Translation:  now that various Obama legislative (i.e., democratic) efforts have failed, it is time to force his policies on the nation through the diktat available to the head of the American federal administrative state.  Of all the items mentioned in the article, the most destructive is probably the Administration’s plan to begin regulating carbon emissions via the Environmental Protection Agency.  This will be enormously costly for the American economy, and it comes at a time when the science supporting man-made climate change is collapsing.  (See these articles as evidence: here, here, here, here and here (listed on Mark Levin’s website.)  The collapse of scientific support may provide some minimal chance that the federal courts might block or alter EPA’s rulemaking efforts, but EPA clearly has the upper hand in any litigation.  Congress needs to eliminate EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions until some scientific clarity emerges.

In a slightly differently category is the Administration’s apparent decision to stop enforcing the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” which is statutorily mandated and has been in effect for approximately 16 years.  It seems axiomatic that if the administration wants to change the policy, Congress needs to change the law.

The article deals at length with presidential recess appointments, and President Obama’s threat to make use of them.  The use of “holds” by members of the Senate seems to have gotten out of hand.  All that said, the appointment power is far different from unilateral executive branch lawmaking – which was never remotely considered by our Founding Fathers.  And, here, we see plans for this constitutional abuse to be taken to new levels.

America is rapidly becoming a judicial and bureaucratic oligarchy.  This institutional development is a threat conservatives and libertarians need to focus on much more seriously.  This development is even more dangerous when coupled with the crony capitalism (corporatism) that is emerging from government ownership or subsidization of American industries.  The United States is beginning to resemble the corrupt England of George III’s era where commercial monopolies were sold by the Crown drawing the ire of the American colonists and men like Adam Smith.

Obama calls for ramped-up education spending. Department of Education outlays would increase from $32.4 billion in 2009 to $71.5 billion in 2011. Obama puts money into a laundry list of initiatives, from a $1.6 billion increase in child care funding to making permanent the expansion of Pell Grant payouts.

He has sought to please his supporters in the powerful teachers unions by pushing to rework the unpopular parts of Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. Now he’s trying to put $3 billion more into K-12 education generally, with up to an extra $1 billion if Congress reworks the education system in the way he wants this year.

If you look at the 2011 budget’s section for the Department of Education (pp. 63-68), go to page 68 and look for the line entitled “Total, Outlays.”  There one finds that the actual 2009 budget for the Dep’t of Education was $32.409 billion and that the projected amount for 2011 is $71.479 billion.  By my calculation that is a 121% increase in two years.

I am not an expert on direct loan programs, but on the same page the figures for disbursements increases from $100.7 billion (2009 actual) to $135.0 billion (2011 projected) – a 34% increase over two years.  This Congress wants to enact a statute to federalize the student loan programs, so the budget contains this gobbledygook comment: “This measure would then use savings to make historic investments to increase college access and success, and would lay a foundation for success for America’s youngest children.”  What does that mean?  $$,$$$,$$$,$$$.$$  Good grief.

More seriously, I wonder if his desperation to be liked is compelling him to try to woo his skeptics.  Of course, he won’t succeed.

It is hard not to like President Obama, at least the persona he projects in such settings as the State of the Union Address.  He seems so reasonable.

Yet his policies are those of a man of the Left.  It is as though he believes empathy is a substitute for substantive compromise, or that by virtue of patiently listening he can lull his opponents into political somnolence.

The speech, like the Obama presidency, was interwoven with unintended ironies:

** Mr. Obama calls for unity and patriotic oneness but simultaneously calls for open homosexuality in the military in a time of war.  He knows this will go nowhere, but throws the political bone to the homosexual lobby anyway.  Why?  Because he can say he tried (placating a key part of his base) while bearing no real consequence (the measure lifting the ban on gays in the military won’t succeed and so, given the relative inattention of the American people to this issue in a time of economic
crisis, there will little political price to pay for Democrats in November).

** He insists on taxpayer-subsidized abortion, resists litigation limits against health care providers and persists on wanting to micro-manage Americans’ medical care but urges Republicans to share with him their ideas about health reform – as though they have not already done so myriad times!

** He is all over the map on taxes, calls for yet another commission on entitlement reform (as if the several essential steps were not obvious, especially after many other such reform bills, panels, studies, commissions, select committees, etc.) and rewrites the economic history of the past decade — and does so with such seeming intensity that one wants to join him in the land of political make-believe.

The President needs to come to terms with some basic realities: People aren’t stupid.  Politicians aren’t children.  Civility doesn’t mean acquiescence.  And facts are stubborn things.

I argued that these “Jack Bauer” war issues are a political acid that are badly damaging Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

The national security issue has been mentioned as one that Scott Brown ran on but MSM reporting has not placed it as a first-tier issue in Massachusetts.  However, in Jamie Glazov’s interview with national security attorney and former prosecutor, Andy McCarthy, in Frontpage Magazine, we read the following (my emphasis):

McCarthy: …. The Brown campaign’s internal polling told them something very interesting.  While it’s true that healthcare is what nationalized the election and riveted everyone’s attention to it, it was the national security issues that put real distance between the two candidates in the mind of the electorate—in blue Massachusetts of all places. Sen.-elect Brown was able to speak forcefully and convincingly on issues like treating our jihadist enemies as combatants rather than mere defendants, about killing terrorists and preventing terrorism rather than contenting ourselves with prosecutions after Americans have been killed, about tough interrogation when necessary to save innocent lives.  Martha Coakley, by contrast, had to try to defend the indefensible, which is Obama-style counterterrorism.  It evidently made a huge difference to voters.

Similarly, the brilliant American-Israeli columnist for the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick, picked up on this as well.  She made note of Robert Costa’s National Review interview (1/19/2010) with Eric Fehrnstrom, the Brown campaign’s senior strategist.  Fehrnstrom made the following points about the national security issue:

On the issues, “people talk about the potency of the health-care issue, but from our own internal polling, the more potent issue here in Massachusetts was terrorism and the treatment of enemy combatants,” says Fehrnstrom. Health care, he says, was helpful in fundraising, but it was the campaign’s focus on national security in the final week that he believes helped to give voters another issue to associate with Brown…. (2^nd paragraph from bottom)

Wow.  KSM’s trial in NYC; the undie bomber trial’s in Detroit; moving / releasing Gitmo prisoners.  These are wounds that won’t stop bleeding.

His legacy has led to serious problems in the courts, the economy and the way Americans understand their federal government. Yet there is still much to admire about the Democratic Roosevelt – the way he heartened Americans with his optimism, the masterful manner in which he spoke to the hopes and fears of ordinary people, and even his unabashed invocation of the God of the Bible in times of national need.

FDR was also nothing if not decisive. He did not dawdle in times of crisis. For better or ill, he acted. People knew that they had a leader in the White House.

Knowing he was nearing death, he jettisoned starry-eyed Vice President Henry Wallace for sharp, crisp and purposeful Harry Truman. When we entered World War II, he shelved the New Deal and put his full energies into winning the conflict, even appointing Republicans as secretaries of War and Navy. And when eight German spies were found in the U.S., they were not tried in civil court. They were taken before a military tribunal appointed by FDR himself; six were hung, one imprisoned for life, and the eighth sentenced to 30 years. The time between when the spies landed and the hangings: less than two months.

Mr. Roosevelt’s most recent successor could learn a thing or two from him. Barack Obama took three months to decide on adding to America’s troop level in Afghanistan. It took him three days to reassure a shaken public that his national security team would work to better safeguard the country from terrorist attacks.

On health care, the President seems content with getting something — anything — as long as it is slapped with rubric of reform and contains federal funding for abortion. He has not led in crafting the legislation. He has led only in demanding a finished product, and then too often, and when legislative deadlines have been missed, he has done nothing about it.

There have been moments when Mr. Obama seems to understand he is not a global citizen or a national academic-in-chief. When, early last year, he ordered American sharpshooters to kill the pirates who had seized U.S. sailors, he rightly won plaudits, including from my organization, the Family Research Council. But these moments have been more incidental and dramatic than consistent and dependable.

In the name of caution, he dallies. For the sake of consideration, he procrastinates. On behalf of prudence, he dissolves into quietude.

“One thing is sure,” said FDR. “We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment.” Is this a perfect way of addressing crises? Certainly not, especially if the “something” that is done is animated by emotion and directed by panic. But upon obtaining the best counsel possible, the job of a President is to act quickly and firmly when urgency requires it.

Time is a luxury upon which the security of the United States cannot wait. Al-Qaeda, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the tyrants of North Korea and their assorted allies in the international fellowship of evil know this. Do you, Mr. President?

The only problem with the A.P. story is that the president doesn’t resemble Spock – he resembles the Vulcan Tuvok from a later iteration of the show.  (Yes, that would be the indescribably terrible Voyager. The show with Captain Janeway and Neelix — the most P.C. of all.  The one with the Indian shaman.  Didn’t the men wear dresses?  Hide the razor blades.  The memories of it are returning.)

Well, Tuvok was played by an African-American actor, Tim Russ, and Russ bears an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Obama.  One eco-Trekkie agrees; go here and see Obama in Tuvok’s uniform.  Or this on Facebook (“Barack Obama Is Actually Tuvok.”  Yes, we have never seen both of them at the same time.)

Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night Live, give Tim Russ’s agent a call and sign him to a three-year two-month contract with a renewal option.  Russ is your dead-ringer Obama impersonator, but he needs to wear the Vulcan ears when playing the President or the gag won’t work.  (Lorne, it shouldn’t have taken this long to figure this one out.)

+  +  +

On a more serious note, this Vulcan thing is now having political implications.  So says A.P.’s Seth Borenstein who writes, “President Obama’s Spock-like qualities have started to cause him political problems in real-world Washington. Critics see him as too technocratic, too deliberative, too lacking in emotion.”  No kidding.  (The A.P. article appears to be an attempt to spin Obama’s bloodlessness to be a positive – a nerdy love for science.  It isn’t.)

Obama’s Vulcanism seemed completely obvious to me.  He’s a great orator, but he has none of the warmth of a Ronald Reagan or a Bill Clinton.  They would light up a room when they entered.  Obama’s different.  I was always struck by images of Obama sitting next to some poor shlub in an Iowa diner at breakfast with the other guy looking like he wanted to take his pancakes and run away.  No one-on-one rapport.  None.

That doesn’t make someone a Vulcan, however.  Unfortunately, Obama has a detached, rationalism that is incapable of projecting any empathy.  Combine that with his general demeanor, and you start getting a Vulcan.  Even the patrician Bush the Elder could shed a tear occasionally.  One doesn’t have to go Dick Vermeil to beat the Vulcan tag, but I don’t think I have ever seen Obama come close to choking up.

The greatest example of Obama’s Vulcanism occurred when the president hosted ABC’s propagandistic Health Care Day at the White House.  He told a woman whose 100+ year-old mother had a pacemaker that under his scheme her mother’s zest for life wouldn’t have gotten her the device that kept her alive.  You could almost hear the utilitarian Vulcan maxim: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”  “Your mother’s Death Panel does not approve of pacemaker’s for 100 year-olds.”  “So, we’ll give your mother some painkillers and send her on her way to go die in Vulcan Valhalla.”  (Actually, that’s a pretty close approximation of what Obama did say.)

Who knows how this will all end up, but articles like this one in the Washington Times demonstrate that the public is starting to look at Mr. Obama much differently.  And the media spins on.

That bow was atrocious. But Obama’s low bow before the Emperor of Japan over the past weekend was bad enough. Barack Obama apparently never memorized the Pledge of Allegiance as a boy. He has told us many times of his grade school education in Indonesia and how his devoted mother taught him U.S. constitutional law before dawn. Apparently, he never learned “…and to the republic for which it stands…”

To secure our Independence and to found a new republic, a country where “We the people” ruled, was the Glorious Cause for which the Founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. How actually to be republicans with a small “r” was not easy.

George Washington helped in countless ways to teach us patriotism, republicanism, and self-government. He is justly revered as the Father of our Country. But he wasn’t right in every detail. When the new federal government commenced in New York City in 1789, the President and “Lady Washington”–as his devoted wife was called–held regular public levees. At these receptions, the ladies and gentlemen of New York society would enter and bow before the President and the First Lady. President and Mrs. Washington would bow to their guests.

Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Representative James Madison were horrified by this ceremony. Didn’t we just fight and win a revolution to be rid of such “trappings of monarchy,” they fretted.

Twelve years later, “Mr. Jefferson” walked to his own inauguration as our third President in the newly constructed Capitol in Washington, D.C.  After that ceremony, he walked down Pennsylvania Avenue to the freshly painted President’s House. It was this First Citizen’s walk that the newly inaugurated Jimmy Carter re-enacted in 1977. That was the last of President Carter’s actions I could praise.

From Jefferson on, no bowing to Presidents. Andrew Jackson introduced a fascinating new chapter in the history of Presidential bows. At his raucous inauguration on March 4, 1829, the newly widowed Jackson bowed low before the assembled multitude. Clad all in black, his bow was dignified and stately. It confirmed the arrival of Jacksonian democracy.

Abraham Lincoln fought a long and desperate Civil War defending the idea that government of the people, by the people and for the people should not perish from the earth. When he visited Richmond, Virginia, in April, 1865, just days after Confederate leader Jefferson Davis fled the city, an old man rushed up to the President and bowed before him. This former slave saw “Master Lincoln” as his Moses. Lincoln gently admonished the old man: “You must not bow to me. It is not right. Bow only to God,” Lincoln said.

That was a good rule for Americans for more than a century. Prime Minister Winston Churchill met President Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard the USS Augusta off Newfoundland in August, 1941. Churchill called the United States “the Great Republic.” When he approached the Commander-in-Chief, he bowed and handed FDR a letter of introduction from King George VI. Churchill hardly needed this. As a lifelong monarchist, however, he recognized that he was only the head of the government in Britain–the King’s first minister–whereas Roosevelt was Chief of State as well as head of government.

Churchill the half-American Briton understood the differences between republics and monarchies better than Barack Obama does.

When Churchill came to visit FDR in the White House in those stern days after Pearl Harbor, he was taken to worship at Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia. It was there, on New Year’s Day 1942, that he first heard “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Churchill loved the hymn so much that he decreed it should be played at his own funeral. It was. There, in St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1965, Britain’s monarch stood and listened with thousands of mourners to hear the greatest of her subjects eulogized with a hymn to a republic.

Obviously, the President of the United States must deal at the highest levels with monarchs. No one expects our President to treat allies’ Chiefs of State with disrespect. Japan, unlike the tyrannical Saudi Arabia, has been a true and loyal U.S. ally since World War II.

The problem is that Barack Obama seems not to understand what a republic is and how the President of the United States should conduct himself when traveling abroad. This is not surprising. He thinks American history began with his election. He said his election would mark  the time when “the oceans ceased to rise.” King Canute, a Danish king of England known for his wisdom, famously went to the seaside and commanded the tide not to rise. And laughed at his toady advisers when they and he got soaked. The problem today with Obama’s abasement is that he degrades all of us and we all get soaked.

President Obama spoke to an interviewer about the Ft. Hood shootings. He had just come from the Memorial Service for the fourteen people whose lives were taken by the terrorist, Nidal Hasan:

OBAMA:  In a country of 300 million people, there are going to be acts of violence that are inexplicable, even within the extraordinary military that we have. I think everybody understands how outstanding the young men and women in uniform are under the most severe stress.  There are going to instances, in which an individual cracks.

Forget, for the moment, this confused part of the statement that seems to psychologize the killer’s actions. I want to focus on the “inexplicable” part.

This is a serious problem for liberals. They are forever finding such murderous acts inexplicable. They often employ words like “random” and “senseless acts of violence.” One of their favorite bumper stickers is “Practice random acts of kindness.” Random is okay if it’s kind. But if kindness and terror are truly random, what’s the moral difference?

Whatever.

Historian John Lukacs can help these confused people. Lukacs has developed deep insight into the mind and character of Adolf Hitler. In books like The Duel and The Hitler of History, Lukacs enables us to understand some of what is inexplicable to President Obama.

Hitler, Lukacs writes, was not a monster. He certainly did monstrous things. Think of all those children’s shoes in the Holocaust Museum. That’s enough to appreciate monstrous acts. But if we think of Hitler as a monster, then there really is no lesson to be drawn from his life. Monsters are like aliens. They’re inhuman. They are not like us.

Nor was Hitler insane. It may seem insane to us for anyone to plan to murder all the Jewish people, enslave all the Poles, and sterilize all the Ukrainians. Simply to dream that anyone could invade Russia and give orders to shoot millions on sight partakes of madness. But if Hitler was insane, Lukacs teaches us, then he is not morally responsible.

We do not hold even mass murderers responsible for the actions. He was not mad.

No, Hitler was evil. Not a monster, not a madman, but a very, very evil man. We need to understand man’s capacity for evil. Didn’t the Twentieth Century teach us anything? Let’s all take time off and read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

This week, we’ve seen another great public ceremony, the celebration of the anniversary of Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Retired NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw managed to hold forth for 1 ½ hours at the Newseum last week about the great events of that November evening. He never mentioned Reagan. Well, we understand why. Nor did he mention Communism. Or the KGB. Nor did he use the word “evil.”

Similarly, President Obama hailed the coming down of the Wall. But his remarks seemed more to be commemorating the removal of an architectural barrier than the end of something cruel and unjust. After all, the Soviet puppet regime in East Germany managed over twenty-eight years to shoot 136 people who tried to escape. Is it somehow more “explicable” to kill ten times as many innocent people as the Ft. Hood shooter if we stretch out the killings over three decades?

According to the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF) (Center for Research on Contemporary History) in Potsdam, East German border guards were given these inhuman orders: “Do not hesitate to use your firearm, not even when the border is breached in the company of women and children, which is a tactic the traitors have often used.”

Germany has worked hard to reconcile its people, or peoples. But avoiding mention of the evil implicit in orders given to armed young men to shoot women and children will not help national reunification.

What happened at Ft. Hood was evil. What happened at the Wall was evil. We need to face reality. It is especially important that our President understand reality. Three hundred million lives depend upon it.

Many commentators have ridiculed the choice. “Gobsmacked,” wrote the Washington Post’s serious liberal foreign policy columnist, Jim Hoagland. He employed a British slang term for “slack-jawed in utter amazement.” Liberal writer Ruth Marcus likened the award to Pee-Wee Soccer, where every child gets a trophy just for playing. The New York Times’ house conservative, David Brooks, jeered that Obama should have won all of this year’s prizes, including those for economics and literature. Even for chemistry. After all, Obama’s personal chemistry may be his greatest contribution to the world.

Newsweek’s Howard Fineman called Obama “President of the Earth” and said he would accept in Oslo in December. Even long-time Obama promoters were hard-pressed to see the award as anything but miraculous–an effort, perhaps, by the Nobel Prize selection committee–Norwegian Leftists all–to create their own version of the Burning Bush. Saturday Night Live had fun. Their Obama lookalike noted that he had only nine months of experience “not being George Bush.

The idea behind all the jokes seems to be that the award was premature. Most Obama supporters think he’s headed in the right direction. Their Left-wing predecessors used to describe communists as “liberals in a hurry.” Behind the guffaws and the gasps–the press claque in Oslo audibly gasped when the name was announced–is the shared view that Obama’s new emphasis on the UN, on multi-lateralism, on disarmament, on an “open hand instead of a clenched fist,” on bowing before Saudi despots and on accepting mash notes from Latin American dictators, that Obama is taking the world where it truly wants to go. That road, that well-trod path, is being paved with their good intentions.

But eleven days is enough to shake the world. Ten days was once enough. In 1919, an American book appeared. Ten Days that Shook the World was the breathless chronicle of the Bolshevik Revolution written by John Reed. Young Jack Reed was a Leftist journalist, a 1910 graduate of Harvard, and a passionate supporter of the communists in Petrograd. Reed was on scene in Russia’s capital for some of the most important events of that bloody century. When John Reed died, Lenin ordered that his body be buried inside the Kremlin, the only American so honored.

Reed did not live to see what became of his Ten Days that Shook the World. The Bolshevik Revolution resulted in the greatest tyranny the world has ever known. The Heritage Foundation is currently showing a series of fifty paintings by Nikolai Getman. Getman was a Ukrainian prisoner who served eight years in the Gulag. “Gulag” is not a word that President Barack Obama has ever used in public. It is a Russian acronym for “state administration for camps.”

These camps, however, were not just summer camps. They were summer-fall-winter-spring camps. Some of them, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained in his majesterial Gulag Archipelago, were like islands within Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Union, islands as big as France. Others were as small as a telephone booth. All of them had one thing in common: In the Gulag, a person was swallowed up whole. Tens of millions of people disappeared into the Gulag during the life of the Soviet Union.

Barack Obama is not the only one who has never mentioned the Gulag. The UN has never mentioned it. Nor has Hollywood.

The Heritage Foundation’s exhibit is stunning. Visitors can see the luminous painting of the artist’s brother, Alexander Getman, being led down the last mile by two NKVD officers. Young Alexander was shot on 1 December 1934. In his brother’s depiction, young Alexander’s eyes stare at the viewer, accusingly. He is barefooted, his white prison clothes glow as if Alexander is headed for his own Transfiguration. He is.

Some paintings depict diamond miners and gold miners. They are zeks, slaving away in sub-zero cold. Uranium mining, one of the captions tells us, is a death sentence. Those zeks will be killed by radiation. “Zek” is short for zaklucheniye–the locked up ones.

“Waiting to be shot” is another jarring painting. The zeks huddled in the prison yard are emaciated but show no panic. It is dark. We see only the back of the NKVD officer with the gun. The only spot of color in the painting is the incongruous sky-blue cap the killer wears.

It is not all horror. A young Chukchi prisoner must just have been sentenced. He is cheerful, smoking a cigarette, and warming himself by a camp fire. Chukchis are Asian tribesmen. This smiling lad has gotten ten years for saying “Yankee is good.” They may be the only Russian words this Siberian native knows. We’re still waiting for Barack Obama to say “Yankee is good.”

The Nobel Committee has occasionally recognized men and women who stood up against Soviet tyranny. They gave Solzhenitsyn the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature–and may have thereby saved the dissident writer’s life. They awarded the Peace Prize to Andrei Sakharov, the Russian human rights advocate and to Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland’s first free labor union, Solidarity.

Too often, however, the Nobel Committee has dishonored itself by giving Peace Prizes to politically correct figures. Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam got it for a “peace” agreement that was being massively violated before the ink was dry. Tens of thousands of boat people were forced to leave Vietnam, willing to face death on the high seas rather than live under Le Duc Tho’s brutal communist masters. They would doubtless have filed a minority report on that Nobel vote.

The Nobel Committee also gave a Peace Prize to Yassir Arafat. Arafat’s citation fails to mention that he invented airline hijacking for terrorism, or that he personally ordered the murder of U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel. Ambassador Noel was not finished off with a quick shot to the head, either. Arafat’s henchman shot him in the legs, the groin, the gut, the chest, all the way up his body. There is some justice in the world. though. When Hamas terrorists overran Arafat’s home in Gaza, several years after his death, they stole his Nobel Peace Prize. They probably melted down the gold medal for guns.

Against all this terror and tyranny, murder and oppression, the UN has had little to say. The Nobel Prize Committee, at a loss, gave a Peace Prize to the UN and to Kofi Annan, who did nothing to stop genocide in Rwanda, who presided over the biggest money scandal in history, the infamous “oil for food” ripoff. At least they were not George Bush.

Barack Obama’s first eleven days in January were not uneventful. He ordered U.S. taxpayers to subsidize International Planned Parenthood Federation, the world’s largest trafficker in abortion. Obama also ordered U.S. taxpayers to back the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). This outfit helps China’s rulers to enforce their one-child policy. Throughout the world each year, fifty million abortions take place, with Planned Parenthood beating the drums. And in China since the 1970s, fifty million abortions have been done forcibly.

When you read what the UN has done, what the Soviet Union did, what the Nobel Prize Committee has honored, Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize does not seem so out of place. His eleven days were not so unproductive. It remains to be seen who will chronicle the rest of his rule.

I’d like to take President Obama on a tour of the Gulag Collection at the Heritage Foundation.

It’s just down the street from the White House and it might be the best thing he could do for peace.

I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.

Those were President Obama’s words in an interview with editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade. The President was explaining his openness to a federal bailout of struggling big-city daily newspapers. For that reason, Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) have introduced S. 673, their so-called “Newspaper Revitalization Act.”

These two very liberal senators should have acted even sooner. They should have sponsored the Manual Typewriter Preservation Act. You see, the computer revolution put great pressure on Royal, Underwood, and Olivetti. Those companies represented thousands of jobs. We can’t just let the free market run rampant. Save typewriter ribbons! Save white-out! Save carbon paper! There’s no telling how much damage these new-fangled computers might do.

The President is concerned that the Internet will not provide the kind of fact-checking and balance that was once provided for us by, say, the New York Times. Remember Jason Blair? In firing the 27-year old reporter, the Gray Lady had to confess: “[He] committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud while covering significant news events in recent months, an investigation by Times journalists has found. The widespread fabrication and plagiarism represent a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper.”

Or what about the care taken by Dan Rather of CBS News? Shall we recall Rather’s careful fact-checking in 2004 of the letters purportedly written by 1/Lt. George W. Bush’s commanding officer in 1972 and 1973? Those letters, it was quickly revealed, were typed in a Microsoft Word computer typeface. This was most interesting, since Word hadn’t even been invented in 1973.

It was the blogosphere that provided the fact-checking that exposed Dan Rather’s trafficking in clearly demonstrated forgeries. It was intrepid bloggers who put a stop to Dan Rather’s long-running career in gonzo journalism.

Dan Rather was typical of the liberal journalists who reigned unchallenged on the airwaves for decades until Ronald Reagan’s FCC appointees in 1987 abolished the so-called Fairness Doctrine. I’d prefer to call it the Furnace Doctrine, since that’s where it consigned our First Amendment guarantees of free speech and free press. After that, radio talkers rose up to challenge the liberal media’s monopoly. The Internet quickly followed. Then, along came FOX.

Obviously, President Obama would prefer town hall meetings where 9-year olds read scripted questions. Real town hall meetings do sometimes get rowdy. So do tea parties.

And so does a truly free press.

If someone today alleges that some of the 53 government bureaucracies to be established by ObamaCare are “death panels,” there are many voices prepared to debate that, voices left and right. Isn’t this vigorous debate preferable for a free people to federal government bailouts? These newspapers are declining because their readers have either fled their decaying cities or have opted instead for Internet sites and talk radio.

Presidents have historically been unhappy with negative coverage in the press. President George Washington was enraged by “that rascal Freneau,” a caustic anti-Washington propagandist who was secretly on the payroll of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. John Adams actually had opposition editors imprisoned under the Alien & Sedition Acts. Lincoln closed down a number of newspapers he charged were inciting rebellion. In modern times, JFK famously threw across the Oval Office a crumpled up editorial page of the Herald Tribune.

But none of these Presidents past actually tried to bail out failing newspapers. They had too much respect for a free press, free markets and the free exchange of ideas, and for the American people, whose resources should not be employed by the federal government to prop-up industries that, due to innovation and creativity of our fellow citizens, are less and less needed as means of communication.

We don’t need another industry bailout. If we bail out failing newspapers, what’s next, a government bailout of MSNBC? This bailout would result inevitably in a government-controlled press. We don’t need President Obama to issue us our “mutual understandings.”

You may have noticed: I wrote this without capital letters and without exclamation points. See? No shouting at all.