David Horowitz and Ben Johnson have written the book the Dems deserve: Party of Defeat. In an excellent review at NRO, Andy McArthy observes that it was the Clinton/Gore administration who made regime change in Iraq official American policy. But after the invasion, the Dems flipped: So why the treacherous flip-flop? In an ad horrendum indictment that piles fact onto sordid fact, Messrs. Horowitz and Johnson convincingly demonstrate that the modern Democrat leadership is singularly dedicated to delegitimizing and thus destroying the Bush presidency. Having calculated this political strategy, they are heedless of the fact that their tireless opposition, distortion, and propaganda can only lead to the defeat of the United States in what the authors aptly call the war with Islamofascism. In fact, many in the hard Left desire just that outcome. With both Bush and the America that he symbolizes as their targets, no betrayal is off the table. David Horowitz, of course, is among the most gifted and consequential writers in the conservative movement — particularly insightful when diagnosing the Left’s bare-knuckles, will-to-power arsenal because he came of age in the radical orb. Ben Johnson is the managing editor of the feisty Frontpage Magazine, which is published online daily by Horowitz’s Freedom Center. In Party of Defeat, they recount “unprecedented attacks on an American president and a war in progress.” Describing and documenting the thrall in which the radical Left now holds the Democratic Party, the authors forcefully argue that the resulting “house divided” may lack the unity of national purpose necessary to defeat the perilous threat of jihadism. The descent of a great political party — one whose determined patriotism was critical to the nation’s victory over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan — has been as predictable as it is disheartening. Many of today’s prominent Leftists were, in the sixties and seventies, heavily influenced by Soviet practices. The authors note that Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest Soviet intelligence official to defect to the West, has explained that “[s]owing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks” of his office. A president cannot rally the public to any great national cause if he becomes the object of distrust and ridicule. Propaganda campaigns toward that end were a Soviet priority. And so it has been with President Bush. The authors recount that as the 2000 election controversy raged in Florida, Jesse Jackson thundered, “We will delegitimize Bush, discredit him, do whatever it takes but never accept him.” In short, the president’s ascendancy was bastardized from the start, long before 9/11 and Bush’s vigorous response to it gave vent to all the Left’s Vietnam-ized predispositions against the use of American power to further American purposes.

Joining the French-looking John Kerry and the effete, well-coifed John Edwards, Kathleen Parker points out that Barack Obama has now joined the Faux Bubba Club: Bowling for Obama Annie got her gun and Obama got his boot stuck in his mouth. By Kathleen Parker Barack Obama seemed to have survived the blasphemous rants of his preacher and remained relatively untarnished by the perceived dissatisfactions of his privileged wife. But he may be less lucky with remarks he made recently about embittered, small-town Americans, who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Those words now cling to Obama ...

As usual, Thomas Sowell is on the money: A Living Lie Obama's controversial statements in San Francisco are perfectly in line with his Senate record. National Review Online April 15, 2008 By Thomas Sowell An e-mail from a reader said that, while Hillary Clinton tells lies, Barack Obama is himself a lie. That is becoming painfully apparent with each new revelation of how drastically his carefully crafted image this election year contrasts with what he has actually been saying and doing for many years. Senator Obama’s election-year image is that of a man who can bring the country together, overcoming differences of party or race, as well as solving our international problems by talking with Iran and other countries with which we are at odds, and performing other miscellaneous miracles as needed. There is, of course, not a speck of evidence that Obama has ever transcended party differences in the U.S. Senate. Voting records analyzed by the National Journal show him to be the farthest left of anyone in the Senate. Nor has he sponsored any significant bipartisan legislation — nor any other significant legislation, for that matter. Senator Obama is all talk — glib talk, exciting talk, confident talk — but still just talk. Some of his recent talk in San Francisco has stirred up controversy because it revealed yet another blatant contradiction between Barack Obama’s public image and his reality. Speaking privately to supporters in heavily left-liberal San Francisco, Obama let down his hair and described working class people in Pennsylvania as so “bitter” that they “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” Like so much that Obama has said and done over the years, this is standard stuff on the far Left, where guns and religion are regarded as signs of psychological dysfunction —

Barack Obama fought hard to see that full-term, partially born babies could be murdered in Illinois. And he's proud of it. Now this: As a law professor, he put Roe at the center of his constitutional law course. That says it all: Roe is ahead of Marbury v. Madison, Dred Scott, and Brown v. Board of Education. The right to kill the most innocent among us is, in his mind, the centerpiece of the Constitution. If the Constitution means anything, it is that the least among us have the right to life and liberty. Some people argue that in ...

A few years ago an arrogant Blue Stater wrote a book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?" This cartoon from IBD's Michael Ramirez could be the cover of the new book: "What's the Matter with New York and New Jersey?"

Dan Henninger wonders if a liberal falls in the forest and no other liberal recognizes it, did he make a sound?

The prevailing orthodoxy of the academy (not to mention the mainstream media and all of liberalism) is the theory that some natural process animated previously inanimate matter which, over billions of years, evolved into all manner of living creature. If you are in the academy and you voice any doubt about Darwin's unlikely theory (as he himself did) you may find yourself expelled. Every generation has a rebel. Ours is Ben Stein. Dare to watch the super trailer. It's fantastic.

. . . as a real campaign issue, that is. Sorry, Barack, You’ve lost Iraq. Bush's efforts to negotiate a long-term U.S-Iraq pact may remove troops as an '08 election issue for Obama, Clinton. Camp Arifjan in the desert kingdom of Kuwait, America's depot to the Iraq war, feels about as far away as you can get from South Carolina, Super Tuesday and the election-year squabbles back home. And George W. Bush, who is currently midway through his six-nation tour of the Mideast, is doing a good job of distancing himself from the politics of 2008. But as Bush rallied U.S. troops at the base here on Saturday with a "Hoo-ah" and conferred with his Iraq dream team, Gen. David Petraeus and ...

Of course, we've known and been reporting this for months: the Surge worked. When will Harry Reid eat his words? When will Nancy Pelosi praise the American military and the Iraqi people for defeating al Qaeda? We won't hold our breath. The Surge Worked By JOHN MCCAIN and JOE LIEBERMAN January 10, 2008; Page A15 It was exactly one year ago tonight, in a televised address to the nation, that President George W. Bush announced his fateful decision to change course in Iraq, and to send five additional U.S. combat brigades there as part of a new counterinsurgency strategy and under the command of a new general, David Petraeus. At the ...