It is becoming apparent for all to see that a man who has made his name as a community organizer does not have the skills to be president of these United States. Maybe he could develop the requisite skills as a governor. Possibly he could develop such skills were he to sit in the Senate for a couple of terms. Yet there are delicate sensitivities, the ability to listen, to stick by your guns, occasionally to remain reticent. These are the fundamentals of a leader, and President Barack Obama has demonstrated that he lacks all of them, most notably reticence. I now think it is clear even to Official Washington that President Obama is the worst president of modern times. President Jimmy Carter is redeemed.

The other night at a White House dinner solemnizing the opening of Ramadan, he leaped right in to endorse the building of a mosque at ground zero. He—a man who has shown no religious fervor during his time in the White House—let out a ringing defense of religious liberty and tolerance. All of a sudden, he was at the center of a national controversy that was growing. It put me in mind of his inability to defuse the controversy over health care. Any sensible president would have relented as opposition to health care reform grew to the majority position. He would have settled for some sort of compromise, but not the community organizer turned president. He wanted it all. He lunged on and created among the electorate a row over national health care that divided the nation and put some of us in mind of a civil war that continues to rage. What is more, he imperiled his party’s margins in both houses of Congress.

Notwithstanding his apparent personal insouciance toward religion, he made clear that the mosque should be built. Who cares about the sensibilities of the loved ones of the 3,000 victims? Or, for that matter, of the 68 percent of the American people who, according to a CNN poll, oppose the mosque? It took him less than a day to make things worse. While on a swing through Florida, he claimed that he was not speaking “on the wisdom” of building the mosque. He merely was commenting on the constitutional right to build the mosque and to practice one’s religion. A right “that dates back,” the prof allowed, “to our founding. That’s what our country is about.” Blah, blah, blah—the community organizer turned lecturer at the University of Chicago could not resist.

Now he has a red-hot national controversy on his hands. It is somewhat like the controversy he created over professor Henry Louis Gates when he pronounced the Cambridge police’s reaction to Gates’ truculence “stupid.” Or when Obama barged into the Arizona immigration pother. He cannot resist showing the world how smart he is, but at what cost? Every Democrat battling in a tight race will be called to answer questions about the mosque. It will become an issue even in remote places, such as Nevada. There the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, fighting for his seat against a tea partyer, Sharron Angle, has come out against the president. He announced that it is not a question of right, but a question of prudence. He says the mosque should be built elsewhere. How many other Democrats will join him? This could develop into a major rebellion against President Obama’s leadership. It could be the beginning of the end of his presidency.

President Obama represents the leadership of a sterile elite. His weird lectures play at the University of Chicago or in the communities he has organized in Chicago, but not among the mainstream of the American electorate. He has brought them together, and they are against this idiocy. As I said in this space two weeks ago, he represents the leadership of the ruling class. It is not the leadership of the consensus of the American people. Only the most extreme voices in this debate are speaking intolerantly about Islam and its right to build a mosque. Most of the American people are siding with the dread Sarah Palin, who was quick to say: “Mr. President, should they or should they not build a mosque steps away from where radical Islamists killed 3,000 people? Please tell us your position. We all know that they have the right to do it, but should they? And, no, this is not above your pay grade.”

Yet it is. It is above the pay grade of a community organizer. That is what our president is. Increasingly, it is clear that the Democrats brought down on the country a community organizer as president. Maybe in the future, they will consider experience a qualification for the presidency. Possibly the age of charisma is behind us. Possibly Obama even lacks that dubious quality.

The other day in The Wall Street Journal, my friend Fred Barnes deposited a few thoughts on journalism provoked by the discovery to a mother lode of left-wing bigotry, screeds and semi-literate gibbering. He hastened to tell his readers that there was no conspiracy behind the journalists’ “tilt” to the left, but rather, “The media disproportionately attracts people from a liberal arts background who tend, quite innocently, to be politically liberal.” Then he filed a caveat, noting that “hundreds of journalists have gotten together, on an online listserv called JournoList, to promote liberalism and liberal politicians at the expense of traditional journalism.”

Well, let me address Barnes’ thoughts before jumping on the JournoList controversy. I rather doubt that journalism was ever a conspiracy. In fact, I doubt that journalism was preordained to be dominated by liberalism. There was a day, before the New Deal, when there were plenty of journalists who were not guided by left-wing ideas or any motive at all. The clever journalist, usually, just wanted to get a good story. Yet the New Deal came along and then the war and, finally, television. At first, it was humanitarian to be in sympathy with the New Deal. Then it was patriotic to be in sympathy with what was a growing homogenization of views among news gatherers. Finally, it was good sense to be a liberal newsperson. By the time television came into its own, liberalism was the corporate mentality of the news gathering business. Hence you can take television news gatherers or print news gatherers and plug them in interchangeably.

But by the 1990s, this corporate mentality had begun to change. Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes saw a market. They dissented from the media’s corporate mentality and presented the news from a conservative perspective. Talk radio came along and presented a conservative talk venue. Now Fox News alone brings in more revenue than the combined revenue of CNN, MSNBC and the network news shows on ABC, NBC and CBS. The corporate mentality was suddenly in trouble.

Instead of breaking up along reasonable lines, it has tried to remain coherent and viable against the odds. Though Murdoch and Ailes at The Wall Street Journal and Fox have employed ideologues and entertainers, the media’s stalwarts are all “true” journalists who have continued gathering the news, pronouncing on it and covering their glutei maximi when some poor wretch, such as Dan Rather, proves to be an embarrassment.

Recently there proved to be another embarrassment. I have in mind Barnes’ “hundreds” of journalists. They were indeed sedulously advancing “liberalism and liberal politicians at the expense of traditional journalism.” Yet with admirable sang-froid, Howard Kurtz, who watches over the corporate mentality of journalism like a mother hen, tsk-tsked, “(Some of these messages) show liberal commentators appearing to cooperate in an effort to hammer out the shrewdest talking points against the Republicans—including, in one case, a suggestion for accusing random conservatives of being racist.”

Did you say “liberal commentators,” Howard? They were all left-wing commentators. One of the reasons the keepers of the news’ corporate mentality no longer can be taken seriously is they cannot identify a “left-winger.” There is no sense of symmetry in their world. The products of Murdoch and Ailes can be called conservative, but no product of ABC, CBS, NBC, The New York Times or The Washington Post ever can be called liberal, to say nothing of left-wing. Call them the products of the corporate mentality.

Typical of those with the corporate mentality—any corporate mentality—they lack wit, humor, any form of urbanity. Here is a sampler preserved from The Daily Caller by Peter Wehner of the sort that aroused Barnes’ initial thought on journalism:

Laura Rozen: “People we no longer have to listen to: would it be unwise to start a thread of people we are grateful we no longer have to listen to? If not, I’ll start off: Michael Rubin.”

Michael Cohen, New America Foundation: “Mark Penn and Bob Shrum. Anyone who uses the expression ‘Real America.’ We should send there (sic) a—to Gitmo!”

Jesse Taylor, Pandagon: “Michael Barone? Please?”

Laura Rozen: “Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich (afraid it’s not true), Drill Here Drill Now, And David Addington, John Yoo, we’ll see you in court?”

Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker: “As a side note, does anyone know what prompted Michael Barone to go insane?”

Matt Duss: “LEDEEN.”

Spencer Ackerman: “Let’s just throw Ledeen against a wall. Or, pace (sic) Dr. Alterman, throw him through a plate glass window. I’ll bet a little spot of violence would shut him right the f—- up, as with most bullies.”

Joe Klein, Time: “Pete Wehner ... these sort of things always end badly.”

Then there was a National Public Radio producer who wrote that upon hearing Rush Limbaugh had a heart attack, she would “laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out. ... I never knew I had this much hate in me.”

Meet America’s elite thinkers.

It is that time of year when we depart for summer vacation. We head for the woods and mountains. Unless we planned to visit the Gulf, we head for the beach. Oh, what the hell. Even if we planned to visit the Gulf, let us head for the beaches. All the beaches I have seen there look pretty clean. So let us hit the beaches there, too. It is cheap! America is a vast continental country, so we have various locales to infest during summertime vacation. I prefer the beach, but maybe you prefer the mountains or even wander off to one of our great cities to tour. Barack Obama headed off to Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island in Maine for a few days. Good for him. Unfortunately, he came back.

Yet what are we going to bring with us on vacation? Lotions, picnic baskets, toys for the kids, high-tech and otherwise? If you are like me, you will want to bring a book. I am always surprised when debate begins among Americans about the educations of our young. Only a minority of American adults read, so why are we surprised that the young falter in school? Few Americans stress reading, and reading is essential for success in school. But you knew that or you would not be reading this column. What books will make up your list? Let me suggest a few for you.

Pre-eminently, I suggest “The Citizen’s Constitution: An Annotated Guide,” by Seth Lipsky, the founding editor of The New York Sun. Seth is a legendary newspaperman, but he is something more, a first-class writer and a student of the Constitution. As he says, “the country is in a constitutional moment.” Limited government is the bedrock of our way of life. “With the Congress and the White House expanding government’s grasp, we have only the Constitution to protect us.” The Arizona immigration law, health care issues, gun control, gay marriage—“all,” Lipsky says, “are coming down to the Constitution.” Lipsky has written a very readable explication of it, and it comes down on the side of the tea partyers, as the Founding Fathers would expect.

“Only a minority of American adults read, so why are we surprised that the young falter in school?”

“Brief Lives: An Intimate and Very Personal Portrait of the Twentieth Century,” by the British historian Paul Johnson, is worth a read. Asked to write his autobiography, the great man demurred, but he did serve up glimpses of great figures he has known, from Margaret Thatcher to Princess Diana to Gerald Ford to Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan, with all manner of man and woman thrown in between. The book begins with two paragraphs devoted to Konrad Adenauer and ends with two more on Woodrow Wyatt, whom I did not know. We Yanks need not know who the minor figures are to enjoy this book. Its observations about public figures are instructive. On Reagan, he writes, “He was friendly to all. ... At a certain level, he was ice-cold.” In telling yarns and observations about figures he has known, he tells us much about himself and the art of the historian.

Books are coming out about William F. Buckley, but none is better than one by Buckley himself. For a taste of his wit and analytical prowess, I suggest you savor “Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations: A William F. Buckley Jr. Omnibus,” edited by Linda Bridges and Roger Kimball. In the years ahead, dubious fellows are going to write on Bill. Bridges and Kimball preserve the master’s voice and let him speak for himself. One who has us all apprehensive is Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review. Recently he wrote an article in The New Republic, “Conservatism Is Dead,” which he liked so well he elongated it with padding and published it as a book, titled “The Death of Conservatism.” It even was reviewed in the Sept. 29, 2009, issue of the paper. Naturally, I felt that when I met him head-on a few months later with “After the Hangover: The Conservatives’ Road to Recovery,” he would defend himself, especially when I wrote “(conservatism is America’s) longest dying political movement” with him in mind. Not at all—he completely ignored the book—and that is why liberals are so smugly stupid. They take no notice of those who oppose them. Let me suggest my book and Sean Hannity’s “Conservative Victory: Defeating Obama’s Radical Agenda.” I offer a little more on where we came from intellectually. Hannity offers a little more on Obama. Both are better than Tanenhaus, starting with the observation that conservatism is not dead.

Finally, before letting you go, let me suggest a novel, Ian McEwan’s “Solar.” It sends up the whole global warming movement. It is riotously funny. McEwan seems to understand how the pliant government, the environmental movement and venal scientists work, and he explains it. Now if only it would cool off.

My friend Andrew Roberts has inherited the title of “historian of the English-speaking people” from Winston Churchill. Churchill wrote his four-volume history up to 1900. Roberts took up the story from there and has written his stupendous “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900.” I commend it to you.

In the book, Roberts says that there is something about English-speaking people that encourages a certain number among them to speak ill of us. He does not think that their criticism is legitimate for the most part, and I do not, either. But it is a characteristic of certain of us. You never find that captious quality in Russia. Would Vladimir Putin say the kinds of things about Russia that, say, Barack Obama says about America? Would Hugo Chavez say such things about Venezuela, Fidel Castro about Cuba, Hu Jintao about China? Roberts’ case is made, and the Democratic Party and Labour Party offer plenty of examples to fortify his point.

Yet lay that observation aside for another day. He makes another case in his book worth mentioning. English-speaking people love liberty. I thought of this the other day when I read a piece in The Washington Post about the revival of fox hunting in Britain and the desire to legalize it once again. Ian Farquhar, an English hunter, leads the piece by saying, “I felt—we all felt—they were spitefully taking away the very essence of our liberty” when the 2004 ban on fox hunting went into effect. Now the Conservative government is back, and the law is up for repeal. What will happen I do not know, for the Conservatives are in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats and only a minority of them are with the Conservatives on this one. However, that is not the issue. Rather it is the question of “the very essence of our liberty.” It is a part of British tradition. Some have it. Some do not.

We have the tradition here, and it is seen by many as “the very essence of our liberty.” The right to keep and bear arms is actually written into our Constitution, in the Second Amendment. Guns are seen as essential to liberty by many of us. In many communities, we can actually carry guns. There are studies that show that gun ownership and law abidingness correlate. There is a robust debate in America over gun ownership, but robust as it is, it is unlikely that the gun controllers ever will outnumber the gun rights people. We are safe with our guns.

Yet let us look at another matter, the hunt itself. Over in Britain, it is all tallyho, handsome attire, follow the pack. An occasional fox gets mauled, but that is one fewer fox for a farmer to gas or shoot, to trap or snare. If the hunt is legalized rather than restricted—as it is now—there will be a few more foxes to be mauled. But attendant with the hunt are the festivities, and there are jobs for the keepers of kennels and stables and the land managers. There is equipment to be maintained. The Countryside Alliance claims 45,000 members in some 300 clubs. During the winter months, the countryside comes alive with activity. I say good show!

On this side of the Atlantic, we do, of course, have the tallyho set. There are the hounds and horses and stylish dress. Yet there is much more. North America is a continent and a pretty raw continent when the great outdoors is at issue. Some hunt for trophies, some for the feast after the hunt. I am numbered among the latter. I freely get up before the sun is in the sky and set up for turkey, deer or even bear. But I am not a particularly avid hunter. Once when with my partner I shot a bear—or, likelier, he did—I had to follow the critter for two hours or more before it dropped. Not much fun—but when we got back to camp, we told some great stories, and there was a stupendous feast that night.

The important thing on this side of the Atlantic or the other is that English-speaking people find liberty in the air. We relish our freedoms, and one is to hunt. I hope the present ban on fox hunting is repealed over there. Possibly I even will join in the fray. Though if I do, I shall ride at the back of the hunt. I would not want to incite a dog to carnage.

“If you have nothing else, you have your principles,” Lady Thatcher told me when things were pretty tough at The American Spectator in the late 1990s. Sharks were circling the ship, and there was blood in the water; I was getting anxious. She was serene, having just flown back from Beijing, but she was adamant. “You have your principles.” They endure, and they fortify you when things are dire.

Doubtless, Conrad Black has had his principles, too, and they are not much different from mine, though he is Canadian. For that matter, if you are reading this, they are not much different from yours: the sanctity of the individual, individual liberty, limited government, the rule of law. Now, because he has resisted being put away in a dark place for 6 1/2 years, the rule of law is more secure. On June 24, all nine Supreme Court justices sided with him. The “honest services” statute of a 1988 law that has been used ever since to prosecute white-collar crime is too vague and unconstitutional. The court has remanded Black’s conviction back to a lower court for reconsideration. I hope it is just a matter of time before his long ordeal is over.

He has lost his company, which provided an alternative to the mainstream media around the English-speaking world. He lost his fortune and many friends. To the friends, I would say au revoir. They were not much anyway, and besides he has Seth Lipsky, Ira Stoll, Roger Hertog and thousands of others who have proved their mettle by sticking with him. And most emphatically, he has his principles.

Through the years he has fought for his freedom and the 27 months he has spent in prison, I never have seen him waver in his confidence in eventual vindication. Nor have I seen him lose faith in the American rule of law or the Constitution. He got a bad break, but he recognized that in the American system of justice, he still had a chance. Nine justices have spoken. He has his chance. Now let us hope that the lower court does the decent thing and lets him go. He has had one of the most brilliant constitutional lawyers of his generation, Miguel Estrada, who himself might have been on the Supreme Court had it not been for the partisan poisons out there. Estrada will be hustling to get him out on bail while he awaits reconsideration.

I had the opportunity—it would be a stretch to call it a pleasure—to visit him in prison at Coleman, Fla.‘s, low-security prison. I was not the only one. Hertog visited him regularly, sometimes under very unpleasant circumstances. And the excellent Lipsky put in an appearance. Lipsky was like me: “What the hell am I doing here?” But it was the least we could do. We were paying our respects to a great newspaperman, and he was full of fight.
Prison is no place to be. If people talked more about it, not so many people would be trifling with such places today. Conrad did not belong there, but that was beside the point. He wanted to talk about the things we always talked about in the past, but first he directed me from the sun court. I thought I could at least get some sun. He directed me from the heat and saved my hide. He talked about elections, great people and great issues from the present and the past. He speculated on the future and talked about economics and the sorry state of American industrial output. He never dwelt on his own condition. That was the great war of the lawyers.

Through the last few years, he had time on his hands, and seeing an opportunity, I asked him to write for The American Spectator. He is not only a gifted publisher but also a very energetic student of history—and a noted biographer of Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. He did a long essay on George W. Bush, FDR, and the consequences of Bush’s re-election. Later he wrote on Sean Wilentz’s book The Rise of American Democracy, Martin and Annelise Anderson’s Reagan’s Secret War, and my own book on Clinton in retirement, The Clinton Crack-Up. The review was favorable, but I would not say it glowed. Conrad is his own man. Look for our September issue, in which he reviews Teddy Roosevelt’s visions of America. He liked Teddy. They are two of a kind.

Now he sits in Coleman, Fla., awaiting a lower court’s orders. He was tried on 13 counts, and he beat nine of them. He was convicted of three counts of fraud and one of obstruction of justice; he had agreed to his former company’s request that he empty his office. That was construed by our government as obstruction. The hope here is that he will be cleared on all counts.

It was precisely Feb. 5, 2009, when I broke my self-imposed rule. It was not a very old rule, but it was serious. I had told myself that I would not criticize the new president of the United States, Barack Obama—at least not for a few more months. But I slipped up. I could not completely swallow the fact that a community action leader with almost no experience at the national level had become president. There were already complaints coming in from foreign parts. The Indians warned against his sticking his nose into their dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir, and to the president’s offer of talks with Iran, a low-level spokesman, Gholam Hossein Elham, replied, “This request means Western ideology has become passive.”

Yet since those halcyon days, the flubs and near disasters have gotten worse. They have gotten worse for two reasons. To begin with, there is the experience factor. President Barack Obama is less experienced than any modern president, and I am not sure he has had any more experience than any president, period. Maybe Millard Fillmore was less experienced. I shall research the matter and report my findings.

Now think about what this means. He has had no experience in foreign affairs, intelligence gathering, the workings of the Treasury or any other aspect of the federal government. He does not know how to deal with a gigantic oil spill or, come to think of it, a small one. We are left thanking the stars in the heavens that this president has Joe Biden at his side! Maybe we are even reassured that Rahm Emanuel is there, if one does not mind a sharp elbow in the ribs, and David Axelrod and that someone by the name of Valerie Jarrett can be counted on to keep watch while this president flies off to foreign parts.

Second, Obama is wedded to the politics of the far left. He thinks that because there is someone to the farther left of him, he is a moderate. But as things stand, there are people to the right of him, too. As I see it, there are at least three-quarters of the American people to the right of him, possibly more. These people matter. It probably was imprudent of him to go to the baseball game last weekend, even if the Chicago White Sox were playing. And the next day, he should not have played golf, even if Joe Biden came along. Not even if Saul Alinsky had written about golf back in the 1960s.

There is something very dated about the ideology that this president takes so seriously. The progressives thought they were electing a forward looker. They were getting an antique merchant. In fact, they are antique merchants. Even the Chinese and the Indians think Obama is backward. The Canadians’ view of the world is light years beyond his. Now even his supporters are beginning to talk. The president is dangerously out of touch, and he is incompetent.

The other day, Mortimer Zuckerman wrote an ominous piece. In U.S. News & World Report, he cited widespread talk in Britain of the end of our “special relationship” with that country. He cited French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s speaking ill of Obama, and he noted Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s contempt for a number of our president’s views. Zuckerman went on to cite problems that the president had had with China, Middle Eastern leaders—particularly the king of Saudi Arabia—Turkey and Brazil. Of course, in his tour d’horizon, he mentioned Obama’s problems with Cuba, Iran and North Korea. Then he said it: “A critical mass of influential people” in the world “are no longer dazzled by his rock star personality and there is a sense that there is something amateurish and even incompetent about how Obama is managing U.S. power.”

Now, I have not always been an admirer of Zuckerman’s, but there is something solid about his piece. He wrote it clearly worried about the path that lies ahead, and when he spoke of that “critical mass of influential people,” he knew what he was writing about. This is why officials in Washington are taking a fresh look at Joe Biden. They note his gaffable presence, but they clearly are fortified by his presence. After all, who else is there, Axelrod, Emanuel and Jarrett?

(Please contact your local newspaper if you would like to see the R. Emmett Tyrrell column in your local paper.)

The exposure of Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal as a hoaxster boasting of a nonexistent record of service in the Vietnam War is a splendid example of what is known as the Taranto Principle. Someday the Taranto Principle will be taught in all the journalism schools, assuming one or two survive the present detumescence of journalism. Formulated by the inimitable Wall Street Journal editorialist James Taranto, the principle posits that when the liberal mainstream press indulges a liberal politician’s deceits or fails to hold the politician accountable for his misbehavior, it encourages the politician to ascend to a higher level of misbehavior.

Thus, for years Sen. Jean-Francois Kerry was wont to boast of his exploits in the Vietnam War. His sympathizers in the press never bothered to remind him or to remind the citizenry that Kerry had embellished his military record and that—worse!—upon returning from Vietnam, he cast his lot with the rising anti-war movement. As an opponent of the war, he even was emboldened to appear before Congress and mendaciously testify that his comrades had “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, (and) razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.”

This garbage spiel was televised nationally, and he should have known that tapes of it were readily available in 2004, when he ran for president. Nonetheless, rather than stress less controversial aspects of his years of public life, he, thanks to the liberal press’s indulgence of his exaggerated claims to heroism, made the risky choice of running as a veteran of the Vietnam War. That angered those who had served with him, and their revelations about his service sank his candidacy. The Taranto Principle is vindicated.

It has been vindicated again with the revelations about Blumenthal. For years, he has been fawned over by the liberal press. Pari passu, with the passage of time, he has gone from being a young man who sought five military deferments during the Vietnam War to claiming repeatedly and falsely that he actually served in the war. On the way to making those false claims, he did indeed enlist in the Marine Reserve, but he never served in the war.

In a speech in 2008, The New York Times reports, he said, “We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam.” At another point in 2008, the Times reports, he informed an audience that he “served during the Vietnam era,” concluding that he remembered “the taunts, the insults, sometimes even physical abuse.” As recently as a few weeks ago, he publicly recalled being spit upon when he “returned from Vietnam.”

Now his campaign for the United States Senate is in grave jeopardy. Perhaps it all could have been avoided if years back the press had taken a look at his claims, reported them and chastened him from making the increasingly bold assertions of nonsense.

As an addendum to the Taranto Principle, let me add an observation. Increasing numbers of candidates for public office, particularly at the national level, seem given to fantasy. They are encouraged to tell dramatic stories about themselves. The press loves it. The politicians are goaded by the Taranto Principle, and it is not long before those stories become total fantasies. Blumenthal is obviously one of those fantasists. Had he not been tripped up this week, he might have soon been telling the electorate about his Medal of Honor. Possibly, if he somehow manages to win the Democratic primary, he still will, and then, when the stakes are so high and the possibility exists that a Republican might beat him, will the Times raise doubts about his Medal of Honor? Taranto will be watching.

A few days after the failed attempt of a Pakistani-born naturalized American citizen to blow Times Square sky high, I bravely made my way through the returning throng of tourists and street vendors to take a look. By my calculation, had the jackal, Faisal Shahzad, 30, succeeded with his evil project in the early evening of Saturday, May 1 to explode the SUV he left on a Times Square street, he might have killed several hundred utterly innocent civilians, possibly a thousand. Fortunately, he failed.

Despite instructions from highly experienced terrorists back home, he packed his Nissan Pathfinder with the wrong kind of fertilizer—a variety unsuited from bombs. The firecrackers he rigged up as detonators were insufficiently powerful to set his incendiaries off.

Finally, according to my favorite intelligence analyst, Rush Limbaugh, Shahzad’s alarm clocks, which were supposed to serve as timers, were set wrong. He failed to distinguish a.m. from p.m. Oh, yes, and he ran from the SUV leaving on its key ring the keys to his getaway car and to his apartment.

The evil Shahzad’s incompetence, we are told, should not give us confidence that the next attempt by another terrorist or terrorist group will fizzle as his did. The failed attempt in 1993 to blow up the World Trade Center was followed brief years later by Sept. 11. In fact, the terrorist threats against us here at home continue and may be speeding up.

Since Sept. 11, there have been 20 Islamists terrorist plots directed against us at home, former Attorney General Michael R. Mukasey writes in The Wall Street Journal, including Maj. Nidal Hasan’s massacre of American soldiers at Fort Hood. He urges that any terrorist such as Shahzad be designated as “an unlawful enemy combatant” and that information obtained from them in interrogation remain confidential to be exploited against our enemies. Doubtless he is right and prudent in his recommendations.

Yet without diminishing the extent of the threat from Islamist terrorists, let me return to my expedition into Times Square. Naturally, brave as I am, I did not face those crowds alone. I was accompanied by Greg Gutfeld, whom the nation’s insomniacs and a growing cult of niche viewers know is the host of Fox News’ nightly “Red Eye,” which airs in the East at 3:00 a.m. Aficionados burdened by normative daytime schedules TiVo it.

He is also known—though to a smaller audience—as the man who while working for me robbed me of a hoard of pre-Castro cigars the night he was supposed to be assisting the Secret Service while President Ronald Reagan dined at my home and I introduced the Old Cowboy to King Frederick the Great’s flute concerto in G major. Yes, I know, our current president is supposed to be very intellectual, but it is Ronald Reagan who was the first president to listen to the music of the Prussian dilettante.

At any rate, I have forgiven Gutfeld, and so after reconnoitering the area, I even allowed him to buy me a drink at a local saloon, where he filled me in on his view of the Islamists who confront us. He came quickly to the point. Said he: “They’re losers.”

He cited the large numbers of them who come to America, immerse themselves in our popular culture, go broke and still cannot find a nice American girl to marry. Later, he elaborated on his findings in his blog: “The fact is, these guys—despite their education—are seduced by a belief system devised to offer something they can’t find anywhere else. Recognition. The shortest line to fame is infamy. Think about how it works in America. If you’re a young man out to impress a girl, you join a band. Another becomes a comic. Another might obsess over his quads in a gym. But few alternatives exist for jihad-embracing losers when your culture demonizes women.”

“Men are left angry,” writes Gutfeld, who then launched into a diatribe that sounds very much as though he could begin a second career as a sex therapist, especially a sex therapist for Islamist terrorists dissatisfied with Big Bang theories propounded by a fat and grinning mullah.

There is a huge ambivalence about the Islamist terrorists, even a hypocrisy. The ambivalence and hypocrisy have been inherent in the angry Islamists for a long time. After a journey through Islam back in the 1970s, V.S. Naipaul offered his perception of it: “All the rejection of the West is contained within the assumption that there will always exist out there a living, creative civilization, oddly neutral, open to all to appeal to.”

Of course, that was before the Islamists began planting bombs on our shores and dreaming of bigger and bigger bombs.

As I read the news about this Pakistani jackal who admits to planning a cowardly assault on hundreds of innocent people in New York’s Times Square, a thought that occurs to me is, how endlessly interesting history is. Often things take place that one never would have imagined.

For most of the last decades of the 20th century, America girded its loins to defeat world communism, at the time led by the Soviets and the Chinese. We lived in fear of nuclear holocaust. We feared Soviet domination. Once our partners in thwarting Nazi domination of the West, the Soviets had replaced the Nazis as our enemies. Their war machine was even deadlier. It could bring down on the globe eternal night. We expended up to 9 percent of our gross domestic product annually to protect ourselves. We devised policies to neutralize Soviet aggression. Finally, when President Ronald Reagan faced down the Soviets with a vast arms buildup and a resolute, albeit flexible, foreign policy, his liberal critics warned that we faced nuclear world war.

All of a sudden, the Soviet Union collapsed. And what was the liberals’ response? Well, it was one of history’s surprises. The liberals announced that the Soviet Union had been a paper tiger all along. It had been destined to collapse from day one. All our military appropriations were a waste of money. Oh, yes, and one other surprising detail: It was not Ronald Reagan’s vigilance and resolve that ended the Cold War, but Mikhail Gorbachev’s good sense—though practically every one of his policies and policy pronouncements was a failure. In, say, 1985, if you had asked me what the national response in America would be at the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union by the end of the decade, I would have predicted national jubilation. I would have predicted that liberals (many of whom, certainly up through the Johnson administration, were vigilant opponents of communism) would join with conservatives in a general feeling of good will. Both could take credit for their successful defense of democracy against tyranny. Instead, the liberals told us that our efforts against the Soviets were a waste.

Surprise, surprise—yet the liberals’ response to Islamofascism surprises me more. Islamic terror is anti-Western, anti-democratic, fundamentalist, reactionary, nihilistic and repressive of some of liberalism’s supposedly favored groups, women, gays and household pets, namely dogs living indoors. It is also fascism with a Quranically prescribed beard and burqa. Yet the liberals do not even want to use the term “Islamic terror.” The mosque is about the only house of prayer for which they have any sympathy. They depict the tea party movement as more troubling than fundamentalist Islam protesting in the streets.

Just hours after this Islamic brute attempted to kill the peaceful denizens of Times Square—many of whom were doubtless followers of Islam—Mayor Michael Bloomberg speculated to the press that the perpetrator of this attempted atrocity was “homegrown, maybe a mentally deranged person or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something.” Later, there was more. He would not tolerate “bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers.”

Now the mayor was manifesting the liberals’ time-honored suspicion of his fellow Americans. Those of us who have studied the liberals’ bugaboos as they pollute our political culture (we call the phenomenon Kultursmog are familiar with this idiocy. We saw it during the Cold War, when suspicion of communist infiltration of government was described by many liberals as a senseless “Red Scare.” With the release of the Venona files and of research from the KGB’s archives, we now know many of the accused Reds were in fact communist spies. We also saw the liberals’ suspicion of ordinary Americans—or at least conservative Americans—when their first suspects after a communist assassinated President John F. Kennedy were Dallas conservatives unnamed. Now the mayor’s first suspects upon the discovery of a bomb in Times Square are opponents of the health care monstrosity.

Returning to the liberals’ sympathetic treatment of fundamentalist Islam, let me proffer an explanation. Liberals are sympathetic to it because it is anti-American and anti-Western. In fact, that is the only explanation. Liberals such as Mayor Bloomberg are not very comfortable with their fellow Americans. That is one of history’s surprises.

The liberals hate the middle class. There, I said it, and I am glad. Once again I am a truth teller, in this case speaking truth to stone heads. So certain am I of the truth of my asseveration that I honestly doubt any liberal will take issue with me. Can you imagine a liberal coming forward and saying: “Wrong, Tyrrell! I love the middle class.” Well, I guess I can imagine it, because liberals are effortless liars. Yet what specifically about the middle class might the liberals adduce to demonstrate their affection? The middle class’ sobriety? Hard work? Love of country? Love of liberty?

The liberals’ contempt for the pulchritudinous Sarah Palin obviously is fired by their hatred of the middle class. She has said nothing that many ordinary Americans have not said privately, though she does it with charm. I was particularly charmed by her playful taunt directed toward the Prophet Obama at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tenn., in February, when she said, “How’s that hopey, changey stuff working out for ya?” At the time, his polling figures were low—not as low as they fell later, but low—and not much was “working” for him. Things have not improved.

What seems particularly to offend the liberals is that she is from Middle America and from a state whose citizens pride themselves in self-reliance. Then, too, it has to hurt that she is so easy on the eye while being the antithesis of the feminist. By the way, has there ever been a comely feminist? Yes, Gloria Steinem had her moments, but then as the years went on and her gripes and disappointments multiplied, her anger got the best of her, and today her face looks like a gnarled fist. Palin could teach her a lot, starting with a pedicure and maybe a prayer. That is another thing that brings the liberals to a boil, Palin’s being a person of faith. For some reason, religion really alarms liberals, unless it be the religion of the Prophet Muhammad. Now there is an evolution in liberal thought I would not have anticipated.

The tea party movement is another perfectly middle-class phenomenon that sets off fires of indignation with the liberals. I could understand if they simply disagreed with the tea partyers. The tea partyers favor freedom, limited government, low taxes, and addressing the staggering debt that government is piling up. These are values that liberals do not champion. But the liberals have to go further, depicting the tea partyers as violent racists. Once again we see how fluently the liberals lie, starting by lying to themselves.

Last week during a seminar at The Heritage Foundation on my new book, After the Hangover: The Conservatives’ Road to Recovery, Michael Barone, surely one of the most learned political observers of our time, made a very instructive point. While writing his fine book Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan, he discovered that there was in the late 1930s a growing resistance against the New Deal’s spreading governmental tentacles. Very much as they are in today’s tea party movement, Americans were becoming uneasy about the cost and coercion of FDR’s huge government projects. Moreover, as Amity Shlaes has demonstrated in her most recent book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, the New Deal was not ending the Depression, but lengthening it.

Barone now believes that had World War II not arrived, this late-1930s tea party manifestation would have supported a stiff challenge to FDR’s precedent-breaking third term. He speculates that there is something about America that makes many of its citizens relish their freedoms and suspicious of government involvement in areas Americans envisage as off-limits to government power and inefficiency. That something is the Constitution, which might explain why liberal judges want to be free to ignore it or disfigure it.

Yes, the liberals hate the middle class, and I think I tripped across the reason for their hatred while finishing Hangover. Whereas conservatism is fundamentally a temperament to delight in reality and in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, liberalism is fundamentally an anxiety. The environment? The Constitution? The middle class? Liberalism is an anxiety about reality. The liberals prefer fantasy to reality—hence their fluency in lying about the tea party movement and the pulchritudinous Sarah Palin.