.S. citizen to do so. Another young woman, visiting from next-door Saudi Arabia, said that all her friends in Riyadh are “for Obama.” The symbolism of a major American presidential candidate with the middle name of Hussein, who went to elementary school in Indonesia, certainly speaks to Muslims abroad.

That's an interesting way to make a point lost on most American commentators: Barack Obama's father was Muslim and therefore, according to Islamic law, so is the candidate. In spite of the Quranic verses explaining that there is no compulsion in religion, a Muslim child takes the religion of his or her father.

The point of course is not that Obama is really a Muslim, because in America he is whatever he says he is. American ideas about such things as choice, religion, freedom of expression – including the freedom to choose your own faith – are different from the rest of much of the world. For us, a man is whatever religion he wants to practice, or not practice. But for Muslims around the world, non-American Muslims at any rate, they can only ever see Barack Hussein Obama as a Muslim.

It's useful keeping in mind that difference between how Americans see our lives and our actions and how others see us, given that one of the chief conceits of the Obama campaign is that a president of his biological identity will redeem our reputation around the world after George Bush enflamed the better part of humanity by invading two Muslim countries.

Or, as Fareed Zakaria put it:

We're moving into a very new world… For America to thrive, we will have to develop a much deeper, richer, more intuitive understanding of them and their peoples. There are many ways to attain this, but certainly being able to feel it in your bones is one powerful way.
Perhaps this is the only obvious strategy available to a presidential candidate whose Washington experience to date has afforded him little time to grasp the niceties of policy-making. And indeed there's already evidence that some Middle Easterners, or the people in whose part of the world the United States has expended vast human and material resources over the last six years, are not impressed with Obama.

Over at From Beirut to the Beltway, Abu Kais gives low scores to a recent Obama recent speech about Lebanon.

From Now Lebanon:

“Washington must rectify the wrong policy of President George Bush in Lebanon and resort to an efficient and permanent diplomacy, rather than empty slogans,” [Obama] added. He also said that the US must cooperate with its European and Arab allies to sponsor an inter-Lebanese consensus on a stable and democratic Lebanon.

To which Abu Kais replies:

What kind of diplomacy that has not been tried before by the “Europeans and Arab allies” will help Lebanon? I am not going to defend the Bush administration's policy in Lebanon. It may reek of “empty slogans” at times, but how does talking to criminals create solutions? And pray explain how supporting the Hariri tribunal, as Obama said he does, can be reconciled with chatting up the ones who killed him?

Lebanese journalist Michael Young and Iraqi blogger Iraqpundit have expressed their reservations about one of Obama's foreign policy advisers, Samantha Power. The self-described “Genocide Chick” seems to them insufficiently concerned that an American withdrawal from Iraq will lead to genocide. Her solution? Move people from one area to another and give money to Iraq's neighbors to stabilize the country. You can't blame her for basically parroting the egregiously cynical recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, but in reality this means that US forces should be complicit in the sectarian cleansing of Iraq and pay off countries like Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia that have themselves funded and supported death squads targeting Iraqi Shias, Kurds and Sunnis as well as US troops.

It's true that the Lebanese and Iraqis have benefited, and suffered, more than anyone from the Bush White House's regional transformation program, so you can't hold it against them if they're more interested in a man's ideas than in the faith he professes or the color of his skin.

Other Arabs apparently think that the color of man's skin should matter, but are not sure it will, like Hezbollah friendly-analyst Amal Saad-Ghoraye.

“There's always the sense that African-Americans would be more sympathetic (to Arabs), because they're oppressed too,” Saad-Ghorayeb said. “But,” she added, “that wasn't really the case with Colin Powell or Condi Rice, was it?”

In fact, Secretary Rice really does believe that African-Americans and Arabs have something in common, which is why she has likened, for better or worse, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to Martin Luther King, Jr. and thrown all her weight behind a Palestinian state that only she seems to believe in at this point. She hasn't gotten much credit for her efforts, or her race for that matter. When she was named Secretary of State, the Saudi press outdid themselves in lampooning the first black woman to serve as America's top diplomat.

“They exaggerated her features and were amazingly crude and disrespectful in showing her body,” Peter Theroux told me. Theroux was asked to serve under Rice as Persian Gulf director from 2003-2005 when she was the National Security Adviser. “One cartoon from the daily Al-Watan showed her as a boxer with boxing gloves, hitting a punching bag shaped like an Arab; with her wearing some form-fitting thing that showed the shape of her breasts. You never, ever see Saudi newspaper cartoons show any woman that way, let alone a senior official in an allied government. But with Rice being black, and a woman, an infidel, and wielding power - I think that just pushed them over the edge.”

I was in Beirut when she first traveled there as Secretary in the summer of 2005 to show her support for an Arab society that had just come out of fifteen years of Syrian occupation. The pro-Syrian opposition protested her visit, including Hezbollah supporters who marched with placards that would have made a Klansman proud – “N——r,” read one sign with a picture of Ms. Rice's face, “go home.”

Sure, there are numerous instances of dark-skinned people who won respect in the Muslim world, like Bilal ibn Ribah, the first muezzin, a slave of East African origins whose allegedly sonorous voice won him the admiration of the prophet of Islam and earned him the right to call the early Muslim community to prayer.

And then there was the revolt of the Zanj, the East African slaves whose uprising in Basra against the Abbasids from 869 to 883 AD is a key historical episode for Arab, especially Iraqi, communists.

But generally, it should come as no surprise to anyone save the most cloistered third-world fantasists, that a society which discriminates against sex, religion, ethnicity, language, nation, tribe, and family is not likely to have very progressive attitudes about race. Arab society, like many others, has a race problem. For instance, abd, or slave, is a word commonly used to refer to blacks, regardless of a man's stature, or his faith.

لا تشتري العبد إلا والعصا معه ….. إن العبيد لأأنجاس مناكيدو

“Don't buy a slave unless you get a stick, too,” wrote Al-Mutanabi, the incomparable tenth-century Baghdad poet. “For slaves are vile and vexing.”

The poet directed the line at the black Muslim commander he had once served. I found it posted recently on a Syrian Web site as a comment on Obama's mild rebuke of the Damascus regime.

So, if we're concerned about how we look to the rest of the world, we should at least recognize how much of the world looks at things. Laugh as some may about the Bush Administration's idea to export democracy to the Middle East, they had the basic principle right. The world needs our help more than we need to petition its approval. We are a people who choose our own faith, and, after a civil war and a civil rights movement, a nation where the dignity of each individual human being is accorded respect, and men and women are equal regardless of race, sex, religion or creed.

The Middle East is not like that and George W. Bush thought it wise, for the sake of Arabs and Americans, to try to do something about it, an initiative that inspired some Arabs while it enraged others. (So now guess who the good guys are in the Middle East and who are the bad ones?) What made them like or dislike Bush wasn't the color of the president's skin or his religious faith, but his ideas. It's not clear to me why Americans seem now to be trying to export a very un-American idea - that a man's color and his faith matter.

Why Democrats Are Kicking the Clintons to the Curb

By Lorie Byrd

Hillary Clinton's recent primary losses to Barack Obama may say as much about Democrats' desires to be done with the Clintons as they do about the cult of personality that is Obama.

Some say Hillary is now paying for the sins of her husband. I agree that may be true to some degree, but in many cases she was an accomplice to those sins and has only herself to blame. I have wondered for some time whether or not Americans would want another soap opera presidency and I think we are seeing the answer in the most recent primary vote counts. There are many reasons Democrats have to send the Clintons packing. Here are a few:

1. Democrats don't want a return to non-stop scandal defense mode. Democrats like to wrap the Clinton scandals up in a blue dress and say they were all about sex, but that is ridiculous. There were numerous scandals in the Clinton White House well before anyone knew who Monica Lewinski was and many of them involved Hillary. The travel office firings, subpoenaed billing records, Whitewater, and FBI files are only the beginning of the list. It goes on for a while and includes names like Vince Foster, Johnny Chung, and the FALN.

Why on earth would Democrats want to sign up for a second ride on the Clinton scandal train when they could opt for a clean slate candidate? Besides, it would not be so easy to deflect future scandals as it was previous ones. I don't think Ken Starr will be making a repeat performance as boogeyman and he was a necessary element to the Clinton scandal survival strategy. Without a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy to oppose, there is not so much enthusiasm for defending the Clintons.

I believe there is a whole group of Democrats out there who are secretly enjoying being able to vote against a Clinton. They can take out their frustrations with the Clintons and still vote for a Democrat. For the first time in 16 years, Democrats can vote against a Clinton without having to vote for a Republican to do it.

2. The Clinton is no longer the hip one in the race. Think about it. In Bill Clinton's presidential primary he was up against Paul Tsongas, Tom Harkin, Bob Kerrey, and some other people I don't even remember. In the general elections he was up against George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole. Hillary, in sharp contrast, is up against the Obamassiah who makes women swoon.

It is 16 years later and she is now the establishment candidate. What it comes down to is that even though Hillary was married to the "Man from Hope," now she faces a candidate much better at Hope-A-Dope (as Jon Henke calls it) than she and her husband ever dreamed of being. Instead of the Man from Hope that Bill Clinton was, Hillary is in many ways just "The Man" who stands in the way of the first black President of the United States. (Yeah, that's right - it wasn't Bill Clinton, regardless of what Toni Morrison said.)

3. Not only is Hillary not hip enough, but she is not liberal enough for the Democrat base. Democrats, like Republicans, will settle for a moderate if they are desperate enough for a win and if they believe that person has the best chance of getting elected, but not if they have a more liberal candidate who appears to have just as good a chance to win in the general election. Hillary is far from a moderate. She is definitely liberal, but on some issues she has angered her base by not being liberal enough, or at least not being in step with the far left in the base - most notably on the issue of Iraq. Barack Obama has the distinction of having the most liberal voting record in the Senate.

Although things look really bad for Hillary Clinton at this point, and many have said she is done, I will never count a Clinton out until the last vote is cast. But even if Hillary pulls a rabbit out of her hat on March 4, and some super delegates out of it after that, a statement has been made by many Democrats. The Clinton magic as we once knew it is gone. The Elvis in Bill Clinton left the building long ago and Hillary's inevitability went with it. I suspect many Democrats are cleansing their political souls in the process.

Lorie Byrd is a Townhall.com columnist and blogs at Wizbang

Clinton v. Obama: The Lawsuit

By Theodore B. Olson

What splendid theater the Democratic Party presidential nominating process is shaping up to be. And they are just getting started. The real fun would be a convention deadlock denouement a few months from now, the prospect of which is already quickening the pulses of scores of Democratic lawyers who have been waiting more than seven years for an encore of their 2000 presidential-election performances.

Press reports following super-duper Tuesday's primaries and caucuses gave Sen. Clinton a narrow popular vote lead over Barack Obama. At the same time, Sen. Obama's supporters were claiming a narrow lead among pledged delegates. The delegate count keeps changing, of course, and Sen. Clinton's team is also claiming a delegate lead, based in part on a larger share so far of what are known in Democratic Party circles as superdelegates: 796 slots (20% of the total) set aside for members of Congress and a menagerie of assorted elected officials and party Pooh-Bahs.

These superdelegates, Byzantine hyper-egalitarian Democratic Party delegate selection formulas, and the fact that many delegates are selected at conventions or by caucuses rather than primaries, combine to offer the distinct possibility that by convention time the candidate leading in the popular vote in the primaries will be trailing in the delegate count.

How ironic. For over seven years the Democratic Party has fulminated against the Electoral College system that gave George W. Bush the presidency over popular-vote winner Al Gore in 2000. But they have designed a Rube Goldberg nominating process that could easily produce a result much like the Electoral College result in 2000: a winner of the delegate count, and thus the nominee, over the candidate favored by a majority of the party's primary voters.

Imagine that as the convention approaches, Sen. Clinton is leading in the popular vote, but Sen. Obama has the delegate lead. Surely no one familiar with her history would doubt that her take-no-prisoners campaign team would do whatever it took to capture the nomination, including all manner of challenges to Obama delegates and tidal waves of litigation.

Indeed, it has already been reported that Sen. Clinton will demand that the convention seat delegates from Michigan and Florida, two states whose delegates have been disqualified by the party for holding January primaries in defiance of party rules. The candidates agreed not to campaign in those states. But Sen. Clinton opted to keep her name on the Michigan primary ballot, and staged a primary-day victory visit to Florida, winning both of those unsanctioned primaries. Her campaign is arguing that the delegates she won in each state be recognized despite party rules and notwithstanding her commitment not to compete in those primaries. Of course. "Count every vote."

As the convention nears, with Sen. Clinton trailing slightly in the delegate count, the next step might well be a suit in the Florida courts challenging her party's refusal to seat Florida's delegation at the convention. And the Florida courts, as they did twice in 2000, might find some ostensible legal basis for overturning the pre-election rules and order the party to recognize the Clinton Florida delegates. That might tip the balance to Sen. Clinton.

We all know full well what could happen next. The array of battle-tested Democratic lawyers who fought for recounts, changes in ballot counting procedures, and even re-votes in Florida courts and the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 would separate into two camps. Half of them would be relying on the suddenly-respectable Supreme Court Bush v. Gore decision that overturned the Florida courts' post-hoc election rules changes. The other half would be preaching a new-found respect for "federalism" and demanding that the high court leave the Florida court decisions alone.

Would the U.S. Supreme Court even take the case after having been excoriated for years by liberals for daring to restore order in the Florida vote-counting in 2000? And, would Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, the dissenters in Bush v. Gore, feel as strongly about not intervening if Sen. Obama was fighting against an effort to change a presidential election by changing the rules after the fact? Will there be a brief filed by Floridians who didn't vote in their state's primary because the party had decided, and the candidates had agreed, that the results wouldn't count?

In short, the way things are going so far, Sens. Obama and Clinton will probably be so close to one another in delegate count by the time of the convention that all those primary votes may be tabulated, but will turn out to be irrelevant to the outcome. Those 796 superdelegate politicians will decide who the candidate will be. Maybe no cigar or cigarette smoke this time, but back-room politics all the same. All those primary voters and millions in campaign expenses locked out of the room.

This may be one of those déjà vu fantasies that won't happen. But it did happen before. And Florida has a quirky habit of popping up again and again in close presidential elections, having been a factor not only in 2000, but also the epic presidential election controversy of 1876. And Democratic lawyers have undoubtedly kept copies of the legal briefs they filed for Al Gore in 2000 into which their computers can easily substitute the name Clinton for Gore.

If it does happen, I'd be more than happy to loan Sen. Obama the winning briefs that helped secure the election of the legitimate winner of the 2000 election, George W. Bush.

Mr. Olson, a lawyer in Washington, D.C. and a former solicitor general of the United States, represented George W. Bush before the Supreme Court in 2000 in Bush v. Gore.

Hillary clinton and the radical left

By David Horowitz

MY SUBJECT is Hillary Clinton in her role as America's foremost leftist. This is not an obvious idea to those leftists who identify themselves as radicals. Purists of the creed are likely to regard both Clintons as opportunists and sellouts of their cause. But the left is not and has never been a political monolith, and its factions have always attacked each other almost as ferociously as their political enemies.

It is possible to be a socialist, and radical in one's agendas, and yet moderate in the means one regards as practical to achieve them. To change the world, it is first necessary to acquire cultural and political power. And these transitional goals may often be accomplished by indirection and deception even more effectively than by frontal assault. Political stratagems that appear moderate and compromised to radical factions of the left may present an even greater threat from the perspective of the other side. In 1917, Lenin's political slogan wasn't "Socialist Dictatorship! Firing Squads and Gulags!" It was "Bread, Land and Peace."

Yet Hillary Clinton as America's "first lady of the left," is also not an obvious subject to many conservatives. And since conservative politics begins with the defense of America's constitutional order, this is a far more significant matter. Underestimating the foe on any battlefield can be a fatal fault; in politics likewise.

This problem is exemplified in a brilliantly etched and elegantly deconstructed portrait of Mrs. Clinton by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan. Thus, the focus of The Case Against Hillary Clinton is not Mrs. Clinton's kitsch Marxism or perverse feminism or cynical progressivism. Instead, it is her narcissism. It is this psychological nexus in which Noonan finds the key to Hillary Clinton's public persona. It is almost as though Mrs. Clinton's politics were merely instrumental to her career, as changeable as her famous hairstyles.

"Never has the admirable been so fully wedded to the appalling," Noonan writes of the subject and her faithless spouse. "Never in modern political history has such tenacity and determination been marshaled to achieve such puny purpose: the mere continuance of Them."

The wit is sharp but the point just wide of the mark. There are many unprincipled narcissists in politics. But there has never been a White House so thoroughly penetrated by the political left. Noonan's psychological characterization is surely correct. But if Hillary and Bill Clinton were unable to draw on the dedication and support of the left—if they were Republicans, for example—there would be no prospect of a continuance of Them.

Ever since abandoning the utopian illusions of the progressive cause, I have been struck by how little the world outside the left seems to actually understand it. How little those who have not inhabited the progressive mind are able to grasp the ruthless cynicism behind its idealistic mask or the fervent malice that drives its hypocritical passion for "social justice."

No matter how great the crimes progressives commit, no matter how terrible the future they labor to create, no matter how devastating the catastrophes they leave behind, the world outside the faith seems ever ready to forgive them their "mistakes" and to grant them the grace of "good intentions."

It would be difficult to recall, for example, the number of times I have been introduced on conservative platforms as "a former civil rights worker and peace activist in the 1960s." I have been described this way despite having written a detailed autobiography that exposes these self-glorifying images of the left as so many political lies. Like many New Left leaders whom the young Mrs. Clinton once followed (and who are her comrades today), I regarded myself in the 1960s as a socialist and a revolutionary. No matter what slogans we chanted, or ideals we proclaimed our agendas always extended beyond (and well beyond) the immediate issues of "civil rights" and "peace."

New Left progressives—including Hillary Clinton and her comrade, Acting Deputy Attorney General Bill Lann Lee—were involved in supporting, or protecting or making excuses for violent anti-American radicals abroad like the Vietcong and anti-American criminals at home like the Black Panthers.* We did this then—just as progressives still do now—in the name of "social justice" and a dialectical world-view that made this deception appear ethical and the fantasy seem possible.

As a student of the left, Jamie Glazov, has observed in an article about the middle-class defenders of recently captured Seventies terrorist Kathy Soliah: "if you can successfully camouflage your own pathology and hatred with a concern for the 'poor' and the 'downtrodden,' then there will always be a 'progressive' milieu to support and defend you."* Huey Newton, George Jackson, Bernadine Dohrn, Sylvia Baraldini, Rubin Carter, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rigoberta Menchu and innumerable others have all discovered this principle in the course of their criminal careers.

There is a superficial sense, of course, in which we were civil rights and peace activists—and that is certainly the way I would have described myself at the time, particularly if I were speaking to a non-left audience. It is certainly the way Mrs. Clinton and my former comrades in the left refer to themselves and their pasts in similar contexts today.

But they are lying. (And when they defend racial preferences now—a principle they denounced as "racist" then—even they must know it).

The first truth about leftist missionaries, about believing progressives, is that they are liars. But they are not liars in the ordinary way, which is to say by choice. They are liars by necessity—often without even realizing that they are. Because they also lie to themselves. It is the political lie that gives their cause its life.

Why, for example, if you were one of them, would you tell the truth? If you were serious about your role in humanity's vanguard, if you had the knowledge (which others did not), that you were certain would lead them to a better world, why would you tell them a truth that they could not "understand" and that would hold them back?

If others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as a "vanguard." You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite, whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the promised horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the vanguard of the saints.

That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a social redeemer. To feel anointed. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism.

That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in their wake. That is why they don't care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than all the injustices they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their "mistakes." That is why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth.

If you were active in the so-called "peace" movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you tell people that no, you weren't really a "peace activist," except in the sense that you were against America's war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that while you called yourselves "peace activists," you didn't oppose the Communists' war, and were gratified when America's enemies won?

What you were really against was not war at all, but American "imperialism" and American capitalism. What you truly hated was America's democracy, which you knew to be a "sham" because it was controlled by money in the end. That's why you wanted to "Bring the Troops Home," as your slogan said. Because if America's troops came home, America would lose and the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be one step closer.

But you never had the honesty—then or now—to admit that. You told the lie then to maintain your influence and increase your power to do good (as only the Chosen can). And you keep on telling the lie for the same reason.

Why would you admit that, despite your tactical support for civil rights, you weren't really committed to civil rights as Americans understand rights? What you really wanted was to overthrow the very Constitution that guaranteed those rights, based as it is on private property and the individual—both of which you despise.

It is because America is a democracy and the people endorse it, that the left's anti-American, but "progressive" agendas can only be achieved by deceiving the people. This is the cross the left has to bear: The better world is only achievable by lying to the very people they propose to redeem.

Despite the homage contemporary leftists pay to post-modernist conceits, despite their belated and half-hearted display of critical sentiment towards Communist regimes, they are very much the ideological heirs of Stalinist progressives, who supported the greatest mass murders in human history, but who remember themselves as civil libertarian opponents of McCarthy and victims of a political witch-hunt. (Only the dialectically gifted can even begin to follow the logic involved.)

To appreciate the continuity of communism in the mentality of the left, consider how many recent Hollywood promotions of the industry Reds and how many academic apologies for Stalinist crimes (in fact, the vast majority of recent academic texts on the subject) have been premised on the Machiavellian calculations and Hegelian sophistries I have just described.

Naturally, today's leftists are smart enough to distance themselves from Soviet Communism. But the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev was already a critic of Stalin forty years ago. Did his concessions make him less of a Communist? Or more?

On the other hand, conservative misunderstanding of the left is only in part a product of the left's own deceits. It also reflects conservatives' inability to understand the religious nature of the progressive faith and the power of its redemptive idea. For instance, I'm often asked by conservatives about the continuing role and influence of the Communist Party, since they observe quite correctly the pervasive presence of so many familiar totalitarian ideas in our academic and political culture. Though still around and sometimes influential in the left, the Communist Party has been a minor player for nearly fifty years. How can there be a communist left (small "c" of course) without a Communist Party?

The short answer is that it was not the Communist Party that made the left, but the (small 'c') communist Idea. It is the idea, as old as the Tower of Babel, that humanity can build a highway to Heaven. It is the idea of returning to an Earthly Paradise, a garden of social harmony and justice. It is the idea that inspires Jewish radicals and liberals of a tikkun olam, a healing of the cosmic order. It is the Enlightenment illusion of the perfectibility of man. And it is the siren song of the serpent in Eden: "Eat of this Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and you shall be as God."

The intoxicating vision of a social redemption achieved by Them—this is what creates the left, and makes the believers so self-righteous.

And it did so long before Karl Marx. It is the vision of this redemption that continues to inspire and animate them despite the still-fresh ruins of their Communist dreams.

It is this same idea that is found in the Social Gospel which impressed the youthful Hillary Clinton at the United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Illinois. She later encountered the same idea in the New Left at Yale and in the Venceremos Brigade in Communist Cuba, and in the writings of the New Leftist who introduced her to the "politics of meaning" even after she had become America's First Lady. It is the idea that drives her comrades in the Children's Defense Fund, the National Organization for Women, the Al Sharpton House of Justice and the other progressive causes which for that reason still look to her as a political leader.

For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal—"social justice"—is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. "Social Justice" for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself.

Even though they are too prudent and self-protective to name this future anymore, the post-Communist left still passionately believes it possible. But it is a world that has never existed and never will. Moreover, as the gulags and graveyards of the last century attest, to attempt the impossible is to invite the catastrophic in the world we know.

But the fall of Communism taught the progressives who were its supporters very little. Above all, it failed to teach them the connection between their utopian ideals and the destructive consequences that flowed from them. The fall of Communism has had a cautionary impact only on the overt agendas of the political left. The arrogance that drives them has hardly diminished. The left is like a millenarian sect that erroneously predicted the end of the world, and now must regroup to revitalize its faith.

No matter how opportunistically the left's agendas have been modified, however, no matter how circumspectly its goals have been set, no matter how generous its concessions to political reality, the faithful have not given up their self-justifying belief that they can bring about a social redemption. In other words, a world in which human consciousness is changed, human relations refashioned, social institutions transformed, and in which "social justice" prevails.

Because the transformation progressives seek is ultimately total, the power they seek must be total as well. In the end, the redemption they envision cannot be achieved as a political compromise, even though compromises may be struck along the way. Their brave new world can ultimately be secured only by the complete surrender of the resisting force. In short, the transformation of the world requires the permanent entrenchment of the saints in power. Therefore, everything is justified that serves to achieve the continuance of Them.

In Peggy Noonan's psychological portrait of Hillary Clinton, one can trace the outlines of the progressive persona I have just described. She observes that the "liberalism" of the Clinton era is very different from the liberalism of the past. Clinton-era liberalism is manipulative and deceptive and not really interested in what real people think because "they might think the wrong thing."

That is why Hillary Clinton's famous plan to socialize American health care was the work of a progressive cabal that shrouded itself in secrecy to the point of illegality. Noonan labels Clinton-era politics "command and control liberalism," using a phrase with a familiar totalitarian ring. But, like so many conservatives I have come to know, Noonan is finally too decent and too generous to fully appreciate the pathology of the left.

She begins her inquiry by invoking Richard Nixon's comment that only two kinds of people run for high office in America, "those who want to do big things and those who want to be big people." She identifies both Clintons as "very much, perhaps completely, the latter sort," and clinically examines their narcissism by way of unlocking the mystery of who they really are.

Regarding the husband, Peggy Noonan is probably right. I do not think of Bill Clinton as a leftist inspired by ideas of a socially just world, or as having even a passing interest in the healing of cosmic orders. He is more readily understood as a borderline sociopath. Fully absorbed in the ambitions of self, Clinton is a political chameleon who assumes the coloration of his environments and the constituencies on which his fortunes have come to depend.

Hillary Clinton is not so slippery. Despite the cynicism she shares with her husband, one can clearly observe an ideological spine that creates political difficulties for her that one knows he would be able to avoid. This is not to deny the force of her personal ambitions or the power of her narcissistic regard. But these attitudes could be expected in any member of a self-selected elite, especially one like the left, which is based on moral election.

For this reason, it would be difficult to separate the narcissistic from the ideological in the psychology of any political missionary. Do they advance the faith for the sake of the faith, or because advancing the faith will turn them into saints? Do the Lenins of history sacrifice normal life in order to achieve "big things" or because they hunger for the canonization the achievements will bring? It is probably impossible to finally answer the question. But we can observe that the narcissism of Stalin—ex-seminarian, Father of the People and doer of epic revolutionary deeds—makes the Clintons' soap opera of self-love pale by comparison.

Despite their life-long collaboration, Bill and Hillary Clinton are different political beings in the end. Her marital rages provoked by a mate whose adolescent lusts put their collective mission at risk are probably a good measure of just how different they are.

"In their way of thinking," Noonan observes of the Clintons, "America is an important place, but not a thing of primary importance. America is the platform for the Clintons' ambitions, not the focus of them." The implication is that if they were principled emissaries of a political cause, the ambition to do big things for America would override all others. Instead, they have focused on themselves and consequently have made the American political landscape itself "a lower and lesser thing."

They have "behaved as though they are justified in using any tactic in pursuit of their goals," including illegality, deception, libel, threats and "ruining the lives of perceived enemies . . . " They believe, she continues, "they are justified in using any means to achieve their ends for a simple and uncomplicated reason. It is that they are superior individuals whose gifts and backgrounds entitle them to leadership." They do it for themselves; for the continuance of Them.

But the fact is they all do it. The missionaries of the big progressive causes, the Steinems, the Irelands, the Michelmans, the Friedans, and Hillary Clinton herself, were all willing to toss their feminist movement overboard to give Bill Clinton a pass on multiple sexual harassments, and on a career of sexual predation that reflects his utter contempt for the female gender.

Indeed, the Clinton-Lewinsky defense—accord which the feminists signed onto, can be regarded as feminism's Nazi-Soviet Pact. Their calculation was both simple and crude: If Clinton was removed, Hillary would go too. But she was their link to patronage and power, and they couldn't imagine losing that. Their kind was finally in control of the White House, and the conservative enemies of their beautiful future were not.

Almost a decade earlier—in the name of the very principles they so casually betrayed for Clinton—the same feminists had organized the most disgraceful lynching of a public figure in America's history. Despite fiercely proclaimed commitments to the racial victims of American persecution, they launched a vicious campaign to destroy the reputation of an African American jurist who had risen, unblemished, from dirt-shack poverty in the segregated south to the nation's highest courts. They did it knowingly, cynically, with the intent to destroy him in his person, and to ruin his public career.

Has there ever been a more reprehensible witch-hunt in American public life than the one organized by feminist leaders who then emerged as vocal defenders of the White House lecher? Was there ever a more sordid betrayal of common decency than this collective defamation—for which no apology has or ever will be given?

What was the sin Clarence Thomas committed to earn such punishment? The allegation—that he had talked inappropriately ten years before to a female lawyer and made her uncomfortable—appears laughable in the post-Lewinsky climate of presidential gropings and borderline rapes that the same feminists have sanctioned for their political accomplice. Thomas' real crime, as everybody knew but was too intimidated by the hysteria to confirm at the time, was his commitment to constitutional principles they hated. They hated these principles because the Constitution was written for the explicit purpose of preventing the realization of their socialist and egalitarian dreams.

Peggy Noonan is right. The focus of Hillary Clinton's ambition is not her country. But it is not just herself either. It is also a place that does not exist. It is the vision of a world that can only be achieved when the Chosen accumulate enough power to change this one.

That is why Hillary and Sid Blumenthal, her fawning New Left Machiavelli, call their own political philosophy the politics of "The Third Way." This distinguishes it from the "triangulation" strategy Dick Morris used to resurrect Bill Clinton's presidency. Morris guided Clinton, in appropriating specific Republican policies towards a balanced budget and welfare reform as a means of securing his re-election. Hillary Clinton was on board for these policies, and in that sense is a triangulator herself. But "triangulation" is too merely tactical and too morally crass to define a serious political philosophy. Above all, it fails to project the sense of promise that intoxicates the imaginations of self-styled "progressives." That is why Hillary and Sid call their politics "The Third Way."

"The Third Way" is a familiar term from the lexicon of the left with a long and dishonorable pedigree in the catastrophes created by messianic socialists in the 20th Century. It is the most ornate panel in the tapestry of deception I described at the beginning of this essay.

In the 1930s, Nazis used "The Third Way" to characterize their own brand of national socialism as a equidistant between the "internationalist" socialism of the Soviet Union and the capitalism of the West. Trotskyists used "The Third Way" as a term to distinguish their own Marxism from Stalinism and capitalism. In the 1960s, New Leftists used "The Third Way" to define their politics as an independent socialism between the Soviet gulag and America's democracy.

But as the history of Nazism, Trotskyism and the New Left have shown, there is no "Third Way." There is the capitalist, democratic way based on private property and individual rights—a way that leads to liberty and universal opportunity. And there is the socialist way of group identities, group rights, a relentless expansion of the political state, restricted liberty and diminished opportunity. The Third Way is not a path to the future. It is just the suspension between these two destinations. It is a bad faith attempt on the part of people who are incapable of giving up their socialist schemes to escape the taint of their discredited past.

Is there a practical difference in the modus operandi of Clinton narcissism and Clinton messianism? I think there is, and it is the difference between "triangulation"—a cynical compromise to hang onto power until the next election cycle, and "The Third Way"—a cynical deception to ensure the continuance of Us, until we acquire enough power to transform everyone else. It is the difference between the politics of getting what you can, and the politics of changing the world.

A capsule illustration of these different political ambitions can be found in the book Primary Colors , which describes, in thinly veiled fiction, Bill Clinton's road to the presidency. Primary Colors is an admiring portrait not only of the candidate, but of the dedicated missionaries—the true believing staffers and the long-suffering wife—who serve Clinton's political agendas, but at the price of enabling the demons of self.

These staffers—political functionaries like Harold Ickes and George Stephanopoulos—serve as the flak-catchers and "bimbo eruption"—controllers who clean up his personal messes and shape his image for gullible publics. But they are also the idealists who design his message. And in the end, they enable him to politically succeed.

It is Primary Colors' insight into the minds of these missionaries that is revealing. They see Clinton clearly as a flawed and often repellent human being. They see him as a lecher, a liar and a man who would destroy an innocent person in order to advance his own career. (This is, in fact, the climactic drama of the text). Yet through all the sordidness and lying, the personal ruthlessness and disorder, the idealistic missionaries faithfully follow and serve the leader.

They do it not because they are themselves corrupted through material rewards. The prospect of fame is not even what drives them. Think only of Harold Ickes, personally betrayed and brutally cast aside by Clinton, who nonetheless refused to turn on him, even after the betrayal. Instead, Ickes kept his own counsel and protected Clinton, biding his time and waiting for Hillary. Then joined her staff to manage her Senate campaign.

The idealistic missionaries in this true tale bite their tongues and betray their principles, rather than betray him. They do so because in Bill Clinton they see a necessary vehicle of their noble ambition and uplifting dreams. He, too, cares about social justice, about poor people and blacks (or so he makes them believe). They will serve him and lie for him and destroy for him, because he is the vessel of their hope.

Because Bill Clinton "cares," he is the vital connection to the power they need to accomplish the redemption. Because the keys to the state are within Clinton's grasp, he becomes in their eyes the only prospect for advancing the progressive cause. Therefore, they will sacrifice anything and everything—principle, friends, country—to make him succeed.

But Bill Clinton is not like those who worship him, corrupting himself and others for a higher cause. Unlike them, he betrays principles because he has none. He will even betray his country, but without the slightest need to betray it for something else—for an idea, a party, or a cause.* He is a narcissist who sacrifices principle for power because his vision is so filled with himself that he cannot tell the difference.

But the idealists who serve him—the Stephanopoulos's, the Ickes's, the feminists, the progressives and Hillary Clinton—can tell the difference. Their cynicism flows from the very perception they have of right and wrong. They do it for higher ends. They do it for the progressive faith. They do it because they see themselves as having the power to redeem the world from evil. It is that terrifyingly exalted ambition that fuels their spiritual arrogance and justifies their sordid and, if necessary, criminal means.

And that is why they hate conservatives. They hate you because you are killers of their dream. Because you are defenders of a Constitution that thwarts their cause. They hate you because your "reactionary" commitment to individual rights, to a single standard and to a neutral and limited state obstructs their progressive designs. They hate you because you are believers in property and its rights as the cornerstones of prosperity and human freedom; because you do not see the market economy as a mere instrument for acquiring personal wealth and political war chests, to be overcome in the end by bureaucratic schemes.

Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will forever be blind-sided by the malice of the left—by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on principle, by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity, by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal, and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the downtrodden by those who preen themselves as social saints.

Conservatives are caught by surprise because they see progressives as merely misguided, when in fact they are fundamentally misdirected. They are the messianists of a religious faith. But it is a false faith and a self-serving religion. Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them.

Bill Clinton: Clawing for a Legacy

By Charles Krauthammer

There was general amazement when (the now-muzzled) Bill Clinton did his red-faced, attack-dog, race-baiting performance in South Carolina. Friends, Democrats and longtime media sycophants were variously perplexed, repulsed, enraged, mystified and shocked that this beloved ex-president would so jeopardize his legacy by stooping so low.

What they don't understand is that for Clinton, there is no legacy. What he was doing on the low road from Iowa to South Carolina was fighting for a legacy -- a legacy that he knows history has denied him and that he has but one chance to redeem.

Clinton is a narcissist but also smart and analytic enough to distinguish adulation from achievement. Among Democrats, he is popular for twice giving them the White House, something no Democrat has done since FDR. And the bouquets he receives abroad are simply signs of the respect routinely given ex-presidents, though Clinton earns an extra dollop of fawning, with the accompanying fringe benefits, because he is (a) charming and (b) not George W. Bush.

But Clinton knows this is all written on sand. It is the stuff of celebrity. What gnaws at him is the verdict of history. What clearly enraged him more than anything this primary season was Barack Obama's statement that "Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that ... Bill Clinton did not."

The Clintons tried to use this against Obama by charging him with harboring secret Republican sympathies. It was a stupid charge that elicited only scorn. And not just because Obama is no Reaganite, but because Obama's assessment is so obviously true: Reagan was consequential. Clinton was not.

Reagan changed history. At home, he radically altered both the shape and perception of government. Abroad, he changed the entire structure of the international system by bringing down the Soviet empire, giving birth to a unipolar world of unprecedented American dominance.

By comparison, Clinton was a historical parenthesis. He can console himself -- with considerable justification -- that he simply drew the short straw in the chronological lottery: His time just happened to be the 1990s which, through no fault of his own, was the most inconsequential decade of the 20th century. His was the interval between the collapse of the Soviet Union on Dec. 26, 1991, and the return of history with a vengeance on Sept. 11, 2001.

Clinton's decade, that holiday from history, was certainly a time of peace and prosperity -- but a soporific Golden Age that made no great demands on leadership. What, after all, was his greatest crisis? A farcical sexual dalliance.

Clinton no doubt wishes he'd been president on 9/11. It is nearly impossible for a president to rise to greatness in the absence of a great crisis, preferably war. Theodore Roosevelt is the only clear counterexample, and Bill is no Teddy.

What is the legacy of the Clinton presidency? Consolidator of the Reagan revolution. As Dwight Eisenhower made permanent FDR's New Deal and Tony Blair institutionalized Thatcherism, Clinton consolidated Reaganism. He did so most symbolically with his 1996 State of the Union declaration that "the era of big government is over." And more concretely, with a presidency that only tinkered with such structural Reaganite changes as tax cuts and deregulation, and whose major domestic achievement was the abolition of welfare, Reagan's ultimate social bete noire.

These are serious achievements, but of a second order. Obama did little more than echo that truism. But one can imagine how it made Clinton burn. He is, after all, a relatively young man who has decades to brood over his lost opportunity for greatness and yet is constitutionally barred from doing anything about it.

Except for the spousal loophole. Hence his desperation, especially after Hillary's Iowa debacle, to rescue his only chance for historical vindication -- a return to the White House as Hillary's co-president. A chance to serve three, perhaps even four terms, the longest in history, longer even than FDR. The opportunity to have dominated a full quarter-century of American history, relegating the George W. Bush years to a parenthesis within Clinton's legacy.

It was to save this one chance, his last chance, to be historically consequential, that Bill Clinton blithely jeopardized principle, friendships, racial harmony in his own party and his own popularity in South Carolina.

Why not? Clinton knows that popularity is cheap, easily lost, easily regained. (See Lewinsky scandal.) But historical legacies are forever.

He wants one, desperately. But to get it he must return to the White House. And for that he must elect his wife. At any cost.

Why was he out of control in South Carolina? He wasn't. He was clawing for a second chance.