The War Party's New Torchlight Parade

Contrived Controversy: Protesting the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque."

The most powerful patron of radical Islam is not Iran, Iraq, or Saudi Arabia. It is the government headquartered in Washington, D.C., which for more than a half-century has diligently cultivated Islamic terrorism. Yet millions of Americans are suffering what amounts to a collective loss of bladder control over the purported threat embodied in the proposed Cordoba House -- the Islamic equivalent of a YMCA -- in New York City.

Allowing the "Ground Zero Mosque" to be built, insists Newt Gingrich, would be tantamount to "surrender" in a struggle against those implacably committed to our destruction. New York gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino, a New York crony capitalist who anointed himself a paladin of the Tea Party movement, has made opposition to the "Ground Zero Mosque" the central plank of his campaign. Paladino, who has profited handsomely from government's redistribution of wealth, promises that if elected he will confiscate the property used for the Muslim Community Center through eminent domain and use the land to erect a war memorial.

Writing in National Review, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy insists that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf -- the Kuwait-born U.S. citizen who leads the Cordoba Initiative -- is pursuing a "stealth jihad" as a fellow-traveler of the Muslim Brotherhood. "The Ground Zero project is a test of America's resolve to face down a civilizational jihad that that aims, in the words of its leaders, to destroy us from within," maintains McCarthy.

 

According to Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association (AFA) the problem isn't the proposal to build a Muslim cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero. Rather, it's the fact that the government ruling us permits the existence of mosques anywhere in the United States. 

Since "every single mosque is a potential terror training center or recruiting center for jihad," Muslims "cannot claim First Amendment Protections," maintains Fischer (who, in addition to supporting case-specific abolition of the First Amendment, has previously called for the abolition of the habeas corpus guarantee as well).

Rather than focusing exclusively on the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, the AFA and like-minded organizations have instigated a nation-wide campaign to protest construction of Muslim houses of worship in more than a half-dozen states. Like McCarthy, Fischer treats Imam Rauf as an asset of the Muslim Brotherhood, which (according to Fischer) is "at the heart and center... the soul of Islam in America."

Here's a quick digest of the charges leveled by Fischer, which are typical of this manufactured controversy:

Islamic houses of worship serve as recruiting centers for soldiers of jihad, who will kill and die on behalf of Sharia Law. Many Islamic clerics, including Imam Feisal, are joined at the hip with the Muslim Brotherhood -- the most powerful element of the international Islamic terrorist network.

Jihadist at work? Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf (right).

Stipulating that those concerns are genuine, and that the proper course of action would be to target the greatest offenders first, the campaign to shut down the global jihad should target the United States Government -- and the Republican-dominated Evangelical Churches that serve as military recruiting stations for the Regime in Washington.

During the past decade, a Middle Eastern nation of roughly 30,000,000 people once ruled by a secular government succumbed to Sharia Law. The predictable results of that catastrophe included a dramatic increase in religious violence, such as the persecution of professional women whose dress and conduct are now seen as unacceptable. More than half of the Christian population of that country -- which includes congregations tracing their roots back to the original disciples -- was driven into exile. 


That nation is Iraq, which suffered for decades under Washington's loathsome subcontractor Saddam Hussein before Saddam's employer decided to remove the middleman.

For a dozen years after the 1991 Gulf War -- which followed the Washington-instigated Iraqi assault on Kuwait, which itself was a sequel to the Washington-abetted Iraqi war with Iran -- the country was suffocated by a murderous embargo punctuated with the occasional terror-bombing. After being softened up for more than a decade, Iraq was invaded and occupied by U.S. troops who killed and died in order to install an Islamist government whose new constitution formally enshrines Sharia Law.

When American jingoists offer misty-eyed tributes to the soldiers who died in the course of "liberating" Iraq, it could be said that they are, in effect, praising the efforts of men and women who are martyrs to the cause of Sharia Law.  

This outcome is not an historical anomaly. For the past six decades, the Anglo-American elite (with Washington assuming the senior partner role after World War II) has assiduously promoted the most violent strains of revolutionary Islam, often -- but not exclusively -- as a strategic weapon in the context of the Cold War. 

Professional revolutionary: Afghani.

The Muslim Brotherhood -- which grew out of the late-19th Century agitation of Persian-born professional revolutionary Jamal Eddine al-Afghani -- has long been one of the Anglo-American elite's most important strategic assets, as well as the talent pool that was used to staff the deadliest terrorist network in the Muslim world.


While he was superficially the most devout and pious of Muslim believers, Al-Afghani, writes Robert Dreyfuss in his valuable book The Devil's Game, "a heterodox thinker who was a Freemason, a mystic, a political operative, and above all ... someone who believed in the `social utility of religion.'" 

After serving as a Russian agent in the 1860s, Afghani defected to the British. He was in London's employ when he made a disciple of an Egyptian Sugist named Mohammed Abduh. 


During the 1870s, Afghani and Abduh used Cairo's storied Al-Azhar mosque as a recruiting center for a revolutionary network, which gathered cadres from throughout the Middle East and Europe. Afghani also founded a lodge of his Arab Masonic society, which became the headquarters of what Egyptian police called "young Thugs" -- a description invoking India's notorious Thugee Cult, an oath-bound fraternity of murderers. 


When Afghani was eventually expelled from Egypt, his disciple Abduh remained, eventually rising to become the nation's Mufti (supreme interpreter of Islamic law) in 1899. Like his mentor, Abduh considered revolution to be his religion, and the Islamic faith to be a vessel for his political ambitions. Among those who fell under Abduh's influence was Hassan Al-Banna, the schoolteacher who gave tangible form to Abduh's revolutionary designs by founding the Ikhwan al-Mulimeen (Islamic Brotherhood) in 1928.

Disciple and organizer: Abduh.

Reflecting the influence of Afghani and Abduh, Banna organized the Brotherhood into cells (called "families") of five to seven members. 


The Brotherhood "was more than a movement," writes Dreyfuss. "It was a cult, it was a revivalist party, it was an intelligence operation, it was a paramilitary unit, and it was an international organization that was rapidly building branches in many Middle Eastern countries." During World War II, Dreyfuss continues, Brotherhood cadres were recruited by British, Nazi, and Soviet intelligence agencies. 



"In the eastern regions of the Soviet empire, where the Nazis were more interested in oil than ethnic cleansing, the Third Reich mobilized Muslims and other ethnic minorities to fight for the liberation of their homelands," writes Eliza Griswold in The New Republic, summarizing the findings in Ian Johnson's recent book A Mosque in Munich. "The Nazis plucked Muslims from German prisoner-of-war camps; some Muslims became German soldiers, members of the SS; some, professional propagandists.... Once World War II ended, many of these men, stuck in Germany and having lost their homelands, found a new employer: the United States."

Brotherhood founder al-Banna.

A CIA-created propaganda arm called Radio Liberty employed "many of these former Nazi sympathizers," Griswold points out. In 1953 -- the same year the CIA and MI6, working through a network of Islamic radicals, brought down the Iranian government of Mohammed Mossadegh -- the White House hosted 27-year-old Said Ramadan, the Muslim Brotherhood's chief international organizer in addition to being son-in-law to Hassan al-Banna's son-in-law, who had been assassinated in 1949.



In subsequent years, many adherents of the Brotherhood -- including former Nazi sympathizers who worked with the CIA -- affiliated with the Al-Quds Mosque in Munich. Among them was Mahmoud Abouhalima, a Brotherhood member who became a leader in the CIA-funded Afghan mujahadeen and later played a prominent role in the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. 

Abouhalima, who spent the late 1980s networking with radicals among American Muslims, sponsored the 1990 visit of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, later convicted of "seditious conspiracy" in the 1993 WTC attack. Despite being on a State Department terrorist watch list, Sheik Omar was granted a visa at the U.S. consulate in Khartoum: As something other than coincidence had it, the CIA station chief personally attended to the matter by substituting for the consular official who was usually in charge of issuing visas. 

Ike and Ikhwan: Brotherhood leader Said Ramadan is at the far right, holding papers.

Like practically everyone else involved in the 1993 WTC plot, Omar had also been an asset of the U.S. Government.  The same is true of former U.S. Army Special Forces Captain Ali Mohammed, who -- according to investigators -- most likely "called the shots" in the bombing conspiracy. Despite -- or perhaps because of -- that fact, Mohammed went on to become a "privileged asset" of the FBI. 

In 2001, Mohammed pleaded guilty -- "in exchange for considerations" -- to charges arising from the 1998 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. He then disappeared into the witness protection program, where he remains to this day. 


The extent to which the Muslim Brotherhood is (in Bryan Fischer's phrase) "the soul of Islam in America" reflects the tireless efforts of our rulers to nurture radical Islam as a strategic asset -- both for prosecuting war abroad and making war on us at home by terrorizing us into supporting its corrupt, needlessly bellicose foreign policy. 


In his eagerness to strip American citizens who profess the Muslim religion of their rights, Bryan Fischer offers an analogy to the recent arrest of the so-called Hutaree Militia in Michigan on charges of seditious conspiracy.  "The fact that they were a Christian militia did not stop them from being locked up,"Fischer told an interviewer. 


Had his research into the Hutaree case been more exhaustive than scanning headlines, Fischer may have discovered that the rapidly disintegrating case against that group was built entirely on the claims made by an informant-provocateur employed by the FBI. The same is true of practically every recent "terrorism" case involving American Muslims. 


If there is reason to be suspicious of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, it would not be his sensible criticism of Washington's foreign policy; instead, it would be his willingness to cooperate with the FBI, which seems more interested in manufacturing "terrorist plots" than interdicting them.

Not having access to his unspoken plans and motives, I cannot say whether Imam Rauf is sincere or duplicitous in his efforts to encourage mutual respect and understanding among people of different faiths. However, I am impressed by the answer he gave in 2006 when asked what his "Ramadan wish" would be for the world:


"[I would wish that] we would remember that the two greatest commandments that God gave us through the mouths of his many prophets and messengers, including Jesus, Moses, and Mohammed  -- to love the Lord our God and to love our neighbors. It also means do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you. If that can be the criterion of our foreign policy, I guarantee you that our foreign policy will be successful and wildly popular." 

As the treatment given to its Author demonstrates, preaching the Golden Rule will always provoke the murderous hostility of the ruling elite.  Apparently, the last thing many American Christians can abide is the spectacle of an American Muslim leader who -- whatever else he may be up to -- insists that we abide by the central moral tenet of the Christian faith. 

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Shadows and Foreshadowing at Nagasaki

Atomic shadows at Nagasaki

        

When U.S. Secretary of War William Howard Taft arrived in Nagasaki Harbor on July 31, 1905, he and the huge imperial retinue about the SS Manchuria were given a rapturous welcome. 

As the ship departed that evening, notes James Bradley in his infuriatingly informative history The Imperial Cruise, Nagasaki's mayor toasted Taft and his party with champagne. The Sumo-sized American functionary then led the throng in a war chant to celebrate Japan's battlefield triumphs over Russian forces in Manchuria:

Japanese emperor -- banzai [may he live ten thousand years]!

Japanese navy -- banzai!

Japanese army -- banzai!

At least some of those who joined in Taft's celebration would be immolated almost exactly 40 years later, some of them memorialized in the "atomic shadows" etched into walls by the nuclear fireball that vaporized them. As they lifted their hands skyward, those Nagasaki residents couldn't have imagined that their government's imperial benefactor would someday annihilate them.

The frenzied reception granted to Taft and his entourage was generated, at least in part, by the celebrity of Alice Roosevelt, Teddy's oldest daughter, a rebellious girl who was something of a pre-electronic media Britney Spears. (One widely circulated photo depicted the First Wild Child wearing a boa constrictor draped around her neck and shoulders.)  But Japan's government, in which Washington had played a key role, was eager to please its imperial patron. 

Teddy Roosevelt, whose geopolitical views were defined by a nearly obsessive preoccupation with what he called "ethnic conquest," had conferred the status of "honorary Aryans" on the Japanese. In diplomatic machinations he kept secret from his cabinet and the Congress, Roosevelt had abetted the rise of Japanese militarism, goading them into their war with Russia over control of Manchuria. 

Harvard-educated Japanese emissary Kentaro Kaneko.

Japan had a role in TR's vision for the Pacific. As long as Japan kept Russia in check, did its part to pry open China to Washington's corporate clients, and didn't make a play for America's overseas colony in the Philippines, it could claim dominion over Korea and Manchuria under the terms of a "Monroe Doctrine for Asia," Roosevelt privately told Baron Kentaro Kaneko, Tokyo's emissary to the United States. 


"Japan is the only nation in Asia that understands the principles and methods of Western civilization," Roosevelt wrote to Kaneko on July 8, 1905. "She has proved that she can assimilate Western civilization, yet not break up her own heritage. All the Asiatic nations are now faced with the urgent necessity of adjusting themselves to the present age. Japan should be their natural leader in that process, and their protector during the transition stage, much as the United States assumed the leadership of the American continent many years ago, and by means of the Monroe Doctrine preserved Latin American nations from European interference, while they were maturing their independence."


Kaneko repeatedly urged Roosevelt to make public his support for a Japan-dominated "Monroe Doctrine for Asia." Teddy unctuously assured the Japanese emissary that while he couldn't do so as president, he would gladly offer public support once he had left office. 

As Bradley points out, if Congress had been aware of Roosevelt's secret dealings, "perhaps a senator would have challenged Roosevelt to think through the consequences of the United States' carving out a chunk of Asia for Japan to nibble on. Perhaps a congressman might have inspired Roosevelt to imagine a Japan that later would chafe at Teddy's leash." 


At the time, however, America's imperial elite was too enthralled by the Japanese victories in Manchuria -- where, as Teddy privately exulted, they were "playing my game" -- to consider what would happen when Japan's imperial ambitions could no longer be restrained by Washington. 


"The victory of the Japanese is a distinct triumph for Christianity," pontificated Reverend Robert MacArthur of New York's Calvary Baptist Church following the Battle of Tsushima. "The new civilization of Japan is largely the result of Christian teaching. A very great proportion of Japan's leading men today, especially those who fight her battles on land and sea, with such skill and valor, profess the Christian faith." 

Japan was emulating "Christian" teaching in the sense that any pious adulterer could claim to be acting on Jimmy Swaggart's example. The Japanese government's duplicitous and aggressive behavior faithfully mimicked that of the ascendant "Christian" power of the age. 

Under McKinley and Roosevelt, the U.S. government offered a detailed tutorial in the ruthless acquisition of territory through aggression, and the pitiless exercise of power to suppress uprisings against imperial rule.  The Philippines provided the classroom, and the Japanese would prove to be eager and observant students. 


After Washington wrested the Philippines from Spain, Admiral George Dewey (whose assault on the decrepit Spanish fleet -- ancient wooden vessels tied up in rows in Manila Bay -- wasn't much different from the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor) sent a pair of emissaries to compile a report on the Filipino civic culture. Under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo, hailed as the "George Washington" of the Philippines during the war with Spain, the Filipinos had developed all of the institutions of representative government, and were firmly committed to the rule of law.


The report commissioned by Dewey was quickly buried by the War Department. After all, the prevailing doctrine held that the inhabitants of the Philippines -- like other non-Anglo-Saxon peoples -- weren't fit for self-government, and wouldn't be ready until after at least a few generations of benevolent, paternalistic rule by their racial superiors. 

This meant, Admiral Dewey would later write, that the U.S. Government would have to "establish our authority by force against the very people whom we sought to benefit." After learning of the victory of Teddy Roosevelt -- an apostle of imposing Anglo-Saxon "authority" by force -- in the 1900 presidential election, Private Robert Austill, who was serving in the Philippines, paraphrased Dewey's conclusion in terms that were both earthier and more candid: "The people of the United States want us to kill all the men, f**k all the women, and raise up a new race in these Islands." 


It was the islands Washington coveted as an outpost for the projection of military power into Asia. The Filipinos were an encumbrance.

“We do not want the Filipinos,” declared the San Francisco Argonaut in 1898. “We want the Philippines. The islands are enormously rich, but unfortunately they are infested with Filipinos. There are many millions there and, it is to be feared, their extinction will be slow.”

Fortunately, the Filipinos are not extinct, despite the U.S. Government's devoted efforts. In a 41-month period from 1898 to1902, roughly 20,000 Filipino guerrillas were killed. At least ten times that number of civilians were slaughtered as well. Some chroniclers estimate that more than two million Filipinos were liberated of their mortal cares during America's lethal application of muscular Christianity in the islands.

"The United States later fought World War II over a period of fifty-six months with approximately four hundred thousand American deaths," observes Bradley, who has written two acclaimed books about the Pacific War (Flags of our Fathers and Flyboys).  "So Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo, with their mechanized weaponry, killed about the same per month -- seventy-two hundred -- as American civilizers did in the Philippines." 

Call this an "imperial baptism": US "ministering angels" at work.

Among the benefits of Christian culture the American Army shared with the Filipinos was the ancient ritual called the "water cure."




During World War II, American P.O.W.s were subjected to waterboarding by Japanese interrogators who, as convicted war criminals, experienced the long drop to the end of a hangman's rope. 

Decades earlier, American soldiers sent to "pacify" and "civilize" the archipelago -- “We come as ministering angels, not as despots,” warbled Senator Knute Nelson in praise of that noble venture -- would chant a marching cadence called "The Water Cure" in happy anticipation of their ministry:


Hurray, hurrah. We bring the Jubilee.
Hurray, Hurrah. The flag that makes him free.
Shove in the nozzle deep and let him taste of liberty.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!


We've come across the bounding main to kindly spread around
Sweet liberty whenever there are rebels to be found.
So hurry with the syringe boys. We've got him down and bound.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!...


Oh pump it up in him till he swells like a toy balloon.
The fool pretends that liberty is not a precious boon.
But we'll contrive to make him see the beauty of it soon.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!



Grover Flint, a first lieutenant in the 35th Infantry who served in the Philippines for a year and a half, later described how America's Ministering Angels used the "water cure" to fill Filipinos to the brim with liquid liberty:


"He [the victim] is simply held down, and then water is poured into his face, down his throat and nose from a jar, and that is kept up until the man gives some sign of giving in or becoming unconscious, and when he becomes unconscious he is simply rolled aside and he is allowed to come to.... His suffering must be that of a man who is drowning, but he can not drown." 

"Let him taste of liberty!"

Such treatment was appropriate, insisted Gen. Frederick Funston, whose troops -- with his knowledge and support -- executed helpless POWs, tortured civilians, massacred non-combatants, and raped countless women. 

The Filipinos, explained this exponent of pagan barbarism, are "an illiterate, semi-savage people, who are waging war, not against tyranny, but against Anglo-Saxon order and decency."


The "decency" of which Funston spoke so piously was famously displayed in a village called LaNog, the entire population of which was murdered on the orders of Captain Fred McDonald -- except for a single comely mestizo woman who was gang-raped by McDonald's officers and then turned over to the enlisted men for similar treatment. 


A particularly vigorous display of "Anglo-Saxon decency" took place in March 1906, when the Army mowed down roughly 1,000 Muslim men, women, and children who had taken refuge in the crater of an inert volcano.


"I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag," Roosevelt wrote, without a whisper of irony,  in a congratulatory cable to the commander. 

"A brilliant feat of arms": The Moro Massacre.

Mark Twain, who lent his gifted pen to the service of the anti-imperialist cause, pointed out that penning six hundred "helpless and weaponless" Filipinos "in a hole like rats in a trap" and then gunning them down at leisure  over a 36-hour period "from a safe position on the heights above" could hardly qualify as a brilliant feat of arms. This would have been true "even if Christian America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets."


On the home front, Roosevelt and his comrades relentlessly de-humanized the Filipinos -- or, as they were commonly called, "Pacific Negroes."  

The 1904 St. Louis World's Fair would be a propaganda triumph for Roosevelt. Hundreds of thousands flocked to exhibits promoting America's imperial thrust into Asia, and depicting Filipinos (as well as Chinese and "uncivilized," non-westernized Japanese) as evolutionary throwbacks in need of Washington's stern but enlightened rule. Millions received this indoctrination second-hand through press coverage.


"As a keepsake souvenir to take home to the kids, fairgoers could purchase an `Album of Philippine Types,'" recalls Bradley. "Each Filipino type was represented by two photographs that looked like mug shots, which they were -- Roosevelt's scientists had searched Bilibid Prison in Manila to find `typical' Pacific Negroes. Fairgoers viewed more than one thousand photographs depicting a Philippines populated by robbers, murderers, and rapists."


Filipinos conscripted into America's imperial military were among the troops who marched past Roosevelt's reviewing stand during his second inaugural in March 1905. TR was heard commenting that these assimilated "Pacific Negroes" were "rejoicing in their shackles."

I wonder if Japan's short-lived conquest of the Philippines produced similar expressions of self-satisfaction from its imperial ruling class. 

I also find myself wondering how many of the Americans who perished in the Bataan Death March had been given a copy of the Roosevelt administration's "Album of Philippine Types" as children in order to advance their education regarding their duty to promote "Anglo-Saxon civilization" at bayonet point. 

And I detect nearly toxic levels of irony in the fact that at least some of the Americans who would later perish in the Pacific War saw the World's Fair exhibit celebrating the achievements of the "Japanese Empire" -- Washington's sub-contractor in "civilizing" Northern Asia.

Monument to 26 Christians martyred in Nagasaki during the 16th Century.

"In 1905, when he green-lit Japanese expansion, Roosevelt was forty-six years old and Baron Kaneko was fifty-two," notes Bradley. "Roosevelt would be dead fifteen years later, while Kaneko would live to hear Franklin Roosevelt condemn Japan for doing what Theodore Roosevelt had recommended." 


Kaneko died on May 16, 1942, just weeks before the Battle of Midway effectively ended Japan's dream of dominating the Pacific. 

To his credit, Kaneko exercised whatever influence he could muster to encourage peaceful relations between Japan and the United States; he opposed war with America as late as 1941. Had he lived three years longer Kaneko may have witnessed the aftermath of the August 9, 1945 atomic assault on Nagasaki, where just a generation earlier the skies were rent by American-led war chants in praise of the Imperial Japanese military. 


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Presidential Dictatorship: Not Thinking Things Through

He sees the flaw in your logic: Lucius Fox

Let me get this straight: You think that your client, one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands -- and your plan is to blackmail this person?... Good luck.

Bruce Wayne's confidante and tech adviser Lucius Fox, confronting accountant Coleman Rose when the number-cruncher tries to expose Batman's secret identity. 

Some of Barack Obama's most impassioned conservative critics see him as an incipient dictator bent on radically transforming the United States into a socialist dystopia through the exercise of unfiltered executive power.

Many of those same critics denounce Obama for being insufficiently ruthless in using arbitrary presidential power to kill and imprison people. Their plan, apparently, is to goad that incipient dictator into becoming a fully realized despot. 

Writing in Investor's Business Daily, attorney Ernest S. Christian and economist Gary A. Robbins -- the former a veteran of the Ford administration, the latter a Reagan administration alumnus -- tidily encapsulate the conservative Republican critique of Obama the embryonic dictator:

"Too many overreaching laws give the president too much discretion over too many aspects of our lives. There's no end to the harm an out-of-control president can do.... [Barack Obama] is undermining our constitutional traditions: The rule of law and our Anglo-Saxon concepts of private property hang in the balance. Obama may be the most 'consequential' president ever."

In fact, Obama is nothing less than "an alien in the White House," they write, borrowing an expression coined by Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal. 

"A wounded rampaging president can do much damage -- and, like Caesar, the evil he does will live long after he leaves office, whenever that might be," they continue. There is even the possibility that Obama would remain in office in defiance of law and the will of the electorate, since the "overgrown, un-pruned power of the presidency to reward, punish and intimidate may now be so overwhelming that his re-election in 2012 is already assured -- Chicago-style."

The authors appear to believe that the formidable powers exercised by Obama somehow originated with him -- or, at very least, that Republican occupancy of the White House immunizes the office against depravity.

While painting Obama as a singular threat to liberty and Bill Clinton as a degenerate who "lowered the culture" of an electorate that twice elected him, they insist that "George W. Bush stood up for America, albeit sometimes clumsily." 

Translated into Roman terms, the authors would have us believe that Clinton was the corrupt, self-absorbed adolescent Elagabalus, and Obama either the depraved Nero or the despotic Diocletian -- but Bush the Younger, heck, he was Claudius, a relatively well-intentioned, albeit physically maladroit and verbally challenged, legitimate heir.

In fact, Obama is not materially different from his predecessor in any significant way. Mssrs. Christian and Robbins depict Obama as a unique threat to our "Anglo-Saxon" tradition of liberty protected by law. But it was Bush -- acting under the influence of his Sith Master, Dick Cheney -- who disemboweled the habeas corpus guarantee, the foundation of common law protections of individual rights. Granted, Obama has embraced and enlarged on Bush's actions, but the damage was done before the "alien" occupied the Oval Office. 

Brutum hominis cum Imperator

Perhaps Christian and Robbins intend to intimate that the threat Obama poses to the "Anglo-Saxon" tradition is a matter of identity, rather than performance, given that the chief damage was done by Bush the All-American Boy, rather than Obama the "alien."

During the reign of Bush the Lesser, Marc Thiessen -- now enjoying a sinecure at the American Enterprise Institute -- was one of the Imperator's scriptwriters. Since the end of that regime, Thiessen has continue to evangelize on behalf of torture, murder by executive decree, and other key tenets of the Bush-Cheney doctrine of totalitarian presidential power.


Thiessen has done nothing to conceal his disdain for the incumbent president; he is firmly in the camp of those who see Obama as a subversive and aspiring tyrant. Yet in a recent Washington Post column, Thiessen called for that same neo-Leninist to employ extraordinary means to abduct WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.


"Assange is a non-U.S. citizen operating outside the territory of the United States," observes Thiessen. "This means the government has a wide range of options for dealing with him. It can employ not only law enforcement but also intelligence and military assets to bring Assange to justice  [sic] and put his criminal syndicate out of business."

This could mean sending a CIA or even a military team to snatch Assange off the streets of Iceland, Belgium, or other friendly countries unwilling to surrender him to Washington, Thiessen insists. It also means using the newly created U.S. CyberCommand to interdict WikiLeaks' access to the Web: "With a stroke of his pen, the president can authorize USCYBERCOM to protect American and allied forces by eliminating WikiLeaks' ability to disseminate classified information that puts their lives at risk," Thiessen insists.
 
In other words, Thiessen is eager to see the dreaded Obama deploy kidnapping teams and throw the internet "kill switch," and will hector him mercilessly until he does -- making sure to season those critiques of presidential weakness with dire regarding what he has described as Obama's despotic designs.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, Thiessen's comrade at National Review, likewise laments the supposed fact that Barack Obama -- whom he has described as a "neo-communist" -- has been diffident and tentative in exercising presidential power.

In an address last March in an event sponsored by Hillsdale College, McCarthy chided Obama for not emulating Andrew Jackson's example as military governor of New Orleans during the War of 1812.

On December 15, 1814 -- shortly before the storied "Battle of New Orleans" -- Jackson issued a decree announcing that it was his "unalterable determination rigidly to execute the martial law in all cases which should come before [my] province." The city would be run as an armed camp. A 9:00 PM curfew was imposed, and anyone found on the streets after that hour would "be apprehended as spies and held for examination."

Following the battle -- regarded as the only significant American victory, although the War of 1812 had already ended -- Jackson refused to restore civilian government. In March, nearly two months after the climactic battle,  a member of the Louisiana senate named Louis Louailler published an anonymous letter in the Louisiana Courier condemning the continued state of martial law as an affront to "our oath of making the Constitution respected."

"It is high time the laws should resume their empire," wrote Senator Louailler, who also demanded that the dozens of civilians held in military custody be brought before civilian courts and either charged or released.

As if anticipating Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction-era dictum -- "Whenever you hear a man prating about the Constitution, spot him as a traitor" -- Jackson treated this invocation of the U.S. Constitution as the act of a British spy.

He first commissioned publication of a propaganda sheet called Friend of the Laws that pointedly warned New Orleans residents that those found guilty of "espionage" within the "armed camp" would be subject to immediate execution. He then dispatched agents to learn the identity of his anonymous critic and arrest him.


Once Louailler was in military custody, he was accused of acting with  "the direct and manifest object [of bringing] the military authority into contempt," as well as fomenting sedition by "stirring up discontent and mutiny in the camp" -- meaning the City of New Orleans.

Jackson's critics had a point.

Some of Louailler's constituents filed an appeal with U.S. District Judge Dominick Augustin Hall, who issued a writ of habeas corpus.

"Instead of responding to the writ as directed," McCarthy admiringly recalls, Jackson "had Judge Hall arrested." Jackson charged the judge of "aiding[,] abetting, and executing mutiny within the camp" and threw him into the same cell holding Louailler. Shortly thereafter, Judge Hall was marched a short distance outside the "camp" and released.

A few weeks later, Louailler -- a civilian legislator -- was subjected to a court martial on numerous charges, including espionage, "illegal and improper conduct," "disobedience to orders," and "writing a willful and corrupt libel."

To his credit, Louallier refused to recognize the jurisdiction of that spurious court, and also rejected an offer of amnesty "by which they had sought to brand me a criminal." He spent years working to restore his reputation.

Alas, sighs McCarthy, "We've come a long way from Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama" -- the latter, presumably, a timid milquetoast scandalously unwilling to punish dissent through summary imprisonment, and exile judges who object to such abuses of due process.

My question to McCarthy would be this: Do you really want Obama to exercise those powers? Would we really be better off if Obama -- the incumbent "wartime Commander-in-Chief" -- treated criticism of his actions as sedition, arrested his critics, and imprisoned judges who issued writs demanding that the government justify its actions?

Jackson repays former allies: The Cherokee "Trail of Tears."

As it happens, Obama's behavior in office isn't that far removed from the totalitarian ideal espoused by Thiessen, McCarthy, and their ilk.


The indefatigable -- and entirely irreplaceable -- Glenn Greenwald of Salon points out that the Obama administration, building on the precedents set by Thiessen and McCarthy's former boss, has created a "hit list" of people subject to summary execution on presidential orders. This includes several U.S. citizens, prominent among them the radical Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

When Awlaki's father -- working with the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights -- filed an emergency appeal for an injunction to prevent the extra-judicial state murder of his son, "a significant and extraordinary problem arose," notes Greenwald: Regulations issued by the Treasury Department under the Bush administration "prohibit U.S. persons from engaging in any transactions with individuals labeled by the Government as `Specially Designated Global Terrorists,' and those regulations specifically bar lawyers from providing legal services to such individuals without a special `license' from the Treasury Department specifically allowing such representation."

"On July 16, roughly two weeks after Awlaki's father retained the ACLU and CCR to file suit, the Treasury Department slapped that label on Awlaki," Greenwald continues. "That action would have made it a criminal offense for those organizations to file suit on behalf of Awlaki or otherwise provide legal representation to him without express permission from the U.S. Government."


Timothy Geithner, the career criminal in charge of the Treasury Department, has condescended to issue the requested license, thereby permitting Awlaki's father to press his legal challenge. This also preserves the supposed authority of the executive branch to grant or deny -- on any whimsical basis it considers appropriate -- permission to attorneys seeking to defend the legal rights of people on the president's "kill list."

Last January, after Awlaki was accused of inciting the attempted Christmas bombing of Northwest Flight 253, his father was asked why he didn't encourage his son to return to the United States to confront the charges.

"I will do my best to convince my son to do this," Awlaki told CNN, but he understandably doesn't trust a government that claims the right to execute his son without trial -- or even formal criminal charges.

"They want to kill my son," he pointed out. "How can the American government kill one of their own citizens?"

The unsettling answer to that troubling question is one terrifying word: "easily." Obama's conservative critics want to make this task even easier still. They really haven't thought this through, have they?

    Postscript, August 5: On the subject of the "Alien in the White House"....

This is the kind of thing that threatens to eliminate the ever-narrowing gap between life and parody that sustains The Onion's existence: 

The head of an eastern Pennsylvania amusement company has yanked a carnival game in which players shot foam darts at an image resembling President Barack Obama.

Irvin Good Jr. pulled the target-shooting game after receiving a complaint from a Massachusetts woman attending a fair in Roseto, about 65 miles north of Philadelphia. Good said Wednesday his company, Hellertown-based Goodtime Amusements, won't offer the game again.

"It was just a big, big mistake in judgment, and I feel sorry about it," he told The Associated Press. "I can't take it back, but I can try to make it better."

The game, dubbed "Alien Attack," featured a large painted image of a black man wearing a belt buckle with the presidential seal and holding a scroll labeled "Health Bill." Players could win prizes such as stuffed animals by hitting targets on the image's head and heart.

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