“If you want to see a place where Christmas is as non-existent as you can get, come to prison,” Steve wrote to me from California’s Avenal State Prison.

“There are no lights, no trees, no gifts, no nativity scenes, no family gatherings, and no signs that say ‘Merry Christmas.’”

How Steven came to spend Christmas at Avenal, alas, tells us all we need to know about the skewed sense of justice in progressive America.

In brief, as an 18-year old sailor in March 1996, Steven got drunk on shore leave in San Francisco and ended up at a co-ed dance club for the under-25 set.

There, a sexual predator with several priors offered him a ride back to the ship across the Bay Bridge, tricked him into coming to his apartment, likely drugged Steven, tried to rape him, refused Steven’s pleas to stop, and died in the fight that followed.

When I first learned about the case, I thought that if Steven were my son there is no way he would ever have been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, even in San Francisco, even if the predator proved to be gay and a leading Hispanic activist.

In recent months, as I have come to understand Steven’s family history, I have seen how this tragedy unfolded, and it only reinforces my initial assessment of the trial.

Shame on San Francisco.

When Steven was born in Biloxi, Mississippi, his mom had just turned sixteen. In that time and place, men did the honorable thing: they married the mother of their child.

My sense is that Steven’s working class father did so grudgingly. He would always keep his son at arm’s length. Steven ran away from home at least once, and his father turned his back on him after Steven’s arrest.

The father did not tell his brothers about Steven’s predicament until after he was convicted. The brothers to this day fail to understand why the father behaved as he did. Had they known, they would have done everything they could have to help.

The Navy turned its back on Steven as well. This was 1996, an election year. Bill Clinton was in the White House. The “victim,” Juan Pifarre, was gay, ethnic, and politically wired. The city of San Francisco would name a building after him.

The “killer,” on the other hand, was white, poor, powerless, and alone. He made for an easy and nicely symbolic notch on a progressive prosecutor’s belt.

The judge set bail at $1 million. The figure shocked Steven’s public defender because, as the San Francisco Chronicle would report, “The suspect called police voluntarily and asked to be picked up.”

Besides, Steven had “defensive wounds,” and the bail for first time defendants in a passion crime almost never exceeded $250,000.

“I felt my life was over, nonexistent,” Steven told me. “I was an 18-year-old kid who was scared, alone, and hopeless. I had no contact with my parents or anyone else. The military at the time just abandoned me.”

Steven’s mom has recently tried to enlighten me as to what happened in those days before the trial. I use her own language not to embarrass her, but to suggest the unevenness of the conflict.

“I was told by the Navy and all these Lawyer that the worest could happen was involtary manslaughter,” she writes. When Steven’s attorney moved for a plea bargain, Steven dismissed him. He could not understand what he was guilty of.

His mom sensed the danger at hand. “We were told by many people that he would not get a fair trail and that they were going to send a message to the President and the Navy,” she adds.

“We asked for the trail to be moved but no they would not do this they had to make a statement.”

That they did. The prosecutors timed this appalling show trial for March 1999, just a week before the start of Russell Henderson’s trial in Laramie for the notorious murder of gay college student, Matthew Shepard.

Steven never stood a chance. On one occasion, members of the audience stood up and faced the jury wearing large bright orange lapel tags saying “Recuerda [Remember] Juan,” “Stop Homophobia,” and “Stop Immigrant Bashing.”

“Where is that rage coming from?” the prosecutor asked the jury of Steven’s desperate struggle to stop from being raped.

The prosecutor then arbitrarily wrote the word “faggot” on a black board and insinuated that it was not the attempted rape but the military’s presumed anti-gay ethos that had stoked Steven’s rage.

Ill-educated and inarticulate, Steven was nonetheless made to stand as proxy for a presumably homophobic military establishment that had long since thrown him to the wolves.

“Ill-educated and inarticulate, Steven was nonetheless made to stand as proxy for a presumably homophobic military establishment that had long since thrown him to the wolves.”

“The day the verdit came in was a Mothers nighmare,” writes his mom. “I can’t say it is as bad as losing a son but not ever being able to see him again just was the end of all my hopes.”

After thirteen years in prison, Steven came up for parole this past June. In his favor, he had some two-dozen letters of support, offers of jobs and places to live. His psychiatric report was among the best anyone had seen.

He had all but completed his AA degree, had gotten five certificates from Microsoft, had “laudatory” marks in program after program, and had taught himself to write better than the average college senior.

“He’s a model inmate,” said the appointed attorney. “He has proved that the rehabilitation system really does work.”

“I don’t know when you had time to sleep,” said the deputy commissioner to Steven. “You’ve done an awful lot. I want to just acknowledge that.”

That much said, at the urging of San Francisco’s prosecutor, the parole board nixed his release for at least five more years: “The panel feels that you haven’t fully explored the totality and magnitude of this commitment offense.”

Shame on San Francisco.

Still, Steven remains undaunted, even at Christmas. “There may be no trees or decorations,” he wrote recently, “but there is paper and glue that can be turned into anything. This year I made a three foot Christmas tree with lights, bulbs, candy canes, and a star.”

He concluded, “I am grateful for all the wonderful people who have come, gone, and stayed in my life, and all have saved me with small and big gestures. To all Thank you and Merry Christmas!!”

Steven Nary can be reached at:

Steven Nary
P-61614
A.S.P. , 210-1-76 Low
P.O. Box 9
Avenal, CA 93204

© Jack Cashill
WND.com – January 7, 2010

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In researching my own book, What’s The Matter With California, I had no intent in waging any such argument. In the California spirit, I shied from judgments like “good” or “evil” or even “just plain stupid.”

Instead, I looked at outcomes from a material perspective, namely how does a given phenomenon affect the economy and the ecology of the state and the well being of its citizens.

In doing so, however, I stumbled upon one very powerful rationale for Christianity and, in the stumbling, I stumbled upon one more powerful rationale still.

The stumbling began when I visited Michael and Deborah Grumbine and their family of nine children, now aged 11 to 31, in the Los Angeles suburb of Whittier. I wanted to see how a large family could live on a median income in an area where such an income can buy only 2 percent of the homes on the market.

In Kansas City, by contrast, a family of median income can buy 87 percent of the homes on the market.

What I saw was that a family, bound together by a deeply held belief in God, could live on almost anything, anywhere, even in Los Angeles.

Michael himself grew up in Whittier in a deeply Christian family of twelve children, eleven of whom survived to adulthood. I asked him if he would survey his siblings to see how their 47 children had fared, and he graciously obliged.

As I report in the book, 43 of the 47 have lived their lives with a father in home. Only two of the 47 receive any kind of public assistance. Of the 35 old enough to have graduated from high school, 35 have graduated. None has been to prison. And the many Grumbine cousins have all had to work their way through school and college doing the jobs Americans allegedly won’t do.

I concluded that material poverty does not seem to cause crime. Michael Grumbine grew up in the same metro at the same time as Stanley “Tookie” Williams, whose story I also tell. Tookie was the one with his own bedroom and eventually his own cell on San Quentin’s death row. Michael was the one with his own father.

Obviously, however, there is more to a God-centered life well lived than a civil, self-supporting society. This I saw clearly in reading Michael’s response to the chapter I wrote on the Grumbine family. It speaks for itself:

Dear Jack,

You gave a great deal of joy, comfort and pride to a little bed-ridden lady, covered with sores, and racked with pain from several serious diseases.   My dear mother, who will not likely be with us much longer, and who has all too few joys left in life, was smiling from ear-to-ear as I read to her the Whittier chapter from your book.  She could not stop say “My, oh my” during and after the reading.

And I must also tell you about the difficult moment you presented her with, when I reached the parts where you say:  “If all the materially impoverished children in California had grown up with the support of faith and family that the Grumbine cousins did, California could virtually eliminate serious crime. . . . When all is said and done, the state’s future depends on the Grumbines.”

At that point, I looked over at my mom as she lay stretched out in her bed, her life and purpose now nearly complete.  I watched as her frail and well-worn lips trembled with emotion.

Here was a woman who had lived all of her life in her home as the very antithesis of the militant feminist ideal.  She had never left her children for strangers, and was truly valiant in her self-sacrifice and dedication to her husband and family.  But according to feminist logic, she had wasted away her life on the humdrum and the unfulfilling.

It was truly, truly wonderful, then, to see this humble and dedicated heroine get some public appreciation and honor for the great work she has actually done, before she passes on.

I watched her eyes sparkle with nearly uncontrolled pride and delight, to see her singular life’s work acknowledged to the entire country — she truly had made a difference.  It left me with tears in my eyes.

But I could not help but chuckle inwardly at the dilemma you had given her.  For mother is also one of the most completely humble people you could ever know.  And as is typical of such self-effacing saints, they are uncomfortable in moments of high praise.

But soon the “crisis” passed, and once more she graciously rose to the occasion and resumed her graceful demeanor.  She did what she always did – provide me with a lesson in virtue.  For despite her debilitated condition, she has never stopped teaching her family about grace, and the ways of Christian virtue.

For those who wonder why God allows “old people” to painfully linger in this world, I wish they could meet my mother.  For that matter, I wish you had the room in your book to list all of the heroic mothers who have dedicated their lives to their family, and through their selfless efforts and example, allowed culture, civilization, and yes, goodness itself to exist, in a fallen world.

But as Dad used to say, “Life isn’t fair.”

Perhaps not this life, but I dare say that when the final reckoning comes, and all of humanity stands before their Creator with His Son at His right hand reading from the Book of Life, we will finally be able to witness and rejoice aloud in the glory of those unsung heroes.  Indeed, I can’t wait to sing!

Blessings,

Michael Grumbine

Dinesh D’Souza could not have said it any better.

© Jack Cashill
WND.com – November 1, 2007

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Ayers called Obama’s decision to send additional troops to Afghanistan a “catastrophe” for Afghanistan and for the United States and a natural result of our “insane policy in the Middle East.”

This was not a feint by Ayers to make Obama look more attractive to the center. He has been on Obama’s case from the beginning.

Although coy with Churkina about the nature of his relationship with Obama, Ayers was likely telling the truth when he told her, “I wish I were a close friend, and I wish he would call me for advice, but of course it is not going to happen.”

Ayers had begun signaling his displeasure in late February 2009, less than five weeks into the Obama era, when he blasted Obama’s decision to send additional troops to Afghanistan as a “colossal mistake.”

This fall, while Obama dithered on the question of whether to honor the military’s request for additional troops, Ayers, I believe, used the leverage he does have with Obama to dissuade him from pursuing the war in Afghanistan.

After celebrity biographer Christopher Andersen—in his book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage–confirmed my theory that Ayers was the principal author of Obama’s acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, Ayers admitted his authorship on two separate occasions.

I suspected then, and still do, that this these unprompted admissions, however ironic their delivery, were designed to remind Obama of the power that Ayers held over him.

The truth about Dream’s authorship is Ayers’ nuclear option. He watched the media ignore Andersen’s bombshell as universally as they had my own literary detective work.

Ayers knows that now only he can deliver the truth about Dreams’ authorship, a revelation that would critically undermine Obama’s claims to genius, to honesty, and to independence of thought.

Obama, I suspect, gambled that Ayers would not go nuclear.

Accordingly, after months of indecision, Obama approved the troop surge in Afghanistan.

Immediately after the surge was announced, Ayers took to the streets of Chicago to protest. He told an interviewer that he was “appalled and alarmed that once against we are escalating the war.”

Ayers was not kidding. It is becoming increasingly evident that Ayers’ protest was not part of some strategy to burnish Obama’s moderate credentials.

As Ayers described the process to Churkina, Obama had yielded to the generals and to weight of the foreign policy establishment.

Ayers has little use for this establishment. “The idea that we have been a force for good for the last six decades,” he insisted, “is utter nonsense.”

Obama’s capitulation disappointed Ayers but did not surprise him. He claimed that Obama has always positioned himself as “a moderate, pragmatic, compromising politician.”

“People on the left think he is secretly winking at them,” Ayers continued, but he believes that leftists deceive themselves into so thinking.

For all of Ayers’ radicalism, one cannot deny him his consistency over time. He loathes the “warrior nation” that is America as purely as he did forty years ago.

Obama, however, has been consistent about little. The evidence suggests that Ayers initially supported Obama because he thought him a likely mayor of Chicago, a position in which “compromising” is a threshold job requirement.

As Chicago mayor, Obama could have been very helpful to Ayers. As a leftist president of color willing to compromise on the big issues, Obama is pure problem.

Although Ayers had less of a role in Obama’s 2006 book, Audacity of Hope than he did in Dreams, the former book’s epilogue seems to be his handiwork and points to the trouble to come.

In it, “Obama” tells of a conversation he had at a pivotal moment in his life with “an older man who had been active in the civil rights efforts in Chicago in the sixties”

When Obama tells the man of his career plans, the man responds, “Both law and politics required compromise,” something that he himself had refused to do.

The man sounds very much like Ayers, who has long been battling what he calls in his memoir, Fugitive Days, “the culture of compromise.”

In Audacity, Obama concedes that he was “perhaps more tolerant of compromise” than this older friend was.  Ayers always knew this about Obama.

He may have underestimated, however, just how tolerant of compromise Obama was.

Who is Jack Cashill?

©Jack Cashill
WorldNetDaily.com – December 17, 2009

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I will be filling in for Kris Kobach. Listen live via internet

* Sunday evening, December 13, 6-8 PM (Central).

Also for Chris Stigall 5-9 AM (Central). Listen live via internet

* Wednesday the 23rd

* Thursday the 24th

* Monday the 28th through Thursday the 31st

Call line is (816) 576-7710. Hope to hear from you.

Jack

Dr. Richard Sternberg knows all about the kind of abuse global warming skeptics have endured at the hands of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the brewing “Climategate” scandal.

Five years ago, Sternberg challenged the most vulnerable of the science establishment’s paradigms, namely Darwinism and its derivatives, and learned first hand the lengths that establishment will go to suppress dissent. For any number of uneventful years, the evolutionary biologist Sternberg was a member in good standing of that very establishment.

Employed by the National Institutes of Health in association with the Smithsonian Institution, he served as the managing editor of the Smithsonian-affiliated journal, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington .

In 2004, Sternberg chose to publish a tightly argued paper by the Discovery Institute’s Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, titled The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories. In brief, Meyer contended that neo-Darwinism has failed to provide a convincing explanation for the relatively sudden and massive infusion of new genetic information into the fossil record popularly known as the Cambrian Explosion.

Shortly before receiving Meyer’s paper, Sternberg had attended an in-service training module on the ethics of peer review. What Sternberg took away from the training is that the “peers” selected to review a given paper be neither prejudiced against the topic or partial to it for reasons of self-interest. Sternberg identified three such scientists to review Meyer’s paper. They offered some useful revisions, and the paper was published in August 2004. In publishing Meyer’s paper, Sternberg had merely hoped to provoke a good discussion. He was “absolutely not expecting” the hell that rained down upon him with the paper’s publication.

The road to hell was paved with email. But even by Climategate standards, the email campaign to punish Sternberg was a cruel and catty one. One zoologist colleague, for instance, asked their common department head, Dr. Jonathan Coddington, why the heretical Sternberg should be allowed to keep an office, especially one with “a name on it.” Prejudiced to the point of paranoia, the zoologist demanded that his own office “be re-keyed.” Coddington handled the affair with all the courage and conviction of a Pontius Pilate. “At present I am not tossing him out,” he told his colleagues of Sternberg. “Do you want anything done?”

Coddington’s own plan was to meet with Sternberg and “hint that if he had any class he would either entirely desist or resign his Appointment.” When Sternberg failed to take the hint, Coddington and colleagues settled on a bold plan of petty revenge, death by a thousand academic cuts. For Sternberg to keep his research associate position, he would have to detail every move he made short of bathroom breaks. When Sternberg asked if the other research associates were being subjected to the same treatment, Coddington replied, “This is not about the other RAs. This is only about you.” Coddington continued, “you are being treated differently, but you know perfectly well why you’re being treated differently.”

One obvious reason for Sternberg’s special treatment was what a subsequent House Committee Report described as “a general anti-religious culture existing at the Museum.” Once the Meyer article was published, Coddington and others began to probe into Sternberg’s background, asking around to see if he were a closeted “religious fundamentalist” or, God forbid, a “Republican.”

In an email of solidarity sent to Coddington, Research Associate Sue Richardson openly complained about her own unhappy tenure in the “Bible Belt.” Wrote Richardson, “The most fun we had by far was when my son refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance because of the ‘under dog’ part.” The House Report asked rhetorically, “Would similar expressions of disparagement have been tolerated by Smithsonian officials if directed at a racial minority?” That answer is obvious. A more pointed question would be whether Smithsonian officials would have tolerated comparable comments about Muslims or even Jews. That answer is obvious too.

These same officials colluded with the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a pro-evolution advocacy organization, to discredit the beleaguered editor. “I will keep an eye on Dr. (von) Sternberg,” wrote the Smithsonian’s Dr. Hans Sues to the NCSE’s Eugenie Scott in a not so subtle ethnic slur. The extent of the anti-Sternberg collusion–“ on government time and with government resources”– the House Committee described as “alarming.” Nor did Sternberg’s colleagues limit their pique to those who needed to know. Indeed, they sent word of his heresy to scientists around the world.

Wrote one Dutch scientist back to a Smithsonian colleague: “These people are coming out and invading our schools, biology classes, museums, and now our professional journals. These people to my mind are only a scale up on the fundies of a more destructive kind in other parts of the world.” Ah yes, “these people.” Some of them publish papers on intelligent design. Others fly planes into the World Trade Center. The Smithsonian’s continuous refusal to take action in the Sternberg case prompted the House Committee to recommend Congressional action to “protect the free speech rights regarding evolution” among those scientists working at federally-funded institutions.

Now, if Congress would only do the same for honest climate scientists.

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I had the occasion this past week to meet with former Attorney General, John Ashcroft. I asked him how he felt when Democratic express outrage about accusations of fascism against the Obama administration.

Ashcroft smiled. He knows a little something about such accusations. Five years ago I wrote about the subject on these pages, and I thought it worth a revisit.

Back then, one progressive friend after another alerted me to a rather scary development: U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft had become a Nazi—“another Hitler” as one fretfully described our former Missouri governor and senator.

This all came as news to me. I had met Ashcroft a few times, and he had exhibited no signs of latent Nazism: no heel-clicking or arm-thrusting, no anti-Semitic slurs or “sieg heils,” no quiet yearnings for the Fatherland.

I wondered too how a man of such presumed extremes could manage to win five statewide races in America’s most politically indicative state.

Still, I could not just dismiss those alarums. At least, three of my friendly Cassandras were prominent Missourians. Perhaps they knew something I did not.

To test their suspicions, I did a quick online search and got a jolt of confirmation. Some 18.400 web postings linked “Ashcroft” and “Nazi,” at least 2/3 of which accused Ashcroft of being a Nazi.

One site served as an unofficial Ashcroft songbook. It posted the lyrics of more than 70 songs, all of which alerted the innocent to the suspected reign of terror at Justice.

Indeed, it must have taken an act of deep courage to pen a song like The Obnoxious Right Wing Nazi Pig Dog From Missouri (sung to tune of Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy) knowing that the aforementioned “pig dog” was creating “Dachaus” for his political opponents.

I could not write off these suspicions as mere Internet blather. On one even more damning site, America’s erstwhile “most trusted man,” the late Walter Cronkite, denounced Ashcroft as the “ Torquemada of American law.”

Torquemada was the proto-fascist responsible, according to Cronkite, for the unholy methods of the Spanish Inquisition, “including torture and the burning of heretics – Muslims in particular.”

Egads! No wonder my friends were upset.

As I learned in my investigation, progressives do not upset easily. During World War I, the Espionage and Sedition Acts allowed Woodrow Wilson’s progressive administration to prosecute those reckless enough to voice anti-war sentiments.

Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs spent 10 years in prison as a result. He was one of 2,000 so prosecuted. During World War II, the always progressive FDR interned–by executive order–120,000 ethnic Japanese with the full-throated support of the Supreme Court.

The Clinton years witnessed a renewal of the left’s selective affection for civil rights. When, for instance, Ashcroft’s predecessor as Attorney General, Janet Reno, launched a tank assault on a religious community outside of Waco, killing 80 people, more than half of them minorities, 20 of them children, my friends kept silent.

Ditto when Reno sent her troopers to liberate Elian at gunpoint from his Miami family and send him back to Cuba where, unlike America, no little boy goes without health coverage.

In the age of Obama, our progressive friends uphold that finely tuned tradition of situational libertarianism more than ever.

There is not a government intrusion or overreach, not a single suppression of thought or liberty, that they can bring themselves to protest.

Close to home, my progressive friends prudently held their tongues when In early October 2008, KMOV News 4 in St. Louis ran a feature on Missouri’s “Barack Obama Truth Squads.”

These squads, the viewer was told, were composed of Democratic prosecutors and sheriffs from throughout the state that support Barack Obama.

“They will be reminding voters,” said News 4 reporter John Mills mindlessly, “that Barack Obama is a Christian who wants to cut taxes for anyone making less than $250,000 a year.”

They also say,” Mills continued, “they plan to respond immediately to any ads and statements that violate Missouri ethics laws.”

A week later, a YouTube video caught the shocked attention of just about every one in America without an Obama bumper sticker.

The video showed a group of boys at a Kansas City public school marching in military attire, chanting “Yes we can” in praise of Obama. My progressive friends held their tongues once more.

The fact is that liberty or the lack of it is not what outraged the left about John Ashcroft or any other conservative.

In inquiring more deeply, I learned that his opponents had begun to label Ashcroft a “Nazi” even before September 11th.

The one scribe who had warned of another “ Dachau” wrote tellingly, “We tried to stop this religious fanatic fundamentalist from ever getting the job.”

Walter Cronkite was only slightly more circumspect. “ What makes this administration’s legal bloodthirstiness particularly alarming,” he writes in his denunciation of Ashcroft, “is the almost religious zeal that seems to drive it.”

Even the composer of The Obnoxious Right Wing Nazi Pig Dog From Missouri penned his immortal lyrics before 9-11 due largely to Ashcroft’s unapologetic Christianity and the lyricist’s phobia about the same.

The celebrated logician Jesse Jackson helped me understand the progressive angst about a traditional Christian like Ashcroft.

”In South Africa, we call it apartheid,” warned Jackson. “In Nazi Germany, we’d call it fascism. Here in the United States, we call it conservatism.”

As I learned, Jackson was not the first person to yoke these two wildly dissimilar ideologies. As was often the case, the Soviets showed the way.

When Nazi Germany turned on its Soviet ally in May 1941, American communists and fellow travelers shifted in a heartbeat from being anti-war to pro-war.

From their perspective, those conservatives who continued to resist America’s entry into World War II (before Pearl Harbor) now had, of course, to be fascists.

Through their influence in the media, the left made the so-called “brown smear” stick on a whole lot of innocent people. It worked so well they continued to use it. John Ashcroft was merely its latest victim.

Ashcroft was called a fascist by the left for limiting the freedoms of our enemies.
The Obama administration is earning the title by limiting the freedoms of ourselves.

© Jack Cashill

WorldNetDaily.com
November 26, 2009

Image wallyg via Flickr

At that same time, in America’s other new outlier state, Hawaii, two year-old Barry Obama was just getting used to a fatherless existence in the otherwise comfortable world his white grandparents and occasionally his mother would make for him.

At the time, not even Nostradamus could have foretold that the paths of Barry and Sarah would intersect in the “historic” 2008 election, Barry as the first major party presidential nominee of African descent and Sarah as the first woman with a real shot at the vice-presidency.

Each would change names before reaching the national stage. Barry Obama would become Barry Soetero would become Barack Obama. Sarah Heath would become Sarah Palin after eloping with the formidable Todd Palin. Obama would chronicle his journey in the 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father and in the 2006 sequel, The Audacity of Hope. Palin would chronicle hers in the 2009 memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life.

How the literary/ media establishment would respond to the respective memoirs of these two political figures would reveal far less about the authenticity, honesty, and literary quality of the tales the authors tell than it would about the collective mindset of that establishment.

From a classical perspective, Palin’s is the more compelling narrative. The obstacles that she must overcome to fulfill her destiny are many, varied, and real. Raised in the frozen outback by a schoolteacher father and a school secretary mom, Palin accomplishes nothing without a good deal of work, often under difficult physical circumstances.

Palin takes a semester or two off to pay for college. She works at a diner over the summer. She enters the Miss Alaska contest to help pay tuition and is awarded second runner-up and “Miss Congeniality.” She interns during other summers to become a sports reporter.

After college, Palin joins fiancé Todd on his Bristol Bay salmon boat. During slow salmon runs, she works “messy, obscure seafood jobs” until she can find a job as sports reporter, and even them she keeps returning to Bristol Bay when the salmon are in season.

Throughout this period, despite the hard work and harsh environment, Palin never loses her sense of wonder about the spectacular natural theater in which she is so very much at home. When asked about the state’s best attributes during a Miss Alaska pageant, Palin responds, “its beauty and everything that the great Alaska outdoors has to offer.” Prophetically, she also plugs the states “potential in drilling for oil,” which, even then, “Outsiders don’t understand.”

Back in Hawaii, either through his grandparents’ connection or by dint of affirmative action, Obama spends grades five through twelve at Hawaii’s poshest prep school. Like Palin, he too plays basketball, but while she is leading her school to the state championship, he is a second stringer on a team whose wins and losses go unremarked. The only scores Obama shares are the imagined racial ones that need to be settled, a working out of his “pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s race.”

In his recent book, Barack and Michelle, Chistopher Andersen quotes a black friend who rejected Obama’s claimed reason for being benched in a particular game.

“No, Barry, it’s not because you’re black. It’s because you missed two shots in a row.”

Obama admits to “marginal report cards” in prep school, but his underperformance does not diminish his dreams. He hits the mainland in the late 1970s with the “diversity” movement in full flower. Diversity’s rationale is that people of varied cultures enrich the educational experience. Obama’s upbringing, however, has been thoroughly white and elitist. The diversity bean-counters could care less. His skin color improves their “metrics.” Obama will ride this pony far.

After two druggy, uninspired years at Occidental College, Obama transfers to the Ivy League, Columbia to be precise. In Dreams, Obama dedicates one half of a sentence to a summer job on a construction site. Otherwise, he is silent on work and how his tuition might have been paid for. As to his grades and SAT scores, it would be easier to pry North Korea’s nuclear secrets out of Kim Jong-il.

After several years as a low-paid community organizer in Chicago, Obama decides to return to law school. Despite a lack of resources and a mediocre performance at Columbia—he does not graduate with honors—Obama limits his choices to “Harvard, Yale, Stanford.” He had absorbed the diversity zeitgeist deeply enough to see success as an entitlement.

In the spring of 1989, during Obama’s first year at Harvard Law, Palin’s “life truly began” with the birth of her oldest son Track. That summer, with Todd working a blue-collar job on the North Slope oil fields, Palin, her father, and their Eskimo partner work Todd’s commercial fishing boat in Bristol Bay. Palin’s mother meanwhile baby-sits the ten-week old Track.

In 1992, while an anxious Obama dithers in an office that the University of Chicago had given him to write Dreams, half of his $150,000 advance already cashed, Palin is pulling her babies, Track and Bristol, along on a sled as she goes door-to-door seeking votes in her run for Wassila city council.

Not yet thirty, Palin settles upon the philosophy that would guide her political career, reducing taxes “and redefining government’s proper role.” Like few Republicans this side of Ronald Reagan, Palin will adhere to these principles throughout her political ascent.

Not surprisingly, Palin’s tenacity makes her enemies among those who had cashed in their Republican heritage for the perks and power of office. Her perseverance in the face of this resistance makes for compelling political drama. That she is a woman challenging the good old boys of backroom Alaska heightens that drama.

Yet despite pushing the boundaries of female accomplishment throughout her career—as sports reporter, as commercial fisherman, as councilwoman, as mayor, as oil and gas commissioner, as governor, as vice-presidential candidate—Palin never loses her sense of the feminine. Having five children surely helps. So does living in an environment where manly virtues still matters.

An exchange with the larger-than-life Todd helps clarify Alaskan reality. Todd is a four-time winner of the Iron Dog competition, a 2,200 mile snowmobiling marathon. One night, Sarah expresses interest in competing. Says Todd:

Can you get the back end of a six-hundred-pound machine unstuck by yourself with open water up to your thighs, then change out an engine at forty below in the pitch black on a frozen river and replace thrashed shocks and jury rig a suspension using tree limbs along the trail?

When Sarah answers “Nope,” Todd replies, “Then go back to sleep, Sarah.” Todd lives his Eskimo heritage. He does not just dream about it, let alone exploit it.

While Palin is slugging through Alaska’s political morass like a determined Iditarod musher, Obama is cruising through Illinois politics on skids greased by his Chicago cronies. In his 2004 run for U.S. Senate, both his chief primary opponent and his expected general election opponent are undone by damaging personal information leaked to the media. Obama wins both elections easily.

The combination of his black genes and white upbringing makes the famously “articulate and bright and clean” Obama an irresistible choice to keynote the race conscious 2004 Democratic convention. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man,” adds the inimitable Joe Biden.

The story told in Dreams would become a huge bestseller in the wake of the 2004 convention. The lofty, lyrical style of the book would seal the Ivy-educated Obama’s reputation as a genius, and its much celebrated “narrative” would serve as foundational myth for Obama’s ascent to the White House.

Said NEA chairman Rocco Landesman just last month, reiterating the accepted wisdom of the chattering classes, “This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln.”

The establishment would not be so kind to Palin. In the week of Going Rogue’s release, the New York Times house conservative David Brooks would call her “a joke.” Dick Cavett, the Norma Desmond of TV talk, would dismiss her as a “know-nothing.” Ex-con Dem fundraiser Martha Stewart would brand Palin “a dangerous person.” And literally thousands of lesser liberal lights would deride her as “stupid,” an “idiot,” or a “moron” (8.5 million Google hits for “Palin” “moron.”)

In that same week, Chris Matthews was worrying out loud that Obama was “too darned intellectual” and author Michael Eric Dyson was celebrating Obama’s “sexy brilliance.” But while the Associated Press was sending a platoon of reporters to fact check Palin’s book, neither the AP nor any other media outlet dared check either Dreams or Audacity of Hope.

They likely feared what they would find, namely that Obama’s genius depends solely on his willingness to lie about it. “I’ve written two books,” Obama told a crowd of teachers in Virginia last year. “I actually wrote them myself.” He did no such thing. He had massive help with both books.

Although the prose of Dreams is often lyrical, it is not Obama’s prose. As I have argued in these pages and Christopher Andersen has confirmed, Obama’s gifted friend Bill Ayers gussied up the rough outlines of Obama’s life and imposed upon it the mythic dimensions of Homer’s Odyssey. To accomplish this, the authors invented any number of incidents, many of which are easily disproved. For a serious seeker of facts, Dreams is Sutter Creek in 1848.

In Going Rogue, by contrast, Palin does not shy from crediting Lynn Vincent for “her indispensable help in getting the words on paper.” And yet the story is told honestly and sincerely in Palin’s voice. There is no artifice, no postmodern mumbo jimbo, and not a sentence in the book Palin could not have written herself. My personal favorite, “I love meat.” I suspect that, unaided, journalism major and former reporter Palin is the better writer than Obama.

Left to their own devices, Palin is clearly the better speaker. In the book’s climactic moment, the unknown Palin serves up the most dazzling convention speech in modern political history, and she does so before a malfunctioning teleprompter. “I knew the speech well enough that I didn’t need it,” writes Palin.

Had Obama’s teleprompter malfunctioned at the 2004 convention, he would not be president. He has always depended on the eloquence of others. So thoroughly hooked on the teleprompter is Obama that the irrepressible Biden jokes about it. “What am I going to tell the president?” Biden asked the crowd at the Air Force Academy after a teleprompter blew over. “Tell him his teleprompter is broken? What will he do then?”

In the final analysis, Going Rogue is the better book than Dreams. No Republican has ever held Palin up as a genius, literary or otherwise, but her narrative is as shrewd, sensitive, and straightforward as its author.

Dreams, on the other hand, is merely a well-crafted fraud.

©Jack Cashill
AmericanThinker.com – November 27, 2009

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To be sure, no one has ever accused Sarah Palin, a defeated vice presidential candidate, of creating her reputation thusly. One has to wonder, then, why her book, Going Rogue, would merit a fact check by no fewer than eleven Associated Press reporters when neither the AP nor any other mainstream outlet has spent a moment vetting the books of the “author in chief,” as President Barack Obama was anointed in a November GQ article, “Barack Obama’s Work in Progress,” by Tom Draper.

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/politics/200911/barack-obama-writing-books-writer-robert-draper?printable=true

http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2009/11/the-road-to-bali.html

In an observant piece, the Road to Bali, blogger Tom Maguire addresses the implicit media balance. He does so by calling attention to just one relevant question that the media might have profitably asked our president: did you take new bride Michelle to Bali with you in 1993?

In the course of asking that question, not terribly significant in and of itself, Maguire sheds light on a more substantive question: why have the media paid so little attention to how Barack Obama came to write the book that would make his reputation, his acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.

As source, Maguire turns to Draper, who has spent time with Michelle and Barack and written the most detailed account to date of the genesis of Dreams. Blinded by Obama’s light, however, Draper fails to see the gaping holes in how own story line.

As Draper tells the story, a February 1990 New York Times article telling how Harvard has elected Obama president of the Harvard Law Review attracted the attention of a young agent named Jane Dystel. Draper implies that Obama’s “irresistible” writing skills netted him the position, which is not at all true.

In fact, the election was a popularity contest held in racially charged environment. The culturally ambiguous Obama won on his race-healing talents, not on his literary ones. He would contribute only one leaden, unsigned case note to the HLR and has not written another legal article since.

According to Draper, on November 28, 1990, Poseidon Press, a Simon & Schuster imprint, issued “a six-figure contract” to Obama for a book tentatively titled Journeys in Black and White. In his recent book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of An American Marriage, Christopher Andersen specifies the amount at $150,000.

In the hope of recruiting Obama, the University of Chicago Law School offered him an office in the law school to use for finishing the book, and there he spent 1991 and 1992. Nearly two years passed, and Obama could not produce. “I just can’t get it down on paper,” Draper quotes an Obama confession to confidante Valerie Jarrett in 1992. “I’d much rather hang out with Michelle than focus on this.”

Although Draper would never say so, this represented a failure of character as much it did a failure of talent. Obama had pocketed $75,000 of that advance and promised in return a manuscript by June 15, 1992. He had more than eighteen months to complete a memoir, the easiest of all genres. It required minimal research, no footnotes, and a narrative that needed not be factual as long as it was plausible.

As a point of comparison, I was offered a contract in April 2005 to write a memoir with a deadline of September 1, 2005. In other words, I had four months to do what Obama could not do in eighteen. To complicate matters mine was to be a story of growing up in the age of Muhammad Ali. So, in addition to writing, I read roughly 30-40 books on boxing and related subjects during that period and watched scores of fight films and documentaries.

I set as a goal a thousand words a day, and I made the September 1 deadline. It would have helped a lot if I had ever learned to type, but to me missing the deadline was unthinkable if for no other reason that I, like Obama, had signed a contract and accepted an advance. Although Sucker Punch was my fourth published book, I can assure you that my advance was considerably less than that of the untested Obama.

In any case, the June 15, 1992 deadline came and went without a manuscript from Obama. As Draper blithely notes, Obama had other things on his mind, namely his impending October 3rd marriage to Michelle. On October 20, 1992, according to Draper, Poseidon terminated Obama’s contract.

Andersen adds a detail that mythmaker Draper chooses to omit. Obama feared that Simon & Schuster would demand the $75,000 already advanced. Writes Andersen, “But when Barack informed them that he had spent the money—and that he and his wife were still chipping away at their massive student loan debt—the publisher agreed not to press the issue.” In other words, Obama asked for and received an undeserved bailout. A pattern was developing here.

The tenacious agent Jane Dystel managed to find another publisher, Times Books, and secured a smaller advance, $40,000.Draper tells us that Obama used the advance “to fulfill his outstanding financial obligation to Poseidon.” Andersen’s take sounds more credible.

“Now he’s got to produce,” writes Draper. “But how?” Although the sanctuary at the University of Chicago and a previous retreat to a friend’s Wisconsin farm had done no good, Obama hit upon the idea of going to Bali to unblock. (For Sucker Punch, I went to my cabin on Lake Erie).

As blogger Maguire notes, the pre-election myth, advanced by the New York Times and others, is that Michelle accompanied him. Wrote the Times on May 18, 2008, Obama “eventually retreated to Bali for several months with his wife, Michelle.”

A more recent and less romantic version, advanced by Draper and by the Times as well, is that Obama went by himself. “For a month,” writes Draper, “he is a lone figure pacing on the white sand and hammering on his laptop. . . . “

Andersen describes the Obamas as “drowning in debt” during this period. How either Barack or Michelle could have afforded to go to Bali during this period, for one month or three, remains something of a mystery. Mysterious too is how the media could leave unresolved such glaring contradictions in the biography of the world’s most famous man.

Maguire highlights still another hole in the Draper narrative. Incredibly, in a 5,000-word article on Obama’s development as a writer, Draper says nothing about what happened between early 1993 when Obama returned from Bali to June 1995 when Dreams was published. Draper leaves the impression that the month-long Bali high was just what Obama needed to fire his synapses.

Andersen is much more credible here. As he tells it, Bali proved no more helpful than any other retreat. At the urging of Michelle, the “hopelessly blocked” Obama finally turned to “friend and Hyde Park neighbor” Bill Ayers to help him.

Andersen’s details are specific. The Obamas were convinced of “Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer.” Barack particularly liked the novelistic style of To Teach, a 1993 book by Ayers. The key sentence in Andersen’s account is the one that follows: “[The Obama family] oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers.”

Adds Andersen, “Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Book.” Based on my own research, I would argue that Ayers actually wrote the book’s best sections. Obama’s published efforts before Dreams show not a wisp of the skill on display in Dreams. Not surprisingly, Draper overlooks those early efforts.

With his man crush trumping his critical insights, Draper chooses not to relate the fate of plucky agent Dystel. That story was hard to miss. The proudly liberal but seriously disgusted publisher Peter Osnos went public three years ago. According to Osnos, Obama dumped his devoted long time agent after Dreams took off and then signed a seven-figure deal with Crown, using only a by-the-hour attorney.

Obama pulled off the deal after his 2004 election to the U.S. Senate but before being sworn in as Senator, this way to avoid the disclosure and reporting requirements applicable to members of Congress. Osnos publicly scolded Obama for his “ruthlessness” and “his questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday.”

But that was in 2006, when Obama was mere mortal. Today, Obama is a literary god, however false, and challenging the gods is apparently above the AP’s pay grade.

©Jack Cashill
AmericanThinker.com – November 18, 2009

Editor’s note: For a more complete account of this phenomenon, read Jack Cashill’s amazing new book, “Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture.

Landesman was not alone in his praise. This month’s GQ has a faux-exhaustive article on “the untold story of the first man since Teddy Roosevelt to serve as author in chief.”

In truth, however, if Teddy Roosevelt came back to life today, he would find that he would have much more in common with Sarah Palin than Barack Obama, both as a fellow adventurer and as a fellow writer.

I am not being ironic here: Palin’s new memoir, Going Rogue, is superior to the 1995 memoir that made Obama’s reputation, Dreams From My Father.

A clue as to why can be found in one choice moment from Dreams.

At the time, 1988, community organizer Obama was contemplating law school, and he announced his potential choices as “Harvard, Yale, Stanford.”

What makes any narrative compelling is when the protagonist confronts obstacles and overcomes them through force of will and character.

But when a mediocre student with LSAT scores too humble to reveal can casually limit his law school choices to Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, the reader winces.

It is as if the good witch told Dorothy to click her heels together on day one and skip the damn yellow brick road. There is no drama here.

In fact, Obama’s career has been greased by affirmative action and its bastard offspring—“diversity”–from prep school on.

His path to power proved particularly stressless because of what a black friend called “his solidly middle-class” manners. By advancing the white-raised Obama, his mentors and bosses could ease their anxieties and still enhance their “metrics.”

Ironically, a program originally intended for those who have descended from slaves and survived the rough and tumble of urban life ended up most benefiting people like Obama who did neither.

As a consequence, Obama never developed the character that comes with earned success. Lacking real obstacles, he has had to fabricate—or have fabricated for him–a whole string of racial slights and injustices.

In his recent book, Barack and Michelle, Chistopher Andersen quotes a black friend of Obama’s from Hawaii who rejected Obama’s claimed reason for being benched in a basketball game.

“No, Barry, it’s not because you’re black. It’s because you missed two shots in a row.”

Many of the moments of racial reckoning in Dreams have proved equally false: the Life Magazine exposé of skin whiteners, the insensitive white girlfriend in New York, the suit-and-tie job “behind enemy lines” in corporate America. Others, though unfalsifiable, sound equally mendacious and, if true, merely trivial.

Palin, like Obama an unusual duck from an outlier state, also played basketball. She writes not about her slights, however, but about the accomplishment of her team.

In Dreams, there is no sense of team or game, and the only scores the reader is aware of are those are the racial ones that need to be settled.

The language of Dreams is, to be sure, more lyrical, but it is not Obama’s language. He never breathed it before and has not done so since. Skillful as it is, the style rings as false as the book’s fabricated details.

Unlike Obama, Palin has admitted to having a collaborator. Whoever put pen to page, however, did so in Palin’s voice. There is not a sentence of the book she could not have written.

Palin’s book is not great art, but her story is captivating and humbly told. As a woman in a series of historically male professions—sports journalism, commercial fishing, Alaska politics—she actually does overcome genuine resistance to achieve unlikely success.

Along the way, Palin never whines. She charms. She also appreciates and enthuses. Her evocations of small town Alaska life and big sky Alaska adventure cheer the soul. There is no equivalent appreciation of anything in Dreams.

Half way through Going Rogue, I look forward to the further adventures of our plucky heroine and the Palin family, especially husband Todd whose history is so much more “diverse” and manly than Obama’s that Dreams should have been written about him.

©Jack Cashill
WorldNetDaily.com – November 18, 2009

Scott Roeder, the accused murderer of late term Wichita abortionist George Tiller, admitted killing Tiller earlier this week in an interview with the Associated Press.

Roeder told the AP that the shooting was provoked by “the fact [that] preborn children’s lives were in imminent danger.” He plans to plea “not-guilty” and hopes to use this “necessity defense” at trial.

Roeder’s public defenders, however, were quick to disown this strategy if for no other reason that the Kansas Supreme Court rejected a similar defense in an abortion clinic trespassing case in 1993.

Indeed, were Tiller legally performing a state sanctioned service, however malevolent, it is hard to imagine that Roeder’s hoped-for strategy would have much of a chance.

In a similar vein, if the accused Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, were to argue that an “unjust” war in Afghanistan provoked his murderous rampage, he would have little hope of acquittal.

Hasan’s chances would likely improve, however, had he gone to the base to shoot those specific soldiers who were torturing captives to death and escaping justice thanks to a corrupt Army judicial system.

Were the courts to deny Hasan a “necessity defense” in a case like that the media would howl to the heavens and well they ought.

As has been painfully evident, the media have expressed more support for inconvenienced terrorists than they have for the exterminated unborn, even those capable of living outside the womb.

Consequently, the media have no use for Scott Roeder save as a way of clubbing Christians in general and pro-lifers in particular. Already, left-leaning bloggers are equating Hasan’s actions with Roeder’s and calling it all square.

(Word to the left: Timothy McVeigh was not a “right-leaning white Christian.” He was an anti-war atheist, whose mantra was “Science is my religion.”)

Say what one will, Roeder was not a terrorist. There was nothing random about his actions. Nor was Tiller an innocent victim. Far from it.

In the scenario above, Tiller was the torturer who gamed the system to escape justice. He specialized in late term abortions and performed them for any reason whatsoever.

As the annual reports from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment reports show in ten years not one single late term abortion that Tiller performed saved the life of the mother.  This life-saving hokum was pure liberal media myth.

The reports also show that of the 192 late term abortions on healthy babies performed in 2008—98 percent on women from out of state–none were performed for a legitimate “medical emergency.”

Every single late-term abortion involved a temporary mental health diagnosis, made, of course, by Tiller, who is no one’s idea of a mental health expert.

Dr. Paul McHugh is one such expert. He served as Chair of the School of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University for 25 years.

After reviewing Tiller’s files, McHugh concluded that not one of them showed anything close to the potential “severe and irreversible impairment” to the mother needed to justify a late-term abortion under Kansas law.

Dr. McHugh taped a video discussing the files that can be accessed on youtube:

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mviFMpy_sBU

McHugh reveals that Tiller would perform a late-term abortion for reasons such as a mother not wanting to hire a babysitter when she attended rock concerts or a mother not wanting to miss the prom or the rodeo circuit.

Tiller had used the revenue from these abortions—he boasted of having aborted 60,000 “fetuses over 24 weeks”—to buy off the state’s “moderate” establishment, including the sitting governor.

Over the years, he pumped literally millions into the Kansas political system to accomplish this. In 2006, his money helped amplify the media cheerleading to unseat intrepid Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline.

Kline had had the nerve to charge Tiller with taking the life of fifteen fully viable unborn babies whose mothers were equally healthy in utter disregard of Kansas law. Kline had to go.

After Kline’s defeat, but while these charges were still under review, Kansas Governor –and now HHS Secretary—Kathleen Sebelius honored Tiller and his staff at an elegant but extremely discreet soiree at Cedar Crest, the governor’s Mansion.

Among the more revealing of the photos taken at the event is one of Sebelius holding a T-Shirt presented to her by Tiller, which reads, “Trifecta 2006: Sebelius, Parkinson, Morrison.”

In the photo, Sebelius points at Tiller as if to acknowledge his contribution to her re-election and the booting of that troublesome Kline.

To no one’s great surprise, the new AG dropped the charges Kline had brought against Tiller. And a subsequent Democratic AG pursued a watered-down case against Tiller half-heartedly.

The jurors in the 2009 Tiller trial did not learn any more about Tiller’s illegal torture and murder of fully viable babies than the jurors in the Roeder trial are likely to.

Had Tiller gotten the trial he deserved, he would be where Roeder is today, but at least he would be alive.

by Jack Cashill
Published in WorldNetDaily.com – November 12, 2009