George Zimmerman

Three months ago, George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla., shot and killed Trayvon Martin.

Handcuffed, taken in and interrogated, Zimmerman told police Trayvon had been acting suspiciously that dark and rainy night, that he had followed Trayvon, been knocked down and battered on the ground, and, fearing for his life, pulled a concealed handgun and shot him.

Sanford police and prosecutors concluded that Zimmerman acted in self-defense and had not committed a provable felony. They let him go.

A racial firestorm followed. “Blacks are under attack,” railed Jesse Jackson. “Killing us is big business.” Arriving in Sanford, the reverend dialed it up. Trayvon was “shot down in cold blood by a vigilante ... murdered and martyred.”

Rep. Maxine Waters’ charge of “hate crime” was echoed by radio talker Joe Madison. Rep. Hank Johnson said Trayvon had been “executed.” The Grio compared his killing to the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955.

The New Black Panther Party put Zimmerman’s face on a “Wanted Dead or Alive” poster, called for 5,000 black men to run him down and said Trayvon had been “murdered in cold blood.”

Spike Lee twittered Zimmerman’s home address.

Zimmerman and his family have been in hiding for months in fear for their lives after the death threats.

President Obama expressed his empathy with the parents.

“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. And I think (the parents) are right to expect that all of us as Americans are gonna take this with the seriousness it deserves and that we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”

Obama said not a word to cool the lynch-mob atmosphere created by some of his major allies in a nation where he is the chief law enforcement officer. And so the campaign to convict Zimmerman of racist murder in the public mind, before he ever got to trial, proceeded on.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky called Trayvon’s killing a “modern-day lynching.” CNN claimed to have picked up the phrase “(bleeping) coons” on the tape of Zimmerman’s call to police, but had to retract when an enhanced version of the tape revealed no such slur.

Three times NBC used a version of Zimmerman’s call to the police edited to make it appear he racially profiled Trayvon.

The actual version:

Zimmerman: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining, and he’s just walking around, looking about.”

Dispatcher: “OK, and this guy, is he white, black or Hispanic?”

Zimmerman: “He looks black.”

The transcript was spliced to have Zimmerman say: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.”

CNN media critic Howard Kurtz called it “blatant distortion.”

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Caught and called out, three NBC employees were cashiered.

With this wind at her back, Florida State Attorney Angela Corey charged Zimmerman with second-degree murder. Translation: Zimmerman murdered Trayvon in a “depraved” state of mind.

If convicted, he could get life.

Last week came a more ominous report. Federal investigators are looking into hate crime charges that could bring the death penalty. The feds would have to prove Zimmerman stalked and murdered Trayvon because he was black.

Yet, last week also, evidence from the investigation spilled out into the national media and seemed to contradict and swamp the prosecution’s case.

A medical report the day after the shooting revealed that Zimmerman had suffered a broken nose, two black eyes and lacerations on the back of his head. Photographs from the night of the shooting confirmed it.

A police report that same night said Zimmerman’s sweatshirt had “grass stains and was wet on the back,” consistent with his being flat on his back.

The lead investigator on the scene, Officer Christopher Serino, wrote that Zimmerman could be heard “yelling for help as he was being battered by Trayvon Martin.” One witness said he heard 14 separate cries for help. Trayvon’s father initially told police the cries were not those of his son, then recanted.

One responder at the scene said he saw wounds on the knuckles of one of Trayvon’s hands, suggesting he had connected with a punch. The coroner found both the knuckle wounds and traces of the drug found in marijuana in Trayvon’s blood and urine.

Trayvon’s hoodie had powder stains indicating he was shot in the chest from 1 to 18 inches away, consistent again with what Zimmerman said.

Another eyewitness said the guy in the hoodie was on top beating the guy on the bottom “MMA style”—mixed martial arts style.

With this evidence, how can a jury convict Zimmerman of murder?

Yet the public mind has been so poisoned that an acquittal of George Zimmerman could ignite a reaction similar to that, 20 years ago, when the Simi Valley jury acquitted the LAPD cops in the Rodney King beating case.

Should that happen, those who fanned the flames, and those who did nothing to douse them, should themselves go on trial in the public arena.

Among the more controversial chapters in Suicide of a Superpower, my book published last fall, was the one titled, “The End of White America.”

It dealt with the demographic decline of the white majority and what it portends for education, the U.S. economy, politics and national unity.

That book and chapter proved the proximate cause of my departure from MSNBC, where the network president declared that subjects such as these are inappropriate for “the national dialogue.”

Apparently, the mainstream media are reassessing that.

For, in rare unanimity, The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today all led yesterday with the same story.

“Whites Account for Under Half of Births in U.S.,” blared the Times headline. “Minority Babies Majority in U.S.,” echoed the Post. “Minorities Are Now a Majority of Births,” proclaimed USA Today.

The USA Today story continued, “The nation’s growing diversity has huge implications for education, economics and politics.”

Huge is right.

Not only are whites declining as a share of the population, they are declining in real terms. Between 2010 and 2011, the number of births to white women fell 10 percent. The median age of white Americans, now 43 and rising, means that half of all white women have moved past the age that they are ever likely to bear more children.

White America is a dying tribe.

What do these statistics mean politically? Almost surely the end of the Republican Party as a national governing institution.

Republicans now depend on the vanishing majority for fully 90 percent of their votes in presidential elections, while the Democratic Party wins 60 to 70 percent of the Asian and Hispanic vote and 90 to 95 percent of the black vote.

The Democratic base is growing inexorably, while the Republican base is shriveling.

Already, California, Illinois and New York are lost. The GOP has not carried any of the three in five presidential elections. When Texas—where whites are a minority and a declining share of the population—tips, how does the GOP put together an electoral majority?

Western states like Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona, which Republican nominees like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan swept almost every time they ran, are becoming problematic for the party.

Thus the GOP refrain: We must work harder to win over Hispanics.

Undeniably true. But how does the GOP appeal to them?

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Fifty-three percent of all Hispanic children are born out of wedlock, with no father in the home and many of the moms themselves high school dropouts. Most Hispanic kids thus start school far behind.

In tests of fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders, their scores are closer to those of African-American kids than whites and Asians. Their dropout rate matches that of black kids. Absent affirmative action, not only are America’s colleges and universities but her professions are going to look far more Asian and white than the national population.

Not a formula for social peace.

Comes the reply: We must spend more to close the racial gap in test scores. Yet, according to The Washington Examiner, in the District of Columbia, the community where we have spent perhaps the most per capita to close the racial gap in test scores, the racial gap is by far the largest in the nation.

Not only do we seem not to know how to close it after four decades of plunging trillions into public schools, the country is tapped out. We are in the fourth consecutive year of trillion-dollar deficits, and our largest and richest state, California, just discovered its deficit has exploded to $16 billion.

And why should Hispanics vote Republican?

The majority of Hispanics are among that half of the population that pays no income tax. Why should they vote for a party whose major plank is that it will cut income taxes?

Hispanics benefit disproportionately from government programs.

Government puts their kids in Head Start before public school and provides them with Pell grants and student loans after public school.

From kindergarten through 12th grade, government educates their kids for free. Government provides them with free or subsidized health care through Medicaid and clinics. Government provides their families with public housing and rent supplements. Government provides the food stamps that feed the family. Government provides them with an annual earned income tax credit, a check just for working.

Government provides all these things, and what are Republicans going to do? They promise to cut government.

Again, why should Hispanics vote Republican?

Establishment Republicans say the party should support amnesty for illegal aliens. Yet this would make millions more eligible for federal programs in a country sinking in debt and mean millions more Hispanics going to the polls, and millions more coming to America in anticipation of the next amnesty.

How would that help the GOP?

By endlessly expanding Great Society programs, by lopping taxpayers off tax rolls, by supporting open borders and endless immigration from the Third World, the Republican Party, out of sheer nobility of character, has probably ensured its impending departure from history.

When the April figures on unemployment were released May 4, they were more than disappointing. They were deeply disturbing.

While the unemployment rate had fallen from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent, 342,000 workers had stopped looking for work. They had just dropped out of the labor market.

Only 63.6 percent of the U.S. working age population is now in the labor force, the lowest level since December 1981.

During the Reagan, Bush I and Clinton years, participation in the labor force rose steadily to a record 67 percent. The plunge since has been almost uninterrupted.

Here is a major cause of the economic malaise of the 21st century, a condition over which a president has little control. A shrinking share of our population is carrying an ever-expanding army of dependents.

If this were a result of American women going home to have kids, that would be, as it was after World War II, a manifestation of national vigor and health.

But that is not the case here.

The number of Americans of working age not in the labor force grew in April from 87,897,000 to 88,419,000—by an astonishing 522,000. This is an immense army for the rest of society to carry.

Why are Americans dropping out?

Some have given up looking for jobs in towns they grew up in, because the jobs are gone and not coming back, and they don’t want to leave. Some are rejecting the low-wage unskilled work being offered, because the alternative—unemployment checks and federal and state welfare—is not all that torturous.

With some, the work incentive was never implanted. With others, the option of moving back in with the parents is not all that terrible.

America, it seems, is becoming less like the country we grew up in, in its attitudes about work and idleness, and more like Europe.

Whatever its causes, this social and economic torpor that seems beyond the capacity of presidents to correct or cure is a dark cloud over the hopes of Barack Obama for a second term.

And yet another ominous cloud, no longer on the far horizon, is now directly above: the impending departure from the labor force of 70 million baby boomers in the next two decades.

According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, from Jan. 1, 1930, to Dec. 31, 1935, there were 13 million births in the U.S. From January 1940 through December 1945, there were 16 million.

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This was the Silent Generation, born in Depression and war. It never produced a president, and never will, unless Ron Paul catches fire pretty quickly. The Greatest Generation gave us six presidents, starting with JFK and ending with Bush I. Our three most recent presidents—Bill Clinton, Bush II, Barack Obama—are all baby boomers.

And here we come to the heart of our next economic crisis.

If one adds up all the children born between Jan. 1, 1946 and Jan. 1, 1965, the era of the great American baby boom, the total comes to 77 million babies born in the United States.

Why is this so significant now?

Because this year, 2012, the first wave of baby boomers, all those born in 1946, like Clinton and George W. Bush, will reach 66, and eligibility for full Social Security and Medicare benefits. The boomers, en masse, will start moving off payrolls onto pension rolls.

Let us assume the 77 million boomers are down to 72 million. This means that over the next 20 years, boomers will be retiring and reaching eligibility for Social Security and Medicare at a rate of 3.6 million a year, or 300,000 a month, or 10,000 every day.

Three hundred thousand a month leaving the labor force may help to explain its shrinkage. And as the boomers are the best-paid, best-educated generation we produced, the loss of their collective skills, abilities and tax contributions will be as heavy a blow to the nation as the funding of their Medicare and Social Security will be a burden to the taxpayers they leave behind in the labor force.

Since Roe v. Wade, abortions have carried off 53 million of the generations that were to replace the boomers. While those 53 million lost have been partially replaced by 40 million immigrants, legal and illegal, our recent immigrants have not exhibited the same income- or tax-producing capacity as boomers.

In 1965, LBJ announced his plan to convert our ordinary society into a Great Society. Since then, trillions have been spent.

The fruits of that immense investment? The illegitimacy rate, dropout rate, crime rate and incarceration rate have set new records, as the test scores of high school students have plummeted to new lows.

Our labor force is shrinking, the number of dependent U.S. adults is growing, our social programs are failing, and our best educated and most productive generation is retiring.

To borrow from Merle Haggard, “Are the good times really over for good?”

It took Joe Biden’s public embrace of same-sex marriage to smoke him out.

But after Joe told David Gregory of “Meet the Press” he was “absolutely comfortable” with homosexuals marrying, Barack Obama could not maintain his credibility with the cultural elite if he stuck with the biblical view that God ordained marriage as solely between a man and woman. The biblical view had to go.

Obama had to move, or look like a malingerer in secularism’s next great moral advance into post-Christian America.

Consider. Obama had an appearance coming up on “The View,” where Whoopi Goldberg would have demanded to know why he lacked the courage of Biden’s convictions. He has a $40,000-a-plate fundraiser at George Clooney’s, where the Hollywood crowd would want to know why he does not end discrimination against homosexuals.

He has appearances lined up before gay activists raising millions for his campaign. Monday, his press secretary was pilloried for his feeble defense of Obama’s now-abandoned position.

His hand was forced. Yet the stand Obama took could cost him his presidency. Same-sex marriage may yet be a bridge too far, even for a dying Christian America.

On the plus side for Obama, his decision is producing hosannas from the elites and an infusion of cash from those who see same-sex marriage as the great moral and civil rights issue of our time.

But Obama may also have just solved Mitt Romney’s big problem: How does Mitt get all those evangelical Christians and cultural conservatives not only to vote for him but to work for him?

Obama, by declaring that homosexual marriages should be on the same legal and moral plane as traditional marriage, just took command of the forces of anti-Christian secularism in America’s Kulturkampf. And Nov. 6, 2012, is shaping up as the Antietam of the culture war.

Obama’s second problem is that he may soon be seen as America’s champion of same-sex marriage, but an ineffectual advocate. For Obama can do nothing, as of now, to impose homosexual marriage on the American people.

Thirty-one states have voted to outlaw it. A constitutional amendment supporting same-sex marriage could not win a majority of either house of Congress, let alone the necessary two-thirds of both.

Hence, Obama is going to spend six months winning cheers by calling for same-sex marriage. But the price of those cheers will be the rallying of millions of opponents of homosexual marriage, who will fight this battle where they are winning it, at the state level.

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Only six states have approved homosexual marriage, while 30 have imposed a constitutional ban. In North Carolina, a ban not only on same-sex marriage but also civil unions, though opposed by Obama and Bill Clinton, carried on Tuesday with 61 percent of the vote.

Republican turnout in North Carolina’s primary was up half a million, the highest in history. And this is a state Obama carried in 2008, a state whose largest city, Charlotte, will host Obama’s convention.

Even in liberal California in 2008, while John McCain was getting a smaller share of the vote than Barry Goldwater in 1964, Proposition 8, restricting marriage to men and women, won.

How does Obama propose to win this battle?

He has one path to victory—the Supreme Court.

The New York Times, declaring that homosexuals’ right to marry is “too precious and too fragile to be left up to the whim of states and the tearing winds of modern partisan politics,” is looking to the court as the last, best hope to impose same-sex marriage on the nation.

Can’t trust voters, can’t trust elected legislators, can’t trust Congress. Homosexual marriage, says the Times, is too important to be left to democratic decision. The republic must be commanded to accept it by unelected judges who serve for life and against whom the people have no political recourse.

That process of judicial tyranny has begun. A California judge has overturned the decision of California’s voters to ban gay marriage, and his ruling is headed for the high court.

The Supreme Court thus will tell us whether this issue is to be decided democratically by voters and their elected state and federal legislators, or dictatorially by themselves.

Four liberal activists on the Supreme Court—Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor—are probably ready to declare that homosexual marriage is a constitutional right, as their predecessors declared abortion to be a constitutional right.

But Obama needs one more justice. If elected, he will get it, and same-sex marriage will be forced on all of America. If Romney wins, the Supreme Court will likely leave the issue of same-sex marriage to be decided by the people and their elected representatives.

Thus everything is up for grabs this November: the House, the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court and whether we still call the United States of America God’s country.

Game on!

How Europe’s crisis resolves itself as yet remains unknown.

But with Sunday’s returns from France and Greece, the mega-trends on the Old Continent are unmistakable. And for the European Union, they are ominous.

Nationalism—be it economic nationalism or ethnic nationalism—is ascendant. Transnationalism and multiculturalism are in headlong if not irreversible retreat. The European project is itself imperiled.

To be sure, no one should underestimate the commitment of Europe’s elites to the vision of One Europe as challenger to the United States. In the capitals and corporate headquarters of the continent, these elites are, almost to a man and woman, devout Europeans.

Yet their ability to keep Europe on course until its peoples have yielded up their sovereignty and agreed to submerge themselves in a single entity is now in question. From Paris to Athens, the radical left and the nationalist right are resurgent. Marxists and patriots dream different dreams than the disciples of Jean Monnet.

Consider what the French electorate just said.

In the first round of voting, communists and radicals took 11 percent. Their leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon, endorsed the socialist Francois Hollande, who went on to win Sunday.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, who ran second in the first round with only 27 percent, raised his total Sunday to 48 percent. Though Marine Le Pen of the National Front had refused to endorse him, Sarkozy openly courted her voters.

As Marine put it, they call us racists, protectionists and xenophobes. Then they come asking for our endorsement, echo our words and seek our votes.

The near 30 percent the National Front and far left combined pulled in the first round is unprecedented in the annals of the Fifth Republic.

In Greece, the returns were equally dramatic.

PASOK, the governing center-left party, ran third with 13 percent of the vote. New Democracy, the center-right party that is in coalition with PASOK, ran first but won only 19 percent.

These two parties saw their combined support sliced in half since the last election and may be unable to form a government that can continue to impose the austerity the German-led eurozone is demanding as the price of Greece’s bailout.

The parties that gained most were the communists with 7 percent, Syriza, a radical-left party, with 17 percent, and Golden Dawn, a far-right party that has called for land mines on the border, with 7 percent. All three will bedevil any coalition that accedes to German demands.

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What is causing the collapse of the center in Europe?

The austerity being imposed by Germany and her hard-money allies in the north of Europe on the indebted nations of the south of Europe.

Across the continent, voices are rising to demand that a growth package be attached to Angela Merkel’s fiscal pact.

But a growth package means tax cuts and spending increases. How do Europe’s nations provide these without adding to deficits and national debts, which mean new borrowing and the higher interest rates that are a primary cause of the present crisis?

The debtor nations seem to be saying this:

“Yes, we have been addicted to the narcotic of deficit spending. But we cannot survive going cold turkey. If you force us into it, our people will rebel and throw us out. Before we can give up the drugs, we need a new fix.”

From inception, the European project was built on a Faustian bargain.

If the nations of Europe would surrender their sovereignty, let their identities be diluted through immigration and open borders, and submerge themselves in a larger and more inclusive Europe, their peoples would be rewarded with an unparalleled prosperity.

Surrender your souls, and we will make you rich, secure and happy, said the eurocrats to the peoples of Europe.

After two terrible wars, Europe’s peoples took the bribe.

Free-riding off America’s defense, enjoying a prosperity produced by internal free trade and the explosive growth of their welfare states, financed at low interest rates once the euro was accepted as the common currency, they came to relish the good times.

Now the bill has come due. Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain must sacrifice and suffer to pay for these good times. Their public sectors must be pared back, pensions reduced, retirement age advanced. They must work harder and longer for all the years it takes to put their fiscal houses in order and pay back what they owe.

The left is saying: We want our pensions restored, our public employees rehired. If our leaders need more money, take it from the rich, take it from the banks, take it from the big corporations.

The right is saying: We want our countries and culture back. We want our borders closed. We want no more immigration from the rest of Europe or the rest of the world.

Let France be France again. Let Greece be Greece again.

Tribalism, radicalism and socialism are the growth stocks of the new Europe.

Syntagma Square, Athens

U.S. growth in the first quarter fell to 2.2 percent, a disappointment. But in Europe, that news would have caused general rejoicing.

For consider the gathering crisis on the old continent.

With negative growth now for six months, Britain has fallen back into recession. “I don’t think we’re anywhere near halfway through the eurozone crisis,” said Prime Minister David Cameron this weekend.

Romania’s government fell last week. The Czech government barely survived a vote of no confidence. In the capital cities of both countries, tens of thousands have angrily protested the new austerity.

The Dutch government also fell last week, when the Freedom Party of right-wing populist Geert Wilders abandoned the governing coalition.

Wilders refuses to support spending cuts and new taxes needed to meet the hard deficit target of 3 percent of gross domestic product set by the European Union for 2013.

The Rome government of Silvio Berlusconi is history. New Prime Minister Mario Monti says Italy cannot sustain the austerity being imposed upon her.

In Spain, unemployment has hit 24.4 percent. Half her young are jobless. “Spain is undergoing a crisis of enormous proportions,” says Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo. He compares the EU to the Titanic.

French elections are Sunday. Most observers believe they will end the career of President Nicolas Sarkozy and install in the Elysee Palace a socialist, Francois Hollande, who has pledged to impose a 75 percent tax on incomes above 1 million euros.

With a week to go, the French campaign calls to mind the 1930s.

Sarkozy, says The New York Times, is focusing on “patriotism, protectionism, French values,” attacking immigrants who do not assimilate.

“I do not want to let France be diluted by globalization,” Sarkozy declared Sunday. “Europe has given in too much to free trade and deregulation. ... I do not want France to be isolated in the world, but I want frontiers respected. ... France expects a Europe that protects the European people.”

The far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Melanchon, defeated in the first round, is charging Sarkozy with using the language of Pierre Laval and Marshal Philippe Petain, both convicted of collaborating with the Nazis.

“To be treated as a fascist by a communist is a compliment,” says Sarkozy.

“In 2012, the issue is borders, and I will put them at the center of the debate,” Sarkozy said Sunday in Toulouse, where an Islamist fanatic recently murdered four Jews, including three children, and three French soldiers.

“Without borders, there is no nation, there is no Republic, there is no civilization,” he told 10,000 cheering supporters. “We are not superior to others, but we are different.”

Sarkozy is on “a mad path,” says Hollande. “The issue in France and in Europe is the fight against extremism.”

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Greek elections are also scheduled for Sunday, with the center-left Pasok Party and center-right New Democracy having lost half of their support since 2009.

Ireland votes May 31 on the eurozone fiscal pact that calls for austerity among Europe’s most indebted nations. Polls are predicting a yes vote. But Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams has ridden a rising tide against the pact to make his party the second-most-popular in Ireland.

“The rise in political extremism in Europe,” writes Financial Times columnist Wolfgang Munchau, “is in part the consequence of stubbornness and stupidity among centrist elites.”

Where is Europe going?

Larry Summers is probably right, “Again Europe and the global economy approach the brink.”

With the demonstrations, riots, and governments falling like dominoes, Europe’s ruling elites are losing the confidence of the people and its ruling parties are bleeding support to the more militant left and right.

What does this portend for Europe?

Probably an easing up of austerity—of the tax hikes and budget cuts for payrolls, pensions and health care—demanded by Germany’s Angela Merkel and her fiscally hawkish allies. And it probably means an effort to stimulate the dormant economies of Europe without sending buyers of Europe’s bonds fleeing for the exits out of fear of inflation or default.

But the vision of One Europe that dates back to the 1950s and Jean Monnet seems to belong to yesterday.

Transnationalism, the idea of sacrificing the national interest for the greater good of Europe, is dying. Not one of the four leading French parties in the first round of voting was making the case for Europe.

Second, the idea of a multicultural Europe open to immigration from beyond its borders seems to be dead.

Third, the ideology of Occupy Wall Street has crossed the pond.

The senior Catholic cardinal in Britain is demanding that Cameron accept a “Robin Hood tax” on large financial transactions to make “banks and large financial institutions pay their fair share,” with the tax money going to the poor.

The One Percenters are in the gun sights everywhere. Rarely was Yeats’ couplet more apposite.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

With the number of Secret Service members and agents caught up in the partying-with-prostitutes scandal in Cartagena now at a dozen, and six already gone, how much wider and deeper does this go?

No one can take pleasure in seeing Secret Service agents—whose deserved reputation is that they will “take a bullet” for the president, his family and all whom they protect—shamed and disgraced.

Yet one would have to be naive to believe this was some isolated incident. No sooner was the first day’s work done in Cartagena than 20 hookers were trooping into the hotel rooms of SS agents, supervisors and members of the military advance team.

And Sen. Charles Grassley asks a relevant question.

As the Secret Service travel and work in close contact with the White House Advance Office and White House Communications Agency, was the Obama staff oblivious to this misconduct? If they were aware of it, did no one report it to the White House chief of staff?

Hostile intelligence services often use “honey traps” to ensnare U.S. diplomats and journalists. Thus this hookers-and-agents scandal is no laughing matter.

And it hit just as we learned that the General Services Administration, purchasing agent for the U.S. government, shelled out $823,000 on a party for 300 employees at a casino-spa in Las Vegas, where the hired entertainment included a mind reader, a clown and a $75,000 bicycle-building exercise.

Jeff Neeley, the GSA western regional commissioner, invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than testify to Congress about what is now being investigated as criminal misconduct.

President Obama’s appointee to head GSA, Martha Johnson, has resigned.

Infinitely larger in terms of the tax dollars looted or lost is the Solyndra scandal, where a green technology company favored by the White House went belly up after receiving an endorsement visit from Obama and an astonishing half-billion dollars in federal loan guarantees.

These events all point to a culture of entitlement born of a belief that now that the Democratic Party, the Party of Government, is again running the government, we can “let the good times roll” once more.

And so we see President Obama for six months literally campaigning on the public dime. Not a day seems to pass that he is not helicoptering off the White House lawn on Marine One to Andrews Air Force Base to board Air Force One to fly to some swing state, while his staff finds an official cover event so the White House can charge most of the trip to taxpayers.

Has any other president spent so many days campaigning, half a year and a year before the traditional Labor Day start of the election season, or used tax dollars so flagrantly to buy re-election?

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The sense of entitlement appears to extend to the Obama family.

In 2010, at the bottom of the Great Recession, Michelle Obama, accompanied by daughter Sasha and friends, took Air force Two to Spain for a lavish vacation. The first lady paid for her stay at a five-star hotel in Marbella, but the cost of flying her there and moving her about, with scores of Secret Service agents, had to run into the millions.

And the trip came at a time when President Obama was instructing the nation on the need to sacrifice and the number of Americans on food stamps was setting a new record every month.

How many so-called “1 percenters” project a lifestyle as lavish?

Last December, flying out of the District of Columbia in separate planes, the first couple took a two-week Christmas vacation at a resort in Hawaii, the taxpayers’ cost of which has been estimated at $4 million. Winters in Hawaii, summers in the Vineyard, and with it all subsidized by taxpayers?

What kind of example is this? Where is the spirit of sacrifice here?

Is this the same president who talks about having inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s?

Lately, we learned that Leon Panetta, in the 10 months he has been secretary of defense, has spent $860,000 of taxpayers’ money on 27 separate trips to his home in Monterey, Calif.

Curing Leon of his homesickness is getting expensive.

What all of the above reveals is how the Party of Government views the government. They see its perks, privileges and power as their entitlements, their inheritance, their patrimony.

And there is some truth to that.

After all, the bureaucracy was built up in the New Deal and Great Society, and remains dyed-in-the-wool Democratic.

Even when the GOP wins the White House, the conservatives are outsiders in this city. Even when Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan won their 49-state landslides, neither came even close to carrying Washington, D.C., the sole Electoral College precinct that has never gone Republican.

While John McCain lost the nation by eight points to Obama, he lost Washington, D.C., by 86 points. This is Obama’s town. He owns it.

But if a noxious aroma of self-indulgence and corruption is arising from it, it is Obama’s problem, and it is no longer a small one.

Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama

“Bibi” Netanyahu was disgusted.

“My initial reaction is that Iran has gotten a freebie. It has got five weeks to continue enrichment without any limitation.”

The Israeli prime minister was referring to Saturday’s meeting in Istanbul of the P5-plus-1—the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany—with representatives from Iran.

Subject: Iran’s nuclear program. After a “constructive” meeting of one day, all agreed to meet again in Baghdad, May 23, and departed.

For Bibi, it was a strategic defeat.

For Israel’s goal is a halt to Iran’s enrichment of uranium and the removal of enriched uranium from that country.

But Catherine Ashton, the foreign minister for the European Union who is leading the P5-plus-1, stated that the West accepts Iran’s position that, as a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, she has a right to a peaceful nuclear program and nuclear power.

“Iran’s right to the peaceful use of nuclear power” must be fully respected, Ashton said. No one dissented.

If the United States assents to Iran’s enrichment of uranium, and Iran gives assurances that the Ayatollah’s fatwa against the acquisition of nuclear weapons is being observed, a Washington-Tehran deal may be in the offing.

What would be the elements?

An end to Iran’s enrichment of uranium to 20 percent, once Iran has a sufficient stock for its program of nuclear medicine.

Transfer of any excess 20 percent uranium outside the country to prevent further enrichment to weapons grade.

Regular intrusive inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities to ensure there is no diversion of uranium to bomb-making.

What would Iran demand?

Step-by-step lifting of sanctions, as it demonstrates it is telling the truth about not seeking nuclear weapons.

Such a deal would end the U.S.-Iran confrontation, yet allow Iran to continue to gain the knowledge, experience, and technical capacity to break out, should it ever decide to take the risk and build the weapons.

Netanyahu believes Israel’s security and survival mandate the nuclear castration of Iran. Sunday, in a detailed report cleared by military censors, Israeli TV showed how an attack would be mounted.

Yet reporter Alon Ben David conceded that the Israeli Air Force “does not have the capacity to destroy the entire Iranian program.”

Unlike the Iraqi nuclear reactor and the Syrian reactor Israel bombed in 1981 and 2007, Iran has many more nuclear facilities, spread over a far larger country, farther away and better defended.

And given the public threats by Israel and test runs by the IAF as far as Gibraltar, no attack on Iran will come as a total surprise. There would be losses of planes and pilots.

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What would be the results?

While it would destroy some of Iran’s nuclear facilities, it would not end the program but rally Iranians behind the regime. And it might trigger retaliation by Iran and Hezbollah, by missile, against Israel itself.

An Israeli attack on Iran, which President Obama and the U.S. military strongly oppose, would also put the issue of a U.S. war with Iran front and center in the presidential election.

What would America do; what would Obama do?

The election of 2012 could turn on that decision.

Should Iran retaliate against Israel, the Israeli lobby and the neocons would demand that America come to Israel’s defense. Mitt Romney, the GOP hawks, evangelical Christians, conservative commentators and many Democrats would echo the demand, no matter who started the shooting.

A clamor would arise for us to finish the job of smashing Iran’s nuclear facilities.

As Israel is admired and Iran’s regime is detested, Obama could never declare neutrality. And should he order the U.S. military to go to Israel’s aid, his re-election might well be assured.

As commander in chief and first diplomat, Obama holds all the cards.

If Iran is accommodating, the sanctions he has imposed will be seen as successful. If Iran balks in negotiations, he can impose new sanctions.

If Iran walks out of the talks, he can issue ultimata.

If Israel attacks Iran, he can come to Israel’s defense and finish the job of destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities. If done close to the election, this would assure Obama’s re-election. The “October surprise” of 2012.

What are Iran’s interests and options?

Tehran cannot want war with the United States. For whatever the damage done to U.S. interests, the destruction of Iran’s air, naval and missile forces and nuclear program would be total.

The smartest course for Iran to pursue is to demonstrate to the West that she is reasonable and anxious to prove she has no present or future intention of building atomic weapons.

Which is what Iran was doing in Istanbul.

No wonder Bibi is frustrated. If there is no U.S. attack on Iran by November, and Obama wins, there may never be a U.S. attack on Iran.

Israel cannot do to Iran what Bibi wants done to Iran. Only Obama can.

But how does Bibi get Obama to do it, before November?

Barack Obama

God save me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.

That thought must be coursing through the mind of President Obama right now as his White House rigs for silent running in the murder trial of George Zimmerman.

Obama foolishly inserted himself into this volatile case weeks ago, and injected the issue of race. Expressing empathy with the family of Trayvon Martin, Obama flashed a signal of racial solidarity:

“If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”

Obama also implied that he shares the liberal perspective that America is a country where black kids must walk in daily fear of white racist vigilantes.

“All of us have to do some soul-searching to figure out how does something like this happen. And that means that we examine the laws and the context for what happened, as well as the specifics of the incident.”

Translation: The death of Trayvon tells us something is wrong with America.

To most Americans, this is a slander against their country, refuted by the statistics on interracial crime. Obama, however, buys into it.

Angela Corey, the special prosecutor, says that the charge against Zimmerman of second-degree murder was based on evidence and not influenced by the weeks of demonstrations, demands and threats from black leaders.

Perhaps. But from what the public knows, a charge of second-degree murder, which carries a sentence of 25 years to life, does not seem to stand up.

To convict, prosecutors must convince all 12 members of a jury that not only was Zimmerman in no danger of bodily harm, he did not believe he was in danger of bodily harm. He simply killed Martin in a “depraved” state of mind.

Nothing revealed so far seems to support that theory.

Zimmerman saw a tall stranger, hooded and acting suspiciously. He called the cops. He did not tell them the man was black. They had to ask him whether the suspect was black, white or Hispanic.

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“He looks black,” said Zimmerman.

The CNN report that Zimmerman, on the call to the cops, used a racial slur, “(bleeping) coon,” has been withdrawn. What Zimmerman said was that it was “(bleeping) cold” outside.

Came then the fight. Two eyewitnesses say they saw Zimmerman on his back being beaten and screaming for help.

A cop at the scene said Zimmerman had a bloody nose and a gash on the back of his head. Zimmerman’s family says Trayvon banged George’s head on the sidewalk. Film of Zimmerman entering the police station that night shows bruising on the back of his head.

Trayvon was found lying face down. If Zimmerman had been on top and shot him, would not Trayvon have been found on his back?

Zimmerman’s family says Trayvon started the fight with a fist to the nose, and George went down. Trayvon is not here to tell his story. But a natural question arises:

Why would Zimmerman, with a holstered gun to protect himself, close with and start a fistfight with a teenager half a head taller? A grown man with a gun his adversary does not know he has—would he not more likely stand some distance away, to pull it out if needed?

The prosecutors must have discovered new evidence to indict for murder. For all of the testimony from Zimmerman’s side and the eyewitnesses seems to create more than a reasonable doubt that he committed a murder.

Where is Obama’s political problem?

With the election on, the case has begun to divide the nation along racial lines. And Obama’s allies are doing it. It is Jesse Jackson and the Black Caucus crying that Trayvon was “hunted down like a rabid dog in the street,” that he was “murdered and martyred,” that it was a “hate crime.”

“It’s a disgrace that man (Zimmerman) hasn’t been shot yet,” says Mike Tyson. The New Black Panther Party has put out a poster offering a $10,000 reward that reads, “Wanted: Dead or Alive.”

The face on the poster is George Zimmerman.

Trayvon is the victim here, but George Zimmerman is beginning to look like a victim—of lynch law and mob rule.

With the Panthers and Tyson calling for vengeance and vigilante justice, where is Attorney General Eric Holder? Out congratulating Al Sharpton for bringing political pressure on Florida to indict.

Is this how justice is advanced in Obama’s America?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has denounced Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law—which may be Zimmerman’s defense—as “a license to murder” and an excuse for “vigilante justice.”

Bloomberg seems about to lead a crusade against the National Rifle Association and for repeal of stand-your-ground laws in the two dozen states that have enacted them.

Given their huge emotional investment in this case, how will black leaders and black America react if Zimmerman walks?

And how will the rest of America react to that reaction?

And if Zimmerman, Trayvon, race, guns and stand-your-ground become voting issues this fall, how good is that for Barack Obama?

Mark Felt

As the 40th anniversary of Watergate impends, we are to be bathed again in the great myth and morality play about the finest hour in all of American journalism.

The myth?

That two heroic young reporters at The Washington Post, guided by a secret source, a man of conscience they dubbed “Deep Throat,” cracked the case and broke the scandal wide open, where the FBI, U.S. prosecutors and more experienced journalists floundered and failed.

Through their tireless investigative reporting, they compelled the agencies of government to treat Watergate as the unprecedented constitutional crisis it was. No Pulitzer Prize was ever more deserved than the one awarded the Post in 1973.

These young journalists saved our republic!

However, the myth, fabricated in All the President’s Men and affirmed by the 1976 film of the same name, with Robert Redford as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein, has a Hellfire missile coming its way.

Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat is an exhaustive study of the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein and the leaking by the FBI’s Mark Felt, whose identify as Deep Throat was revealed in 2005.

Leak author Max Holland zeroes in on the last great unanswered question of Watergate: Why did Felt, an FBI No. 2 on the short list to succeed J. Edgar Hoover, risk reputation and career to leak secrets to the Post?

Woodward and Bernstein paint Deep Throat, writes Holland, as a “selfless high-ranking official intent on exposing the lawlessness of the Nixon White House.” But this is self-serving nonsense.

The truth was right in front of Woodward. His refusal to see it made him a willing or witless collaborator in the ruin of the reputation and career of an honorable pubic servant, Patrick Gray.

Felt was consumed by anger and ambition. When Hoover died, a month before the break-in, Felt, who had toadied to Hoover, saw himself as Hoover’s successor. But President Nixon went outside the bureau to name Gray from the Department of Justice acting director.

Concealing his rage and resentment, Felt wormed himself into Gray’s confidence, and then set out to destroy Gray.

Felt’s method: Leak discoveries of the Watergate investigation to a cub reporter at the Post, which everybody in Washington read, rather than to veteran journalists known to be FBI outlets.

This would cover Felt’s tracks.

Published in the Post, the leaks of what the FBI was uncovering would enrage Nixon and make Gray appear an incompetent unable to conduct a professional investigation. This would make it unlikely that Nixon would ever send Gray’s name to the Senate for confirmation as permanent director.

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And if Gray, an outsider, fell because he couldn’t keep the FBI from leaking, Nixon might turn to Felt, the ranking insider who could button up the bureau like Hoover did.

By ingratiating himself with Gray as he set out to discredit and destroy him, Felt expected that when Gray was passed over by Nixon, he would recommend to Nixon that he appoint his loyal deputy, Felt, as director.

Even if cynical and vicious, the scheme was clever.

Until Nixon found out Felt was the leaker in late 1972, he was considering Felt for the top job. Felt’s machinations and deceptions at the apex of the FBI make Nixon’s White House appear in retrospect to have been a cloistered convent of Carmelite nuns.

More revolting than the ruin of Gray’s reputation was what Felt did to the good name of the bureau he professed to love. By leaking what agents were learning about Watergate, he was discrediting the FBI.

Inside the government, he made the FBI look like an agency of bumblers who could not keep secrets. Outside the government, the FBI looked like a three-toed sloth, while a fleet-footed and fearless Washington Post was unearthing the truth.

The FBI appeared beaten at every turn by the brilliant Post, when it was the FBI’s homework Felt was stealing and the Post was cribbing.

Woodward and Bernstein were glorified stenographers.

And though Deep Throat was portrayed as a man sickened by the wiretaps and break-ins by the White House, Felt himself, writes Holland, “authorized illegal surreptitious entries into the homes of people associated with the Weather Underground.”

In 1979, Felt was prosecuted and convicted and then pardoned by Reagan.

In The Secret Man, Woodward calls Felt “a truth-teller.” That’s quite a tribute to an FBI man who lied to Pat Gray, lied to all of his FBI colleagues and lied to every journalist who asked him for 30 years whether he was Deep Throat.

If Felt was a hero, why did he not come forward to tell the country what he had done and why?

Because he was no hero.

Mark Felt was a snake. He used the Post to destroy his rivals and advance his ambitions, and the Post didn’t care what his motives were because Felt was assisting them in destroying their old enemy.

Yes, indeed, the finest hour in American journalism.

President Barack Obama

The night of his victories in Maryland, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia, Mitt Romney laid out the ground upon which he will stand to fight his fall battle with Barack Obama.

Obama, said Mitt, seeks “a government-centered society.”

But Mitt would restore an “opportunity society” built on the foundations of freedom and private enterprise.

“Romney spoke in upbeat, elevated and optimistic tones that were steeped in themes of patriotism crafted for a general election,” said The New York Times.

That same day, President Obama went before America’s editors to lay out the ground on which he intends to fight.

His overarching themes will be security and fairness—social and economic security for the American people and a reduction of income inequality in a country where the top 1 percent does extraordinarily well while the middle class treads water:

Can we succeed as a country where a shrinking number of people do exceedingly well while a growing number struggle to get by?...

“If you benefit from programs you pay nothing to support, why would you vote for a Republican president who would cut those programs?”

This is…the defining issue of our time….It’s why I ran in 2008. It’s what my presidency has been about. It’s why I’m running again….I can’t remember a time when the choice between competing visions of our future has been so unambiguously clear.

With that, the president turned to the budget of Rep. Paul Ryan, which Romney had called “marvelous”:

This congressional Republican budget is…a Trojan Horse…an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism…antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it.

Whereas the Romney-Ryan vision emphasizes individual initiative and entrepreneurship, Obama’s appeal is to the values of community and common purpose.

Yet listening to Obama describe his Republican rivals recalls to mind Theodore Roosevelt assailing the “malefactors of great wealth” and Franklin Roosevelt savaging the “economic royalists” and “money-changers in the temple of our civilization.”

Obama’s rhetoric is not remotely in that league. But the campaign he intends to run, which can be deduced from his speech to the editors, is one that the Republicans had best take seriously.

Obama intends to plant himself in the populist-progressive tradition of William Jennings Bryan, FDR, and Harry Truman and to demonize Mitt and the Ryan Republicans as the tireless toadies of the 1 percent.

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Obama’s strategy comes straight out of the old socialist Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Demagogic though his rhetoric may be, Obama’s argument has appeal. Millions of Americans agree with his fundamental points. The rich have gotten richer. The gap between rich and middle class has grown. Workers’ wages have remained largely stagnant.

A second strength of the Obama campaign is that today, if one adds up all of government’s beneficiaries and employees, the total exceeds 91 million Americans. Moreover, half of wage earners have by now been dropped from the federal income tax rolls.

The process has been going on since the Great Society was launched after Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964.

Each decade, more Americans are dropped off the income tax rolls, more move onto government payrolls, and more sign up for benefits from government programs.

If you benefit from programs you pay nothing to support, why would you vote for a Republican president who would cut those programs?

Not only ideology but the interests of scores of millions of Americans now dictate a vote for the party of government and against any party that promises to cut government.

We have arrived at the fail-safe point of the American republic. If we do not roll back government now, we will end up having to do it the way they are doing it in Italy, Spain, and Greece, accompanied by riots in the streets.

The strategy Obama has chosen—to turn the 2012 election into a choice between standing with the middle-class many or the Wall Street few—is not only polarizing. It may prove perilous for President Obama.

First, it is divisive and partisan, stripping Obama from all pretense of being the uniter who can bring red state and blue state together.

Second, though this populist assault will energize the left, it will unsettle the middle and depreciate the most precious political assets Obama has—his presidential office and his personal reputation as a nice and likable man.

Third, the timing is wrong. Such crescendo rhetoric usually comes in the last seven days before an election, not seven months.

Moreover, a campaign to demonize Romney as a right-wing extremist would represent a de facto admission by Obama that he cannot win running on his record.

This tactic succeeded for the Democrats with Goldwater in 1964; it failed with Ronald Reagan in 1980. Romney’s political history and benign persona suggest that it will fail again.

Nevertheless, while Romney stays on the high road, his surrogates may have to dial up their rhetoric soon to match that of Barack Obama.

With the shooting death of Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch volunteer who was legally carrying a 9-millimeter handgun, the familiar wail has arisen from our cultural and media elite:

America has too many guns!

“Open carry” and “concealed carry” laws should be repealed.

Florida’s “Stand-your-ground” law, replicated in two dozen states, threatens to turn America into the Tombstone of Doc Holiday and Wyatt Earp. This is insane!

The United Nations agrees. This year, the world body takes up the global control of firearms, including small arms in the hands of citizens.

According to Sen. Rand Paul, the U.N. “Small Arms Treaty” will almost surely mandate tougher licensing requirements to own a gun, require the confiscation and destruction of unauthorized civilian firearms, call for a ban on the trade, sale and private ownership of semi-automatic weapons, and create an international gun registry.

No more Colt .45s in the top drawer or M-1 rifles in the closet.

Memo to the U.N.: Lots of luck.

Forty-five Republican and 12 Democratic senators have declared their opposition to any such U.N. treaty, which means it is dead in the water the moment it is launched from Turtle Bay.

For when it comes to Second Amendment rights, Middle America has spoken—at the ballot box and the gun store. And Congress, most state legislatures and the federal courts have all come down on the side of the Silent Majority.

In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court struck down one of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation, assuring district citizens of their right to keep a gun in the home.

U.S. Judge Benson E. Legg just struck down the section of Maryland’s gun law that left it to local authorities to decide if a citizen could carry a gun outside his house.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, mentioned as a running mate for Mitt Romney, just signed a law striking down a 20-year ban that kept residents from buying more than one pistol per month. In Virginia’s legislature in 1993, McDonnell had voted in favor of the one-gun-per-month rule.

The new law ignited New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who calls Virginia “the No. 1 out-of-state source of crime guns in New York and one of the top suppliers of crime guns nationally.”

Two New York cops have been shot this year, one fatally, with guns from Virginia.

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But there is another side to the gun story, and University of Houston Professor Larry Bell relates it:

Law-abiding citizens in America used guns in self-defense 2.5 million times in 1993 (about 6,825 times per day), and actually shot and killed two and a half times as many criminals as police did (1,527 to 606). These self-defense shootings resulted in less than one-fifth as many incidents as police where an innocent person was mistakenly identified as a criminal (2 percent versus 11 percent).

The figures tell the story. Along with rising incarceration rates, the proliferation of guns in the hands of the law-abiding has been a factor in the nation’s falling crime rate.

And that proliferation has accelerated under President Obama.

According to ammo.net, tax revenues from the sale of firearms and ammunition have gone up 48 percent since 2008, with Iowa, North Carolina and Utah registering revenue gains of over 100 percent.

On Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, there were 129,666 background checks of individuals seeking to buy a gun, the highest one-day search in history. This exceeded by 32,000 the number of background checks by gun dealers on Black Friday 2010.

Background searches in December broke the all-time monthly record set in November, as 1,534,414 inquiries were made to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System about prospective gun-buyers.

Half a million inquiries came in the six days before Christmas.

Why are Americans arming themselves?

More and more citizens, says the National Rifle Association, fear that if or when they confront a threat to their family, lives or property, the police will not be there.

Reports of home invasions and flash mobs have firmed up the market for firearms. After the 1992 Los Angeles riot, when Californians found themselves defenseless in homes and shops, gun sales soared.

Others argue that a fear of new laws in an Obama second term, or even the possible confiscation of handguns, is driving sales.

Gun-control organizations claim that gun ownership is actually declining, that fewer and fewer people are buying more and more of these guns.

But the numbers seem to contradict the gun-controllers.

A 2005 Gallup survey found that three in 10 Americans own a gun, that 40 percent had a gun in the house, that nearly half of all men own a gun, as do one in seven women. Two-thirds of all gun-owners gave as a reason they own a gun: protection against crime.

America is an armed camp, with the South and Midwest the most heavily armed. Yet, still, Americans buy guns in the millions every year.

Why? Whatever the answer, it is our business, not the U.N.’s.

"In France we kill blacks, Jews and Arabs"

As an act of pure evil it was difficult to match.

After dragging the 8-year-old by her hair across a schoolyard, the killer put a 9 mm pistol to the girl’s head and pulled the trigger.

The gun jammed. So he took out a Colt .45 and finished her.

She was one of four victims. The others—a 30-year-old rabbi and his two boys.

As the gunman had targeted a Jewish school and the bullets were identical to those used in the murders of two North African soldiers and one black soldier, suspicion fell on some neo-Nazi racist.

And in France’s tight presidential campaign, left and center moved swiftly to exploit the atrocities by charging the French right with creating an atmosphere in which such racist horrors can occur.

“Killings Could Stall Election’s Nationalist Turn,” ran the New York Times headline. The debate over whether the murders were “inspired by anti-immigrant political talk is likely to continue,” wrote the Times’ Steve Erlanger, “both as a weapon in the presidential campaign and as a more general soul-searching about the nature of France.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy was thrown on the defensive.

These murders, said centrist candidate Francois Bayrou, “because of their origin, of the religion of their family,” are linked “to a growing climate of intolerance.”

Politicians “have the duty to make sure that tensions, passions, hatred should not be kept alive at every moment. To point the finger at one or another according to their origins is to inflame passions, and we do it because in that flame there are votes to get.”

The massacre at the Jewish school and the murders of Muslim and black soldiers, said the head of France’s Council of Muslim Democrats, “are a strong signal sent to politicians and, more particularly, to those who, for several months, have played with fire.”

And who had “played with fire”?

Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen, candidate of the rightist National Front.

Sarkozy has been toughening his stance on immigration and national identity. In a March 7 debate, he said that there are “too many foreigners” in France and that assimilation is “working worse and worse.”

He pledged to cut immigration in half.

Last summer, Sarkozy sought to deport Gypsies who had overstayed their visas. In echo of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he has called multiculturalism a failure.

He has spoken of revising the Schengen agreement, which lets residents of the European Union travel freely across borders. He has denounced burqas and facial veils worn by Muslim women. Boys and girls, he says, should swim together, a practice intolerable to devout Muslims.

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With his rightward move to siphon votes from Le Pen, Sarkozy had surged into a tie with Socialist Francois Hollande.

So it was that the left leapt with alacrity upon the massacre to charge that Sarkozy’s new populism had created the climate in which such horrors against Jews and Muslims can occur.

So it was that the Times concluded that the nationalist turn in French politics might be halted, as it had in Norway after berserker Anders Breivik slaughtered scores of children last year.

What was happening should be readily recognizable to Americans.

When John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a Marxist in Dallas, the Goldwater right was charged with creating an atmosphere of hate that had made it likelier to happen there. When Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot by a crazed gunman who wounded a dozen others and slaughtered six, moral responsibility was laid at the feet of Sarah Palin.

Unfortunately for the French left, however, by Wednesday, the mass murderer had been identified as a homegrown Salafist jihadi and self-styled member of al-Qaida who had spent time in Afghanistan and Pakistan and been under surveillance for years by French intelligence.

Mohamed Merah was seeking revenge against Jews for the deaths of Palestinian children and against French soldiers for fighting in Afghanistan.

Le Pen seized on the news to blast the left, which had sought to blame the atrocities on her, and charged the French government with underestimating the Islamist threat and being lax on national security.

“It is time to wage war on these fundamentalist political religious groups who are killing our children,” she said.

“The threat of Islamic fundamentalism has been underestimated. ... (I) have been talking about this for months and months, and the political class has rejected (me). Some are going to have difficulty explaining themselves, but I have a clear conscience.”

With the killer precisely the type of individual the French right has said bears watching, Bayrou was hastily backtracking:

Politicians must “tackle the risk of importing into French society conflicts that are foreign to us or should be foreign to us.”

As Europe’s native citizens age and die and immigration goes on and on—with 5 million Muslims already in France—issues of national identity will bedevil Europe, even as they will bedevil us, forever.

In Toulouse we see clearly now not only the dark side of diversity but perhaps the future of the West.

Rising inequality “is the defining issue of our time,” said President Obama in his Osawatomie speech that echoed the “New Nationalism” address Theodore Roosevelt delivered in that same Kansas town a century ago.

In the last two decades, the average income of the top 1 percent in the U.S. has grown by 250 percent, bemoaned our populist president, while the income of the average American has stagnated.

“This kind of inequality—a level we haven’t seen since the Great Depression—hurts us all,” said Obama.

“Inequality ... distorts our democracy. ... It gives an outsized voice to the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists ... and runs the risk of selling out our democracy to the highest bidder.”

But is the president, a former disciple of radical socialist Saul Alinsky, truly serious about closing the inequality gap?

Or is this just political blather to frame the election year as a contrast between Barack Obama, champion of the middle class, and a Republican Party that supposedly hauls water for the undeserving rich?

Obama’s retort to those who say he is waging class warfare?

Republicans alone prevent him from raising the top U.S. income tax rate from 35 to 39.6 percent, where it stood under Bill Clinton, and advancing America toward true equality.

Republicans reply that the top 1 percent of U.S. taxpayers already carry 40 percent of the income tax load, while half of the nation and a majority of Obama voters pay no income tax at all. Moreover, these free-riders also consume almost all of the $900 billion the nation spends annually on Great Society programs.

Yet, a path has just opened up to test the seriousness of the president, to determine if he is a phony on the inequality issue, or a true egalitarian eager to close the gap.

That opportunity comes from a report last week that income inequality in America is at its greatest in the electoral precinct where Obama won his largest majority: Washington, D.C.

In Washington, the top 5 percent of households have an average income of $473,000, highest of all of the 50 largest cities in America. The average income of the top 20 percent of district households is $259,000. Only San Francisco ranks higher.

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Moreover, that $259,000 average household income for the top 20 percent is 29 times the average household income of the bottom 20 percent, which is only $9,100 a year.

The citadel of liberalism that Obama carried 93-7 has a disparity of incomes between rich and poor that calls to mind the Paris of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Washington is a textbook case of the inequality that Obama says “distorts our democracy,” and it is the ideal place to prove that he is serious.

For Washington is Obamaville. The mayor is a Democrat. The city council is Democratic. There are more lawyers and lobbyists concentrated here than in any city in America.

Here we have the perfect test case—the most liberal city in the republic, with the greatest income inequality, where Obama’s political clout and personal popularity are highest. And there is no obstructionist Republican cabal to block progressive reforms.

If Obama and the Democratic Party will not use their power to close the inequality gap right here in their own playpen, how do they remain credible in Middle America?

How to proceed, if the left is serious about inequality?

Consider. The District of Columbia income tax reaches 8.5 percent after the first $40,000 in income. A 5 percent surtax takes that rate to 8.95 percent for incomes over $350,000.

Yet, half a dozen states have higher and more progressive income tax rates than that.

Obama should call on his allies in the city government to raise the district income tax to the 15 percent level New York had in the 1970s.

Since district income taxes are deductible against federal income taxes, this would translate into an actual top tax bite on the Washington rich of 9.75 percent. Is that too much to ask of true progressives?

The new revenue could be transferred to Washington’s working class and poor through tax credits, doubly reducing the district’s glaring inequality.

Republicans will argue that raising the district tax rate to 15 percent on incomes above $250,000 will precipitate an exodus into Maryland and Virginia, where the top tax rates are not half of that. Conservatives believe as an article of faith that tax rates heavily influence economic behavior.

But Obama, who has kept the U.S. corporate tax rate among the highest in the world and wants U.S. personal tax rates raised closer to European levels, rejects this Republican argument.

Has he the courage of his convictions?

When the district’s schools were desegregated in the 1950s, liberals fled. Let us see if they will stick around for a “progressive income tax” to reduce this unconscionable inequality between Kalorama and Spring Valley—and Anacostia and Turkey Thicket.

Ingrid Bergman

The original “Hollywood blacklist” dates back to 1947, when 10 members of the Communist Party, present or former, invoked the Fifth Amendment before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

The party was then a wholly owned subsidiary of the Comintern of Joseph Stalin, whose victims had surpassed in number those of Adolf Hitler.

In a 346-17 vote, the Hollywood Ten were charged with contempt of Congress and suspended or fired.

The blacklist had begun. Directors, producers and writers who had been or were members of the party and refused to recant lost their jobs.

Politically, the blacklist was a victory of the American right.

In those first years of the Cold War, anti-communism and Christianity were mighty social, political and cultural forces. Hollywood acknowledged their power in what it produced.

Rhett Butler’s departing words to Scarlett O’Hara—“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!”—were the most shocking heard on screen.

Catholicism was idealistically portrayed in Going My Way and The Song of Bernadette. Priest roles were played by Bing Crosby, Spencer Tracy, and Gregory Peck.

But over a half century, the left captured and now controls the culture.

The Legion of Decency is dead. The Filthy Speech Movement from Berkeley 1964 has triumphed. The “seven filthy words” of comedians like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin are regular fare in films and steadily creeping into prime-time.

Movies show sexually explicit scenes that make Howard Hughes’ 1944 condemned film, The Outlaw, starring Jane Russell, look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

Where Ingrid Bergman of Casablanca fame had to flee the country in 1950 after an adulterous affair with director Roberto Rossellini, the media today happily provide all the salacious details of every “relationship” that Hollywood stars enter into and exit.

All of this testifies to the cultural ascendancy of the left.

Yet every establishment has its own orthodoxy, its own taboos, and its own blacklist. And, despite its pretensions to be open to all ideas, our cultural establishment is no different.

While the Hollywood Ten have been rehabilitated and heroized, it is Christians and conservatives who are in cultural cross hairs now.

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Traditional Catholic morality is mocked, as are Southern evangelical Christians. And the new cultural establishment has erected a new regime called Political Correctness. It writes the hate-crimes laws that citizens must obey and the campus speech codes students must follow.

The new mortal sins are not filthy talk or immoral conduct, but racism, sexism, homophobia and nativism. The establishment alone defines these sins and enforces the proscriptions against them, from which there is no appeal, only the obligatory apology, the act of contrition and the solemn commitment never to sin again.

If you still believe homosexuality is unnatural and immoral and gay marriage absurd, you are a homophobe who is to keep his mouth shut.

If you think some ethnic and racial groups have greater natural athletic, academic or artistic talents, don’t go there, if you do not wish an early end to your journalistic career.

If you think illegal aliens should be sent home and legal immigration should mirror the ethnic makeup of the nation, you are a xenophobe and a racist.

All of these terms—racist, sexist, homophobe—are synonyms for heretic. Any of them can get you hauled before an inquisition.

To control the politics of a nation, control of the culture is a precondition. For who controls the culture defines what is moral and immoral, and what is heroic and villainous. And if you can set limits on what journalists write and broadcasters say, you can shape what people think and believe.

Through history, frightened establishments have dealt severely even with peaceful challenges to their power, which is why Socrates was forced to drink poison, Christ was crucified, Sir Thomas More was beheaded and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was sent to the Gulag.

When Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut” for demanding that Georgetown Law School subsidize the $3,000 women students annually require for birth control to exercise their sexual freedom, the media that piled on Rush objected less to the term than to the target he picked: one of their own.

Bill Maher routinely uses far more odious terms on Sarah Palin. Yet his $1 million gift to an Obama Super PAC was welcomed by agents of the same president who phoned Fluke to console her over Rush’s remarks.

Rush apologized. But the left still campaigns to have his voice stifled and censored, by threatening advertisers of his radio show with boycotts if they refuse to drop him.

Thus does the left honor the First Amendment.

As shown in HBO’s Game Change, John McCain in 2008 ruled out attacks on Barack Obama’s 20-year ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago preacher of “God damn America!” fame.

Why? Wright and Obama were black, and such attacks might agitate the latent racism of white America. The Republican Party censors itself so as not to antagonize a cultural establishment that wants to see it dead.

“Beautiful losers,” my late friend Sam Francis called them.