Tell me these MSM bastards did this by mistake:

I got this in my email so I can’t completely vouch for the authenticity of the graphic, but if true, here’s CNN saying Romney won the debate by 67%. But look at the graph! The BLUE bar, with the D next to it and the tiny “Romney” – 67%! The RED bar with the R next to it — Obama! — 25%

I’ve written a lot about how California is doing its level best to scare away every business in the state. Now you can add a paragraph about what they are doing to scare away every RESIDENT in the state.

I just got a new apartment. Yes, at the end of August I will be moving from [UNDISCLOSED LOCATION A] to sunny [UNDISCLOSED LOCATION B]. It’s a great place, and up until half an hour ago – when I went in to sign the lease agreement – I was really excited about it.

Not anymore. Here are some of the clauses I had to agree to (and I hope you’re sitting down!)

NO CRIMINAL ACTIVITY ON PREMISES. Well! There goes the meth lab AND the underage Vietnamese prostitution ring. How am I supposed to make my rent when the lease for that very apartment forbids me from making any money?

ALLOWS LANDLORD TO ENTER THE APARTMENT WITHOUT NOTICE IN THE CASE OF FLOOD, BLOOD OR DEATH. Okay, great! So now what they’re saying is that a man does not have a right to keep dead bodies in the privacy of his own apartment? This used to be a free country. Statists!

TERRORISM NOT ALLOWED ANYWHERE ON PROPERTY. Okay, let me see if I have this straight: they’re saying that if I fly a guy in from Yemen, let’s say, on my own dime, and I train the guy in my own private apartment on flight simulators that I paid for with my own hard-earned money… and then that guys goes off and flies a jet into a building I could lose my apartment? Just like that?

I’ll tell you what I told them: you wanna put these kind of anti-business, anti-freedom clauses in your lease, California, you need to advise the renter about them before they write you the deposit.

Savages.

If you want to see how California is chasing business away, you can watch this:

Well, as you know, I like to update the site every season or so. But this ATTACK WATCH thing is so important that I decided to report myself. And, out of a superabundance of civic duty, I also made my own graphic for the poor SEIU workers who must be chewing through files at a shocking pace. You know what kind of cardio system those guys have! The thought of one of those hard-working government informants keeling over on my account is just more than I can bear.

So, here’s the thing: anyone whose sense of civic duty compels them to report themselves, and then make their own ATTACK WATCH! graphic will get it posted here. That way, the President of the United States will not have to waste all of that time surfing the internet to compile his Enemies List: it will all be right here in one place for easy re-education assignments!

If you’re new to the game, here’s a quick FAQ:

Send your ADVANCE RE-EDUCATION IDENTITY ID BANNER to attackwatch [at] BillWhittle [dot] net.

And now, the Gallery of Unrepentant Enemies of Dear Leader’s Glorious Worker’s Paradise:

And, for the style change-up to confuse the Auto-Snitch software:

I had so much fun doing this show. Listen COMMERCIAL FREE at the link below. The first ten minutes, and scrolling forward to 1:02:00 through 1:10:00 is some fine radio you got there, Lou.

You can listen here.

Like many kids my age, I grew up on Mary Poppins, and that proper picture of England and Englishness – the well mannered, prudent, kind-hearted nanny teaching discipline and manners in the heart of London. This past week we’ve seen rioters in the streets of London protesting modest cuts to the nanny state, by throwing traffic signs through the windows of banks and luxury shops in order to get back at the people hoarding all the money… namely, the rich.

In Wisconsin, of course, we saw the same thing: mobs disrupting the legislative process because they didn’t like the outcome, and state senators walking out on their jobs and their oaths because they were going to lose a vote critical to their liege lords and masters, the members of the public employees unions. They know which side their bread is buttered on.

Speaking of heartless multi-millionaires… the mendacious Michigan Manatee of Malevolence – Michael Moore himself –  appeared on the steps of the state capitol in Madison and said this:

“America is not broke! Not by a long shot! The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands! It has been transferred in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers, to the banks and portfolios of the uber-rich!”

Put aside the hypocrisy of a multi-millionaire who made his millions attacking capitalism; a man known to hire the cheapest non-union labor available and treat them as badly as anyone in the business. Put all of that 450 pounds of oleaginous quivering hypocrisy off to one side – or at least as far from center as it will fit – and ask yourself if Michael Moore is, in fact, correct: are we in fact broke as a nation? Or is there a “national resource” — namely the wealthy – that have locked up all the money?

Well, many of us on the right know that the left only wins when they can find one isolated sob story and sell that. Statistics – that is to say, data – that is to say, EVIDENCE – is usually fatal to the Liberal worldview.

Noted gear head, hot-rodder, statistical expert and super genius – my friend Iowahawk – took a few minutes out of a busy day of gapping spark plugs, did some basic research, and tried to figure out hot to actually pay for the 3.7 trillion dollars Barack Obama and the congress plan to spend in 2011. Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational Iowahawk!

We’ve got a year to pay for; let’s start at:

12:01 AM, January 1 The only thing more evil than a rich person in the eyes of leftists is a rich corporation. Let’s take the two most evil of all: Exxon Mobil and Wal-Mart! Forget high taxes – let’s just take every penny of their combined 2010 global profits: $34 billion dollars! Now we’re talking! Spending all of their money gets us from midnight on January first to:

9:52 AM January 4 Okay, not as impressive as we hoped. So let’s now take EVERY SINGLE PENNY OF PROFIT from the other 498 fat cat companies on the Fortune 500 – ALL of it. That’s  $357 billion! That’ll get us to…

2:00 AM February 9 Okay, we’ve taken every dime of profit from the big companies, and it’s only Super bowl time. So let’s grab the obscene corporate advertising –  $250 million! — which will run the country for… 36 minutes. But why stop there? All the ad money on all 45 Super Bowls – that’s five billion dollars – gets us to:

2:00 PM February 9 Well, it’s obvious we can’t do this just on the backs of corporations. So if we’re going to soak the rich, lets start with the obscene sports salaries. Take all of the salaries from the NFL, NBA, NHL, Major League Baseball – not their endorsement deals, just their salaries – throw in all of the winnings on the PGA tour and redneck, knuckle-dragging NASCAR as well… That’s 9.4 billion, which gets us to…

1:00 PM February 10 Forget athletes… I mean, take all their money, but they’re not enough. Let’s get the rich! Let’s take 100% of every penny that anyone makes above $250,000. I can hardly wait. Let’s see:

A: Number of US households: 116,000,000?B:

Percent of households above $250k income: 1.93%

Number of households above $250k income: 2,238,800

Total income of households in excess of $250k = $1.412 trillion

Now we’re talking! Eat the Rich! Take everything everyone makes in America above 250k, which gets us from February 10 until…

6:00 PM July 2 Well, obviously we’re going to have to cut some spending. Let’s just stop paying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – that’s where the money for health care goes, right? Into wars for oil? Not another dime; just bring ‘em all home. That would save us $105 billion Afghanistan and $159 billion in Iraq, a total of $264 billion – enough savings to cover us until…

4:00 AM July 29 Summer blockbuster season! Hey, we need the money, so screw you, Star Wars: take every penny in movies, toys, lunchboxes, etc — $25 billion – which gets us to…

4:00 PM August 1 Now God knows Hollywood has been good to the left, but they’re no longer useful idiots – they’re just idiots now. So, let’s evict everyone in Beverly Hills and sell their homes at current market value. 15,000 homes at $2 million per gets us another $30 billion, paying the bills through…

4:00 PM August 4 This isn’t working. Michael Moore assured us that there’s plenty of money. And that it’s all tied up in the rich. So liberal billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates – tough luck for you. $100 billion between them… they accidentally fall down the stairs at a public sector union rally, let’s say, and through inheritance tax we keep 50% of their loot — another $50 billion, enough to get us to…

4:00 PM August 9 All right. Let’s get serious: there are 398 more billionaires, according to the latest Forbes 400, with a combined total net worth of $1.29 trillion. A few hundred more accidents at 50% death tax – kill ‘em all and take their estate tax  — that’s another $650 billion. Good until…

4:00 PM October 13 Still not there. Okay, forget this namby-pamby 50% nonsense. Kill all the billionaires and take all of their money. Take everything from the next 100 or so of the almost-billionaires, and that buys us an additional 73 days until…

4:00 PM December 25 Christmas! Almost there! See how easy this is? Now remember, this is for America’s poor, so in the spirit of Christmas let’s get rid of foreign aid. This saves $50 billion – getting us to…

4:00 PM December 30 So near and yet so far: we’ve still got a day and change to pay for. To cover the remaining $12.5 billion we’re going to have to hit every American man, woman and child for $40 to pay for that final 32 hours. Which gets us to:

12:00 AM January 1, 2012. Happy New Year, everybody!

Now what?

We’ve taken all of the profits, all of the salaries, all of the assets, all of the expenses and revenues and holdings of the rich and liquidated it. President Obama is proposing we spend 3.6 trillion in 2012 – one thousand billion of that more than what we take in. But that assumes 2.6 trillion in revenues… but revenues from what? We’ve destroyed the private capitol, destroyed advertising revenues, destroyed professional sports, taken every penny that people have to put into new business, or pay for things – it’s all gone. We ate the rich – ate everything they had – and we scraped through one year.

Now what?

Wisconsin… the Debt… the Tea Party… Public Sector Unions – all of the details of these events have been covered much better by other people. But to try to understand what’s really going on here, I don’t think we should step forward into the details. I think we need to step back. Way back.

The United States – as envisioned by our Founders and as laid out by our Constitution – survived pretty much intact for over a hundred years.

It was only after the Civil War that America fundamentally began to change, because that was the cusp of a change much bigger than mere political change.

This kind of change has only happened three times – not in the Nation’s history, but in ALL of history.

The first of these matachanges occurred so far back in the past that we have no written record of it in any language. That first metachange occurred when bands of hunter-gatherers first learned how to cultivate crops. They could grow enough food to not have to wander to fresh pastures, and the result was the rise of the first cities and the first great Age of Mankind – the Agricultural Age.   Agriculture meant a city-state; a city-state meant the first governments, and the first money, too.

The Agricultural age lasted for about 7,000 years.  And an open, horizontal, decentralized America – based on Agriculture – was the America that was designed for us by the Founders.

Then, at the close of the nineteenth century, society changed in a fundamental way. American freedom and inventiveness – what used to be commonly called Yankee Ingenuity – allowed the United States to go from being a backwater in the Agricultural Age to the predominant power of the Second Age, the Age of Industry… the Industrial Revolution.

Now, just as it was a social trauma for most of an entire population to go from being hunter-gatherers into becoming farmers, so too was it hard – very hard – for our society to go from being primarily farmers into being primarily factory workers and what would later be called “company men.” And during this time, as the Industrial Age dawned and with it unimagined opportunities for new wealth, so too rose the men known as the Robber Barons – not free-market capitalists, but men who practiced mercantilism – crony capitalism – men who used political connections to write the laws that favored them and their monopolies.

At the end of the nineteenth century, these anti-competition Mercantilists were buying not just individual politicians, but entire legislatures, entire cities, including the greatest city in the world. If you wanted to do business in New York in the 1800’s for every dollar you spent on your business you had to put one – just one if you were lucky – into the pockets of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall – basically the Democratic Party – for the privilege.

And so the Progressive movement started, as all hell-bound philosophies do, with the best of intentions: eliminating the political corruption epidemic in the system – the unholy alliance of money buying political influence to write laws and regulations to stifle competition, endanger and virtually enslave workers, set prices, and make tons of money to buy new politicians with.   To combat these ills, Progressives sought to empower a centralized, vertically structured, top-down Federal government that could mirror perfectly the centralized, vertically structured, industrial economy. They wanted a government more powerful than the Robber Barons. And they got it, too.

In just a few years – twice in 1913 and again in 1919 – the Progressive Movement passed three Constitutional Amendments that radically changed the kind of country we live in shifting enormous, previously undreamt of power, into Washington.

The 16^th Amendment authorized the Income tax, which gave the federal government, for the first time, the power to look into your wallet, and which started to divide the country — psychologically – into those who pay and those who receive.

Should you have to  pay a higher tax at the gas pump if you drive a Lexus than if you drive an old Chevy?  Should you get to check the wallet of the guy ahead of you in line, to see if he has more money than you so he can pay for some of your groceries?

Well, that’s what the 16^th Amendment did – it made THAT kind of thinking normal, and more importantly, it put HUGE sums of OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY in the hands of politicians.

The 17^th Amendment seemed innocent enough: it changed the way US Senators were chosen. Previously appointed by the state legislatures, the 17^th made Senators elected by the people. Democracy! Only, there was already a house that represented the people – the House of Representatives.  The founders had intentionally designed the Senate to be the State’s House: Just as the House of Representatives would protect the rights of the citizens against federal power-grabs, the Senate, where each state received two senators, no matter how large or populous would protect state power against a Federal power grab.  The 17^th Amendment eliminated that diffusing force.

And finally, the signature Progressive legislation: the 18^th Amendment. Prohibition. The truly Progressive Amendment, it was the first time in American history that an amendment was written to TAKE AWAY A FREEDOM. People had been drinking alcohol since at least the invention of Agriculture, 7,000 years before. But the Progressive, you see, knows what is better for you than you do. It’s never about them, or their pathological need to control and order other people’s lives, or their sick need to have the power over you to enforce their will over you. No, it’s always for your own good.

That is, of course, the fatal flaw in progressivism – a belief that their own goodness could keep them from being corrupted by rivers of money and power over others that had corrupted the Robber Barons before them. But the money available to Progressives through taxation was orders of magnitude greater than the relatively meager private fortunes that had bought politicians before.

Okay. What now?

Well, a new metachange is occurring – and we are living through it as we speak. A new age, the third age, the DIGITAL AGE is upon us. And as the smartest man in Congress – that would be Thad McCotter whose simple hand gesture got me thinking along these lines – pointed out to me; today, just about anybody can reach into their pocket and order goods or services from anywhere on the planet, and have them delivered within a few days, if not a few hours.

Like the hunters who became farmers, and the farmers who became company men, we are now going from being company men to dispersed, decentralized, independent, interconnected FREE AGENTS.  Because the Industrial Age is drawing to a close as the Information Age takes its place. And all of our economic structure is – once again – going back to being horizontal, independent, light, fast, agile, decentralized, local, smaller and cheaper.

The old dinosaurs may totter for a while but they will eventual fall. And the government that will come out of our Third Wave, Information Age society will HAVE to be fast, decentralized, local, smaller and cheaper as well  But who could conceive of, much less design such an open-source, freedom-based, limited government?

IT’S AN UTTER MYSTERY.

Which is why what we are seeing with the Tea Party is so remarkable: people, whether they realize it or not, are using the new toys of the Information Age to create a political structure to match the economic one. It is a political pushback against BIG: Big Government, Big Spending, Big, inefficient, corrupt, badly managed and financially unsustainable programs, and – as if by instinct – back to the kind of dispersed, decentralized, horizontal, local and small type of government that worked well for the First Age, was hijacked by the Progressives  for the Second, and now is returning again for the Third.

This clash between fundamentally conflicting philosophies, this fight between small government Tea Party supporters and big government unionists now going on in Wisconsin is not, as Winston Churchill once said, the end… or even the beginning of the end. But it may be the end of the beginning.

It is the people with the Gadsden Flags – the ones calling for less government – that are on the side of the future… not the public sector union members living in the past to preserve benefits and entitlements that OTHER PEOPLE have to pay for… No, these Public Sector Unions actually have become the old, corrupt alliance of money and political power that they themselves were created to destroy.

These messages come to you through the vision and generosity of our Citizen Producers at Declaration Entertainment. And if you want to keep them coming, become one yourself!

Declaration Entertainment was started because we believe that politics is downstream of culture. People often vote not so much on what they know but rather on how they feel, and the way they feel about the issues of the day they derives from the culture’s mythology.

Modern America gets its national mythology from the movies. So I thought I’d start a series called TAKE A MOVIE TO WORK, where we look at the hidden moral, ethical, philosophical and political points being made beneath the plot and the characters. And I thought we’d start with one of my all-time favorites: MGM’s 1956 classic scifi adventure, Forbidden Planet.

So, what does Al Gore have to do with Robby the Robot? You’ll have to watch the piece to find out… and even though I’ll post the script below the fold, it is so much better watching it all on video.

TAKE A MOVIE TO WORK: FORBIDDEN PLANET can be seen here.

Here’s the print version:

Hi everybody, welcome to Declaration Entertainment – I’m Bill Whittle. We started Declaration because we believe that politics is downstream of culture; that like all cultures, we get our values and morality from our mythology – and in 20^th and 21^st century America, our mythology mostly comes to us through the movies. So I thought we’d start a little segment called TAKE A MOVIE TO WORK, where we pick apart a movie and find out some of the lessons it is trying to teach us, under the actual plot.

Let’s start with an all-time classic, and one of my favorite films of all time: MGM’s 1956 classic, Forbidden Planet.

Forbidden Planet, is said to have been based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and like The Tempest, on the surface Forbidden Planet is indeed a shipwreck story. United Planets Cruiser C-57D is dispatched to the planet Altair IV to search for the survivors of the Bellerophon sent there 20 years earlier to establish a colony and never heard from again. While approaching the planet, Captain John J. Adams receives a radio message warning not to land, sent by the sole survivor of the Bellerophon mission – Dr. Edward Morbius. The Bellerophon was destroyed by unknown forces, warns Morbius, and he can’t be responsible for his safety. Adams – like that better-known starship captain who will appear ten years later — decides to land anyway.

Adams and his crew are greeted by one of Morbius’ creations, Robbie the Robot, who takes The Captain, the Executive Officer and the Ship’s Doctor (stop me if any of this sounds familiar) to meet Morbius and his daughter Altaira – who was born on the planet just before the mysterious disaster that killed all the rest of the crew. And during the visit, Altiara meets the first young men she has ever seen, and she seems to like it.

Morbius takes the Captain on a tour of the remarkable ruins of a lost civilization –the product of the indigenous race called the Krell, whose entire population mysteriously disappeared in a single night, 200,000 years before. Morbius reveals that the Krell had a “plastic educator” that the Krell used to control their machinery by thought alone and which greatly enhanced the users intelligence… Morbius used it to double his already impressive intellect, but the experience nearly killed him.

Meanwhile, back as the ship, in perhaps the most impressive pre-CGI effects sequence ever, the Monster that killed the Krell and the crew of the Bellerophon runs up against the ship’s defensive force field and weaponry, before suddenly fading away, for no apparent reason.

When Adams and the ships doctor return to Morbius for an explanation, the Doctor slips away and gets the intelligence boost from the Krell machine to try and understand the mystery. As he lies dying, he mutters, “Monsters, John! Monsters from the Id!”

And so it’s revealed: the monster that killed the Bellerophon crew, and the crew of the C-57D, was generated from Dr. Morbius’ subconscious mind, while he was sleeping, and now his Oedipal reaction to Altaira falling in love with the young Captain has led his rampaging Id – his subconscious mind – to use all of the power of the Krell to come into the fortress-laboratory and kill both the usurper and his own daughter! It is only when Morbius is mortally wounded fighting off the physical manifestation of his own inner demons that the Monster from the Id subsides. Morbius’ last act is to show Captain Adams how to destroy the entire planet before anyone else is killed.

As Adams, Altaira and the surviving crew leave orbit and watch the destruction of Altair IV, the starship captain says, “We are, after all, not God.”

The End.

Now, what can we take from that – aside from a first rate, sci-fi mystery – adventure? Well, Forbidden Planet really is nothing less than a warning against the terrible dangers of intellectual elitism. Morbius is far more intelligent than Captain Adams, but Adams – a man of action – is wise enough to see what Morbius for all his intellect cannot see: that all of the intelligence in the world cannot make up for the inherent defect in human character; that all people, no matter how smart, are ultimately driven by base and selfish desires, and that the reason no one can handle the unlimited power of the Krell technology on the Forbidden Planet is not because no one is smart enough to master it. It is because no one is good enough to master it.

Our intellectual elites do not ever seem to get this message. Like Morbius, they believe that given enough power, they would use it to remake the world into a better place for all people – unaware of the blind spot in their own subconscious. Men are not Gods, and that is why the greater the power, the more it should be dispersed. That is the rare wisdom of our Founding Fathers, of men like George Washington, who, like Morbius was offered kingship of the new world, but who, rather, as a man of action like Adams, was wise enough to see it is a trap.

When it comes to the Mad Scientist archetype, Dr. Morbius may be best of breed. But in the movies, scientists are only portrayed as “mad” when they use science to advance a political agenda – such as when they want to take over the world for evil purposes, or even more telling, as in the case of Forbidden Planet, when they want to take over the world for good.

No one is that good. That’s the lesson of Forbidden Planet.

And, of course, we lost both Leslie Nielson on November 28^th of 2010, and Anne Francis just a few weeks later, on January 2^nd, 2011. They were both terrific actors and we’re going to miss them.

If you want to help control the mythology of America, you can join the movement to take back your culture. Become a Citizen Producer here at Declaration Entertainment dot com.  I’m Bill Whittle; we’ll see you next time we TAKE A MOVIE TO WORK.

Hi everybody. Welcome to the Firewall; I’m Bill Whittle.

You know, there comes a point where – no matter how you try to offer the benefit of the doubt – evidence builds up to such a degree that you can no longer deny that the evidence is trying to tell you something. And halfway through his first term, the foreign policy decisions made by Barack Obama and his administration are so appalling, and so destructive in the long term; they no longer can be credited to inexperience or even incompetence. They are so consistent that they must be due to ideology.

Some of you are old enough to remember life during the cold war. Well, the final stroke that shattered the Soviet Union came from a steelworkers union in the Polish town of Gdansk – called Solidarity – the raw personal courage of its leader, Lech Walesa, and the immediate and unequivocal moral support given by two champions of human decency and freedom:  Polish Pope John Paul II, and United States President Ronald Reagan.

Poland became the first and the greatest of former adversaries turned into ardent pro-west, pro-democracy countries, but after decades of research and billions of dollars – and not long after the Russian invasion of former soviet satellite Georgia — President Obama cancelled a working missile defense that was to have been based in Poland. He did it to appease the country which divided Poland with the Nazis in 1939 — Russia. And he did it on the 70^th anniversary – to the day – of the German invasion. That is a mortal insult to a brave people and stalwart ally.

In Honduras, another American ally in sea of socialism and dictators, the ruling Honduran President tried extra-constitutional measures to extend his term, a move rejected by the Honduran courts and the Honduran people. But the Obama administration ignored this, and essentially said they would not do business again with Honduras unless the proto-dictator was re-seated.

Israel – the only western country in the most volatile region of the world. First, Vice President Biden starts an international incident by exploding over the fact that a developer in Jerusalem – Israel’s capitol city – simply wanted to build more units on existing property. Obama and his administration turned it into a crisis about “expanding settlements.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, being officially received at the White House, was not allowed to enter through the Front Door but rather through the rear, like a house servant. The President of the United States dictated his conditions to one of our closest allies, and when the Israeli Prime Minsiter began to discuss these ultimatums President Obama told him to work it out with his low-level advisors as he was off to have dinner with Mrs. Obama. That is ASTONISHING in the degree of studied, intentional diplomatic insult and humiliation. That is not an accident, or inexperience, or even incompetence. Wars have been fought over less than this.

And on, now, to Britain. We talk about a “special relationship” between Britain and America. We have had a special relationship since World War I, where American soldiers in their thousands went to their death to help their British Allies; where American and British troops bloodied the beaches of Normandy, where untold thousands of British soldiers fought and died under American command and vice versa, where Churchill and Roosevelt and later Truman had to balance their shared values to defeat not only Hitler, but also Japan, and their erstwhile ally in Josef Stalin and the aggressive communist monolith he would go on to lead.

The British gift to the first African-American American President was magnificent pen holder made from the timbers HMS Gannet, a Victorian-era anti-slavery ship. In exchange for this exquisitely sensitive and thoughtful token, President Obama gave the British Prime Minister a 25 disk DVD collection of Hollywood movies – unwatchable in the UK due to format differences. Queen Victoria gave to all American Presidents a magnificent desk made from the HMS Resolute  – and the Narcissist in Chief provided Her Majesty, the Queen, with a $150 piece of consumer electronics – an iPod — made immortal and priceless, of course, by the inclusion of various speeches given by Barack Obama for the Queen to reflect upon and drawn wisdom from. Oh, and Queen Elizabeth already owned an iPod. Barack Obama did not previously own a Resolute desk.

At a session of the UN in New York, the British Prime minister pursued the President of the United States on a matter of pressing urgency, and the President hustled from room to room like a rock star avoiding an autograph request.

A spokesman for Obama’s State Department told a collection of British diplomats, quote: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.” We didn’t get the example of the Magna Carta from Ecuador, respect the Rule of Law from Uzbekistan… we didn’t get the idea of the Presumption of Innocence from Thailand or any of the other bedrock institutions and values that built America from Luxembourg or Chad or Portugal or Korea. We got them from Great Britain.

NONE OF THIS compares to the recent announcement that – in stark contrast to the help given Margaret Thatcher by Ronald Reagan in Britain’s 1982 defense of the Falkland Islands – America would remain “neutral” should Argentina try to give the invasion another go… Or, the fact that President of the United States of America gave to the Russians – over strenuous, almost incredulous British protests – the actual serial numbers of the US Trident missiles sold to Great Britain. KGB spies were presumably prepared to die to get this information, but Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, handed these secrets to the Russians over the protests of our closest ally so that he could get a Start Treaty with Russia to help his sagging poll numbers at home.

That is how he treats our Allies. How does he treat our enemies?

He shakes hands and smiles with brutal Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chaves. He sides with Venezuela and Cuba – another brutal dictatorship – against our allies Columbia and Honduras. He campaigned on having no-conditions, high-level meetings with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the rabid, barking-mad dictator of a country – Iran — that is responsible for virtually all of the ongoing acts of terror leveled against the US since they war on America in 1979 and grows day by day closer to deploying and using an atomic bomb. In Afghanistan he has made it clear to the Taliban that they will not be crushed as the Iraqi insurgents were under George Bush’s surge, but will rather simply have to hold out until some arbitrary date for our publically scheduled retreat in shame and defeat.

He bows to Saudi Princes, praises the Mullahs against the protestors giving their lives for freedom in the Streets of Tehran as they were shot dead trying to topple our mortal enemy, and instead of using the influence of his office to pressure Mubarak on freedom from day one, he instead mangles the situation in such a way that no Ally we have in the world has the slightest confidence in us whatsoever.

And finally, the boy who was raised in Indonesia can revisit the land of his childhood, where Israelis are not allowed to set foot in country, where in some provinces sharia courts allow stoning to death for adultery, where 100 lashes with a whip is meted out for the crime of homosexuality, female circumcision is practiced openly, where so-called “honor mutilations” go unpunished if not celebrated and where political and religious repression exist that would boggle the American mind, and say, with his megawatt smile, that Indonesia and America are bound together by “shared values.”

America does not share Indonesia’s values, Mr. President – America’s, and Britain’s, and Canada’s, and Australia’s, and Israel’s core values are antithetical to what Indonesia practices with impunity every single day. Iran, and Venezuela, and Cuba, and Russia, and China, and all the other enemies of freedom you get so cozy with do NOT share America’s core values either, and the tide of evidence lifts me – almost daily — to the disgraceful conclusion that while they do not share America’s core values… perhaps they share some of yours.

If you want to keep these messages coming, go to Declaration Entertainment dot com and become a Citizen Producer. And we’ll see you next time on the Firewall.

It’s great to be back at National Review. My 399 words on Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday are here.