Today is my late mother’s 90^th birthday. We sometimes had words. For starters, she couldn’t abide George W. Bush. Of my last visit in 2005, however, my memories are sweet. I did not know how ill she was. She told me how my dad had proposed to her. They shared a love of poetry, especially Robert Burns. Praising the Scot’s lyrical “Mary Morison, Ma Jo (My Joy),” my father said: “If you marry me, your name will be Mary Morrison.” What poetry lover could resist?

My mother told me how she’d walked across the Brooklyn Bridge at midnight during World War II. She crossed over walking arm-in-arm with her young sisters-in-law. The kicker: “I was carrying you then,” she said. We differed strongly on abortion, but I will always cherish those stories she gave me as her parting gifts.

Frieda was the mother of one of my best friends in high school. Often, I’d drop by their home, looking for my friend. I’d often linger talking politics with Frieda and her husband, Irv, even if my friend was not at home. Irv was a Democratic zone leader in our town. Frieda did not suffer from polio. She suffered from nothing. Her lively talk distracted me from the special shoes and hobbling gait that polio had inflicted on her. She was totally like her beloved FDR. He, too, used witty repartee to distract everyone from his polio. Frieda and Irv named their black Scottish terrier after FDR’s little dog, Fala, and they moved to his town of Hyde Park when they retired. Frieda and Irv instilled in me an indelible memory of the Holocaust and a deep concern for Israel.

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“We who hate your gaudy guts salute you”

William Allen White

Republican William Allen White, editor of Kansas’ Emporia Gazette, was often exasperated with President Franklin Roosevelt, but he recognized his great qualities of leadership. Recently, one of the callers to a popular conservative talk show was especially angry at Newt Gingrich: “Why, he said FDR was the greatest president of the twentieth century!”

A highly acclaimed recent book, The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shlaes, argues that Roosevelt’s famous New Deal did not improve the stricken economy in the 1930s, and may even have slowed the recovery. It’s a commonplace among conservatives to argue—against the New Deal’s vast public works projects—that it was really the military buildup leading into the Second World War that got us out of the Great Depression. But that leads us inevitably to look at FDR’s wartime leadership. Columnist Pat Buchanan agrees with libertarian Ron Paul that we should never have entered the war against Hitler in 1941. Both of those gentlemen seem to have forgotten that it was Nazi Germany that declared war on the U.S.

As a conservative, I would not defend many of FDR’s New Deal policies, although we should note that his Labor Secretary, Frances Perkins, the first woman of Cabinet rank, fought tirelessly to protect women from the hazards of coal mining, tunnel construction, and lumbering. Why? Because such jobs were hazardous to mothers. FDR’s backing of union demands was always linked to “a living wage” for the working man. It was assumed he was working to support a wife and children.

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The New York Times takes a firm stance against slavery. The “Gray Lady”—as the authoritative “newspaper of record” was once known–wants everyone to know that she won’t tolerate backsliding on the great moral issue of the nineteenth century.

I take no issue with the Times on slavery or on segregation. The liberal conscience of America—for so the editors see themselves—had an honorable record on those twin evils. In the American Civil War, the Times staunchly defended Lincoln and his Emancipation Proclamation. Similarly, during the modern Civil Rights era, the Gray Lady thundered daily against Jim Crow. It was for many of us the great moral issue of the twentieth century.

In the 1960s and 70s, I was a daily reader of the Times. But recently? Not so much.

And the reason is simply that I cannot abide the Times regularly railing against the defenders of human life. The Times routinely excoriates the Roman Catholic Church. Don’t even ask them about Evangelicals and Lutherans who speak up for the unborn.

Since that grim gray day in 1973 when Roe v. Wade was handed down, the Times has not found a single abortion it could not defend. Of 53,000,000 innocent lives lost, there is not one that should have been welcomed in life and protected by law. At least according to the Gray Lady.

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Think of an iceberg and a ship. What comes to mind? The Titanic, of course. And if you don’t mentally picture the greatest luxury liner in history with her stern in the starry, moonless sky, about to break up and go under, you haven’t been to the movies. Unfortunately, Hollywood created a thoroughly dishonest account of that “night to remember.” The image of a bribed ship’s second officer who deliberately shot panicked civilians is only one of the many offenses against the well-documented truths of that night one hundred years ago.

I was researching an American history book several years ago when the subject of the Titanic came up in the text. Although some 1,500 lives were lost, she was not the greatest maritime disaster in history. So, what was the greatest? In those pre-Google days, I had to go hunting.

I learned that the greatest maritime disaster was the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff on January 11, 1945. That German vessel was evacuating terrified refugees from East Prussia. The Soviet Red Army was overrunning this Nazi territory, raping and murdering.

A Soviet submarine torpedoed the German ship and she went down with loss of 9,000 lives, mostly civilians, mostly women and children. The original name for the ship was to have been Adolf Hitler. Hitler, however, fearing the symbolism of any vessel bearing his name being sunk, had forbidden any such naming. So the vessel was named for the Nazi leader of Switzerland.

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Ah, the New York Daily News. How I remember that tabloid journal from my boyhood. That was the newspaper that splashed across its front page photos of the bloody barbershop where Mafia don Albert Anastasia met his end. It was then–is it still?–the largest circulation newspaper in America. In Britain, the tabloids (“tabs”) were called penny dreadfuls. That’s because they cost a penny and they lacked the magisterial tone of the Times of London. Every morning they sold out and every evening they were used to wrap fish and chips.

Now, our Daily News is still plugging away. They conceive it as their duty to inform New York’s “working stiffs”–the subway straphangers–what they should think about the world. Don’t bother going inside to find the editorials. They’re all right there–on the front page. And so is the bias of the Daily News. I wouldn’t say the paper leans to the left, ideologically. The Leaning Tower of Pisa leans. This newspaper’s bias is flat-out, prone, supine.

Sometimes, the bias is so pronounced as to be hilarious. Did you know that John 3:16 is “Tim Tebow’s Verse?” The Daily News thinks it is. It’s almost as if the young quarterback spent his early years in the Philippines as a Wycliffe Bible Translator. If you consider this story, you are warned that–whoa! watch out here–Tim Tebow did a Super Bowl ad for the “anti-abortion” group, Focus on the Family. Focus on the Family is probably anti-Mafia, too. And anti-rubbing out dons in barbershops.

But the fact that they are anti-abortion is information you gotta know. It needs to be front-and-center for discerning readers of the Daily News. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.

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My Mainer friend, Bob Knight, called me last night with the news: our old colleague Tom Landess had died in South Carolina. He apparently suffered an aneurysm while watching a football game Sunday night. I hope it was Tim Tebow’s. Tom was a tireless laborer in the vineyard. A social conservative for decades, we was still in the harness at age eighty.

I had not seen Tom in ten years and had spoken to him only a few times since he returned to the sunny South. Tom joined our staff at the U.S. Department of Education in 1986. That’s when reporters, not so kindly, referred to that agency as “Fort Reagan.” I would joke we were all committed to disestablishing that department, as our brave president was. But if liberals in Congress would not let us do that, we should conduct ourselves so that they will wish they had never created it.

Shortly after meeting Tom, I started laughing. And never stopped. Like Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Tom was not only witty himself, but “the occasion of wit in others.” If you wanted to find him on the fourth floor of that dreary government building, you could just go down the hall, turn right, and follow the peals of laughter.

Very soon I learned that Tom was an American by birth and a Southerner by choice. He exemplified the best in the South. He told us endless stories of the Agrarians, an important literary school of the 1930s and 40s. But he sure could puncture the pieties. He’d tell you the whole story of Allan Tate’s writing of “Stonewall Jackson,” relating the almost worshipful feeling that Southerners have for that intrepid Presbyterian warrior. Then, he’d catch you up by saying: “It’s not a very good book.”

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It’s the General’s Highway in my hometown of Annapolis. Few of the Christmas shoppers at the Mall probably stop to read the roadside marker. But it is so called because it’s the route that General George Washington took in 1783 to resign his commission to the American Congress. Congress had been meeting in Maryland’s capital city. The members had been run out of Philadelphia for failure to pay the troops. Some things don’t change. A handsome flag, America’s first peacetime flag, was hanging from the Old State House where Congress was sitting.

Congress was eager then, as now, to get out of town. Christmas was fast approaching.

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FRC staff, visitors, and friends on the Web had an extraordinary opportunity this week to hear a lecture by Leticia Velasquez. Mrs. Velasquez is the mother of a Down Syndrome child. She spoke movingly of her experiences and how she viewed this child as a special blessing from God. Nurses told her eight years ago, “we regret to inform you that…” It started off that coldly, that clinically. “Mongolita,” her husband told her, using the Spanish word for Mongoloid. But Leticia is a feisty New Yorker. She answered back: “This beloved child will never shoot up her school or do drugs.” And she’s right about that.

Sitting in the audience, I remembered my first encounter with this subject. I was a graduate student reading the biography of Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle had then only recently retired as President of the Fifth Republic of France.

A military hero during World War I, de Gaulle at 6’5″ towered over most of his countrymen, both figuratively and literally. In the interwar years, Col. de Gaulle taught at Saint-Cyr, the French military academy, and was an outspoken advocate for tank warfare. His theories were considered too radical, and he was shunted aside. Only in 1940, did de Gaulle see his ideas put to devastating use–by the Nazis panzers as they plowed through the Ardennes forest. While the divided French Cabinet argued about whether to surrender or keep fighting, the newly promoted Gen. de Gaulle escorted a British friend to the airport outside threatened Paris. Then, without so much as a toothbrush, he closed the door to the aircraft and flew to England. He watched from the air as the battered French towns below burst into flames. His own wife and daughter Anne were down there.

He rallied the French people with a speech delivered over the BBC. And he led the Free French throughout the war. Afterward, he briefly led the government before going into retirement. But in 1958, France was wracked with internal divisions over Algeria, communism, and much else. Called out of retirement, Charles de Gaulle became President of France. He re-wrote the constitution, creating the Fifth Republic that governs France to this day. In World War II, he restored French honor after the debacle of Hitler’s invasion and occupation. As President, he sought to make France respected again throughout the world.

Retiring for a second time in 1969, de Gaulle was asked by an interviewer what gave him the courage, the stamina, and the vision to fight so hard for his country. Unhesitatingly, he answered: “The love of Anne de Gaulle.”

As a student, I was puzzled. But I soon found out what he meant. Anne was born with Downs Syndrome. Charles and his wife Yvonne raised Anne at home. What’s so unusual about that? At that time, most of France’s upper classes, and certainly most ambitious military figures, would quietly place such a daughter in a convent school, where loving and devoted nuns would care for her. There would be visits several times a year, of course, but the child would effectively be banished from the family.

Not the de Gaulles. They rearranged their entire domestic life around the need to love and care for Anne. And Anne returned that love in abundance. One of the most moving scenes I ever read showed Charles and Yvonne standing at the gravesite in a small country churchyard in Colombey Les Deux Eglises. Embracing his grieving wife, the world leader said: “Now she is like all the others.”

As an historian, I’m often asked why it is we don’t seem to have leaders on the world stage who are like the giant figures of World War II. In France today, 96% of unborn children diagnosed with Down Syndrome are killed. In the U.S., it is 92%. These lethal rates are even higher among the elites from whose ranks we draw our leaders. Might it be that we no longer produce leaders who can love as unconditionally as the de Gaulles? Anne’s love inspired and motivated one of the greatest leaders of the Twentieth Century. Perhaps we need more such lovers. And more capacity to love.

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Google famously tells the world: Don’t Be Evil. Good idea. There’s a lot of evil going around. Yesterday, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Sunnis decided to take their dispute with Shi’ites to a higher court when one of these votaries of the religion of peace entered a Shi’ite mosque and blew himself up, killing dozens of others. Evil. Pretty clearcut. But then there’s today’s Google logo. It’s a tribute to the 125th anniversary of Diego Rivera’s birth.

Check it out. I have a terrible confession. I like it. The guy’s art is appealing. His murals of Mexican peasants and industrial workers touch me. I love his bold, bright colors. My hero Winston Churchill said he planned to spend his first thousand years in heaven assaulting canvasses with nothing but the loudest, brashest of colors. So what’s the row about good old Diego? Well, the big Mexican folk artist (big in reputation, and 300 pounds big) was a big Communist. The Rockefellers kind of balked at his May Day mural featuring good old Vladimir Lenin leading the happy peasants and workers through Red Square. Lenin, it should be remembered, whose Communist Party card was Number One, refused to let his mistress play Beethoven piano sonatas for him; he didn’t want them to soften him. Lenin enjoyed, really got a rush out of picking up a telephone in his Kremlin office and ordering a thousand people shot in Vladivostok, 9,000 miles away from Moscow. Okay, so I can’t help liking Rivera’s art, minus Lenin. But here’s a link I felt honor-bound to consult. I doubt you’re going to see Nikolai Getman on the “Don’t Be Evil” corporate logo anytime soon. He’s unknown outside conservative circles. But I hope we will all check out his Gulag Collection. He doesn’t have as many bright colors as Diego Rivera.

Slave labor camps tend to be a bit monochrome. Look at Getman’s haunting paintings of zeks being shot, or forced to work in uranium mines, or even being staked out, Christ-like, on a tree to be attacked by swarms of Siberian mosquitos. So, feeling guilty about Diego Rivera reminded me to check out Nikolai Getman once again. Our heroes will never be the most popular. Their work will never be seen in Rockefeller Center. They will not be offered in exhibits in the National Gallery of Art. Their birthdays will not be celebrated by Google. But here’s a consolation. If you study Nikolai Getman’s Gulag Collection, you’ll have a leg up on not being evil.

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Defense Sec. Leon Panetta has issued a commemorative message to the survivors of Pearl Harbor. It might better be called “Leon’s Amazing Whodunnit.” The secretary waxes poetic, calling the generation that fought World War II “the greatest generation” and lauding their heroic sacrifice. He thanks them for their courage and steadfastness. This is entirely appropriate.

There’s only one thing missing: Nowhere in Panetta’s paean to the vets does he mention why this date, which President Roosevelt called “a date which will live in infamy,” should be remembered. He never mentions that the attack was staged by air and naval forces of Imperial Japan.

Now, if you are a modern Secretary of Defense, you must remember always that America has had a close and cooperative alliance with democratic Japan for more than half a century. You doubtless recall as well that we have U.S. armed forces stationed in various bases in Japan today. You will also want to keep in mind the fact that Japan looks to us for military assistance in the event that North Korea attacks South Korea, or China attacks Taiwan. And we rely on Japan for vital intelligence about movements in Asia.

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I was headed to the hospital where my granddaughters were born. It excited me to think that they were born on my late father’s 101st birthday. My “Pop” was the Yankee-est of Yankees, born in Brooklyn. He never tired of telling me tales of the Civil War. He was a serious student of Lincoln’s diplomacy.

I was born in Brooklyn, too, and less than ten miles from the Old Navy Yard where the great Union warship, USS Monitor, had been built. It was the Monitor that defeated the Confederate ram Merrimack in a monumental clash off Hampton Roads, Virginia, March 9, 1862. As Pop taught me, the day before that fateful encounter, the ironclad Merrimack had devastated Union warships blockading the South. The rebels had re-named their seized Union warship the CSS Virginia.

This monster sank the Congress, and the Cumberland the previous day and was bearing down on the vulnerable wooden Minnesota. The day prior to the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack was the worst single day for the U.S. Navy in its history, prior to Pearl Harbor. If the South succeeded in breaking the Union blockade, then recognition of the independence of the Confederate States of America might rapidly follow and a breakup of the Union would be inevitable. That’s how important it was when that little “cheese box on a raft” steamed forth to meet the Merrimack.

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Trip Dyer, one of the brightest of all our FRC interns, challenged me when I told his class I thought Winston Churchill’s life was the most documented human life ever lived. Trip thought that it was likely that the present Prince William’s life has been better recorded. He may have had a point there.

We certainly didn’t have photographs of Winston’s minutes after his birth–seven months after his parents’ marriage–on this day in 1874. But we know he was born not in his parent’s fashionable London flat. Instead, after his mother’s riding mishap that day, he came into the world early. He was born at Blenheim Palace, the ducal estate of his famous Marlborough ancestors. They were not nearly so famous then as they would become. Winston would write four great volumes on the great Duke of Marlborough, who had defeated the armies of Louis XIV and who was a central figure in England’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-89. Many American Founders looked to that revolution as their model for our own.

Winston was intensely proud of his noble English forbears. But he was just as proud of his American antecedents. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was a beauty from New York, whose tycoon father owned the New York Times. Jennie’s ancestor was said to be Pocahontas. That American princess married an Englishman and captivated the royal court of her own day with her beauty and wit.

Winston’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a reforming politician, a Tory democrat, who was on track to become Prime Minister before he rashly challenged his party leader, Prime Minister Salisbury. Like Icarus who flew too close to the sun, Lord Randolph fell from the post of Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer–second highest in the House of Commons, never to rise again.

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Do we think it will stop with banning crosses by the side of remote highways in the Utah desert? It will not. The atheizers will not rest until they have sandblasted all the crosses in American public life and bulldozed all references to Jesus on federal property.

I thought of this yesterday when I served as an usher at the Naval Academy Chapel. A dear friend had passed away suddenly.

Standing by the elevator, I could really study the stained glass windows in the chapel. The sun streamed through, brilliantly lighting the figure of Admiral David Glasgow Farragut. The 64-year old Farragut is shown lashed to the rigging of his ship, the USS Hartford, at the Battle of Mobile Bay. Fearless as he was, he suffered from vertigo. He is known to history for one great saying; “Da-n the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” Farragut’s family wanted us to know that, salty sailor that he was, he was also a man of deep faith. So the well-thumbed prayer book of Admiral Farragut is encased in this Chapel.

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We already know who the featured speaker at the Gettysburg Address Sesquicentennial will be. Organizers of this one hundred fiftieth celebration have asked President Obama—two years ahead of 2013–to lead the list of distinguished Americans expected to commemorate President Lincoln’s immortal words, delivered November 19, 1863. Event planners must be assuming that Mr. Obama will be re-elected. It would be awkward, wouldn’t it, to have him be the lead speaker if he has been defeated for office?

Well, awkward fits. President Lincoln went up to Gettysburg by train the afternoon before the cemetery’s dedication. He tried to get some sleep that night, but revelers kept him up with their drinking and singing. The party atmosphere that prevailed in Gettysburg at that time was worse than awkward; it was ghastly. Lincoln seems not to have noted it.

Nor did he mind being asked merely to deliver “some appropriate remarks.” The President of the United States, the commander-in-chief of the greatest armies and navy this country had ever assembled, the Great Emancipator himself, was given only a secondary role in the ceremony. It reminds us of the story of Lincoln greeting an old friend from Illinois. The visitor expressed surprise that the nation’s leader should be blacking his own boots. “Whose boots should I black,” Lincoln asked humorously.

I have been to Gettysburg dozens of times. I never tire of seeing that battlefield and walking through that National Cemetery, that hallowed ground. I took scores of students there on field studies. I made a point always of having them join hands atop the monument to the 20^th Maine Regiment, the unit commanded by Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.

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There’s a theme being played out on some radio talk shows: Just nominate any minimally acceptable candidate for president, so long as he (or she) is not scary, and that candidate will cruise to victory, pulling in a strong House and Senate majorities. The formidable Charles Krauthammer has been offering a variant of this notion. He says voter intensity doesn’t count. Every vote is equal in the voting booth.

As well intentioned as these intelligent callers and commentators are, they are wrong. Voter intensity is everything. It determines who shows up at those voting booths. Krauthammer and others perceived a strong conservative tide that swept away thousands of liberals in the 2010 elections. The country is moving conservative, they say.

The country is more conservative than liberal, to be sure. All polls show that about twice as many Americans count themselves conservative as liberal. But that does not assure that the GOP wins the next election.

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A glittering panel was assembled this week on Washington’s EYE Street, the home of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). They had come to discuss Ronald Reagan’s career in the movies and how that influenced his political life. Before Reagan, people asked: “How can an actor be president?” After Reagan, people recognized his joke: “How can you be president if you haven’t been an actor?”

The panel was chaired by Politico’s John Harris. He led off by telling the 40-50 attendees that he graduated from high school in 1980 and cast his first presidential vote in 1984. Mr. Harris was too tactful to mention that it probably wasn’t cast for RR. That’s OK, 59% of the votes cast that year were cast for the Gipper; he carried 49 states.

The panelists included NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell, ABC News’ Sam Donaldson, former White House Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein, and, of course, former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) Dodd left the Senate in January to assume the presidency of the MPAA. I counted one likely vote for President Reagan of the five panelists. Fair and balanced.

Sen. Dodd was most charitable. He spoke of having gone to the White House early one morning for a meeting. The night before, President Reagan had “lost” the Louisville debate to challenger Walter Mondale. Fritz even got a baseball bat from his admirers in the press titled “The Louisville Slugger.” Dodd expected to find Reagan down in the mouth, or at least tired.

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It’s an unlikely inscription, to be sure. British Professor David Starkey leads off an episode of the 2003 documentary, Monarchy, with a scene from Bayeux, in Northern France. He’s walking amid the headstones—4,000 of them—of British Commonwealth soldiers who died during the World War II invasion of Normandy. But the inscription he reads, carved above the classic columns of the war memorial, brings us back—far back—into the mists of time:

Nos a Gulielmo

Victi Victoris

Patriam Liberavimis

(We, Conquered by William,

Have Liberated the Conqueror’s

Native Land.)

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“Lutherans are Evangelical Catholics.” That’s how the late Richard John Neuhaus described our church body, before he entered into communion with Rome and became a Catholic priest. He never said he converted. Why? I suspect the answer may have been engraved on a handsome bronze medallion then-Pastor Neuhaus gave me in 1983. It is a Martin Luther 500^th anniversary commemoration. On the obverse side is a quote from the man we call the Blessed Doctor: “I believe that there is on earth throughout the whole wide world no more than one holy common Christian church.”

That’s what I believe. Pastor Richard Neuhaus had welcomed me into the fold when I joined the Lutherans for Life national board. He encouraged me in my pro-life advocacy. And, oddly enough, when I had the honor to meet him, I was working for the Roman Catholic Bishops of Connecticut. They had consciously chosen me, a non-Catholic, to head up a pro-life office in the Constitution State. The joke one priest told me about my unorthodox selection was from a popular ad of the time. “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish rye.” In the same way, the good father said, “you don’t have to be Catholic to be pro-life.”

He was right. When a hostile reporter from the Hartford Courant demanded to know what percent of the Catholic Church’s money went to “pro-life activities,” I answered mildly: All of it.

I was in a quandary when I first came to faith in the mid-1970s. The Catholic Church was then, as now, the leading voice in the world for the sanctity of human life. Many of the leading “Mainline Protestants” were outspokenly pro-abortion. Tragically, they still are. Only now, there are millions fewer of them. I could never have joined one of them. What part of the readings about King Herod and the slaughter of innocents had they missed?

Even though I admired the Catholic Church’s brave stance, I knew that I was from the Protestant half of my family. We were, truth to tell, unchurched. But if we had gone to a church, it would have been Protestant.

So, what an exciting thing it was for me to discover The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod’s  (LCMS) strong biblical stand against the unjust taking of innocent human life. When I studied more about Martin Luther, I learned he had been schooled as an Augustinian monk in Saxony. In fact, young Dr. Luther had earned a degree in theology at a time when doctorates were rarer than Nobel Prizes are today (and more deserved, too.)

Luther’s courage appealed to the warrior in me. He was warned not to go to the Diet of Worms. That was a legislative assembly of German petty princes and church prelates presided over by the Holy Roman Emperor. You might be betrayed by the Emperor and burned at the stake, as the reformer Jan Hus was burned, his friends cautioned.

Luther would not be deterred. “I would go,” he said, “if there were a devil on every roof tile.” And so, in 1521, he went. Ordered by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to recant his writings on the authority and primacy of Scripture, Luther refused. “Here I stand,” he boldly proclaimed, “God helping me, I can do no other.”

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Bill McGurn formerly headed the Asia bureau of The Wall Street Journal. An experienced and perceptive journalist, he is also a pro-life writer. That’s interesting, since the vast majority of his professional colleagues are pro-choice.

In his most recent column, McGurn never mentions the “issue” of abortion. It’s not what he’s writing about when he scores New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg for hizzoner’s feckless response to Occupy Wall Street.

What, for Heaven’s sake, does the trashing of Zucotti Park have to do with taking the lives of innocents in abortion? A lot. The first right we possess is the right to be free from bodily harm. The unborn child is that person with the greatest need for such protection.

Bill McGurn understands this. It’s not surprising, therefore, that Mayor Bloomberg, who has been a pro-abortion militant and who led the charge to abolish marriage in New York State, fails in his first duty: the protection of the lives and property of New Yorkers through the enforcement of just laws that safeguard the rights of all.

Anyone who has visited Lower Manhattan knows the many small shops and restaurants there. Donut shops. Coffee shops. Chinese take-outs. Pizza joints. There is a densely packed world of commerce taking place there at a frenetic pace. Lunch hour on Wall Street makes the yelling and shoving on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange look tame.

For all the noise and clamor, it is a fun place to go. I am thinking of all those employees of all those little shops and of the police and sanitation workers who have to contend with the spoiled brats of Occupy Wall Street.

A decade ago. I joined a group from FRC that went to New York City. We were there to urge the UN not to kick out the Vatican delegation from the world body. Cardinal Martino, the Vatican delegate to the UN, thanked Family Research Council warmly for our supportive statements. He was most gracious to us. And he seemed especially to appreciate the fact that most of us were—as Catholics term us—“separated brethren.”

We weren’t separated that day. We were fighting together to fend off a premeditated attack by international Planned Barrenhood and by the secular Left. The group urging the expulsion of the Vatican delegation even enlisted some front groups with “Catholic” in their name to cover their real designs.

Apart from our meeting with the Cardinal, what stands out most in my memory was the quiet encouragement we got from UN employees. One of them said the place was “Hillary’s sandbox” and it was about time we got there to represent “normal people.”

Those who work in the day-to-day operations of the UN are likely to be New Yorkers and Jerseyites, regular folks, “strap hangers” who have to contend with daily commutes in the Big Apple.

They are our natural allies in New York. They are the ones much more likely to be pro-life and pro-marriage. They are the ones who gave us high signs when they saw the simple message of our UN-blue buttons. The words The Family in white were all that our buttons said. It’s all they had to say.

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The comparisons between Barack Obama and Franklin D. Roosevelt began even before our 44^th president had taken the oath. In late 2008, TIME magazine portrayed president-elect Obama as FDR on its cover. The wish was father to the thought. Mr. Obama encouraged such dreams from his political father. He did not look to Bill Clinton as a model. And certainly no one would take Jimmy Carter as a mentor. No one, that is, who wanted to have a successful presidency.

Barack Obama might have wanted to offer Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson as a role model. At least, Johnson’s signing of historic Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation could be commended. But LBJ led us into the morass of Vietnam. After four bloody years in the jungles of Southeast Asia, Johnson could give no convincing reasons why the U.S. should prevail there. “Hey! Hey, LBJ! How many kids have you killed today,” chanted anti-war protesters then. The parents of today’s Occupy Wall Streeters drove Johnson from office in defeat and disgrace. Scratch Johnson.

That leaves John F. Kennedy as the Democratic hero to whom Barack Obama might look for inspiration. Well, maybe not. JFK said “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Oops! That’s not the kind of martial music Obama’s Peace Caucus-goers could march to. And JFK took us to the Moon. President Obama’s NASA chief thinks his Mission One is to make Muslims feel good about themselves. Also, Jack Kennedy cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans, arguing that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” That wouldn’t do for a socialist program of “spreading the wealth around.”

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