In the wake of the San Bernardino attack, politicians reverted to to form.  Republicans prayed for the victims, and Democrats called for more gun laws.  No surprise there, but some straight talk about guns is in order.  The Republican calls for prayer prompted the New York Daily News headline, “God Isn’t Fixing This.”  The implication is that Obama and his band of loony lefties have a fix that Republicans are resisting.  They don’t.  The Democrat default position is “we need new gun laws.”  We don’t.  I happen to know something about this problem.  For 25 years, I was a Prosecutor in New Jersey, a State which has some of the toughest gun laws in the country.  We have a mandatory 3 year prison sentence for carrying a gun without a permit.  We have a rigorous review process for carry permits. We prohibit ownership of a wide range of weapons, including assault weapons and large capacity magazines. We impose severe mandatory prison sentences on previously convicted persons who possess a gun.  We impound guns owned by anyone involved in a domestic violence complaint.  We also have no shortage of gun violence in New Jersey.  Here’s a bulletin – People who do violence with guns are criminals, and criminals, by definition, are people who do not obey the law.  Passing one more gun law won’t make the public any safer.  I’ll give you a case in point.  I once supervised a county narcotics taskforce in Essex County.  Although automatic weapons have been against the law in America since 1934, I can assure you that there are more machine guns on the streets of our big cities today than Al Capone ever dreamed of, and these are wholly illegal weapons.

The notion that some new law will magically take guns out of the hands of criminals or the deranged is simply a fantasy.  For good or ill, there are almost as many privately owned guns in America as people.   So, even if the Second Amendment didn’t exist, it’s too late for gun control, what we need is nut control, or in this case, terrorist control.  The San Bernardino shooters wore military gear and carried rifles and handguns when they killed 14 people.  Back at home, they had 5,000 rounds of ammunition, 12 pipe bombs, and materials to make more bombs.   Shooter Farook’s Pakistani wife, Malik, underwent and passed a Department of Homeland Security counter-terrorism screening before being admitted to the U.S.  Presumably, this is the “robust vetting process” that Obama says the Syrian refugees will undergo.  As I write this, we are told that shortly before the attack, Ms. Malik pledged her allegiance to the ISIS leader.  This news, the bombs, and the arsenal have prompted even Il Duce Obama to grudgingly muse that the California attack was “possibly terrorist related” rather than merely workplace violence.  You think?

Yet, the President tells us that the villain here was not the “possible terrorists” but the guns that they bought legally.  The media delights in reporting that the shooters had military-type assault rifles.  They neither know nor care what that means.  It sounds scary, so that’s good enough.  Traditionally, an “assault rifle” was one which was capable of automatic fire   (a machine gun),  or selective fire (a 3 round burst).  These weapons have been illegal since 1934.  The rifles in California were semi-automatic (one bullet with each trigger pull).  California already outlaws “assault rifles” and prohibits magazines of more than 10 rounds.  The shooters carried multiple magazines.  So much for that law.  Do away with all semi-automatic weapons?  That’s not a solution either.  JFK was assassinated with a bolt-action rifle.  Military-type weapons?  That term has no legal significance. The Marine Corps assaulted Guadalcanal (and a number of other islands) armed principally with bolt-action 1903 Springfield rifles.  In short, there is no magic fix for the problem of gun violence.  Passing a new “feel good” law would be a cruel joke on a justifiably frightened public.  And Mr. President, you can’t protect the public from criminals by disarming the law-abiding.

The nation’s universities were once centers for the exchange of diverse ideas and information, where all points of view could be discussed and evaluated.  Not anymore.  Generations of academic inbreeding have created a system in which college faculties are composed almost exclusively of Leftists who indoctrinate the students to accept only one point of view – the view of the  Left.  Any who dare to depart from the orthodox view must be denounced and expelled.  The colleges were content with this system when their acolytes focused their attacks on Conservatives.  However, the students that these schools have imbued with a false sense of empowerment, have now begun to eat their own.  The colleges didn’t object when students forced cancellations of planned speeches by Conservatives.  When students rose up and demanded the firings of professors and administrators in Missouri and California, the schools capitulated.  Now it’s gotten interesting.  At Yale, students are demanding that the name of the Calhoun School be changed.  You see, John Calhoun was a slave owner.  It’s only a matter of time before students at Washington & Lee figure out that the “Lee” is Robert E. Lee, the ranking Confederate General.  But it’s worse than that.  The censorship fever has now reached Princeton University.  Students at Princeton are demanding that the name of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs be changed, because it has come to their attention that Wilson was a notorious racist.  And so he was.  The federal government was desegregated during Reconstruction.  Wilson re-segregated it within three weeks of his March 20, 1913 inauguration.  When the IRS in Georgia fired every black employee, a group of black professionals appealed to Wilson.  Wilson was annoyed by their “tone,” and he refused to help, explaining that segregation was a positive thing because it avoided “race friction.”  That was not surprising, because Wilson’s History of the American People voiced sympathy for the KKK, which Wilson explained was necessary for the self-protection of white men.  Woodrow Wilson’s racism wasn’t limited to American minorities, either.  In negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, Wilson unilaterally killed a proposal that would have had the Treaty recognize racial equality.

All this sounds pretty bad, and if it was anyone other than Woodrow Wilson, he’d be a goner.  But Princeton has a problem.  Woodrow Wilson was not only a Princeton graduate, a President of Princeton, Governor of New Jersey and President of the United States, but he has been the pride of Princeton, canonized as a Progressive saint.  And that’s the problem.  Wilson has been called the Godfather of liberalism, the poster boy for the Progressive cause.  Wilson created the Federal Reserve, he gave us the income tax, and he nurtured the administrative state, the nameless, faceless bureaucracy which permeates every aspect of society, and which never goes away, no matter who is elected.  As an academic and as a President, Wilson had no use for federalism and the Constitution’s separation of powers.  He considered the God-given rights of the Declaration of Independence to be “an outmoded set of beliefs from an earlier, irrelevant era.”  Woodrow Wilson exalted the State over the individual.  Simply put, he was a fascist, before that term came into general use.  You doubt me?  Wilson shut down newspapers and magazines that published anything critical of the government.  He jailed reporters, and indeed, anyone who voiced objection.  His Attorney General conducted raids which jailed thousands without regard to First and Fourth Amendment protections.

Fascism, you see, is part and parcel of the Progressive, liberal, left-wing, whatever name you want to give the wild-eyed fanatics who now control the Presidency.  To those who doubt this fact, I commend Jonah Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism.  Goldberg defines fascism as a religion of the State, where government controls every aspect of society, and where everyone is “taken care of,” whether they like it or not.  Sound familiar?  The liberal fascist believes that the federal government should be allowed to get away with anything, so long as it’s for good reasons.  Sound familiar?  “If Congress won’t act, I have a pen and a phone.”  And therein lies Princeton’s problem, because the current President, Il Duce Obama, is as dedicated a liberal fascist as was Woodrow Wilson.  Obama, like Wilson, seeks to subordinate individual rights to the goals of the collective.  If you doubt me, just listen to him (if you can stand it).  Obama rails against the evil, rich 1%.  He denounces Big (insert the name of any industry).  He has seized control of ever greater portions of the economy through Dodd-Frank, and in the name of health care and the environment.  Jonah Goldberg was criticized for pointing out that the Nazis and the Italian fascists grew out of the Progressive movement.  He was indisputably right, and he wasn’t arguing that today’s Progressives are the same as Nazis.  Instead, he quoted George Carlin, who said, “When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts.  It will not be in jackboots.  It will be in Nike sneakers and smiley shirts.”  This sounds just like the attire of the college activists who are so intent on rooting out all non-Progressive beliefs.  So you see, the Progressives are now eating their own.  Bon appetit.

When he ran for President in 2008, some of us suggested that Barack Obama lacked the experience to be the Chief Executive of the United States and Commander in Chief of our armed forces.  After all, when you’ve written two autobiographies before you’ve had your first real job, red flags tend to go up.  It didn’t matter.  Hope and change, right?  And so it came to pass that a man devoid of any economic experience, foreign policy experience, indeed, any real-world experience, became our 44th President.  As bad as that was, Obama could have functioned, had he put experienced advisers around him and followed their advice.  He didn’t.  Instead, he exhibited extreme levels of ignorance and arrogance, concluding that he and he alone knows best.

In domestic policy, that didn’t matter much.  As a Marxist, Obama had a ready-made plan to follow.  However, in the field of foreign policy, Obama’s     delusions of adequacy have led him to be so reckless as to refuse to read his daily intelligence briefings.  Obama was involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he had no intention of fighting either one.  Former Defense Secretary Gates has said that Obama’s policy was all about getting out.  A retired General has said that Obama never accepted the advice of the military on the troop levels required.  He never gave the military the number of troops they told him were necessary.  You see, Obama knew better.  And what he knew was that the military is the problem.  A strong military is likely to be used, so as a man of peace, Obama set out to reduce the size and power of the military.  If the military isn’t strong enough to get the job done, then a military solution is off the table.  He wants peace, you see.

Obama decided America would “lead from behind” in the Middle East.  He pulled out of Iraq.  He announced plans to pull out of Afghanistan.  He drew a “red line” in Syria, and when the line was breached, he never mentioned it again.  He let terrorists in Libya kill our Ambassador and three other people without lifting a finger to try to help them, and then lied about it.  He agreed to a plan to allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons, while at the same time giving Iran $150 billion in frozen assets to fund the development.  He traded five high-level Islamic terrorists for a soldier who has been charged with desertion.   He has released other terrorists from Guantanamo, and now he’s planning to close that prison altogether.  His policy, or lack thereof, helped ISIS to get started and to expand.  We have seen mass beheadings and people burned alive by ISIS.  Then, on Friday morning last, in the wake of the ISIS bombings of a Russian airliner and the killing of 43 people in Beirut, Obama announced that ISIS had been contained.  Almost as if on cue, that same day ISIS terrorists in Paris attacked six locations simultaneously, killing 132 and wounding hundreds more.  This, Obama tells us, was “a setback.”  Some of the Paris terrorists had been admitted into the EU as refugees from Syria.  Indeed, ISIS has announced its intention to imbed terrorists among genuine refugees.  Yet Obama has derided, and says he will veto, any attempt to stop or delay the admission of thousands of Syrians to the U.S. as “un-American.”  This, Obama tells us, “is not who we are.”

Well, I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of Americans have no confusion about “who we are.”  The pertinent question, I submit is, “Who is Obama?”  Sure, he wants peace, but on what terms?  The policy of “peace through strength” has sustained leaders from the Roman Emperor Hadrian to Ronald Reagan.  Obama’s policy is “peace through weakness.”  What else can you call it?  When the French and the Pope are more bellicose than you are, then you are weak.  Obama prefers surrender to conflict.  When you surrender, you get peace, but often, it is the peace of the grave.  And through it all, Obama lectures us that our greatest threat is climate change.  He may have a point.  When the Iranian nukes start landing on their targets, the climate will decidedly change, and global warming finally will be a proven fact.

To wrap this up, we are faced with two and only two possibilities.  Barack Obama either is a delusional neophyte whose policy of deliberate weakness has endangered free people all over the world, or he is actively working for the other side, purposely participating in the establishment of a worldwide Islamic Caliphate.  So I put it to you – Barack Obama:  weakling or quisling?  Either way we’re in a lot of trouble.

The recent discord on college campuses has been motivated, we are told, by racial insensitivity.  Apparently, minority students don’t feel welcomed enough, and are easily upset and offended.  The curriculum offends them, comments from the faculty offend them, comments from other students offend them, conduct by other students offends them, even Halloween costumes.  Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Council sent an email to students warning against the wearing of any costume that might offend.  Let me pause here.  If racial insensitivity was rampant at Yale, would there even be an Intercultural Affairs Council?  Anyway, back to topic.  A faculty member dared to suggest that it might be acceptable to tolerate a costume that could be considered obnoxious or inappropriate on Halloween.  Helen Keller told us that “the highest result of education is tolerance.”  However, at Yale, the faculty member was run out of his job by screaming students.  Take that, tolerance.  Yale University boasts that its mission is to “train the next generation of world leaders.”  This does not bode well for the world.

So what’s really going on on campus that is causing all this discord?  My theory is that what the minority students are experiencing is equality, and they don’t like it.  Aristotle taught that, “equality consists in the same treatment of similar persons.” That seems logical, but it also stands to reason that, if you’re equal, that means you’re just like everyone else, and if you’re just like everyone else, that means you’re not special.  If you’re not getting special treatment, then you’re being slighted, or in the common vernacular, “dissed,” so you have a right to be angry.  The fact that these students may reach such a conclusion is not their fault.  Colleges have gone to great lengths to insulate minority students, and thus all college students, from the real world.  There is no doubt that racism and intolerance exist.  Clearly, the schools have a duty to ensure that no student is mistreated, but where is the boundary?  For instance, at the University of Missouri, some yahoo in a pickup truck yelled racial slurs at the African-American Student Body President.  That is unacceptable and can’t be tolerated; swift discipline should be meted out.  But how does that relate to students who demand that a teacher be fired because they somehow were made to feel “uncomfortable”?  Place the blame right where it belongs, on the universities.  On college campuses which once were centers for the free exchange of ideas and opinions, they have instituted speech codes and conduct codes which inhibit all but the mindless parroting  of that which is considered “politically correct.”  This PC culture (and I’ve always thought PC stood for “political cowardice”)  stems from faculties which are almost uniformly made up of Leftists who preach liberalism and tolerate no opinions other than their own.  A wise man (Bob Grant) once said, “there is nothing less liberal than a liberal.”  How true.  It’s ironic that these left wing ideologues, who spent their youth railing against “fascism” and chanting “challenge authority,” have created a culture in which all must fear the thought police and careers may hang on the most innocuous of comments.  For you see, now that the inmates are running the asylum, only one view is tolerated, and orthodoxy cannot be challenged.  So much for diversity.

So, back to equality.  Students, if equality means equal treatment, then welcome to the real world, welcome to my world.  It’s a world where everybody in authority is not a Marxist, and some people actually may disagree with you.  You are not special here.  The business world doesn’t run on slogans and platitudes, it runs on profits, and get this, some bosses have a habit of being very demanding and unpleasant, and it’s not because of racial insensitivity.  They’re demanding because they want the job done their way, and on time.  Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers said that Vince Lombardi always treated everyone equally – like dogs.  That’s a world for which these students are ill equipped because they have been handled with kid gloves for far too long.  In grade school they were indoctrinated to value self-esteem over self-control.  In college, they were issued rose-colored glasses by red-diaper professors whose ideas of equality would frighten Mao himself.  The colleges have convinced these kids that they are victims, still suffering the badges and incidences of slavery, which the 13th Amendment was designed to remove.  It’s no wonder they have created a generation which recoils at any unkind word.  The colleges  made them exactly what they are, “for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” GALATIANS 6: 7-9.  Oops, sorry about the Bible verse students.  Wait a minute, what you mean by “man?”  Isn’t that sexist?  And if those farmers are going to sow and reap, they better be making at least $15 an hour.  

In the interest of fairness, and they claim to be all about fairness, it is high time that the Democrat Party changes its name.  By definition, a democrat is one who embraces democracy.  Democracy envisions a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised through the electoral system.  In short, a representative democracy.  That is what the Constitution was supposed to guarantee us.  Sadly, Democrats have as little regard for the Constitution as they do for election results.  Sure, they like to say that elections count, but notice that they only say that after an election they have won.  Case in point, they said that after 2008, but in 2010 and 2014, not so much.  The dirty little secret is that Democrats will tolerate the electoral system when it benefits them, and will ignore it when it does not.  The democratic system gave us a Republican Congress, but that isn’t an impediment to Il Duce Obama.  If the Congress won’t give him what he wants, he’ll just do it himself.  Democracy be damned.  This truth was in evidence again this week, after an off-year election that largely went against Democrats and liberals.  In Houston Texas, a ballot initiative which would have permitted those who considered themselves to be “trans-gendering” to use the public restroom of their choice was voted down 61% to 39%.  Remember, this is the City of Houston, which gave a majority of its votes to Obama in 2012.  Had this measure passed, I’m sure its proponents would have told us that elections have consequences.  But the people spoke and they lost, so what did they do?  They have started a petition to have the NFL move the 2017 Superbowl out of Houston.  Democracy is just not good enough, you see.  This is nothing new.  Majority rule is a thing of the past in America.  Don’t get me wrong.  Minorities deserve nothing less than the full protection of the law.  However, the trend seems to be to bore down to ever more elusive minorities.  Simply put, at what point is the minority so small that its accommodation is an injustice to the majority?  To Democrats, there is no minority so small that it doesn’t justify the discomfort of the vast majority.  While that may be a noble sentiment, it makes no sense.  Nobody really knows how many trans-gender people there are.  You will find an estimate of 0.3% of the population.  But even the word “estimate” gives this figure too much credit.  They arrived at 0.3% by taking a Massachusetts poll result of 0.5% and a California poll result of 0.1%, and by a process described by an LGBT demographer as “statistical gymnastics,” settling on 0.3%.  I was never much good at math, but that just doesn’t add up.  No matter.  The real question is whether fundamental fairness should permit 0.3% of the population to be accommodated in the face of the opposition and discomfort of the remaining 99.7%?  But I digress.  Back to the point of this exercise, if Democrats don’t respect the voice of the people when they lose an election, then they should not call themselves Democrats.  Several other names come to mind.  The Dictator Party, The Mastermind Party, no, not catchy enough.  Let’s see, Democrats only pretend to believe in democracy.  I’ve got it.  The Great Pretender Party.  Maybe they can get the Platters to do the theme song.  They don’t even have to change the lyrics much, “Our need is such, we pretend too much.  We’re phonies, but no one can tell.”  To quote Il Duce, “yes we can.”