On February first, the Virginia Senate passed the resolved version of a new bill requiring women considering an abortion to get an ultrasound before going forward with it. They were the eighth such chamber to do so.

Last week, objections to what seemed like an eminently sensible policy to a majority to both houses of the General Assembly began appearing in earnest from liberal bloggers generally in favor of regulations of all sorts except when it comes to curtailing the gestation of people. In a failure of nerve, the House of Delegates has postponed voting on the final bill yesterday and today.

Echoing the line of Delegate Charniele Herring (D), that the bill amounted to “state-sponsored rape,” the headline of a piece by Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick called the new bill an “abomination,” asking “Where’s the outrage?” from women that, under the new law, would apparently be subject to coerced penetration by ultrasound wand should they choose to have an abortion. That assumption became conventional wisdom so quickly that the bill was ridiculed by Saturday Night Live last weekend.

Their concerns arise from the fact that an ordinary sonogram can’t provide the level of detail that the bill supposedly mandates, meaning the doctor would be required to perform a more invasive transvaginal ultrasound. But the way the bill is written seems to allow for a woman to get an abdominal sonogram even if it results in a muddy picture. Here’s the relevant chunk of text:

“The ultrasound image shall be made pursuant to standard medical practice in the community, contain the dimensions of the fetus, and accurately portray the presence of external members and internal organs of the fetus, if present or viewable. Determination of gestational age shall be based upon measurement of the fetus in a manner consistent with standard medical practice in the community in determining gestational age. When only the gestational sac is visible during ultrasound imaging, gestational age may be based upon measurement of the gestational sac.”

In other words there’s a lot of room for the doctor’s discretion, and nowhere does the state mandate a doctor root around with a camera in a pregnant lady’s hoo-ha. Still, some Democratic legislators appear ready to take that line of attack in court, arguing the ‘forcible-penetration mandate’ violates sex crime statutes.

The bill’s critics are correct that civil liberties protection isn’t the first concern of its supporters. Phil Puckett, a Democratic State Senator from southwest Virginia voted for the bill (one of two Democrats who did, the other being Chuck Colgan of Manassas who has a consistently pro-life record. Republican John Watkins also voted against the bill.), and while he couldn’t say whether or not it mandates transvaginal ultrasounds, the effort to discourage abortions was more important anyway.

“I’m not too concerned with what the procedure is,” Puckett told TAC. “I’m more concerned with pro-life policies that give the unborn the chance to be born. My guess is that it is invasive, for a woman to go through that. It’s not as simple as someone would like to make it sound. That’s not the issue for me. The issue for me is that I believe in life beginning at conception. Whether it’s an ultrasound or whatever the issue is, anything that would enhance the opportunity for an unborn to be born, I would support.”

However, dubious claims of medicalized rape are not the only civil liberties issue raised by the new abortion restrictions. The bill sets a precedent of the government being able to mandate medically unnecessary ancillary procedures to major surgery. More troubling is the provision that requires the doctor to place a photo of the ultrasound in the patient’s file for seven years, with a little note about whether or not they declined to view it.

As for the constitutionality of the law, the standard is that the mandate must not place an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to abort a pregnancy. Since an ultrasound is performed before most abortions already, and even a transvaginal ultrasound is far less invasive than the actual abortion – which the woman has elected to undergo – the Virginia bill seems, to my untrained legal eye, to be alright.

Whether the bill will actually reduce the number of abortions per its clear intent is still an open question. What if women in the first six weeks of pregnancy who decide to have an abortion understandably opt for the less invasive ultrasound option? Even if they decide to look at the resulting images (they don’t have to under the Virginia bill, unlike in some other states), wouldn’t it just be a grainy, amneotic blur? Would this ever actually accomplish the moment of clarity the bill’s supporters seem to have in mind, of a woman who’s decided to have an abortion suddenly realizing the error of her ways? I’m skeptical. In that light, the abortion rights boosters have a point about the bill being another example of government overreach.

But to Puckett, the civil liberties question cuts both ways: ”The unborn have civil liberties too, and some people may disagree with that, but it’s just the way I feel. I don’t put legislation like that in, but when I am faced with voting on it, that’s how I feel.”

The two abortion-related bills in the General Assembly this session are likely to land on Governor McDonnell’s desk soon, and two statehouse sources have told TAC that the Governor’s office is looking into their constitutionality.

Situations where we send in the Marines will resemble President Jefferson’s war with the Barbary pirates. Unless we are directly attacked, we will avoid wars with other states, because their most likely outcome will be the spread of statelessness—watch Libya. Instead we will find ourselves up against Fourth Generation, non-state opponents in situations where government has lost its grip.

Some of these enemies, including pirates, will attack Americans, and we will be forced to respond. Our response will not be to conquer other countries and attempt to turn them into Switzerland. Most often, the Marines will carry out raids, which will last hours or days, occasionally weeks. They will have two purposes: punish those who harbor our attackers and shift the local balance of power against our enemies. To non-state entities, the local balance counts for more than their relationship with the United States. If they know the price of attacking us will be to see their local enemies triumph over them, they may leave us alone.

Thus, just as we will still need a strong Navy, we will also require a capable Marine Corps. The question is how to get it within a modest defense budget. As with the Navy, the answer begins with adopting the old Prussian reserve system. Today’s Marine Corps has three active divisions and one reserve. The new Marine Corps will have one active division and two reserve. But those reserve divisions will be just as capable as their active-duty counterpart because whole battalions will go into reserve together. On recall, everyone will be doing the same jobs and working with the same people as they did on active service.

Another major cut can come from Marine aviation. Rhetorically, its purpose is to support the Marine on the ground. In reality, high-priced aircraft do that poorly. Money can be saved by dumping most of the aircraft, including the complex V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor and transferring the Air Force’s A-10s to the Marines. The A-10 is the only American aircraft that effectively provides ground support.

Another path to savings is to have the Marine Corps follow its own doctrine. The Corps has an advantage over other services in having adopted Third Generation maneuver doctrine in the early 1990s. But it has never applied the maneuver doctrine to its force structure. Doing so would reduce spending while improving military effectiveness.

One source of savings derives from the way maneuver warfare reshapes logistics. In Second Generation attrition warfare, the assumption is that all units are engaging the enemy almost all the time. That requires each combat unit to have an extensive logistics train. In maneuver warfare, the operative assumption is that most units are in reserve, waiting to maneuver. Logistics support is funneled to the few units in contact with the enemy. The overall logistics train shrinks dramatically as the “tooth to tail” ratio rises.

Similarly, maneuver doctrine calls for radical decentralization of decision-making. Orders tell subordinates what result is needed; they are left free as to means. Headquarters shrink. Few things are more dangerous than overly large headquarters, because they lead senior officers to meddle endlessly in their subordinates’ business. The Corps likes to present itself as “lean and mean,” but as far as senior officers and headquarters are concerned, it is morbidly obese. It rosters more than 80 generals, with attendant flocks of colonels and lieutenant colonels to serve as horse-holders and flower-strewers.

Real life in the Corps ends with the battalion. Almost everything above that level is a pack of rocks junior Marines have to carry. Our new Corps would get rid of almost all of it. It would have six generals: three division commanders, a Commandant, an Assistant Commandant, and one general to command the schools at Quantico.

When I first encountered the Marine Corps in the early 1970s as a Senate staffer, it thought little about programs and money. If it needed equipment, it took it from someone else and painted it Marine Corps green. Sadly, in the mid-1990s the Corps decided that it too would be about programs and budgets. But the memory of the older way is not entirely lost. The current Commandant has been wondering aloud if it might be revived. If he acts as well as he talks, the Marine Corps will be better prepared for the post-empire era than any other service.

Earlier entries in this series:

Reshaping the Pentagon for an Age of Austerity

Building a Navy That Won’t Sink the Economy

Given the opportunity on “Face the Nation” to amend his remarks, Santorum declined the offer and plunged on:

“I don’t question the president’s faith. I’ve repeatedly said that I believe the president is a Christian. He says he is a Christian. I am talking about his worldview and the way he approaches problems in this country. … They’re different than how most people do in America.”

Obama’s surrogates on the Sunday shows charged Santorum with questioning the president’s faith.

Not exactly. What Santorum is saying is that in the struggle for the soul of America, though Obama may profess to be, and may be, a Christian, he is leading the anti-Christian forces of what Pope Benedict XVI has called “radical secularism.”

In Plano, Texas, last week, Santorum was even more explicit:

“They (the Obamaites) are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. … What’s left in France became the guillotine.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that, but if we … follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.”

Santorum is saying that where Thomas Jefferson attributed our human equality and our right to life and liberty to a Creator, secularism sees no authority higher than the state. But what the state gives, the state can take away.

The media think Santorum is singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” while heading off into the fever swamps. But Santorum is wagering his political future on his assessment of where we are in 2012.

He sees America dividing ever more deeply between those who hold to traditional Christian views on marriage, life and morality, and those who have abandoned such beliefs. He believes that the former remain America’s silent majority, and he is offering himself as their champion against a militant secularism that has lately angered more than just the right.

Last week, Santorum declared that radical environmentalism is also rooted in this same anti-Biblical view of mankind’s purpose here on earth.

“I think that a lot of radical environmentalists have it backwards. This idea that man is here to serve the earth as opposed to husband its resources and be good stewards of the earth. Man is here to use the resources and use them wisely, but man is not here to serve the earth.”

This is straight out of Genesis:

“Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

Santorum seems to want to steer his primary and general election campaign into a conflict that goes back deep into American history and has surfaced time and again.

An early triumph of secularism came with the Scopes trial in 1923 in Dayton, Tenn. Clarence Darrow, defending a teacher who had violated state law by introducing Darwin’s theory of evolution into the classroom, mocked the Old Testament teachings of the Evangelical Christians, to the merriment of the establishment.

From that day on, Darwinism was taught in our schools, first as theory, then as fact, then as higher truth. With the Darwinian tenet — we evolved, we were not created — established truth in the public schools, secularism set about driving its enemy, Christianity, out completely.

Under the Warren Court in the 1950s and 1960s, it succeeded.

All Christian commandments, holidays, prayers, pageants and plays were gone. Where Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter had declared that America is a Christian nation, Obama has declared, “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation,” but rather a nation of all faiths.

Santorum is undeniably taking an immense gamble here.

First, he is wagering that by emphasizing his moral, social and cultural conservatism, he can trump Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital job-creator card.

Second, he is wagering that Obama, with his latest attempt to impose secular values on Catholic institutions, can be portrayed as possessed of an “overt hostility to faith in America.”

Third, he is wagering that he has the rhetorical and political skills to make this case to the nation through the prism of a hostile media.

Fourth, he is betting that these issues are also the concern of a plurality of Americans in a country far different from the one he grew up in.

Finally, Santorum is betting that Americans still believe this is God’s country, that America’s laws should reflect his Law, and that they will elevate to the presidency a man who presents himself as the instrument to carry out God’s will.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” Copyright 2012 Creators.com.

The Liberty Fund is an intellectually capacious organization — publisher not only of much James Buchanan, Hayek, and Mises, but also Richard Weaver and Michael Oakeshott — so I have high hopes the new project will include a healthy contingent of traditionalist conservatives mixing it up with the libertarians and Straussians. (One thing we could really use is an Oakeshottian approach to the law, a field in which dogmas and interests continually disguise themselves as impartial theories of justice and historical investigations.)

This weekend Students for Liberty hosted the Fifth Annual International Students For Liberty Conference in Washington D.C. It was the largest libertarian student event in history, featuring students from across the world and a variety of speakers. As well as featuring breakout sessions on topics such as second amendment rights, political economy, public education, Austrian economics, and social media, the conference also included an exhibition hall that included organizations such as the Learn Liberty, The NRA, GOProud, the Cato Institute, and Young Americans for Liberty. What became clear throughout the conference was that while most of the students were fiercely uncommitted to party politics they all expressed sympathy with some beliefs shared in the conservative movement. Given the ideological tendencies amongst what is a growing voting group, it is remarkable that the Republicans are not engaging younger voters more effectively.

The guest speaker on Friday evening was libertarian Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and angel investor of Facebook. Outside of the technology industry, Thiel is known as an important supporter of groups like the Seasteading Institute which aims to develop and realize the idea of floating, politically autonomous communities. In his talk Thiel spoke on the lack of innovation in areas outside of technology and finance, something he attributed to overregulation and the growth of government. Thiel also spoke on the growing government bubble that, like the Internet and housing bubbles, will burst dramatically. All of these arguments are familiar to conservatives. Thiel did not speak on drug prohibition, foreign policy, or religious freedom. Even at a libertarian conference, then, the subject of a keynote speech was a matter on which there is a high level of agreement between conservatives and libertarians. There were of course plenty of opportunities for the socially liberal arguments to be heard, with breakout sessions featuring narcotics and the war on terror being among some of the more popular.

Libertarians are notoriously tribal, and the different constituent groups were all represented. James Padilioni Jr., winner of this year’s Student of the Year award, noted that the word “anarchism” had been his source of inspiration over the last year. The Republican Liberty Caucus had a stall in the exhibition hall, as did the Libertarian Party. There were followers of the Austrian and monetarist schools of economics, as well as Voluntarists and Objectivists. Some came to libertarianism through conservatism, while others through liberalism. The diversity of the attendees is not something that worries Alexander McCobin, co-founder and Executive Director of Students for Liberty: “SFL is a big tent organization, united by beliefs in social, economic, and academic freedom, principles which serve to unite the liberty movement.” Indeed the diversity of Students for Liberty seems to be one of its strengths; it allows for a concentrated focus on a common intellectual adversary. The uniting force among all conference attendees was a belief in liberty being politically fundamental. This unity was clear from the results of the conference Straw Poll, with 71% of votes cast for Ron Paul, followed by “not voting” in second.

One of the most interesting parts of the conference was the filming of John Stossel’s show, which I attended with my colleague Jordan Bloom. The conference episode will be shown on Thursday evening on Fox Business. Guests included David Boaz of the Cato Institute and Nick Gillespie from Reason. The most notable guest was former U.S. Ambassador the United Nations John Bolton. Bolton gave a defense of his neoconservative arguments, reiterating his support for attacks on a potentially nuclear Iran. Given the visible outrage felt by many of the students it was a shame that most of their questions to the ambassador were weak. The questioners failed to address what role U.S. foreign policy might have had in motivating the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks or Bolton’s support for the Iranian terrorist group MEK (an omission noticed by Jordan).

For those who support individual liberty, free markets, and peace the conference was a great reassurance. SFL events are growing year over year, and there is no reason not to think that there will be more successes in the future. Yet, despite the growing number of students sympathetic to liberty, the GOP seems committed to alienating not only a significant number of young people who are more likely to volunteer and campaign, but libertarians more broadly. Ron Paul supporters will not be easily persuaded to vote for Romney in a general election. Current polling shows that the GOP will have to be more inclusive in order to win in November. Perhaps in that sense at least, the GOP could learn something from Students for Liberty.

Image: Shutterstock/razihusin

“I am of a Jewish bloodline, a baptized Christian who accepts Christ’s teachings, the Jewish Old Testament and the Holy Koran. I believe there is one God, whether called Allah or Jehovah or whatever you wish to name him. He creates all peoples and religions. I consider myself a Jewish Christian Muslim.”

…

It is almost like I am a criminal for having accepted Islam. I didn’t realize Islamophobia was that deep. People have speculated that I have done this because I am from a spoiled family or that I am lost and trying to find myself. That is ridiculous.

“I don’t care if I get criticized. If I can open up a debate about religion and create some understanding, then it is worth it.”

[link]

All the while, he told AFP his conversion, “is not abandoning Christianity or Judaism.”

Far be it from me or anyone else to doubt Stone’s sincerity. But I think the story gets at one of the problems with the multicultural ethic that conservatives tend not to emphasize, which is its tendency to totalize religious belief within, to borrow a Dreher phrase, a therapeutic moralistic Deism. In the world of a mass culture scion like Stone, the result is a sort of reverse Orientalism – rather than emphasizing the contrast in order to shore up one’s own cultural camp, differences are sufficiently glossed that he can be a member of all three Abrahamic faiths simultaneously, a notion that would probably offend most religious people, Eastern or Western.

Make no mistake, this is a totalitarian ideology. Yet the critique against it makes strange bedfellows. Neocons prefer a Clash of Civilizations-style interpretation, in which someone like Stone would presumably be a trojan horse for multicultural values and, in turn, Islamic domination or something. I would suggest that this isn’t productive, because raising the banner of the Christian West in the face of perceived existential threats has required the same homogenization and politicization of religion in this country. (For more on this subject, stay tuned for D. G. Hart’s piece in the upcoming issue about America and the shift from the private practice of faith to the public performance of it) Thus a thing like the Defense of Marriage Act is considered insufficiently pious by some social conservatives and, to them, a good Christian is compelled to support a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, regardless of one’s 10th Amendment convictions.

Conservative localism offers a better path to a more vibrant, tolerant, and diverse public life. There’s a great interview with David Thomas of Pere Ubu where he gets at some of these issues:

“All these monuments and landmarks of the Cleveland we loved and wrote so passionately about, the other side of the curtain of these things, all ceased to exist. They were “urban renewalized” and all that sort of stuff, but to us they still exist, and to us we still see them. That’s what I mean about living in a ghost town. What happens, and this began to happen in 1980, ’81, ’82, is that the real world and the town that you live in, the geography you live in, begin to diverge. They begin to separate. This is, I think, a very common feeling all over the world. It has to do with culture and the alienation of culture and what happens in a society where things become homogenized by the media and various mechanisms. … Wherever you go in the world, people feel the same thing. The world they live in in reality and the world of their spirit, as it were, or their home, no longer occupy the same space and the same time. This has to do maybe with multiculturalism being forced on everybody. You can look at it any number of ways. Mainly, it’s just the alienation of culture.”

David Thomas has some strange ideas, but they make a lot of sense. I would argue that the single biggest piece of evidence for the alienation of culture is the apathy people hold toward democratic participation now that most of its functions have concentrated in the hands of the federal government though. The irony that he contributes to that universal alienation is probably lost on Sean Stone.

“He didn’t think government mattered. . . . The Reagan failure was to grossly undervalue the centrality of government as the organizing mechanism for reinforcing societal behavior.” [Gingrich in 1992]

“It is not my job to win reelection. It is not my job to take care of passport problems. It is not my job to get a bill through Congress. My job description as I have defined it is to save Western civilization.” [Gingrich in 1979]

“Gingrich had described himself as a “progressive” in his 1970 application to teach at what was then West Georgia College. That self-description changed to a “common-sense conservative” by his 1974 race, when Gingrich skewered his opponent, incumbent Rep. John J. Flynt Jr. (D-Ga.), for voting against numerous government programs.”

“He insisted on pursuing $60 million a year in federal funding aimed at building 12 space stations and a mine on the moon [in 1983]. According to a transcript, he said he wanted to “mandate” that NASA take the money. He proposed unionizing workers in space. And Republican leaders who were resisting additional funds for science, he said, were “idiots” and “so incredibly stupid.”

A good example of deliberate distorting of the truth regarding what we actually do know about Iran and its intentions was on display in the Washington Post today in an op-ed piece by Ray Takeyh.  The piece, entitled “Why Iran Thinks It Needs the Bomb” in the print edition, appeared on the first page of the Opinion section but was also banner headlined on the front page of the paper.  Takeyh, who is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is certainly knowledgeable of his subject and was once a reasonable voice on things Iranian but he has pretty much gone over to the neocon view of the Middle East of late.  Some of his analysis of Iran’s internal politics is excellent but he makes several key judgments that are questionable at best and which are not supported by any evidence.  As the article title indicates, he believes that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon and throughout his piece he equates Iran’s highly popular nuclear energy program with a weapons program.  That cannot be demonstrated and, in fact, it is contradicted by the best intelligence available on the issue.  The second assumption he makes is that Iran is an active hegemon that is seeking to export its revolution, which means, putting the two together, that Iran is seeking a weapon of mass destruction that it will use aggressively, leaving military force as the best option to discourage such a development. That is all sheer conjecture and would seem to be belied by the generally pragmatic behavior of the Iranian government, which is more interested in regime preservation than in any attempt to bring the rest of the Middle East in line with its views.

Given the fact that the mainstream media gives no space whatsoever to anyone opposing the prevailing wisdom on Iran, i.e. that it is a threat, the US public is being subjected to a thorough brainwashing to accept starting yet another war.  The parallels to the lead-up to Iraq are eerie – weapons of mass destruction, terrorist groups, and mushroom clouds on the horizon.  If the Ray Takeyhs of the world get their war it will be a catastrophe for the United States and well as for Iran and will do precious little good for Israel, which is aggressively using its lobby to promote the military option.  Next month’s AIPAC conference will no doubt incorporate a virtual feeding frenzy of anti-Iranian rhetoric.

You can get a taste of Stanley’s volume from the excerpt that appears in The American Conservative, “Buchanan’s Revolution.”

After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.

The calls for my firing began almost immediately with the Oct. 18 publication of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?? A group called Color of Change, whose mission statement says that it “exists to strengthen Black America’s political voice,” claimed that my book espouses a “white supremacist ideology.” Color of Change took particular umbrage at the title of Chapter 4, “The End of White America.”

Media Matters parroted the party line: He has blasphemed!

A Human Rights Campaign that bills itself as America’s leading voice for lesbians, bisexuals, gays, and transgendered people said that Buchanan’s “extremist ideas are incredibly harmful to millions of LBGT people around the world.” Their rage was triggered by a remark to NPR’s Diane Rehm—that I believe homosexual acts to be “unnatural and immoral.”

On Nov. 2, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who has sought to have me censored for 22 years, piled on. “Buchanan has shown himself, time and again, to be a racist and an anti-Semite,” said Foxman. Buchanan “bemoans the destruction of white Christian America” and says America’s shrinking Jewish population is due to the “collective decision of Jews themselves.”

Well, yes, I do bemoan what Newsweek’s 2009 cover called “The Decline and Fall of Christian America” and editor Jon Meacham described as “The End of Christian America.” After all, I am a Christian.

And what else explains the shrinkage of the U.S. Jewish population by 6 percent in the 1990s and its projected decline by another 50 percent by 2050, if not the “collective decision of Jews themselves”?

Let error be tolerated, said Thomas Jefferson, “so long as reason is left free to combat it.” What Foxman and ADL are about in demanding that my voice be silenced is, in the Jeffersonian sense, intrinsically un-American. Consider what it is these people are saying.

They are saying that a respected publisher, St. Martin’s, colluded with me to produce a racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic book, and CNN, Fox News, C-SPAN, Fox Business News, and the 150 radio shows on which I appeared failed to detect its evil and helped to promote a moral atrocity.

If my book is racist and anti-Semitic, how did Sean Hannity, Erin Burnett, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Megyn Kelly, Lou Dobbs, and Ralph Nader miss that? How did Charles Payne, African-American host on Fox radio, who has interviewed me three times, fail to detect its racism? How did Michael Medved miss its anti-Semitism?

In a 2009 cover story in the Atlantic, “The End of White America?” from which my chapter title was taken, professor Hua Hsu revels in the passing of America’s white majority. At Portland State, President Clinton got a huge ovation when he told students that white Americans will be a minority in 2050. Is this writer alone forbidden to broach the subject?

That homosexual acts are unnatural and immoral has been doctrine in the Catholic Church for 2,000 years. Is it now hate speech to restate traditional Catholic beliefs?

Documented in the 488 pages and 1,500 footnotes of Suicide of a Superpower is my thesis that America is Balkanizing, breaking down along the lines of religion, race, ethnicity, culture, and ideology and that Western peoples are facing demographic death by century’s end. Are such subjects taboo? Are they unfit for national debate?

So it would seem. MSNBC President Phil Griffin told reporters, “I don’t think the ideas that [Buchanan] put forth [in his book] are appropriate for the national dialogue, much less on MSNBC.”

In the 10 years I have been at MSNBC, the network has taken heat for what I have written, and faithfully honored our contract. Yet my four-months’ absence from MSNBC and now my departure represent an undeniable victory for the blacklisters.

The modus operandi of these thought police at Color of Change and ADL is to brand as racists and anti-Semites any writer who dares to venture outside the narrow corral in which they seek to confine debate. All the while prattling about their love of dissent and devotion to the First Amendment, they seek systematically to silence and censor dissent.

Without a hearing, they smear and stigmatize as racist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic any who contradict what George Orwell once called their “smelly little orthodoxies.” They then demand that the heretic recant, grovel, apologize, and pledge to go forth and sin no more.

Defy them, and they will go after the network where you work, the newspapers that carry your column, the conventions that invite you to speak. If all else fails, they go after the advertisers.

I know these blacklisters. They operate behind closed doors, with phone calls, mailed threats, and off-the-record meetings. They work in the dark because, as Al Smith said, nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” Copyright 2012 Creators.com.

Her speech hit on a familiar mix of Marxist historicity, sophistry, and Foucauldian hocus-pocus common to thinkers of her ideological disposition. The Attica prison riot, for example, was not a riot at all, but rather an “experiment in democracy.” As for the penal system, rather than reform current racially-biased laws such as drug prohibition, Davis advocates the wholesale abolition of jails and prisons.

Not only that, but the “prison-industrial complex” and its “carceral technologies” have metastasized:

“I’m not only interested in abolishing jails and prisons largely because they present themselves as solutions to problems that they continue to replicate and reproduce. But I’m also concerned about the degree to which these carceral technologies bleed into what we consider to be the free world. What do schools look like in poor communities of color? Those schools increasingly have the appearance of jails and prisons.”

I wonder if she supports homeschooling. Probably not.  As for unions, the traditional seedbed for leftism, “there has been a concerted effort to destroy the power of the labor movement, and especially public employee unions. You remember Wisconsin? And that was just last year. And it happened the same time as the uprising in Tahrir Square in Egypt.” Did you catch that transition? Those Egyptian activists overthrowing their corrupt dictator are kind of like overpaid teachers in Madison. Isn’t solidarity great?

Davis wasn’t about to let the audience get away with their standard understanding of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a mere civil rights hero. Instead, she focused on the more radical Poor People’s Campaign, on which King embarked near the tragic end of his life, observing that many of his techniques presaged the Occupy movement of today:

“When King was assassinated, it was during his participation in an effort to have a sanitation workers’ union recognized by the city of Memphis. The focus on poverty in that moment in 1968, the focus on organizing workers, represented what could have well become the future of the black struggle for freedom. When Dr. King was assassinated he was in the process of organizing what he called a poor people’s march. And when you go back and look at his description of that campaign it sounds very much similar to the Occupy strategies that developed last fall.”

…

“[King had] plans to create this massive revolution against injustice. He talked about bringing some 3,000 activists, trained activists to Washington, he talked about setting up tents and camping out in Washington, he talked about people coming up from the South, poor people who have never had the opportunity to have decent healthcare and he talked about them taking their children into hospitals in Washington and remaining there until they received attention from doctors and healthcare providers. If one reads through that lecture, one would say that he was calling for an Occupy movement in 1967-1968.”

She ended, predictably, with a qualified endorsement of the President’s reelection campaign:

“I want us to think of black history not simply as a history of the past, but also as a history of the present, and a history of the future.

Because we were so unaccustomed to the possibility that someone like Barack Obama who identified with the black radical tradition could be elected to the presidency of the United States of America, we completely forgot we were trying to elect a president. We thought we were electing someone who would lead us to freedom and not someone who would have to deal with the day to day activities of being the president of the U.S. Empire. I know that many people are disappointed, and I’m disappointed, because I would have liked to see a much better healthcare plan. I would like to have seen an end to the war in Iraq much earlier, and I would like to have not had to witness the troops going into Afghanistan. So there are many disappointments we might express.

…

Within a very short period of time, 900 cities across the country had Occupy encampments. Do you think this could have happened under George W. Bush? The reason I ask is there is not nearly as much excitement around Barack Obama’s campaign this time around, because the theme of hope doesn’t work in the same way it did then, but I think it is extremely important for us to figure out how to develop some excitement. Do we want Romney? Not only the 1 percent, the one one-thousandth of a percent?”

Afterward there was a short Q&A but I left after the first question because I know better than to stick around and hear a commie charlatan answer softball questions from a bunch of self-styled college activists about Troy Davis or the School of the Americas. The first question was about whether Gitmo should be shut down, and Davis’ answer (“it should”) exemplified how frustrating and obfuscatory left-wing ideology can be:

“The way in which Islamophobia was deployed to create this form of 21st-century racism that associated terrorism with people who practice Islam or are of middle eastern descent. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are symbolic of that. I think our task is to understand how these historical modes become articulated with each other. The anti-terror ideology would not have been so effective had not it been linked to anti-communism, and anti-communism is linked to racism. So you had racism and anti-communism, and then you also have this fear of the criminal, which was also articulated with racism.”

She’s not wrong about any of this, and I happen to agree with her conclusion as well. But the problem with Guantanamo is not that it’s a “symbol.” The problem is not some false consciousness foisted on the proletariat or Islamophobia or anything like that; it’s absurd to suggest that Gitmo should be closed because some racist in Mississippi is paranoid about having to file Sharia-compliant tax returns. The problem with Guantanamo is more real and all the more serious for it, it is a concrete matter of the integrity of the rule of law.

Beyond that, I was puzzled and a bit distressed that she could warn against the dangerous ways in which anti-communism and racism intertwined (very true) at the tail end of an hour-long speech arguing for the civil rights movement’s pride of place in the global proletarian revolution.  Surely this too is exploitation, of a sort.

The Catholic clergy vigorously protested Obama’s plan in its original form and in its not significantly revised draft. Led by the about-to-become Cardinal of New York Timothy Dolan, clerics from across the country thundered in sermons against forcing Catholics to act against their consciences. Dispensing birth control particularly to the unmarried is an offense against Catholic moral teachings, but assisting in making abortion services available by paying for them goes beyond that. It is seen as turning Catholic institutions into accomplices in homicide. It would have been impossible for Catholic parishioners to have missed this message. And it would have been equally hard for TV news watchers to have missed the assertions made by all GOP presidential candidates that Obama was trampling on the religious consciences of individual Americans. He was doing this by removing an exemption that had been granted to religious institutions to withhold coverage for what they found morally objectionable.

Meanwhile there have been dire predictions that Obama and his party will pay for their presumptuous behavior at the polls. Supposedly American Catholics, who until now have been mostly Democrats, will change sides in the next presidential race and vote overwhelmingly Republican. For the clergy this outcome is being sought to punish a president who has never swerved from the secularist Left. Republicans desire the same outcome for more practical reasons, but perhaps just as passionately. If attacking Obama in the name of “individual religious freedom” can get them back into the White House, an awful lot of Republican politicians will be rejoicing.

There are two problems with this interpretation. For one thing, we are talking here not so much about “individuals” as about the largest church in the country and about other traditional Christian institutions that until now have operated mostly without harassment. Obama and the anti-Christian Left, which includes much of the media, would like to change our society. Clearly they have a cultural agenda, which consists of promoting a post-Christian form of religion centered on Political Correctness. In this new culture Martin Luther King, various feminists and other figures of the revolutionary changes that remade this country since the 1960s will be given places of prominence, while older Christian institutions and sacred festivals will receive less government attention. It was no accident that when Obama gave an address at Catholic Georgetown soon after assuming the presidency, he ordered that all Christian symbols be removed from his immediate vicinity. At the time it seemed that the new president was trying to distance himself from old religious associations. At the very least he gave the impression of being an immaculate secularist.

Even more importantly, there is no indication that Obama is losing his Catholic base of support. His Catholic, feminist Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius pushed for making the now challenged coverage available to those working in Catholic-affiliated institutions. Another Catholic, feminist, and a strong advocate of gay marriage, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, is visibly overjoyed by what Obama has just done. Gillibrand’s popularity in New York has soared to such dizzying heights that no Republican thus far has expressed any willingness to run against her. This lady represents a heavily Catholic state in which Obama would carry two-thirds of the vote against any Republican contender.

Those who foresee a dramatic about-turn in American Catholic voting behavior are bound to be disappointed. They are dealing here not with a theologically united community but with what is left of a tribal community that attends church out of family habit. According to a poll taken by Public Policy Polling, 59 % of American Catholics approve of what Obama imposed on Catholic-affiliated services. Those interviewed in fact seem peeved that their clergy would oppose such a progressive measure. The once proverbial blue-collar Catholic of sixty years ago, who was imbued with deeply traditional attitudes, is a relic of the post-World War Two past. In a brilliant biography of a devout Catholic and outspoken conservative, The Crusader: The Life and Times of Pat Buchanan, English author Timothy Stanley depicts his subject as the flamboyant representative of a once sturdy Catholic working-class culture. Although Stanley respects that culture, he does notice that it’s all but vanished. The GOP should not count too heavily on its comeback.

The New York Civil Liberties Union reported two days ago on one of the main ways an average New Yorker might have witnessed the Bloomberg administration “making a difference”; stop-and-frisk policies that have caused NYPD stops to spike 600 percent since he took office.

From the report:

Of those subjected to NYPD street stops in 2011, nearly nine out of 10 were completely innocent, meaning they were neither arrested nor issued a summons. About 87 percent were black or Latino.

 …

Under the Bloomberg administration, the NYPD has conducted more than 4.3 million street stops. About 88 percent of those stops – nearly 3.8 million – resulted in no arrest or summons.

Quite a success rate. Isn’t it great when cause and effect are “so tightly coupled”? But lest the fine people of New York City worry Gotham’s Lord Protector is too one-sided in his methods, fear not. The nanny extraordinaire is also not above gentrifying Harlem, banning smoking in public parks, and distorting state elections to advance an anti-gun agenda.

Hopefully this will lay the “Draft Bloomberg” nonsense to rest.

CORRECTIONS BELOW*

Contrary to what some outsiders might believe, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference is not a big happy tent for conservatives. Rather, think of the vaunted “CPAC” as a veritable planet of partisan uniformity, to which its predominantly college-age participants instinctively flock each year, their behavior, language and dress code all working off the same operating system they would be the first to proudly brand, Reagan 4.0.

Take gay Republicans. In year’s past, the gay rights group GOProud was a sponsor and had a booth and a tolerated, albeit strained, presence in the conversation. The American Conservative Union, which built CPAC over its 39-year existence, took GOProud’s sponsor fees gladly, as part of the full spectrum of Republican interests within the movement. But when the whining in the hive hit media saturation point last year, the ACU responded by shoving GOProud back into the closet, disinviting the group for the 2012 confab. No more debate about whether free speech and equality means gay Republicans at CPAC anymore. Door closed.

A lot of folks would like to see the same fate for the anti-interventionist strain of their conservative kin at CPAC. Especially those who can’t seem to get their heads or their backsides out of 2001. For them, the recession is just another justification to armor-up and keep the war machine humming forever, not to mention rattling the sabers at Iran and Syria and against what one CPAC panelist called an “Iranian Revolution 2.0” across the Arab world.

Mackenzie Eaglen, a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, the same think tank that has hosted hawks Richard Perle, Fred and Kimberly Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Rubin, Danielle Pletka and Bill Kristol, spent her opening remarks on a CPAC panel whining that there were conservatives in their midst who actually want to cut defense spending. The horror!

“If there was a liberal political action conference — let’s just call it ‘LPAC’ — I doubt there would be a panel discussing ‘Social Security cuts, bad or good for America,’” Mackenzie lamented, referring to the faint beat of dissent among the war drums at this year’s CPAC (that’s exactly five panels and/or speakers sponsored by the Committee for the Republic about reining in spending and intervention, out of the nearly 200 other events scheduled at the three-day conference.)

“We’re at war with ourselves on this issue,” she charged. “It’s one thing we need to be aware about as a family — a family of conservatives,” she added portentously, as though it were time for some Corleone-style tough love against their wayward kin, presumably those who read The American Conservative and Antiwar.com and support Ron Paul and just plain don’t “get it.”

According to a source who has his ear to the ground on these matters, CPAC organizers felt their social conservative base had been losing control over the conference in recent years (read: gays and Ron Paulites). They may have had a point — with the infusion of hundreds if not thousands of students bused-in by* supporting Campaign for Liberty and other libertarian groups, Ron Paul not only won the much-anticipated straw poll in 2010 and 2011, but last year his supporters were able to boo, shout, heckle and rattle both Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld as they took the main stage together. It was an unprecedented moment, taking place a day before Paul made a rousing speech, where he called for an end to overseas interventions.

This year, Paul came in fourth in the straw poll. Campaign for Liberty was noticeably absent, their usual full-of-hipster-swag presence leaving a huge gap in the libertarian element that kicked up all the dust in recent years. Seems they wanted to pour all their energies into Paul’s primary campaign* (a Campaign for Liberty reader tells us it did not skip CPAC to support the Paul campaign, but to put “all its resources into federal and state legislative fights and educational efforts, as well as to plan for the next LPAC”). Paul, who has not won a primary so far, skipped, too, citing his busy travel schedule, though the campaign trail didn’t stop the other Republican hopefuls still left from speaking at CPAC on Friday. Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, Paul’s son, delivered remarks on Thursday, but he generally kept away from defense issues and instead focused on supplying the usual anti-Obama red meat.

So what was left? One could say a very unsophisticated, if not completely hackneyed, supercilious approach to foreign policy and national security harkening back to the old post-9/11 days. Here the muscular meets the fear-mongering, leaving little by the way of constructive conversation struggling for oxygen somewhere in everyone’s afterthoughts. Evidence of this could be seen in the straw poll, where national security issues were so low on voters’ priorities they barely registered.

I asked Christopher Lawton, a self-described Paul supporter, if he felt out-numbered this year in his non-interventionist views. He was manning a booth in the cavernous basement exhibit halls at CPAC (nearby, The American Conservative and Committee for the Republic bravely competed with rows and rows of slick corporate kiosks and tables draped by scrubbed-faced twentysomethings hawking military prowess and American exceptionalism).

“One word — yeah,” he said, smiling. “The warmongers are in full swing.”

One might attribute this to a backlash against the Paul “taint” in the Republican primary process, he being the only one on the campaign trail today talking explicitly against escalating a war with Iran, and calling for an immediate end to military operations in Afghanistan. Attempting to cleanse CPAC of what they call the “isolationist” strain might have resulted in more steroidally interventionist offerings, thus the ham-handed attention given to Newt and Callista Gingrich’s documentary, “A City Upon a Hill: The Spirit of American Exceptionalism,” and all of the jingoistic pandering to the military overall (it seems that reflexively and slavishly supporting war at CPAC is the only way to demonstrate support for veterans).

Lawton has another, not totally unrelated theory. “Our national pride has been so damaged and people are thinking so negatively, that they want to rally around some national identity, so bombing the hell out of Iran would sort of give us that Super Bowl mentality, something we could feel good about — it’s a very sad state of affairs.”

If that’s the case, being at CPAC this year must have been Chicken Soup for the Soul or better yet, a pep rally in an echo chamber. Finding it difficult to square your new fondness for a constitutionally limited government with the gargantuan military industrial complex? Never fear. AEI’s Eaglen, flanked by three ex-military men and Jihad hunter Frank Gaffney, told us the projected $487 billion in defense cuts over the next 10 years (and those are cuts are to increases in the budget mind you, as cooler heads have long pointed out) will not only destroy our economy, but ruin our communities, and harm our troops, too. If you support muscular defense spending, in other words, you support America.

Mackenzie appeared most perturbed that the U.S. will be “advertising our weakness” and be “just like everyone else” if and when the administration “abandons” its ability to fight two major ground wars at the same time. Meanwhile, Gaffney, ever the minstrel of sweetness and light, warned that Iranian-sponsored terrorists are ever-present in our hemisphere, and the administration is cutting defense at a time when the world is more dangerous than ever. Anyone who thinks cuts won’t harm America, “don’t know what they are talking about,” he told a standing room-only audience filled with nodding heads and compliant faces.

Certainly Loren Spivack, who wrote a charming play on the Cat in the Hat with Obama as the Cat called “The New Democrat” (cue Ted Geisel rolling, rolling in this grave) “gets it.” He told us we are pretty much too poor to defend ourselves, thanks to Obama.

“(The government),” he said, “is doing a million things that it ought not to do, and is leaving us precious little resources to do what we need to do to defend ourselves.”

Against whom, prey tell?

Meanwhile, don’t much care for the nuances of foreign policy? That’s okay, because at CPAC, most discussions devolve into alarmist variations on Muslims here in America and everywhere else on the planet planning to establish a Caliphate, with Jews and Christians first on the list for systematic persecution.

“Is the ‘Arab Spring’ Good or Bad for America?” asked one Thursday panel. Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, who unsuccessfully ran for the GOP presidential primary in 2008, sounded almost Paulesque when he told the crowd that a “helpful hand” should be offered, but not forced upon, the nascent democracy movements in the Arab world.

“I know this — I think the United States can have over-confidence in the use of force,” he said, with all the tact necessary for this particular audience. He tread softly. “I am not a isolationist and I am not an neoconservative. But I think intervention can create a negative reaction among people.”

“In my view the most important mission for the people of the United States is to repair our economy. We cannot deal with the international challenges that are unpredictable and unforeseeable in the future if we are not repaired.”

A small smattering of applause could be heard from somewhere in the corner of the room.

But what host Cliff May, another neoconservative warhawk from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies really wanted to know was, is “Arab Spring” an appropriate moniker for what is going on in the Arab world?

“Is ‘Islamist ascendency’ too strong a phrase?” he asked puckishly.

He was smiling, but David French, senior counsel at the Pat Robertson-founded Center for Law & Justice, wasn’t. At one point obliquely referring to Gilmore’s take on things as “naïve,” he warned that “this is no velvet revolution,” but an “Arab revolt,” which has accelerated Christian persecution and anti-Semitism all over the Middle East.

“You’re beginning to see the negative implications of a Middle Eastern culture, that is the problem. And if you have a culture that is seething with anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and aligns itself with radical Islamists … then this is bad for America,” French said, predicting that in the short-term, radicals will take over places like Egypt and in Syria (though he insists President Bashar al-Assad must go), before “the people say enough.”

“I shudder to think what that means to us in the short term.” What could it mean David? “A much larger emerging Iranian Revolution 2.0” across the Arab world, “filling stadiums with people calling for new holocaust.”

No surprise it is these remarks that got the most applause, just like Michele Bachmann’s earlier CPAC criticism of Barack Obama’s foreign policy in respect to Iran and Israel. She blamed the president for allowing Iran to become the “epicenter for global jihad,” and appealed to the already willing crowd to save Israel from its enemies, unlike Obama, who she accused of “putting Islamic outreach over Israel.”

Clearly for this audience, boiling down complicated foreign policy and national security issues to these familiar tropes is the way to go. Especially since Obama has been anything but an “antiwar” president. He’s gone out of his way to engage an aggressive war in the Muslim World, killing thousands — “jihadis” and civilians alike — in drone strikes across Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. He has expanded the reach and resources of U.S. Special Forces and the CIA in dozens of countries across the globe and has maintained the prison at Guantanamo Bay. It’s hard, I think, to argue against that directly.

On the brighter side of this grim picture, beyond the other depressing CPAC discussions, like “Does Hollywood Still Embrace American Exceptionalism?” or “What Would a Reagan Foreign Policy look like” (by John Bolton) or “Islamic law in America: How the Obama Justice Department is Selling us Out,” there were promising exceptions, like Constitutional scholar Bruce Fein taking on the role of John Quincy Adams in “America & its Wars: John Quincy Adams vs. James K. Polk.”

So maybe hipster swag isn’t everything. Non-interventionist conservatism was never about one man, one candidate anyway. All it can do now is to quietly burrow in for the long haul, at least until the door to CPAC closes completely.