“Philip Dru, Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935″ is a novel about a successful rebellion against a hopelessly corrupt U.S. government. Its leader then becomes a benevolent dictator, and restores the rule of law to the Republic. Though he didn’t put his name on the book, author Colonel Edward Mandell House was a Texas political insider who worked assiduously to make Woodrow Wilson president. After the 1912 election, he became Wilson’s closest advisor.

So is it a bad turn-of-the-century novel — or a Nostradamus-like prediction of America under President Obama?

“Philip Dru,” published in 1912, is no less dated and didactic than most works of its kind; imagine what future generations of readers will make of Glenn Beck’s “The Overton Window.” But Beck and those like him, inside the twisted thought system of right-wing conspiracy blogs, seriously regard House’s book as “a detailed plan for the future government of the United States.” The extreme right reads “Philip Dru” as the smoking gun that proves the existence of a vast left-wing conspiracy, as a terrifying presage of the Obama administration. Beck has asked listeners to read the book as “homework.” To them, this is not a novel of the Wilsonian era, but a terrifying tale of today.

Republicans might have resented the fanatical hatred that George W. Bush inspired in so many Democrats — Bush Derangement Syndrome, as Charles Krauthammer called it — but there was no mystery about its causes. Bush strutted and smirked; he launched wars with cowboy talk; he angered his adversaries and he knew it. Barack Obama, in contrast, promised a post-partisan presidency that would be all about splitting differences and searching out common ground. Most Democrats — including Obama himself — were caught off guard by the spirit of vindictiveness (Hitler mustaches; birth certificates; “You lie!”; death panel accusations, etc.) that have possessed the right since his inauguration.

Colonel House, the founder of the Council on Foreign Relations, looms larger in the conservative imagination than he does in the popular memory. Not just an arch internationalist, he is also the personification of the cult of expertise. As George Will summarized the “awful but indicative” plotline of House’s novel: “With the nation in crisis, Dru seizes power, declares himself ‘Administrator of the Republic,’ and replaces Congress with a commission of five experts who decree reforms that selfish interests had prevented.” Progressives, Will explained, “are forever longing to replace the governance of people by the administration of things. Because they are entirely public-spirited, progressives volunteer to be the administrators, and to be as disinterested as the dickens.”

If Will’s stance is condescending, harder-line rightists are more alarmist. House and “Philip Dru” figure largely in “Secrets of the Federal Reserve,” a book the notorious anti-Semite and racist Eustace Mullins wrote with Ezra Pound’s encouragement in the early 1950s. “This ‘novel’ predicted the enactment of the graduated income tax, excess profits tax, unemployment insurance, Social Security and a flexible currency system,” Mullins notes.

A chorus of extreme right-wing pundits echo Mullins’ analysis today. “There is God and there is Satan. There is good and there is bad … Well, the opposite of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is the book ‘Philip Dru,’” says Milton Reid, who offers his readers a free download so they can see for themselves the “blueprint the lefties (and progressive Republicans) are trying to follow now!”

Glenn Beck has urged his listeners to seek out House’s book online and read it to learn the ugly truth about progressivism. Woodrow Wilson — “the worst president this country has ever had; he hated America” — read it three or four times, Beck said.

“The similarity between Philip Dru and Barack Obama is uncanny,” Henry Lamb informed readers of WorldNetDaily.

Obama set out immediately to create an ‘administrator’ type of government by naming more than 30 czars that bypassed congressional approval and oversight, each with administrative power and responsible only to the administrator-in-chief … Philip Dru Obama is making unbelievable progress toward converting the United States to an ‘administrator’-type government under the control of his personally chosen sub-administrators. His policies ignore the Constitution and the expressed will of the American people. The nation Obama is building is looking much more like the socialist nations in Europe than the free-market America our founders created.

The view of Obama as a dictator goes much farther than the principled critiques of his Justice Department’s overreaches in the realm of civil liberties. Even as the fate of the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s largest legislative achievement (a chimerical public/private compromise, painstakingly cobbled together, Rube Goldberg-like, from ideas proposed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation) has been punted up to the Supreme Court, the far right still sees Obama as a classic strongman. If the left views Obama as virtually a hostage of the right, the right sees him as a tyrant who rules with an iron hand.

Just last week, a far-right website called Political Vel Craft ran an article called “Obama – The Genghis Khan for the Rothschild Bankers!” Zelig-like, Philip Dru makes his obligatory appearance a few paragraphs in.

The character Philip Dru was a West Point officer who resigned his commission due to ill health to become a social worker and community organizer in New York’s Lower East Side for five years. Dru’s ‘purpose was not so much to give individual help as to formulate some general plan and to work upon those lines.’ Dru comes out of this experience as a military leader of the rebellion against a corrupt national government to become ‘administrator to the Republic,’ that is, dictator of the United States, and then later of one quarter of the world, and finally, in cooperation with the British, the rest of the world.  He then, once the world government is set up, retires to study the Russian language.

Take the trouble to read “Philip Dru: Administrator ” and you will quickly discern that House’s elitism, his noblesse oblige and his militarism — he foresaw a vast extension of the Monroe Doctrine that would result in “the amalgamation of Mexico and the Central American Republics into one government, even though separate states were maintained” — had much more in common with Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick Progressivism than Marxist-Leninism. But as anyone who reads John Birch Society publications or listens to Beck knows, even Teddy Roosevelt is regarded as something of a crypto-Communist in far-right circles these days.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the conspiracist literature also features considerable speculation about whether House was Jewish. In “Zionism: The Hidden Tyranny,” a 1950s vintage pamphlet, Benjamin H. Freedman, the millionaire owner of the Woodbury Soap Co. who, before he converted to Catholicism and took up the cause of anti-Communism and anti-Zionism had been a self-styled “highly-placed insider” in the Jewish establishment, notes that House “did not claim or disclaim his Talmudist ancestry to this author.” In “The Controversy of Zion,” the English anti-Semite Douglas Reed expatiates on the mystery of House’s origins, pointedly quoting his biographer Arthur D. Howden, who wrote that House’s “middle name, Mandell, was that of ‘a Jewish merchant in Houston, who was one of his father’s most intimate friends; the fact that the elder House conferred a Jewish name upon his son indicates the family’s attitude towards the race’).” John Coleman has contended that House, who was born in Houston in 1858, was really Mandell Huis, a Dutch Jew.

Even Henry Ford got into the game. In his Nov. 20, 1920, installment of “The International Jew,” Ford observed that the financier and Washington wise man Bernard M. Baruch attended the College of the City of New York. “This college,” he averred, “is one of the favorite educational institutions with the Jews, its president being Dr. S. E. Mezes, a brother-in-law of Colonel E. M. House, the colonel whose influence … at the White House has for a long time been a favorite subject of wondering speculation on the part of the American people.”

The Jews could do greater things in the United States than even Baruch has done, if the opportunity offered … but what would it signify? The ideal of a dictator of the United States has never been absent from the group in which Baruch is found — witness the work, “Philip Dru, Administrator,” commonly attributed to Colonel E. M. House, and never denied by him.

What would Henry Ford have said had he lived to see not a Jew but a black man — with an Islamic name yet — taking the reins of power? Most of the same things that Obama’s adversaries are saying, in all likelihood.

Just watch the first couple of minutes of this and watch Beck sit there, dumbstruck, as the disembodied voice of Gingrich rambles about Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” the Wright Brothers, and Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures (which Gingrich incorrectly refers to as his “First Report on Manufacturing” — such shoddiness from Freddie Mac’s historian in residence!).

This isn’t just because Gingrich is smarter than Beck, though he is.

There’s a reason Glenn Beck’s show generally featured monologues: The guy doesn’t do interviews very well. He’s easily filibustered. Remember him looking completely lost and dejected while attempting to get anything worthwhile out of a babbling Eric Massa?

And Gingrich, who’d agree to sit down for a day-long “Lincoln-Douglas-style debate” with a Teddy Ruxpin doll, is selling himself as a candidate based in large part on his ability to talk. Republicans think Obama talked his way into the White House, mesmerizing voters with his fancy words and soothing tone. And certain conservatives are itching for Gingrich to face Obama in a talking contest. They think Gingrich would destroy him. And they base this impression on the sight of Gingrich dominating interviews with morons like Glenn Beck.

What Newt is good at — and it’s the exact thing Romney is awful at — is defending himself against charges of apostasy. Gingrich has been all over the political spectrum during his career, but when you try to nail him on some sort of offense against conservative orthodoxy, he talks his way out of it. Glenn Beck says Gingrich compared himself to Teddy Roosevelt, lately a “Progressive” villain. Gingrich responds with a history lesson and a defense of very basic public safety regulations that no one would argue with. Beck criticizes Gingrich’s support for ethanol subsidies, Gingrich responds with crowd-pleasing nationalism about competitiveness with Saudi Arabia and Venezuela and a bit of Obama-bashing.

When directly confronted with his attack on Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan, an attack that almost ended his campaign before it began, Gingrich defended himself by saying that he was right and also he’d vote for Ryan’s plan.

GINGRICH: Well, let’s go back to what I just said. What I was asked was if a program is unpopular, should the Republicans impose it anyway. We can go back and we can listen to exactly what I was asked on that show and what I said I stand by, which is in a free society, you don’t elect officials to impose on you things that you disagree with. We just went through this slide over ObamaCare.

Now, I also, ironically, I would implement the Medicare reforms that Paul Ryan wants, I would implement them next year as an optional choice and I would allow people to have the option to choose premium support and then have freedom to negotiate with their doctor or their hospital in a way that would increase their ability to manage costs without being involved, you know ‑‑ but I wouldn’t impose it on everybody across the board. I think that’s a very large scale experiment. But I think you could migrate people toward it. I’m proposing the same thing on Social Security. I think young people ought to have the right to choose a personal Social Security insurance savings account plan and the Social Security actuary estimates that 95% of young people would pick a personal Social Security savings account over the current system but they would do so voluntarily because we would empower them to make a choice. We wouldn’t impose it on them. That’s a question of how do you think you can get this country to move more rapidly toward reform, and I think you can get it to move toward reform faster.

GLENN: All right.

GINGRICH: By giving people the right to choose.

Gingrich even successfully spins his longtime vocal support of government action to reverse climate change by saying he was talking about tax credits for nuclear power and besides he never liked Al Gore and thought cap-and-trade was an attempt to establish government control over the private sector.

And because Beck’s a bad interviewer, Gingrich got away with all of this. But even if Beck wasn’t a bad interviewer, Gingrich is quite good at making himself sound good to conservatives. It’s a skill Mitt Romney lacks; in his long career, Gingrich has only ever managed to sell himself to credulous Beltway journalists and the right-wing rabble. Everyone else has tended to find him more than slightly ridiculous.

A Gingrich-Obama debate would certainly be more fun than a Romney-Obama debate, but I can’t imagine it’d be as easy for Gingrich as outwitting Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren.

09/13/01: Remembering the Day We Forgot the Lessons of the Day We Had Sworn We Would Always Remember

Under the aegis of “Courage to Stand,” Beck addressed a fairly sparse crowd of 2,000. Also on stage was Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat and cantorial music superstar Dudu Fisher, who sang the Fiddler on The Roof’s version of a Sabbath psalm.

Outside the venue, in an archeological garden located on the spot where King David, it is claimed, established the city of Jerusalem over 3,000 years ago, Beck intoned, “The world is expecting movement, the world is expecting someone to lead!”

A hodgepodge of opponents weakly demanded that Beck go home. Leftists condemned his anti-Islamic views whereas religious Jews decried the un-Jewish character of his extravaganza being held so close to the Temple Mount. Former left-wing member of Parliament Yossi Sarid published an Op-Ed entitled, “Glenn Beck, Don’t Come Back.”

Beck, who appears to be drawing smaller crowds since leaving Fox News, ignored his detractors.

“He’s a guy who shares the beliefs of Christian Zionists throughout America,” said Zev Chafets, author of “A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man’s Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance,” and “Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One.”

Those beliefs, he said, are rooted in Genesis 9:12: “I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.”

Nonetheless, Beck has a spotty history with Jews. In the not-so-distant past he accused the financier (and Holocaust survivor) George Soros of collaboration with Nazis, and in a similar vein, referred to the children murdered in the recent terror attack in Norway as akin to Hitler Youth. In addition, he authored a strange novel blaming the attacks of 9/11 on a sniveling public relations executive based on the real life Edward Bernays, an American pioneer in the field of publicity and a nephew of Sigmund Freud.

Now Beck looks poised to claim the mantle of pro-Israel Christianity, which was previously championed by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and is now held by the Rev. John Hagee, who accompanied Beck to Israel.

“I think this is positive for Beck, because I think he wants to be the head of this parade when Hagee dies,” Chafets said. “He’s the prominent figure out there right now. He is reinventing himself as a religious leader, not a media figure. He is placing himself at a very advantageous spot. And at the same time, he is doing something very good for Israel.”

In the audience was Ronald Wiltsey, a Sarah Palin fan from Texas, who came to Israel with Beck along with his mother, Emma Caldwell, 76, and his uncle, Sam Miller, who is 68.

“I’m a history buff,” Wiltsey said. “I don’t agree with what we normally get back home about the Israelis. This is the land given to the Jews.”
Wiltsey, 52, spent 23 years in the army and is veteran of Desert Storm. “I did not get a good impression of Islam,” he said. “I’ve been through a lot. This is easy street now. This is a great trip.”

Before heading to South Africa and South America, Beck wrapped up his Israeli sojourn with an invocation, “We pray for the peace of Jerusalem. We have abused our positions and show no love for others. We are here to say, Israel, the Holy Land, you are not alone. … May God bless Israel, may God bless the Palestinian people, may God bless the United States of America. Amen.”

“He is a history nut,” Chafets said. “He garnishes his speeches with things like Christian anti-Semitism of which needs to be atoned for, and the close kinship between Muslim anti-Semitism and Christian anti-Semitism, which has to be repudiated.”

Two days before the rally, a uniquely Jerusalemite commotion threatened to do away with the musical accompaniment altogether. Eli Yaffe, the choirmaster and conductor of the Great Synagogue’s Choir, which was to accompany Fisher for the Israeli national anthem and other tunes, grasped the Christian nature of the event and hastily backed off. With him went 16 performers, all of whom are to sing at the synagogue’s High Holy Day services next month.

It then fell to Meir Briskman, a young acolyte, to improvise a replacement group with hours to go. One of the bass singers on stage with Beck was Steven Timoner, 39, a graduate of the Yale Conservatory and a Chicago native who is now married to an Israeli and living in Jerusalem. He made $500 for the gig. From his perch, he could see that people gave Beck “scores of standing ovations.”

“I think he gave a decent speech,” Timoner said, smiling. “Look, it was very good. It was coherent. He had a real message. It was nothing like seeing him on TV, where he’s just, um, a moron.”

2. Glenn Beck blames racially diverse “Spider-Man” on Michelle Obama

Obviously, Glenn does not understand the difference between the Ultimate and regular Marvel universe, or he’d know that the comic book company has every intention of keeping Peter Parker alive and Caucasian.

You’d think that Peter Parker’s Spider-Man working with the president  would be the more complex issue, but no … he’s right. This is what Michelle was referring to when she said, pre-election, that we’d have to change some of our traditions. She was talking about the Ultimate Marvel universe.

3. Children explain the darnedest debt deals

These sixth-graders know more about what’s going on in D.C. right now than 77 percent of America. 

Now tell me about Super Congress!

4. Justin’ Time: Justin Timberlake takes a break from terrible rom-coms for “In Time,” a sci-fi futuristic film where aging stops at 25. Cool, right? Except then you have only a year to live, and the only currency accepted is minutes of your life.

So it’s like “Gattaca” meets “Children of Men” meets this prank.

5. iPad Head Games:

A woman walking around Bryant Park with an iPad where her face should be makes for the creepiest marketing campaign of all time.

The spot was supposed to promote Hearst’s new iPad-only app (“Cosmo for Guys” does not sound like something any man wants to buy), but all it makes me want to do is scream “Kill it!” before running away.