I went to a launch party last night for James O’Keefe’s new book Breakthrough: Our Guerrilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy. As all the world knows, O’Keefe performed an important public service by exposing ACORN for the partisan voter-fraud-enabling sewer that it is. But as Breakthrough shows, he has been tirelessly devoted to exposing other facets of the leviathan of Government Unlimited, Inc. I’ve only just dipped a toe into the book, but already I can see that this intellectual heir to Andrew Breitbart has produced a devastating attack on the smary leftist establishment. I don’t expect to see it reviewed in The New York Times, but I’ll wager it will rocket up that paper’s bestseller list. Don’t miss it.

Don’t miss Christian Adams’ review:

James O’Keefe’sBreakthrough: A How-To Guide for Conservative Activism

I am contemplating the train wreck revolving around the revelations about our National Security Agency’s appetite for spying on U.S. citizens, along with the train wreck that swirls around the revelations about the deployment of the IRS for partisan vengeance, along with the train wreck that is the fiscal, administrative, and, ultimately, medical catastrophe called ObamaCare (aka, the un-affordable “Affordable Care Act”), not to mention the train wreck that was the administration’s reaction (“What difference does it make?”) to the murderous Islamic terrorist attack on our consulate in Benghazi, along with  . . . well, you get the picture.

Thinking just about the first, the NSA part of the current entertainment, I am reminded of a friend’s note to me about how it fits in with the administration’s gradual transformation of itself into an unaccountable nomenklatura with more or less unlimited powers.  The concomitant transformation, it does not quite go without saying, is the transformation of us citizens — formerly the employers of all those “public servants” (it sounds funny now, doesn’t it: “public servants” forsooth!) swanning about in Washington on our money — the transformation, I say, of us citizens into serfs, i.e., slaves working for a feudal master. My friend quoted Obama’s statement about the behavior of the NSA when it came to your phone/internet/banking/whatever data. “It’s important to recognize,” said the leader of the formerly free world,

that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society. And whatI can say is that in evaluating these programs, they make a difference in our capacity to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity.

As my friend noted, Obama leans toward the security side of the equation, and he does so with, so to speak, a vengeance. Right: we have to debate this issue, “but he puts his thumb on the scale. And because of the secrecy involved, no one outside his top-secret circle can make an informed judgment about the efficacy of these powers.”  Just like those unpleasant chaps in Orwell’s 1984, the fact that we are now and apparently ever shall be on a war footing means that we are living in a state of perpetual emergency, which in turn means that he, the man in charge, can do pretty much whatever he wants to whomever he wants, and so can his minions. Either you’re part of the nomenklatura, or you’re not.

I just caught up with Charles Murray’s brave and perspicacious column at NRO about Jason Richwine. I know memories are short, but the outrageous story of how Mr. Richwine was hounded out of his job at the Heritage Foundation by a gaggle of PC witch-hunters last month is worth bearing in mind. His own account of his travails is very much worth reading. The bare outline:

1. On May 6, Mr. Richwine’s co-authored report on the fiscal cost of immigration amnesty (we’re talking trillions, trillions) is published by Heritage. Many interviews, lots of media attention.
2. The next day, The Washington Post reports that Mr. Richwine’s 2009 Harvard dissertation presented data showing that recent Hispanic immigrants “score lower than U.S.-born whites on many different types of IQ tests. Using statistical analysis, it suggests that the test-score differential is due primarily to a real cognitive gap rather than to culture or language bias.”
3. Later that day: a media fire-storm. Accusations of racism. The Heritage Foundation lives up to the title of Ralph Buchsbaum’s zoological classic, Animals Without Backbones: An Introduction to the Invertebrates, and Mr. Richwine “resigns.”

Another victory for the forces of “diversity” and “tolerance.” The enforcers in George Orwell’s 1984 would have been proud. Once again, reality caved in to ideology.

I know that this depressing scenario is happening too often to be surprising. While there is still a little space for dissent, however, it is worth publicizing such disgusting events for what they are: the victory of totalitarian imperiousness over a cowardice masquerading as prudence. (I am speaking of the Heritage Foundation, not Mr. Richwine).

Charles Murray, with his usual instinct for the salient, gets it just right:

In resigning, Dr. Richwine joins distinguished company. The most famous biologist in the world, James D. Watson, was forced to retire from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2007 because of a factually accurate remark to a British journalist about low IQ scores among African blacks. In 2006, Larry Summers, president of Harvard, had to resign after a series of attacks that began with his empirically well-informed remarks about gender differences. These are just the most visible examples of a corruption that has spread throughout American intellectual discourse: If you take certain positions, you will be cast into outer darkness. Whether your statements are empirically accurate is irrelevant.

If you take certain positions, you will be cast into outer darkness. Whether your statements are empirically accurate is irrelevant. Translation: truth doesn’t matter when ideology triumphs. White is black, day is night, there are no IQ differences among ethnic groups.

Remember Malik Obama?  He’s the Kenyan-born half brother of the more famous Obama. The men, who first met in 1985, are not close, but each served as the best man at the other’s wedding.  Malik has what The Daily Caller delicately calls “a checkered past.” That’s not the president’s fault, of course, any more than Jimmy Carter was responsible for his erring brother Billy.

There are, however, wheels within wheels here. Consider the Barack H. Obama Foundation, a 501(c)(3) entity founded in 2011 and presided over by Malik Obama.  Never heard of it?  I hadn’t either until a friend pointed out the curious connection between Lois “Fifth Amendment” Lerner, one of the IRS officials at the center of the widening scandal engulfing that federal agency, and the Barack H. Obama Foundation.  It turns out that these last several years the IRS has not only been harassing groups whose descriptions include phrases like “tea party” and “patriot.” It has also been bending over backwards to give preferential service to certain groups with a different political complexion. Groups, that is, like the Barack H. Obama Foundation. As The Daily Caller reports, Ms. Lerner

signed paperwork granting tax-exempt status to the Barack H. Obama Foundation, a shady charity headed by the president’s half-brother that operated illegally for years.

According to the organization’s filings, Lerner approved the foundation’s tax status within a month of filing, an unprecedented timeline that stands in stark contrast to conservative organizations that have been waiting for more than three years, in some cases, for approval.

Lerner also appears to have broken with the norms of tax-exemption approval by granting retroactive tax-exempt status to Malik Obama’s organization.

Yikes! No wonder she wants to take the Fifth. Where do you suppose this rottenness ends?  Yesterday, Israpundit pointed out in a video that Malik’s “checkered past” extends to the present.  Among other things, he is the executive secretary of the Islamic Da’wa Organisation, an entity that was created by the Sudanese government, which is considered by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist state. So why was Ms. Lerner so eager to facilitate the fund-raising operations of a foundation presided over by a man with such dubious connections?

I do not know the answer to this. But one thing, I think, is certain: we’re going to hear a lot more about this affair and I predict that Malik won’t be the only person named “Obama” involved.

Related: ABC News Reporter: White House Authorized IRS Abuses

Like most sentient adults, between my bouts of general alarm at the lurching incompetence of the Obama administration I have been enjoying little nibbles at the cornucopia of Schadenfreude it offers. Particularly amusing are the parallels between Obama’s response to some of the recent scandals that have plagued his administration — above all, the still-unfolding  scandal of the IRS targeting political opponents of the Obama administration — and Richard Nixon’s response in the early days of the Watergate scandal.  Steve Hayward at Powerline points to a video montage, at once amusing and upsetting, that juxtaposes the two leaders’ embarrassing evasive maneuvers: “I only know what you know.”  “I just heard about this from a news report.” “What my press secretary said matched the reports I heard.” “As president, I am not going to let myself be distracted by these politically motivated side issues.” Etc.  Take a moment to watch the video. The parallels are striking.

At the same time, it’s important to note that Obama is not Nixon.  For one thing, Nixon, whatever his flaws, was a great president. No creditable witness is saying that about Barack Obama. (As one wag put it, comparing Obama to Nixon is an insult  . . . to Nixon.) For another, verbal echoes can obscure the historical chasms that separate one period, and one personality, from another. Harold Nicolson, in his little jewel of a book on the Congress of Vienna, was right to warn that  “We can learn little from history unless we first realise that she does not, in fact, repeat herself.  Events are not affected by analogies; they are determined by the combinations of circumstance.” What forces and contingencies conspire to determine those combinations it is the task of the historian to limn.

That said, I continue to believe that we are living through a sort of revolution, one of those yeasty times that Karl Marx called a “plastic hour” in which many of our assumptions about the way our lives will unfold are up for fundamental renegotiation. Institutions whose nature we had taken for granted are in the process of thoroughgoing redefinition. No one’s crystal ball is sufficiently clairvoyant to tell us where it all will end. But it seems clear that Obama’s legacy is no more immune to these forces than any other aspect of our social and political life. Scandals are accumulating like dust bunnies around the president.  Long gone is the “Yes We Can,” “promise-you-anything” candidate who found himself cheered when he said he was only a few days away from “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” We’ve had a little preview of what such a transformation might look like, and most people find it pretty scary.

The IRS scandal: It’s bigger than a few wayward officials. And as Andy McCarthy points out, the remedy lies not in a “special counsel.” It lies rather in root-and-branch transformation. The Institution that the IRS has mutated does not need to be reformed. It needs to be dismantled. Andy  sums up the reality in two sentences:

[T]he problem is a perversely complex regulatory framework that gives the IRS — which should simply collect taxes based on an easily knowable formula — enormous discretionary power to discriminate and intimidate. That makes the IRS an un-American weapon, particularly when it is controlled by an Alinskyite will-to-power administration.

We have a chance now to do something about this exercise in un-American state tyranny.  Who knows if we’ll get another?

Last fall, I thought the premeditated terrorist attack on our consular facility in Benghazi — an attack, let us remember, that left Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead — would cost Barack Obama the election. I was wrong about that, as indeed I was wrong about the basic dynamics of the election more generally. I looked at Obama’s dismal record, his incontinent spending, the failure of his economic policies to spark growth or jump-start the jobs market, his “you-didn’t-build-that” attack on individual effort, and I thought “He’s toast.”  The September 11 attack on Benghazi by (as we now know) an al-Qaeda affiliate was, I thought, another, perhaps the biggest, nail in the coffin of his hubris.

As all the world knows, it didn’t turn out that way, partly because of Obama’s superior ground game, partly because of Romney’s many missteps.  But one of the biggest reasons, I believe, was the administration’s skillful though deeply duplicitous stage-management of the Benghazi crisis. They somehow managed to spin it out of all recognition. Instead of appearing as what it was — a deadly terrorist attack by an al-Qaeda affiliate — the Obama administration managed to make us (well, some of us) believe that it was primarily about our sins, not terrorist perfidy. The real cause of the event, we were told, was a sophomoric anti-Islamic internet video, not the RPG-wielding thugs who overran our consulate in Libya and murdered Chris Stevens and three of his colleagues.  Islamophobia, not Islam, was supposedly the culprit.

I never believed this and I was powerfully dismayed to discover just how successful the Obama Narrative was. From the moment Susan Rice hit the airwaves on September 16, the story, the real story, began to evaporate.  Plenty of fresh details emerged — above all the detail that the Obama administration did absolutely nothing to help Stevens and his colleagues despite their desperate pleas for help over the course of hours. But outside the conservative echo chamber, they had no resonance.  The presidential election loomed.  Obama had offed Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda was supposed to be yesterday’s news. The central fact about Northern Africa was supposed to be the “Arab Spring,” which in turn was supposed to corroborate Obama’s foreign policy genius and justify his Islamophilia. No one — certainly not the mainstream media — was interested in stories that gainsaid that rose-colored picture. Benghazi had died.

Until, that is, the testimony before Congress by Gregory Hicks, the State Department’s number two official in Libya at the time of the attack, earlier this month. Hicks directly contradicted the official Obama narrative. The attack — which took place, remember, on the anniversary of 9/11 — had nothing to do with that hitherto obscure internet video.  It had everything to do with al-Qaeda-sponsored terrorism. Suddenly Benghazi, like Lazarus, sprang back to life.

There is still a huge amount we do not know about the event. But more and more pieces of the puzzle are being unearthed, dusted off, and fit into the mosaic.  And the more we know, the worse it looks for Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “What difference does it make,” an angry, or at least angry acting, Clinton asked last fall when questioned about the event.

Turns out it — that is, she and her boss — might have made a big difference. But instead of doing something that could have challenged the narrative of Obama’s foreign-policy prowess, they fabricated the internet video wheeze and hid behind the smokescreen of putative “Islamophobia.”

What is it about the word “art”? Pronounce it, and the IQ of susceptible folk is instantly halved. (I’ve seen cases where it is diminished by 87 percent.) Normally sensible people who do not, as a rule, appreciate being being made fools of stand idly by as someone tells them that a video of some charlatan climbing naked up a scaffolding while applying vaseline to sensitive parts of his body is “the most important American artist of his generation.” Instead of throwing something soft and rotting at such mountebanks, they nod solemnly and reach for their wallets. They are only too eager, when a stiffy arrives from the Museum of Modern Art or some similar establishment, to don the soup and fish and buzz round to the super exclusive evening event where scores of beautiful people line up to sip the shampoo and admire a tank full of formaldehyde and a dead tiger shark.

What is it about the word “art” that endows it with this mind-and-character-wrecking property? Why does it induce incontinent gibbering, not to mention mind-boggling extravagance, among normally hard-headed souls? A full answer would take us deep into the pathology of our time. It has something to do with what I’ve called elsewhere the institutionalization of the avant-garde, the contradictory project whereby the tics and outré attitudes of the avant-garde go mainstream. The half-comic, half-contemptible result is that ordinary bourgeois adults find themselves in the embarrassing position of celebrating the juvenile, anti-bourgeois antics of people who detest them.

Our misuse of the word “art” also has something to do with our age’s tendency to look to art for spiritual satisfactions traditionally afforded by religion. “In the absence of a belief in God,” Wallace Stevens observed, “poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”

That, anyway, is the idea, though exactly what sort of “redemption” may be had from much that goes by the name of “art” today is another question. Consider, to take an example I read about just a couple of days ago, Millie Brown. This 26-year-old deep thinker drinks tinted milk and then regurgitates it over a canvas. That’s her claim to immortality. And good news! The Daily Mail reports that Brown’s “unique vomit-art canvases will be available for purchase.” Act quickly! “Many maintain that now is a great time to invest in this hotly tipped artist.” Who knows? The Mail also reports that one of Millie’s most avid fans is the pop singer Lady Gaga, “who personally chose the artist to feature in her own performance video,” in which “Millie can be seen vomiting shimmering turquoise liquid over the singer.” The paper compares Millie Brown to Jackson Pollock. People — not art people — used to say contemptuously that their child of five could paint something indiscernible from a Jackson Pollock painting. Perhaps so. Millie has gone a step further: her creations are indiscernible from the “creations” of one year olds, whose canvases are the products not of their hands but of other organs.

I am just writing a piece about Maureen Dowd that begins with a quotation from William Hazlitt: “Those who lack delicacy hold us in their power.”  La Dowd exemplifies the melancholy truth of Hazlitt’s observations in her girly, gossipy prose that brings the cattiest of sorority nastiness to the august pages of a once-serious newspaper.  It’s the disjunction that causes the frisson: you’re expecting some sort of serious analysis or opinionating and what you get instead is this painful smart-ass calling people names and calling attention to herself like a poorly brought-up, pubescent brat who recently discovered that her sex could be deployed as a weapon as well as an excuse.

But let me leave Maureen Dowd for later on.  Now I want to remark on the wide application of Hazlitt’s principle: “Those who lack delicacy hold us in their power.” You can, I’m sure, think of plenty of examples.  Here’s one. My friend Kevin Williamson, a writer for National Review, author (most recently) of The End is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome, and theater critic for the magazine I edit, The New Criterion, got tossed out of a theater last night.  Why? Because Hazlitt’s principle was working overtime.  Let Kevin explain:

The show was Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, which was quite good and which I recommend. The audience, on the other hand, was horrible — talking, using their phones, and making a general nuisance of themselves. It was bad enough that I seriously considered leaving during the intermission, something I’ve not done before. The main offenders were two parties of women of a certain age, the sad sort with too much makeup and too-high heels, and insufficient attention span for following a two-hour musical. But my date spoke with the theater management during the intermission, and they apologetically assured us that the situation would be remedied.

The situation was not remedied.  On the contrary, “The lady seated to my immediate right (very close quarters on bench seating) was fairly insistent about using her phone. I asked her to turn it off. She answered: “So don’t look.” I asked her whether I had missed something during the very pointed announcements to please turn off your phones, perhaps a special exemption granted for her. She suggested that I should mind my own business.

This is where things got interesting.

So I minded my own business by utilizing my famously feline agility to deftly snatch the phone out of her hand and toss it across the room, where it would do no more damage. She slapped me and stormed away to seek managerial succor. Eventually, I was visited by a black-suited agent of order, who asked whether he might have a word.

Kevin wondered, as I would have done, whether management had come over to give him a pat on the back and congratulate him on dealing effectively with a public nuisance.  I hope you will be as shocked as I was to learn that instead, he got the boot. There is, Kevin concluded, “talk of criminal charges.” I assume, but do not know, that he means he is contemplating suing the female in question, the theater, or both. It’s been suggested to me that, on the contrary, the possible charges might be directed at Kevin.That, I suppose, is possible, but only because William Hazlitt, with his laser-like insight, saw deeply into the heart of human folly.

*****

Cross-posted at PJ Lifestyle.

So, Andy McCarthy reports on the Pew Research Center’s survey on “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics, and Society.” The world’s Muslims, mind you. That’s a capacious group.  The bottom line: things are not so bad, really. Yes, two thirds of those interviewed support the death penalty — the death penalty, Kemo Sabe — for apostasy from Islam. But only one third support  suicide bombings. Yay! And the main take-away is that Muslims’ views about sharia, i.e., Islamic law,  should calm the nerves of Islamophobic neanderthals like, er, well, like me.  Sure, those interviewed overwhelmingly support the imposition of sharia, but sharia, we are  told in the best lullaby tone, is not so bad. “Unlike codified Western law,” you see, “sharia is a loosely defined set of moral and legal guidelines based on the Koran, the sayings of Prophet Mohammad (hadith) and Muslim traditions. Its rules and advice cover everything from prayers to personal hygiene.”

“Prayers to personal hygiene.” Let’s see, what does that leave out? Oh, right. Jihad!  Remember jihad?   The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), an Islamist front group charged with putting the smily faces on the activities of their Muslim brethren, has waged a risible PR effort to convince people that jihad has more to do with achieving your personal best than with blowing things up. But no sane person believes that. “Jihad” is what the boys in Boston were up to a few weeks ago shen they detonated those pressure-cooker bombs, murdering and maiming scores.

But the “see-no-evil,” “let’s-not-be-beastly-to-the-Muslims” song that the Pew’s report attempts to sing is not the only thing wrong with it.  There is also the “huge” flaw that McCarthy notes. This world-wide survey of Muslims is not world wide. It leaves out one or two spots. Saudi Arabia, for example. And Iran. And India. And China. And the Sudan. Etc.  In other words, this survey of Muslim attitudes leaves out some of the most toxic Muslim countries.  What sort of survey is that?

Perhaps the only thing in this story more preposterous than the survey itself is the response to McCarthy’s critical post by James Bell, director of international survey research for the Pew Research Center. Mr. Bell complains that McCarthy didn’t appreciate Pew’s good efforts. Countries like Saudia Arabia, Iran, an the Sudan were left out of the survey not because of “any lack of desire on our part. We wanted very much to survey in these countries, and we regret that we were unable to do so.” Oh. I see. And why was that? Well, because “we were unable to conduct surveys in some places with large Muslim populations — including India and China as well as Saudi Arabia — where political sensitivities or security concerns prevented opinion research among Muslims.” Ah.

Well, that’s all right then. But again, why was that? “In some situations, asking questions about religious beliefs and practices can make people suspicious, agitated, even hostile. We were advised that in parts of India, for example, asking people about their religious identity might be seen as stoking communal tensions — and this, in turn, could put the safety of interviewers at risk.”

Whoa. “Could put the safety of the interviewers at risk”? What sort of place would that be? Possibly, just possibly, a barbaric Islamic hell-hole where people cannot hear the word “survey” without reaching for the scimitar (or modern equivalent)?

What Mr. Bell has really said is that his survey is totally worthless, a complete waste of time and money. Actually, it’s worse.  By providing a distorted and untruthful picture of Islam it lulls its target audience—we gullible rubes in the West who are always on the lookout for some reason  to accommodate and compromise (not to say capitulate).

One knowledge commentator described James Bell’s response as “laughable.” It is that.  But in its shameless mendacity it is contemptible as well.