Those on the Alinskyite left understood the campaign to be merely a charade necessary to grab the reins of power

Selections: Andrew C. McCarthy, The House Divided

Bill Bennett and Seth Leibsohn don’t mince words on NRO:

“Allowing the running down of a part of the United States by the head of a foreign government, at the White House, standing next to the president — who not only didn’t challenge him, but encouraged him — is a foreign- and domestic-policy catastrophe.”

[F]or the first time in our history, we have a president who would be much more comfortable sitting in a room with Bill Ayers than sitting in a room with me. We have a governing class that is too often comfortable with anti-American radicals, with rogue and dysfunctional governments that blame America for their problems, and with Muslim Brotherhood ideologues who abhor individual liberty, capitalism, freedom of conscience, and, in general, Western enlightenment. To this president and his government, I am the problem. Americans who champion life, liberty, and limited government are not just the loyal opposition; they are deemed potential terrorists, and are derided with considerably more intensity than the actual terrorists. Arizona — for criminalizing criminal activity, for defending its sovereignty and protecting its citizens’ lives and property — is slandered as a human-rights violator. . .

To be elected, candidate Obama had to run as a post-partisan moderate, a pragmatic centrist who would not be constrained by ideology. Two camps well knew that this was nonsense: those few of us on the right who bothered to study Obama’s record, and those on the Alinskyite left who understood the campaign to be merely a charade necessary to grab the reins of power. It was the second camp we saw standing and cheering for Calderón in Congress on Thursday. They used him as a vehicle to condemn Arizona. . .

Whatever that country may be, it is not America as we know it. Quite the opposite: Its purpose is to remake America, to render it unrecognizable to those who love America as she is, or has been. To that frightening new country, the rest of us are Arizona. We are here to be jeered and loathed. We are necessary only to pay for the unsustainable Change.

That, however, is not supposed to be the social contract, not for most of us. We don’t aspire to be citizens of the world. America suits us just fine. Arizona suits us just fine. And while the Alinskyites know they need us to underwrite their utopia, we will eventually figure out that we don’t need them to govern — and bankrupt — us.

A nation is a big, bumptious thing. It needn’t agree on everything. It can even bitterly disagree on major things. But to be a nation, a People, it has to agree that it has a shared destiny: that its unique culture, core principles, and independence are worth preserving, protecting, and defending.

I didn’t see a shared destiny during those moments in the People’s House Thursday.