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.”

Writing in The Washington Post, Yale Law School Professor Bruce Ackerman attempts to chastise General Stanley McChrystal for standing behind his well known recommendations on the military strategy for the United States to follow in Afghanistan. What upsets the professor is McChrystal’s audacity to challenge the wisdom of the expert from Delaware, Vice-President Joe Biden- a man who has been consistently wrong on every foreign policy recommendation he has made for the past twenty years.

The man who voted against the First Gulf War under Bush 41 now favors less troops and the use of strategic bombing and drones—a tactic that would assure no return, harm innocent civilians, and guarantee America’s losing in Afghanistan. But the professor tells us “McChrystal has no business making such public pronouncements,” since the NSC, not the General, determines our strategy. Keep in mind, as Max Boot has pointed out, that McChrystal was not acting contrary to his orders, or even disagreeing with Obama. Indeed, Obama’s March 27^th edict was made clear when he announced a “comprehensive strategy” that would reverse the Taliban’s gains. As the president then argued, we cannot allow Afghanistan to fall to the Taliban, or “that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”

General McChrystal was simply doing what he was told: informing President Obama what needs to be done to accomplish the ends he said were necessary to achieve. Why would the President not listen to the recommendation of the very man he put in charge who knows the territory and what needs to be done better than anyone else? Does Ackerman really believe that Joe Biden has one ounce of credibility for his recommendations? This is especially the case, as Boot notes, since McChrystal was only “offering his judgment about what it will take to implement the existing policy.”

Nevertheless, Ackerman and others are making a very flawed analogy—that pertaining to the Truman-MacArthur fight during the Korean War. “We have no need,” Ackerman writes, “for a repeat of the showdown between President Harry Truman and Gen. Douglas MacArthur over Korea. Truman faced down his general the last time around, but it was a bruising experience.” Once again, Ackerman suggests that if the General does not “show more-self restraint,” there could be another showdown over the issue of civilian control of the military.

Columnist Eugene Robinson agrees. He too thinks the General should “shut up and salute,” and not campaign publicly on behalf of what he thinks should be done. Again, Robinson makes the same mistake as Ackerman: he does not seem to realize that McChrystal was defending the strategy Obama originally favored, not one contrary to that of the Administration. He was not, as Robinson charges, engaging in politics.

And in the same paper, columnist Richard Cohen too raises the Truman-MacArthur analogy, while failing to comprehend what that dispute was all about. Cohen, unlike his fellow columnists, thinks the war in Afghanistan “is eminently more winnable than was Vietnam,” and he knows to win, that more troops and funding are needed. That takes presidential leadership, and he is afraid that is something Obama lacks. “Does he,” Cohen asks, “have the stomach and commitment for what is likely to continue to be an unpopular war?” Will he send some troops- but not enough to do the job?

By now, there have been scores of terrific comments on the Polanski controversy. But perhaps the best single line was offered on it by Jay Leno. “It’s not as if he committed a real crime,” Leno said, “like colorizing a black and white movie.”  That comment reveals the mindset of the Hollywood elite, for whom anal rape of a 13-year-old drugged with Quaaludes is something to be forgiven. This is especially true  when committed by a celebrated director whose status as a Holocaust survivor offers him lifetime protection from having to pay for his own criminal behavior.

The usually astute Anne Applebaum, whose columns on political matters and the crimes of Communism are second to none, also joined in on behalf of Polanski’s defense. Writing in a Washington Post blog, Applebaum offered the following unique set of defenses: First, there “is evidence of judicial misconduct.” Since she wrote that line, however, new information has been released that indicates the testimony offered in last year’s documentary about Polanski, which for many people proved judicial misconduct, has been withdrawn by the talking head, the L.A. prosecutor in charge of the Polanski judicial misconduct allegations.

An article by attorney Marcia Clark (of the O.J. prosecution) on The Daily Beast reveals that the former prosecutor, David Wells, lied on camera when he said he had advised the judge on what course to take in order to send Polanski back to prison. “It never happened,” Wells said, and that statement undermines the heart of Polanski’s legal appeal. Wells said the director told him to make that statement, that the film would never air in the United States, and that “it made a better story if I said I’d told the judge what to do.”

Second, Applebaum argues that Polanski has already paid for his crime in many ways. He did not know the girl’s real age (a great excuse that reveals only the stupidity of those who repeat it). He has legal fees. He has suffered “professional stigma” and cannot return to the United States. What great suffering! The man jet sets around the world, is lionized by his own community of film world acolytes — who hardly show that he has suffered any stigma at all — earns a fortune for widely acclaimed films, and we are supposed to now see him as a victim.

In the 70’s, when I taught a course that covered the Civil War era and I dealt with slavery, I recall that black students in my class were outraged when I assigned a collection of slave letters edited by a white historian.  The argument they made was simple: whites cannot teach black history. That claim lead eventually to the absurdities of Afro-centrism.

Later, some feminists would argue that only women could teach women’s history. While mainly histories of the American Left have been written by sympathetic historians who are also on the Left- and who mine the past largely to rescue their heroes as models to follow for today-there is proof that conservatives can write sympathetically and with insight about the Left’s own history. The key example is the 2008 book by Daniel J. Flynn, A Conservative History of the American Left, which I reviewed favorably.  

But given the new polarization in America, the question must now be raised as to whether these same left-wing and liberal historians- most scholars who get Ph.D.’s in American History are of the Left- can write fair and insightful histories of the emergence of the conservative movement in America. The answer I have, a resounding yes- surprisingly comes from a lengthy cover article that appeared in the September 28^th issue of The Nation.  It is called “Right On: Tracing the History of Movement Conservatism,” and is written by Kim Phillips-Fein, an assistant professor at NYU’s Gallatin School.

Make no mistake. Ms. Phillips-Fein is unabashedly a woman of the Left. Aside from her first book that was published last year and that deals with this topic (and which I have not read) all her other popular pieces are from the standard left of center publications. Yet, in this lengthy discussion of twelve books that deal with the past of American conservatism (some old and others recent) Prof. Phillips-Fein offers interesting assessments and some shrewd observations, as well as challenging some of the Left’s own assumptions about the failure of conservatism and the triumph of their own side in the American political arena.

She starts noting that for a long time, the death of conservatism has been predicted on a fairly regularly basis. Despite the rifts and tensions that exist today among conservatives, she writes that in the past not only have they failed to lead to a predicted collapse, but “On the contrary, they have generated a strangely durable, tenacious politics that has avoided being shunted to the margins of American life.” Thus she joins the ranks of younger historians who not content with older New Left veterans who spent all their academic time doing research on the 60’s Left they once were part of themselves, have decided to follow the path suggested fifteen years ago by historian Alan Brinkley of Columbia University. Young scholars, he suggested, even or particularly liberal and left-wing scholars, study those whose movement had become “something of an orphan” in the literature, the conservative movement.

Now, studies of the conservative movement have become yet another cottage industry, just as studies about American Communism written by left-wing historians had become a few decades earlier.  She acknowledges that much of the motivation for this effort is that many of these new historians “have sought to understand the conservative movement partly to forge the tools to undermine it.” This is undoubtedly true, but to make this admission is to acknowledge that history should be a tool for understanding, not a tool to enable activists to learn what they should do in a current political fight.

What Prof. Fein-Phillips wants is something else, “a retelling of the larger narrative of the postwar period incorporating the insights of recent histories of the right,” especially at a moment when with the election of Barack Obama, the most  left-wing president in our history, so many assume the forward march of inevitable liberalism. She knows, however, that before Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, most scholars thought conservatism was a “relic” never to be revived, a sect made up only of “a menagerie of resentful oddballs and misfits…eccentric racists and assorted cranks.” A good historian, she does not want others to make such a mistake again.

She offers readers of her essay a summary of how since that time, historians have dealt with the reality that at first shocked and surprised them. First was a theory of social backlash that explained for many working-class reaction to 60’s social radicalism; then a realization that a shift had occurred in American politics and that a new political force had managed to grow and rise. Next came studies of movement conservatism and the social origins of its participants, who were “not driven by irrational fears or anxieties but rather by a deeply held set of beliefs about how society ought to be organized.” They were not those left out of a failing economy, but those who had won, and who sought to use the same kind of tactics previously engaged in by left-wing movements. She writes:

For some, the New Left’s inability to moderate its strident moralizing and appeal to a broader public made it tragically culpable for the ultimate failure of consensus liberalism–the left had been unable to speak to working-class Americans, who turned instead to the right. For others, the clash simply revealed the intractable racism endemic to segments of American society, meaning that there was no particular tactical failure on the part of the left. Yet most of these earlier scholars, who focused on the collapse of the New Deal electoral coalition, agreed that the modern right was born in this furious, embittered reaction against civil rights, feminism and the antiwar movement.

A newer generation of historians saw things differently. They argued that

Far from being a sudden, explosive and negative reaction to the decade’s tumult, the conservative movement simmered throughout the postwar period, motivated by its activists’ positive vision of small government, the perfect social ordering promised by the free market and a world without communism. The social crises of the 1960s may have offered the movement an opportunity to broaden its base of support, but conservatism was thriving before that upheaval. The earlier generation of scholars, after all, never did explain how thirty years of conservative politics could have sprouted from a few explosive conflicts in the 1970s. Nor could they elucidate how the blue-collar workers who cheered for George Wallace wound up supporting a politics committed to promoting the free market, fighting unions and rolling back the welfare state.

Thus, Prof. Fein-Phillips concludes that “it was necessary to look at the rise of the conservative movement on its own terms- to study its internal logic, its intellectual history and the way its activists promoted their agenda.” (my emphasis) For one, she challenges the common idea that the new right-wing exists as a populist revolt, and recommends books studying the origins of the revival of laissez-faire economics in the Southwest, and anti-statist politics among groups like truckers, and suggests that conservatism’s success comes instead of “deeper economic changes in the country.” She suggests that the entire postwar period “might be seen as no more than a ‘long exception’ to the more lasting conservative project of individualism and laissez-faire that has defined so much of American history.” Citing the new book by the conservative historian Patrick Allitt, she writes that to some “the post-1945 conservative movement is one more development of a strain of politics reaching back to the founding fathers.”

It is clear, therefore, that in evaluating what explains the growth of a conservative movement, Prof. Fein-Phillips does not slight the work of conservatives who have also sought to explain their own movement’s growth. She notes “Allitt emphasizes the continuities between postwar conservatism and the laissez-faire politics of the nineteenth century.” Indeed, she writes that “the old narrative has been turned upside down: more and more, historians are depicting the century as one of conservative strength only briefly interrupted.”

Historians, of course, look at the past, and do not as a rule try to predict the future. But turning to the current debate about conservatism, and to  Sam Tanenhaus’ much discussed book predicting its end, she writes that “the intellectuals who have brought conservatism to a broader public have been moving away from their old certainties.” She agrees with David Frum- although she does not mention him- that many are talking only to a small segment of the population, whom she calls “a narrow and frustrated segment of opinion,” and thus risk becoming more marginal and no longer part of the central focus of American politics. She cites approvingly the stance of Ross Douthat and Rehan Salam, “that Republicans need to win back the ‘Sam’s club’ voters and convince working-class people that family values are actually in their economic interest” and that they might have to give up a hard-line laissez-faire position.

Her article is serious, although her concluding paragraph reads like old-line left-wing boilerplate. She worries that many Americans still believe in laissez-faire politics and a purely market driven world. She criticizes Obama for being surrounded by Wall Street plutocrats. Yet for conservatives who seek to gain in influence once again, she warns her friends on the Left that “History has a strange way of rescuing the defeated.” And just when conservatism seems to be on its lowest rungs, she asserts that it is only now “that we can for the first time assess the full significance of all that the right has won.”

Obviously, readers of this blog will have much to argue with Prof.Phillips-Fein. Conservatives will disagree with her assumptions and how it shapes her own examination of the conservative movement. But we should welcome a real debate, especially one done without rancor and written in a serious fashion. At a moment when most liberal/left commentary is purely a set of venomous screeds, this essay by Prof. Phllips-Fein stands alone.

It was one of those ironies that the new issue of The Atlantic, which features the brilliant article “The Story Behind the Story” by Mark Bowden, arrives just after ACORN, Van Jones, and Yossi Sergant were brought down by bloggers, young conservative activists and talk-show hosts on Fox News. What Bowden deals with is the amazing debate that took place during the period that Judge Sonia Sotomayor was preparing for her Senate hearings prior to her Supreme Court confirmation.

We all recall watching on virtually every news station — not only cable but the MSM key outlets — her remarks at a Duke University panel in 2005 and a speech at Berkeley Law School in 2001, at which the then Circuit Court judge said that her identity as a “Latina woman” made her judgment superior to that of a “white male.” At the Duke panel she seemed to say that appellate judges make policy, and then followed that with these words: “I know this is on tape and I should never say that, because we don’t make law, I know,” at which her law school audience all laughed.

It was these remarks that led many conservatives to oppose her and caused many to argue that Sotomayor was not going to be the moderate she claimed to be. How did these videos get to the stations immediately after it was announced that Obama picked her as his choice? The answer is that it came not from scores of network or news reporters combing through files, but from one conservative blogger in particular. He is Morgan Richmond, a man who runs a computer consulting business and blogs during his spare time as a hobby at the relatively unknown website VerumSerum.com, which he runs with a Christian conservative, John Sexton.  His goal was, Bowden writes, “to develop original stories that attract attention” and would resonate, not to damage the candidate.

Usually his website gets 30 readers a day. Yet what he uncovered, after going through long tedious tapes of the judge speaking at the two law schools, would soon be known in almost every American household, at least those who watch at least one news program. Every news program ran his tapes and never verified their accuracy, or checked to see if Sotomayor’s remarks were made in context. Nor did they cite the source of the videos, thereby, as Bowden says, “abdicating its responsibility to do its own reporting.” Thus, he writes, “several hours of Internet snooping by Richmond at his upstairs computer wound up shaping the public’s perception of Sonia Sotomayor.”

Critics portrayed her as a racist and liberal activist, which Bowden, and even Richmond, now acknowledge was not accurate. Richmond told him: “She’s really fairly moderate, compared to some of the other candidates on Obama’s list … she really wasn’t all that bad.”

Bowden says in conclusion that we now live in a “post-journalistic” world, in which our democracy is in a constant political battleground. Bloggers exist to help one side or the other, which leads to what Bowden sees as “distortions and inaccuracies, lapses of judgment, the absence of context,” which do not bother the bloggers, since they are simply ammunition for their own chosen side. Truth is simply what comes out of whoever wins a particular battle — it is winning that is key, not who is right. This, Bowden argues, is not journalism.

What he despairs is the result that we have more propaganda, and not news, with no room for compromise. Hence he asks a key question:  “Isn’t there, in fact middle ground in most public disputes?” Can’t one weigh public good against factional goals? Can’t we decide the public interest in other than through a “partisan lens,” in which “politics becomes blood sport”?

Those who were skeptical of Barack Obama’s bona fides before the campaign, particularly the nature of  his apparent relationship (or non-relationship, if you believe Obama) with Bill Ayers, will be stunned by Jack Cashill’s new revelation. Remember Cashill? He is a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue University and a blogger at American Thinker, one of the multitudes of conservative websites.

In October 2008, 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. His claim was so reminiscent of the discussion before Bill Clinton’s first campaign about who wrote the novel Primary Colors, which bore only the name “Anonymous.” Some suspected Joe Klein, the political journalist. Klein vehmently denied the allegation. Then, he was forced to admit authorship when a literary detective compared phrases in Klein’s writings and those in the novel for New York magazine, and Klein was forced to hold a press conference admitting that he indeed was the author.

In this case, Barack Obama did not pull a Klein, especially since, as Cashill wrote, “no reviewer of note has so much as questioned Obama’s role in the writing.” That left him, a rather unknown figure, isolated in trying to make the case. And as he also acknowledged, his arguments, although many found them compelling, could not be proved to everyone’s satisfaction. As he put it: “Shy of a confession by those involved, I will not be able to prove conclusively that Obama did not write this book.  As shall be seen, however, there are only two real possibilities: one is that Obama experienced a near miraculous turnaround in his literary abilities; the second is that he had major editorial help, up to and including a ghostwriter.”

And so his effort became just another one of those apparent conspiracy theories so prevalent in the ranks of both the left and the right. Then at the end of June 2009, Cashill returned to his original article. This time, 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. Two contributors whom Cashill does not name, he writes, made a  contribution that “should dispel the doubts of all but the willfully blind that Ayers played a substantial role, likely the primary role, in the writing of Dreams.” Again, the two contributors and Cashill played literary detective, offering more examples of strange similarities in the metaphors used in both Ayers’ Fugitive Days and in Obama’s Dreams. One of them found 759 striking similarities. Cashill found one of his contributor’s analysis to be “systematic, comprehensive, and utterly, totally, damning.” You can read his article and judge for yourself.

And now, Cashill picked up the new bestseller about Obama and his wife, Christopher Andersen’s Barack and Michelle:Portrait of an American Marriage. What he found simply threw him for a loop because, I suspect, it was the last thing Cashill expected to find. Andersen writes in his book that after Obama finally got a new contract to write a book, Michelle Obama suggested that her husband get advice “from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.”