And we can visit the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. There, we will have a chance to smile, perhaps to laugh, at the parody magazine cover they’ve displayed. It shows President Barack Obama riding in an open car, a battered fedora atop his head, his head thrown back, and his dazzling smile radiating throughout the room. In his brilliant teeth is clenched a cigarette holder, held at a jaunty angle.

It’s a sight gag. It’s a throwback. It’s a pose so familiar to older Americans that it’s instantly recognizable.

Franklin D. Roosevelt died when I was still in my mother’s womb. Still, I grew up with stories about him. His voice was familiar in our home–if not on records, certainly from TV documentaries of World War II. My relatives would delightedly mimic his head-tossing delivery and his stentorian eloquence.

Now, you can hear him, too. The Miller Center at the University of Virginia has archived many original recordings. Included in their collection is President Roosevelt’s great speech from June 10, 1940, delivered seventy years ago this week to the graduating class at U.Va.

For context, you must realize that the British Expeditionary Force, the main British army, had just been evacuated from the beaches at Dunkirk, France. The French army was in a state of stunned collapse, reeling from the powerful blows of German panzers rolling swiftly through Northeastern France and strafed from above by Nazi Stukas. Hitler’s Luftwaffe chief, the hugely menacing Marshal Goering, had fitted sirens to the wings of his dive bombers for the express purpose of terrifying the women and children upon whom their wicked fury was wreaked.

The peoples of the Americas looked on as newsreels and newspaper photos showed fleeing refugees. These refugees–old men and women and little children crowded the roads and market squares of quiet Belgian, Dutch, and French villages. French reinforcements couldn’t get to the scene of the battle.

It would not have been surprising if young people in America–those like the U.Va. Class of 1940 –felt that the world was just too threatening a place and retreated from it.. But that is not how they reacted. Despite the terrors of war–in the air, on the seas, under the oceans–the reaction of President Roosevelt’s audience that day was strong, thunderous, and like Roosevelt himself, confident.

He had the gift of putting the great conflicts of his day into the perspective of America’s long struggle for freedom. He summoned the heroes of the past to give courage to the people of his own time. Soon, all too soon, they would be called upon to prove themselves heroic. And led by FDR, they would.

The President’s words of scorn for the duplicity, the treachery, of Italy’s self-annointed Duce, Benito Mussolini, are unforgettable. On that very morning–June 10, 1940, despite his protestations of peace, and only when he saw that Hitler had struck the killing blow, the jackal Mussolini attacked France from the South. “The hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.” In FDR’s Hyde Park accent, that came out nay-bah. Stirring stuff.

Our current President has a young speech writer, Jon Favreau, who is not yet thirty.

Mr. Favreau has no sense of America’s storied past, no feeling for what the National Archives calls “the glory and romance of our history.” He does not reach back to Jamestown or Plymouth Rock. Nor does he evoke the trials of Valley Forge, the “landscape turned red” at Antietam, or the sands of Iwo Jima.

Does Jon Favreau even know that Americans walked on the Moon and through the Brandenburg Gate? He churns out words for President Obama that are sonorous and silky, but which evaporate upon contact with the hard and cold reality of the world.

Here’s a challenge: Try to recall even one line from President Obama’s Normandy speech of just one year ago. Can even Jon Favreau do it?

If the President is really convening a committee of experts to tell him “whose a– to kick,” I have a suggestion: Jon Favreau.

If President Obama really wants to connect with the American people, it’s time he learned something of how we got here. It is this failure to form a bond of the heart with Americans past, present, and future, that led the Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz to call him the “Alien in the White House.”

No one–no matter how much they “hated his gaudy guts”–could ever have said that about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Unless President Obama learns–and learns quickly–how to make this vital connection with the people he hopes to change, that failure will  doom his presidency.

I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Oh, the mountain has been rumbling for weeks,” I told her, trying to assuage her concerns. “NO! It’s erupted. Mount Saint Helens is all over the news.”

I ran to the window, straining to see any evidence of the volcano’s dense cloud of ash. I saw nothing. We were about 100 miles north of the mountain.

Turning on the television, we learned that the volcano had indeed erupted, with the force a nuclear bomb, and with devastating results. The top of the mountain was blown away. Volcanic ash rose violently and menacingly sixteen miles into the air. Spirit Lake was destroyed.

Washington State’s rich agricultural regions—Eastern Washington—were all in the path of the ash cloud. Soon, pictures on television showed towns and villages blanketed with ash, like some weird blizzard in May. And the TV stations provided maps of the expected path of the ash cloud.

I called my mother and dad back to reassure them. They were more likely to feel the volcano’s effects than we were, I told them. And by that time it passed over Virginia, it would mostly have dissipated. That’s because the prevailing winds were carrying the cloud eastward. The ash cloud would have to circle the globe before it dumped any ash on those of us who lived north and west of the destruction.

Our hearts and our prayers went out, nonetheless, to our friends in Eastern Washington. It seemed they were facing an environmental disaster of the first order. The media had been playing up the catastrophic possibilities for plant and animal life for months.

The press was not so concerned about Harry Truman, however. This curmudgeonly old cabin-dweller—no relation to the feisty President of the same name–had been adopted by Seattle’s TV stations as the hardy representative of the Wild West.  Soon, even if Harry Truman had had second thoughts about the rumbling mountain under his feet, he would have faced embarrassment for not sticking it out.

Gov. Dixie Lee Ray, an atomic scientist, had publicly pleaded with Harry to be reasonable. She wanted to send in state troopers to yank the old man out of the path of danger. Mount Saint Helens will erupt, she said, and the results could be devastating.

For awhile, they were. Several dozen people lost their lives, including the redoubtable Harry Truman. Those blanketed towns and farms had a job digging out.

But what strikes us now, thirty years later, is not how fragile the earth is, but how resilient. Trees have come back to the blast area, especially red alder. Fish are back in Spirit Lake. Deer and elk thrive today. Here’s what an official U.S. Government website says about Mount Saint Helens:

It wasn’t long before scientists working in the area found surviving populations of plants and animals. This was particularly evident in areas protected by snow cover and where erosion had thinned the overlying ash deposits (along streams and in gullies that formed on hill slopes). Plants were observed sprouting from the pre-eruption soil surface and signs of activity by gophers and ants indicated that subterranean animals (living below ground) had survived beneath the volcanic ash.

The survival of plants and animals in the midst of the apparent total devastation was of special interest to the scientific community. Early studies have demonstrated that, even after a large-scale, catastrophic disturbance, recovery processes are strongly influenced by carry over of living and dead organic material from pre-disturbance ecosystems. At Mount St. Helens, ecosystem recovery was influenced not only by the survival of plants and animals, but also by the tremendous quantities of organic material that remained in the standing dead and blown down forest.

What was the most surprising discovery immediately following the eruption?

The single greatest surprise to scientists entering the blast zone shortly after the eruption was the realization that many organisms survived in, what initially appeared to be, a lifeless landscape

Washington State is not only renowned for Boeing, Microsoft, and Starbucks, the Evergreen State is justly famous for her apples, cherries, and blueberries. This rich volcanic ash proved to be a great fertilizer. The state’s agricultural bounty quickly bounced back.

Let’s consider this when we hear predictions of gloom and doom from floods or earthquakes or even oil spills. We don’t welcome these events and, where we can, we should take vigorous action to mitigate the effects of these natural disasters.

When Scripture tells us “The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” we need to internalize that message, caring lovingly for the great gifts He has given us, but mindful that, in the final analysis, He has the whole world in His hands. It’s not in ours.

Check out PBS’ NOVA, “Back from the Dead” trailer

“Among the actions to be taken in the near-term are:

(1)   Expand the pilot program to fully deploy eGuardian as the DoD-wide force protection threat reporting system to handle suspicious incident activities. The eGuardian system, which is FBI-owned and maintained, will safeguard civil liberties, while enabling information sharing among Federal, State, local, and tribal law enforcement partners, including interagency fusion centers.

(2)   Complete the deployment of the Law Enforcement Defense Data Exchange system (D-DEx) allowing all DoD law enforcement agencies to share criminal investigation as well as other law enforcement data as appropriate. D-DEx  will be a consolidated database to enable organizations across the Department  to query, retrieve, and post criminal investigation and law enforcement data in a single repository.

(3)   Establish the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs as the DoD lead for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force program.

(4)      Strengthen DoD’s antiterrorism training program by incorporating lessons learned from the Fort Hood incident, Department of Homeland Security best practices on workplace violence, and civilian law enforcement active shooter awareness training.”

Shooter awareness training? What in the world is that supposed to mean? Can any American take any comfort from this dismal report? Does anyone think anyone at Fort Hood—or in the nation, for that matter–had any problem being aware of the “active shooter” in their midst?

I am surprised the report did not advocate advance positioning of grief counselors—good grief—and offer to distribute candles for memorial services before the next outbreak.

Here’s my recommendation:

Step 1. Require every member of the Armed Services, officer, non-com, and enlisted, to take an oath. The oath might say something like this:

I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

What’s that you say? They already take such an oath? That you’ve even seen them take it? That it looks like this:

Very well. Then that brings me to Step 2.

ENFORCE THE OATH.

Nidal Hasan was commissioned in the Army of the United States. He took this oath, along with millions of other Americans. For years, he was allowed to spew venomous anti-American and anti-Christian statements. He was cosseted and coddled in the interests of diversity.

Every time he spoke up for jihad he was in violation of his oath. And he got away with it. Treason is not diversity. Sedition is not diversity. Insubordination is not diversity.

By winking at Hasan’s treasonous statements, the army brass created the conditions for this mass killing. They were enablers of Hasan’s murderous rampage. For the troops to see such treasonous statements going unchallenged and undisciplined is to undermine morale at every level.

Once, in the midst of the Civil War, President Lincoln heard that one of Gen. McClellan’s officers, a Major John Key, had been loudly telling his fellows that the reason McClellan did not pursue the retreating Gen. Lee and the rebel army was because the “game” was to fight the war only to reach a stalemate; then, Major Key said, the generals North and South would intervene to force a negotiated settlement. Key’s sentiments were by no means as dangerous, as treasonous as Nidal Hasan’s were. But Lincoln summoned Key to the White House and dismissed him from the army on the spot. Although Lincoln was a famously merciful man, he never relented in his determination to banish disloyal sentiment from the army.

That’s the kind of leadership that is missing here. With this kind of pathetic report, filled with all the usual vapid sentiments, the typical bureaucratic gobbledygook, who among our all-volunteer services can have confidence that their seniors will truly look out for them?

Our military has historically been a great place to bring Americans from all backgrounds together. Men and women from different regions, races, religions, ethnic and social groups work together, fight together, live together, pray together. The military has been a great unifier for our country. Our armed forces have survived and prevailed over every enemy that has come against them. But they cannot survive political correctness.

“Small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht” is what Rich calls the apparent excesses of a tiny minority of anti-Democratic health care bill protestors.  His own crypto-racist presuppositions are apparent in Blow’s evisceration of those he terms “extremists:”

Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.

Let me posit for Mr. Blow an alternative scenario: For the Left,

Even the optics must be disturbing.  A (nationally recognized) woman (Sarah Palin) opposed the health care bill that passed the House.  The bill’s most visible and vocal opponents included a practicing Catholic (John Boehner) and a Jew (Eric Cantor).  And prominent black men (former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele and former Godfathers Pizza chairman Herman Cain) didn’t want the black man in the White House to sign the bill into law.  It’s enough to make a New York secular liberal go crazy.

Frank Rich., fueled by the same reactionary unction as Mr. Blow, writes something eerily similar in his piece:

The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play.

Again, allow me to rephrase:

The conjunction of a black Republican National Committee Chairman and a female conservative vice-presidential candidate – topped off by a wise African-American conservative on the Supreme Court and a powerful evangelical committee chairman – would sow fears of disenfranchisement among the tiny self-anointed secular elite in the media and the academy no matter what policies were in play.

However, unsatisfied with smarmily tarring all conservatives with the base brush of bigotry, Rich returns to the 1964 Civil Rights Act as further evidence of the Right’s calumny (apparently ignorant of the fact that more House Republicans voted for it than Democrats).  Blow goes one better, asserting that Tea Partiers, per a Quinnipiac University Poll, shows them to be “disproportionately white, evangelical Christians and ‘less educated … than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack’.”

Ah, the Evangelical Slur rears its head: conservative Christians just don’t have the smarts the rest of society possesses.  This assertion is to intellectual credibility what the Big Mac is to nutrition.  The tired asseveration that evangelicals are pear-headed ignoramuses fails the test of serious scrutiny.  According to a comprehensive poll done in 2004 by GreenbergQuinlanRosner Research for the PBS program “Religion and Ethics,” “About 22 percent of white evangelicals hold 4-year college degrees, compared with 27 percent of the general population. (One) quarter (27 percent) of white evangelicals have some sort of post-secondary education, compared to 26 percent of the general population.”

Sadly, Blow and Rich were silent when images of a decapitated George W. Bush, of guns being placed to his head, and tee-shirts bearing the message, “Kill Bush” were rampant among the Left.  Throughout most of the 2000s, the blogosphere was flooded by horrible messages of hate and vileness and violence directed at the 43^rd President.  Most of us on the Right attributed these sickening things to a minority of political opinion, yet remained troubled that MoveOn.org, Michael Moore, Arianna Huffington and other pop culture “acceptables” accepted and encouraged Bush hatred as though it were merely boisterous patriotism.  Jonah Goldberg correctly calls this “liberal fascism.”  Now that a handful of people go too far, suddenly conservatives (both Tea Partiers and Republicans) are (I derive this list from exactly two op-eds over a three day period in the New York Times):

• Frothing
• Copper-faced
• Apoplectic
• Goons
• Vigilantes
• Unglued
• Homicidal (at least rhetorically)
• Apocalyptic (not to be confused with apoplectic – see above)
• Petulant
• Hysterical
• Bullies
• Desperate
• Extremists
• Angry
• Frustrated
• Nefarious
• Mad (Tea Partiers)
• Anemic (Republicans)
• Bigoted (Tea Partiers)
• Violent (Tea Partiers)
• Anachronistic

And most are, I suppose, bad dressers, to boot.

Both Blow and Rich conclude triumphantly that white conservatives are a dying breed and that the demographics of America doom the (overwhelmingly white) Tea Party movement to failure.  Here, to borrow a phrase from the late Israeli diplomat Abba Eban, Blow and Rich experience “an isolated spasm of lucidity.”

America’s racial and ethnic composition is indeed changing.  Conservatives need to take seriously the reality that sometime in the mid- to late-century, American whites will become merely the largest plurality in a multi-ethnic nation.  We have to do a far better job of winsomely and thoughtfully engaging people of color and persuading them that the conservative vision of personal responsibility, limited government, lower taxes and true social justice (for the born and the unborn) is the best course for our – and I emphasize, our – nation.

But Blow and Rich should consider the wisdom of America’s greatest President, Abraham Lincoln (a Republican, no less!): The hen is the wisest of all the animals because she never cackles until her eggs are hatched.

The battle over the ideas and convictions that should shape our country should never include in its ranks those pathetic souls on either extreme whose malevolence, whether racial, ethnic or ideological, inspires their political conduct.  But Charles Blow and Frank Rich should beware of cackling too soon.

Whose country is it?  All of ours.  Of “We, the people,” who lived not under a whimsical state manipulated by a Leftist bourgeoisie elite, but a constituted political order grounded in a written text and the unwritten but palpable virtue of an informed citizenry.  Conservatives are fighting to keep it.  And we’ve just begun to fight.

The White House ordered the Justice Department Thursday night to consider other places to try the 9/11 terror suspects after a wave of opposition to holding the trial in lower Manhattan.

The dramatic turnabout came hours after Mayor Bloomberg said he would “prefer that they did it elsewhere” and then spoke to Attorney General Eric Holder.

Well, the dam appears to be breaking on ostensibly what is the easiest of the “Jack Bauer War” issues facing the Obama Administration: that is, where to try KSM.  I say “ostensibly” because the matter of where to try KSM will not be as easy it may seem.

All this being said, there are all sorts of conflicting stories about whether or not this will happen.  See Jack Foster’s piece at NRO.

According to the Daily News’ account four options are being considered – all in New York State:  1) Governors Island (near Manhattan and Brooklyn); 2) West Point, N.Y. (U.S. Military Academy); 3) Newburgh, N.Y. (Stewart Air National Guard Base); and 4) Otisville, NY (Federal Correction Institution).

Why won’t this be so easy?  First, leaving aside Governor’s Island, these communities will go crazy in opposition.  Even Governor’s Island may not leave New Yorkers feeling warm and fuzzy.  Second, a civilian trial will still be a disaster.  Think Slobodan Milošević turning the Hague into a circus for a year.  Enormous damage will be done to the national security.  Third, the cost will still be enormous.  Fourth, what civilian will risk his or his family’s well-being to sit on the jury?  Can the jurors identity be protected?

I guess the good news is that they can always move the trial back to Guantanamo.  Didn’t KSM already plead guilty before a military commission down there and ask to be executed?  Oh, I forgot, he was given the mass-murdering-jihadist-criminal-procedure-do-over-and-mulligan.

So, how long does Eric Holder have left as Attorney General?

One excerpt about information gathered from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (“KSM”) is astounding, mind-boggling:

[KSM’s] resistance is described by one senior American official as “superhuman.”  Eventually, however, the techniques work….

He begins telling his CIA de-briefers about active al Qaeda plots to launch attacks against the United States and other Western targets  He holds classes for CIA officials, using a chalkboard to draw a picture of al Qaeda’s operating structure, financing, communications, and logistics.  He identifies al Qaeda travel routes and safe havens, and helps intelligence officers make sense of documents and computer records seized in terrorist raids.   He identifies voices in intercepted telephone calls, and helps officials understand the meaning of coded terrorist communications.  He provides information that helps our intelligence community capture other high-ranking terrorists,

KSM’s questioning, and that of other captured terrorists, produces more than 6,000 intelligence reports, which are shared across the intelligence community, as well as with our allies across the world.

Perhaps I’ve been under a rock, but I never heard these details before.  I assume they are correct.

Some of the KSM information appears to have foiled an August 2006 plot to destroy seven airliners flying across the Atlantic from London-Heathrow in a revised version of KSM’s failed 1994-1995 Bojinka operation.

Top CIA officials are clear that the enhanced interrogation methods in the Bush counter-terrorism program were essential to obtaining extremely valuable, life-saving information. According to Thiessen, Obama shut the program down within 48 hours of assuming office when he signed Executive Order 13491.  That order allowed only interrogation techniques permitted in the U.S. Army Field Manual 2 22.3.  The manual does not permit water boarding, for example.

The Left and President Obama have completely misread the desires of the American people on this matter.  I put it this way:  Jack Bauer – Yes; Nation Building – No.  That is, the American people want to fight the jihadists in any manner necessary to kill and defeat them anywhere in the world.  They have never waivered on this principle, and that includes keeping Guantanamo prison open in Cuba.  It also means keeping it filled.  That said, the American people have never been keen on protracted wars of attrition, counter-insurgency, and/or nation-building – see, Iraq and Afghanistan.

To be fair, President Obama may have been fooled by John McCain’s idiosyncratic positions on interrogations and Gitmo.  I mean idiosyncratic for a Republican.  Inside the GOP there are very few people who agree with McCain on either position.

That said, the Obama Administration clearly does not understand how Americans feel about Jack Bauer’s War.  Consequently, its behavior after capturing the underwear bomber left bare a policy which American’s deem to be ill-advised and dangerous.  Instead of treating Flight 253’s Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as an enemy combatant, Obama/Holder have decided to try him in federal courts.  After singing for a mere six hours, Abdulmutallab was given a lawyer and has stopped talking.  Now he’s negotiating with prosecutors.

Look above at Thiessen’s quote and think about the information that would have been lost had KSM only talked to us for six hours.  Seven planes lost over the Atlantic?  That’s a pretty high price to pay for adherence to glib liberalism.

This is a public opinion cancer that will not go away for the administration.  The KSM trial in New York City may decimate the Democrat Party in that State, and it will go on for months and years.  Now there will be a trial in Detroit for Abdulmutallab.  And, heaven forbid, that an actual attack on the United States or Americans overseas succeeds.  Obama would be finished instantaneously.  Every Gitmo prisoner brought to the United States will constitute a new crisis.

Therefore, it is completely unsurprising that Scott Brown, the senator-elect from Massachusetts, was able to pound Martha Coakley on this point.  Brown is a USAF reserve JAG officer who was able to hammer away at the Dem’s soft position on terrorism.  This he succeeded in doing even in ultra-liberal Massachusetts.

In sum, while we are correct in focusing on the health care legislation as the core political issue at present.  I would argue that the Obama Administration’s foreign policy and national security strategy are hurting it and doing so at an increasing rate of damage with the passage of time.

That’s why it matters when a good man like Fred Grandy launches into a shtick that includes this: “Oh, the Founders, they thought black people were just three-fifths of a person.” Maybe Fred was joking. Maybe he was pulling everyone’s leg. But it didn’t sound like it.

Political theorists can get pretty heavy duty. Which is why morning drive time includes very few of them as talk show hosts. Bill Bennett is one of the few who can pull it off successfully. But political theorists talk about “ideological hegemony.” That means you get the other guy–your opponent–to think in categories that you’ve determined in advance. Another phrase would be “setting the terms of the debate.”

If even conservatives seriously think that the Founders were so racist as to deny the full humanity of black people, then, “Houston, we’ve got a problem.” Grandy’s “three-fifths” crack echoes Al Gore’s infamous rants during the 2000 campaign. Gore demagogically whipped up crowds in Pennsylvania saying that those who favored “original intent” in constitutional interpretation wanted to deprive black people of their civil rights. They thought you were only three-fifths of a person, Gore suggested.

The Founders thought no such thing. The much-misunderstood Three-Fifths Compromise was just that, a compromise. Northern, anti-slavery delegates to the Constitutional Convention would have preferred not to count slaves at all for purposes of representation in Congress. This would have penalized slaveholding states and given them lesser influence in the House of Representatives. Just as important, it would have penalized them in the Electoral College that chooses our Presidents. Delegates from slaveholding states would have preferred to count slaves fully for purposes of representation, but they didn’t want to be taxed fully for slaves.

So the Founders compromised. It’s important to point out that such a compromise also existed in the Articles of Confederation, prior to the Constitution, when all taxation was by state.

A little-noted feature of the Three-Fifths Compromise is that it gave a reward–an electoral bump, if you will–to all states that emancipated their slaves. Free the black people of your state, and you get to count them fully for Congress. Then, American you can increase your numbers in the House and in the Electoral College.

Seven of the original Thirteen States got that reward. Tragically, six of the original thirteen failed to free their slaves. And other slaveholding states were later admitted to the Union.

The Founders were anti-slavery. They took pains never to use the words “slave,” “Negro,” “African,” etc, in the great charter of freedom they gave us.

Abraham Lincoln’s Midwest common sense exceeded even that of Fred Grandy. Lincoln said the Founders hid away in the Constitution the fact that we had slavery, just as a man who has a tumor or wen or other defect tries to hide it from view. Frederick Douglass hailed the Founders’ Constitution and said not of word of it would have to be changed if the states would only agree to free their slaves. They were both right.

Why does any of this matter today? Because President Barack Obama is using the tragedy of American slavery in 1787 as a pretext for casting aspersions on the Founders’ great work. Why should we listen to the authors of the Constitution? They allowed slavery to exist. They thought black people were only three-fifths of a person. So goes the liberal take on the Constitution.

It wasn’t true then. It’s not true now. Lincoln knew that if the Founders had tried to ban slavery outright in 1787, the liberty-promoting Constitution would never have been adopted. But the principles of the Declaration of Independence as embodied in the Constitution were, Lincoln said, like “apples of gold in pictures of silver.” Lincoln used the words of Scripture to speak of his awe and reverence for the Founders’ work. Should we have less?

They’ll be greeted by dozens of people from the local community, many of them former service members themselves. Some of these older veterans can tell sad stories of returning from Vietnam to a cold and sullen airport arrival. No more. Operation Welcome Home is determined to give our all-volunteer servicemen and women the homecoming they deserve.

Incoming flights are posted on the organization’s website—www.operationwelcomehomemd.org.  Greeters are invited to bring “goodie bags” of food, water, and other favors from home. When the uniformed service members come through those arrival gates, many are stunned to see the reception committee yelling, cheering, applauding, and playing “I’m proud to be an American” on iPods. To be hugged by total strangers is an unusual experience, to say the least.

But they are not total strangers. They cannot be total strangers. For those who have worn the uniform, no one in the military will ever again be a total stranger. Perhaps watching the made-for-TV series, Band of Brothers, can explain that all-too-bloodless term “unit cohesion.” It might better be called the Bond of Brothers.

The most shocking thing about Fort Hood is that an obvious traitor in our midst was allowed–for reasons of political correctness–to move freely among our troops. Someone at the highest levels should pay with his stars for allowing such a hostile environment to exist.

Our best young soldiers and sailors today say without hesitation “I’d take a bullet for my brother.” Many of them, sadly, have done just that. No one should ever take a bullet from a traitor in the ranks.

This week, thankfully, hundreds of veterans from Iraq have passed through BWI. They’re given special Christmas cheer as they come home in time for the holidays. They are all volunteers. And the ones who welcome them home are all volunteers, too. It’s another reminder that Liberty is the most precious gift under our tree and that we are the land of the free because of the brave.

Following their meeting, Mr. Obama reported, “On areas where we disagree … I don’t anticipate a meeting of the minds anytime soon.”  Welcome, Mr. President, to the real world.

This must be jarring for the former community organizer, whose utopianism was his presidential campaign’s stock-in-trade.  Shortly before his election in November 2008, he told a Missouri audience that “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Earlier his campaign, he went so far as to assert that we can build a form of “the kingdom of God on earth” (he later disavowed this).  This kind of language prompted University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein to argue that during the 2008 campaign, then-Senator Obama presented an “elusive utopian vision of hope and change.”

“I am asking you,” implored candidate Obama, “to stop settling for what the cynics say we have to accept.  Let us reach for what we know is possible: A nation healed. A world repaired. An America that believes again.”  “And,” as political commentator Dana Milbank imaginatively perorates, “still be home for dinner.”  This was what candidate Obama promised during the campaign.  Elusive, indeed.

Americans are not the only skeptics.  Polish journalist Marek Magierowski calls the President’s foreign policy a “mirage.”  Regarding Mr. Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, Gideon Rachman of Britain’s Financial Times commented, “While it is OK to give school children prizes for ‘effort’ — my kids get them all the time — I think international statesmen should probably be held to a higher standard.”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, scholar Eric Cohen comments of Mr. Obama’s approach to policymaking:

Brimming with confidence in his abilities and certain of the rightness of his views, he has undertaken a wildly ambitious agenda at home and abroad. He will bring peace between Arab and Israeli, wean Iran from its nuclear ambitions, restructure the international financial system, set us on the path to the abolition of nuclear weapons, reconcile Islam and Christendom, and end global warming, while introducing universal health care at home and bringing the country out of the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Happily, Mr. Obama seems to be getting a bit mugged by reality.  In his Nobel speech, he spoke forcefully about the intransigent reality of human conflict:

We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified … I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world.

For words like this, George W. Bush was burned in effigy and hated deeply.  But they are words an Americana President must speak if he is to be true to his most fundamental duty: As Commander in Chief, to defend America in the face of the evil.  As President Bush reminded us, “good and evil are present in this world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise.”  It’s good to see his successor, chastened by the stern authoritarianism he found when visiting Russia and China and the overt threats of Iran and North Korea, is adopting his predecessor’s outlook.

As Benjamin Kerstein writes in the December 15 edition of The New Ledger:

… no messianic political movement can withstand its encounter with power for very long. Political messianism is inherently uncompromising, absolutist, and obsessed with perfection and the possibility of perfection. As such, it cannot survive politics itself, which is, for the most part, the exact opposite of all of those things. Political messianism must either compromise — and thus cease to be messianic — or collapse.

Yet Mr. Obama would be, perhaps, less surprised by his tepid welcome from America’s erstwhile “partners” and the failure of his international charm offensive if he would go back to the very beginning of our nation.

America’s Founders had a decidedly cautious view of the possibilities of the way government conducted policymaking at home and abroad.  The reason was there much more wary view of human nature.  “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” wrote James Madison, the person perhaps most singly responsible for the original text of the Constitution.  “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

Madison’s leeriness of government’s possibilities was rooted in his essentially biblical worldview.  “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form,” he observed.

In other words, human fallenness permeates human nobility and dignity.  Thus, Madison’s conclusion: Be careful of what you expect of government; without intentional virtue of character, man’s innate “depravity” will surmount his ability to govern himself wisely or well.

Madison’s Federalist colleagues Alexander Hamilton and John Jay shared his view.  Hamilton wrote of the “folly and wickedness of mankind” and of “human nature as it is, without flattering its virtue or exaggerating its vices … men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.”  Jay talked “the dictates of personal interest” and said men “swerve from good faith and justice.”

“We must take human nature as we find it,” warned George Washington.  “Perfection falls not to the share of mortals.”  Does this mean we should all be glum, unmoved by the possibility of a brighter tomorrow for ourselves or our children?

No: We should strive to live up to the demands of our Founders – that we should be people of such character that we can govern ourselves wisely, mindful that our limitations as sons of Adam are endemic to our nature as human beings.  This mindfulness should keep us politically humble, aware that under God and with His help and guidance, we can do great things but that on earth, heaven will never be ours.

We cannot change human nature anymore than we can change the rotation of the earth.  We can ennoble our hearts and dignify our conduct in the context of being finite and fallen, achieving a great measure of ordered liberty and economic opportunity, justice in our courts and safety on our streets.

The President called on us to sustain what he called a “fundamental faith in human progress” as the “North Star that guides us on our journey.”  This faith is unmerited by the witness of the past century, which he himself sited in his Oslo speech.

Rather, as our Founders, taught us, it is belief in the God of the Bible and reverence for Him, informed, in part, by an ongoing recognition of our own innate fallibility, that enables us to do good, pursue justice and create a society in which hope is tempered by the bracing knowledge of human sin.

Our foreign policy can be honorable if conducted consistent with our convictions and institutions, animated by the pursuit of our vital security interests and pursued commensurate with our belief in the principles of human dignity and freedom.

But foreign policy is the application of principles and interests with care, intelligence and prudence.  It will not take us to some cosmic destination.  And therein, Mr. President, lies a rub we can never eradicate this side of the institution of God’s kingdom.

So, you can imagine my shock, sitting there on the floor in my living room, staring at the TV, mouth agape, at the opening of the Carrie Underwood Christmas Special: Miss Underwood rises from under the stage in a throne-like chair, smoke swirling and lights flashing.  She’s clad in skin-tight, black leather from head to toe.  I didn’t know hair spray could get hair that high?  I didn’t know Christmas was about Carrie Underwood.  Male dancers (wearing only pants – yikes – and matching, black leather, of course) flanked her on all sides.  They all started dancing… err, more like flailing, all over the stage.  The song she sang (though, is it technically a “song” if it lacks a discernable melody?) was no more a Christmas song than fruitcake is cake.

I grabbed the remote and hit “OFF”.  Sigh.  “Speaking of fruitcake…”  I trot off to the kitchen.  I figure I’ll have better luck getting into the Christmas spirit with a slice of grandma’s fruitcake.  And that’s not sayin’ much.  Sorry, Grandma.

But, Christmas is about rejuvenation and re-birth, and last night, I got my second chance.  I was on the treadmill at the gym, of all places, barely eeking out that first mile.  (One too many marshmallows, apparently).  There were about eight TVs on the wall, each broadcasting a different channel.  “Let’s see, what can I watch to help me reach mile two?”  TV one: news.  Pass.  TV two: news.  Pass.  TV three: …what’s this?  I see a church sanctuary, brightly lit with candles and adorned with wreaths and garland.  A gospel choir is swaying back and forth.  I see Jennifer Hudson belting something out at a microphone.  Could it be?  I scrambled for my headset so I could listen.  They’re singing, “Silent Night!”

Alleluia!  Throughout the next forty-five minutes, I was delighted by one traditional, Christmas carol after the next.  No self-glorification or self-aggrandizement.  No dance choreography.  Not even any Rudolf.  Only the beautiful singing of the old, great Christmas carols and hymns.  Only the celebration of love, giving and family.  At one point, during an interview before a song, Jennifer Hudson tells us, “Jesus is the light of the world.”  Now this is a Christmas Special.  I was invigorated.  I looked down at my treadmill’s screen.  Five miles?!  I haven’t run five miles in at least five years!  (Okay, a decade, at least).

Thank you, Jennifer Hudson, for producing an appropriate, traditional Christmas special.  In an age where Christmas decorations are stripped from public buildings, and citizens are forced to take down nativity scenes displayed in their yards, I know I speak for many when I say, I appreciate you remembering Christ in Christmas.  And thank you ABC (did I actually say that?) for your bravery in broadcasting Hudson’s show.  And P.S., Miss Hudson, the note you struck in “Diiiiiiiiiivine”, was far more beautiful than Carrie Underwood’s ever could have been.