The Internal Revenue Service announced today that, under the direction of the Obama Administration, beginning in 2010 filing your income tax return will be dramatically simplified. Gone will be all the confusing schedules, work sheets and 100-page instruction books. They will be replaced by a single form, Schedule O, with only two lines to fill out. The first line reads: How much did you earn in [2010]? The second line reads: Send it in.

The IRS, hoping to improve its image, also unveiled its new public relations campaign centering on its new motto, “From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs”.

Thanks to the personal benevolence of President Obama, all individual needs will be assessed and met out of the revenues collected to insure parity in the name of fairness.

Our world faces the prospect of imminent disaster— by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s calculation we’re doomed in less than four months—due to a menacing, runaway global warming trajectory kicking into high gear and propelling us toward a harrowing near-future characterized by rising sea levels, submerged island nations, deforestation, hyper hurricanes, tornados on steroids, drastic desiccation and the specter of widespread famine. Or, at least, thus saith the Algorian priesthood. For it is written and foretold in the sacred scripture, the holy Earth In The Lurch, dictated to the prophet Algore himself by Gaia Herself, as well as other canonical writings such as The Unibomber’s Manifesto.

Back in the seventies our planet faced a similar impending catastrophe of unimaginable magnitude. The clarion cry at that time warned of worldwide hunger and starvation. There were simply too many people to feed. The solution, according to the scientific “consensus” of the day, was population control. (I can imagine the eugenics crowd and abortionists practically salivating at the prospect of culling the Homo sapiens herd.) This underlying anti-life assumption, no doubt, appealed to the Left in general. The only possible way to limit the Earth’s population and avert a holocaust was to, naturally, marshal the forces of government—guided, of course, by elite enlightenment, all under the auspices of liberal good intentions.

Fast forward to the present. There’s still world hunger. But the situation has improved dramatically. Many of the pockets of hunger and malnutrition that remain exist, not in spite of, but because of governments. Many of the corrupt rogue regimes of African nations let the humanitarian food shipments rot on the docks, refusing to disburse the food and supplies to their people. And a lunatic like Kim Jong Very Ill lets his subjects literally starve to death while he funnels all his country’s resources into North Korea’s masturbatory nuclear arms program.

So that Third Horseman of the Apocalypse failed to show up on his black steed after all, in spite of all those Leftist soothsayers. And today there’s even more people populating the globe than there were in the 1970s. So which U.N. project turned things around? How did the governments of the world, in concert, turn back the relentless tide of imminent starvation?

Actually, most of the credit goes to one individual, an agronomist by the name of Norman Borlaug—he died just a month ago—who is considered the father of the Green Revolution (to be distinguished from today’s “green” environmental movement). He figured out a way to significantly increase the yield of wheat. His methods were later applied to rice production. It’s estimated that Mr. Borlaug single-handedly saved the lives of a billion people. (By comparison, Rachel Carlson merely caused the death of millions.) Not a bad legacy, Norm.

One inspired, motivated and creative scientist did more to mitigate world hunger than all the governments of the world combined. Their myopic vision, all their committees, summits, central planning and clumsy bureaucracies could never have matched the simple genius of this one man who, working freely, unconstrained by governmental meddling, transformed his world.

Democrats now propose to destroy the U.S. economy with their fatuous Crap And Tax legislation that won’t do diddly-squat to cool the globe but will go a long way toward the Left’s favorite project and real goal, the redistribution of wealth—and on such a grand scale!

To whatever slim extent global warming is a real problem—and more and more scientists doubt that it is—maybe we should remember Norman Borlaug’s example. Pelosi, Reid, Waxman, Markey, Boxer and Kerry notwithstanding, there just must be a better way.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Barry The Duffer putts the greens while the Republic sinks deeper into the morass of His own making.

Chuck Schumer now thinks all CEOs of publically-traded companies should have their executive compensation scrutinized by Obama’s Pay Master, Kenneth Feinberg. The populist mood of the country isn’t too bothered by executives at big Wall Street firms having their compensation packages trimmed by Big Government to the tune of up to ninety percent. That’s understandable considering these institutions made their deal with the devil with all those bailouts. But every CEO in America? Can you say “intrusive”?

Since liberals are so offended by “obscene” wealth, how about letting Mr. Feinberg determine the “worth” of Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Leo DiCaprio? Oh, that’s right—they’re all Obama sycophants. How about slashing the pay of U.S. senators, including Senator Chuck’s, by ninety percent?

President Obama proudly proclaims He will not meddle in the affairs of other nations, even countries like Iran where a revolution against the insane regime is afoot. Oh that Barry would, here at home, pledge to not meddle in our private lives and enterprise.

Barack Hussein Obama has won the Nobel Appease—sorry, Nobel Peace Prize—narrowly edging out the runner up, America’s warbling troubadour, Bob Dylan. Barry’s extended, un-clutched hand reaching out to dictators, thugs, whackos and malcontents everywhere, in the end, trumped the legacy of Chimes of Freedom ringing and blowin’ in the wind while the times they were a changin’.

(I wonder if Barry now regrets His decision to diss the Dali Lama, a fellow Nobel laureate.)

We must laud those prescient Norwegians for picking Barack Who, at the time the selection process concluded, had been president of the world a mere ten days. Somehow they just knew the fledgling Leader of The Free World would be great for world peace.

Well, now that that’s that, Barry can finally pull out of Afghanistan with a clear conscience. That conflict now seems trivial and superfluous. Who needs war when you can have peace through the sheer force of Mr. Obama’s personality? (Still, the current war in the southern provinces of Chicagoland remains troublesome; but we must just be patient and let Barry do His thing.) In a similar fashion, Jimmy Carter, another Nobel winner, brought lasting peace to the Middle East by his goofy smile along with the charity of his good will and good intentions, the hallmark of any liberal’s diplomacy. Both these great men embody and exhibit perfectly the ideals of the esteemed moral philosopher, Rodney King, an intellectual giant of the last century.

So now the young Barack Obama joins Jimmy and Algore in the ethereal mists of Nobel’s Olympus, thus completing the Holy Triumvirate of Lefty Peaceniks for our age. And a glorious Age it is.

Poor little Barry Obama. Nothing seems to be going His way these days. He got His keister handed to Him in the health care debates (in spite of being aided and abetted by the slavering State-run media). His poll numbers continue to nose-dive. Even the French, for Pete’s sake, have mocked Him for His stellar naïveté and Titanic ego—a dangerous combination—in the realm of geopolitics. And, now, the Chi Town triumvirate of Barack, Michelle and Oprah has blown it big time in Copenhagen. They didn’t even make it past the first round of balloting. Even Michelle’s sob story about her dad’s multiple sclerosis —it’s always about the Obamas—failed to move the officials. If Barry can’t seal the deal with the We Are The World crowd, just how the hell is He going to convince the Ayatollahs and their simian stooge to play nice?

And it’s pretty pathetic when a corrupt politician, schooled in the Daily tradition, can’t even win the nod from another bunch of crooks, those corrupt IOC members.

It’s really a shame. Half the members of the Obama Administration are slumlords who stood to make a lotta money selling off their South Side tenement holdings to the city to make room for the Olympic venues.

I wonder if these loser ambassadors from Chicago—all three solidly “ethnic”—will cry racism this time around. That might prove to be difficult, even for these practiced race-baiters. Well, there’s always the old tried-and-tested boogey man, George Bush. There must still be so much residual bad feeling toward America left over from the Bush era, lingering like some foul, toxic cloud, that even Barack’s mojo wasn’t potent enough to dispel it. Can it possibly be that all that America-bashing has failed to pay off? Even the meager dividend of winning the Olympics for Chicago has been lost. Yet Barry still thinks He can charm Kim Jong Ill or Mahmoud?

So, how much tax-payers’ money did these pompous narcissists and celebretants blow on their failed mission? Even more important, what kind of a carbon footprint did these Green hypocrites leave in the wake of their three 747s and the caravan of limousines they were transporting?

The world has flipped off their naked Emperor. The myth of Barack Hussein Obama is beginning to tumble like a house of cards. What a loser.

The Left’s principia mathematica can be summed up thusly: reduce everything to the lowest common denominator. For these radicals, there’s simply no other way to achieve their utopian vision of universal equality. It’s much easier to hold people back, to drag people down, than to set the bar higher and compel everyone to reach that elevated level. Too much energy would need to be expended to overcome the gravity of reality. Of course, the unstated truth is even the leftists don’t really believe in a society where everyone is perfectly equal and everything is “fair”. There must always be the vanguard, the elites who engineer this ambitious project and who exempt themselves from their social reductionism. The proletarians were consigned to Stalin-era tenements and long bread lines but the Politburo members enjoyed their caviar while vacationing in their dachas.

This was always to be a protracted enterprise. But the leftists have made a good start. They work obsessively and relentlessly to “dumb down” America’s culture, from “values-based” education to revisionist history to multi-culturalism and its fatuous cousin, moral equivalency, to the coarsening—and neutering—of language to “sound bite” news coverage to the State-sponsored and funded “arts” to the trivialization and debasement of entertainment. Even the idea of sports competition, once valued as something good, has been reduced in our schools to the farcical notion that neither team should win because, after all, that wouldn’t be “fair” to the losing—oops, poor choice of words—the other side. And the Juvenile currently occupying the Oval Office has adopted this same puerile thinking—hence, His aversion to using, in the context of foreign policy, the term “victory”. It might damage the bad guys’ self-esteem. Pursuing victory is too close to gloating, I guess.

This perverse moral malaise, however, does not stop at America’s borders. No, it must be exported. The unique, the exceptional, in any form, will always be offensive to leftists because such categories contradict their radical egalitarianism. And so this is why our president is always taking to the world stage to, at every opportunity, denigrate the country He was elected to represent, reminding the rest of the world that the United States is just another nation with no particular moral standing. So, no, it just won’t do to have an America that stands alone as that “shining city on a hill”. We must forget that America has, since the end of World War II, remained the sole Western nation solidly committed to market economics with its attendant freedoms—and unprecedented prosperity—while the Europeans gravitated to social democracies characterized by varying degrees of statism, social and economic stagnation, moral vacuity and the erosion of personal freedoms. Yet, according to Obama, it’s time we drop our airs of superiority along with our yearning for freedom and join our friends on the Continent (even though many of those countries are now beginning to realize the bankruptcy of their own regimented social systems). After all, it’s only “fair”.

Despite claims to the contrary, our health care system is the best in the world. It is exceptional. There certainly are problems that need to be addressed but the system is “hopelessly broken” only because Rahm Emanuel, salivating for another “crisis” to energize his dialectic, deems it so. It turns out the radical Democrats not only want to redistribute the wealth. With ObamaCare, they also plan to redistribute the misery—just to be “fair”. And those EU healthcare systems the liberals love so much? These social democracies are only able to afford their universal health care systems—and then, just barely—because they don’t have to commit large appropriations to their own defense. They’ve let the United States with its exceptional military might take care of that for them for the past six decades. Thank you very much.

But, unfortunately for them—and us—there can no longer be a lone Super Power in Obama’s World—and, yes, it’s His world now. Such lofty status is anathema to Barry’s New World Order. To the relief and joy of the rest of the world, The Messiah has finally come. He’s not, however, the Great Unifier, as advertised. No, He’s the Great Leveler. He’s The Messiah, but an impotent One, Who hasn’t a clue how to lift the masses out of abject poverty; so He’s left with only one option, to emasculate the vitality of prospering nations. (How will the poor be helped when everybody ends up poor?) He’s the Zany Zen Master who speaks in riddles, dispensing nuggets of wisdom like, “If you can’t bring the impoverished, disenfranchised Third World to the “mountain” of Western Civilization, then you must bring that mountain down, leveling it, to the flatlands of a shared mediocrity and misery”. Whatever.

Most folks are familiar with Jesus Loves The Little Children, the classic sing-along hymn tailored for the kiddies’ set. Here's the well-know refrain:

Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
All are precious in His sight,
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

A new Obama “hymn” has surfaced on YouTube (yet again). Frankly, there are so many of these musical paeans to The One out there, they’re popping up in cyberspace like so many crazed prairie dogs on meth. This particular one debuted at a grade school somewhere in New Jersey. It’s not just a little ditty. It’s almost epic. But one stanza jumped out and clobbered me:

Barack Hussein Obama
He said Red, Yellow, Black or White
All are equal in his sight
Mmm, mmm, mmm!

Let’s set aside the troubling aspect of this smacking of a blatant attempt to brainwash our impressionable little ones. Or that, curiously, this lovely little chant doesn’t seem to violate the Left’s sacrosanct—and largely fictional, distorted—principle of “separation of church and state”; at least, one could thus conclude since, in this instance, the ACLU is AWOL. We can argue the issue of church and state, but it seems to me Eric Holder should at least be prosecuting somebody for copyright infringement.

What interests me is that while Jesus sees all children—and, by inference, all people—as precious, a perception born out of deep abiding Love, today’s ersatz Messiah sees everybody as equal. Equality is, evidently, the Highest Good, trumping even Love.

Of course, Jesus, too, is color-blind. In his sight, red and yellow, black and white—all are equal. But Jesus recognizes an organic equality. All humans share the metaphysical distinction of being molded in the very “image” of God, all are inherently stamped with a Holy Imprimatur which sanctions human beings to be pale expressions of—and imperfect reflections of—The Divine’s attributes. So our common humanity and intrinsic equality is ontological, rooted in our very bed-rock nature.

But Barack Obama has something else in mind. Despite empirical evidence to the contrary, He champions a pure moral equivalence in the name of “diversity”. He believes in an experiential, worldly equality that must be finessed and compelled and which wars against human freedom, the expression of which can never be homogenous. In truth, such immanent equality can only perfectly exist in the abstract.

This reveals one of many contradictions in leftist thinking. Liberals believe that Man is perfectible through evolution and by humanist enterprise yet deny any real inherent value to human life. This attitude is manifested in the Left’s addiction to abortion, its penchant for euthanasia in some form or another, its promotion of perverse, dehumanized culture devoid of transcendent meaning and by its conviction that Homo sapiens have no more intrinsic value than a titmouse. Radical ideology, lofty rhetoric and idealism notwithstanding, has no genuine love for people; human beings are inevitably seen as expendable (to wit, the mass slaughters of the last century).

Jesus declared, “the poor you will always have with you.” But isn’t this a tacit admission that perfect plenary equality in a free-will Universe is an impossibility? It’s one thing to strive to promote and effect equality by removing impediments to opportunities for all; it’s another to impose it through artifice at the expense of freedom.

That’s the difference between Jesus and the Latter-Day Messiah we happen to be stuck with. Jesus of Nazareth loves each of us and has ordained our moral freedom to make our way in this world and to make the most of our lives (with inevitable mixed results). Barry of Hyde Park loves Himself but promises us the illusion that we’re all equal—or will be—He’s still working on it.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think I’ll stick with Jesus Loves The Little Children.

Historically, excluding the obligatory State of the Union speech, a president summoning a joint session of Congress has been a relatively rare occurrence and generally presupposes some momentous crisis or the fact that the nation finds itself at some historic crossroad. It was appropriate for George W. Bush to address the Congress and the American people in the aftermath of the devastating attacks of September 11^th, 2001. Our country’s future was uncertain and its economic vitality threatened. And it was not entirely inappropriate for President Obama to address a joint session of Congress this past February as the world economy teetered on the brink of the abyss. I disagreed with His approach, the bloated and dubious Stimulus Plan, to meeting this crisis head-on. But it was a crisis.

Now our president has decided to, again, call for a joint session of Congress. This time the “crisis” is health care. This is simply fear-mongering, a tenant of the Left whose entire agenda is underpinned by a need for chaos and crisis to effect change. Go back through the annals of radicalism’s history and the concept “out of chaos, order” is there. It’s in the New Left’s Port Huron Statement and it’s in Alinsky’s writings. Its more contemporary expression can be found in Rahm Emanuel who famously remarked that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. The Democrats, true to form, have consistently been chronic whiners hysterically inflating every conceivable social ill into a full-blown “crisis”. What a humorless, morose lot.

The only genuine crisis that compels Obama to address the Congress this time is His own, both political and personal. His popularity is flagging, His credibility—not that He ever had much—is eroding and He’s lost control of the debate over the defining centerpiece of His domestic agenda. The clock’s ticking and it’s time for that Hail Mary pass. As usual, this is all about Barry, juvenile narcissist. (During His much awaited—and disingenuous—speech to the young’uns, our Obamacentric president referred to himself with words like “I”, “me” or “mine” no less than 56 times.) ObamaCare has never been about health or caring. It’s about an intrusive and bullying government hijacking a significant and strategic chunk of the private sector. It’s about manufacturing Obama’s synthetic legacy as a “great” president. And it’s about securing Obama’s place forever in the pantheon of radical luminaries who’ve all worked tirelessly to actualize Marx’s utopian dream.

Anticipating His prime-time address to the Congress, the silver-tongued snake oil huckster is hoping—gambling, really—that He’s got His mojo back. If He doesn’t—if it’s just another long-winded boiler plate speech—the Democrats will have a real crisis on their hands.

Maybe there’s something to be said for decadence. The same pop culture that created and, to some degree, still sustains Obama’s cult of personality may, in the end, turn out to be His public relations Waterloo (to borrow a phrase from Senator Demint). Thank God—the real one, that is—for all those insipid Americans that suffer from an attention span so short it sometimes needs to be measured in nanoseconds.

Obama continues to play to His strength: His much-vaunted, “extraordinary” ability to make great speeches that stir the soul of America, eloquent calls to action to effect the Change We’ve All Been Waiting For (whatever that means). We’ve discovered, though, there’s a caveat. Without David Axelrod’s speechwriting, the ever-present teleprompter and the networks’ stellar production values, Barry can often be underwhelming, at times even giving W a run for his money in the sputtering, stumbling and bumbling department.

So, while there’s a calculated risk, they keep putting Barack out there for mass consumption. He’s everywhere. He must hold the record for the most times a president’s mug has graced magazine covers. CNN and MSNBC have entire wings in their retail shops devoted to nothing but Obamabilia. In just the first few months of His tenure, our young, charismatic president has held more prime-time press conferences than you can shake a stick at—and much to the annoyance of American Idol fans. And now, in unprecedented Orwellian fashion, President Maximus plans to address all our school children at one time in one big coast-to-coast general assembly, filling their little skulls full of mush with who knows what palatable bromides. Obama will also be throwing a Hail Marry to save the languishing health care reform initiative by addressing a joint session of Congress during prime-time. This will be the second “state of the union” speech He’s given before actually giving the real State Of The Union in January.

One gets the impression The First Egoist loves to hear Himself talk. Frankly, I’ve grown weary of His melodious yet droning meter. (Rush Limbaugh came up with a palliative for this by cycling Obama’s audio clips at a higher rate, thereby rendering an Alvin The Chipmunk effect—it helps.) Especially irksome is Obama’s robot-like, well-timed turns to the left followed, with the precision of a fine Swiss watch, turns to the right. When He’s addressing an audience He’s like a zombie watching slow-motion ping-pong. He’s become predictable. The pixie dust has finally begun to settle and the magic has gone out of His glorious speech which sounds more and more programmed and inauthentic. And Barry’s propensity to tell whoppers while earnestly pleading His case hasn’t helped. He’s developed a nasty credibility problem.

Barack Hussein Obama, deep-thinker, profound intellect, brilliant Man of vision, has embarrassingly committed a pop culture faux pas: He’s allowed Himself to become oversaturated. And, in the Video Age, where titillation and instant gratification are paramount, where tweeting the latest meme or craze is the norm, that’s a no-no. Morally vacuous Americans, especially young people, have little appreciation for transcendent, enduring values. Instead they love fads—and celebrities. Obama is both. That’s why so many of the shallow, unthinking and gullible jumped on the Obama bandwagon. Rather than being embarrassed by the adoration, Obama has promoted it. Remember, He wrote two autobiographies before He ever accomplished anything of note.

But the problem is fads and celebs are transient, like quarks constantly bubbling up from the Quantum Field only to instantly disappear, being absorbed back into the subatomic soup of endless possibilities. Okay, Obama has shown more staying power than that; but this shooting star is gradually burning out as the plummeting poll figures reveal. Thankfully, there’s a natural limit to America’s stupidity. So come on America, it’s about time to redirect your worship to the latest Britney Spears or Zack Efron.

People watch the Super Bowl as much for the clever, innovative ad campaigns that are debuted as for the football contest itself. Yet a few months later those same viewers will tune out those same ads which have become commonplace, having lost their novelty and luster. Obama’s brand has been over-sold. The Obama cult of personality is just another bubble which the laws of physics dictate must burst sooner or later.

While there is much to critique about American pop culture, the irony is this: pop culture’s Zeitgeist of superficiality which propelled Obama to superhuman heights, coupled with the ennui of that same fickle culture, may just, in the end, save the Union from this ubiquitous, ambitious and dangerous Wizard of O.

There was just something special about watching all those Democrats, leftist lemmings being drawn by the ineffable, filled with unease and dread of the numinous as they entered uncharted waters, yet stalwartly filing in and filling the pews of a church on Saturday; special in the same sense observing a total eclipse of the sun is special—it does happen; but only very occasionally.

Still, it was very moving to witness the faithful flocking together for a memorial service to bid farewell to their recently-fallen martyr and saint. Especially touching was the cavalcade of Saint Teddy’s grandchildren—it’s a big clan and there were a lot of them—as they bravely, in holy succession, stepped up to the lectern, young foot soldiers for the cause, prepared to read from the cue cards previously printed up and distributed by the DNC diocese. How courageous were these little acolytes as they came forth in service to the One True Universal Faith (Progressivism, that is—not Catholicism—much less universal Christendom)!

It’s true Jesus once said something about “suffer the little ones to come unto me”. But I wonder if even Jesus on His exalted Throne in Heaven wasn’t literally suffering—at least wincing just a bit—at the spectacle. I know it pained me.

You do have to hand it to those devout Democrats, though. They know how to shamelessly politicize just about any occasion, no matter how sacred or solemn. In the case of the service on Saturday, to their credit, these good liberals appropriated what wasn’t theirs, the religious trappings and church surroundings, and made them their own, subordinating Catholic traditions to suit the needs of their own religion. And, even more amazing, these True Believers seemed to be able to pull it off with nary an outcry from the irreligious press about separation of church and state. It’s curious, then, that so many of them continue to deny the miraculous (even when it happens in their own midst).

Frankly, I'm surprised the youthful mourners weren't conscripted into a more overt pageantry of ecclesiastical service, lighting candles and incense while wearing the sacred vestments, gilded sandwich boards promoting TeddyCare. What next? With their religious zeal rekindled, will the Democrat devotees go fundamentalist and start enlisting juvenile suicide bombers, sending them into fractious town hall meetings? What better training for the day when they'll be old enough to join the ranks of Colonel Obama's genuine paramilitary infrastructure, the domestic Civilian Defense Force—the one The Commissar, Himself, said should be as well-organized and well-funded as our military?

During the service, with each poignant remembrance brought to mind by family and loved ones, the gathered congregation was enjoined to bestow approbation by responding out loud in unison with the words, “Lord, hear our prayer”. One woman was overheard whispering to her neighbor, “Don’t they mean ‘Lord, yes we can’?” To be fair, a lot of these folks are a little rusty when it comes to the nuances of religious affirmation and traditions. That, and Holy Communion—appropriately, red Kool-Aid—had been served just before.

Bless their hearts, these big goofy oafs try their damnedest to practice the fine art of subterfuge—they really do. They’re ushered into assembly halls via the backdoor or through basement windows as stealth commandos. Another sneaky tactic they employ is to simply show up for a scheduled town hall meeting several hours early to not only pack the house but to do so in a way that, hopefully, won’t be noticed. So far so good.

But then, on other occasions, they go and blow their cover by showing up en mass in a fleet of chartered buses. In an age when everyone’s cell phone doubles as a camera, the arrival of these invading armadas is easily documented. What’s even worse, they all show up—for instance, at Representative Tim Bishop (D)’s town hall meeting in Farmingville, New York—wearing their identical bright red Ban-Lon shirts with the local union insignia prominently displayed. I guess solidarity is everything to these members of the proletariat. But the problem is they stick out like a sore thumb. As I viewed video footage of the event in Long Island, the crowd was peppered with roving bands of operatives wearing their bright red shirts. Nothing says “grassroots” like a visible marching army in full dress uniform. The only thing missing were armbands and nifty helmets fashioned to look like ACORNS.

(By the way, this was the same Tim Bishop who had scheduled one of his previous meetings with his constituents at the local SEIU union hall. Ballsy.)

Maybe these labor dudes need to brush up on the Che Guevara Field Manuel issued to them by Organizing For Obama—er, Organizing For America—in order to learn better how to blend in with the enemy. If you want to avoid the charge of Astroturffing, next time you might want to show up in separate cars and wearing your street clothes.

Christians worldwide, long concerned for Barry Obama, their wayward fellow pilgrim in the faith, are now rejoicing! Some have even gone so far as to kill the fatted calf to celebrate the prodigal’s return to the fold. For it turns out Brother Barry will finally be attending a church service this Saturday. In fact, Reverend Barack will actually be delivering the scheduled fiery sermon which, reportedly, will call down hellfire and brimstone upon the heads of unruly town hall mobsters. Along with the righteous Revered One, congregants attending Boston's The First Church of St. Paul Wellstone will be celebrating the life, death, resurrection and recent assumption of one of their own, Saint Teddy, patron of imbibing, debauchery and extreme swimming. In the past these religious gatherings—normally quite rare for these materialists and secularists—have been known to get pretty rowdy “in the Spirit”. (Screw down the chandeliers and carpet the aisles.) In fact, under the unction and inspiration of O's Oily Spirit, expect some of these liberal fundamentalists to start speaking in forked-tongues.

It’s always entertaining to witness outraged liberals playing make-believe, pretending to actually be principled. With the release of new documents detailing CIA interrogation abuses in questioning detainees, Oprahesque liberal angst is spiking into the red again. Claiming the lofty moral high ground, these bed-wetters—hey, if our intellectual president can say people get “all wee-weed up” then I’m comfortable with my descriptive noun—anyway, these sensitive effete whiners moralistically chasten the rest of us Neanderthals for failing to uphold America’s highest ideals. Well, if I lived in the same imaginary, utopian world which deluded liberals tend to think they inhabit, I too could be idealistic. In such a world—if it existed—this discussion would be moot. There would be no hand-wringing over detainee abuses because there would be no detainees.

Besides, compared to those Islamo-fascist dudes, our interrogators are a bunch of spineless pikers. We may threaten to kill some jihadist psychopath’s kids if he doesn’t sing; but we would never carry out the threat. Unlike Abdul or Hakeem, we don’t actually sever our prisoner’s heads. And if we did, we wouldn’t film the bloody affair and broadcast it to the entire world for popular consumption. The liberal mind just can’t seem to grasp the reality of evil or the salient fact that we are at war with fundamentalists who want to kill a bunch of us infidels. I may not go so far as to say that “all’s fair in love or war”. But let’s at least recognize that those are both grey areas. Desperate times may call for desperate measures and certain idealistic values may need to be tarnished for the greater good. (Funny; moral relativists—that is to say, liberals—normally love situational ethics.) So reality, at times, can be messy. By plotting the assassination of Hitler, Bonheoffer violated one of his own values. But, to his spiritually-informed mind, doing nothing would have been even more immoral. I wonder what would happen to a liberal’s principled opposition to torture if their own immediate loved ones were specifically targeted by Allah’s warriors.

The liberals’ righteous indignation is laughable and deplorable because most of the time it’s in deep hibernation. They only drag out and dust off their scruples when it serves their greater agenda. Where is the noble, courageous Democrat when ACORN is being paid by the DNC to steal elections? Or when Black Panthers are enlisted to be vigilantes with clubs outside a polling station? Or when half the Obama Administration is comprised of tax cheats? Where was an incensed Naomi Wolf or an indignant Kate Michelman when Bubba was debasing himself and his office, exploiting his position of power to use—and then discard—a naive intern for his own gratuitous pleasure? (Hint: principled feminist condemnation was subordinated to the larger approbation of Pro-Choice politics which Slick Willy championed assiduously.)

Political southpaws also love to become moral crusaders when it comes to weightier causes like protecting the imperiled snail darter or Pelosi’s beloved salt marsh mouse; but they seem unperturbed by the systemic abortion of human beings. Hey, why get hung up on such a trivial matter?

These self-appointed pseudo-priests of piety dare to define and safeguard our country’s values but are woefully ignorant or disdainful of its great history which is embedded in and emanates out of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. And it’s precisely those “embarrassing” religious values that define America’s exceptionalism, itself the product of this great spiritual heritage, which “principled” liberals are constantly at war with.