"We did not go by choice, we went because of necessity. I am aware that some question or justify the events of 9/11. But let us be clear: al-Qaida killed nearly 3,000 people on that day. The victims were innocent men, women and children from America and many other nations who had done nothing to harm anybody. And yet al-Qaida chose to ruthlessly murder these people, claimed credit for the attack, and even now states their determination to kill on a massive scale. They have affiliates in many countries and are trying to expand their reach. These are not opinions to be debated; these are facts ... "

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Speaking of this crowd, have you seen any "I am so sorry" postings from that quarter as Obama continues and even escalates the former president's war policy in Afghanistan and attempts to consolidate his military occupation of Iraq?

Conservatives, please. Let's not duplicate the manias of the left as we figure out how to deal with Mr. Obama. He is not exactly the antichrist, although a disturbing number of people on the right are convinced he is.

I have recently received commentaries that claim that "Obama's speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American history" and "never has a politician in this land had such a quasi-religious impact on so many people" and "Obama is a narcissist," which leads the author to then compare Obama to David Koresh, Charles Manson, Stalin and Saddam Hussein. Excuse me while I blow my nose.

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Here is what Conason wrote: "In many quarters on the right, doubt about war equals hatred of America or worse. This sort of hysteria now pervades the propaganda operations of David Horowitz [whose] Front Page magazine features 'The Fifth Column,' where political adversaries are smeared with treason. Like many right-wingers, he insists that anyone who doesn't enthusiastically support an invasion of Iraq must despise America and love Saddam. Anyone, that is, except for the antiwar skeptics on the right -- who somehow escape being branded as traitors."

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The more recent article about the Wichita events originally appeared on the Web site of American Renaissance, a white racialist group founded by Jared Taylor. Even though the article stayed with the facts in the case and did not include any interpretative remarks that might be construed as racist, reposting it from this site seemed to require some commentary about the source, so I reprinted the piece with my own commentary. But Salon readers probably require additional explanation as to why I would post even a factual article from a tainted source.

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Defenders of racial checklists note that the current census has been liberalized to let citizens to choose from among 63 racial and ethnic categories -- although there is no obvious reason for stopping at 63, and there is no constitutional basis for asking the race question at all. The constitutional rationale for the census is to count heads for the purpose of determining congressional districts. Since congressional districts are not determined on the basis of race or ethnicity there is no justification for such questions.

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In the same year, a much more famous (and much more disingenuous) New Left document appeared, called "The Port Huron Statement." This document, which did not 'fess up to its socialist agenda at all, was the founding manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Instead of calling for a socialist revolution, it agitated for "participatory democracy," a form of democracy which was direct instead of representative and which would embrace the economy as well as the polity. This was exactly how Marx had described the socialist agenda, although the Port Huron statement refrained from mentioning that fact.

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Among those invited to the dinner was a silver-haired history professor, who served as the faculty sponsor of the club inviting me. This man represented a dying breed of faculty conservatives who had become tenured in an era when hiring committees were not yet applying a litmus test to exclude those whose political views were not suitably left. The transformation that followed was succinctly described by the distinguished intellectual historian John P. Diggins at an annual meeting of the American Studies Association in Costa Mesa, Calif., a decade ago. Diggins told the assembled academics: "When my generation of liberals was in control of university faculties in the '60s, we opened the doors to the hiring of radicals in the name of diversity. We thought you would do the same. But you didn't. You closed the doors behind you."

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The trigger of the debate is the recent decision of the Justice Department to remove restrictions it imposed on itself in 1972 that prevent the agency from spying on organizations that have not yet committed an actual crime. A chorus of so-called civil rights groups has already attacked the decision -- which involves no change in the law and no endorsement of illegal behavior -- as though it were an attack on the Constitution itself.

The 1972 restrictions were adopted by the FBI in the face of an assault on its practices by the political left. The issue was the FBI's "COINTELPRO," an effort to counter massive civil disobedience and the growing threat from quasi-military radical groups who had gone from demonizing America to planting more than 1,000 bombs, committing acts of military sabotage and killing at least one innocent math professor in their campaign against the Vietnam War.

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Not every Democrat is as kooky or anti-American as Rep. Cynthia McKinney who sits with her party's connivance on the House International Relations Committee and spent the week before 9/11 joining hands in South Africa with Iranians and other Islamo-fascists to condemn the United States, then came home to accuse Bush of plotting the September terror attacks so that his friends in the Carlyle Group could make war profits on defense contracts. But more mainstream Democrats -- the Leahys and the Boxers and other equally left-wing and determined antagonists of American power -- are far more significant players in the debacle of 9/11. And no one is more singularly responsible for America's vulnerability on that fateful day than the Democratic president, Bill Clinton, and his White House staff.

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No aspect of the university system exposes this bias so readily as the process by which tribunes of the nation's culture wars are invited to speak at college forums. Only authorized student groups with faculty sponsors can extend such invitations. Moreover, they must come up with funds to underwrite travel and lodging arrangements, along with an honorarium that can range from $1,000 to $20,000, depending on the speaker's celebrity. If the speaker is a political activist, these appearances can provide a substantial supplement to personal income and a significant subsidy to the speaker's political cause.

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The job of identifying this piece of Brockian hypocrisy fell to critic Bruce Bawer, who performed the task in a devastating review that appeared in the Washington Post. This was a bad break for Brock, because Bawer is also a formerly conservative gay man who, like Brock, worked for the American Spectator. Thus his credibility on Brock's subjects is quite high. Brock responded with an angry squeal to the Post's editors, claiming that Bawer had not disclosed that he was mentioned in the book. The Post editors apologized to Brock, drawing some of the sting from Bawer's verdict.

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The Palestinian agenda is announced through suicide bombings that target Jewish babies; through maps that erase the state of Israel; through the 1999 rejection of a peace plan that included 95 percent of their negotiating demands; through the never-abandoned 1964 liberation manifesto that calls for the obliteration of Israel as the "Zionist entity"; through their spiritual leaders, the Grand Muftis of Jerusalem -- including the current one who calls for the destruction of America and the Jews, and the one from the past who, in the midst of the Nazi Holocaust, was a disciple and ally of Adolf Hitler. It is clear for all those who want to see: The real agenda of Arafat and the Palestinian leadership is now, and has always been, the elimination of Jewry from the Middle East.

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But there are some who can't take yes for an answer. In some quarters President Bush, the leader responsible for these triumphs, is himself under siege. Even Salon, after initially praising the president and his handling of the war, has gone on the offensive. Its regular Bushed! column seems dedicated to the notion that the president hasn't done anything right since the military victory in Afghanistan, and overall, wasn't up to the job of president in the first place (I've asked in another column how Salon can praise Bush's handling of the war and still think he's stupid, and still haven't received an answer.)

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My critics' optimism that the poorly reasoned case for reparations could never gain a mainstream hearing was misplaced. Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree has teamed up with the godfather of the reparations movement, Randall Robinson, to put a new legal spin on the issue. Ogletree and a team of billion-dollar class action attorneys are smart enough to know taxpayers might not be thrilled about the reparations idea. So they're going after everybody's favorite enemy, American corporations, trying to make them pay reparations for their ancient ties to slavery, in the hopes that a more general push for reparations from Congress might take off from there. And they may well succeed.

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Chomskyites who read "The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky (Part I)" have complained to me that my refutation of Chomsky was not achieved "by reasoned argument or detailing the errors of fact or logic in his writings and statements, but by character assassination and the trivializing of Chomsky's strongly held beliefs through accusations that they were unpatriotic."

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There are many who ask how it is possible that our most privileged and educated youth should come to despise their own nation -- a free, open, democratic society -- and to do so with such ferocious passion. They ask how it is possible for American youth to even consider lending comfort and aid to the Osama bin Ladens and the Saddam Husseins (and the Communists before them). A full answer would involve a search of the deep structures of the human psyche, and its irrepressible longings for a redemptive illusion. But the short answer is to be found in the speeches and writings of an embittered academic and his intellectual supporters.

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