Concerning the sham election in Iran, our erudite Poser-In-Chief has not-so-wisely painted Himself into a corner. The image of Himself which He has carefully and cunningly crafted, as the all-wise Boy King, ever calm, reflective, deliberate, fair-minded, transcendent—this caricature prohibits The One from actually and meaningfully speaking out in defense of the Iranian students and protestors themselves. That would be “meddling” and, besides, we shouldn’t be imposing our values on any other sovereign nation (except Israel, of course). So, instead, all President Wimp can do is issue some tepid lame statements in the abstract about how we stand for freedom and human rights. Blah blah blah. These “profound” pronouncements contained Obama’s usual lyrical but meaningless platitudes and were laced with His signature “umms” and “ahhhs” and excruciating pauses which, I guess, are intended to convey the notion that Barry is some sort of sage Who’s always engaged in deep, meditative thinking preceding His every utterance.

No, Obama The Wise will not be sullied by rolling up His sleeves and joining the fray to defend the oppressed people of Iran who are clamoring for democracy and freedom. That would be “unbecoming” a Moral Leader of His stature. From His perch on Mount Olympus, the God-Man prefers to remain above it all, an objective Observer choosing not to meddle in the affairs of mortals. (By contradistinction, the Greek deities of yore were more than happy to screw with us mortals.)

During the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980, then President-Elect Ronald Reagan forcefully expressed his moral indignation without ambiguity. There was no doubt about where the United States would stand on the issue. And, on the day Reagan was inaugurated, the theocratic mullahs, even more truculent than today’s Iranian clerics, yielded to the pressure, releasing the hostages. Now, with the entire world watching and waiting, Obama, the self-described student of history, could learn a valuable lesson from President Reagan. Unfortunately, Reagan’s aggressive “no nonsense” approach does not comport with the image Barry strives to project.

The winds of change are blowing in Iran and potentially could build, becoming dangerous gusts. Yet the Leader of the Free World, catapulted to that position largely on the basis of a single flatulent slogan, Change We Can Believe In, now seems hamstrung and clueless. Apparently, in Barry’s view, in Iran the moment is not now and the anti-hope is “no, we can’t”. And our president, Change Incarnate, just sits on the sidelines. Or, maybe, “in the corner” would be more apt. Better yet, “in the dunce corner”.

According to secret White House communiqués, Chief Auto Executive Obama plans to introduce a new car to the American public, the "Peopleswagen". Under the plan GM would cease production of all current models, opting instead to produce just one model, a modest "green" car with a profile resembling B. Hussein Obama's round head that experts anticipate would retail at around $70,000 due to a myriad of federal standards that would have to be met as well as the added expense of renegotiated lucrative union contracts. The "Peopleswagen" will run on an esoteric technology that somehow taps into the good vibes Obama gives off, converting them to electricity, although analysts fear that if Barry's poll numbers fall significantly there could be an adverse reduction in MPG ratings. The new "car for the masses" would be available in a single color, a vibrant red (to be called "Soviet Crimson" when the brochure comes out).

When you think about it, socialism is doomed to fail because it is contradicted by Nature, Herself. Consider our Universe. Its very essence is expansive. Out of the Void, Reality as we know it began as a mind-numbingly dense singularity which exploded with ferocity in a miniscule fraction of a nanosecond. That Reality has been expanding and evolving ever since with gleeful abandon, freely introducing novelty after novelty, ever unfolding into an extravagant plenitude. Twenty-first century scientists are still discovering literally thousands of new species that were unknown before. Astrophysics continues to reveal new planets and galaxies, new mysterious and wondrous members of our Universe.

Nature, “red in tooth and claw”, is also a messy business. That is the cost of Her freedom to experiment between the poles of contingency and necessity. There are inevitably winners and losers. Progress is the product of a winnowing process where the inadaptable fall by the way. Better patterns and ideas slowly, surely and painfully emerge.

Statism stands in contradistinction to Nature. Its pull is inward. It seeks to consolidate, to draw power and life to a concentrated point. Life must be controlled and dictated by Committee. To realize its Utopian Dream, statism must necessarily be at odds with Nature and Reality. Through sheer engineering and the hubris of the human intellect it seeks to reorder the World, eclipsing Nature’s own way of producing freedom and life. In the end, Man’s audacity to change Reality is suffocating and brings about a static uniform death to spontaneity, uniqueness, exceptionalism and singular achievement.

A decade ago, Kevin Kelly authored a fascinating book, Out Of Control, which “chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the robust adaptability and autonomy of living organisms [like bees in their hives or colonizing ants] becomes the new model for human-made systems” (like the Internet, for example). “The old [model] of mechanistic, top-down control is” passé. “In software, in animation, in programmed trading on the global stock market, we have already built systems that approach the complexity of nature, neo-biological systems that run on self-replication, limited self-repair, mild evolution, partial learning and self-governance beyond the reach of humans …” As Mr. Kelly proclaims, “No one can be in control—and it’s better that way”.

There’s a reason why socialism and other more virulent forms of totalitarianism have always failed historically. In a fallen world, capitalism may not be perfect. But it will always be preferable to the well-intentioned but inevitably disastrous decisions made by some central politburo’s tinkerers.

Our Universe, with its unique processes and laws, is the one that was spoken into existence by God Almighty. Until the New Heaven and a perfected New Earth descend, we’re stuck with it. Railing against it will only result in human tragedy.

To say that Barry Obama panders to that mysterious and indefinable constituency known as The Unborn would be a monumental overstatement. In fact, it would be patently false. Obama’s utter contempt for pre-born human beings is well known and substantiated by His appalling voting record when it came to laws that attempted to protect these future citizens from the more egregious forms of what amounts to the Left’s own version of ethnic cleansing. During the campaign, when Barry was still pretending to be a moderate, the best He could come up with was His lame cop-out: to answer that question [when human life begins to have value] with specificity was above His pay grade. Well, after the Immaculate Inauguration, BO must have enjoyed a bump in His pay grade (or an epiphany) because He acted swiftly, within a week’s time, and with bold decisiveness to deliberately promote abortions here and abroad. Apparently He can now answer with precise specificity that human life has no intrinsic value whatsoever as long as it’s still ensconced in a womb.

It now strikes me that Obama’s hatred for the unborn can no longer be sated merely by the systematic and wholesale extermination of nascent life by the abortion mills. No, that only takes care of the current crop. As a Man of great vision with a view to the future (and His legacy), Obama now realizes that He must not be simply content to stick it to today’s womb-dwellers. There will be hordes and hordes of the little buggers coming down the pike in the years and decades to come.

Enter the Obama Budget of 2009, a Machiavellian masterpiece. For all those little future citizens lucky enough to avoid the scalpel and the vacuum hose and to actually manage to be born, they’ll have a heck of a surprise waiting for them, especially when they grow up and enter the work force. One whopper of an invoice is already in the mail.

That is the genius of Barack Hussein Obama. Not only will His own bizarre version of voodoo economics manage to cripple our economy and horribly deform our democracy in the short term. His orgiastic and insatiable Porkapalooza will ensure that future generations—technically, the unborn—will be utterly crushed under a mountain of debt, generations of serfs slaving to pay for the immoral excesses in the Age of Obama. The irony is, had there been no abortions, there’d at least be more workers around to share the burden.

In Barry’s defense I will say this: at least He’s thorough, leaving no stone unturned and no unborn untouched.

Once again, Barack Obama represents an historic first, having accomplished something entirely unprecedented. Generally, it takes several months, if not years—even, retroactively, decades—for an administration’s policies to be distilled into a “doctrine”. Furthermore, it is usually the sitting president’s name—and not the name of a White House spokesperson—that is attached to such a doctrine. (For example, the Monroe Doctrine or the Bush Doctrine.)

Yet, within a mere three weeks of His historic inauguration, a revolutionary new doctrinal stance with broad implications has emerged from the confines of the Obama White House and is now formally being enshrined as the “Gibbs Doctrine”, a political and, possibly, geopolitical formula stated most simply as, “nobody’s perfect”.

The Gibbs Doctrine (named after White House obfuscator, Robert Gibbs) was condensed out of the swirling cauldron of controversy surrounding the nomination of Tom Daschle to head the Health and Human Services Department after it was discovered that the former Senate Majority leader avoided paying well over $100,000 in back taxes. In response to a rare, hard-hitting question from an actual journalist, press secretary Gibbs countered tersely with a strong, decisive retort: nobody’s perfect. Touché.

Already the Gibbs Doctrine is creating consternation among legal scholars who see it as a seismic shift in thinking that could undermine the very integrity of American jurisprudence. Thousands of convicted and incarcerated criminals have already filed appeals, hoping that the Gibbs “defense” will carry the day in a new trial: Sure, I offed my old lady; but, hey, nobody’s perfect, right?

There may be disturbing implications for foreign affairs and national security matters as well if the Gibbs Doctrine is extended into the realm of world politics:

Breaking news … Tehran has successfully nuked what used to be known as Tel Aviv.

Jake Tapper of ABC: What will be the president’s response to this unconscionable act of terrorism?

Robert Gibbs: Well, first of all, Jake, let me remind you that this administration refrains from using any term so loaded as “terrorism”. That said, President Obama strongly condemns this breach of international law but would hasten to add that nobody’s perfect.

As with all things Democratic, there’s irony here. The Gibbs Doctrine would seem to contradict a hallowed tenet of the Left, that people are perfectible (if not perfect) and, instead, appears to uphold the conservative postulate that human nature is bent toward wrong-doing and needs to be tempered by traditions, cultural institutions (like the family and schools), laws and, yes, even that evil of all evils, religion. After all, nobody’s perfect.

I’m fighting back waves of nausea as I’m forced to endure the orgiastic spectacle known as Obamapalooza. (Four more years of this crap?!) I keep asking myself, can Golden Boy really be that golden? Even I, rabid right-wing zealot, have come perilously close at times to being sucked into The One’s orbit by His powerful gravitational pull. Yet deep in my center I hear the whisper of common sense that insists, unless Barry truly is divine, nobody can be that magical, that mystically magnificent. So what gives?

Upon considerable reflection I’ve come to believe that what we’re witnessing is really nothing more than a natural process of nature. In biology and in cybernetics, it’s known as feedback, a self-reinforcing loop of information between two systems or agents characterized by a state of equilibrium or near equilibrium. But sometimes, with too many feedback signals zinging, too much excitement bombarding the system, stasis can give way to chaos which could push things toward a higher order or may, instead, drag the system into destruction.

I would posit that a significant percentage of Americans, out of their own spiritual vacuity, at some point gradually began to project— in a non-clinical sense of the word— their hopes and longings upon one Barack Hussein Obama. Or in more popular vernacular, they started to send Him vibes. The initial wave of perturbations took place in 2004 during the Democratic National Convention where a young, relatively unknown Illinois congressman delivered a memorable keynote address. His oratory was, indeed, impressive. Soon after that speech, there were already murmurings reverberating throughout the Party about how this young, charismatic black was presidential material.

Barack Obama, astute committed egoist, no doubt heard these whispers and intimations. There was resonance. The feedback loop had been formed. I believe that at some point, Barry actually started to take these sentiments seriously. He began to believe in His own greatness, in His own possibilities. Yes, I can!

The savvy politician soon moved beyond mere believing in Himself to calculated posturing and political positioning. On to the United States Senate. Ever more voting “present”. More speeches, more interviews. He became further enmeshed in Chicago politics, making connections, accumulating political capital and making a name for himself, ever spurred on by the growing buzz about his presidential viability.

Eventually, he had the audacity to enter the primaries, the audacity of hope to actually defeat the Clinton machine. It was at this point that the feedback loop, now sustained by polling data, focus groups and friendly reporters on one hand and sublime campaign rhetoric on the other, was ratcheted up into hyperdrive. Let’s all get jiggy. The more the people clamored for His brand of Change, the more His image inflated. Soon the devoted were swooning in His very presence. The media, too, fell completely and unabashedly under His spell. With their unending paeans of praise, they elevated O from mere mortal to the stature of The One. The more God-like He became, the more worthy He was to be worshipped. This frenzied feedback loop is now near to spiraling out of control, not unlike a nuclear chain reaction. We’re still on the wobbly cusp of that uncertain threshold but with no pressure relief in sight. If the pressure doesn’t dissipate soon, the Barry Bubble, like most bubbles in nature or economics, will inevitably burst with consequences unknown. Maybe Barry will simply transfigure like Jesus on the Mount of Olives. Maybe chaos will propel us into the next stage of human evolution with Barry as prototype, The Really New Adam. Or maybe we’ll all go up in flames.

I realize that in a strict Freudian sense, people project fear (not hope) and guilt (not adoration) on others as a defense mechanism to avoid their own psychic pain and anxiety. They, in effect, create a scapegoat. In that sense, the “people” fashioned their own collective American version of the Bogeyman and named him George W. Bush. So, technically, Sigmund would describe the frothing, frenzied, sweaty Barack Bacchanalia we’re all witnessing as an aberrant, viral form of transference (not projection).

In the parlance of biology, the “people” and The One have formed a symbiotic relationship. Or, for you cynics, a parasitic partnership. Either way, they feed off each other, and they need each other to survive. At some point might they coalesce into a new living— and possibly monstrous— single organism? Let’s hope not.

All this discourse is not to completely deny the talents and gifts Obama genuinely possesses. He is intelligent (although this is endlessly overstated by guilty liberals who feel the need to overcompensate and stress Barack’s intelligence because blacks are not supposed to be that smart). He is charming and engaging. He loves His wife and is a good Father to His daughters. His cool, calm demeanor can be reassuring. He even used to go to church.

Rather, the point is this: Obama somehow has become a Whole greater than the sum of its parts. He has become insufferably larger than life. Too big and too black to fail, He’s His own self-fulfilling prophecy. He’s a life-size cardboard cutout with a winning smile. But it’s all smoke and mirrors, an illusion. He is not a self-made man. WE made Him. Our adulation sustains Him and strokes His massive ego even as His Magnanimous Self nurtures us. Quid pro quo. Feedback loop. He’s the awesome Wizard of O, but in reality only the quirky, little man behind the curtain pulling the levers of his own “glory”, a pseudo-glory feasted upon by a starved popular culture like so many zombies.

I don’t know about you but I’m growing weary of trying to follow the electoral recount up there in Minnesota. One day Norm Coleman’s gained some net votes. The next day Al Franken has whittled away his opponent’s slim lead. These ballots will now be counted. This precinct’s original tally will be upheld. Blah blah blah.

What a waste of money and resources. Whether Al can still manage to steal the election or not, everyone already knows that it’s going to come down to a damn close election (or re-election). In the end, it will still be a statistical dead heat. Should we then recount the recount?

My first instinct was to suggest settling the matter with a good old-fashioned coin toss. Why not? It’s much more cost efficient than prolonging this affair in litigation.

But then I was struck with a better solution. A coin toss is— unless the Franken team manages to sneak in a weighted official coin— purely arbitrary. Such a random act completely fails to take into account the merits of each candidate. Fate alone has the last word. The word “contest” would hardly apply any longer.

I pride myself as a progressive thinker (in the larger sense of the word). So I am proposing that Norm Coleman and Al Franken should settle this matter once and for all. I propose that Coleman, the nobler of the two, challenge Mr. Smalley (aka Al Franken) to a duel to the death. There is precedence for this in our history. Recall the mortal duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.

One advantage would be that a duel to the finish would rid us of one (or possibly both—that’s the risk) of these politicians for good. Of course, I’m pulling for Norm, big time. Compared to his lunatic opponent, he’s a decent fellow and has served admirably in the Senate. I’m also betting on Norm because I think he’s probably fired a gun before whereas the uber-liberal sissy, Franken, is probably terrified of firearms.

Finally, to help our ailing economy, I would propose that this “vote to the finish” duel between Mr. Coleman and Mr. Franken be featured for public consumption through pay-for-view broadcasting.

Are there any downsides? Sure. If such a match catches on in the public imagination, we may be setting a dangerous precedent for future elections. The popular vote and the Electoral College may very well be at stake. But for now, the biggest downside would be that Al get’s lucky and manages somehow to plug Norm first. That would truly be tragic, not just for Norm Coleman’s family but for the citizens of Minnesota and the rest of us who’d have to suffer this maniac running loose in the halls of Congress.

Despite (premature) plans to carve his visage into the side of Mount Rushmore— the ears might present engineering challenges— no one really knows just what kind of president Mr. Obama will turn out to be. But we do know this much: by sheer ontology, Obama, himself alone, has already solved one of the most distressing problems our nation has faced since George Bush assumed office. At long last, the rest of the world now likes us again. Even Hugo and Raul are beginning to warm up to Washington. (Rumor has it one of the theme songs at the inauguration will be War’s Why Can’t We Be Friends?.)

Our tarnished image as the voracious imperialist occupying power of jack-booted thugs gallivanting around the globe has single-handedly been redeemed by the Redeemer Himself. Halleluiah. Maya Angelou was on the verge of tears when she realized that, now, she no longer had to feel ashamed when she traveled abroad. I’m not sure every American traveler has suffered that stigma. Naturally, if you frequent the salons of Paris, you’re liable to encounter intellectuals and Marxists who might make you feel embarrassed for having an American passport. But I just can’t believe that Americans are met with chants of “Yankee go home” wherever they travel.

Of course, this is all patently absurd. I’ve never bought into the notion that America, that shining city on a hill, had somehow, in the course of seven years, morphed into universal Boogey Man, scorned by erstwhile friends and intractable foes alike. Inspired by a Mr. Rogers sentimentality, a chorus of apologia was sung ad nauseam by Leftists (who hate America in the first place) and their lackeys in the media throughout the 2008 election season. In the Video Age it’s possible for reiterated nonsense to sometimes become “conventional wisdom”. This self-deprecating strain of “patriotism” was a recurrent theme throughout Obama’s campaign. Delivering his epic speech to a throng of inebriated Germans in Berlin, Obama showed great contrition and shame for being an American. He quickly reassured his audience that he was also (perhaps, above all) a citizen of the World. Had the election been held that day (in Germany), Obama would have won easily.

In truth, this liberal hand-wringing bent for psychoanalysis and a propensity for self-loathing pre-dates George W. Bush. President Bill Clinton went out of his way to formally apologize for slavery. The Democrats have long been obsessed with and invested in America’s failure (moral and otherwise) on all fronts because they subsist on the votes of the disgruntled. They proudly give safe haven to myriad victims, citizens all, of evil America. And Marxist professors have long decried American imperialism and the evils of free market capitalism.

I would never deny that our nation has not always been above reproach. Slavery, the Civil War, broken Indian treaties, systemic racism and bigotry are all historical realities. As a conservative, I have the capacity to recognize evil— even America’s sins— in this world. I take a restrained— if not dim— view of completely unfettered human nature. So yes, America has failed morally at times. But the Left refuses to see the bigger picture. The American “experiment” in self-governance (tempered by religious sensibilities) is a singular achievement in the history of Man. In spite of America’s short-comings, people from all corners of the globe still long to come to her shores, to the land of freedom in search of a better life. Yet there are those in this country that, in a spirit of “fairness”, would prefer to reduce America to the lowest common denominator rather than elevate others to our own lofty ideal.

It’s certainly possible to acknowledge that there are some people in the world that don’t particularly like us without buying into this promoted myth that everybody hates us. Even the popular— perhaps particularly the popular— may still have enemies. Here’s a news flash for Barry: Islamo-militants will continue to hate us and plot our destruction whether you’re the Leader of the Free World or not. Their irrational animosity toward the United States is rooted in a tradition of intolerance and a pathological hatred of Israel. Try to transcend that with your cult of personality.

The real boogey man in this story is insidious multiculturalism along with its evil cousin, moral equivalency. It’s one thing to recognize and honor laudable features of other cultures. It’s quite another to conclude that all cultures and peoples are inevitably of equal worth*. To be fair, even liberals recognize this principle (though they don’t realize it) when they praise Cuba but disparage their own fellow citizens like Evangelical Christians. Pragmatically, we all, liberals and conservatives alike, make value judgments about others and often discriminate on that basis. Multiculturalism is a bogus artifact from Academia that promotes a phony and perverse “equality” at the expense of genuine freedom. Diversity inevitably degenerates into balkanization, identity politics and victimization. In the end, nobody is happy (much less unified).

*One clarification: while all human beings are intrinsically of equal value in the eyes of the Creator, they and the cultures they eventually develop needn’t be (of necessity) qualitatively equal as history is played out in a fallen— or, if you prefer, Darwinian— world.

This pressing emotional need to be liked by everybody strikes me as rather juvenile. Little kids feel less insecure when they are popular in school or on the playground. It’s as if the beauty contestant America could easily win the pageant but prefers to settle for Miss Congeniality, just happy to be voted likeable by her competitors. One is reminded of the pathetic Sally Fields, upon winning an Oscar, gushing to the audience, “You like me! You really, really like me!” Grow up. At least she managed to win something. I wonder how she dealt with the liberal guilt of offending the others by her sin of simply winning when they did not. Maybe the other nominees didn’t like poor Sally as much as the rest of America apparently did.

I’m not suggesting that the United States should go out of its way to deliberately make enemies. We would all prefer to coexist in a peaceful world. But the truth is America will always be envied— and, yes, in some cases hated— by others precisely because of her exceptional greatness and a national character that cherishes and elevates freedom as its highest principle. It is this very love of freedom that most incenses the Islamo-Nazis.

In our perverse desire to be introspective and reflective, we’ve become self-loathing. Taking a moral inventory from time to time may be healthy, but to eagerly embrace the suicidal notion that we, as a nation, are unequivocally evil is dysfunctional and bizarre. If our national self-esteem depends on being liked by the rest of the world, Mr. Rogers notwithstanding, we’ve lost our way.

There’s been much soul-searching and analysis since the election as conservatives try to identify the reason(s) we lost. Inarguably, the cards were stacked against any Republican candidate for president. There were historical dynamics that simply did not bode well for the GOP in 2008. The economic meltdown that began to manifest a month before the election certainly didn’t help the situation. Widespread and systemic voter fraud and irregularities didn’t help McCain’s chances either. While no one really knows the full extent of this corruption of the electoral process, it’s doubtful that its absence would have made up the vote deficit in the end. (On the other hand, voter fraud may very well be a significant factor to the extent it impacted the razor-close Senate race in Minnesota.)

In a complex world it’s probably impossible to indicate a single cause for the recent debacle; but if I had to pick one principle reason for McCain’s loss, I’d have to point to the embarrassment known as the establishment media and its shameless dereliction of duty to its own orthodoxy. I realize that constantly conjuring up the “mainstream media” as the bogey man, after awhile, runs the risk of sounding whiny. It runs close to becoming a conservative “mantra” as tiresome as those from the Left. Nevertheless, the culpability of America’s powerful media in colluding with the Obama campaign from the very start is just too stark to ignore.

I would submit that the American people did not elect a gifted black politician to be their president. Instead, they elected a Symbol. They elected an Archetype that embodied such aphorisms as Hope and Change. They embraced and certified a Platonic Ideal. More cynically, they elected a Cartoon.

It says something about the vacuous state of America’s secularized Soul that so many would abandon reason and common sense only to embrace the young charismatic Obama as their exemplar. But who fashioned this gestalt that would have millions worshipping an enigma like a kennel of Pavlov’s dogs?

We’re back to the media. Instead of probing and poking holes in this bizarre inflation of personality known as the Obama Phenomenon, these so-called journalists saw the Light, converted and became acolytes of The One. One commentator, Chris Mathews, had a near-Pentecostal experience; and others, based on some of the gobbledygook they were spewing, may well have been speaking in tongues. They, like the mad scientist Doctor Frankenstein, actually created this freak of nature. Like the monster in Mary Shelley’s novel, the obscene creation which at first seemed to promise hope for Mankind began to take on a life and momentum of His own. However, unlike the locals, sensing something dark and ominous afoot, who came with torches and pitch forks to put an end to Frankenstein’s creation, the reporters and pundits nurtured this product of their well-intentioned but ultimately misguided enterprise. They deliberately sustained the life of this peculiar candidacy in spite of its disturbing opacity. The populace, forever being transfused with a liturgy of messianic religion, came to embrace The One everybody (apparently) had been waiting for. By osmosis, half the electorate absorbed the numinous and swallowed (along with media-provided Kool Aid) the New Idea.

Had these journalists and reporters been doing their job with professional integrity from the start, had they gone after this shady character with the same tenacity they showed in eviscerating Sarah Palin, Barack Hussein Obama would never have won his party’s nomination. Polls show that, had she run as the Democratic nominee, Hillary would have beaten McCain by an even wider margin than Obama did. Maybe so. She would have been a preferable choice. Despite her faults, or perhaps because of those faults, Hillary Clinton would be a real, flesh-and-blood president. We’d at least know what we were dealing with. Instead, we’re stuck with not so much a person as an artificial personality that will soon occupy the Oval Office.

In what follows, I’ve borrowed heavily from David Horowitz.

In contemplating the issue of the health care crisis that loomed large in this year’s election, it struck me that there is another dimension to this issue that has received scant consideration. Setting aside economics, I started to think about the potential political/social nature of an Obama health care plan.

Think back to the early seventies when a minority of gay activists, in the name of “identity politics” and “sexual liberation”, managed to hijack public health policy in this country. At that time a list of venereal diseases a mile long was traced back to the infamous bathhouses of San Francisco. Public health officials sensibly wanted to shut them down but ended up being intimidated by political correctness and a militant gay lobby. So the bathhouses remained open and disease spread at an alarming rate.

Perversely, gays were urged to wear their venereal diseases like a “red badge of courage”. Instead of calling for a moratorium on wanton trysting with multiple partners, the gay advocates preferred to hope for more and more antibodies and, later, antiviral “cocktails” to preserve their liberty to continue to engage in their sexual practices. They claimed that they had a “right to unsafe sex”.

In the mid-eighties, when AIDS emerged, the gay activists, with support from their allies in the Democratic Party, petitioned the courts against attempts by the public heath community to institute regular testing for HIV infection. So the disease continued to spread.

When officials became concerned about the purity of local blood banks, homosexuals protested. By being discouraged from giving blood, they cried that they were being discriminated against. Again, they won the day. One result was a dramatic increase in HIV infection among hemophiliacs, drug-users as well as the black and Hispanic communities. The cat was out of the bag.

Rather than submit to measures they considered to be transformative, gay organizations opted to push for AIDS research and AIDS “education”. This “education” campaign first tried to stress the nondiscriminatory nature of the disease by promoting what turned out to be the myth of widespread heterosexual AIDS cases. Curiously, the category of anal sex was nowhere to be found in the AIDS education curriculum.

AIDS became the most politicized and expensive disease ever in terms of money spent on research. Despite the “safe sex” campaign, the disease continued to reach epidemic proportions in the gay community, largely because gay men often chose not to wear their condoms.

Because of all this, to this day I want to puke every time I see some smiley naïve celebrity proudly wearing their pink AIDS ribbon at some award show. As if wearing a token ribbon means they're combating this disease. Instead, these sycophantic bleeding-hearts are really just dupes.

So what does all this have to do with Barack Obama whom I’m fairly sure is a devout heterosexual? One needs to recognize that the “gay politics” that emerged in the seventies was just another strain, albeit a virulent one, of the radical movement. They not only flaunted bourgeois society. They flaunted nature. The gay activists displayed the same reckless nihilism that is the very hallmark of the Radical Left. Not content to merely be equally protected under the law, they aspired to transcend the social order (and the natural order) in order to refashion a new humanity, to bring about a brave new genderless society without norms, norms that had evolved over time and had been tested pragmatically.

To many of us, this all sounds crazy. And yet, this radical fringe minority, was able to impose its will on the larger population. And at every turn they were defended and applauded by, not just the radical wing of the Left, but the liberal wing as well.

Whether one considers Obama an ultra-liberal or, as I’m inclined to, a bona fide radical of the first order, the question is, economics aside, do Americans really want to entrust the creation and overseeing of a universal health care system to someone of Obama’s ilk? I hope not.

Like his namesake Vlad The Impaler, famed vampire of old, Vladimir Putin plans to rise from the crypt of figurehead Premiership to, once again, lead Mother Russia as her beloved and strong-armed President in the coming year. The timing is curious. And, perhaps, ominous. Would I be straining the metaphor to refer to Mr. Putin as blood-thirsty? Maybe. How about we settle for power hungry? The argument could be made that he is an ultra-Nationalist with a grudge, fed by a wounded and paranoid psyche that keeps reminding him that his country has been dissed by the world community, and a territorial instinct that most mammals would envy.

Could it be that, with the neophyte Obama about to enter the arena of geopolitics, Putin, the scrappy street cat, wants back in the game so he can toy with and bat around the new mouse in the neighborhood? Joey Biden practically promised us as much.