We often quote Melanie Phillips, chiefly her columns in the Spectator, because we often think she is right. We also admire and are grateful for her courageous writing against – among other controversial subjects – the Islamic conquest of Europe, most notably in her book Londonistan.

In her new book, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth, and Power, she  expresses opinions on religion and science that we  do not agree with, though we find quite a lot of other ideas in it that we like.

She writes of “the climate of unreason”. Unfortunately, with this book she is contributing to it.

Here is what she writes about ‘Islamism’  – a concept invented by non-Muslims to avoid offending Muslims, or their own sense of fairness, or both, when they’re speaking critically of what Muslims do and believe:

I have used the word “Islamist” to denote those who wish to impose Islam upon unbelievers and to extinguish individual freedom and human rights among Muslims. There are, however, scholars who hold that Islam is an inherently coercive ideology and that therefore “Islamist” is a meaningless word that creates a false distinction. It is not my purpose here to enter that particular argument. I use the term “Islamist” not to make a theological point but to allow for the acknowledgment of those Muslims who support freedom and human rights and who threaten no one – and who are themselves principal victims of the jihad. I believe it is very important to acknowledge the existence of such Muslims who have a peaceable interpretation of their religion, just as its is very important not to sanitize and thus misrepresent the doctrines and history of Islam as a religion of conquest.”

While we welcome her plain assertion that Islam is a religion of conquest, we can only wonder who these Muslims can be who embrace the religion but not its ideology of conquest and forced submission, since that is what it is about and all that it is about.

She goes on:

The book explores the remarkable links and correspondences between left-wing “progressives” and Islamists, environmentalists and fascists, militant atheists and fanatical religious believers. All are united by the common desire to bring about through human agency the perfection of the world, an agenda which history teaches us leads invariably – and paradoxically – to tyranny, terror and crimes against humanity.

Again we are largely  in agreement with her, but are surprised by the inclusion of atheists in her list. “Militant” atheists, she says. Perhaps on the model of “Islamists” she could have constructed the word “atheism-ists” to distinguish them from those atheists “who support freedom and human rights and who threaten no one”.

Who are these militant atheists? Where are they placing their bombs? We know that there are atheist progressives, atheist fascists, and atheist environmentalists (just as there are atheist conservatives, atheist libertarians, atheists altruists), but we had not noticed that it is atheism they are trying to impose on the rest of the world. Collectivism, yes. Poverty, yes. World government, yes. But atheism – who says so, when and where, and above all, how? Her book, though it deals with some left-wing atheists whose political views we strongly disagree with, does not tell us.

David Solway, whose insights often impress us, has today done us the honor of linking to one of our posts in a new article of his.

The article is at Front Page, titled Is the U.S. Too Big to Fail? Here’s a part of it (but read it all). The link to our post, Speaking of Secession, [April 7, 2010] comes with the words “parting of ways” in the third paragraph:

The Bridge Mix of social, political and economic programs—redistribution of wealth, a bloated bureaucracy, reduction of military power, amnesty for illegals, toleration of inimical communities, government takeover of the marketplace, ideology supplanting pragmatics—adopted by the American liberal-left and rapidly being put in place by the current administration are hurtling the nation toward its moment of truth when it will have to decide whether it survives as the United States of America or devolves into something that, until just a few years ago, would have been almost unimaginable.

Often what seems to be inconceivable is only the prelude to what may well become unavoidable. And in the case of America such a scenario is all too possible. For America has only three options looming before it in a rapidly foreclosing future. The best case scenario is that, assuming a concerned citizenry, the growing Tea Party movement, a return to strict budgetary rectitude and a revival of the wisdom of the Constitution and the Founders, the United States may weather the storm of social and political dismemberment it is presently undergoing and recover its essence as a constitutional republic. To accomplish this aim, however, the policies of the Obama administration must be resisted at every turn. What Henry David Thoreau wrote in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience in 1848 has a proleptic ring to it and is truer today than it ever was: “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

On the other hand the calamity of disintegration, as happened to the Soviet Union not so long ago, is a deeply troubling likelihood. The drive toward secession or what is called “disunion” along red state/blue state lines appears to be acquiring strength by the day. It is in the air. The threat of dissolution cannot be wished away or conveniently ignored. Whether such a parting of ways can be achieved peaceably and rationally or would entail violence and bloodshed remains an open question. But what resembles a bitter marriage between cultural incompatibles, the statist Left and the conservative Right, who have nothing to say to one another and disagree on just about everything, makes an eventual divorce by no means unthinkable. The clash between a pervasive scavenger mentality of collective entitlement and the ancestral belief in the values of personal initiative and individual responsibility cannot, it increasingly appears, be resolved amicably.

The third possibility is that America under the stewardship of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party will become an impoverished, socialist, Muslim-friendly country, much like the United Kingdom today or Sweden tomorrow, with devastating consequences for the majority of its citizens. As David Horowitz remarks of the U.S., “its constitutional order is threatened by a political left whose values remain socialist and whose agendas are subversive.” Such is the fundamental transformation promised by the Democratic candidate five days before his election: the intent to legislate outcome at the expense of input, to ensure a syndicalist homogeneity of status among the population while installing a privileged managerial class in the seats of power, and ultimately to transform America’s most industrious entrepreneurial sector into over-taxed and over-regulated obsolescence. Where have we seen this before?

These, then, are the three alternatives between which America will have to choose: recovery, dissolution, socialism. Regarding the latter two, to cite Aeschylus …,  it’s “either way, ruin.” Clearly, the moment of decision is not far down the road. Even a one-term administration for Barack Obama and his cohorts may be sufficient to wreak irreparable damage; a two-term presidency would probably spell the end of the noble and unique American experiment in republican democracy. For there can be little question that Barack Obama and the Democratic ascendancy together form the single greatest disaster to befall the United States in the modern era. If the country does not right itself sooner rather than later, it will find itself broken down the middle or wake up one day to discover that it is now nothing more than another socialist or quasi-Marxist Republic, which is a republic in name only.

Thoreau is on the mark again. Deploring the effects of a “wordy” and ever-compliant Congress which had “not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and freedom” and which was devoid of “talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufactures,” he argues that without the “seasonable experience…of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations.” And we remember, too, that the United States was a much smaller political entity in 1848 than it is in 2010.

Now is not the time to take refuge in the smug conviction of indestructibility. America is not too big to fail and it may well be too big not to fail. But one thing is undeniable. As it approaches the eleventh hour, its survival depends on a determined and informed citizen “army” of genuine patriots capable of restoring the practical ideal of limited government  …

Are we exaggerating when we call Obama “the Dictator”?

Judging by this, we  guess that Thomas Sowell would not say we are:

So much of what is said and done by those who rely on the power of government to direct ever more sweeping areas of our life seem to have no sense of the limits of what can be accomplished that way.

Even the totalitarian governments of the 20th century eventually learned the hard way the limits of what could be accomplished by power alone. China still has a totalitarian government today but, after the death of Mao, the Chinese government began to loosen its controls on some parts of the economy, in order to reap the economic benefits of freer markets.

As those benefits became clear in higher rates of economic growth and rising standards of living, more government controls were loosened. But, just as market principles were applied to only certain kinds of slavery, so freedom in China has been allowed in economic activities to a far greater extent than in other realms of the country’s life, where tight control from the top down remains the norm.

Ironically, the United States is moving in the direction of the kind of economy that China has been forced to move away from. China once had complete government control of medical care, but eventually gave it up as the disaster that it was.

The current leadership in Washington operates as if they can just set arbitrary goals, whether “affordable housing” or “universal health care” or anything else — and not concern themselves with the repercussions — since they have the power to simply force individuals, businesses, doctors or anyone else to knuckle under and follow their dictates.

Friedrich Hayek called this mindset “the road to serfdom.” But, even under serfdom and slavery, experience forced those with power to recognize the limits of their power. What this administration — and especially the President — does not have is experience.

Barack Obama had no experience running even the most modest business, and personally paying the consequences of his mistakes, before becoming President of the United States. He can believe that his heady new power is the answer to all things.

On Saturday April 10, 2010, the President of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, was killed in a plane crash in Russia. He was on his way to the site of the Katyn massacre, to commemorate the killing of 21,768 Polish officers in April 1940. They were shot dead in cold blood by Russians on the orders of Josef Stalin, most of them in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk.

Kaczynski was leading a delegation of 88, including his wife, and the last president of the anti-Communist Polish government-in-exile in London, the head of the National Security Office, presidential aides, the Deputy Speaker of the Polish parliament, a Deputy Foreign Minister, the head of the Army Chief of Staff, the head of Poland’s National Bank; also relatives of the men who had been murdered at Katyn. All died in the crash.

President Kaczynski was a founder member of Solidarity, as were some of the others in the delegation. He was staunchly against Communism and Russia, and strongly pro-America.

Dr Paul Kengor writes at Townhall:

The Katyn Woods massacre was one of the worst war crimes of the bloody 20th century. …

The Polish officers were taken to three primary sites, the most infamous of which bears the namesake of the crime: the Katyn Woods … There, these unsuspecting men, Poland’s best and brightest, were methodically slaughtered like farm animals. The Bolsheviks covered their crime with a thin layer of dirt.

The locals shuddered at the howling cries of dying men echoing through their once peaceful woods. One Russian farmer later told authorities: “For approximately four to five weeks there were three to four trucks daily driving to the forest loaded with people…. I could hear the shooting and screaming of men’s voices.”

Some Poles were destroyed on site in the forest, whereas others were first shot in the NKVD prison in Smolensk, with their rotting corpses transported to Katyn for burial under a few inches of soil.

At the prison, bullets were fired 24/7 by a cadre of deranged, homicidal NKVD/KGB killers who were so consumed with bloodlust, and so taken by the dark side that, in the end, their work finished, they turned their guns on themselves. Death had consumed them.

In April 1943, it was the Germans, then at war with the USSR and advancing with lightning speed into Soviet territory, who discovered the mass graves. They immediately tried to turn the atrocity into a propaganda coup to split the Big Three Allies: the USSR, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Of course, the Soviets, being masters of lies, responded by claiming the Nazis were the perpetrators. …

In the United States, Ambassador Jan Ciechanowski of the Polish government-in-exile and Congressman John Lesinski (D-Mich.) were certain the Soviets did it. For [saying] this, they were denounced by FDR’s hideous Office of War Information, which we now know was one of the most infiltrated agencies of the entire wartime federal government, penetrated by communist spies and sympathizers. FDR [President Franklin D. Roosevelt] refused to believe that the government of his pal “Uncle Joe”—his term of endearment for Stalin—was involved. This greatly frustrated men like former Pennsylvania Governor George Earle, a fellow Democrat whom FDR had appointed to investigate the matter, and who knew the Soviets were guilty as sin.

FDR disagreed, fully buying the Soviet line, telling Earle: “George, they [the Nazis] could have rigged things up. The Germans could have rigged things up.”

The liberal/progressive icon [FDR] insisted to his special emissary: “I’m absolutely convinced that the Russians didn’t do this.” An amazed Earle responded: “Mr. President, I think this evidence is overwhelming.” Of course, it was…

FDR’s wilful blindness was itself criminal. Why did he refuse to believe that Stalin was evil? At least part of the answer is to be found in a statement we report in our post below, A date which should live in infamy: “The liberal cannot strike wholeheartedly against the Communist,” wrote early National Review columnist James Burnham, “for fear of wounding himself in the process.”

It has happened. The CHANGE has been made.

Mark Steyn sums up just what has happened and what it will mean for America and beyond:

Happy Dependence Day!

Well, it seems to be in the bag now. I try to be a sunny the-glass-is-one-sixteenth-full kinda guy, but it’s hard to overestimate the magnitude of what the Democrats have accomplished. Whatever is in the bill is an intermediate stage … The governmentalization of health care will accelerate, private insurers will no longer be free to be “insurers” in any meaningful sense of that term (ie, evaluators of risk), and once that’s clear we’ll be on the fast track to Obama’s desired destination of single payer as a fait accomplis.

If Barack Obama does nothing else in his term in office, this will make him one of the most consequential presidents in history. It’s a huge transformative event in Americans’ view of themselves and of the role of government. You can say, oh, well, the polls show most people opposed to it, but, if that mattered, the Dems wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing. Their bet is that it can’t be undone, and that over time, as I’ve been saying for years now, governmentalized health care not only changes the relationship of the citizen to the state but the very character of the people…

More prosaically, it’s also unaffordable. That’s why one of the first things that middle-rank powers abandon once they go down this road is a global military capability. If you take the view that the U.S. is an imperialist aggressor, congratulations: You can cease worrying. But, if you think that America has been the ultimate guarantor of the post-war global order, it’s less cheery. Five years from now, just as in Canada and Europe two generations ago, we’ll be getting used to announcements of defense cuts to prop up the unsustainable costs of big government at home. And, as the superpower retrenches, America’s enemies will be quick to scent opportunity.

Longer wait times, fewer doctors, more bureaucracy, massive IRS expansion, explosive debt, the end of the Pax Americana, and global Armageddon. Must try to look on the bright side . . .

The bureaucracy will be busy. It will come poking into our private lives, because the government now owns us. It now “has a right” to order us to live like this and not like that. What we eat, how much we eat, how warm or cool we may keep our homes, what sort of transport we may use …. it’s hard to think of a daily activity that won’t be regulated, because the government will be paying – with our tax dollars, of course – for our medical treatment, and may provide it if we’ve been “good”, or withhold it if we’ve been “bad”.

“You will obey” is the new true motto of once-free America.

Good-bye, freedom!

This is a fulcrum moment in history.

If the Democrats succeed in “kicking down the door”, “crossing the threshold”, “vaulting over the fence” – to use Pelosi-Obama metaphors – by passing their “health care” bill, which is actually a bill to turn America towards unstoppable socialism, they will have a clear field in front of them.

The Left’s “long march through the institutions” brought Obama to the most powerful position in the world. Now the purpose of the long march can be realized: a collectivist world.

Then the brief American experiment in liberty – successful though it has been while it lasted – will be over: over for America, and so for the world. There have been only a few periods and places in which people have been able to live in freedom under law. Britain managed it for a while. The United States has managed it triumphantly for about 234 years. Ahead, if the bill passes and the Democrats continue in the direction Obama and Pelosi are leading them, lies collectivism, poverty, serfdom, misery. There will be hunger and want as there was in collectivist Russia and collectivist China; not immediately, but once the Capitalist Goose is killed, there can be no more golden eggs and the store will soon be bare.

However the swing to socialism is accomplished, whether by majority vote in a corrupt Congress, or by hook-and-crook, deem-and-wangle, if this measure becomes law it will be a victory for evil.

Jillian Becker March 19, 2010.

If enough Democratic votes are found to pass the monstrous health care legislation that will condemn America to the terminal illness of socialism, it will mean that many Democrats have decided to support their party rather than listen to their constituents, and so risk not being re-elected in November.

Why aren’t they troubled by this prospect? Mark Steyn and Andrew McCarthy have an explanation. Mark Steyn writes:

A big-time GOP consultant was on TV crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass ObamaCare because it’s so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.

Okay, then what? You’ll roll it back — like you’ve rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago?

Like you’ve undone the Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel ‘n’ dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter?

Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus:

“Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?”

Indeed.

Look at it from the Dems’ point of view. You pass ObamaCare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years.

And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier.

If they are right – and we think they are – then there is only one sure way of killing off this “fetid behemoth” right now.

The Republicans must firmly decide and declare that they will repeal the legislation when they are returned to power. They must say it and mean it – and of course, if the Democrats think it’s only a bluff and go ahead anyway, then, when the time comes, they must do it.

How does the seemingly benign campaign, figureheaded by Michelle Obama (see our post Great ideas from the pumpkin patch Janury 29, 2010), against childhood obesity, serve the socialist agenda of Barack Obama?

Michelle Malkin explains how. She writes:

Behind every seemingly good deed in the Obama White House, there’s a deep-pocketed, left-wing special interest. Take first lady Michelle Obama’s crusade against childhood obesity. Who really benefits from the ostensible push for improved nutrition in the schools? Think purple — as in the purple-shirted army of the Service Employees International Union. Big Labor bigwigs don’t care about slimming your kids’ waistlines. They care about beefing up their membership rolls and fattening their coffers….

The East Wing is now in full campaign mode — leaning on the nation’s mayors, traveling with the surgeon general and meeting with Congress and cabinet members to reauthorize the Lyndon Johnson-era Child Nutrition Act, which provides government-subsidized meals to more than 30 million children. It’s part of the Obama administration’s self-proclaimed “cradle-to-career” agenda for America’s youth.

For decades, school administrators have criticized this Great Society relic for outgrowing its initial conception. The program was originally created to use up post-World War II food surpluses… While spending on youth nutrition and wellness have ballooned, so have the kids. Nearly one-third of U.S. children are now overweight or obese. The feds spend $15 billion a year on nutrition in schools; the White House wants at least a $1 billion increase this coming fiscal year.

The well-intended program to feed poor kids has morphed into an untouchable universal entitlement with a powerful school-lunch lobbying coalition of Department of Agriculture bureaucrats, food-service industry executives and union bosses. Enter the SEIU. Headed by the White House’s most frequent visitor, Andy Stern, the powerful labor organization representing government and private service employees has an insatiable appetite for power and growth. Working alongside the first lady, the SEIU unveiled a major ad campaign this week demanding reauthorizing and funding increases in the Child Nutrition Act.

What’s in it for Big Labor? SEIU Executive Vice President Mitch Ackerman explains: “A more robust expansion of school lunch, breakfast, summer feeding, child care and WIC (the federal Women, Infants and Children nutrition program) is critical to reducing hunger, ending childhood obesity and providing fair wages and healthcare for front line food service workers” (emphasis added).

There are 400,000 workers who prepare and serve lunch to American schoolchildren. SEIU represents tens of thousands of those workers and is trying to unionize many more. “More robust expansion” of the federal school-lunch law means a mandate for higher wages, increased benefits and government-guaranteed health insurance coverage …

They are casting food-services workers as indispensable saviors. The union has rallied behind P.R. efforts casting them as superheroes “serving justice, and serving lunch.” Opposing the union means opposing children’s health. SEIU propaganda features New Jersey school cafeteria workers like Leslie Williams of Orange, N.J., lamenting: “I love my work, but it’s getting harder to prepare nutritious meals on the low budget we’re working with. … It breaks my heart to see a child who’s hungry. As I see it, part of my job is to make sure the kids are well-fed.”

Actually, that’s the primary job of parents. Mom? Dad? Remember them? But the more responsibility we demand of parents, the less power and influence SEIU bosses are able to grab. Unionized school dietician and nutrition jobs are booming. And in addition to school breakfast and lunch, the SEIU is now pushing subsidized dinner plans and summer food service to create a “stronger nutrition safety net.” Translation: Perpetual employment for big government and its public employee union au pairs.

Cede the children, feed the state.

The food police, led by First Busybody Michelle Obama, are on the warpath.

Why can’t these obominable people mind their own business? Medium-sized people as we are, we libertarians of this website stand in solidarity (as the left would say) with our large-sized fellow citizens against these interfering bossieboots.

Reuters reports:

U.S. health officials have leveraged the star power of first lady Michelle Obama to roll out a new campaign against obesity, a preventable condition that drains billions of dollars from the economy.

Could someone explain to us how on earth obesity, or for that matter any other condition of the human body, can ‘drain billions of dollars from the economy’?

If there was a nationalized health service in America the government would be sure to claim the right to interfere with what and how much people eat – Fat Panels alongside the Death Panels – but as there is no such thing at least for the present, neither the government nor its henchwomen have any excuse to monitor and complain about individual choices even if they affect those individuals’ health.

[Michelle] Obama, who plans to take on childhood obesity as a cause, headlined the launch on Thursday of Surgeon General Regina Benjamin’s blueprint for what can be done at home, school and work to reverse the epidemic.

Hasn’t the First Busybody got anything better to do? Actually no, probably not.

In her first initiative since becoming “America’s doctor,” Benjamin issued a report on the consequences of obesity to start a national dialogue on the subject.

“The number of Americans, like me, who are struggling with their weight and health conditions related to their weight remains much too high,” she said.

Benjamin’s report lists recommendations for preventing obesity. They range from simply eating more fruit and vegetables to adding “high-quality physical education” in schools and bringing more supermarkets to low-income communities.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said at the launch that the Obama administration was investing $650 million in economic stimulus money in wellness and prevention programs aimed at obesity and stopping smoking.

Ah, now we see! So the government is going to waste hundreds of millions of tax-payer’s money on this busybodying in order to claim the right to interfere? Waste the money and then accuse those they’re interfering with of being the wasters?

She introduced the first lady as “everyone’s favorite vegetable gardener.”

Charmingly sycophantic. But – everyone’s? Not ours! And wasn’t there something about the soil in the White House garden being too full of chemicals to grow edible vegetables? If so, it’s gone down the official memory hole.

[Michelle] Obama, who created a White House garden with local school children, said the solution to the obesity epidemic cannot come from government alone. Everyone has to be willing to do their part to end the public health crisis.

Here it is – the community organizing. The mind of the collectivist at work. ‘Don’t make me alone bear this burden of ordering the lives of 300 million people – be kind enough to share it with me by co-operating.’  That, in coy terms,  is what happened in China when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution.

“This will not be easy and it won’t happen overnight. And it won’t happen simply because the first lady has made it her priority,” Obama told an audience of children’s advocates [?] at a recreation center in Alexandria, outside Washington.

“It’s going to take all of us. Thank God it’s not going to be solely up to me.”

The United States spends nearly $150 billion a year on obesity and related complications — twice what it cost in 1998 and more than every cancer cost put together, Sebelius said.

Note  – in their minds it is the ‘United States’ that spends this money.

Perhaps the First Busybody, obviously having too much time on her hands, could use some of it to learn some basic Economics.

“The unhealthier we are as a nation, the more our health care costs will continue to rise and the less competitive we will be globally,” she said.

Good grief! What a silly woman!

In Commentary magazine, the admirable commentator and analyst Jennifer Rubin examines at length the possible reasons for Sarah Palin’s unpopularity with Jewish voters. If she is right – and by saying that, we are not intending to cast doubt on her conclusions – Sarah Palin is scorned by American Jews as being intellectually inferior.

‘Jews,’ Rubin writes at the end of her article (we suggest interested readers read it all) ‘are not about to cast aside their preference for those leaders whom they perceive as intellectually worthy – and socially compatible.’

In other words – ours not Jennifer Rubin’s – she is the victim of intellectual snobbery. (Maybe social snobbery too, but ‘social incompatibility’ may not be because one social group thinks itself superior to another, but simply because it feels that it has little in common with the other. So we’ll overlook that. It’s the ‘intellectually worthy’ judgment that concerns us.)

We believe Rubin is right to take into account that Jews in general place a high value on intellectual ability and achievement. It’s well known that they do. A circle of Jewish voters of our acquaintance holds that Bill Clinton deserved to be president because he was a Rhodes scholar. That’s more than enough all by itself to secure their admiration and their political loyalty. Academic brilliance, in their judgment, is a ‘pro’ that cancels any ‘con’, such as character flaws, sexual exploitation, even perjury. And that is not wise. It is also not intellectually respectable!

Most Jews in America are liberal and vote Democratic, even though Jewish interests, especially where relations between the US and Israel are concerned, are in far safer hands when the Republicans are in power. The Left is now predominantly and universally anti-Israel, and in Europe positively anti-Semitic. The illogic of Jewish loyalty to the Left in the light of these facts is glaring enough to need explanation, and Norman Podhoretz has taken a whole book (Why Are Jews Liberals?) to explain it.

So Jewish voters’ opinions of Sarah Palin can be understood in part as the opinions of the Left in general. And of course the Left is against Sarah Palin: she is a conservative and a Republican. But the degree of animosity towards her aired obsessively by leftist intellectuals goes beyond mere difference of principle and opinion. It is so contemptuous, so personal, so cruel as to outrage civilized standards. They even attack her children! Women writers ridicule her appearance (out of envy, we suspect, of her quite exceptional beauty), as if that were relevant to her politics and aspirations to leadership.

In our view Sarah Palin is highly intelligent, and – yes – not an intellectual. Thomas Sowell has convincingly defined an intellectual as someone whose product is ideas, and Sarah Palin does not fit that definition. But that is in no way a deficiency in her. America does not need an intellectual as a leader. We’d even go so far as to say that an intellectual is the last person America needs to lead it. It needs someone who is principled, who holds liberty to be the highest value, who respects the Constitution and the traditions of America, is competent, commonsensical, has proved herself electable, has been tried and tested in office, is fiscally responsible, knows the importance of keeping America militarily strong, and is exemplary in her self-reliance. If ever there was a model of an American able and willing to stand on her own two feet, it is Sarah Palin. (She and her husband fill their deep freeze with meat and fish that they themselves hunt and catch; and they built their own house. Not the sort of activities, we acknowledge, that intellectuals are likely to admire.)

We are not saying that Sarah Palin would be the indubitably best choice for the 2012 presidential election. We are saying that she would be a good candidate. And we think that Jewish voters should know that in her office when she was Governor of Alaska, she displayed an Israeli flag on her wall. Or so we have been told. If we’ve been misinformed about that, we’d still like to point out to them that she is much more likely than Obama to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons.

And speaking of Obama – who, it is worth noting, will not let his academic records be made public – we wonder: how do the Jews who voted for him reconcile their preference for an ‘intellectually worthy’ leader with his manifest ignorance and career-long dependence on affirmative action?