For unbridled bias, ignorance and animus, this Reuters story on firearms has to be read to believed. Let’s start with the headline: 

Gun enthusiasts pack shows to buy assault weapons

In case you’re slow on the uptake, the story contains no fewer than thirteen uses of the word “assault,” all of them used incorrectly. The idea is to get the reader to think that enraged gun nuts all across America are lining up to buy machine guns in order to “assault” a particular target of their ire. And just how does Reuters define an “assault” rifle?

Reuters reporters went to gun shows in Pennsylvania, Missouri and Texas, and found long lines to get in the door, crowds around the dealer booths, a rush to buy assault weapons even at higher prices and some dealers selling out.

The busiest table at the R.K. Gun & Knife show at an exposition center near the Kansas City, Missouri airport was offering assault weap near the entrance.

West Plains, Missouri dealer Keith’s Guns sold out of about 20 AR-15 style assault rifles in a little over an hour, owner Keith Gray sa.

That would be this type of gun, one of the most popular civilian rifles in America.

Reuters continues:

An AR-15 type assault weapon was among the guns authorities believe suspect Adam Lanza stole from his mother to use in the massacre of 20 school children and six adults at a Newtown, Connecticut elementary school on December 14.

The killing of innocent children at the school shocked the nation and prompted a number of politicians including President Barack Obama to call for a ban on assault weapons and ammunition clips that allow the rapid firing of multiple bullets.

“Rapid firing of multiples bullets” sounds pretty scary until you realize that rapid fire is, along with accuracy, one of the points of shooting and no gun I know fires more than one bullet at a time.  But such drivel is par for the course for American journalists writing about firearms.

The story now reveals its true agenda:

The killing of innocent children at the school shocked the nation and prompted a number of politicians including President Barack Obama to call for a ban on assault weapons and ammunition clips that allow the rapid firing of multiple bullets.

Rather than tighten gun ownership restrictions, the powerful lobby for gun rights, the National Rifle Association, on Friday called for armed guards at every school…

Assault weapon is a broad term commonly used to refer to semi-automatic or automatic weapons that can fire multiple bullets rapidly. From 1994 to 2004 certain assault weapons and ammunition clips of more than 10 bullets were illegal.

The ban was allowed to expire when Republican George W. Bush was in the White House.

That darn Bush and those damn Republicans want school children to die. But then, what do you expect from a bunch of sexists and racists?

More than 200 people lined up at each of three entrances on Saturday morning to pay the $8 entrance fee to the Will Rogers Memorial Center in Fort Worth, which has an exhibit hall spanning 25 acres. They crowded the aisles of the show and stood two-deep at booths for assault weapons and ammunition clips.

At all three shows the attendees were overwhelmingly white men, with some women and very few ethnic minorities.

The story closes with a sideswipe at the so-called “gun show loophole” (private citizens engaging in private commerce) and then, for the sake of “balance,” finds a fellow who thinks guns aren’t regulated enough:

Bruce Abernathy walked away with an assault rifle after sitting through a 30-minute background check at the Texas show.

“There should be more strict background checks,” said Abernathy, a Dallas resident. He said there should be a 30-day waiting period to buy weapons and a thorough background check that includes five references.

So now you know how the discussion is going to be framed going forward: all rifles are “assault” rifles, and the term will quickly expand to include pistols — because, after all, what duck hunter uses a .357 Magnum? No defensive use of a firearm will be considered legitimate. As Rahm Emanuel famously said, “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” No wonder the lines at gun shows and in gun stores across the country last week were so long: folks can see where this movie is going.

Ask any cop or serviceman and he’ll tell you that gunfights at close range are nasty, brutish and short.  They are not the multi-magazined battles of Hollywood’s full-auto imagination, in which two parties duck, dodge, weave, take cover and trade shots for minutes on end.  In reality — and aside from spectacular gun battles like the North Hollywood bank robbery (which inspired the heart-pounding robbery sequence in Michael Mann’s Heat, above) — most combat ends after one or two shots. As the old saying goes: “If you need to reload — you lost.”

And yet, the anti-gun Left, which has happily seized upon the Newtown, Conn., tragedy to further its stealth disarmament agenda, continues to believe that resistance to a crazed, evil gunman is, essentially, futile; that any confrontation by an armed, responsible citizen will necessarily result in a prolonged hail of bullets that will take more lives than it will save; and that the best course of action is to let the gunman continue to fire uninterrupted until the SWAT team, the EMTs, and the coroner finally show up.

Nearly half a century after a young woman was stabbed to death in Queens, her dying screams falling upon the deaf ears of her Kew Gardens neighbors, to their everlasting shame, the Left would now make us all into Kitty Genovese.

There are many problems with this attitude but since “progressives” consider passivity  the “moral” course of action, let’s start with the morality: fighting back, if only with contempt, is always preferable to supine submission to those who would kill you — even if you die in the process. If you have a problem with that, then don’t pretend to want a national “conversation” about firearms. Instead, why not adopt the sneering ad-hominem attitude of Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, which under David Remnick has become a parody of  neurotic “progressive” thought:

After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat, people who are in their own way every bit as twisted and crazy as the killers whom they defend. (That they are often the same people who pretend outrage at the loss of a single embryo only makes the craziness still crazier.)

Well, pace Mr. Gopnik, guns really don’t kill people — people kill people. With guns, knives, clubs, poison, explosives, pillows and their bare hands, among other things. And yet what George Orwell first dubbed the “pansy left” continues to insist that not only are guns the cause of crime, but that they have no use in the prevention of crime, unless wielded by the police. And so the Left has come full circle since the ’60s, when every right-thinking hippie loathed the pigs — even wanted to “off” them — and was always looking for ways of sticking it to The Man.

But waiting for the Man is not an option. “When seconds count, the police are only minutes away” — in Newtown, they were twenty minutes away. The obscene horror of mass-shooting sites is often compounded by how long the killers have to go about their deadly work in “gun-free zones” (which should be re-dubbed “free-fire zones”) before being interrupted — at which point they typically kill themselves. In the recent Oregon mall shootings, the killer decided to turn his gun on himself when he caught sight of an armed civilian, and the Connecticut monster shot himself once the “first responders” started to arrive.

What would have happened had some civilian at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown or in that movie theater in Aurora, Colo., been armed and had shot back?

The assaults on the helpless and the unarmed would have ceased at that moment.

Nobody, even the craziest of shooters, can ignore gunfire coming in his direction; the instinct  toward immediate self-preservation, however temporary, is too strong. The shooter would have turned to assess the threat, perhaps fired back, been fired upon again and possibly hit, retreated to cover  – or, more likely, taken his own life — thus giving his victims life-saving moments out of the kill zone, in which to try and escape. But the kids of Newtown didn’t have that chance, nor did the Norwegian youth on that island in 2011, nor the students at Virginia Tech four years earlier. Because nobody was able to fight back.

And here’s the man who may soon succeed Hillary Clinton, on the Firing Line with WFB:

One more for those who can’t get enough of the senior senator from Massachusetts:

And, finally, Mr. Sixteen Weeks vs. fellow vet and future Swiftboater, John O’Neill on the Dick Cavett Show:

Maybe Susan Rice should reconsider, for the sake of the nation.

By now we’ve all seen NBC’s Bob Costas (not to be confused with my friend and NRO colleague, Bob Costa) pontificating in his smug lefty way in reaction to the murder/suicide of a Kansas City Chiefs football player and his girlfriend. Costas used as the basis of his remarks this column from Jason Whitlock, which included this passage:

Our current gun culture simply ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy, and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead.

In the coming days, Belcher’s actions will be analyzed through the lens of concussions and head injuries. Who knows? Maybe brain damage triggered his violent overreaction to a fight with his girlfriend. What I believe is, if he didn’t possess/own a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.

That is the message I wish Chiefs players, professional athletes and all of us would focus on Sunday and moving forward. Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it.

It’s easy to spot the flaw in this logic. Whitlock is confusing firearm availability with increased violence (when in fact the exact opposite is true), and if he needs to consult someone on domestic double murder without a gun, he need to look no farther than this guy:

If the glove don’t fit… you still might be guilty

He also makes the common liberal mistake of ascribing temptation to an inanimate object; my lefty friends are always telling me they would never have a gun in their homes because they couldn’t trust themselves around it. That surely says more about them than about a Colt M1911, and if that’s the way they feel, I wouldn’t want them to have easy access to firearms, either.

Whitlock’s larger point — which I agree with completely — is that football occupies entirely too much of the American landscape. Personally, I think spending even a minute watching pro football on television is a complete waste of time and I sincerely wish I had back all those misspent hours watching — and, worse, caring about — football. Among other things, I might have been spared this agony:

So it’s too bad Whitlock had to double down on dumb in this conversation with CNN’s Roland Martin:

You know, I did not go as far as I’d like to go because my thoughts on the NRA and America’s gun culture — I believe the NRA is the new KKK. And that the arming of so many black youths, uh, and loading up our community with drugs, and then just having an open shooting gallery, is the work of people who obviously don’t have our best interests [at heart].

I think it’s obvious if you’ve traveled abroad, and traveled to countries where they have legitimate gun laws, that we don’t have to have what we have in America, where people somehow think a gun enhances their liberty, and that people somehow think a gun makes them safer. It just doesn’t. A gun turns some kids listening to music into a murder scene. And uh, you know, if you don’t have a gun, you drive home. You know, kids listening to some loud music, you don’t like it, you go home and complain to your wife. But when you have a gun, you open fire, potentially, and take the life of a child.

The NRA is hardly “arming black youths” or pushing drugs in the black community, and Whitlock needs to distinguish between the pathologies of the underclass — white and black — in which arguments over trivial things all too often turn deadly, and the morality of the vast majority of citizens , whose first instinct is not to reach for a gun, even if they’re carrying one. (Link is to the Democratic Underground website, so be sure to enjoy the krazy komments after the chart.)

The last two Democratic candidates for president have been Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Neither man grew up poor — Clinton’s boyhood home was, in fact, one of the larger houses in Hot Springs, Ark., while Obama was a pampered, dope-smoking student at the elite Punahou School in Honolulu — but neither did he come from the moneyed aristocracy. By contrast, the GOP has nominated two scions of the Connecticut WASP oligarchy, George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush; John McCain, the son and grandson of admirals in the U.S. Navy; and millionaire Willard Mitt Romney, the son of the former governor of Michigan and failed presidential candidate George Romney.

You see where I’m going with this.

Clinton defeated Bush I in an election that Poppy never should have lost in 1992, consigning him to one-termer status, while Obama handily defeated both McCain (another GOP millionaire, who married his money) and Romney, who has now effervesced into the political ether as if he’d never run for president, which I’m still not sure he actually did. Only Bush II managed two wins against the donkeys, first by running against a guy who was ever dumber than he was (Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.) and later by running against a guy who was even richer (John Kerry, who also married his money).

Now you see where I’m going with this.

American’s don’t like plutocrats in the White House. With the rare exception of a JFK or an FDR — to the manner and manor born, but with the common touch — they prefer men who have fought their way up from humble circumstances to grab at the highest rung of the ladder. Men for whom losing means losing everything. What would Bill Clinton be today had he failed in his daring gambit to unseat Bush the Elder? A has-been southern governor with a wandering eye and the gift of the gab, working the rubber-chicken circuit on behalf of lesser men. Or Obama? From non-entity to non-entity in the blink of an eye. They both fought like hell to win because, with their outsized egos and ruthless ids, the alternative was unthinkable. By contrast, here’s Mitt Romney‘s La Jolla consolation prize for losing Ohio.

In California, a teardown.

And this little dump in Massachusetts:

How the other half lives.

Not to mention the compound in New Hampshire and the ski house in Park City, Utah, and whatever else may suit his fancy down the line.

Now you definitely see where I’m going with this.

Now, this is America: buy all you can eat, if you can stomach it. But the point is, there was no personal downside for Romney in losing the election. Everything in his life continues as before, and he’ll be living off his investment income forever — and living a life completely disassociated from the vast majority of his fellow citizens.

Just a week after the re-election of Barack Hussein Obama II as, unaccountably, president of the United States, the full extent of the looming disaster is beginning to dawn on the American people. Forget the looming fiscal cliff, the Senate majority leader’s irresponsible decision to exclude the soon-to-be-bankrupt Social Security system from any budget agreement, the retention of the corrupt Eric Holder as attorney general, or the bruited nominations of the inept Susan Rice as secretary of State, the arrogant John Kerry as secretary of Defense, and the incompetent John Brennan as the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Those things, if they come to pass, will cause us plenty of heartburn down the road to Alinskyite serfdom.

For now, though, simply consider the state of the U.S. military, whose moral collapse was signaled by the surprise resignation of CIA director David Petraeus last week as details of his affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, slowly became public — a scandal that quickly ensnared Gen. John Allen, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and another woman, Jill Kelley. By now, you’ve read most of the salacious details of this French bedroom farce, which would be funny if it weren’t so serious — with one door at Centcom after another flying open to reveal lissome bare-limbed married ladies and half-uniformed generals scrambling to get their pants on as the press explodes in orgiastic satisfaction. With its mission accomplished — getting Hussein re-elected and condemning America to four more years of potentially fatal economic disaster, foreign policy malevolence, and domestic fascism in the form of Obamacare, bureaucratic regulation, and executive orders, the media is only too happy to start poking around in the bedrooms of the soon-to-be-formerly famous and powerful.

It’s richly ironic that after celebrating a Democratic Party campaign that was almost entirely based on explicit appeals to female sexuality, including free birth control and the abortion of the inconvenient as a constitutional right, the media now finds itself back in the drag of Tom Wolfe’s Victorian Gentleman, prudishly cluck-clucking over the remarkable fact that when institutional barriers between men and women break down — barriers erected not out of sexist animus or irrational prejudice, but in recognition of the biological reality of boy meets girl — all sorts of things start to happen. Including rampant sexual activity from the top down; as David French observes here:

In the military — as elsewhere — sexual scandal is simply called “drama,” and “drama” (with its related fights, substance abuse, and sometimes even suicide attempts) can dominate military justice in deployed environments. During my deployment, I was with an all-male combat arms unit on a small, isolated base and thus missed most of the controversy that sometimes consumed entire units. But go to Balad — or one of the other larger bases — and it was everywhere. The larger DFACs (dining facilities) were the deployed equivalent of singles bars, and the omnipresent port-o-pot was a favorite location for clandestine couplings.

Whoever decided that “women’s liberation” required the sexual integration of the armed forces did his or her country a signal disservice.

Ever since the September 11 attack on our consulate and CIA station in Benghazi, “the dog in the night-time” of the scandal the media did its best to bury during the election campaign has been David Petraeus, the Iraq War commander turned spook-in-almost-chief. Throughout the orgy of misinformation, disinformation, finger-pointing, blame-shifting and general confusion, Petraeus remained adamantly silent, a hostage to fortune somewhere within the bowels of the CIA building in Langley. The one man who could have cut through the administration’s fog machine said nothing substantive as ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were laid to rest.

And now, just a couple of days after the election that returned Barack Hussein Obama II to executive power in Washington, he’s gone — resigned in the wake of an affair that likely occurred more than a year ago, apparently with his biographer, Paula Broadwell — who herself is under FBI investigation, reportedly for trying to access the general’s classified emails. Further, Petraeus will now not testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee about Benghazi next week.

And that, if Congress acquiesces and does not immediately subpoena Petraeus and either compel him to testify or force the administration to again assert executive privilege (as it did with Attorney General Eric Holder in the Fast and Furious mess), will be that — we’ll never know, and Obama will do his best to completely bury, what happened in Benghazi.

More details no doubt will dribble out over the coming days and weeks, but here’s what we can reasonably surmise. Although the official story is that the affair was uncovered by the FBI’s investigation into the emails, nevertheless it appears from the wording of Petraeus’s resignation letter that the affair began some time after July 2011; he became CIA director fourteen months ago. Therefore — unless he concealed that information from his vetters, which is highly unlikely given everything we know about the man — the Obama administration had to have known about the relationship from the start. Which means that, in effect, Petraeus confessed to his own “honey trap” and handed Valerie Jarrett, the Javert of Obama’s White House, a termination card, effective whenever she and the president cared to play it. And play it they did, right after the election and just before his testimony on the Hill. Well played, indeed.

On the other hand, if the affair began before Petraeus was being considered for the CIA post, and he didn’t reveal it, his reputation will never recover. As Ronald Kessler notes:

The investigation began last spring, but the FBI then pored over his emails when he was stationed in Afghanistan.

The woman who was having an affair with Petraeus is a journalist who had been writing about him.

Given his top secret clearance and the fact that Petraeus is married, the FBI continued to investigate and intercept Petraeus’ email exchanges with the woman. The emails include sexually explicit references to such items as sex under a desk.

Such a relationship is a breach of top secret security requirements and could have compromised Petraeus.

At some point after Petraeus was sworn in as CIA director on Sept. 6, 2011, the woman broke up with him. However, Petraeus continued to pursue her, sending her thousands of emails over the last several months, raising even more questions about his judgment.

So, one way or the other, we can begin to understand the silence emanating from the Langley Home for Lost Boys over the past several months. Right from the start, the Agency was fingered by the White House and by Hillary Clinton’s State Department as the fall guy for the Benghazi fiasco, especially once they understood that their “hateful video” legend wasn’t going to fly, and once leakers within the Agency began slipping the embarrassing details of what happened that night to their favorite journalist mouthpieces.

If the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was making us believe he doesn’t exist, then what are we to make of the Obama administration’s fixation on female sexuality, and its weird insistence that young women should be free to have sex whenever they wish, have their birth-control provided at public expense, and have carte blanche to kill the unwanted product of any liaisons without consequences? That they are, in short, nothing but sex objects?

Convincing American women that it is a moral good, practically a moral imperative, to murder their unborn children for reasons of personal convenience — what they call “choice” — is one of the Democratic Party’s signal accomplishments. Still, this campaign-closing ad is truly breathtaking.

Agree or disagree, the “choice” is yours. And today you get to do something about it.

****

Thumbnail Image courtesy shutterstock / Dionisvera

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“A coward dies a thousand deaths,” to paraphrase Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, “but a hero dies just one.” As we hopefully approach the end of the Barack Hussein Obama II administration, cowardice is just one of the many possible explanations of its catastrophic failure at Benghazi last month, a failure that cost the lives of four Americans, the loss of valuable intelligence assets, the burning of countless Libyan collaborators, whose lives are now forfeit in that wretched land and elsewhere, and the needless handing to the ascendant jihadists of a propaganda victory that might have been avoided and has yet to be avenged.

But wait — it gets worse. According to this story, they knew an attack likely was coming — and still did nothing:

The U.S. Mission in Benghazi convened an “emergency meeting” less than a month before the assault that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, because Al Qaeda had training camps in Benghazi and the consulate could not defend against a “coordinated attack,” according to a classified cable reviewed by Fox News.

Summarizing an Aug. 15 emergency meeting convened by the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, the Aug. 16 cable marked “SECRET” said that the State Department’s senior security officer, also known as the RSO, did not believe the consulate could be protected.

“RSO (Regional Security Officer) expressed concerns with the ability to defend Post in the event of a coordinated attack due to limited manpower, security measures, weapons capabilities, host nation support, and the overall size of the compound,” the cable said.

It’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of what Obama’s handling of what is sure to go down as one of the most disgraceful episodes in American political and military history tells us about him, his administration, the ethos of the modern Democratic Party, and the state of our nation. The short answer: nothing good.

Understanding the implications of the Benghazi story — which my colleague Roger Simon has outlined here and here and here — the MSM (except for Fox News) has done its best to ignore it. They know that, properly presented to the American people, the fiasco — in which our ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three others who died fighting like men instead of like politicians  – rightly should spell the end of the Obama administration. And regarding Roger’s suggestion of impeachment, it’s worth remembering that the Watergate burglary — the thing that ultimately ended Nixon’s presidency via resignation (under the threat of impeachment by the House) in 1974 — took place five months before his landslide victory in 1972. In other words, one doesn’t have to look very far for a precedent, should it come to that.

Because, let’s face it, the president of the United States — for no apparent legitimate reason of state or military doctrine — let those four men die on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, a clear and present dereliction of duty that, were he an officer in the services, would have gotten him court-martialed, stripped in rank, and sent to the brig. Instead, Obama’s decision (or, more likely, indecision) was a result of purely political calculations: the Slayer of Osama, having tamed the savage Islamic breast and declared the War on Terror over, chose to ignore any evidence to the contrary. And the media, ever eager to please, ignored the story because it didn’t fit the narrative.

We have now arrived at the purest distillation of the philosophy of the criminal organization masquerading as a political party that we call the Democrats: not only the personal is political, but everything — even the lives and deaths of our troops — is political.  But no surprise here.

Recently, one of the nastiest men of the 20th century — yes, I’m talking about you, Eric Hobsbawm — died at the age of 95.  (If you can stomach the face of pure moral-equivalence evil, click here.) Hobsbawm, an Egyptian-born Marxist, died honored in Britain, to which he emigrated from Germany after Hitler came to power. Before his death, as noted by Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal, Hobsbawm famously opined that:

None of this should have been surprising coming from a man who, over the years, gave his political assent to everything from the Nazi-Soviet Pact to the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Asked by the BBC whether the achievement of a communist utopia would have justified “the loss of fifteen, twenty million people,” he answered “Yes.”

Holodomor: the Ukraine, 1933

That “yes” is the authentic voice of the modern sociopathic Left of which Barack Obama is so unmistakably a part. Theory is everything to them; indeed, the villains of the Frankfurt School (to whom we provided safe haven from Hitler’s Germany) invented something called “critical theory,” a juvenile discipline predicated on the adolescent fixation with questioning strictures in the name of “human freedom,” but whose practical effect has been the demolition of moral and aesthetic standards and their replacement with nihilism. The deaths of millions of people in the name of their false god, communism, were — in words attributed to Stalin and endorsed by Hobsbawm — just a statistic.

From his boyhood in Honolulu to his young manhood at Occidental and Columbia, to the streets of Chicago and the halls of Harvard, Barack Obama has been passed along from one mentor to another, swimming in the seas of left-liberalism and internalizing its anti-American world view to such an extent that — as a candidate for president — he could stand in front of adoring throngs and proclaim that “we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Think about that extraordinary statement (alas, too few of our fellow citizens did): what did he mean? Why did the nation need to be “fundamentally transformed” in the first place? Into what was he proposing to transform it? The answers today are all too apparent.

In just four years under President Obama, the United States has seen its stature in the world sink, its economy crater, and its soldiers left to die, unaided, on a foreign battlefield. As a member of a military family, I concur with Roger that Obama’s inaction at Benghazi fully warrants the opening of an impeachment inquiry, so manifestly derelict in his duty does he appear to have been. But then, throughout his woebegone presidency, Obama has never been particularly interested in that aspect of the job, other than to play Drones of Death with his political advisors and crow about how “he” got bin Laden — behavior more suitable to a Chicago gangland chief dispensing with his enemies than a commander in chief defending his country.

In other words, Obama is crazy brave as long as there is no personal or political cost, a fearless killer of even American citizens: judge, jury, and executioner by remote control. But when it came time to act, in real time, to support a few brave men fighting not just for their lives but to save other Americans, he choked (which is why those stories that he had little or nothing to do with bin Laden raid are now being given wide currency in Washington). Given his pampered upbringing at Punahou and the Ivy League, his cowardice is unsurprising, and his sociopathy obviously comes naturally:

Clinton, being Clinton, had plenty of advice in mind and was desperate to impart it. But for the first two years of Obama’s term, the phone calls Clinton kept expecting rarely came. “People say the reason Obama wouldn’t call Clinton is because he doesn’t like him,” observes [former aide Neera] Tanden. “The truth is, Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people. My analogy is that it’s like becoming Bill Gates without liking computers.”

Tanden was, of course, forced to apologize for her candor once the Obama drones got to her, but her Kinsley Gaffe (inadvertently telling the truth) simply reinforced what everybody had long since come to understand about Obama, that he is a cold and unfeeling man, who views the military as his personal Praetorian Guard, Congress as his courtiers, and the American people as his subjects. He openly boasts about going around Congress with his executive orders and via his control of the regulatory agencies. And a second term, in which he would be unaccountable to the electorate, would be far worse. Because that’s where the real “fundamental transformation” will occur; these past four years will be seen as mere prologue to the nightmare to come.’

A new low from the Repressive Tolerance Party:

I liked it better in the original Kander and Ebb:

Proving once more that socialists are socialists, whether of the communist, Marxist or National Socialist variety. And the time to stop them is on Nov. 6. As the video says: Vote.

UPDATE: The creepy Children of the Corn video has now been taken private, thanks to the oceans of ridicule heaped upon it. Who knew lefties could feel shame and embarrassment? Mock them, relentlessly; as St. Thomas More famously said: “The Devil, that proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.”

UPDATE 2: Like diamonds, the interwebs are forever: you can still find the video here and here.