Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Obama Sinks Israel



By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, November 27, 2013

This week, President Barack Obama doomed Israel to a choice between unpalatable options: either striking at Iran's nuclear facilities in its own defense and thereby internationally isolating itself, or watching as its most ardent enemy goes nuclear. The deal, put into place with Iran by the Obama administration, allows Iran to continue developing nuclear-enrichment processes, encompasses virtually no real monitoring standards and grants cash to a regime busily preparing for a second Holocaust.

Obama made the conscious decision to shove Israel into this corner for two reasons. First, because he is an egotist determined to divert attention from his domestic political woes. Second, because he is a hard-core, anti-Israel fanatic who believes that Israeli power represents the chief threat to peace in the Middle East.

The first rationale explains Obama's timing. After years of flirting with Iran -- a flirtation dating all the way back to his presidential campaign of 2008, during which he said he would engage in direct negotiations with the Islamic theocracy without preconditions - Obama culminated the burgeoning relationship with a rammed-through deal leaving Iran in control of its own nuclear destiny. Why the sudden rush? With his poll numbers dropping precipitously and his signature program, Obamacare, dragging down his presidency, Obama needed a big win.

The media duly delivered this to Obama by proclaiming his diplomatic blunder an enormous victory. Ignoring the fact that Obama tacitly gave Iran the right to nuclear development in contravention of all United Nations' resolutions and the best interests of the United States, The New York Times proclaimed, "No one can seriously argue that it doesn't make the world safer." The newspaper also called Israel's dismay at the deal "extremist" and "theater," and even admitted that the Iran deal acted as a "welcome change of subject" for Obama.

The Obama administration, meanwhile, rapidly erected a series of straw men designed to make the president look like a tower of strength rather than the appeaser he is. Secretary of State John Kerry immediately stated that those who opposed the deal thought war should be the "first option" -- an odd proclamation, given Israel's repeated desire to delay action. Obama himself said that the time for "tough talk and bluster" was over -- as though harsh sanctions backed by the threat of force were a bluff. (Which, apparently, they were.)

Though none of this explains why Obama wanted to make a deal in the first place. Yes, it was a convenient distraction -- but the president of the United States can always find a way to shift the political narrative.

The truth is that the president despises Israel and always has. He has spent his entire adult life surrounded by Israel-haters, from Professor Derrick Bell to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, from former Palestine Liberation Organization spokesman Rashid Khalidi to Jimmy Carter's former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. His current ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, has suggested that the United States ought to place troops on Israeli ground to protect Palestinians from those brutal Jews.

Obama's administration has repeatedly leaked Israeli national security information in order to stop Israel from striking Iran, and Obama himself forced Netanyahu to apologize to the government of Turkey for stopping its flotilla, directed toward helping the terrorist group Hamas, in the Gaza Strip. The Obama administration sees Israel building homes in its capital city of Jerusalem as more of a threat to peace than Iran building nukes.

Obama's political philosophy dictates that Israel is a colonialist outpost offending the locals -- an unfortunate hangover from the Holocaust instead of a historic Jewish dream and possession. Obama's belief system suggests that Middle Eastern conflict springs not from religious and cultural differences but from Jewish intransigence. So Israel must be stopped. And if that means arming Iran, Obama is happy to do it. If he can while simultaneously winning himself a second Nobel Peace Prize and distracting people from his failed domestic tenure, so much the better.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

The American Idol Electorate



By  Charles C. W. Cooke
Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Contrary to the impression that he has so assiduously worked to cultivate, Barack Obama is not a king of either the divine-right or impotent-figurehead variety, but instead the president of a republic. Having grown up in a country that still boasts the last vestiges of a once-potent monarchy, I am reasonably familiar with the role that incumbent sovereigns play in the world’s most popular constitutional arrangement, and aware too of what it takes for a modern potentate to be regarded as a success. In modern Britain, the Queen’s likeability and personality help her no end, whereas her political talent and her personal views do not. In the United States system, likeability is certainly important. But, as they cannot bypass that tricky rise-to-power bit and achieve office simply by being born, aspiring Americans must have other talents if they wish to stay in office.

At least until now, for, in recent years, the public has exhibited instincts that are more often on display in the world’s constitutional monarchies than in America’s radical system. Were he contactable, Dr. Franklin would certainly be pleased to know that, 214 years after the system was grafted onto the messy American Revolution, the United States is still a republic. But he would presumably be less cheered to learn that the electorate currently appears to value the head of state’s ceremonial qualities much more than it does his political skills. The results of polls both recent and distant make difficult reading for the enthusiastic radical, alas.

A CNN/ORC survey conducted between November 18 and November 20 reveals that the American people do not think that Obama is capable of doing his job, nor do they really trust him to try. Less than half of Americans (40 percent) think President Obama can manage the government effectively, the poll shows, while 53 percent said that the phrase “honest and trustworthy” “does not apply” to the president. Meanwhile, 56 percent of the public say that he does not inspire confidence, the very same percentage has noticed that the president does not agree with them on issues that are important to them, and only 44 percent profess to “admire” him. His approval ratings, meanwhile, are hovering around the 40 percent mark — and moving in the wrong direction to boot.

But here’s the kicker: Americans are still fond of him anyway. Seven in ten Americans affirmed in this same poll that they like Barack Obama personally, and slightly more than half agreed with the statement that he “cares about people like you.” We thus seem to be living in a country in which a majority of the people deem the president incapable of managing the government that it is his job to manage; think him untrustworthy; suppose that he doesn’t inspire confidence or admiration; and know full well that he doesn’t agree with them on political issues — and yet still like him quite a lot.

Now, competence and likeability are by no means synonymous virtues, and it is the people’s sacred prerogative to distinguish between traits in any way they wish. Indeed, I feel similarly split about, say, the actor Zach Galifianakis. I do not think that Galifianakis would be especially capable of managing the executive branch of a sprawling federal government, and I’d hesitate before trusting him with my belongings, and yet I have a generally warm feeling toward him. But it all becomes a bit trickier when the person in the scenario is the most powerful man in the world and not merely a figurehead or one-off talent. Popularity contests are all well and good. Until you hold one for the position of commander-in-chief.

Second-term blues being what they are, it is perhaps a touch unfair to turn the screws on Obama simply for falling out of favor with the public. After all, most presidents do. But a quick review of the exit polls from 2012 reveals that Americans felt broadly the same last year when they had the chance to pick a new guy. In November 2012, a majority trusted Obama less than his opponent on the debt, on defense, on taxes, on the economy in general, and on health care. The majority also considered the United States to be “on the wrong track.”

Yet Obama won. Why? Well, largely because Americans liked him more — a lot more. Never mind that people preferred Romney’s political positions; he wasn’t as appealing, nor was he believed to “care” enough about the people. Personally, I find the unavoidably subjective “cares about me” question positively emetic. I can just about accept the public’s contradictory assessments of Bill Clinton, who in 1998 was simultaneously deemed highly competent (75 percent) but deeply dishonest (75 percent). But this? This is more insidious.

Almost certainly, the Obama phenomenon is the product of a recent trend in which the electorate has based its decision on the depressingly aesthetic question of “What sort of American do I want to head up the country?” — or worse, “have a beer with?” — and not on any particular policy or plan. This isn’t a partisan problem but a structural one — if the next Republican is particularly winsome, it is feasible that he could benefit from exactly the same process. But whatever its causes, it’s dangerous. In a country with a small government, picking people because you like them wouldn’t matter so much, but when the government is out of control, it matters an awful lot when the guy you agree with politically is not the guy you like as a person and whom you vote for.

“The American head of state grew up with a mother on food stamps,” the disgraced British writer and fantasist Johann Hari once quipped, whereas “the British head of state grew up with a mother on postage stamps.” Those of us who would like to see the presidency returned to its more modest roots know deep down that our hopes are futile, but this distinction has long been an important one. One can certainly lament that Obama’s tendency to behave like an emperor while affecting to be a bewildered outsider has moved the presidency in an increasingly imperial direction. But, in a republic, it’s the people who are the ultimate check and architect, and if they are hard at work changing the game as well, then who can blame the man on the throne?

The Front Man



By  Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, November 24, 2013

Conservatives have for years attempted to put our finger upon precisely why Barack Obama strikes us as queer in precisely the way he does. There is an alienness about him, which in the fever swamps is expressed in all that ridiculous Kenyan-Muslim hokum, but his citizen-of-the-world shtick is strictly sophomore year — the great globalist does not even speak a foreign language. Obama has been called many things — radical, socialist — labels that may have him dead to rights at the phylum level but not down at his genus or species. His social circle includes an alarming number of authentic radicals, but the president’s politics are utterly conventional managerial liberalism. His manner is aloof, but he is too plainly a child of the middle class to succumb to the regal pretensions that the Kennedys suffered from, even if his household entourage does resemble the Ringling Bros. Circus as reimagined by Imelda Marcos when it moves about from Kailua Beach to Blue Heron Farm. Not a dictator under the red flag, not a would-be king, President Obama is nonetheless something new to the American experience, and troubling.

It is not simply the content of his political agenda, which, though wretched, is a good deal less ambitious than was Woodrow Wilson’s or Richard Nixon’s. Barack Obama did not invent managerial liberalism, nor has he contributed any new ideas to it. He is, in fact, a strangely incurious man. Unlike Ronald Reagan, to whom he likes to be compared, President Obama shows no signs of having expended any effort on big thinkers or big ideas. President Reagan’s guiding lights were theorists such as F. A. Hayek and Thomas Paine; Obama’s most important influences have been tacticians such as Abner Mikva, bush-league propagandists like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and his beloved community organizers. Far from being the intellectual hostage of far-left ideologues, President Obama does not appear to have the intellectual energy even to digest their ideas, much less to implement them. This is not to say that he is an unintelligent man. He is a man with a first-class education and a business-class mind, a sort of inverse autodidact whose intellectual pedigree is an order of magnitude more impressive than his intellect.

The result of this is his utterly predictable approach to domestic politics: appoint a panel of credentialed experts. His faith in the powers of pedigreed professionals is apparently absolute. Consider his hallmark achievement, the Affordable Care Act, the centerpiece of which is the appointment of a committee, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), the mission of which is to achieve targeted savings in Medicare without reducing the scope or quality of care. How that is to be achieved was contemplated in detail neither by the lawmakers who wrote the health-care bill nor by the president himself. But they did pay a great deal of attention to the processes touching IPAB: For example, if that committee of experts fails to achieve the demanded savings, then the ball is passed to . . . a new committee of experts, this one under the guidance of the secretary of health and human services. IPAB’s powers are nearly plenipotentiary: Its proposals, like a presidential veto, require a supermajority of Congress to be overridden. The president likes supermajorities, except when he doesn’t — the filibuster was not a sacred institution, but it did give the Senate an important lever for offsetting executive overreach. The House is designed to be an engine, the Senate a brake. Harry Reid has just helped take the brakes off of President Obama’s lawless agenda, for the purpose of installing friendly judges who will look the other way when his agenda is put to the legal test.

IPAB is the most dramatic example of President Obama’s approach to government by expert decree, but much of the rest of his domestic program, from the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law to his economic agenda, is substantially similar. In total, it amounts to that fundamental transformation of American society that President Obama promised as a candidate: but instead of the new birth of hope and change, it is the transformation of a constitutional republic operating under laws passed by democratically accountable legislators into a servile nation under the management of an unaccountable administrative state. The real import of Barack Obama’s political career will be felt long after he leaves office, in the form of a permanently expanded state that is more assertive of its own interests and more ruthless in punishing its enemies. At times, he has advanced this project abetted by congressional Democrats, as with the health-care law’s investiture of extraordinary powers in the executive bureaucracy, but he also has advanced it without legislative assistance — and, more troubling still, in plain violation of the law. President Obama and his admirers choose to call this “pragmatism,” but what it is is a mild expression of totalitarianism, under which the interests of the country are conflated with those of the president’s administration and his party. Barack Obama is the first president of the democracy that John Adams warned us about.

“Democracy never lasts long,” Adams famously said. “It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” For liberal regimes, a very common starting point on the road to serfdom is the over-delegation of legislative powers to the executive. France very nearly ended up in a permanent dictatorship as a result of that error, and was spared that fate mostly by good luck and Charles de Gaulle’s patriotism. Long before she declared her infamous state of emergency, Indira Gandhi had been centralizing power in the prime minister’s office, and India was spared a permanent dictatorship only by her political miscalculation and her dynasty-minded son’s having gotten himself killed in a plane wreck. Salazar in Portugal, Austria under Dollfuss, similar stories. But the United States is not going to fall for a strongman government. Instead of delegating power to a would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a bureaucracy-without-death. You do not need to install a dictator when you’ve already had a politically supercharged permanent bureaucracy in place for 40 years or more. As is made clear by everything from campaign donations to the IRS jihad, the bureaucracy is the Left, and the Left is the bureaucracy. Elections will be held, politicians will come and go, but if you expand the power of the bureaucracy, you expand the power of the Left, of the managers and minions who share Barack Obama’s view of the world. Barack Obama isn’t the leader of the free world; he’s the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics.

In an important sense, the American people have no political say in the health-care law, for example, because Congress did not pass a law reforming the health-care system; instead, Congress passed a law empowering the Obama administration, through its political appointees and unelected time-servers, to create a new national health-care regime. The general outline of the program is there in the law, but the nuts and bolts of the thing will be created on the fly by President Obama and his many panels of experts. There are several problems with that model of business, one of which is that President Obama, and more than a few of his beloved experts, have political interests. The partisans of pragmatism present themselves as disinterested servants of the public weal, simply collecting the best information and the best advice from the top experts and putting that into practice. Their only political interest, they would have us believe, is in helping the public understand what a great job is being done for them. Consider President Obama’s observation that his worst mistake in his first term was “thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right . . . .The nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.” (It never seems to have entered into the president’s head that he might have got the policy wrong.) But of course there is a good deal more to politics than that. For example, the president would very much like the unemployment problem to be somewhat abated by the time of the 2014 congressional elections, but he knows that this is unlikely to happen with employers struggling under an expensive health-care mandate that he has not told enough of a story about. And so he has decided — empowered to do so by precisely nothing — that the law will not be enforced until after the elections. Neither does the law empower him arbitrarily to exempt millions of his donors and allies in organized labor from the law, but he has done that too.

This is a remarkable thing. The health-care law gives the executive all sorts of powers to promulgate regulations and make judgments, but it does not give the executive the power to decide which aspects of the law will be enforced and which will not, or to establish a different timeline from the one found in the law itself. For all of the power that Congress legally has given the president in this matter, he feels it necessary to take more — illegally. There is no obvious and persuasive legal rationale for the belief that the president can willy-nilly suspend portions of the law or delay their execution. There is still less reason to believe that the president has the unilateral authority to overturn the law’s fundamental requirements, including the requirement that all health-care plans on offer meet certain federal regulations. Honoring the law meant breaking a key promise — “If you like it, you can keep it” — which the president and his advisers knew all along would be the case. What they did not know was how unpopular breaking that promise would prove to be, and so the final breaking of it has been put off, along with the enrollment deadline, until after the midterm elections. The administration is transparently violating the letter of the law to see after its own political interests. That is an intolerable state of affairs.

The president and his admirers dismiss concern over this as so much chum for the talk-radio ravers, but it is no such thing. The job of the president is to execute the law — that is what the executive branch is there to do. If Barack Obama had wanted to keep pursuing his career as a lawmaker, then the people of Illinois probably would have been content to preserve him in the Senate for half a century or so. As president, he has no more power to decide not to enforce the provisions of a duly enacted federal law than does John Boehner, Anthony Weiner, or Whoopi Goldberg. And unlike them, he has a constitutional duty to enforce the law. Representative Tom Cotton says that the president’s health-care delay makes a deal on immigration less likely — if the president can simply decline to enforce the provisions of a law he fought for, why trust him to enforce provisions of a law he is accepting only as a compromise? Representative Cotton must also of course have in mind the fact that after Congress had unequivocally rejected another piece of immigration reform, the so-called DREAM Act, that the president had supported, he simply instituted it unilaterally, as though he had the authority to declare an amnesty himself. He then did away with criminal-background checks for those to be amnestied, also on his own authority. Strangely, the order to halt background checks came down on November 9, 2012, the same day that John Boehner said Republicans would seek a compromise on immigration reform.

In a similar vein, President Obama refused to cut off foreign-aid funds to the Egyptian government, though he is required by law to do so in the event of a coup d’état, which is precisely what happened in July in Egypt. It might be embarrassing for the president to punish the Egyptian military and the grand mufti of al-Azhar for their overthrow of the unpopular Mohamed Morsi, but the law does not make exceptions for presidential embarrassment. The president is not legally empowered to assassinate American citizens, but he has done so, after going through the charade of drawing up a legal argument under which he judged himself entitled to do what the Constitution plainly prohibits. The law also prohibits the president and his allies from using the instruments of government to persecute their rivals, but that is precisely what the IRS has been up to for several years, as it turns out. And not just the IRS: Tea-party activist Catherine Engelbrecht was subject to an IRS audit, two FBI visits, an OSHA investigation, and an ATF inspection of her business (which does not deal in A, T, or F). And although the IRS has no statutory power to collect Affordable Care Act–related fines in states that have not voluntarily set up health-care exchanges, Obama’s managers there have announced that they will do so anyway.

The president not only ignores the law but in some cases goes out of his way to subvert it. The U.S. military carried out the killing of Osama bin Laden, but the records of that event have been removed from military custody, where they are subject to inquiries under the Freedom of Information Act, and moved to the CIA, where they can be kept in secrecy. He has attempted to make “recess appointments” when Congress is not in recess and has been stopped from doing so by the federal courts, which rightly identified the maneuver as patently unconstitutional.

There exists a federal law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which restricts the federal government’s power to force Americans to violate their consciences. The Obama administration is forcing an abortifacient mandate upon practically all U.S. employers, in violation of that law. Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, who is responsible for drafting those regulations, received a number of letters from lawmakers arguing that the mandate she was contemplating violated the law; she proceeded anyway — without so much as getting an opinion from her departmental lawyer.

Congress’s supine ceding of its powers, and the Obama administration’s usurpation of both legal and extralegal powers, is worrisome. But what is particularly disturbing is the quiet, polite, workaday manner with which the administration goes about its business — and with which the American public accepts it. As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.” Barack Obama makes a virtue out of that caprice, having articulated for his judicial nominees not a legal standard but a political standard requiring sympathy for politically favored groups: African-American, gay, disabled, old, in his words.

We have to some extent been here before. It is a testament to the success of free-market ideas that it is impossible to imagine President Obama making the announcement that President Richard Nixon did on August 15, 1971: “I am today ordering a freeze on all prices and wages throughout the United States.” President Nixon created not one but two IPABs, the Pay Board and the Price Commission, which were to be entrusted with managing the day-to-day operations of the U.S. economy. President Nixon, too, was empowered by a Congress that invested him with that remarkable authority, through the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970, whose provisions were to be invoked during times of economic emergency. There was no economic emergency in 1971, but it is a nearly iron-clad rule of the presidency that powers vested will be powers used. That President Obama has adopted President Nixon’s approach but limited himself to health care might be considered progress if he had not adopted as a general principle one of Nixon’s unfortunate maxims: When the president does it, it isn’t illegal. President Nixon’s lawlessness was sneaky, and he had the decency to be ashamed of it. President Obama’s lawlessness is as bland and bloodless as the man himself, and practiced openly, as though it were a virtue. President Nixon privately kept an enemies list; President Obama publicly promises that “we’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends.”

Barack Obama’s administration is unmoored from the institutions that have long kept the imperial tendencies of the American presidency in check. That is partly the fault of Congress, which has punted too many of its legislative responsibilities to the president’s army of faceless regulators, but it is in no small part the result of an intentional strategy on the part of the administration. He has spent the past five years methodically testing the limits of what he can get away with, like one of those crafty velociraptors testing the electric fence in Jurassic Park. Barack Obama is a Harvard Law graduate, and he knows that he cannot make recess appointments when Congress is not in recess. He knows that his HHS is promulgating regulations that conflict with federal statutes. He knows that he is not constitutionally empowered to pick and choose which laws will be enforced. This is a might-makes-right presidency, and if Barack Obama has been from time to time muddled and contradictory, he has been clear on the point that he has no intention of being limited by something so trivial as the law.

Mary Cheney, Liz Cheney and Left-Wing Hate



By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, November 26, 2013

There are individual haters on the right and individual haters on the left. But there is no large-scale hatred in the United States of America today that compares with the hatred of the left for the right. Whereas the right regards the left as wrong -- even destructively wrong -- the left regards all those on the right as evil. Sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted -- these are typical descriptions of the right made by the most respected names on the left. This hatred is what enabled MSNBC's Martin Bashir to broadcast -- reading from a teleprompter, meaning that it was not spontaneous -- that Sarah Palin deserves to have someone defecate into her mouth. (He later offered a serious apology.)

But among all of the left's hatreds, none compares with its hatred of anyone who believes that marriage should remain defined as the union of a man and a woman. The left believes anyone, or any business, that supports the only gender-based definition of marriage that had ever existed should be politically, personally and economically destroyed. Recall, for example, the left's attempt to drive out of business a restaurant in Los Angeles because one of its employees donated one hundred dollars to California's Proposition 8, the left's boycott of Chick-fil-A and the left's vicious attacks on the Mormon Church.

This greatest of contemporary American hatreds expressed itself again in the last two weeks after Liz Cheney, running for the Republican nomination for U.S. senator from Wyoming, said that she believes in the traditional definition of marriage.

The comment would have probably gone almost universally unreported were it not for a Facebook post written by Heather Poe, the woman who is married to Liz's lesbian sister, Mary Cheney:

"Liz has been a guest in our home, has spent time and shared holidays with our children, and when Mary and I got married in 2012 -- she didn't hesitate to tell us how happy she was for us. To have her now say she doesn't support our right to marry is offensive to say the least."

Mary Cheney shared the message on her own Facebook page, adding, "Liz -- this isn't just an issue on which we disagree --you're just wrong -- and on the wrong side of history."

This triggered a tsunami of left-wing hate against Liz.

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni:

"Isn't there a tradition of close-knit family members' taking care not to wound one another? ... Liz and Mary aren't speaking to each other now, and there's a long shadow over the Cheneys' holiday get-togethers. Is any political office worth that? ... I'm imagining her awkwardness the next time that she goes to hug or kiss them (and I'm assuming that she's a hugger or kisser, which may be a leap)."

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd:

" ... the spectacle of Liz, Dick and Lynne throwing Mary Cheney and her wife, Heather Poe, and their two children under the campaign bus. ... Dick's Secret Service code name was once 'Backseat.' Liz's should be 'Backstab.'"

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson:

"Liz Cheney is also the sort of person who would not only throw her sister under the bus but also effectively do the same to her sister's young son and daughter. ... The Cheney sisters, once extremely close, reportedly haven't spoken since the summer. What price political ambition?"

Blogger Andrew Sullivan:

"I would like to respond on behalf of Mary and Heather and the rest of us: f--k [Sullivan, of course, spelled out the word] your compassion. ... You cannot publicly attack your own sister's family and say you love her as well. It does not compute."

On Anderson Cooper's CNN program, Sullivan repeated these themes, and was echoed by fellow left-wing panelists Peter Beinart and Jeffrey Toobin.

The hatred of the left on this issue is matched only by the superficiality of their arguments.

Let's get this straight: it is not throwing people under the bus to disagree with a relative -- even if the relative lives out something you oppose.

Some questions for Bruni, Robinson, Dowd, Sullivan, Beinart and Toobin:

1. Imagine a person who opposes unwed motherhood (that is, single women voluntarily getting pregnant). Further imagine that this person has an unwed sister who did get pregnant and is now an unwed mother. Do you deny that such a person can love their sister even while opposing unwed motherhood? Or do you believe that if one loves a family member, one must cease holding any conviction that runs against that family member's behavior? That continuing to hold that conviction means throwing the family member under the bus?

2. Do you believe that it is morally acceptable for all gays to stop speaking to their siblings -- one of the worst things a person can do to a sibling and to one's parents -- solely because the sibling believes in the man-woman definition of marriage? Or do you only defend Mary Cheney's decision to cut off relations with her sister because you hate the Cheneys?

3. When a Jewish or Catholic parent or sibling speaks out against interfaith marriage, should the intermarried member of the family stop speaking to that parent or sibling?

I have received numerous emails from parents and siblings of gays who have completely cut off communications with their parents and siblings solely because those parents and siblings oppose same-sex marriage. In my view, this decision to shatter one's family over this issue is the real immorality here.

The support of Bruni, Robinson, Dowd, Sullivan, Beinart and Toobin for this shattering of families by gay family members is not only morally wrong. It is frightening. Clearly, for them it is not enough for parents and siblings to show their gay family member love -- and even celebrate their gay relative's family -- they must also permanently shut their mouths.

This is not only left-wing hatred. It is left-wing totalitarianism: Your good and kind behavior is completely insufficient. You must also speak and think as we do.

Or we will destroy you.