While the cheerleaders testified to the superior moral fiber of their team, the Palestinian civilian death toll mounted. Israeli missiles tore at least fifteen Palestinian police cadets to shreds at a graduation ceremony, blew twelve worshippers to pieces (including six children) while they left evening prayers at a mosque, flattened the elite American International School, killed five sisters while they slept in their beds, and liquidated 9 women and children in order to kill a single Hamas leader. So far, Israeli forces have killed at least 500 Gazans and wounded some two thousand, including hundreds of children. Yesterday, the IDF blanketed parts of Gaza with white phosphorus, a chemical weapon Saddam Hussein once deployed against Kurdish rebels.

“It was Israel at its best,” Yossi Klein Halevi declared in the New Republic.

By New Year’s Day, Israel’s cheering squad had turned the opinion pages of major American newspapers into their own personal romper room. Of all the editorial contributions published by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times since the Israel’s war on Gaza began, to my knowledge only one offered a skeptical view of the assault. But that editorial, by Israeli novelist David Grossman, contained not a single word about the Palestinian casualties of IDF attacks. Even while calling for a cease fire, Grossman promised, “We can always start shooting again.” 

Israeli public relations agents fanned out to broadcast studios from the US to Europe, fulfilling an aggressive strategy conceived after the country’s catastrophic 2006 attack on Lebanon. An analysis by Israel’s foreign ministry of eight hours of coverage across international broadcast media concluded that Israeli representatives received a whopping 58 minutes of airtime compared to only 19 minutes for Palestinians. ”Quite a few outlets are very favourable to Israel, namely by showing [its] suffering. I am sure it is a result of the new co-ordination,” said Major Avital Leibovich, an IDF spokesperson who has become a fixture on cable news in the past weeks.

But while Israel’s PR machine cranked its Mighty Wurlitzer to full blast, drowning out all opposing voices with its droning sound, a surprisingly substantial portion of the American public decided to dance to its own tune. According to a December 31 Rasmussen poll (so far the only measure of US opinion on the Gaza assault), while Americans remained overwhelmingly supportive of Israel, they were split almost evenly on the question of whether Israel should attack Gaza — 44% in favor of the assault and 41% against it. The internals are even more remarkable. 

While Republicans supported the assault on Gaza by a large margin, a predictable finding, only 31% of Democrats did. Members of the Democratic base thus stood in sharp contrast to most of their elected representatives (freshman Rep. Donna Edwards is a notable exception), who backed the latest Israeli assault in lockstep, and seem to support Israel no matter what it does. At the same time, Barack Obama’s Change.gov site was deluged with demands for the president-elect to issue a statement against Israel’s assault on Gaza. 

So what accounts for the surprising split in American opinion on Gaza? The proliferation of progressive online media and social networking sites could be a factor, but I have another theory: The same pundits who are cheerleading Israel’s assault on Gaza once sold the occupation of Iraq to America, and with a nearly identical set of arguments. In their voices and those of the grim Israeli PR agents carted out for cable news, many Americans hear echoes of the Bush administration’s most fantastical lies. When they see images of Gazans under withering bombardment, they flash back to Fallujah and the assorted horrors of Iraq. When they look at Israel, they see themselves during the darkest days of the Bush era.

Now, an increasing share of Americans know what Israel is doing to Gaza. And they reject it, even when Israel is “at its best.”

But no blog award meant more to me than being included in Phil Munger’s top five Alaskan muckrakers of 2008. Without Phil and his wife, Judy, my coverage of Sarah Palin would not have been possible. They were more than generous hosts, they were skillful guides to a vast, complex and utterly fascinating local culture that I knew little about before I arrived. Phil’s presentation is below the fold, from his blog, Progressive Alaska: 

Max Blumenthal. David Neiwert, one of the Pacific Northwest’s top experts on ties between militias and fundamentalists, and on the history of hate crimes, told me in mid-September to expect Max to show up, covering the Rev. Thomas Muthee and the latter’s colleagues, at some Wasilla revivals. Max stayed with us for a bit over a week, overlapping with a stay by Nancy Lethcoe, who ran against Rep. John Harris for the state House.

I chose Max here, to represent himself and several other young people who came to Alaska, hoping to find information that would convince Americans - especially the vast reservoir of non-partisan Americans - that Sarah Palin was totally unfit to be a candidate on a presidential ticket. I have to say, these youngsters give me hope.

Max, like many of the people who visited Judy and me, or stayed with us, combined an awesome sense of humor with total dedication to his work. He left Alaska with a lot of raw material, and did as much or more than any other Outside reporter to get the truth out in September.

Rick Warren, courtier and culture warrior

Today I discussed Barack Obama’s selection of Rick Warren as his inaugural pastor with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. Watch or listen to it here or read the transcript, which continues below the fold:

AMY GOODMAN: President-elect Barack Obama, speaking in Chicago last week. 

I’m joined now by Max Blumenthal, Puffin Foundation writing fellow at the Nation Institute. His work has appeared in The Nation, Salon and many other publications, currently writing a book on the US evangelical movement. His latest article, “Rick Warren’s Hypocritical Double Life,” is online at dailybeast.com. Max Blumenthal joins us by DN! video stream. 

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Max. 

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Great to be here. 

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the history of Rick Warren. 

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, the history of Rick Warren is pretty interesting. And you heard some of his views right there. These are views that people have only recently started paying attention to. Prior to this controversy, Rick Warren was, you know, proffered by the media as the voice of the new evangelical movement, which embraces environmentalism and fights poverty and is going to move beyond the old hobgoblins of the Christian right and the old, you know, draconian figures of the Christian right, like James Dobson and Pat Robertson. Rick Warren was supposed to be the pioneer of this new movement. He is the founding pastor of Saddleback Church, a megachurch in Orange County. And he’s the author of The Purpose Driven Life, which is, you know, a sort of subtly Christian, self-help manual that sold 25 million copies. So he has a really broad appeal, and he’s planted churches across the world, especially in Africa. 

And because, you know, the media has expected evangelicals, especially conservative evangelicals, to be draconian and retrograde, you know, they’ve made a hero out of Rick Warren without looking at who he really is and what he really believes. Nicholas Kristof from the New York Times, for example, has called Rick Warren an evangelical liberals can love. You know,Newsweek named Rick Warren one of the fifteen people who make America great. And even The Nation, which I’ve written for, you know, the venerable left-wing magazine, in 2005 published a piece calling Rick Warren America’s pastor. 

You know, he wears a Hawaiian shirt. He looks like a big teddy bear. He doesn’t holler or hector. He speaks in a ponderous tone. And he does seem to genuinely care about the environment and care about poverty. It’s not clear what he’s actually done. 

And he’s been pumped up by a small group of Democratic consultants, who urged Barack Obama first to go to his church and speak with him and then to participate in a debate this August that was broadcast by CNN, the Saddleback Forum, where Rick Warren essentially got to interview both candidates sequentially, John McCain and Barack Obama, on the issues and serve as the national minister. The debate went really badly for Obama, because Rick Warren asked him a trick question about abortion: When does a baby get human rights? Barack Obama couldn’t answer it. Soon after, he was attacked by right-wing radio hosts for his answer, because he said, you know, “This question is above my pay grade.” And Rick Warren even went on a conservative radio show and, you know, chuckled about Obama’s response and kind of lightly mocked him. 

So, the real Rick Warren is someone who fights the culture war with a velvet glove. He’s a religious right figure who’s figured out a new strategy to move into a Democratic post-Bush era and still hold influence. He even—he freely admitted to a reporter from the Wall Street Journal that the principal difference, the only difference, between him and James Dobson is a matter of tone. And when I called Rick Warren’s PR handlers, you know, the people that are responsible for making him into this major national figure, from Larry A. Ross Communications, they kind of laughed at the idea that he was America’s pastor. They said he’s consistent with what the Bible teaches. He’s not trying to be America’s pastor or whatever. 

So, Rick Warren openly backed Proposition 8 in California last November—this November, and he did so in the terms that you heard him speaking to Steven Waldman, essentially saying that two percent of our population, the homosexual population, was trying to dictate to the rest us, which is a really demagogic thing to say. He told that to his congregation. And he’s backed every anti-gay proposition that’s come down the pike in California in the last ten years, including Proposition 22, which laid the groundwork for Proposition 8. He joined up with James Dobson and Charles Colson and Tony Perkins and these people to do this. 

Beyond that, he compares pro-choice advocates to Holocaust deniers. He recently was interviewed by Sean Hannity, and Sean Hannity asked him, “Should we attack Iran?” And Rick Warren said, “Well, it’s our God-given obligation to take out evildoers.” He has recently scrubbed material from his website claiming that man walked the earth with dinosaurs, basically that, you know, history is one big Flintstones episode. He will not allow homosexuals to be members of his church, and he recently scrubbed that from his website. 

So it’s just interesting to me that people are finally paying attention to this, after Rick Warren has never tried to hide his views. He’s never really gamed the media. It’s just that progressives have finally drawn the line, where Barack Obama has not. 

AMY GOODMAN: You write about, one, Rick Warren saying he doesn’t feel that politics and religion should be mixed. But you also talk about how in the last days of the presidential race of Bush’s 2004 re-election bid, Warren sent an urgent blast email to hundreds of thousands of evangelicals, insisting they base their votes on five non-negotiable issues: abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage, human cloning and euthanasia.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right. And this is before Rick Warren became a member of the ONE Campaign, before, you know, the media had began puffing him, and before people—Democratic consultants like Mara Vanderslice, who ran a sort of Christian front group for Obama called Matthew 25, and self-proclaimed progressive evangelicals in the media, like Amy Sullivan, began presenting him as one of the new evangelicals who was going to take us beyond the Christian right. But the evidence was there that Rick Warren had sort of insidiously backed George W. Bush by saying that pastors had to vote and urge their congregations to vote on issues like abortion and homosexuality. If you vote on those issues and you say that those issues are non-negotiable, then of course you’re going to vote for George W. Bush, and of course you’re going to back the Republicans for Congress. 

Beyond that, you know, Rick Warren says he’s for the environment. Rick Warren says that he’s for fighting poverty, which is great. But what has he actually done? You know, I’ve spent hours scouring the internet, calling around, trying to find some results that Rick Warren has produced in Africa against AIDS, results he’s produced against poverty. And all I can find is that his peace programs, which he calls them, are sort of recruitment vehicles for the churches that he’s planning in Africa and that he is using these programs actually to evangelize, and there’s no real way of measuring his results. And there are Christian groups that are doing good work, you know, in the third world, that are fighting poverty, and they measure results, groups like Medical Teams International. Even World Vision measures results. But we have no way of knowing what Rick Warren is doing. It looks to me like he’s going around to the Aspen Institute and to these big elite festivals and telling people who expect evangelicals to be retrograde and who expect evangelicals to be draconian, that he’s doing something different. And he speaks the language that people want to hear in the media-manufactured age of post-partisanship. But it’s unclear what he’s actually doing, beyond fighting the culture war with a velvet glove. 

AMY GOODMAN: Max Blumenthal, let’s turn to another clip highlighting some of Rick Warren’s views. Earlier this month, he was interviewed by Ann Curry of MSNBC. 

ANN CURRY: If science finds that this is biological—   

REV. RICK WARREN: Yeah? 

ANN CURRY: —that people are born to be gay, would you change your position? 

REV. RICK WARREN: No. And the reason why is because we all have biological predispositions. I’m naturally inclined to have sex with every beautiful woman I see. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Rick Warren. Max Blumenthal, final thoughts? 

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, that’s a bizarre remark I haven’t heard. And, you know, I like to get to know women first, and I think, you know, most people do. Rick Warren has a doctrine of women’s submission, which he preaches to his church, and he tells the female members of his church that they have to support their husbands’ decisions, even if they make bad financial decisions, because women have to submit in a biblical manner to their husbands. So this goes way beyond being anti-gay. He’s, you know, patriarchal. He’s supported assassinating Iran’s president. And he’s just— 

You know, I have no problem, and I don’t think anyone should have any problem with Barack Obama going to Rick Warren’s church and meeting with him or working with him on good initiatives. But the question is, where does Barack Obama draw the line when someone demonizes a segment of Americans? Is this person really fit to address the nation and confer God’s blessing on the entire United States of America, when Rick Warren freely admits that he only believes that a small segment of Americans are going to heaven and that the rest of us are going to burn in an everlasting lake of fire? That’s the question. And I think that Barack Obama has answered it. But at the very least, progressives have drawn the line here, and I think they should hold the line. 

AMY GOODMAN: Max Blumenthal, I want to thank you for being with us, Puffin Foundation writing fellow at the Nation Institute, writing a book on the evangelical movement. His latest article is called “Rick Warren’s Hypocritical Double Life.” It’s online at dailybeast.com.

In his heart, Paul Weyrich knew he was right

Pioneering conservative activist Paul Weyrich died on December 18 at the age of 66. Though Weyrich was commonly regarded as a behind-the-scenes Beltway operator, he achieved one of his most enduring goals in the backwaters of the South.

In 1971, before the Roe v. Wade decision riveted America, the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. At about the same time, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating (blacks were denied entry until 1971.) The decisions infuriated a popular evangelical pastor from Lynchburg, Virginia named Jerry Falwell. “In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school,” Falwell complained.

Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His pleas initially fell on deaf ears.

“I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. “What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”

In 1979, at Weyrich’s behest, Falwell founded a group that he called the Moral Majority. Along with a vanguard of evangelical icons including D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, Falwell’s organization hoisted the banner of the “pro-family” movement, declaring war on abortion and homosexuality. Thanks to the persistence and vision of Weyrich, a pre-Vatican II Catholic, the heavily Protestant religious right was born. Even the phrase, “moral majority,” was a Weyrich creation.

While working in Colorado, Weyrich met beer baron Joseph Coors, a funder of the far-right John Birch Society and friend of California Gov. Ronald Reagan. Inspired by Weyrich’s vision of a vast infrastructure of conservative instituions that would replace the liberal establishment and guide the right out of the wilderness, Coors ponied up $250,000 in 1973 to found the Heritage Foundation — the crown jewel of Weyrich’s planned counter-establishment.

The Washington think tank, which Weyrich chaired, became Reagan’s unofficial idea factory as soon as he entered the White House in 1980. (Coors guided the president’s personnel decisions as a member of his “kitchen cabinet.”) During the George W. Bush era, Heritage has inspired White House policy on issues ranging from abstinence education to missile defense, while grooming a generation of conservative cadres for the future through its intern program.

A pre-Vatican II Catholic traditionalist, Weyrich was most passionate about social issues. He railed against abortion before the GOP was officially against it, and teamed up with anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly to torpedo the Equal Rights Amendment in 1977, warning darkly that its passage would force good Christian girls to use unisex bathrooms. Last year, Weyrich howled that “the Feminazi crowd” planned to reintroduce ERA.

In 2001, Weyrich circulated a commentary accusing Jews of murdering Jesus. When a conservative writer named Evan Gahr attacked Weyrich as a “demented anti-Semite,” he learned how powerful the conservative founding father truly was. In short order, neoconservative activist David Horowitz barred Gahr from writing for his FrontPageMag and forced him to apologize to Weyrich.

Obsessed with ideological purity, Weyrich homed his most vitriolic attacks on the Republican congressional leadership. David Grann’s classic profile of Weyrich as a “Robespierre of the Right,” published in 1997 in the New Republic, is probably the best window into Weyrich’s often destructive efforts to force the GOP to the hard right. “The problem with Gingrich,” Weyrich said of the House majority leader at the time, “is that he does not have any immutable principles that he would die for.” (Weyrich sued The New Republic for libel after it published Grann’s article, a suit that was dismissed.)

In 1996, Weyrich was diagnosed with a debilitating spinal injury. Five years later, the injury consigned him to a wheelchair. He spent the last years of his life in constant pain, and took heavy doses of painkillers. In 2004, after a bad fall, Weyrich’s legs were amputated. But he soldiered on, addressing conservative conferences and pumping out a steady flow of commentaries urging the Republicans to stay tethered to their right-wing base.

In September 2006, foreshadowing Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s notorious remarks about her congressional colleagues two years later, Weyrich called for an FBI investigation of reporters who harbor subversive attitudes and urged the resurrection of the House Un-American Affairs Committee.

By the time Weyrich died, the conservative movement he created had grown so vast his imprimatur on its agenda was no longer apparent. But his impact is undeniable. Thanks to his efforts and those of the thousands of cadres he recruited and cultivated, the Republican Party is more ideologically extreme, more disciplined — and more politically marginalized — than at any time since the Goldwater Era. And that might be just where Weyrich wanted it. In his heart he knew he was right.

Inaugural pastor Rick Warren is officially not gay

Why couldn’t Barack Obama have at least selected Rich Cizik to deliver his inaugural prayer? Cizik was just drummed out as the head of the National Association of Evangelicals for revealing that, like Obama, he supports civil union (James Dobson had tried to oust Cizik over his environmentalism, but nailed him on the gay issue instead). But as I wrote at The Daily Beast, the man Obama did select to give the benediction, Rick Warren, had this to say a week before election day:

“Here’s an interesting thing: there are about 2% of Americans [who] are homosexual, gay, lesbian people. We should not let two percent of the population determine—to change a definition of marriage that has been supported by every single culture and every single religion for 5,000 years. This is not even just a Christian issue, it is a humanitarian and human issue, that God created marriage for the purpose of family, love and procreation. I urge you to support Proposition 8 and to pass that on.”

Nixon "evil genius" Chuck Colson is rewarded with the prestigious Citizens' Medal. But has his life truly been redeemed, or simply reframed?

The Republican campaign of 2008 will be remembered, among other things, for the accusation that Barack Obama was “palling around with terrorists,” namely former Weather Underground leader William Ayers. But visions of domestic terrorism don’t seem to bother the Republicans now. On December 10, President George W. Bush bestowed the prestigious Citizens Medal on Charles Colson, who plotted various acts of domestic terrorism in the Nixon White House. To paraphrase an old saying, one man’s terrorist is apparently another man’s medal-winner.

In Bush’s final days, perhaps few other gestures could capture the arc of the Republican era. Colson is a representative figure, once Richard Nixon’s special counsel and chief dirty trickster turned into born-again missionary for the religious right and mentor to Bush and his acolytes—including his former chief speechwriter Michael Gerson. By honoring him, Bush exalts the whole legacy.

For Nixon, Colson operated a black-ops program, willing to resort to any means—even planning a bombing and a riot—to destroy perceived White House enemies. But after a seven-month stint in prison for obstruction of justice in the federal investigation of the break-in of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, Colson found a new identity through the wonder-working power of Jesus. To many on the right, his sins were forgiven. He is now, in the words of columnist Peggy Noonan, “one of the heroes of Watergate…He paid the price, told the truth, blamed no one but himself, and turned his shame into something helpful.”

At the same time that Bush rewarded Colson’s long march toward rehabilitation, William Ayers sought respectability of his own. On November 17, at Washington, D.C.’s All Souls Unitarian Church, he delivered his first major statement since the campaign began. Before an adoring crowd, many of whom were too young to have heard of him before the right used his past to attack Obama, Ayers unburdened himself. “The big lie that gets perpetrated, that somehow I’ve been violent, that somehow I’ve killed people, is utterly false,” he insisted to raucous applause.

Ayers’ coming-out party was followed with a New York Times op-ed and a round of nationally televised interviews. During his most recent one, on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, Ayers discussed his Weather Underground activities in third person, referring to himself as “this young man…in those extreme conditions.” Matthews played the role of priest granting absolution: “I think you’re a different man than you were in the Weather Underground, and you’ve said so.” Finally, Matthews plugged the newly published paperback edition of Ayers’ Fugitive Days, a 2001 memoir in which Ayers claimed, “Terrorists intimidate, while we only aimed to educate.”

Both Colson and Ayers appeal to America’s unique attraction to personal conversion, confessing airbrushed versions of their stories with varying degrees of repentance (Ayers less so than Colson), then bullying forward to stress their good works. Ayers’ and Colson’s violent extremism inspired each other, just as their current self-recreations reflect similar efforts to distort the past.

No redemption can take place without the fallen sinner first confessing his dirty deeds. “The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices—the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious—as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation,” Ayers recalled in his December 5 New York Times op-ed.

He referred to “an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village,” avoiding mention that the “accident” of March 6, 1970, was a bomb intended to massacre dozens of young Army officers and their wives at a Fort Dix dance. Ayers also neglected to note that one of those “comrades” killed was Diana Oughton, a girlfriend he had just abandoned, according to fellow Underground member Jane Alpert.

A year after that tragic incident, Colson plotted a bombing of his own. Hoping to create a diversion for a team of burglars so they could retrieve classified State Department documents the White House wanted back, Colson proposed firebombing the Brookings Institution, the preeminent Washington think tank. When he revealed the plan to Nixon aide John Caufield, however, Caufield stormed out of his office in a panic. Caufield “came straight to [White House counsel] John Dean,” an anonymous associate of Dean told then-Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, “saying that he did not want to talk to that man Colson again because he is crazy.” Top Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman shut the operation down, fearing that Dean would disclose details of it to the media if it were actually carried out.

Less well known but equally sinister was Colson’s orchestration of violent “hard hat riots.” The riots began on May 8, 1970, four days after National Guard soldiers killed four student demonstrators at Kent State University and four days after a Weather Underground bomb blasted a Chicago monument dedicated policemen who died in the Haymarket Riot. As Ayers and his followers paid explosive homage to the ghosts of cop-fighting workers, Colson organized hard hats to brutalize anti-war demonstrators.

On the steps of New York’s City Hall, a thousand peaceful students gathered to protest the Kent State massacre. In a show of solidarity, liberal Republican Mayor John Lindsay ordered that flags be flown at half-mast. Across the street, a phalanx of 200 burly ironworkers from the AFL-CIO clanged metal pipes against the girders of an unfinished building and chanted, “Lindsay is a queer!” NYPD officers stood aside and watched as the workers savagely attacked the students, chasing them onto the campus of nearby Pace University. There, the hard hats continued their assault, beating dozens of innocent bystanders with metal bludgeons. “I didn’t see Americans in action,” said one ironworker disgusted by the violence of his co-workers. “I saw the black shirts and brown shirts of Hitler’s Germany.”

A White House tape of May 5, 1971, captured the riot’s initial planning phase, revealing Colson’s role. “Chuck is something else,” says Nixon. H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, says, “He’s gotten a lot done that he hasn’t been caught at.” He goes on: “And then they’re going to stir up some of this Vietcong flag business, as Colson’s going to do it through hard hats and legionnaires. What Colson’s going do on that, and what I suggested he do—and I think that they can get away with this—do it with the Teamsters. Just ask them to dig up their eight thugs.” “They’ve got guys who’ll go in and knock their heads off,” Nixon gleefully replies. “Sure,” says Haldeman. “Murderers. Guys that really, you know, that’s what they really do…regular strikebuster-types…and just send them in and beat the shit out of some of these people. And hope they really hurt ‘em, you know what I mean? Go in with some real—smash some noses.”

Two weeks after the White House organized the attack, Colson arranged a ceremony at the White House to honor its field general, Peter Brennan, president of the Building and Construction Trades and later appointed secretary of labor.

At the same time, Ayers went underground. Bouncing from one safe house to the next and pickpocketing unsuspecting rubes for false IDs, he composed a Weather Underground manifesto, Prairie Fire, which declared: “We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years…Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside.” Dedicated to convicted RFK assassin Sirhan Sirhan and “All Who Continue to Fight,” and proclaiming “revolutionary” war, Prairie Fire was released in 1974—toward the end of the Vietnam War that supposedly motivated Ayers’ terrorism.

After resurfacing, Ayers was acquitted of his crimes due to prosecutorial misconduct. While he began a career as a professor of education, financed by his father, Thomas Ayers, chief executive officer of Chicago’s Commonwealth Edison Co. (“My father worked for Edison,” he wrote obliquely in his memoir Fugitive Days), his one-time partner, Kathy Boudin, continued “revolutionary war.” Her quixotic struggle ended when the first African-American member of the Nyack, N.Y., police department was murdered during a Weather Underground robbery of a Brinks armored car in 1981. One Weather Underground member was killed in a subsequent firefight. Boudin, convicted of murder, along with three others, was sentenced to prison. (She was paroled in 2003.) “We killed no one and hurt no one,” Ayers claimed to The New Yorker in one of his first published interviews after the presidential campaign.

Over the years, Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, another Weather Underground leader, remade themselves within the activist circles of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. That is where they met Barack Obama, an ambitious former community organizer possessed with pragmatic instincts and boundless intellectual curiosity. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley used Ayers as an informal adviser, awarding him $50 million in grants to promote education reform (led by members of the wealthy and influential Ayers family). Explaining their relationship, Daley said, “I believe we have too many challenges in Chicago and our country to keep refighting 40-year-old battles.” Ayers’ transformation seemed almost complete.

But, then, while promoting Fugitive Days, Ayers veered off script. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” he told a New York Times reporter for an article published on September 11, 2001. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”

While Ayers was underground, meanwhile, Colson nervously prepared for his trial. In the summer of 1973, with the prosecution preparing its case against him and the press corps circling like sharks, Colson knelt on the floor with his friend Raytheon CEO Tom Phillips. While Colson fought back tears in an embarrassed state of silence, Phillips prayed for his soul. Driving through Washington afterward, Colson suddenly began to cry “tears of release.” “I repeated over and over the words, Take me…” Colson wrote in his best-selling memoir, Born Again. “Something inside me was urging me to surrender.” The sinner was ready to come to Jesus.

After serving seven months in prison, Colson returned to convert the godless criminals he encountered there. In 1976, he founded Prison Fellowship, now a multimillion-dollar organization that operates with public funding in several states and 110 countries. The hundreds of thousands of inmates who have enrolled in Colson’s InnerChange Freedom Initiative—motivated by coercive enticements like extended visits with family members and access to musical instruments and better food—are promised by official program material that they will be transformed “through an instantaneous miracle.”

Named one of the 25 “Most Influential Evangelicals” in 2005 by Time, Colson has used his platform to inflame the culture wars. Colson’s 1995 science fiction novel,Gideon’s Torch, reads like an imaginative right-winger’s crash re-edit of Ayers’Prairie Fire. The book follows a heroic band of Christian guerrillas who must stop the National Institutes of Health from harvesting brain tissue from aborted fetuses to cure AIDS, a plan funded by Hollywood liberals. To do so, they launch a righteous killing spree of abortion doctors, eventually firebombing the NIH—just as Colson hoped to do to the Brookings Institution.

Unsurprisingly, Gideon’s Torch became a recruiting tool for those wishing to realize its fictional narrative. It has been excerpted at length on the website of the Army of God, a radical anti-abortion group responsible for the killing and bombing of abortion providers.

Only moments after Obama’s spectacular victory, Washington pundits immediately adopted the conventional wisdom that “Nixonland,” the polarized country depicted in historian Rick Perlstein’s recent book, had finally been replaced by “Obamaland,” where we all just get along. Even Ayers parroted the trendy theme. “We’ve ended the era of 9/11 and we’ve entered the era of ‘Yes, we can,’” he proclaimed onHardball.

Meanwhile, Colson was fresh from a political victory, as a leader in the movement for Prop 8 in California, banning gay marriage, a battle of “Armageddon,” he said. “We lose this, we are going to lose in a lot of other ways, including freedom of religion.”

Then Colson went to the White House, where President Bush bestowed the Citizens Medal on him. The inscription read: “The United States honors Chuck Colson for his good heart and his compassionate efforts to renew a spirit of purpose in the lives of countless individuals.”

Steve Sailer likes Jews who write Christmas ditties

One of the most confounding characteristics of open anti-Semites is their tendency to deny harboring any malice towards Jews after being confronted with their own anti-Semitic statements. At the 2006 American Renaissance conference, after David Duke delivered a conspiratorial disquisition in the hallway to me about the “Jewish Supremacists,” I asked him if all Jews were involved in an insidious plot to exploit the world. He stated, “Oh no, not all Jews are supremacists. There are good Jews.” Holocaust revisionist David Irving said the same sort of thing to me when I interviewed him, recommending to me the work of Norman Finkelstein, who I doubt would have appreciated this endorsement. And then there was the weird spectacle of Louis Farrakhan, denouncer of the “synagogues of Satan” and one-time mentor to beerhall demagogue Khalid Muhammad, playing a symphony by Mendelson.

In responding to my recent piece on the War on Christmas, Steve Sailer took issue with how my treatment of his theory of Jewish “de-assimilation.” I reported that Sailer had argued matter-of-factly that, “American Jews, those exemplars of successful assimilation now seem to be de-assimilating emotionally, becoming increasingly resentful, at this late date, of their fellow Americans for celebrating Christmas.” My mere quoting of this line was enough to arouse his anger and defensiveness. In his blogged response, Sailer claimed his column was devoted to “praising the large Jewish contribution to the great American Christmas songbook.” Right! Like Duke, Irving, and Farrakhan, Sailer is embarrassed by the depth of his resentment for Jews, and retreats when confronted with it. 

The commenters on Sailer’s blog made no attempts to hide their true feelings, however. The id of Sailer lies below the fold.

Sailer commenter Simon: “‘De-assimilation’ doesn’t seem quite right, but clearly there is something going on with elite Ashkenazi secular Jews in the US, something that we don’t see here in the UK. There is a definite hostility to WASP traditional culture, both elite and popular.”

Sailer commenter Lloyd: “The Jewish liberal intelligentsia in the US is certainly not “de-assimilating” — i.e.: retreating into its ghettos. Rather it is attempting to de-assemble the cultural underpinnings of Christian European American culture.”

Sailer commenter Anonymous: Speaking of Jews in the media business, it was reported that the candidates to take over Meet the Press on NBC included David Gregory (Jewish); Chuck Todd (Jewish); Ted Koppel (Jewish); Andrea Mitchell (Jewish and aka Mrs. Alan Greenspan);Katie Couric (half-Jewish Episcopalian) and Gwen Ifill (not Jewish black female). 

So, the only fully non-Jewish person rumored to be even considered for the MTP moderator job was the African-American female Gwen Ifill. That’s diversity for you.

Sailer commenter Anonymous: Sue him. Force is the only thing these people grok.