Gosnell was committing abortion-related atrocities in Philadelphia at least as far back as 1972, when he performed a series of second-trimester abortions with an experimental instrument called the “super coil.”  According to testimony from a colleague of his, the super coil was “basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball.” Once inside the womb, this ball of tiny blades would spring open and kill the baby.

The Grand Jury report notes, unsurprisingly, that this humanity-shredding device caused “serious complications” for nine of the 15 women on whom Gosnell had operated.  What’s more, the women had not consented to be experimental subjects.  For over 40 years, Planned Parenthood and others in the abortion industry have known about Gosnell and these irresponsible practices.  They also knew about the super coil’s inventor, Harvey Karman.

Karman was a psychologist with no medical degree, who had done time for killing a woman during an illegal abortion he attempted with the use of a nutcracker.  He was pardoned by Jerry Brown, the same man who again serves as California governor all these years later.  In addition to the super coil, Karman had a more successful invention called the Karman cannula, a flexible tube that is commonly used with a syringe to perform first-trimester abortions.  So this is one of the pioneers of “safe, legal and rare” abortion – Dr. Nutcracker.

Months before Gosnell’s super coil experiment, Karman was sent by the International Planned Parenthood Federation on a depraved charity mission to Bangladesh.  Not only did he inflict his super coil method on some of the women there, but he also began his decades-long campaign of promoting do-it-yourself syringe abortions.  If someone as medically unqualified as himself could do abortions, he may have figured, then so can anybody.  Either the IPPF knew about Karman’s lack of credentials and his criminal past, or it just didn’t care enough to find out.

For all their feigned outrage over “back-alley butchers,” advocates of legal abortion generally have no problem with those abortions that are done outside the law.  The 1999 movie The Cider House Rules starred Michael Caine as a World War II-era illegal abortionist, whose protege (Tobey Maguire) had no formal medical training.  The fact that these two were depicted as heroes prompted Planned Parenthood to give the film a Maggie Award for Media Excellence, which is named after PP founder Margaret Sanger.  Hooray for the butchers!

Both PP and the National Abortion Federation admit that they knew about the state of Gosnell’s clinic, but neither organization reported him.  If they had, they’d have been faced with the question, why stop there?  A clinic in Muskegon, Michigan was closed down in December, after being found in a comparable state of squalor.  Two nurses at Planned Parenthood of Wilmington, Delaware have recently been driven to leave that clinic, due to its hazardous conditions. Another clinic in Tidewater, Virginia has been closed for noncompliance with safety regulations that were passed in reaction to Gosnell’s arrest.  These are just some of the most recent offenders.  The 1996 book Lime 5: Exploited by Choice by Mark Crutcher, founder of the anti-abortion group Life Dynamics, thoroughly chronicled similar offenses in clinics across America.  Many of Gosnell’s trademarks – unsanitary conditions, unsterile equipment, unqualified personnel, and haphazard storage of fetal body parts – are shockingly not uncommon.

Gosnell’s killing of already born infants is nothing new, either.  When PP spokeswoman Alisa LaPolt Snow was asked what should become of a baby who’s born alive as a result of a botched abortion, she said, “We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family and her physician.”  In other words, it’s okay to kill it anyway.

When the partial-birth abortion ban was being debated in 1996, Republican senator Rick Santorum asked two of his Democrat colleagues whether it should be legal to kill a baby once it has been entirely born.  Both senators Russ Feingold and Frank Lautenberg declined to answer.  “I am not the person to be answering that question,” Feingold said.  “That is a question that should be answered by a doctor, and by the woman who receives the advice from the doctor.”  These are not innocent slips of the tongue.  Abortion advocates are well aware of their need to excuse certain cases of outright infanticide.

In 1999, an employee of a fetal tissue and organ wholesaler told Life Dynamics that he’d frequently been asked to dissect babies who were still alive.  “It happened again and again … all the way up to sometimes 30 weeks, we had live births come back to us,” he said.  “Then the doctor would either break the neck or take a pair of tongs and beat the fetus until it was dead.”  He told of one particular instance in which an abortionist had brought him a pan containing a pair of 24-week-old twin girls.  When he pointed out that they were still breathing, the abortionist drowned them by filling the pan with water.

Those methods, like Gosnell’s “snipping” of infants’ spinal cords, are monstrous.  Yet they are arguably less inhumane than the practice of abandoning babies who survive abortion attempts in a linen closet, where they are left gasping for breath until they slowly die of neglect.  After nurse Jill Stanek blew the whistle on hospitals that were committing this act, the Illinois senate proposed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, after which the federal bill of the same name would be modeled.  Barack Obama, then a state senator and chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee, opposed the measure, and blocked it from coming up for a vote.

The mainstream of the pro-abortion movement has a long history of condoning most of what has gone on in Gosnell’s “house of horrors,” sometimes tacitly, but often explicitly so.  As far as the people who embraced Dr. Nutcracker are concerned, the only thing Gosnell did wrong was get caught.

The pro-abortion media narrative is that the practice of abortion has been made clean, respectable and even noble by its legality, but the only real difference is in its nomenclature.  Yesterday’s “back-alley butchers” and today’s “reproductive health care providers” are one and the same.  Their single and unambiguous purpose is to kill tiny children.  Any additional harm that is done to the mothers’ health, medical ethics and the law may be dismissed as collateral damage.

If Gosnell’s Philadelphia clinic is a “house of horrors,” then Planned Parenthood and the NAF are operating national chains that ought to have titles like “Horrors R Us.”  For them to claim not to recognize Gosnell is plausible only if they, being bloodsuckers, cannot even look at themselves in the mirror.

“There’s no more important ingredient for success,” he said, “nothing that would be more important for us reducing violence than strong, stable families, which means we should do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood.”  As if in awareness of his having strayed from the liberal orthodoxy, he hastily added that what’s important is to have “loving, supportive parents – and by the way, that’s all kinds of parents.  That includes foster parents and extended families.  It includes gay or straight parents.  Those parents, supporting kids, that’s the most important thing.”

At first glance, there may not appear to be any contradiction here.  One might presume that Obama is using some liberal redefinition that includes such potential “fathers” as grandparents, older siblings, in-laws, unrelated surrogate father figures, mothers named Stanley, especially good caddies, Marxist preachers, kits, cats, sacks and wives, and of course, good ol’ Uncle Sam.  According to the currently accepted left-wing lexicon, anybody who “identifies as” a father must be recognized as one, right?

… But wait a minute.  His personalization of the issue rules out any such redefinition.  Obama was raised in Indonesia by his mother and stepfather, and in Hawaii by his grandparents, with the help of his mentor, Frank Marshall Davis.  By “father,” in this context, he cannot have meant simply having yet another adult present.  His wish was not to have belonged to some alternative family structure, perhaps consisting of a man, a boy, and Charlie Sheen.  It was specifically for his own father, Barack Obama Sr., to have been involved in raising him.

When Obama said “we should do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood,” he was talking about promoting marriage as a means of producing actual fathers, not extended family members, second mothers or absentee sperm donors.  What he was doing, until he caught himself, was upholding the ideal of the traditional nuclear family.  That’s irreconcilable with his “evolution,” through which he has concluded that any two grown people can be married, whether one of them is a man or not.

Marriage originated from the recognition that a man and a woman have different, complementary traits, and that either of them individually is incomplete, but that they need each other in order to be made whole.  This understanding precludes any attempt to approximate such a union with two people of the same sex.  It is this that President Obama used to say he believed, but now says he does not.

Since Obama “evolved” from this presumably primitive concept, he believes that marriage is no longer a union of a man and a woman in order to make them whole.  It is merely a formalization of any pair or collection of people who feel committed to each other.  The wording of the ceremony might as well be changed to, “Do you take this person to be your BFF?”

His having arrived at this conclusion almost a year before his Chicago speech reveals his suggestion that we “promote marriage and encourage fatherhood” to be fatuous.  What he is now telling us he believes is that it is extremely important for a family to have a father, but it is not the tiniest bit important for a marriage to have a man.  Those two thoughts cannot coexist in the mind of a rational person.

Most advocates of same-sex marriage also advocate same-sex parenthood.  Some of them even claim that homosexual and lesbian couples are better suited to raise children than mothers and fathers are.  At least they’re being consistent.  Obama’s stated desire to have been raised by a mother and father presumes the exact opposite.

If we had news reporters in this country, President Obama would be challenged to explain his contradictory views of marriage and the family until he gave a single, coherent answer.  Why is having a father so important for him, they’d ask, but not important for the child of a female same-sex couple?  By the end of his next “uuuuuuhh,” he’d better have thought of an answer.

Until that happens, we can only conclude that he has not really evolved as he claims, but rather has only changed his stripes.

For the most part, Buchanan’s analysis reads like a transcript from one of the panel discussions during his stint at MSNBC, complete with his sarcastic exclamation, “Mission accomplished!”  The thrust of his argument is a flawlessly executed triple-balderdash, which he has perfected through repetition over the years.

“Of the three goals of the war, none was achieved,” he gloats.  Okay, so let’s take these one at a time, and find out if that’s true.

“No weapon of mass destruction was found”

Notice how the rhetoric has evolved as the anti-war narrative has gone unchallenged.  Back when small numbers of WMD were being found on a regular basis, the defeatist position was that no “stockpiles” of WMD had been found, which was true.  Saddam Hussein chose to go into hiding rather than stand and fight, therefore he did not keep large stockpiles of WMD at arm’s length.

With the complicity of the liberal media, the anti-Bushies were allowed to paraphrase this as “no weapons of mass destruction,” which is an utter lie.  By 2006, no fewer than 500 sarin and mustard gas munitions had been found in Iraq.  Also found were empty binary warheads specifically designed to deliver sarin gas, and missiles equipped to deliver those warheads.

Our soldiers made multiple discoveries of deadly chemicals hidden in the desert, in camouflaged ammo dumps.  Even the UN revealed that Saddam had kept equipment for producing chemical and biological weapons at dozens of missile sites, which he swiftly dismantled and moved before the invasion.  In addition, Saddam left a WMD-related paper trail of internal documents, including purchase records and progress reports, which we are now to believe he fabricated in order to fool people within his government, to whom he wasn’t accountable anyway.

Even if no chemical weapons had been found, their existence could have been deduced from the mountains of circumstantial evidence.  These include satellite photos of caravans streaming toward the Syrian border before the invasion, repeated attempts to bribe the weapons inspectors, the very fact that Saddam had ejected the inspectors after a VX discovery five years earlier, and incriminating statements made on Saddam’s secret recordings.  To dismiss all this is to act as the Butcher of Baghdad’s defense attorney, not an objective seeker of truth.

“While Saddam and his sons paid for their sins, they had nothing at all to do with 9/11.  Nothing.  That had all been mendacious propaganda.”

President Bush has never claimed that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks, which is the phony argument that Buchanan pretends to rebut.  To state that Saddam “had nothing at all to do with 9/11,” however, goes quite a bit further than that.

We have it right from Saddam’s own mouth, among other sources, that his Iraqi Intelligence Service had repeatedly met with al-Qaeda, although he denied that this established an alliance between them.  A 2008 Pentagon report disagreed with him on that point.  It concluded, “Captured documents reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al-Qaeda, as long as that organization’s near-term goals supported Saddam’s long-term vision.”

How willing?  For starters, Saddam is known to have funded two precursors of al-Qaeda – Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the organization created by Ayman al-Zawahiri that would become the nucleus of al-Qaeda, and the Afghani Islamic Party, which controlled that part of Afghanistan where bin Laden established his terrorist training camp.  Saddam also funded a group called Army of Muhammad, which his own IIS recognized as an “offshoot of bin Laden,” as well as al-Qaeda’s Filipino affiliate, Abu Sayyaf.

Osama bin Laden was considered to be particularly dangerous because of his wealth, but his inheritance was a pittance compared to the steady stream of revenue that Saddam Hussein took in as dictator of an oil-rich nation.  Osama’s net worth was estimated at $50 million.  Saddam is believed to have spent $35 million in bribes to Palestinian families who sacrificed their children as suicide bombers.  We can only guess how much total funding he gave to al-Qaeda-related groups, but whatever the amount, it is certainly enough to implicate him in their atrocities.  One cannot knowingly collaborate with terrorist organizations, and yet have “nothing at all to do with” their terrorist acts.

“Where there had been no al-Qaida in Iraq while Saddam ruled, al-Qaida is crawling all over Iraq now.”

The naysayers like to believe that when bin Laden publicly endorsed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi from afar, it was a superficial contrivance, and that the independent Zarqawi was al-Qaeda in name only.  In reality, the connection between the two was far more concrete.  In 2006, The Atlantic ran a profile of Zarqawi that depicted him as a two-bit thug who had been blown up into a monster by overzealous American war propaganda.  However, it also described his face-to-face meeting with Osama bin Laden in December of 1999.

The two men reportedly took an instant disliking to each other, in no small part because of Zarqawi’s refusal to pledge allegiance to bin Laden.  Nevertheless, the al-Qaeda leader gave Zarqawi the seed money he needed to start a terrorist training camp near the Afghan-Iranian border, for the reason that he agreed with Zarqawi’s aim of overthrowing the government of Jordan.

After fighting alongside the Taliban against the United States in Afghanistan, Zarqawi and his followers fled to Northern Iraq, where they joined the Kurdish terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, which not surprisingly was partially armed and funded by Saddam Hussein.  Well before the U.S. invasion, a subsidiary of al-Qaeda had relocated to Iraq, with the intention of toppling one of the most benign governments in the Arab world.

In addition, Saddam had operated no fewer than three training camps, at which thousands of foreign jihadists received instruction from his Fedayeen – paramilitary irregulars who specialized in guerrilla warfare.  After Saddam’s ouster, the foreign fighters who became known as al-Qaeda in Iraq helped the Fedayeen wage what will forever be mislabeled “the insurgency.”  Is AQI the al-Qaeda that Buchanan says is “crawling all over Iraq now,” and if so, are none of them the same people who had trained in Saddam’s camps beforehand?

Never for a single day did Saddam honor the terms of the treaty that ended the 1991 Gulf War.  This gave America a standing justification to remove him at any time since.  For President Bush to decline that opportunity, during a war on terror that was not of our choosing, would have been a dereliction of his duty to the American people.

None of the evidence cited here has been fished from the murky fever swamps of the twittersphere.  All of it is easily available from government reports and mainstream media sources, although Buchanan would surely find excuses to dismiss it all the same.  Mind you, if he could ever scrape up one billionth as much support for his contention that a dastardly cabal of neoconservatives had seized control of the Bush White House on behalf of their Israeli overlords, he would blather about it incessantly.

Oh, wait a minute.  He does that anyway.

The bill would have sailed through, if not for the addition of several Democrat amendments. The most controversial of these allows non-Indian men who are accused of assaulting American Indian women on reservations to be tried by the tribal courts, thereby depriving the suspects of their Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights. In addition, the Democrats expanded the bill to protect gay men and transsexuals as well as women. Yet another new provision allows illegal aliens to obtain visas by claiming to have been abused.

House Republicans proposed their own version of the bill, which omitted these provocative items. It was voted down, with all but two Democrats in opposition. So, in reality, far more Democrats than Republicans voted against renewing VAWA, but don’t expect it to be reported that way.

If liberals had any sense of irony, they might have noticed that they were posing as foes of violence against women at the same time that they cheered President Obama’s directive on women in combat. When given a chance to undermine America’s military, and satisfy their own fealty to the Cult of Diversity, they find it not only acceptable, but laudable to subject women to the most horrific violence imaginable.

A less extreme example can be seen in liberals’ support for Lauren Silberman, who comically tried out as a kicker at an NFL combine. Contrary to popular belief, kickers are not exempt from the violence of football. They are sometimes expected to block and tackle, and to fight for loose balls. There’s also a quaint tradition that referees call “roughing the kicker.” Imagine extending one leg as far in the air as it will go, and having 250 pounds of humanity come barreling into your other leg. Who, but a liberal, would encourage a woman to expose herself to such danger?

Liberals might say that by “violence against women,” what they mean is domestic abuse in particular, but even then, they aren’t credible. As much as feminists like to portray husbands as the chief abusers, a married woman is far less likely to suffer physical abuse than a single woman who shares her residence with a series of transient boyfriends. The prevalence of violence against women has undoubtedly increased as the welfare state – with help from the sexual revolution – has dissolved the nuclear family. Yet seldom does any liberal express so much as a pang of regret over it.

The central hypocrisy of feminism is that it demands that society treat men and women exactly the same, while also expecting it to maintain special considerations and protections for women. No wonder its adherents find reality so problematic. They seem to think they can put women on the battle lines alongside men, and assume that the bullets will distinguish between the two.

Conservatives are the ones who recognize that equality between the sexes does not mean that their societal roles must be identical. Women can be “the gentler sex,” who ought to be shielded from levels of violence that are acceptable toward and among men, without that making them inferior beings.

If you don’t accept that premise, as liberals tend not to, there is no rational basis for specifically combating violence against women. Maybe that’s why the Democrat revisions to VAWA lose sight of that concern. Now, it’s the Violence Against Women, Homosexuals, and Men Who “Identify As Women” Act, with a couple bones being thrown to the racial Balkanists for good measure. They might as well have simply retitled it the Violence Against Likely Democrat Voters Act.

If liberal Democrats were really concerned about violence against women, they would never have used sadistic pornographer Larry Flynt as a party operative. They wouldn’t idolize Bill Clinton, who was famously accused of rape, is a notorious pervert, and is known by his friends to exhibit “purple rages.” They would have been outraged by Al Gore’s explanation that even if Clinton is a rapist, his liberal policies more than made up for it.

In the liberal world of metaphor and euphemism, “violence against women” doesn’t mean real violence against real women. It is therefore unimportant whether or not Clinton ever brutalized women like Juanita Broaddrick. What really matters is that he never spoke disapprovingly of a feminist TV character like Murphy Brown.

Obama’s stated goal has been to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion, so we’re already well on our way. By the end of 2014, our problems ought to be solved. That is, except for the problem that our president and his party are about as firmly rooted in reality as a Felix the Cat cartoon. It’s impossible for the deficit to have been cut by over a trillion more than it has ever been in the first place. What Obama really means is that the combined total of the next ten deficits will be $4 trillion less than that of ten other deficits that never existed. It’s a wonder that the networks don’t obediently report the deficit as “X-minus-4 trillion.”

Even by Obama’s optimistic assumptions, the national debt will have ballooned by about $9 trillion during his presidency. What’s more, he’s been pumping it up deliberately, in hopes that massive deficit spending will stimulate the economy. Yet he imagines he’s the most fiscally responsible president in history.

Obama’s congressional allies are not as completely dismissive of the national debt as he is. They just refuse to believe that spending has anything to do with it. Annual federal outlays have increased by almost a third since 2008, and still, Democrats insist that the blame rests “on the revenue side.” As House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer put it when asked if our nation is overspending, “The country has a paying-for problem.” In other words, it’s not the government’s fault for spending too much, but the taxpayers’ fault for paying too little.

It’s only consistent, then, for the Democrats to see no connection between the subprime mortgage crash and the requirement that loans be made to people who could never pay them back. George W. Bush tried repeatedly to hold Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac accountable for their risk assessments, only to be thwarted by those who would later blame him for the collapse. Sen. Christopher Dodd referred to this federally-mandated economic lunacy as “one of the great success stories of all time.” Rep. Barney Frank openly declared his intention to exacerbate the problem, saying, “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation toward subsidized housing.”

When these two crafted the Dodd-Frank “Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010,” they conspicuously left Fannie and Freddie untouched by any of the bill’s 2,315 pages of regulations. It seems that irresponsible housing policy, in pursuit of what liberals call “economic justice,” is just another imaginary monster that hides under conservatives’ beds.

Another of these is voter fraud. In many states, Republicans have introduced voter ID bills, most of which are utterly innocuous to anyone who’s not actually in favor of illegal voting. There is simply no innocent reason to oppose the requirement that voters identify themselves when they go to the polls.

Perhaps in tacit acknowledgment of this, the bills’ opponents have fallen back to the position that there’s no need for voter ID, because voter fraud doesn’t exist. These measures must be defeated, then, because if there’s anything a Democrat can’t stand, it’s a lot of unnecessary laws cluttering up the place. They’re merely trying to save Republicans from wasting resources on a quixotic mission to stamp out a fabricated menace.

This pattern of denial is not restricted to Democrat politicians. You’ve probably observed the same behavior in your liberal friends or co-workers. To hear them tell it, Communists, traitors, illegal aliens and liberal media bias are figments of a right-wing imagination. Liberals’ refusal to grasp the obvious is so reflexive that they’ll mockingly refer to “the so-called, quote-unquote, ‘War on Christmas,’” even as they walk past the Anti-Bullying Awareness Tree in the town square.

Mind you, they don’t scoff that way at Michael Moore, who declared in 2004, “There is no terrorist threat.” Everybody knows that Bush blew up the Twin Towers to justify going to war, so that he could enrich his cronies in the Carlyle Group, who were invested in Bradley armored fighting vehicles. That makes so much more sense than the fact that there are Islamic terrorists who want to kill us, or that trillion-dollar deficits result from too much spending.

Panetta met with Obama and Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, around 5 o’clock on the day of the attack, which would continue until about seven hours later. He says the president told the two of them, “to do everything we needed to do to try to protect lives there,” and that they received no further communications from him for the rest of the day. Obama is known to have spoken with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for an hour that night, but other than that, nobody seems to know where he was or what he was doing while the crisis in Libya was unfolding.

This illustration of Obama’s neglecting his military duties raises questions about the recently leaked Justice Department “white paper” setting the administration’s policy on drone strikes. Although the white paper has been the subject of outrage, it is for the most part unremarkable. Its main purpose is to establish that the legal authority for the strikes comes from the declaration of war (sorry – “authorization for use of military force”) against al-Qaeda that Congress passed in 2001. (You know, the one that Ron Paul voted for. Look it up.)

The peculiar part is that a declaration of war authorizes the president to act, whereas the white paper finds a drone strike lawful if “an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.” Furthermore, it explains that the word “imminent” in this clause does not literally mean “imminent,” but instead is a murky concept that is more broadly and subjectively defined.

In keeping with the declaration, it ought to be the president who, having informed himself, makes that determination. In fact, last May, the administration planted a story in the New York Times that presented Obama as an omnipotent figure, who determines the fate of terror suspects by deciding which ones are placed on a drone “kill list.” So why has Obama’s own Justice Department assigned that responsibility to unspecified individuals farther down the chain of command? Perhaps he has appointed an Imminence Czar to make such decisions in his stead.

Obama tried to portray himself as being in total control of the bin Laden raid, also, but he couldn’t even pull off a convincing publicity photo. The picture that the White House released depicted the president as the one person least likely to have been in charge. Observing from the periphery, while dressed in a golf shirt and a Nike windbreaker, he looked as if he’d been brought there for Take Your Child to Work Day.

There’s no such photographic evidence of his presence during the Benghazi attack, of course. Whenever there’s nothing to take credit for, the president remains as invisible as a shovel-ready job.

If there was any reason to doubt Panetta’s testimony, it should have been dispelled five days later, when Obama paraphrased him during his State of the Union Address. “As long as I’m Commander-in-Chief, we will do whatever we must to protect those who serve their country abroad.” How interesting that he shifted from a singular to a plural pronoun mid-sentence.

You may remember that he performed a similar grammatical evasion last month, when he was asked directly whether he had any personal experience with firearms. “Yes,” he said. “In fact, up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time.” His answer to a follow-up question revealed, however, that he was referring to guests who do the shooting, and that the “we” he’d mentioned didn’t necessarily include himself. In the context of his “do everything we need to do” order regarding Benghazi, it is clear that the “we” from his address means the same thing.

That Obama would hand off these responsibilities as if he were giving his car keys to a valet is only consistent with his dismissive attitude toward attacks against America, from his categorizing the Benghazi killings as “bumps in the road,” to his cold estimation that we could “absorb” another 9-11 attack, to his reducing the Fort Hood massacre to just another talking point in an otherwise lighthearted monologue. How many more examples do we need before we’re willing to draw the obvious conclusion that he simply doesn’t give a damn?

At President Obama’s second inauguration, he took the oath of office with his hand placed on two Bibles, one of which had belonged to Abraham Lincoln, and the other to Martin Luther King. Considering that each of those men was able to get by on only one Bible at a time, this double dose of devoutness on Obama’s part is curious, especially since he’s never been much of a churchgoing man.

That is, unless we’re going to seriously count his 20 years’ attendance at Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s First Marxist Church of Hatred, Bigotry and Treason. If Obama had borrowed those Bibles from Rev. Wright, at least it would have made sense for there to be two of them. One book wouldn’t have been nearly thick enough, what with all the Jewish parts cut out. Moreover, the second book could have been the Progressive Testament, that section of the Bible that has been omitted from all other versions, undoubtedly by rich white people. Once the president was finished swearing on it, he could have opened it up and read us a passage from the Book of Fomentations.

The fact that religious fervor was not an ingredient in Obama’s Good Book sandwich is evident by the lack of controversy over it. If Obama really were a two-Bible kind of a guy, his most loyal supporters would drop him faster than he could say “letmebeclear.” Rather than sucking up to him, the media would be badgering him over his indecisive answer about how old the earth is, just like they’ve done to Sen. Marco Rubio. (Memo to Rubio: The correct answer is, “The earth is so old – ‘How old is it?’ – The earth is so old, it once dated Helen Thomas in high school.”)

Bill Maher, the world’s leading exporter of anti-religious unfunniness, did not give Obama a million dollars so that he could start bitterly clinging to religion. Next thing you know, he would have started to “do skeet shooting all the time,” as gun enthusiasts are known to put it. Had that ever happened, it would have made Maher extremely glum and mopey. Oh – never mind.

Obama often likens himself to great men in American history, which may lead one to conclude that he meant to suggest a deeper connection between himself and the Bibles’ previous owners. One problem with that explanation is that such a symbolic gesture is far too subtle to penetrate the dormant consciousness of those who are inclined to adore him. Furthermore, he has no need for subtlety, given the media bias in his favor. He could have come right out and said, “I am Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King,” and we’d now be reading op-eds scolding conservatives for obstructing all the good work that President Lincoln and Dr. King are doing to combat global warming.

It may be that Obama chose two Bibles because he perceived one of them to be the first chapter of a miniseries, with the start of his presidency being the opening scene of Episode Two. Perhaps he even brought multiple copies so that he could turn the event into a book signing, by claiming the Bible as his own autobiographical prequel. He could rename it The Audacity of Plagiarism.

On the other hand, maybe he was only being defensive about his ability to fulfill his oath. We’ve all heard the saying, “I swear on a stack of Bibles.” Usually, this is said with the understanding that the speaker’s credibility is in doubt. Well, there was our president, literally swearing on a stack of Bibles. Was the one on top supposed to have served as a shock absorber? It’s telling that this act was not unprecedented, to borrow one of Obama’s favorite words. The last president who swore his oath on two Bibles was none other than Richard Nixon.

Mind you, these are only some of the most innocent explanations. Suppose, instead, that Obama has designs on liquidating our representative government, and remaining president for life. If he increases the number of Bibles he uses at each inauguration, then once he’s been sworn in an infinite number of times, he’ll have confiscated them all!

The possibilities are nearly endless, which means we’ll never really know Obama’s true reason for the use of both Bibles. We can be certain, however, that it was not to solemnly swear to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Listening to liberals speak can be like visiting Alice’s Wonderland. Taking things that belong to somebody else is what they call “fairness.” Parading through town while wearing leashes and chains and nothing else is an exhibition of “pride.” Violent criminals who are turned loose on the streets are referred to as “ex-felons,” as if it were reasonable to presume a recidivism rate of zero.

The killing of innocent children in the womb is called “choice,” as if it had no greater moral consequence than a choice among coffee, tea or milk. If that’s not chilling enough, the people who do the killing are said to be “providers.”

Economic terms are subject to their grotesque redefinitions, also. A legitimate tax deduction is deemed a “break” if liberals would rather you not have it. Wanting to keep more of what you earn is called “greed,” whereas another person’s claim to your earnings is an “entitlement.” Now, as a result of the “fiscal cliff” negotiations, higher taxes have been renamed “revenues.”

This latest euphemism is undoubtedly the result of a premeditated campaign of deception. Linguistics professor George Lakoff, the Democrats’ chief advisor on all things gobbledy, proposed that they start saying “revenue” when they mean “taxes” as early as 2009, when he and fellow linguist Elisabeth Wehling co-authored The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic. Lakoff pitches his advice as if he were merely helping his party to express itself more effectively, when in reality, he’s just plain lying.

The ostensible purpose of raising tax rates may be to increase revenue, but the two are far from synonymous, and Lakoff surely knows it. To assume a direct correlation between tax rates and federal revenues is to apply the discredited static economic analysis on which the Democrats’ assumptions, and therefore those of the media, are based.

A static analysis assumes that an income tax rate cut will result in a proportional decrease in federal income tax revenues. That’s why Democrats always claim that tax cuts need to be “paid for.” It’s also how the media help them blame the Obama deficits on George W. Bush. In 2009, federal revenues fell by more than $400 billion, accounting for almost a third of that year’s startlingly high deficit. If revenues equaled tax rates, this must mean that tax rates were dramatically reduced shortly beforehand, but they weren’t.

The drop in 2009 revenues was the result of the stagnant economic growth that followed the subprime mortgage crash, and bore no relation to tax policy whatsoever. The bulk of the Bush tax cuts were enacted back in 2003, and not only did they not cause a reduction in federal revenues, but they helped stimulate the economy in such a way that annual revenues rose by almost 50 percent over the next four years.

George W. Bush increased federal revenues by cutting tax rates, just as Presidents Kennedy and Reagan had done before him. Lakoff’s Democrats are now trying to erase that record, by introducing a new economic lexicon that makes such results sound literally impossible. If taxes are “revenues,” then you can’t both cut and increase “revenues” simultaneously, can you?

Moreover, this semantic trick ignores potential revenues from sources other than taxation. Privatization can produce revenue, for example, but don’t expect our pro-“revenue” politicians to entertain the thought of selling Amtrak. In other words, now that “revenue” means taxes, it can no longer mean revenue also. If the Democrats ever want to refer to actual revenue, they’ll have to think of something else to call it.

So you see, there’s no need to write a liberal-to-English dictionary, because Lakoff has already done that, albeit preemptively. If Lakoff were to write that euthanasia should be called “anti-aging,” Democrats would soon start touting the anti-aging effects of Obamacare, and Sunday news anchors would accuse Republicans of wanting to inflict age on people. To liberals, no reality exists beyond their own words.

It is said that you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar. The Democrats, not wanting to give up any precious honey, have decided instead to put a “free honey” sign next to the vinegar. Can the flies really be that stupid?

The argument behind such a ban is that there’s no reason for a private citizen to own military-style weapons, or in the president’s words, “AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not on the streets of our cities.” Under the Clinton-era prohibition, “assault weapons” were defined arbitrarily, in such a way that one could easily obtain comparable guns without violating the law. The same would likely be true of whatever similar ban the Democrats hope to pass in reaction to Newtown.

For that reason, the NRA and likeminded groups may seem unreasonable to the passive observer, but they’re only trying to head off the liberals’ anti-gun pincer movement before it’s too late. If the “assault weapons” ban is reenacted, and made permanent this time, it will codify into law the premise that military-style weapons should not be owned by civilians. The fact that there would remain similar guns that were still legal would come to be seen as a loophole in need of closing.

Meanwhile, there’s the United States v. Miller Supreme Court precedent to contend with. The Court ruled in that 1939 case that appellant Jack Miller was not within his Second Amendment rights to transport a sawed-off shotgun across state lines, on the basis that the weapon, being inconsistent with use in a militia, did not fall within the constitutional definition of “arms.”

What the judiciary calls “arms,” Obama and his congressional allies call “assault weapons.” That’s not by accident. It’s a conscious, incremental step toward outlawing the ownership of firearms altogether. If that sounds paranoid, then ask yourself what else the president might have had in mind when he said on Meet the Press that “something fundamental in America has to change” where gun ownership is concerned.

This is how politicians proscribe an object or activity without having popular support for doing so. They don’t attempt to pass an outright prohibition, but instead indirectly regulate it out of existence. The American people would never have supported a ban on incandescent light bulbs, for instance, so no such thing was proposed. The way Congress did it was to pass new efficiency standards that were not realistically attainable. Likewise, Obama’s mandate to double fuel efficiency standards by 2025 is a means of preventing the manufacture of certain larger, heavier vehicles, without having to face the controversy that would arise from explicitly forbidding it.

So-called “commonsense gun restrictions” would operate in a similar but more stealthy manner, in that they’d rely on the Miller precedent, and the knowledge that the liberal media won’t bother to explain its relevance. Obama and his party seek to trap law-abiding gun owners between that ruling and the contrary assumptions underlying their legislative efforts. They still respect the people’s right to own firearms, they’ll say, just as long as those firearms are neither consistent nor inconsistent with military use.

You might wonder how this is possible, since an individual’s right to keep and bear arms was reaffirmed in the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller decision. The Heller ruling steered clear of overturning Miller, however, and also left the door open to future legislative restrictions.

Not that liberals feel bound by that decision anyway. By the time a challenge to any new law works its way through to the Supreme Court, there will likely be a third and possibly a fourth Obama appointee on the bench. Even as the Court is presently configured, Chief Justice John Roberts could always reverse himself. If he can flip-flop in the middle of writing his own opinion in the Obamacare case, disavowing a five-year-old decision ought to be a snap. All he has to do is cite some “compelling interest” or “evolving standard,” or whatever legal weasel words come to mind.

Besides, Obama might not directly propose a ban on the ownership of firearms. He might instead try to prohibit their manufacture and sale, and mandate the registration of those that are already privately owned. So, you see, your Second Amendment rights wouldn’t really be threatened at all. Neither will your right to purchase a new Hummer, just as long as it gets at least 54.5 miles to the gallon.

* Now we’re just like the Europeans, which makes us ever so fashionable and pungent.

* Under Sharia law, we’ll finally have a Democrat president who isn’t soft on crime.

* We have the honor of being served for four more years by the vice presidentiest vice president in American history.

* As long as we don’t address our national debt, the government will compensate by printing even more money! More money’s a good thing, right?

* When you’re euthanized, some evil one-percenter will have to foot the bill for the poison.

* If you couldn’t bring yourself to vote for ideologically impure GOP establishment candidate Mitt Romney, you’ll have plenty of time to congratulate yourself for staying true to your principles, while standing in line for bread.

* Electricity rates will “necessarily skyrocket,” which at least will give us some semblance of a space program.

* In order to avoid Obamacare’s mandates and fees, some employers are cutting back their workers’ hours in order to make them part-time employees. Of course, they’ll have to hire more part-time employees than they would full-time employees, which means that Obamacare is creating jobs!

* Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez can now die happy, but at least they’ll be just as dead.

* As long as Obama is president, jihadist attacks like the one in Benghazi are barely even newsworthy. That means we can ignore them, and go back to reading celebrity tweets until further notice.

* If Obama’s position on marriage continues to evolve, Michelle will soon cease to be First Lady.

* Maybe Dick Morris will shut up now.

* Since Obama’s reelection occurred during the NHL lockout, the absence of hockey serves as proof that we haven’t actually turned into the Soviet Union.

* Bill Maher will still manage to find some excuse not to be happy.

* With Obama in Washington until 2016, the golf courses throughout the rest of the country will be relatively uncrowded.

* If we didn’t continue to kill millions of children in the womb, they’d only grow up and kick the crap out of us for what we’ve just done to them.

* An abundance of new material will rekindle Yakov Smirnoff’s career.

* We needed to reelect Obama in order to find out how Obamacare will turn out to be George W. Bush’s fault.

* When the gas mileage standards have been doubled, you’ll be able to fold up your car and carry it with you.

* If Obama gives a bailout to the major news publications, then at least that would lend some justification to all of their sniveling suckuppery.

* Sonia Sotomayor will not be the most unqualified and embarrassing justice on the Supreme Court for very much longer.

* It’s only a matter of time before Obama gets around to blaming you for something, and you’ve always wanted to see your name in the papers.

* The greenhouse effect will not bake the earth into an apocalyptic wasteland like in Soylent Green, although most of the rest of that movie will still happen.

* The Chris Christie 2016 campaign is already doomed.

* For the second time in her life, Mrs. Obama is proud of her country. As long as she’s in such a good mood, this would be an opportune time to ask her for some of our food back.

* Wiping Israel off the map will remove a major sticking point in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

* Now that Obama has been given that increased flexibility he told the Russians about, he might actually become good at basketball, so then he can stop lying about it.

* Those jobs ought to become shovel-ready any minute now. No, really.

* You’ve always wanted to buy more expensive cuts of beef, and now you will.

* Had Obama lost, he’d soon have enough time to write another pretentious memoir.