The dueling-perspectives political panel is compatible with the aims of CNN, MSNBC, and the other progressive broadcasters. Here is how it works: You invite a member of the Republican establishment—often a RINO, preferably a bimbo—to do battle with a lefty from similar circles. The sides are ideologically so close, that, in all likelihood, the panelists hang out after the show.

This format is positively postmodernist. Why? Because, by presenting the public with two competing perspectives—you mislead viewers into believing that indeed there are two realities, and that it is up to them to decide which one is more compelling.

The one parallel universe is represented on Fox Business by the likes of Nancy Skinner, Caroline Heldman, Tara Dowdell, Carl Jeffers, Joe Sibila, Erika Payne, and others.

Skinner is a Democratic talk show host. The description is self-explanatory. Heldman is a professor at Occidental College whose considered opinion is that “the “private sector” put us in “the economic position we are in.” Heldman, who resembles the popular caricature of Mary Antoinette, calls regularly for the heads of business people. Dowdell is one of many fast-talking Democratic strategists to plump for every imaginable assault on private property issued by Washington. Sibilia is a successful CEO who—in his monumental ignorance of the benefits that redound to society when “both capital and labor are … permitted to make their own free choices”—is demanding that corporations “be designed for the common good.” Erika Payne, among other evils, is the author of what Jonathan Alter of Newsweek endorsed as “a blueprint for a progressive conspiracy to help save the country.”

The philosophical filth spewed by such characters—almost nightly on freedom-promoting programing, no less—is that government can spend and lend to good effect; that it can tax without discouraging and disrupting production; and that our overlords in DC can regulate “better” (read energy squandering) industries into being, by steering capital and labor away from bad (energy efficient) industries (oil and gas).

You expect such illusionary presentations in the liberal media. But those whose fidelity is to reality, the founders’ Constitution, and the natural laws of economics should not have to vie for precious seconds with central planners and thieves-by-proxy on magnificent libertarian programs like the “John Stossel Show” or the Judge’s “Freedom Watch.”

In 2004, a member of Bush 43’s fantasy-based community justified the delusions and consequent budget deficits of that administration thus: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

Impossible!

Certainly there is but one economic reality. And it was described by Henry Hazlitt in “Economics in One Lesson”:

• “The government’s funds all come from taxes.”
• “The government can give no financial help to business that it does not first or finally take from business.
• “When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.”Government lending is as destructive as its spending.
• “The whole argument for [the government] entering the lending business, in fact, is that it will make loans to people who could not get them from private lenders. This is only another way of saying that the government lenders will take risks with other people’s money (the taxpayers’) that private lenders will not take with their own money.”
• “The private lenders … are selected by a cruel market test … a process of survival of the fittest. The government lenders, on the other hand, are … those who can give the most plausible reasons for making loans and the most plausible explanations of why it wasn’t their fault that the loans failed. But the net result remains; private loans will utilize existing resources and capital far better than government loans. … Government loans, in short, as compared with private loans, will reduce production, not increase it. … a lowering of production which must reflect itself in a lower average living standard.”

These natural laws apply to all state endeavors.

The truth is that truth is immutable, never relative. The little truth there is in mainstream media should not be diluted or presented by its adherents as dueling with untruth. The above Fox News fixtures no more represent truth or promote it than does your average Holocaust denier.

With an exception: Libraries have long since engaged in a robust debate as to how to classify Holocaust-denying literature. While admirably advocating for unfettered free access, Professor of Library Services John A. Drobnicki has suggested moving Holocaust denial out of the History section in US libraries and closer to the “Bigfoot books,” so that Holocaust denial’s Dewey Decimal designation is with “hoax materials.”

Indeed, hacks are not historians. Although the dueling-perspectives panel format would suggest it is—the economic bunk spewed by the likes of Skinner, Heldman, Dowdell, Jeffers, Sibila, and Erika Payne is no version of the truth, but a perversion of it.

A Homeric contest is underway in the USA. Rome is burning. Now is not the time to fiddle or to unwittingly defraud the public.

Every immigration worrywart recalls the “astonishing episode” Mr. Buchanan recounts next. In 1998, Bill Clinton brought tidings of “their coming minority status” to a “largely white student body” at Portland State University. “In a little more than 50 years,” rejoiced President Clinton, “there will be no majority race in the United States. No other nation in history has gone through a demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time.” Taking their cue from their “enthnomasochistic” president, the students erupted in cheers.

“Ethnomasochism,” laments Mr. Buchanan—who is surely one of the great patriots of our time—is “the taking of pleasure in the dispossession of one’s own ethnic group.” It is “a disease of the heart that never afflicted the America of Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, or Dwight Eisenhower.”

In this writer’s latest book, the example of post-apartheid South Africa is used to deconstruct the effects of such a shift in a country’s majority/minority power structure. Granted, the shift underway in the U.S.A. is incremental. But as is clear from the facts unfurled in “Suicide of A Superpower,” the transformation of America will be as detrimental as the almost-overnight shift orchestrated in South Africa.

In 1994, South Africa’s Europeans forfeited control over the state apparatus. They ceded mastery over their destiny, and vested their existential survival in a political dispensation: a liberal democracy. In a needlessly optimistic assumption, whites imagined that blacks too would be bound by the same political abstractions—they expected them to relinquish race as an organizing principle, in favor of a constitutional design.

Instead of political partners, South African whites got masters. They also got a low-grade war, waged by a sinecured criminal class, which grasped that the politically helpless minority was “historical fair game.” “The physical vulnerability of white South Africans flows from having surrendered their political dominance for the promise of non-racial constitutional safeguards.”

South Africa’s political eunuchs are particularly vulnerable within a democratic political dispensation for the very reason the descendants of America’s founders will be fair game: their history on the continent. Remedial historical revisionism notwithstanding, South Africa—with its space program and skyscrapers—was not the product of the people currently in control. Rather, it was the creation of British and Dutch colonists and their descendants. For what they’ve achieved and acquired—and for the sins of apartheid—South Africa’s pioneering people are the objects of envy and racial enmity.

Unless they fight it, a similar fate awaits the descendants of the (slaveholding) founders of America.

In South Africa, the ratio of voters to taxpayers is now a stupefying 11 to 1, and growing. The equivalent ratio in the U.S. is still approximately 2 to 1. But the numbers of the unproductive are increasing steadily. As Mr. Buchanan notes, almost all the immigrants replacing the host population in the U.S. come from “Asia, Africa, and Latin America.” Given America’s preference for welfare-dependent, third-world immigrants, pillage politics will proliferate.

South Africans vote almost exclusively along racial lines. That all the elections since 1994 have had the blessing of every liberal alive doesn’t change the fact that they are determined by “a muscular mobilization of a race-based majority.” As illustrated in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” democracy is especially dangerous in ethnically and racially divided societies, where majorities and minorities are rigidly predetermined and politically permanent.

For a prerequisite for a liberal democracy is that majority and minority status be interchangeable and fluid. To wit, a ruling majority party must be as likely to become a minority party as the obverse. Indeed, every democratic theorist worth his salt has urged that the principle of majority rule be severely curtailed “whenever people of different languages, races, religions, or national origins with no firm habits of political co-operation and mutual trust are to unite in a single polity.”

Thirty years on, when the Rubicon is crossed, most Americans will be poorer, less educated, and more welfare-dependent. One party will represent this majority. This party will serve as an instrument of perpetual oppression of the minority by a politically powerful majority. Like South Africa, America is destined to degenerate into a dominant-party state.

Sadly, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” is the sequel to Patrick J. Buchanan’s “Suicide of A Superpower.”

Apartheid was a contemptible caste system. Forgotten, however, in the recriminations over apartheid are the facts as they are documented in my just-released book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.”

The Museum of Apartheid Mrs. Obama and the first daughters graced with their presence will have emphasized that, “Everything that goes wrong in the new South Africa is a legacy of apartheid.” Is not the violence in the rest of Africa blamed on colonialism? “It’s a legacy that has gone on for almost forty years,” I write (citing an exacerbated Jim Peron, an American expatriate, whose idealism drove him to decamp to post-apartheid South Africa). “Every time something goes wrong (and that happens constantly), the same litany of excuses is recited. ‘We inherited this problem from the corrupt apartheid regime.'”

There’s one pesky problem with this particular blame-game: South Africa’s flourishing criminal class consists mainly of youngsters who’ve come of age and blossomed under black rule.

What else will the proprietors of the thoroughly Americanized Apartheid Museum fail to divulge? As is chronicled in Chapter 5 of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot”: “Had the sainted Mandela ascended to power in the 1960s instead of languishing on Robben Island and in Pollsmoor Prison [Mrs. Obama’s destinations in Cape Town], he would have nationalized the South African economy and banned private enterprise.” That’s what the ANC’s Charter called for in 1955. That’s what South Africa’s black-ruled neighbors to the north did.

Except for Rhodesia before Robert Mugabe, minority-ruled South Africa, with all its problems, offered Africans more than any other country on the Dark Continent.

Patterns of migration have always functioned as clues to social reality. Then as now, “black migration patterns into South Africa far exceeded black migration patterns out of South Africa.” Granted, entering African migrants were not “voting with their feet” for apartheid, but they were certainly voting for law and order and a livelihood.

In the “first twenty three years of apartheid, between 1948 and 1981, the South African economy grew at a rate of 4.5 percent.” Of course, in the famous words attributed to both Disraeli and Mark Twain, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Duly, Marxists put the high-growth rate down to exploitation. However, when “exploitation” was replaced with “liberation”—and Africans broke free of the colonial yoke to gain political independence—they promptly established planned economies, in whose shadow nothing could grow, plunging their respective countries into despair and destitution.

To the liberal West, Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere were the faces of black liberation, but both leaders cut a swathe of destruction through the rural economies of their respective countries, Zambia and Tanzania. While South Africa is not quite a one-party state; it is a dominant-party state.

Demographics dictate that Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) will likely never lose an election to one of the country’s tiny, tokenistic opposition parties. One shudders to think what the ANC—now slowly Sovietizing South Africa—would have wrought on the sophisticated, industrialized economy of the country had it been given the opportunity circa 1960.

While black Africa and East Europe circled the drain due to communism, South Africa was experiencing an economic explosion, courtesy of the National Party’s relatively conservative economics. An oasis in the African desert, South Africa’s then gold-backed economy grew at an annual rate of six percent during the 1960s.

In his submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, F. W. de Klerk, who received a Nobel Peace prize for surrendering South Africa to the ANC, corrected the record. The following is excerpted from “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” (which cites liberal historian Hermann Giliomee):

Apartheid was not only about white privilege but also about development and redistribution of income from whites to blacks. The economy had grown by an average of 3.5 percent per year under apartheid, the black school population grew by 250 percent in the first twenty-five years of apartheid, and the black share of total personal income had nearly doubled from twenty percent in the mid-1970s to thirty seven percent in 1995, while that of whites declined from seventy one to forty nine percent.” As bad as the Bantu Education system was, it vastly improved black literacy. Twelve years into the Nationalist government’s rule, the rate of literacy among the Bantu of South Africa was already higher than that of any other state in Africa, or that of India.

From the 1940s to the 1990s, life expectancy for blacks soared from thirty-eight to sixty-one years!Since the dawn of democracy around 1994, life expectancy in South Africa has plummeted by nine years, and unemployment has jumped from nineteen percent in 1994 (before “freedom”) to thirty-one percent in 2003 (after “freedom”), steadily rising until, in 2005, it stood at 38.8 percent.

The Apartheid Museum will make extravagant claims for Mandela’s movement. Air brushed out of a slanted historical presentation is this:

By staving off crime and communism, the apartheid regime, a vast repressive apparatus though it was, saved black South Africans from an even worse moral and material fate.

I’ve finally figured out what it was that repulsed me so about American opinion makers’ slobbering response to this anti- authoritarian upheaval.

It was not so much that the media ignored the likely possibility that democracy in a country that has become progressively more Islamic since the 1950s might not have a happy ending.

It was not that the media pretended that the Muslim Brotherhood, also the “best organized opposition force in the country,” would not field a viable presidential candidate.

It was not that, in their jubilation, Anderson Cooper (CNN), Neil Cavuto (Fox News), and Christiane Amanpour (ABC) failed to mention the precedent set in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has deployed the democratic process to get the better of the country’s Maronite Christians.

It was not even the fact that the journalistic imperative to provide nuance, detail, and an economic and historic backdrop to the unfolding events was replaced, by the journalistic jet-set, with the telegenic drama of the man on the street.

None of this bothered me as much as the patronizing position these American reporters adopted; the neat bifurcation they managed to maintain between “Us” (the “free” men and women of America) and “Them” (those pathetic, shackled Egyptians).

The fact is that the heroic movement for democracy in Egypt dovetails with an ongoing flirtation with fascism in the US; the twilight of individual sovereignty in the US contrasts with its rise in Egypt.

So it was that America’s intellectual “Idiocracy” pontificated about the obvious need for liberty in Egypt, as its political masters worked to refine Mubarak’s methods. No sooner had Mubarak pulled the switch on the internet, than Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican ranking member on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, re-introduced a bill designed to give Obama similar internet-killing powers. All under the cover of democracy.

Foolish reporters fulminated about Egyptian freedoms, but hardly flinched when a Republican-led House of Representatives extended certain provisions of the Patriot Act. All the better to help the home-grown terrorists of the TSA to obliterate those pesky Fourth-Amendment rights.

The same intrepid reporters failed to mention that, when he was not ordering rendition and torture in the service of the US, Mubarak’s dictatorial powers were directed, unjustly indubitably, against the Islamic fundamentalists of the Muslim brotherhood.

American justice, on the other hand, proceeds boldly against … tokers, seven hundred and fifty thousand of whom languish in our prisons. By Wikipedia estimates, “The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world.” By logical extension, the US imprisons more individuals than Mubarak did, millions of who are innocent (arrested for behavior that is licit in natural law). According to “420Magazine,” “Approximately 4 million Americans are arrested each year for victimless crimes.”

According to the CIA World Fact Book, Egyptian unemployment hovers around 9.7 percent. How different is that from American jobless rates? The Egyptian government’s debt is 80.5 percent of GDP (an admittedly iffy measure of economic Brownian Motion, or expenditure). At $14.13 trillion, the debt our government has incurred stands at 96.4 percent of GDP.

For a while, the gilded elites had reason to worry. The natives were growing restless over being manhandled at the nation’s federally controlled airports. But American travelers soon relaxed, and turned, instead — and with a vengeance — on a freedom fighter: WikiLeaks proprietor Julian Assange.

Genghis Bush lied us into war in Iraq, causing the direct and indirect deaths of 108,864 Iraqi civilians and of 4436 (mostly working-class) American men. At least 32,977 of our soldiers were maimed and disfigured for life in that escapade. Most Americans were as upbeat about the carnage as comedian Dennis Miller still is.

Tame tea-partiers (who were easily cowed when called racists) excepted, Americans last took to the streets in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War protests.

American media seem to color events by refracting them through a sickeningly sentimental prism. Their efforts to create reality on the ground — instead of reporting on it — notwithstanding, here’s what we know about the inchoate Egyptian uprising: the movement’s members hated their ruler and did what was necessary to be rid of him.

Egyptians united in non-partisan detestation of their dictator. Whereas the Egyptians held no delusions about their top dog; we in the US lionize ours, mistaking political overlords for benefactors.

I, of course, needed no olfactory reminders to steer clear of the Capital and its surrounds. We headed into Virginia. Fredericksburg, Charlottesville, and Orange: The landscape took my breath away; so beautiful, so steeped in history. One could so clearly see why magnificent men once defended these places to the death.

Sadly, after touring George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate, James Madison’s woefully neglected Montpelier, and Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello — my husband and I turned into betting men. The wager? In which stately room would our guide commence the deconstruction of the American founding for the sin of slavery? Visitors had all been schooled well. Many of the questions fielded touched on slavery; most of those present were eager to display their exquisite sensitivity. As evinced by the furious nodding and sighing, almost all tourists “got” how irreparably blemished these brilliant and brave individuals were because of that peculiar institution. Although the slave quarters at Mount Vernon were closed for renovations, one young man draped himself decoratively over a narrow windowsill. There he stood motionless, deep in thought, his hunched frame racked by (very showy) pain.

An African-American family sauntered toward the Mount Vernon estate plan, where I lingered. The father pointed toward one landmark only: “Here, son, were the slave quarters. Here is their unmarked tomb.” Not a word did dad disgorge about George Washington the farmer and freedom fighter. Thus was a young, black American directed to nurse those unappeasable grievances.

At Monticello, we were joined by our good friend the economist and historian Thomas J. DiLorenzo. What a shame that the entire party could not have benefited from his countervailing commentary. “It didn’t take long before the school-marmish tour guide announced that ‘historians tell us’ that Jefferson fathered six children with slave Sally Hemmings,” Professor DiLorenzo later blogged at Lewrockwell.com:

This was History From Below — the history of the US is what the Legislative Black Caucus, the NAACP, and so-called civil-rights activists say it is; a litany of complaints and contrivances launched by self-styled victims groups on behalf of minor historical figures.

The idea that the Founders were flawed, sinful men like you and me is current among a hefty majority of Americans, conservative too. It is wrong. Quite the reverse. The Founders were nothing like us. Not even close. I say this not as an idealist but as a realist. Judging from their works and their written words, the American Founding Fathers were immeasurably better than just about anyone on earth today. That goes for that gnarled, somewhat stupid sadist Mother Teresa, whom Christopher Hitchens nailed in “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.” And it applies to the moral role-models selected for us annually, courtesy of CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

The Founders are matchless today both morally and intellectually — their actions bespeak a willingness to forsake fortunes and risk lives for liberty, a concept and cause alien to contemporary Americans, who’re, mostly, bereft of both the mental and moral gravitas necessary to grasp it.

As for the writings of the likes of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and others: Today’s muddled and malign pseudo-intellectuals cannot hope to approximate works such as the “The Federalist Papers” and “Anti-Federalist Papers.” In fact, Charles Murray’s monumental work, “Human Accomplishment,” in which he comes up with subjects who “dragged their fellow men out of wattle-and-daub hovels and pushed them into space rockets,” tends to support my harking to the past, not the present, for intellectual inspiration.

George Washington was a brilliantly inventive farmer, who used state-of-the-art technologies and thinking to cultivate and conserve. Yet, the impression you get from the Mount Vernon guide is that he was nothing without his slaves. Indeed, as you traipse around the homes of these men you’re wont to hear about this or the other wonderful cabinet maker or marvelously gifted horseman, or farmhand. Who do you imagine taught the slaves these skills and trades? The monarchs of Buganda?

A member of our group at Montpelier sidled up to my spouse, and snapped, “I wish they’d quit banging on about slavery untethered from its historical context. This was the thinking back in those days.” Granted, the American Founders didn’t share in the Rousseauist reverence for the Noble Savage. That was a French thing.

Indeed, the Founders acted as paternalistic, benevolent patriarchs. The European missionaries in my homeland of South Africa were similarly disposed toward the thousands of African refugees who fled to their mission stations to escape tribal depredations. The missionaries regarded these tribesmen as children, to be de-tribalized, missionized, and taught skills, a trade and literacy in preparation for life in a westernized society.

Slavery was debated vigorously and finally abolished by the English speaking people—not the African slave traders (who persisted in the practice).

Should you insist on retaining a clunky cliché, then fine, “The American Founders were not perfect.” They were, nevertheless, a great deal more perfect than you, me, our mindless twittering offspring, and the errant adults and intelligentsia that have egged the “Idiocracy” on.

“A recent Arizona law, S.B. 1070, has generated significant attention and debate at home and around the world. The issue is being addressed in a court action that argues that the federal government has the authority to set and enforce immigration law. That action is ongoing; parts of the law are currently enjoined.”

The reference here is to Arizona’s attempts to exercise its naturally licit right, and obligation, to protect its law-abiding citizens from the consequences of a full-on, lawless, frequently dangerous foreign invasion.

As the Mexican free market economist Ricardo Valenzuela has argued, “The only thing that Arizona has done is to approve the laws they consider necessary to promote a civilized way of life for their societies. The new Arizona law doesn’t penalize immigration. The law only gives the police force the tools to secure the rule of law.” The difference between Arizona and Mexico, notes Valenzuela ─ who is concerned with retaining the conditions for prosperity in the US and creating these in Mexico ─ is that the first enforces the rule of law and the latter doesn’t know the meaning of those words.

Face it, if not for the US Supreme Court’s established hostility, over the years, to the Constitution’s original intent; to its Tenth Amendment, and to the devolution of powers not enumerated to the states and to their individual inhabitants ─ the federal government would have almost no role in deciding how porous the borders of the “free and independent states” ought to be.

“The Congress shall have Power To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization”: This is as close as Section 8 of Article I in the Constitution of the United States comes to addressing what the Supreme Court has decided categorically speaks to immigration into the US.

Fifty five delegates convened in 1787 at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, to carve out the contours of this Constitution. Imagine those magnificent men making the case that the people of the colonies they represented ought to sit idle should their homesteads be overrun by trespassers and their families and friends imperiled. Imagine those very men arguing for a future central authority that acted as the sole arbiter in deciding who would breach the perimeters of their respective home patches.

Inconceivable.

If we lived in the old decentralized republic of absolute property rights, land owners in border communities would be policing and defending their properties and the commons. They’d have stopped the ongoing influx in its tracks. Whereas America’s modern-day community leader is suing Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio for being a “bad gringo, a racist, and a bully”; community leaders in early America ─ as historian David Hackett Fischer tells it ─ often required an immigrant to furnish them with an affidavit from the Old Country, attesting to good character, before being permitted to settle among them. In that republic of blessed memory, trespassers would never have made it past private land owners. Back in those days when self-defense was not merely nominal, aliens traipsing and trashing land not theirs, as they now do with impunity, would have been repelled by land owners — by force. Thus would the habit have been extinguished for good.

Brussels is now the Mecca to which America turns for moral direction. Alas, around the time of the Constitutional Convention, King Leopold I of Belgium had not yet been born. But it is inconceivable to think of George Washington complaining, say to King Louis XVI, about (the heroic) whiskey rebels of west Pennsylvania for testing his tyrannical impulses.

The Tenth Amendment center has a list of model legislative initiatives designed to help beat back America’s federales. Nullifying the Federal Healthcare act is one (thank you Virginia, Utah, and Idaho). Preventing the federal government from commandeering a state’s National Guard is another. Additional Tenth-Amendment momentums include keeping the federal government from regulating state firearms, commerce, the use of honest money (gold, silver) and dope.

But more than anything, immigration is fueling the fever of freedom. For it plays out at the interstices of the most cherished of individual rights: the rights to life and property. Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has, consequently, ruled that state law enforcement officers are allowed to check the immigration status of those stopped or arrested legitimately. At least eleven other states have taken their cues from Cuccinelli, Governor Jan Brewer, and 81 percent of the registered voters of Arizona, and are standing up to the president.

There are those who contend that any impetus to restrict immigration is always and everywhere predicated on aggression against non-aggressors. This is the case only if one believes that telling someone, “No, you can’t go there” is tantamount to violence.

Repudiate this elevated ethical standard, and a deranged, fulminating Keith Olbermann will pelt you with a panegyric on the imagined martyrdom of one Shirley Sherrod, now the most celebrated public servant in the United States, and perhaps the world.

Ms. Sherrod’s road to sainthood is not that unusual. In this woman we have, indubitably, one among an army of fairly typical black state employees. In this case, working for the rural development division of the United States Department of Agriculture.

Sherrod got into trouble over an address delivered at the twentieth annual freedom banquet of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (whose raison d’être is racial), on March the 27th. (Standards of journalism are not as “big” as Andrew Breitbart’s “big this; big that” websites: the reports don’t say in what year the speech was given.)

Olbermann is a crude pamphleteer who imagines himself a modern-day Emile Zola. Most recently, the anchor has sunk to the level of fraud and falsehood in comparing Ms. Sherrod ─ a contemporary black woman, who has, hitherto, enjoyed safe and secure sinecure in liberal, post-Civil-Rights-Act America ─ to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a 19th-Jew living in illiberal France, falsely accused of the worst military breach possible.

The similarities are as startling as Olbermann’s leveling logic. In 1894, this patriotic Frenchman was charged with spying for the Germans. Dreyfus was tried and convicted of treason with no due process of the law. He was sentenced to a lifetime on Devil’s Island, a penal colony in South America. There, Dreyfus languished until 1899. Outraged at the miscarriage of justice, French writer Emile Zola penned a stirring tract, “J’Accuse,” in defense of Dreyfus, who was eventually exonerated 12 years after his ordeal began.

Dreyfus’s fate clearly mirrors that of Sherrod. Especially glaring are the parallels between Sherrod’s 48-hour, celebratory ride on the cable news merry-go-round, and Dreyfus’s four-year romp around Treasure Island, in French Guiana.

We’ve “pulled a Dreyfus on Sherrod,” foamed old Olby. Sherrod “has been to her own Devil’s Island,” “thanks to the perpetual fraud machine that is Fox News, and the scum that is this assassin [Andrew] Breitbart,” and “the howling fools of the far right, the stand-aside pathetic bureaucrats of the Department of Agriculture, the whole of the cowering media, this network [his] included, the whole of the government,” and the president.

Look, Mr. Olbermann: You are no Emile Zola. You don’t even rise to the level of the kings and queen of Kvetch TV, John and Larry King and Anderson Cooper of CNN. And Sherrod is no Dreyfus. She was fired by an administration that mistook her for a worse racist than she actually was. The Obama posse overestimated the extent of Sherrod’s animus for whites. She turned out to be merely a mezzanine-level racist.

Neither is Sherrod’s story one of “redemption and cross-racial friendship,” as Newsweek put it slightly less hyperbolically than did MSNBC’s front man. Shirley Sherrod’s is a tale of the triumph of low expectations and black racial exculpation in contemporary America.

Here is a USDA worker, whose pay and perks are provided by wealthier Americans ─ given that this country has the steepest, most progressive tax system among all OECD countries.* Yet she disdains the very “haves” who’ve funded her existence and facilitated her “life’s work.” By her own admission, Sherrod arrived each day at work eager to toil for the betterment of nobody but blacks.

One day, as she told the NAACP gathering, God put things in her path that made her realize she was there for poor people. A white farmer appealed for her assistance. Had the white farmer been a brother forced to beg before a sister in a position of power, Sherrod might have characterized him as a proud man in humiliating circumstances. Given the desperate farmer’s hue, Sherrod alleged he had a superior attitude, before going on to describe her dilemma: having to help a white man save his property, when so many black people had lost theirs.”

So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do,” Sherrod smirked. “I did enough. I took him to a white lawyer; one of them; to his own kind.”Drum roll for Ms. Sherrod, who then followed up thus: “That’s when it was revealed to me that this was about poor vs. those who have. And not so much about white—it is about white and black—but it opened my eyes …”

Hallelujah, and what a pure heart!

A nice enough lady, Ms. Sherrod then divulged how she performed the tasks (the rich had paid her to do) even when it came to this dejected white farmer. The acme of ethics in American: a black woman who has graduated from hard-core to soft bigotry.

From the howling wilderness that is his moral universe, Brother Olbermann has demanded that we, first, flagellate and, next, accept Shirley Sherrod as the embodiment of “the kind of true greatness the rest of us can only hope we might express for one moment in the whole of our lives.”

I don’t think so.

* OECD: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

The address Mubarak was referring to was delivered by a grandiose Obama in Egypt’s capital, early in June. There, the president prostrated himself before the Muslim world, offering up prolix praise for the religion of peace ─ a tradition that his predecessor established.

Frankly, I got the impression that Mubarak himself was a little wary of Islam ─ this is the Egyptian’s first sojourn to Washington since 2004, after breaking up with Bush. “W” would not stop bugging Mubarak to democratize Egypt. Fortunately, Mubarak was not about to help catapult the Wahhabist Muslim Brotherhood to power, which would be the likely outcome of a democratic election in Egypt.

But I digress.

In that memorable speech, the president also lauded the compendious knowledge spread far and wide by the Al-Azhar and Cairo Universities. Nary a reference was made to “Islam’s bloody borders,” as Samuel P. Huntington put it in “The Clash of Civilizations?”‘. Or, for that matter, to Al-Azhar’s bloody borders. According to Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, officiating as Grand Sheikh for this much-exalted institute of Islamic learning is a chap by the name of Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi. In the tradition of Islamic Enlightenment, Tantawi has given his approval — on strict Islamic grounds, mind you — to suicide bombing.

After mentioning the value and universality of human rights, our self-styled “student of history,” as the president had dubbed himself on the occasion (he also made a point of repeating his middle name a lot) went on to declare that “America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles.”

The choice to draw parallels between a country and a faith was a curious one. Was Obama intimating that Islam, like America, was a political system? In that case, we are agreed about the project of Islam.

Still ─ and for all Obama’s heavy hinting to the contrary ─ Islam has no “human rights.” The ideas of individual rights and the dignity of man are distinctly Western, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. And while dialogue is dignified; dhimmitude is not, even if it achieves a desired, if temporary, effect.

While in Egypt, our president did not expiate over Iraq, which he continues to occupy. To compensate, he peppered his oration with the standard canards about colonialism and the Arab world.The received wisdom that the Arabs were (and remain) hapless and helpless victims of the West is false, of course.

In Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923, Efraim and Inari Karsh marshal prodigious scholarship to dispel the shopworn shibboleths Obama regurgitated in Cairo. The two show that “Twentieth-century Middle Eastern history is essentially the culmination of long-standing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior rather than an externally imposed dictate.”

Although he didn’t take the liberty of apologizing on behalf of ever-errant white America for the slave trade during another pilgrimage ─ this time to Ghana ─ Obama did tell Anderson Cooper (the “journalist” noted for introducing the country to the practice of tea bagging) that “slavery is a terrible part of the United States’ history and should be taught in a way that connects that past cruelty to current events, such as the genocide in Darfur.”

For the Atlantic slave trade, contemporary Americans and Britons grovel at every opportunity. But as historian Jeremy Black points out in his sprawling survey, The Slave Trade, Europeans were also responsible for bringing about the demise of this despicable practice in Africa.

I wonder: Does Africa’s own Little Lord Fauntleroy seek to rub-in the theme of the white man’s burden, a theme WASPs welcome like wimps? Or is Obama open to educating America about the robust slave trade conducted by Arabs across the Sahara Desert? Or across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to markets in the Middle East. What about the vibrant, indigenous slave trade carried on well into the nineteenth century in the interior of West Africa?

The president might begin changing his own preconceived ideas of events past and present in Africa by reading the words of Brother Keith B. Richburg. Richburg, who is seldom seen on the idiot’s lantern, and whose words are not widely disseminated across the racial tyranny that is America, wrote the following in Out Of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (1997):

“I feel for [Africa’s] suffering, I empathize with her pain, and now, from afar, I still recoil in horror whenever I see yet another television picture of another tribal slaughter, another refugee crisis. But most of all I think: Thank God my ancestors got out, because, now, I am not one of them. In short, thank God that I am an American.”

Given the veritable mirage of lies he conjured in Cairo, blaming the decadence of Arab countries on nefarious Western imperialist intervention in the 19th and 20th centuries ─ B. Hussein’s historical horizons vis-à-vis the Middle East could also do with some broadening.

A good start would be to stop relying on “Lawrence of Arabia’s” homoerotic, ahistoric memoir for the facts.

© By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com & Taki’s Magazine
August 21, 2009

Christine Gregoire allowed impolite atheists to flank the baby Jesus with a placard that read: “There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”

Fox News viewers have since deluged the governor’s office with angry phone calls—200 an hour. So far so good. Bully for Bill.

But then Gregoire briskly disposed of Bill. In response, reported the Associated Press, the Democratic governor deferred to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has “been consistent and clear that, under the Constitution’s First Amendment, once government admits one religious display or viewpoint onto public property, it may not discriminate against the content of other displays, including the viewpoints of nonbelievers.”

Bill might have won the battle, but he lost the debate. Why? Because O’Reilly fiddles with the icing rather than the cake: He defends the country’s founding faith on the frivolous grounds that it is a federal festival like any other—an “uplifting tradition … where peace and love are the theme of the great day.”

The substance of O’Reilly’s claim against those who’d disrespect a Christmas display is, “Be nice, because Christmas is nice.” And because the feds have told you to. Having defended Christmas as a lawful, public holiday, logical consistency then compels O’Reilly to stick up for every foul federal holiday, including Martin Luther King’s dedicated day. This he duly did, even going so far as to suggest that atheists apply to have their own, federally approved, winter solstice celebration. Until such a day, however, Bill vowed to banish them from the public square.

This is the country’s founding faith O’Reilly is talking about; not one among many competing holidays. And this is O’Reilly’s problem. He’s forever arguing his case from the stance of the positive law. The “Law.com Dictionary” defines legal positivism as “man-made law, as compared to ‘natural law,’ which is purportedly based on universally accepted moral principles.” Believers call the natural law “God’s law,” others, like myself, refer to law derived from reason.

Whatever the case, the natural law is the law O’Reilly seldom defers to. O’Reilly generally adopts the position that the law is always just because it was arrived at by majority vote. This species of legal positivism contravenes classical natural law theory, as it equates justice with the law of the State. To follow this reasoning, Hitler’s actions would have to be considered legitimate because he came to power democratically. (The Argument From Hitler is tired, I know, but it’s the end of the year, and I’m tired.)

A jog through First Amendment jurisprudence will reveal that Grinch Gregoire’s ruling is naturally illicit, as does it distort the original intent of the Constitution. First Amendment law has tended to see the injunction against the establishment of a state religion as an injunction against the expression of faith—especially discriminating against the founding Christian faith—in taxpayer-supported spheres. The end result has been the expulsion of religion from the public square and the suppression therein of freedom of religion.

As I’ve repeatedly written, “sometimes the law of the State coincides with the natural law. More often than not, natural justice has been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.”

If you doubt O’Reilly’s defense of the Christmas display was inadequate, consider: If Christmas were not a public holiday, would the atheistic exhibit the uncouth governor authorized be defensible? And if Christmas were not an “uplifting tradition”—O’Reilly’s diminishing description—but a sad and somber day, would it not still deserve pride-of-place in state capitols across the country? It most certainly would. And not because the State designated it a holiday; or because it is a harmless and happy day.

Christmas ought to be defended on the basis that Christianity is America’s founding faith. To defend Christian America with reference to Un-Christian State law that has all but banished Christianity from the public square is worse than silly.

ILANA: The president elect’s leanings are more Marx than Hamilton. This makes Barack Obama even more alien to the American system than was Hamilton, the subject of your new book, Hamilton’s Curse. Nevertheless, he’ll adapt. Tell us how Alexander Hamilton cursed the old republic. And how you think Obama’s socialist statism will blend and meld with American, Hamiltonian statism?

TOM DILORENZO: Hamilton was the intellectual leader of the nationalist movement among the founders who wanted to import the corrupt British mercantilist empire to America.  He wanted the government to pursue “imperial glory,” another word for empire, and to adopt a set of economic policies – protectionist tariffs, a large national debt, corporate welfare, and monetary manipulation by a bank operated by politicians out of the nation’s capital.  At the constitutional convention he proposed a permanent president who would appoint all the governors who would have veto power over all state legislation. A “king,” in other words. Jefferson and his followers viewed this as nothing less than a betrayal of the American Revolution. They had just fought a war against that very system, and Hamilton wanted to turn around and adopt it here in the U.S. Hamilton believed that a mercantilist empire was a bad thing if you were on the paying end, but quite good if you were on the collecting end. It’s good to be the king, as Mel Brooks might say. Jefferson opposed him every step of the way, believing that every one of his policy proposals would not only be economically unwise, but destructive of the very liberty the Revolution was fought to advance. 

The Hamilton/Jefferson political battle raged on for decades, but some historians call the post Civil War era the period of “Hamiltonian hegemony,” where the presidency became more and more dominant over Congress; states’ rights or federalism became essentially nullified; and all of Hamilton’s mercantilist economic policies were adopted, from protectionism to corporate welfare for the railroad corporations. The Republican Party has always been the party of Hamiltonian mercantilism. That’s why I’ve called Lincoln “the political son of Alexander Hamilton,” as far as economic policy and the structure of government are concerned. 

Obama is a slick politician, so I expect him to continue to administer the neo-mercantilist, Hamiltonian empire that has been built up by both parties over the decades, with all of its schemes for corporate welfare for defense contractors, investment bankers, and myriad other politically-active businesses which, in turn, provide financial support for the regime. But Obama is also a hardcore leftist who spent his earlier career working with some of the craziest socialists in America, groups like “ACORN,” who advocated such things as kicking doctors off the boards of hospitals and replacing them with “the poor,” and Soviet-style nationalization of the energy and health care industries.

ILANA: We aren’t going to miss McCain. His philosophy is about the greater good and a greater government. “McMussolini” worships Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, places few limits on government and, therefore, has little use for the Constitution. What precisely makes McCain a dyed-in-the-wool Hamiltonian (minus the high IQ)?

TOM DILORENZO:  John McCain is virtually a poster boy for Hamiltonian mercantilism: he favored a dictatorial executive branch, foreign policy adventurism, and he supported the Wall Street Plutocrats’ Bailout Bill, which of course was pure Hamiltonianism.

Hamilton was called “The Rousseau of the Right” by political scientist Cecelia Kenyon forty years ago because he based his political philosophy on the notion that a small clique, or even one man, should be entrusted with the power to promote “the public interest,” under the assumption that they and they alone somehow knew what was in “the public interest.” This was the philosophy of Rousseau, and of the French Jacobins. Ironically, Hamilton tried to tar his enemy Jefferson with this label, but it really applied to him. In “Hamilton’s Curse” I cite seventeen different phrases Hamilton used for “the public interest” in his speeches.  And this of course sounds exactly like McCain’s “country first” campaign theme. “Trust, but don’t even try to verify” seems to have been his real theme. 

Hamilton was also obsessed with using the powers of the state to pursue “imperial glory” in war, and itched for a war with France, just as McCain itched for a war with Iran (for starters). That also makes him quite the Hamiltonian. Jefferson certainly believed in defensive wars, but was terrified by the prospect of non-defensive wars of “glory.”  He was no national-greatness conservative. He even went to such extremes as to impose a trade embargo as president rather than risk another war with England after the British navy kidnapped American sailors.

ILANA: Obama is right at home with one major Hamiltonian impetus, carried out originally with the help of Chief Justice John Marshall: “liberal judicial activism.” Obama will be big on the idea of “implied powers.” Explain. What do you expect from his soon-to-be ensconced “judicial monarchs”? 

TOM DILORENZO: Exhibit A of what I call Hamilton’s curse is the fact that Hamilton invented the notion of “implied powers” of the Constitution. Although the subject of a national bank was brought up at the constitutional convention and rejected, Hamilton argued that if one reads between the lines of the Constitution, one may see “implied” as well as explicitly delegated (by the states) powers, such as the creation of a bank run by politicians. Jefferson responded that all he saw between the lines was blank space. Chief Justice John Marshall was a protégé of Hamilton’s, and essentially plagiarized large sections of Hamilton’s writings in some of his judicial opinions in order to expand this evil form of constitutional destruction, expand the dictatorial powers of the executive branch, and grow the central government far beyond what the Constitution called for. That’s why one of the chapters of “Hamilton’s Curse” is entitled “Hamilton’s Disciple: How John Marshall Subverted the Constitution.” 

ILANA: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Ron Paul—all strict constructionists. Sadly, the Constitution was not written with crooks in mind. Hamilton, Lincoln, Obama, McCain (who dealt a critical blow to the First Amendment)—all are proponents of the “living Constitution.” Tell us what this means to our constitutional liberties today.

TOM DILORENZO: Well, whenever you hear the phrase “living Constitution,” just substitute the word “no” for “living,” and you’ll understand what it means. Having no constitutional constraints on government, and no ability to ignore, nullify, or secede from federal tyranny, means that every working person’s income and savings is fair game for our politicians to dole out to virtually any person or group anywhere in the world that has the potential to provide political support for the politicians and to enhance their careers.