Ed Kaitz, at American Thinker, has some observations on the contradictions inherent in the rhetoric of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Recent polls are showing that by a good 60% margin, Barack Obama is seen as a candidate who can “unify” the nation. This may be the most brilliant example of what George Orwell called “doublethink” in the recent history of the Democratic Party. Think about it: for over thirty, maybe forty years the American public has been variously sermonized and threatened by crusaders in Obama’s same party into embracing not unity, but “diversity.” Call it what you will – brilliant or duplicitous – it is still a masterful political achievement.

For decades students in our schools have been told to “celebrate difference” and to see America as a “salad bowl” rather than the “melting pot” of old. Those who resisted the collective swoon for “diversity” and who descried the resulting balkanization of our educational institutions were forced into “diversity training seminars” and reeducated under the watchful eyes of “diversity officers.” For as Mao Tse Tung famously said, those who oppose progressive change “must go through a stage of compulsion before they can enter the stage of voluntary, conscious change.” But if these polls are correct, and Obama is indeed the great unifier, what will happen then to all of the “diversity officers” and “diversity training” seminars on our college campuses and in our corporations? Will the entire “diversity” superstructure in our society finally be dismantled? Will Democrats, for maybe the first time since JFK or MLK start talking about what unites us rather than what divides us? Will citizens be thought of as “Americans” first and not categorized and rewarded based on skin color? Is Obama, the great unifier, going to finally liberate us from this divisive ideology? Don’t hold your breath.

George Orwell claimed that there was something more calculated at work when politicians begin to claim for example that “Slavery is Freedom” or that “Hate is Love,” or in Mao Tse Tung’s words, that “Compulsion is Voluntary.” The new and improved Democratic Party version seems to be that “Diversity is Unity.” Orwell called this “doublethink” and he claimed that it was a condition endemic to the totalitarian mind. It meant the ability “to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory” and “to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies.” For example, a liberal socialist political platform usually involves “liberating” us from our attachments to property, families and nation in the name of “freedom.” When the State chooses for us, however, the result is slavery. Doublethink in Mr. Obama’s case (“Diversity is Unity!”) gives him the luxury of defending not only the divisive and intolerant Reverend Wright and his party’s divisive policies over the years, but it also allows him to be seen as the savior who will finally make America whole.

Since it is difficult to recall a time when national unity was high on the list of Democratic Party priorities, the coming months should be a rather curious time for many. …

When.. divisive affirmative action programs were challenged in courts across the country “diversity” was invented as a way of continuing the assault on what many considered “white privilege” or “white oppression.” In the final analysis however, diversity or multiculturalism were never more than a charade to cover the underlying Marxist theory of conflict. Minority students brought in on affirmative action were rarely encouraged to study other languages and cultures because the liberal gatekeepers understood something rather disturbing about this endeavor: a thorough and sensitive investigation of other cultures and religions reveals a rather conservative, not liberal, orientation in their respective beliefs and habits. …

The bottom line is that when the Left in this country embraced Marxism they committed themselves to conflict and division, not cooperation. Obama, unlike Hillary however is smart enough to understand that fostering division is a poor strategy for winning elections. In the words of Eric Hoffer:

Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding or captaining discontent. . . They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope.

Obama’s relationship with Reverend Wright complicates this strategy, as does his receptivity to and defense of the anger in much of the black electorate. But if Obama’s message is “unity” then it means absolutely nothing unless he addresses several decades of divide and conquer liberal ideology. In other words, unless he does this, Obama’s message will amount to nothing other than the latest form of Orwellian doublethink: “Diversity is Unity!”

And used the same Winner Take All Primary System we do, what would the delegate count look like? Rassmussen Reports’ Wesley Little provides the answer.

Peter Carr, Principal Deputy Director of Public Affairs at the Department of Justice, responded to Glenn Greenwald’s request for clarification as follows:

In a question-and-answer session after his Commonwealth Club speech last week, Attorney General Mukasey referenced a call between an al Qaeda safe house and a person in the United States. The Attorney General has referred to this before, in the letter he sent with Director of National Intelligence McConnell to Chairman Reyes on February 22, 2008. In that letter, contained in this link [.pdf], the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence explained that:

“We have provided Congress with examples in which difficulties with collections under [Executive Order 12333] resulted in the Intelligence Community missing crucial information. For instance, one of the September 11 hijackers communicated with a known overseas terrorist facility while he was living in the United States. Because that collection was conducted under Executive Order 12333, the Intelligence Community could not identify the domestic end of the communication prior to September 11, 2001, when it could have stopped that attack. The failure to collect such communications was one of the central criticisms of the Congressional Joint Inquiry that looked into intelligence failures associated with the attacks of September 11. The bipartisan bill passed by the Senate would address such flaws in our capabilities that existed before the enactment of the Protect America Act and that are now resurfacing.”

This call is also referenced in the unclassified report of the congressional intelligence committees’ Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks.

Greenwald spills buckets full of indignation and continues beating his accusatory tom-tom, being absolutely in love with the notion that he has found a deliberate falsehood he can explode to the embarrassment of the evil Bush Administration, and he has a pretty good echo of his theory (accepting it as proven gospel) going in a number ( 1, 2, 3) of the standard cages making up the left blogosphere’s monkey-house, but (sorry, Glenn!) he has actually proven absolutely nothing.

At best (from Greenwald’s point-of-view), the Attorney-General offered an inelegantly-phrased hypothetical open to misinterpretation. On the other hand, it is not impossible at all that there really was a phone call from an al Qaeda safe house which was not intercepted because of legal red-tape. In which case, Mr. Greenwald is going to be very sorry that he has so heavily invested in this story.

Still developing.

Original story.

Readers should be aware that blogs these days are absolutely flooded with Spam comments (advertising on-line casinos, insurance, prescription drugs, Viagra, and porn-sites). NYM receives hundreds a day, and Spam filtering software is not completely effective. Faute de mieux, I have recently started running multiple Spam filters. In most cases, comments not simply eliminated wind up in temporary storage, and I have to glance over them before they are allowed to appear. Consequently, a posted comment may not show up for most of a day sometimes. My apologies, but this state of affairs will prevail for a while (until I find a better solution).

The editorial staff must run off to attend pack trials at the National Beagle Club in Aldie this morning. Posting will resume later.

Back in March, as this New York Sun 3/27 story indicates, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in a speech arguing for Congressional support for FISA, seemed to indicate that the absence of a warrant prevented US surveillance of a crucial pre-9/11 phone call from a safe house in Afghanistan to someone in the United States.

Attorney General Mukasey, in an emotional plea for broad surveillance authority in the war on terror, is warning that the price for failing to empower the government would be paid in American lives. Officials “shouldn’t need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that’s the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that’s the call that we didn’t know about,” Mr. Mukasey said yesterday as he took questions from the audience following a speech to a public affairs forum, the Commonwealth Club. “We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn’t know precisely where it went.”

At that point in his answer, Mr. Mukasey grimaced, swallowed hard, and seemed to tear up as he reflected on the weaknesses in America’s anti-terrorism strategy prior to the 2001 attacks. “We got three thousand. … We’ve got three thousand people who went to work that day and didn’t come home to show for that,” he said, struggling to maintain his composure.

There has been little media coverage of what seems to be possibly a major story, but the left blogosphere has erupted today with attacks on Mukasey for allegedly lying, led by “the left’s most dishonest blogger” Glenn Greenwald himself.

Reading General Mukasey’s comment as reported in the Sun, I was not certain myself whether he was referring to a real incident or merely to a hypothetical, but the major counter-offensive being mounted this morning by the left’s big gun liars seems to indicate that it could very well be the former.

Greenwald’s attack in Salon is being followed up by the leading leftwing Congressional representatives, these days operating on the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers (D-MI), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Bobby Scott (D-VA), sending Mukasey an accusatory letter, demanding that he explain his March statement.

Mr. Mukasey may simply reply that he was only speaking hypothetically of course. Developing.

At least they have to take California!

The same Swedish Absolut vodka brand, which has notoriously previously targeted the Gay Community with special advertising and sponsorships, is now running in magazines and billboards in Mexico an advertising campaign imagining the reversal of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase.

Absolut’s map even takes a particularly partisan Mexican position on the boundary of the Louisiana Purchase.

Did Absolut’s advertising agency think that news of this particular campaign would not reach Americans, particularly Americans residing in Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and the non-Bay-area, non-Hollywood, non-Marin-to-Humboldt portions of California?

Via Gateway Pundit.

One normally doesn’t expect Ann Coulter to supply serious commentary and analysis. Her specialty is a stinging barb at the liberals’ expense, often playfully crossing the line into the realm of prohibited speech.

Her latest column in Human Events, however, discussing Barack Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, features some essential insights pertaining to the heart and mind and the fundamental methodology of a major candidate.

As Ann Coulter rightly notes, virtually no one has read Obama’s book.

Has anybody read this book? Inasmuch as the book reveals Obama to be a flabbergasting lunatic, I gather the answer is no. Obama is about to be our next president: You might want to take a peek. If only people had read “Mein Kampf” …

Peeking into Obama’s Dreams, Coulter finds the tone is significantly different from what one would have expected. Obama is really an angry black man. A very angry black man.

Nearly every page — save the ones dedicated to cataloguing the mundane details of his life — is bristling with anger at some imputed racist incident. The last time I heard this much race-baiting invective I was … in my usual front-row pew, as I am every Sunday morning, at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Then Coulter strikes gold, finding the key to Obama’s entire political methodology and personal style, right there in black and white.

When his mother expresses concern about Obama’s high school friend being busted for drugs, Obama says he patted his mother’s hand and told her not to worry.

This, too, prompted Obama to share with his readers a life lesson on how to handle white people: “It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.” …

This technique seems to be the basis of Obama’s entire presidential campaign.

And Coulter warns:

Forget Rev. Jeremiah Wright — Wright is Booker T. Washington compared to this guy.

Ann Coulter may very possibly be right. All this would certainly explain the Jeremiah Wright-Trinity Church connection. The 2008 Presidential Election may very possibly feature as the current front-runner an extreme black nationalist, harboring a pathological psychic collection of racial animosities, deliberately spoofing the American public with an emollient facade: Malcolm X hiding behind the mask of Sidney Poitier. What on earth would someone with such views actually do in office?

0:31 video

Hillary’s original and Obama’s response link

Saturday Night Live parody link

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But Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm provides the definitive, last word on Hillary’s 3AM ad.

Baltimore Sun:

Part 1

Part 2

Sample (from Part 1): On why Due Process is not applicable to war-time military operations:

The strictures that bind the Executive in its role as a magistrate enforcing the civil laws have no place in constraining the President in waging war:

Soldiers regularly in the service have the license of the government to deprive men,the active enemies of the government, of their liberty and lives; their commission so to act is as perfect and legal as that of a judge to adjudicate …. Wars never have been and never can be conducted upon the principle that an army is but a posse comitatis ofa civil magistrate..

Military Commissions, 11 Op.Att’y Gen. 297, 301-02 (1865) (emphasis added); see also The Modoc Indian Prisoners, 14 Op. Att’y Gen. 249, 252 (1873) (“it cannot be pretended that a United States soldier is guilty of murder if he kills a public enemy in battle, which would be the case if the municipal law was in force and, applicable to an· act committed under such circumstances”).. As Attorney General Speed conciuded, the Due Process Clause has no application to the conduct of a military campaign:

That portion of the Constitution which declares that ‘no person shall be deprived… of his life,liberty, or property without due process of law,’ has such direct reference to, and connection with, trials for crime or criminal prosecutions that comment upon it would seem to be unnecessary. Trials for offences against the laws of war are not embraced or intended to be embraced in those provisions…. The argument that flings around offenders against the laws of war these guarantees of the Constitution would convict all the soldiers of our anny of murder; no prisoners could be taken and held; the anny could not move. The absurd consequences that would of necessity flow from .such an argument show that it cannot be the true construction-it cannot be what was intended by the framers of the instrument. One of the prime motives for the Union and a federal government was to confer the powers of war. If· any provisions of the .. Constitution are so in conflict with the power to carry on war as to destroy and make it valueless, then the instrument,instead of being a great and wise one, is a miserable failure “a felo de se.”

I thought it was a fine piece of work, placing the issues in the correct historical perspective, citing proper precedents, and arriving at just and accurate conclusions. The Bush Administration ought to have released it immediately upon its production, and staunchly publicly defended it.

AP:

Mesa, Ariz. Mesa Unified District – 77.1 –
San Jose, Calif. San Jose Unified – 77.0 –
Nashville, Tenn. Nashville-Davidson Co. School Dist. – 77.0 –
Colorado Springs, Colo. Colorado Springs School District – 76.0 –
San Francisco San Francisco Unified – 73.1 –
Tucson, Ariz. Tucson Unified District – 71.7 –
Seattle Seattle School District – 67.6 –
Virginia Beach, Va. Virginia Beach City Public Schools – 67.4 –
Sacramento, Calif. Sacramento City Unified – 66.7 –
Honolulu Hawaii Department of Education – 64.1 –
Louisville, Ky. Jefferson County School District – 63.7 –
Long Beach, Calif. Long Beach Unified – 63.5 –
Arlington, Texas Arlington ISD – 62.7 –
Memphis, Tenn. Memphis City School District – 61.7 –
San Diego San Diego Unified – 61.6 –
Albuquerque, N.M. Albuquerque Public Schools – 60.8 –
El Paso, Texas El Paso ISD – 60.5 –
Charlotte, N.C. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools – 59.8 –
Wichita, Kan. Wichita Public Schools – 59.6 –
Phoenix Phoenix Union High School District – 58.3 –
Austin, Texas Austin ISD – 58.2 –
Washington District of Columbia Public Schools – 58.2 –
Fresno, Calif. Fresno Unified – 57.4 –
Boston Boston Public Schools – 57.0 –
Fort Worth, Texas Fort Worth ISD – 55.5 –
Omaha, Neb. Omaha Public Schools – 55.1 –
Houston Houston ISD – 54.6 –
Portland, Ore. Portland School District – 53.6 –
Las Vegas Clark County School District – 53.1 –
San Antonio San Antonio ISD – 51.9 –
Chicago City of Chicago School District – 51.5 –
Tulsa, Okla. Tulsa Public Schools – 50.6 –
Jacksonville, Fla. Duval County School District – 50.2 –

Less than 50%:

Philadelphia Philadelphia City School District – 49.6 –
Miami Miami-Dade County School District – 49.0 –
Oklahoma City Oklahoma City Public Schools – 47.5 –
Denver Denver County School District – 46.3 –
Milwaukee Milwaukee Public Schools – 46.1 –
Atlanta Atlanta City School District – 46.0 –
Kansas City, Mo. Kansas City School District – 45.7 –
Oakland, Calif. Oakland Unified – 45.6 –
Los Angeles Los Angeles Unified – 45.3 –
New York New York City Public Schools – 45.2 –
Dallas Dallas ISD – 44.4 –
Minneapolis, Minn. Minneapolis Public Schools – 43.7 –
Columbus, Ohio Columbus Public Schools – 40.9 –
Baltimore Baltimore City Public School System – 34.6 –
Cleveland Cleveland Municipal City Sch.Dist. – 34.1 –
Indianapolis Indianapolis Public Schools – 30.5 –
Detroit Detroit City School District – 24.9 –

50-City Average – 51.8

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The bottom of the list contains Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Chicago.

The Republican Party is about to nominate a man whose past loyalty to the GOP, Conservatism, and the current Republican Administration obviously leaves a great deal to be desired.

Back in 2001, John McCain denied having any reasons for, or intentions of, leaving the Republican Party.” Last year, his spokesman told Power Line that there was no truth in stories that John McCain had considered leaving the GOP.

But former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, currently out promoting a new book, has just leaked his own recollections of private democrat party negotiations with McCain.

According to Sidney Blumenthal, a senior adviser for former President Bill Clinton and current adviser to Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton, at one point McCain was going to leave the Republican Party and caucus with Senate Democrats.

“And although he doesn’t want to talk to reporters about it now, there was a time and I was privy to some of those who were involved, did conduct negotiations through third parties about whether or not he would leave the Republican Party and become an independent more or less aligned in the Senate with the Democrats,” said Blumenthal on April 1. Blumenthal did not say when those negotiations took place.

Of course, this revelation is not completely new

A story dated 3/28/07 from the Hill features a similar account.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was close to leaving the Republican Party in 2001, weeks before then-Sen. Jim Jeffords (Vt.) famously announced his decision to become an Independent, according to former Democratic lawmakers who say they were involved in the discussions.

In interviews with The Hill this month, former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and ex-Rep. Tom Downey (D-N.Y.) said there were nearly two months of talks with the maverick lawmaker following an approach by John Weaver, McCain’s chief political strategist.

Democrats had contacted Jeffords and then-Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) in the early months of 2001 about switching parties, but in McCain’s case, they said, it was McCain’s top strategist who came to them.