First, I must say that this Erick Erickson dude really knows how to throw a punch.

This past week, the Gulf States who hoped Barack Obama would actually do something to help them were stunned when he imposed a ban on deep water offshore drilling.

It is no exaggeration to say that as much as shrimping is part of the way of life in the Gulf Coast area, oil drilling is too. Barack Obama, with the stroke of a pen, put tens of thousands of men and women on the unemployment line.

That was no act of moderation. That was an overreaction — a desire by Obama to move the narrative from “do nothing” to “do something.” He did something alright. In his zeal to turn this from his Katrina to his 9/11 with a “Never Again” moment, he destroyed an entire industry.

That was not an act of moderation. It was a desperate, selfish bid to change the narrative, despite all sorts of collateral damage.

Let hear a loud OUCH! for Obama!

The rest here.

Second, one of Seth’s fun favorites, Julia Gorin and, killing two birds with one stone where saying “farewell” is concerned, one of the best commentaries we’ve yet to read concerning the (all too) clear, departing Helen Thomas.

By occasional reader and California resident Avi Zirler:

Dear Ms. Thomas:

I saw the clip where you told the Jews of Israel to get the hell out of Palestine and go back to Poland and Germany.

Really?

Ms. Thomas, one could expect a renowned journalist of your caliber to know that about half of the population of Israel consists of Middle Eastern Jews who where forced to flee Arab countries like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Yemen, and North Africa. The number of those Jewish refugees far exceeded the number of the so-called Palestinian refugees. Some of them, particularly the Jews of Iraq who were extremely wealthy, were brutally forced to leave their wealth behind, and their assets were confiscated by the government.

Are you suggesting that those Jews should return to the countries who tormented them? Are your Arab friends ready to take them back?

Ms. Thomas, I heard that you are an American of Lebanese descent. I am not exactly sure what gives you the right to live on a land which was taken from the Native Americans. Who gave you the permission to live here?

Thus, Ms. Thomas, I believe that you should give these damn Jews a personal example. I therefore suggest that you get the hell out of America and go back to the Middle East, where you and your anti-Semitic ideas belong and fit in.

Yours,
Avi Zirler
La Canada, CA

My only correction for Helen Thomas is that, again, it’s not “Palestine” — it’s Palestein.

– APPLAUSE for that one!

And Third, speaking of earmarks… Were we speaking of earmarks? No? Well, we are now.

These things (earmarks) have become synonymous, and rightly so, with politicians on Capital Hill stealing — that’s right, blatantly STEALING, robbing, ripping off, burgling, pickpocketing — STEALING money from the American taxpayer to reward campaign contributors and other supporters or to help one another get reelection votes in their respective districts. It’s also a pure manifestation of that unconstitutionally sinful act known as “taxation without representation”.

With a rooftop pool and 24-hour concierge service, the new luxury condominiums off Frank Sinatra Drive here seem an unlikely spot in need of a multimillion-dollar federal giveaway.

Yet U.S. taxpayers doled out at least $8 million on a public walkway and park space in front of the Maxwell Place development here overlooking the New York City skyline - an amenity the development touts alongside its entertainment lounge, rooftop hot tub and theater screening room.

But the decision to use tax dollars to fund the walkway project was made after private developers had already agreed in 2003 to pay for it - indeed, it was a key condition for getting the project off the ground, according to public records and interviews.

Still, under the so-called earmarking process, by which Capitol Hill lawmakers slip requests for pet projects into larger spending bills, Sens. Frank R. Lautenberg and Robert Menendez, New Jersey Democrats, later pushed for millions of dollars in federal funding for the project.

In the swamp of federal earmark funding, $8 million isn’t a lot. But critics say the project is emblematic of why the earmark process so enrages many taxpayers.

Read on.

Have a nice day.

Yessirree, at least on one issue.

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), that’s right, D…

…one of Israel’s staunchest defenders in Congress — wants Americans who were aboard the Gaza flotilla ships prosecuted.

On a conference call organized by the Israel Project on Friday, Sherman said that any U.S. citizen aboard the ship should be considered aiding Hamas, an Islamic extremist organization that controls Gaza. The U.S. State Department considers Hamas a foreign terrorist organization.

The online foreign policy publication Lobelog reported:

On a press call hosted by a pro-Israel organization, Rep. Brad Sherman, Democrat of California, told reporters that he intends seek the prosecution of any U.S. citizens who were aboard or involved with the Freedom Flotilla.

“The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 [PDF] makes it absolutely illegal for any American to give food, money, school supplies, paper clips, concrete or weapons to Hamas or any of its officials,” Sherman said on the Israel Project call, conflating Hamas and Gaza’s civilian population. “And so I will be asking the Attorney General to prosecute any American involved in what was clearly an effort to give items of value to a terrorist organization.”

Let’s enforce that act. There are, sad to say, a lot of Americans out there who have so little respect and so much contempt for the liberty this country guarantees us that they think nothing of abusing it.

Jane Fonda’s orgy of treason with the NVA was one example, these useful flotilla idiots are another. The Fonda traitor shmoozed with the enemy, these folks are so twisted and perverse that they rejoice in the murder of innocent women and children, probably wished they could drink the blood of all those mass-butchered on 9/11, as they sail off in support of terrorism.

They should be more than prosecuted, they should be deported to one of these terrorist manufacturing Muslim countries where they can enjoy be treated like these Islamofascists believe infidels should be treated.

Here’s the entire article.

From MSNBC:

TEHRAN - Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards are ready to provide a military escort to cargo ships trying to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza, a representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Sunday.

“Iran’s Revolutionary Guards naval forces are fully prepared to escort the peace and freedom convoys to Gaza with all their powers and capabilities,” Ali Shirazi, Khamenei’s representative inside the Revolutionary Guards, was quoted as saying by the semi-official Mehr news agency.

So, Ahmadinejad and his boss the Ayatollah want to deal themselves in, hey?

Well…

Any intervention by the Iranian military would be considered highly provocative by Israel which accuses Iran of supplying weapons to Hamas, the Islamist movement which rules Gaza.

No kidding.

This sort of thing would be a blatant act of war on Iran’s part. There’s no way they could claim any kind of otherwise legal entitlement to involve themselves in the running of the Gaza blockade except as an official act by their government.

One wonders if they actually believe they can buffalo Israel, whether by running a bluff or by actually enacting a show of force of sufficient size to cause the Israelis to back down.

Personally, I don’t see it; Unless, of course, they already have a nuke on line to send over, in which case the Israelis will no doubt have a whole lot more to send back.

Let’s pray, friends, that this is not the case.

Let’s also pray that we are not now looking at a prelude to a war between Israel and Iran, both for Israel’s sake and the sakes of the millions of Iranians who crave freedom but are trapped under the thumb of the Islamofascists who have “owned” Iran ever since Jimmy Carter turned his back on Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and abandoned him to a coup by those fanatical maniacs.

If it does come to a war, I have little doubt but that Israel will win, but it will be a prolonged, bloody affair on both sides — Iran is not Trinidad.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel will continue to stop ships reaching the shore and creating “an Iranian port in Gaza,” a reference to Iran’s support for Hamas.

An Iranian port in Gaza is an apt description, and if Netanyahu does not want that to come to pass, it will not.

The Israeli prime minister is not the sheep Tzippi Livni and her corrupt leftist boss Ehud Olmert were, he is old school Israeli patriot.

I wonder if he’ll tell the mad Ayatollah to “bring it on”, like his late older brother and former commander of Sayeret Matkal might have done.

Remember a true hero named Yonatan Netanyahu?

On 6 June 1944, allied soldiers, sailors and airmen, heroes all, commenced Operation Overlord with the Normandy Invasion, also known as the Normandy Landings, which involved some 12,000 aircraft, 7,000 ships and landing craft and around 160,000 troops, a number that increased to over three million in France within two months.

D-Day.

I thought that the best and most educational way to commemmorate that great day in military history would be to link to a comprehensive site that tells the story element by element, so…

This section of the World War II History info guide is devoted to “Operation Overlord,” the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe that began on D-Day — June 6, 1944 — on the beaches of Normandy, France.

Go make a pot of coffee, then sit back, relax and read all about D-Day.

First, the good.

H/T Ric, who brought this to our attention (I had missed it completely!)

PHOENIX - A Glendale optometrist’s yearlong legal fight over what services he had to provide for a Spanish-speaking customer has translated into new protections for other businesses.

Gov. Jan Brewer has signed legislation affirming that nothing in state law requires businesses to provide “trained and competent” interpreters when a customer comes in speaking a language other than English.

Assistant Attorney General Michael Walker said that has probably always been the law. But that didn’t save John Schrolucke from having to spend time and money defending himself and his practice before Walker’s office finally dismissed the case.

Schrolucke told lawmakers the incident stems from a patient who spoke only Spanish.
Although she did bring her 12-year-old child with her to the office, he said allowing the child to interpret for the parent would have gotten him into legal trouble.

He said he faced a potential malpractice lawsuit if the child did not properly translate some of the more technical explanations being provided, so he turned the woman away, telling her through her child to come back with someone at least 18 years old.

Schrolucke said he also gave the woman the option of going to one or two other optometrists who speak Spanish.

Instead, he said, the woman filed a discrimination complaint with the Attorney General’s Office.

State law prohibits discrimination in places of “public accommodation,” which include restaurants, hotels, theaters and any place that offers services or goods to the general public.

Schrolucke said he was given an option to settle. But that would have required him and anyone who bought his business to provide interpreters and documents in Spanish, something he said would set a bad precedent for not only his operation but other small businesses.

English is the official language of the United States of America.

It took the Attorney General’s Office a year to figure out there had been no civil rights violation and dismiss the case.

Once again, from the top: English is the official language of the United States of America.

It shouldn’t have taken the Attorney General’s office more than sixteen seconds to figure out that there had been no civil rights violation before dismissing the case.

Upset with the whole process, Schrolucke approached Sen. John Huppenthal, R-Chandler, who agreed to sponsor what he called “clarifying language” to the state’s civil rights law.

“Nobody should be treated like this,” Huppenthal said. “It’s a nightmare to go through this. He was drug through the mud by us.”

Walker, who is the litigation chief of the civil rights division, offered his own apology “for what does occasionally end up as state bureaucratic confusion.”

But Walker told lawmakers that his agency is legally obligated to investigate complaints of discrimination. He said the system worked - eventually - when the complaint was dismissed.

Nonetheless, if they’re going to permit such a lawsuit to take place, Loser Pays should apply to the plaintiff to compensate the defendant for every minute of his time and every penny of the money he puts out for legal fees, since it is a frivolous lawsuit.

Huppenthal introduced identical legislation last year. While it was approved by a Senate panel it never made it to the full Senate floor.

Next, the Bad.

The Senate is expected to take up the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The effort is a dangerous treaty for the family, according to pediatrician Rosemary Stein of Burlington, North Carolina, and a spokesperson for the Christian Medical Association (CMA).

“It takes away the parents’ rights to rear their child and gives it to the government,” she explains. “The government becomes the caretaker and the guardian, and the parent becomes the babysitter. Another way to define it would be ‘the government takeover of our children.’”

If the contract is enforced, the government would have the right to intercede or supersede if officials believe the parents are doing something that is not in the best interest of the child. An example of this comes from Germany, where the government has passed laws that ban parents from homeschooling their children.

“I didn’t know that it was this insidious, and at the same time, this overwhelming,” Stein laments. “It goes over everything — what you teach them, what you do with them [and] how they’re reared.”

The CMA spokesman predicts this will change society from the bottom up. For instance, a 16-year-old girl in Great Britain asked her parents to let her boyfriend move in and share her bedroom. When the parents said no, the teen filed suit and won.

It is not known when the U.S. Senate will try to ratify the treaty, so Dr. Stein says people need to start contacting their senators to voice their views.

Ah, yes, the fascism of the left.

And the Ugly.

Chuck out.

This was 50% surprise…

IDF forces piloted the Rachel Corrie to the port of Ashdod early Saturday evening after boarding the ship earlier in the day.

None were harmed in the military operation as the international activists on the ship cooperated with the boarding party. The activists went as far as lowering a ladder to the soldiers patrol boat to allow them to board, army sources have revealed.

…And 50% expected.

The boarding of the Rachel Corrie containing activists and aid for Gaza was described by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Saturday as a quiet operation. Netanyahu was quick to distinguish between the boat of Irish and Malaysian activists and the Turkish-sponsored Mavi Marmara which was boarded May 31 in an incident that left nine dead and scores wounded.

“The different outcome we saw today underscores the difference between peace activists who we disagree with but respect their right to express their different opinion and flotilla participants [on the Mavi Marmara] who were violent extremist supporters of terrorists,” said Netanyahu.

IDF navy forces boarded and took control of the MV Rachel Corrie Saturday afternoon. The troops did not meet any resistance from activists attempting to break the Gaza blockade, and the operation was completed without violent incidents.

Why half expected?

Because during their forerunners’ foray last week into blockade running, they learned from the others’ sampling of an old Hank Williams, Jr. remedy.

That’s what our illustrious POTUS has urged the terrorist supporters aboard the MV Rachel Corrie (too bad the Israelis don’t have seagoing bulldozers) as she steamed onward toward the Gaza blockade.

The Obama administration on Friday urged pro-Palestinian activists attempting to break an Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip to avoid another confrontation in the region, but those on board the Irish ship said they had no intention of abandoning their plans.

Of course they have no intention of abandoning their plans: The “humanitarian” supplies in her cargo holds are merely a prop to provide an excuse for running the blockade. These are the kind of pseudo-humanitarians whose motivations are malevolent — they are acting only to abet continued terrorism by Hamas, who terrorize and oppress their own people in the Gaza Strip in addition to committing monstrosities against innocent Israelis.

The MV Rachel Corrie, laden with purported humanitarian supplies, is set to arrive off the coast of Gaza on Saturday morning, setting up another showdown with Israel, which has warned the activists against trying to break its blockade of the territory.

It’s a good thing for them that I’m not in command of the Israeli forces.

My warning would be: To hell with grappling around on your weather decks, you try to penetrate the blockade, we’ll sink you. No negotiations, no debate, no matter what the “international community” has to say about it. They know why you’re coming, so let them stop you.

Israel has warned the activists that it will stop the Rachel Corrie if it tries to break the blockade and has asked the activists to unload their shipment in the Israeli port city of Ashdod, promising to deliver humanitarian supplies to Gaza over land.

Unloading at Ashdod wouldn’t accomplish their mission of disruption. In fact:

Ms. Berlin said the Rachel Corrie had no intention of giving in to Israeli demands that it dock at Ashdod.

Greta Berlin link added by blog author.

In her photo, note the “We are all Palestinians” sweat shirt. Between that and her appearance, looking at her is akin to looking at a billboard that says Wingnut.

It’s all here.

Speaking of the Gaza flotilla kerfuffle, as I was reading today’s Best Of The Web Today, I followed one of the many links one finds therein on any given day, and found an article in the Moscow Times By Yulia Latynina that most definitely agrees with those of us in the world who are not dumb enough to be fooled by the phony righteousness or dense naivety of certain elements, not to mention any names like the U.N., the EU, the Arab world in general, liberal pissants everywhere, the profoundly gullible and the uninformed.

Israeli defense forces intercepted a flotilla with humanitarian aid headed for blockaded Gaza, killing at least nine people and causing an international scandal. The activists knew long in advance that their flotilla would be intercepted. In fact, that is how they planned it from the start.

Which agrees with our own assessment here at Hard Astarboard.

The goal of the activists was not to deliver aid to the people of Gaza but to rack up dead bodies. From the standpoint of the organizers, the ideal ending would have been if the Israeli navy had sunk the entire flotilla.

There is a very good reason why Israel is blockading Gaza. The territory is governed by Hamas, which has the professed goal of destroying Israel and is recognized by some Western governments as a terrorist organization. If activists had wanted to send a flotilla to Osama bin Laden carrying “humanitarian aid” of suspect content, would the authorities be obliged to let it pass unchecked?

Unfortunately, in Gaza we are dealing not only with militants but with a bloodthirsty strategy that long ago abandoned the goal of achieving the maximum possible number of enemy dead. Now Hamas strives to maximize the number of their own women and children killed as human shields in order to win support from the gullible element of world opinion.

The old method was simple: Palestinian militants lobbed missiles into Israeli territory.

The new tactic is for militants to place a rocket launcher on the roof of one of their own schools — or better yet, a kindergarten. If the missile finds its target, then, God willing, two Israelis will die. But if all goes well, the Israeli missile fired in retaliation will give the militants the bodies of 10 innocent children to display to reporters.

The organizers of the flotilla are cut from the same cloth. Would it ever enter your head to feel sorry for a man who bypassed airport security, forced his way onto an airplane and then cried “Executioners!” while shooting at the police sent to apprehend him?

But even that is not the most shocking aspect of the flotilla incident. There were 700 people aboard that flotilla. Of course, many were supporters of Hamas. But there were also Europeans. In a world where terrorists destroy the World Trade Center and bomb the London metro — and where Hamas is dead-set on destroying Israel — it is amazing how many idiots can be found who are ready to defend anyone who whines, “The world owes me.”

And this is the scariest part: The flotilla was essentially designed to exploit the misplaced sympathies of gullible rights activists. The militants have mastered a new strategy, and the myopic do-gooders of the world are their willing pawns.

Hear, hear!!!!

Here is the entire piece.

**** Unfamiliar with the subject of the article, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, I looked him up to see why the author of the column above thought he was innocent.

From Wikipedia:

Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky is a Russian enterpreneur, businessman, philanthropist, and convicted felon. In 2004, Khodorkovsky was the wealthiest man in Russia, and was the 16th wealthiest man in the world, although much of his wealth evaporated because of the collapse in the value of his holding in the Russian petroleum company Yukos.

On October 25, 2003, Khodorkovsky was arrested at Novosibirsk airport by the Russian prosecutor general’s office on charges of fraud. Shortly thereafter, on October 31, the government under Vladimir Putin froze shares of Yukos because of tax charges. The Russian Government took further actions against Yukos, leading to a collapse in the share price. It purported to sell a major asset of Yukos in December 2004.

On May 31, 2005, Khodorkovsky was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to nine years in prison. The sentence was later reduced to 8 years. In 2003, prior to his arrest, Khodorkovsky funded several Russian parties, including Yabloko, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and even, allegedly, the pro-Kremlin United Russia.

In October 2005 he was moved into prison camp number 13 in the city of Krasnokamensk, Zabaykalsky Krai.

In March 2006, Forbes magazine surmised that Khodorkovsky’s personal fortune had declined to a fraction of its former level, stating that he “still has somewhere below $500 m.”

On March 31 2009, a new trial of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev began in Moscow for fresh charges on embezzlement and money laundering, and continues to the present day. The two men face up to 22 more years in prison.

The other side of the coin:

Khodorkovsky has received a high level of independent third party support from groups and individuals who believe the process, charges, and two trials against him are politically motivated. On Nov. 29, 2004, The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights published a report which concluded “he Assembly considers that the circumstances of the arrest and prosecution of leading Yukos executives suggest that the interest of the State’s action in these cases goes beyond the mere pursuit of criminal justice, to include such elements as to weaken an outspoken political opponent, to intimidate other wealthy individuals and to regain control of strategic economic assets.”

In June 2009 the Council of Europe published a report which criticized the Russian government’s handling of the Yukos case, entitled “Allegations of Politically Motivated Abuses of the Criminal Justice System in Council of Europe Member States”

“The Yukos affair epitomises this authoritarian abuse of the system. I wish to recall here the excellent work done by Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, rapporteur of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, in her two reports2 on this subject. I do not intend to comment on the ins and outs of this case which saw Yukos, a privately owned oil company, made bankrupt and broken up for the benefit of the stateowned company Rosneft. The assets were bought at auction by a rather obscure financial group, Baikalfinansgroup, for almost €7 billion. It is still not known who is behind this financial group. A number of experts believe that the state-owned company Gazprom had a hand in the matter. The former heads of Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, were sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for fraud and tax evasion. Vasiliy Aleksanyan, former vice-chairman of the company, who is suffering from Aids, was released on bail in January 2009 after being held in inhuman conditions condemned by the European Court of Human Rights.3 Lastly, Svetlana Bakhmina, deputy head of Yukos’s legal department, who was sentenced in 2005 to six and a half years’ imprisonment for tax fraud, saw her application for early release turned down in October 2008, even though she had served half of her sentence, had expressed “remorse” and was seven months pregnant. Thanks to the support of thousands of people around the world and the personal intervention of the United States President, George W. Bush, she was released in April 2009 after giving birth to a girl on 28 November 2008.”

Statements of support for Khodorkovsky and criticism of the state’s persecution have been passed by the Italian Parliament, the German Bundestag, and the U.S. House of Representatives, among many other official bodies.

Wow! They certainly play hardball in Russian politics, don’t they? If Khodorkovsky is an innocent man, as Yulia Latynina believes, well, there we are with a political structure whose major players honed their ruthlessness and Machiavellan skills under the former communist regime. You know, something like what Obama and the rest of the “progressives” seem to have in mind for us.

Surely, that’s something to think about…

This one, by Michele Malkin, needed to be shared.

In Chicago politics, there’s an old term for the publicly subsidized pay-offs and positions meted out to the corruptocrats’ friends and special interests: boodle.

In the age of Obama, Hope and Change is all about the boodle. So it was with the stimulus. And the massive national service expansion. And the health care bill. And the financial reform bill. And the blossoming job-trading scandals engulfing the White House.

There’s always been an ageless, interdependent relationship between Windy City politicos and “goo-goos” (the cynical Chicago term for good government reformers). Chicago-style “reform” has always entailed the redistribution of wealth and power under the guise of public service. And it has inevitably led to more corruption.

Yes, and there is now so much of it accumulated, that it inevitably found its way into the White House. Who’d'a believed that could happen?

In July 2009, when “Culture of Corruption” was first released, liberal critics scoffed:

How could you possibly write a 400-page book about Barack Obama’s rotten administration when he’s only been in office six months?!

When I proceeded to rattle off case after case of Chicago-style back-scratching, transparency-trampling and crooked special interest-dealing in the new White House, liberal critics such as “The View’s” Joy Behar interjected:

B-b-b-but what about Bush? Why don’t you write a book about Bush? Wha-’bout-Bush? Wha-’bout-Bush? Wha-’bout-Bush?

When I pointed out that I had reported extensively on cronyism in the Bush era (see Harriet Miers, FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security), and when I further pointed out that while the Bush-bashing market overflowed, there remained a massive vacuum of critical analysis of Obama, liberal critics sputtered:

So what? Doesn’t every administration have corruption?

When I patiently explained that no other administration in modern American history had set itself up as loftily as the Hope and Change reformers had done, or when I cited endless examples of Obama’s broken promises on everything from lobbyists to transparency to Washington business as usual, liberal critics changed the subject again…

…Read the whole column.

In this morning’s (the weekend edition) of Jewish World Review there’s an interesting column by Diana West that’s both well worth the read and “what we been sayin’ all dis time!” on the reason there appears to be such a strong symbiosis between the far left and fundamental Islamists (you know, the folks who bring us terrorism).

At some future date, when what Andrew C. McCarthy calls “the freedom culture” is again secure (we hope), the jihad-opposition will see itself divided into two camps in histories written about our current time: those who ineffectually supported efforts to stop “terrorism” and other supposedly generic outbreaks of violence in such lands as Iraq and Afghanistan; and those, far fewer in number (at least in that difficult decade following 9/11), who recognized terrorism as but one aspect of the civilizational assault emanating from expansionist Islam.

If the freedom culture wins, it will be because the latter group grew in influence. And if the latter group grows in influence, it will be due to such books as McCarthy’s excellent, ground-breaking new work, “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.”

Islam and the Left? Since this notion will raise some eyebrows, I asked Andrew himself to elaborate on this and some other related questions.

Q: Why are Islam and the Left, as you demonstrate in “The Grand Jihad,” not such strange bedfellows?

A: “For all their disagreements on matters like women’s rights, gay rights and abortion, Islam and the Left are in harmony on big-picture matters: They are authoritarian, totalitarian in the sense of wanting to control all aspects of human existence, virulently anti-capitalist, and regard the individual as existing merely to serve the collective. Consequently, they have the same obstacle in common: our freedom culture - i.e., Western liberalism, U.S. constitutional republicanism, and their foundation, individual liberty. Historically, Islam and the Left ally when there is a common enemy. But I’d stress that what I am talking about here is an alliance, not a merger. I am not claiming, as someone ridiculously suggested to me the day the book came out, that Barack Obama wants to impose Sharia.”

He doesn’t need to, thank you. “Liberal” fascism would suit him just fine.

Read the entire column here.