A hopeful signal from an Iranian official produced an enraged response from the nation’s parliament that shows the true nature of that regime. Esfandiar Rahim Mashai, Vice President for Tourism, gave a speech in which he declared “we are a friend of all people in the world, even Israelis and Americans.” Parliament then voted by an overwhelming margin to denounce these words as “an unforgivable mistake” and to demand that President Ahmadinejad dismiss the tourism chief immediately—even though that official is related to the President by marriage, with his daughter having married Ahmadinejad’s son. Of Parliament’s 290 members, 200 signed the statement declaring it “unforgivable” to even discuss friendship with Israelis or Americans. This should serve as a powerful lesson to those who believe that our problems with Iran can be readily solved with more negotiation.   

A new poll shows a plurality of Americans want government control of political content on TV and radio. By a margin of 47% to 39%, respondents to a Rasmussen survey say bureaucrats should “require” a balance of liberal and conservative viewpoints in broadcast media – agreeing with the basic premise of the so-called “fairness doctrine.” The same poll showed that 71% also believe all points of view are currently available, so it’s hard to understand why they want government to supervise and limit these existing choices. Those who complain about media messages don't wail over the fact that there aren't enough alternatives-- they rather denounce the fact that there are too many "irresponsible" voices, or that the public and radio companies prefer viewpoints that seem shrill and one-sided. The critics, in other words, seek governmental involvement to reduce free speech, not expand it. Is it possible that some people don’t trust themselves to make the right selections among media options – just like they don’t trust themselves to buy fuel efficient vehicles without government mandates? If people say they want more fuel efficient vehicles (and all polls show they do), then why do they need government to ban gas guzzlers? If those fuel-eating machines are so undesirable and costly, why should it require a bureacratic directive from the feds to force you to buy a more reasonable car? The big mystery is why some Americans trust bureaucrats to do the right thing, more than they trust themselves and their neighbors.

Many Americans feel confused about the current conflict in Georgia, with hysterical charges of genocide arising from South Ossetians and their Russian sponsors, as well as from Georgians. The Russian government even demands that the pro-American President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, must be removed from office and tried for war crimes.Whatever the nature of long-ago abuses, however, there’s no doubt real doubt about which side is guilty of aggression and ethnic cleansing in the current struggle. Even a Major General with the invading Russian troops described the Georgians as victims, not villains. “Now Ossetians are running around and killing poor Georgians in their enclaves,” says Vyacheslav Borisov, commander in charge of the occupied city of Gori. A Russian lieutenant with an armored transport division made similar observations to the New York Times: “We have to be honest. The Ossetians are marauding.” On Thursday, Human Rights Watch issued a report that documented attacks by Ossetian militias, allied with the Russians. A South Ossetian intelligence officer said his forces burn down the houses of fleeing Georgians "to make sure" that they couldn't come back. When soldiers of Putin’s own army certify that their allies are committing atrocities, and when those allies proudly boast of those atrocities, the need for Western support for Georgia’s democratic government becomes even more obvious.

New York Times columnist Gail Collins and other commentators have spoken out against what she calls “a weird Republican attempt to make fun of Obama for saying that if people kept their tires properly inflated it might save as much oil as we could gain by drilling.”  

Actually, the GOP message isn't that Americans should neglect tire inflation—it’s that this shouldn’t be a governmental concern. We don't need a new federal department of tire inflation, or a president to tell us how to take care of our cars. What we do need is for government to get out the way of new drilling for oil by dropping ill-considered bans on developing our vast untapped energy resources.  

In dealing with the energy crisis, as with most other challenges, the best solution is less governmental interference, not more. 

A recent news story suggests that a former top aide to Hillary Clinton advised that she attack Barack Obama for his lack of “American roots.”  

The New York Senator appropriately rejected this appalling advice, and made no attempt to make an issue of his boyhood in Indonesia and Hawaii . But talking about the international—rather than American—focus of his present campaign and future potential presidency is a valid, potent issue for John McCain.  

When Obama tells 200,000 cheering Germans he's “a citizen of the world,” when he commits billions of dollars from American taxpayers to raise living standards in other countries, many voters will rightly question his approach to national leadership. We need a president who will be a champion of America ’s interests first, last and always—rather than following some internationalist agenda.

 Each year in late summer (August 9th this year), religious Jews observe a full 24 hourday of mourning and fasting to recall the destruction of both ancient Temples in Jerusalem – both destroyed on that same calendar day (the Ninth day of the month of Av in the Jewish calendar). Tradition explains that the second Temple fell to the Romans in 70 A.D. because of the sin of causeless hatred  (sinat chimam in Hebrew)—groundless animosity among people of faith who should have been knit together in fellowship and their shared covenant. How can we make up for this grievous failing? A recent sage—the founding chief Rabbi of modern Israel, Abraham Isaac Kook ---said that the Temple can only be rebuilt when we replace causeless hatred with causeless love. We must learn to love our fellow human beings for no reason at all – and only then can we fully repent for the habit of feeling hostile for no reason at all. In Judaism, as in Christianity, learning the ability to feel love just as instinctively and automatically as we sometimes feel anger or envy or annoyance is associated with the Messianic age, and ultimate redemption.

After Israel unified Jerusalem in the Six Day War of 1967, the government foolishly granted Islamic authorities—the Waqf—exclusive control of the Temple Mount . This means that when Jewish or Christian visitors want to connect with the holiest spot of Jewish history, where both Temples once stood, they must submit to the rules of radical Islam.

When my listener tour recently toured the Temple Mount , “minders” from the Waqf followed our every move, confiscating hymnals, Bibles, even notebooks, and warning visitors of potential arrest if they dared to pray or recite scriptural verses.

It’s possible to visit Christian cathedrals and offer prayers from other traditions, or enter Jewish synagogues and pray or meditate according to your conscience. Only Islamic authorities, even at a Jewish holy site, feel profoundly threatened even by quiet prayers they don’t control.

During my recent listener tour of Israel , we toured Israeli military outposts along the Lebanese border and spoke with officers who believe the question isn’t whether there will be another war with Hezbollah, but when.

The Shi’ite terrorist group has blatantly violated UN Resolution 1701 and amassed huge arsenals of Iranian-purchased weaponry, including at least 40,000 Katyusha rockets, some of them perhaps now armed with chemical warheads.

When considering this murderous jihadist band—the same group that slaughtered more than 260 US Marines in Beirut —it’s important to understand their motivation. Hezbollah isn’t Palestinian, and makes no claim to refugee status or rightful ownership of the land of Israel . Their proudly announced determination to obliterate the Jewish state stems solely from religious fanaticism and anti-Semitism, and openly rejects the idea of peace agreements based on any Israeli concessions.

The New York Times recently reported on Barack Obama’s long-standing support for affirmative action that gives preferential treatment to members of disadvantaged minorities. While still a student at Harvard Law School , Obama readily admitted that “I undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action,” but the deeper question is how he could justify that advantage. Apologists for preferences explain these policies as a remedy for long family histories of discrimination, but Obama’s background features no such legacy of oppression.

His mother was white and his father’s family, in Kenya , had never been enslaved or subjected to American “Jim Crow” laws or segregation. Both parents earned graduate degrees, so his only basis for preferential treatment would have been skin color, not family disadvantage. That’s typical of affirmative action, which treats people differently based on pigmentation alone, not their origins or experiences.

After Israel unified Jerusalem in the Six Day War of 1967, the government foolishly granted Islamic authorities – the Waqf—exclusive control of the Temple Mount. This means that when Jewish or Christian visitors want to connect with the holiest spot of Jewish history, where both Temples once stood, they must submit to the rules of fanatical Islam. When my listener tour of Israeli recently toured the Temple Mount, “minders” from the Waqf followed our every move, confiscating hymnals, bibles, even notebooks, and warning visitors of potential arrest if they dared to pray or recite scriptural verses. It’s possible to visit Christian cathedrals and offer prayers from other traditions, or enter Jewish synagogues and pray or meditate according to your conscience. Only Islamic authorities, even at a Jewish holy site, feel profoundly threatened even by quiet prayers they don’t control.

Do angry critics of U.S. policy qualify as anti-American?

Not always, but on occasion they do.

Leftists love to assert that "dissent is patriotic," but that's not invariably true. Some dissenters may see themselves as patriots, but others most certainly deserve identification as anti-American. I much prefer the term "anti-American" to the term "unpatriotic" because it's an attitude that's easier to identify. The word "unpatriotic" lends itself to multiple interpetrations, but "anti-American" specifically defines an attitude suggesting the U.S. constitutes a malevolent, destructive force in the world.

For instance,  a reader who identified himself as "paxnow" responded to my recent USA Today columns  (July 22, 2008, comparing America's role in Iraq and the Philippines) by posting the following comment on the newspaper’s website: “Any honest review of he 20^th century to date would conclude the Evil Empire is the US. There is virtually no country which was not attacked by the US or whose government was not overthrown. The U.S. has over 1,000 military bases in over 130 countries to date. We are 3% the population of earth, but spend 51% of the entire military budget. The enemy is US.”

In a similar vein, Jake Irwin, a student at Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington, and an outspoken admirer of Venezuelan demagogue Hugo Chavez, told the Wall Street Journal: "My political belief is that the U.S. is a horrendous empire that needs to end."

Could anyone characterize this sort of "dissent" as patriotic or, more to the point, pro-American?

For more than a century, psychologists have described a syndrome by which some members of the Jewish community have adopted self-hate (Selbhabst in the original German) as an attitude toward their own people.

Today, it's even more common to find a similar derangement in the fetid, paranoid fever swamps of the extreme left: self-hating Americans.

Barack Obama has been criticized for “playing the race card” with his recent remarks emphasizing his non-resemblance to the previous presidents on U.S. currency. Actually, the bigger problem with his comments involves their fundamental dishonesty, not their focus on racial identity. 

In Springfield, Missouri on Thursday, the Senator said: “So nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other Presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky. That’s essentially the argument they’re making.” 

The same day he delivered very similar remarks in Rolla, Missouri: “So what they’re saying is, ‘Well, we know we’re not very good but you can’t risk electing Obama. You know, he’s new, he doesn’t look like the other presidents on the currency. He’s got a funny name.’ I mean, that’s basically the argument – he’s too risky.” 

Even granting Senator Obama the poetic license he’s earned as a distinguished memoirist, this is a rank and irresponsible distortion of the campaign against him. Yes, the Republicans want to make the public “scared” of the Democratic candidate – but scared at his promises to raise taxes, surrender in Iraq, nationalize health care, and keep gas prices high to force people out of their cars. 

Where have McCain or his principal surrogates ever stressed Obama’s race – or his “funny name”? Whenever allies attempted that sort of attack, McCain rebuked them and repudiated that approach – as he did with talk show host Billy Cunningham stressing Obama’s middle name, or when the North Carolina GOP ran an ad featuring Reverend Wright.

Yes, Obama ought to apologize for his recent statements – not just because they’re racially based, but because they utterly mischaracterize the Republican criticisms of his candidacy. Even the notorious “Celebrity” ad on TV spent half of its thirty seconds stressing Obama’s position on the issues – in particular his opposition to oil drilling and backing for increased taxes on electricity.

As for Obama’s official campaign spokespeople, they’re even more disconnected from reality. On Thursday, Robert Gibbs spoke for the campaign regarding Obama’s references to looking different from faces on the currency and claimed that these comments in no way related to the candidate’s race. “What Barack Obama was talking about was that he didn’t get here after spending decades in Washington,” he explained. “There is nothing more to this than the fact that he was describing that he was new to the political scene. He was referring to the fact that he didn’t come into the race with the history of others. It is not about race.”

Nor about race?

Does anyone actually believe that?

Consider the presidents on currency: George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, U.S. Grant. Do any of them look like John McCain? Actually, Jackson with his long, thin face looks far more like Obama than he does like McCain (though neither candidate boasts Old Hickory’s wild, wavy hair).

The point is, that his audiences and all fair-minded observers understand that Obama’s stress on his different appearance from previous Presidents is meant – unmistakably – to remind people that he would be the first person of color to occupy the White House.. He’s entitled to issue such reminders, but it’s appalling when his campaign fatuously denies that he’s doing so. 

The much heralded “slavery apology” voted on Tuesday by the House of Representatives is far worse than a meaningless gesture. This illiterate and mendacious resolution also constitutes an assault on history and a vicious anti-American smear.

The problem with the resolution isn’t its condemnation of the institution of slavery or its denunciation of the brutal discrimination of Jim Crow; obviously, the oppression and exploitation of millions of African captives represented a monstrous and indefensible crime against humanity.

The resolution, however, makes a specific point that America bears unique guilt for the enslavement of Africans and suggests that slavery in the United States proved the worst in history, amounting to an unprecedented degradation of its victims.

The resolution (written, in obvious haste, by the fatuous freshman Congressman Steve Cohen of Tennessee) includes the following wildly misleading “whereas” clause as its deeply embarrassing third paragraph:

“Whereas slavery in America resembled no other form of involuntary servitude known in history, as Africans were captured and sold at auction like inanimate objects or animals...”

No reputable historian – no, not one – would agree with this outrageous statement.

The House suggests that slavery in America represents some horrible innovation, achieving incomparable levels of degradation? Actually, slavery in the United States strongly resembled all the most common forms of involuntary servitude that have constituted a universal human institution since the beginnings of recorded history. Yale professor David Brion Davis (author of the magisterial and definitive book Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World) suggests that in its very essence, slavery treats its victims like animals. In fact, the practice of enslaving humans began in the mists of pre-history at the same time as the domestication of beasts and pointedly used some of the same cruel techniques to secure unquestioning obedience from man as well as animal.

Davis writes of the hideous abuse of slaves by the Brazilian tribe, the Tupinamba, long before first contact with the Europeans: “It is crucial to realize that such slaves were being treated essentially as animals, a fact symbolized by their ritualistic slaughter and the final cannibal feast. This behavior dramatizes the point that, wholly apart from later economic functions, slaves from the very beginning were perceived as dehumanized humans – humans deprived of precisely those traits and faculties that are prerequisites for human dignity, respect and honor.”

Even among the famously civilized Greeks (more than two-thousand years before the emergence of the United States) Aristotle said the ox was the poor man’s slave and Xenophon “compared the teaching of slaves, unlike that of free workers, with the training of wild animals.”

None of this absolves from guilt the United States (or the British colonies that preceded independence): the institution of slavery wrecked the lives of millions. But the out-of context consideration of that guilt amounts to an irresponsible distortion of its essential nature and its extent. Of the estimated eleven to thirteen million human beings kidnapped from Africa and brought to the New World in the 400 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, less than 5% of them went to the British colonies in mainland North America. In other words, some nineteen out of twenty slaves were shipped to the West Indies and Latin America, not to the future United States.

The idea that the House of Representatives now officially endorses the claim that “slavery in America resembled no other form of involuntary servitude in history” is an embarrassment—one more shameful demonstration that preening politicians are willing to assault history, the truth, and even their own country in their mad, headlong pre-adjournment rush to serve the stern gods of brain-dead, America-hating political correctness.   

Every school day, the federal government feeds lunch to more than 30 million children --- nearly 60% of all school kids in the United States. In Atlanta, 79% of public school children get federally funded lunch. In New York City, the figure is 72%. And in the state of Texas, more than 70% of school children at every level eat midday meals entirely at taxpayer expense.  

How did distant bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. take on responsibility for feeding at least one meal a day to the majority of school age children in the country? 

In the nineteenth century, private (generally religious) charities like the Children’s Aid Society operated extensive programs to bring food to malnourished kids in schools. During the Depression, FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) began operating federally funded school lunch programs in 35,000 schools, using surplus food purchased from struggling farmers. In 1946, President Truman signed the National School Lunch Act, which Lyndon Johnson greatly expanded as part of his “War on Poverty.” LBJ added a free breakfast program (which now serves 7 million kids daily) and a summer meal program (now reaching 2 million more) to feed children even when school is out of session. 

Despite the massive investment of public money over the course of sixty years, poor children continue to suffer from inadequate nutrition and, increasingly, a devastating and crippling epidemic of obesity. The “free” lunches provided by the federal government actually cost $8.7 billion (in 2007), compelling taxpayers to provide daily meals for a majority of their neighbors’ kids.

In 1964, as a cornerstone of his ambitious “War on Poverty”, President Lyndon Johnson launched “The Job Corps” to train disadvantaged young people for productive employment. Based on FDR’s fondly-remembered Civilian Conservation Corps, the Job Corps offers room and board to applicants between ages 16 and 24 at one of its 122 residential centers across the country, as well as providing payments that increase the longer participants choose to remain. In 44 years, more than two million Americans have taken part in the Job Corps so naturally, the Labor Department authorized several studies to prove the effectiveness. Unfortunately, the 2001 “outcome study” showed only trivial benefits to Job Corps graduates compared to non-participants: a weekly income difference of $25.20 four years after finishing the program. A 2003 report produced even more discouraging conclusions – so much so that the Labor Department waited until 2006 to make its findings public. Using official government data, the 2003 analysis showed “statistically insignificant” result for most Job Corps participants, but an unexpectedly negative impact for one key group: female participants without children who earned less than non-participants. Nevertheless, Congress continues to authorize and re-authorize this dubious undertaking, with many Democrats calling for its expansion. Currently, 62,000 young Americans take part in the Job Corps at a cost to the taxpayer of $21,500 for each enrollee in the eight month program.