By now, most of us are tired of the continuing litany of “let’s not judge” what happened at Fort Hood, and that Major Malik Nidal Hasan was simply mentally ill and stressed out because of his impending deployment. He, like a disgruntled employee, simply snapped.

That is why it was so refreshing to hear Senator Joe Lieberman on Fox News Sunday, where the maverick Democrat now independent dissident dared to say that Hasan “reportedly showed signs of being a “self-radicalized, homegrown terrorist.’” There were indications, he noted, that Hasan “had turned to Islamist extremism” which should be investigated.  If so, his action was not that of a mentally unbalanced individual, but “a terrorist act.” The military should have acted, Lieberman added, and once they got notice of various reported signs about Hasan, he should have been gone.

Lieberman’s view is especially refreshing when compared to that offered by Army Chief of Staff General George Casey, who told CNN that “You know there’s been a lot of speculation going on, and probably the curiosity is a good thing, but we have to be careful, because we can’t jump to conclusions now based on little snippets of information that come out.” Rather than acknowledge the obvious, General Casey was concerned instead that undue speculation could “cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers,” and that while Hasan’s action was a tragedy, “it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.”

Any objective observer would think it a tragedy if the Army swept the motivations of someone like Hasan under the rug.  He  not only yelled out “Allahu Akbar” before his shooting spree, but told various people that American Muslims should not be fighting other Muslims abroad, and that actions taken of a violent nature like suicide bombings were justified.

But perhaps the single most egregious post on these events comes, rather predictably, from those good folks at The Nation magazine, in which John Nichols writes “the incident inspired an all-too-predictable explosion of Islamophobia.”  As Nichols perceives what triggered Hasan’s attack, was that he feared getting combat related stress as he had observed in the soldiers he had treated. Of course Hasan would have been assigned to a medical unit treating soldiers in need of psychological counseling, and he himself would not have been in a combat situation.

I understand that like other op-ed pages, The Wall Street  Journal feels compelled to have at least one columnist who is an unabashed liberal.  But one wonders if they picked Thomas Frank because they wanted to choose someone whose arguments are so thin that they did so to expose the weaknesses in the arguments of our contemporary liberal pundits.

Yesterday, Frank hit rock bottom with his rather inane attack on Glenn Beck. What upsets him is Beck’s expose of Anita Dunn’s now famous remark that Chairman Mao was one of her “favorite political philosophers,” who along with Mother Teresa, she regularly turned to for inspiration. At PJM, our colleague Roger Kimball has already dealt shrewdly with the very notion that Mao could even be called a philosopher.

That definition of Mao is not what upsets Mr. Frank. Rather, he argues that to Beck, “Ms.Dunn was yet another person who deserved to be added to the long list of radicals that Mr. Beck had uncovered within the government.” Evidently, it does not disturb Frank one bit that Mao, to anyone who knows some history, was one of the bloodiest tyrants and most vicious totalitarian dictator of the last century.  The point is not that Dunn is another left-wing radical snuck into the White House, but that an individual who speaks with the President’s authority to young people can without a hint of apology be recommending Mao to them as an inspiring figure to emulate.

Second, Mr. Frank thinks it unfair that Beck did not phone those he attacks and ask them to appear on his program to defend themselves. Instead, Beck rants on the air about how the White House will not phone him to explain themselves. Two individuals whom the WH either consulted with or appointed were Robert McChesney, whom Frank simply calls “a frequent target of Mr. Beck,” and Mark Lloyd, the new Chief Diversity Officer at the FCC.

So Frank phoned them up; he calls McChesney an “old friend” and disarmingly describes him as head of an “advocacy group on media policy.”  It sounds like a simple non-partisan organization that McChesney heads. But a quick perusal of his own articles, like this one,  immediately reveal that he is an unabashed sectarian Marxist of the old school, who sees the U.S. media as a tool of the capitalist ruling class that maintains hegemonic control over society. For McChesney, journalism  “smuggles in values conducive to the commercial aims of the owners and advertisers as well as the political aims of the owning class.” Indeed, to McChesney, journalism is simply  “ideological class warfare.” As he concludes: “Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism.”

Now if this man has indeed been to the White House more than once to consult on media policy, shouldn’t this be a concern of ours? How ingenious of Thomas Frank to leave the details out, and simply complain about how Beck has defamed his old friend, without giving him a chance to respond.

Next Frank tells us how he e-mailed Mark Lloyd, whom Beck somehow unfairly defamed by “repeatedly airing video clips in which he appears to hold noxious views.”  Look at Frank’s words: “appears to hold.” Come on, Mr. Frank. The videos, as we all know, were shown in full. They reveal Lloyd telling an audience, fairly recently, how he admires Hugo Chavez and his ability to curb a free media in Venezuela by shutting down opposition stations. Mr. Lloyd is also shown praising Chavez’s revolution.  

In  a public and videotaped panel in 2008, Lloyd called Hugo Chavez’s government the result of “really an incredible revolution…a democratic revolution.”  As a result of his triumph, Lloyd argued that “the property owners and the folks who were then controlling the media rebelled,” with the result that Chavez and his cadre had to move and close their media outlets down. Then he said the US sought to oust him, but Chavez came back stronger than ever, “and  had another revolution,” and then “started to take the media very seriously in his country.” Viewing Chavez’s totalitarian actions favorably, Lloyd implied that opponents of the right-wing media should do the same here.

Lloyd  also said that the “fairness doctrine” isn’t enough, that we need new “structural rules” to put teeth into it, and that “good white people in important positions” should “step down so someone else can have power.” Is it important that a man who now is Associate General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer of the FCC has these views, and that the public get to hear about them?

It is good journalism to report on what Lloyd believes—to show him uttering his actual words- and to call into question with editorial comment the judgment made by the Obama administration in appointing this man to an important media post.

Does Thomas Frank really think that he is making a sound explanation when he writes “that lots of people, including conservatives, have cited Mao and Lenin and other such demonic figures in all sorts of contexts.” I suspect that conservatives, and liberal democrats (with a  small d) who believe in the Western heritage of liberalism have cited these people to criticize their philosophies; quite a different thing than citing them approvingly as figures to emulate or as philosophers of class struggle who should guide our views on media policy.

So, let me close with Thomas Frank’s own words. What Frank argues is “only possible to believe after you have utterly closed yourself off to conventional ways of knowing, after you have decided that the reporting and analysis and scholarship on these subjects are not worth reading, and that you will choose ideological fairy tales over reality….”

Frank, of course, was referring with the above sentence to Glenn Beck. But his words apply to Frank himself. So here are two books he might send to Anita Dunn, Robert McChesney and Mark Lloyd. I would start with Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s acclaimed biography, Mao:The Unknown Story, followed by the book by Plino Mendoza, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and Alvaro Vargas Llosa, Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot.

These would be a fine start to help Thomas Frank get over what he accuses Beck of: “a new kind of ignorance.”  These authors indeed have “professional standards of inquiry,” the kinds of standards that Dunn, McChesney and Lloyd are obviously deeply in need of. I agree with Frank that “ideas have consequences.” The problem is that those Thomas Frank so admires are those whose heads are filled with bad ideas; ideas that history has shown have resulted in the horrors of the totalitarian century that just passed.

Perhaps it is not too late for Thomas Frank to do some reading himself.

The election is over, and one thing is clear. Despite the attempt of the Democratic spin machine to claim that their defeat is a victory — that Republicans won the gubernatorial race in Virginia and New Jersey because of local issues alone, and that their party does not have to worry about the future — they have suffered a rousing defeat. Local issues, combined with growing unpopularity with Obama and in particular the ObamaCare health proposals, led to Republican victory.

America remains a center-right — and not a center-left — nation. Remember, in New Jersey, Obama did all he could to try and guarantee Corzine’s success. He appeared with him over and over, and tried to attach his popularity to that of the governor whose own ratings were quickly tanking to the lowest digits. It didn’t work. Christie won 50% of the vote, and Corzine got a meager 44% in a state that went overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008. How Democrats can ignore this rather obvious conclusion is an issue for the psychologists, not for election analysts.

Yet, Republicans and conservatives too have to carefully evaluate the meaning of the results, and refrain from reaching conclusions that are not warranted. On this point, I second the analysis offered today by my PJM colleague, Roger L. Simon. The reason Doug Hoffman lost in the NY 23^rd Congressional District is that he ran as a purist of the take no enemies Right — that believes simple continual statements of the most far right conservative principles, particularly emphasizing so-called social conservative issues like opposition to abortion and to gay rights, would be the path to electoral triumph.

Instead, moderate and centrist voters who likely would have supported a Republican conservative like, let us say, Joe Scarborough — fiscally conservative and socially libertarian — or would have voted for the winning Bob McDonnell in Virgina, deserted the once solid Republican bastion (in that column since the end of the Civil War) and voted instead for the Democrat Bill Owens. In Virginia, although McDonnell is a traditional conservative, he downplayed the social issues and ran an effective campaign that stressed issues like transportation and jobs — issues that moderates and centrists are deeply worried about.

Here, we can learn from the analysis of a left-wing journalist like John B. Judis who writes today on TNR’s website:

If the results of New York’s 23rd are placed alongside those of New Jersey and Virginia, there is a clear lesson for the Republicans. In New Jersey and Virginia, the gubernatorial candidates ran to the center. Christie is a moderate, and McDonnell at least pretended to be. And as a result, they got the swing vote of independents and moderates. In New York-23, a diehard conservative backed by rightwing groups repudiated the center and lost to a neophyte Democratic candidate who probably could not have beaten Scozzafava in a one-to-one contest.

While the Obama administration continues its war against its media critics, well-known liberal journalists — instead of defending freedom of the press — are joining the attack on a news network they despise as much as does the administration. Gone is any seeming concern for the right of commentators to voice their own opinion, because mainstream liberal editorial writers are sure their opponents are both extremists and wrong.

Take, as our first example, Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of The Slate Group. Writing in last week’s Newsweek, Weisberg explained at the start that anyone who watches Fox News knows immediately that Anita Dunn’s charge that Fox has a “right-wing bias” is correct, since Fox always confirms “it with its coverage.”  Referring to Fox’s own reporting on the administration’s attacks on the network, he notes that Fox showed what he calls a “textbook example of a biased journalism.” If it is true, it is hardly surprising, since the very network under attack might be expected to come to its own defense.

Next, he refers to its commentators as “platinum pundettes and anchor androids.” He offers no names. Could he be referring to Chris Wallace, whose weekly Sunday broadcast is widely acclaimed as one of TV’s best weekend programs, and who publicly complained that never in his decades of broadcasting has he come across more of a bunch of “whiners” than he has seen in the Obama administration?  Is he referring to Megan Kelly, who did a yeoman’s job questioning ACORN founder Wade Rathke in a long and exclusive interview? Wouldn’t he want a defender of ACORN to speak on the one network that reported on its scandals? Is he upset, perhaps, that Kelly came off better than Rathke did?

He thinks it is a silly comparison to their charge that the war on Fox is similar to Nixon’s enemies list. Of course, he gives no reason why the analogy is false — perhaps because to most observers, it isn’t.

Next, he attributes the success of the many “tea parties” as due to Fox’s sponsorship of them — ignoring the fact that it was an internet created phenomenon that Fox alone chose to cover when others ignored them.  Evidently, Weisberg can’t distinguish between paying attention to events it finds newsworthy and sponsoring them. [I acknowledge that Glenn Beck anchored his show’s special coverage of the Washington DC tea party, which he supported.]  Weisberg’s fear is that now “ideologically distorted news” drives ratings up, and that others will soon imitate them in order to gain more viewers.

Not one word by Weisberg about MSNBC’s equally tilted drift to the precincts of the far left. Chris “thrill up my leg” Matthews is an unabashed liberal whose brand of politics stands at the left end of the Democratic spectrum, and its mainstays in prime time, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, are as far Left as O’Reilly, Hannity and Beck are on the right end of the conservative spectrum. If Fox reports critically about ACORN, for example, one can count on Maddow and Olbermann to offer unabashed defenses of the group presented as accurate news analysis.

Weisberg’s problem is that he takes pride that the press had an “old tradition of independence,” one that serves the “public interest” and not “parties, persuasions, or pressure groups.” He claims to be standing firm with this model instead of the Murdoch “model of politicized media” that is slanted in one direction.  Does he really act on this? Look at his own publication, Slate. Is there any reader of it who believes for a moment that it is anything but reflective of a certain kind of left/liberal mentality? Sure, it has one maverick — Christopher Hitchens — whose fame and persona as a media star allows them to run him, even though he alone continues to support a tough foreign policy against Islamic radicalism.  Just look through their list of columnists on their home page, and I defy you to find one voice aside from Hitchens who is outside of the liberal consensus.

My wife and I just got back from Kansas City, where we returned to learn about Dick Cheney’s speech last night to the Center For Security Policy.  Cheney revealed that the Bush administration had given the incoming Obama team a carefully developed strategy for the war in Afghanistan, and that it was a false allegation that the new administration had to start from scratch in developing a policy. “They asked us not to announce our findings publicly,” Cheney said, “and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt.”

Now, of course, Rahm Emanuel is seeking to blame the supposed need for a careful review on the failures of the previous administration, and to find some way to account for Obama’s indecisiveness on the issue of what to do in Afghanistan.  Cheney, as expected, argues that General McChrystal’s recommendations are solid and well thought out, and that Obama should implement them immediately. “Now,” he added, “they seem to be pulling back and blaming others for their failure to implement the strategy they embraced. It’s time for President Obama to do what it takes to win a war he has repeatedly and rightly called a war of necessity.”

The problem is that because Cheney is making that argument, liberals and Democrats will run to say that this is the position of the extreme right-wing, and hence should be abandoned. After all, Obama ran as the anti-Bush, and any policy put forth by the former vice-president is for the liberal-left going to be reason enough to reject it.

That is why the new issue of The New Republic that was waiting for me in the mail is so important. It contains in its pages two major articles on the U.S. and Afghanistan. The first is by Peter Bergen, a senior fellow at The New America Foundation, and author of a highly regarded book on Osama Bin Laden. Bergen argues that the argument we are hearing today from so many, that al-Qadea is the real enemy and is in Pakistan and that hence we can ignore and forget about the Taliban and Afghanistan, is completely false.

His point is that the evidence clearly shows that they are not distinct groups, and in fact have essentially merged into one new jihadist body. The heart of his argument is this:

These arguments point toward one conclusion: The effort to secure Afghanistan is not a matter of vital U.S. interest. But those who make this case could not be more mistaken. Afghanistan and the areas of Pakistan that border it have always been the epicenter of the war on jihadist terrorism–and, at least for the foreseeable future, they will continue to be. Though it may be tempting to think otherwise, we cannot defeat Al Qaeda without securing Afghanistan.

If returned to power in Afghanistan, Bergen shows, the Taliban would not become responsible and moderate, as “realists” like Stephen Walt and others claim. They will not become, he quips, “an ultra-rational clique of Henry Kissingers.” And if we fail to defend Afghanistan, al-Qaeda will gain new momentum and strength. To gain their ends, they want and need a state; and if we let them have control over Afghanistan, we will most assuredly up the ante for a major new attack on our homeland.

As I read the very latest UNHCR report, I could not believe that I was not looking at an Onion parody.  It is but the latest outrage from a would-be human rights commission set up by the United Nations, and which to our nation’s embarrassment, President Obama has seen fit to have the United States sign up as a member.

As Martin Peretz points out, “America’s new membership on the Human Rights Council has had no results in the fairness of the process. Did anyone imagine it would? Well, I suppose the president did.”  Peretz is right. And the current administration’s reversal of staying out of the farcical body is one of the affronts to dignity of our current Chief Executive.

As for the latest broadside, “The report therefore discusses, besides the human rights of women, the gendered impact of counter-terrorism measures on men and persons of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, and addresses how gender intersects with other prohibited grounds of discrimination, such as race and religion.” What this gobbledygook legalese means is that when the Israelis engage in counter-terrorism against terrorists and suicide bombers, they are threatening the rights of trans-gendered individuals. How? When a man dresses as a woman, the Israelis might embarrass an honest cross-dresser by subjecting him/her to a humiliating search, thereby interfering with the person’s sexual identity and human rights. They state: 

The report identifies the ways in which those subject to gender-based abuse are often caught between targeting by terrorist groups and the State’s counter-terrorism measures that may fail to prevent, investigate, prosecute or punish these acts and perpetrate new human rights violations with impunity. These violations are amplified through war rhetoric and increased militarization in countering terrorism, both of which marginalize those who challenge or fall outside the boundaries of predetermined gender roles and involve situations of armed conflict and humanitarian crisis in which gender-based violence and gendered economic, socialcand cultural rights violations abound. 

They add: “The report then draws attention to the fact that contrary to these international human rights obligations to ensure equality, some Governments have used the human rights of women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex individuals as a bartering tool to appease terrorist or extremist groups in ways that have furthered unequal gender relations and subjected such persons to increased violence.” 

On page 19 the report says: “Enhanced immigration controls that focus attention on male bombers who may be dressing as females to avoid scrutiny make transgender persons susceptible to increased harassment and suspicion.” (my emphasis.)

Liz Cheney is sending fervent Obama fans into a tizzy. First, Maureen Dowd, the most overrated op-ed columnist writing today, penned the most mean spirited column she has ever written and  perhaps the most inaccurate. She accuses Ms. Cheney of “regarding bipartisanship with the same contempt as multilateralism and multiculturalism,” and along with her father and sister, of leading “the charge against Obama, painting him as a wishy-washy loser who turned America to mush.”

There is nothing as crude as exaggerating a serious critique of Obama’s foreign policy, one that Liz Cheney regularly makes with aplomb and dignity, by dumbing it down to make Cheney sound absurd. Dowd is obviously furious that Cheney along with Bill Kristol and others have formed a new group, Keep America Safe, that seeks to heighten public awareness of the need to come together as a nation and demand a policy that protects our national security.

Dowd is scornful that Cheney charges Obama will “make America weaker.” After all, didn’t the Nobel Prize Committee respond to its critics by saying that Obama won the prize for contributing to a “world with less tension.”  But as Sean Curvyn writes on his website, “It’s a less tense world. Tell that to the Chinese dissidents…By conceding to the Russians on missile defense, he is reducing “tension” with Putin. By granting the Iranians further stages of delay before there are any real consequences for their pursuit of nuclear weapons, he is reducing “tension” with the Persians.” As he quips aptly, “if only he could reduce tension with Fox News.”

Another commentator who agrees is Marty Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic as his recent “Spine” blogs at TNR’s website makes clear. As he writes today , “Obama hasn’t reset the American relationship with Russia. He was taken for a ride. Maybe his vanity won’t let him admit it. But, believe me, the Russians know they have taken him (and us) for a big ride, indeed.” Obama, he adds, gave the Russians what they asked for, in the hope that Putin would then agree to tough sanctions against Iran. Secretary Clinton then goes to Russia, only to be informed by Putin that his government does not believe sanctions are appropriate. As Peretz concludes: “Of course, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. In fact, with the Russians, if you don’t demand and threaten a little, you get zero.” 

No wonder the Obama administration has decided to single out Fox News as its major opponent, and to wage war against it. Almost everyone acknowledges that with its signal slogan, “We Report: You Decide,” the network in fact leans towards the conservative side, particularly when it comes to its array of on the air pundits and commentators.  But what particularly must rankle the White House is that Fox’s ratings are growing daily, and at present during Obama’s first year in office, are the highest it has ever achieved.

I have addressed this question earlier,  in a blog in which I paid special attention to the forced resignation of Van Jones and to the expose of ACORN’s wrongdoings. Fox News was also the only network to consistently play the videos prepared by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, which quickly became so popular that not only did the other media outlets have to treat it as a legitimate news story- which it was- but was also taken up by the nation’s most popular comic talent, from Jay Leno to Jon Stewart.

To any observer, it is clear that if Fox is the conservative’s station of choice, MSNBC is the darling of those on the side of liberals and the far Left. Why else do these viewers regularly watch Maddow and Keith Olbermann?  Is what they do any different from what Beck, O’Reilly and Hannity do? Of course, MSNBC has its balanced “Morning Joe” with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. But Fox News also has its equivalent on its top rated Sunday program, Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace. And the 6 pm “Special Report with Bret Baier” has its daily panel, that regularly includes mainstream liberal pundits Juan Williams and NPR’s  Mara Liasson.

And yet, the administration has sought to only make war against Fox, and will not allow its people to be on any of their shows, even those widely acclaimed as fair-minded. As Anita Dunn, the White House communications director said, “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent. As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Given that position, it is no wonder people are worrying that an appointee to the FCC, Mark Lloyd, who has previously expressed his admiration both for Hugo Chavez and his revolution’s war against all media opposed to him, might be seeking to find ways to do the same thing to our TV and news sources via the tactic that they are only trying to enforce “diversity.”  Indeed, as Fox accurately reported, Lloyd himself made his goal clear in a 2007 report about the “structural imbalance” of talk radio.

 And in a public and videotaped panel in 2008, Lloyd called Hugo Chavez’s government the result of “really an incredible revolution…a democratic revolution.”  As a result of his triumph, Lloyd argued that “the property owners and the folks who were then controlling the media rebelled,” with the result that Chavez and his cadre had to move and close their media outlets down. Then he said the US sought to oust him, but Chavez came back stronger than ever, “and  had another revolution,” and then “started to take the media very seriously in his country.” Viewing Chavez’s totalitarian actions favorably, Lloyd implied that opponents of the right-wing media should do the same here.

Lloyd  also said that the “fairness doctrine” isn’t enough, that we need new “structural rules” to put teeth into it, and that “good white people in important positions” should “step down so someone else can have power.” Is it important that a man who now is Associate General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer of the FCC has these views, and that the public get to hear about them?

How do I know this? I admit it freely. The man who made this public, from research that anyone could have conducted, was Glenn Beck. Does this mean I agree with everything Beck says, or give credence to his often hysterical conspiracy theories and his endless and breathless monologues?  Does it mean I agree with this support of Ron Paul’s ideas or those of the extremist Bircher, the late Cleon Skousen? Of course not. But give the man credit. He alone has made us aware that this appointment was made. So far others have not picked up on Lloyd, and perhaps in his new office, Lloyd will abandon trying to put his proclaimed views into actual policy. But as citizens, we have a right to watch and see what he is doing, and if he makes moves that jeopardize a free media, respond by demanding that he too step down.

Naturally, the administration that appointed people like Jones and Lloyd must not be happy to see that Fox commentators  are exploring the backgrounds of appointees who have hitherto been under the radar.  Recently, Beck turned his attention to an equally little known Marxist scholar, Robert McChesney, who created the media watch group “Free Press,” who has explained his point of view in the following way: “Instead of waiting for the revolution to happen, we learned that unless you make significant changes in the media, it will be vastly more difficult to have a revolution. While the media is not the single most important issue in the world, it is one of the core issues that any successful Left project needs to integrate into its strategic program.” According to Beck, on a recent program, McChesney and his group met with the FCC commissioners at the White House, to advise them on programs to adopt to help enforce so-called “internet neutrality.”

I have no idea whether the assertion Beck made is accurate. But shouldn’t some media outlet and reporters investigate this, and see whether some in the Obama administration are asking in extreme far left Marxists to advise them on how to better mold the media and prevent the free expression of opposition ideas? If it turns out not to be true, wouldn’t that put a stop to some of the charges Beck is making, and that so enrage many liberals?

Rather than do that, it is clear the administration prefers to try and isolate Fox News by emulating Richard M. Nixon’s strategy of informing his people to blackball The New York Times, or to develop an “enemies list” of media people opposed to his policies and administration. Back then, liberals saw Nixon’s attempts as a gross interference with freedom of the press, and for many in the media, Nixon’s citation of some of them became a badge of honor to proudly wear.

Will a time come when the White House decision not to allow any administration spokesman to be on Fox News in 2009 backfire? Does Barack Obama, the great orator, really think if he appears for an interview with Chris Wallace- a seasoned and respected broadcaster- that he will not be able to handle Wallace’s questions, or that he will not be able to persuade any of Fox’s viewers that he, and not they, is right about the issues?

So far, in the White House battle with Fox News, it is Fox that has won. Their widely reported ban on Fox has been reported everywhere, and it makes the White House look fearful, weak, and ready only to talk with those who are more likely to agree with their agenda. Is this the change America wanted when it elected Barack Obama as President?

When I woke up this morning and saw the clip of the Nobel Prize Committee spokesman announcing that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, I thought that one of the morning talk shows was showing a clip of last night’s SNL Weekend Update parody. Unfortunately, as we now all know, it was all too real.

I can’t say anything more insightful than all of our colleagues on this space and on Commentary’s Contentions site—everyone should read some of their people’s very sharp comments – but I do have this thought about which speechwriter he will use to pen his acceptance speech.

I suggest that he will have to turn to none other than Bill Ayers, and arrange a secret way to ferret the drafts back and forth. Then, he will offer that Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, accompany him and Michelle to the ceremony. That will pose a problem. To do that, Ayers would have to agree to wear a tuxedo. True, Bob Dylan wore one when he got the Kennedy Center award. But we’re talking about Bill Ayers- the last living repository of the 60’s revolution; a man whose website proudly displays the Communist Red Star as its emblem. Nothing- not even attending the Nobel ceremony- is reason enough to go bourgeois. And that is a compromise that Comrade Ayers will never make. Remember, some principles cannot be broken.

Then again, when they were all underground, the Weather Bureau cadre were quite good as disguising themselves with false beards, hair dyed different colors, false mustaches and the like. When Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan hosted an award ceremony for an ecology program and was introduced by the then underground and disguised Abbie Hoffman, the Senator and all the press covering the event didn’t notice it was Hoffman in charge, even though he was on the lam from various charges that were pending and both the FBI and the police were constantly on the lookout for him. But, Abbie did have plastic surgery- and I don’t think Ayers has time for that.

So, there is only one thing that will prevent Obama from using Ayers as his speechwriter. The Nobel Prize Committee is planning to give him the Nobel Prize for Literature, in honor of his great memoir, Fugitive Days.  You doubt this? No one hates America more  for what it stands for than Bill Ayers, as is made clear in his book.  He’s a natural. Are you listening, Nobel Prize Committee?

In October 2008, Jack Cashill penned a much discussed blog, in which he suggested the possibility that Bill Ayers actually was the ghost writer for Barack Obama’s powerful memoir, Dreams From My Father. Later, he wrote yet another blog, reporting about many who sent him more material that they thought would corroborate his original suspicions about authorship of Obama’s first memoir.

Responding to Cashill’s work, I wrote my own blog about whether or not Bill Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father. I ended with some skeptical questions that must be addressed, particularly surrounding the assertion by author Christopher Andersen in his new book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of a Marriage. Andersen gives no sources in his book for his assertions.  Hence one cannot verify whom he spoke with, and whether or not the stories he tells about Ayers writing the book are true. Indeed, when queried a bit later by Howard Kurtz, Andersen backtracked and denied that in his book, he had said that Ayers wrote it. I reread the passages in the book, and contrary to what he said to Kurtz, that is indeed precisely what he wrote. His denial to Kurtz, however, certainly makes it appear that Andersen is a bit worried that he has been caught in somewhat of a lie.

Nevertheless, I thought that Jack Cashill’s case had to be considered. Others think Cashill’s arguments are rather weak. At Powerlineblog.com today, Scott Johnson calls Cashill’s arguments “speculative,” and his textual evidence rather “thin.” He notes, for example, that based on the kind of metaphoric threads he uses, both he and John Hinderaker could also qualify as Obama’s secret ghostwriters, if not for the fact that they did not live in Obama’s neighborhood when he was working on the book.

But now comes the article appearing yesterday from Anne Leary at Backyard Conservative. Bumping into him at Reagan National Airport, Ayers told her: “I wrote Dreams From My Father.” He then added that “Michelle told me to.” Leaving the site where they spoke, he said: “If you can prove it, we can split the royalties.” When Leary told him “Stop pulling my leg,” he responded: “I really wrote it. The wording was similar.” Leary persisted that perhaps he only edited it heavily, and again Ayers said he wrote it. She ended by asking Ayers why should she believe him, since he is a liar. He had no answer to that.  Almost immediately, the Independent D.C. Examiner picked up the story, and James Simpson complained that Ayers admitted his authorship, yet “one of the biggest political stories of the year is being completely overlooked by the Obama-struck mass media.” After reading Leary’s blog, he wrote that her report is possibly “direct confirmation…from Ayers himself.”