By Dave Andrusko

When I got back from the printer’s this afternoon, having placed the final touches on the special January 22 Commemorative Issue of National Right to Life News, I found an email from a friend of mine in my in-box. Like me, he is Civil War buff and he had forwarded me a piece from the Washington Post.

The Post, which takes itself dreadfully seriously, runs a series under the headline “Five Myths About…” Some of them are spot-on, others are just opportunities to promote the writer’s own bias in the guise of debunking a “myth.” The latest entry had to do with the Civil War.

For me it was an interesting juxtaposition While waiting for the latest issue to roll off the presses, I read a piece from the latest issue of “Democracy: A Journal of Ideas,” which is the kind of journal that spends much of its time telling us how wonderful Barack Obama is.

It’s late in the day, so I don’t have time to enumerate the “Five Myths about Barack Obama” which you find contained in Alan Brinkley’s review of a new book titled, “Reading Obama” by James T. Kloppenberg, a professor of History at Harvard. Let me just mention just two.

First, I have no problem with anyone telling us that President Obama is brilliant, if that be their opinion. (In Brinkley’s view, “Obama is one of the most articulate and intelligent men ever to have been president.”) Obama does not come across that way in public settings—smart, but hardly brilliant-- but perhaps he does in private.

What I object to in Brinkley’s review is that he seems to share a bias common to Obama admirers: the belief that among Obama’s biggest problems is that he is analytical and cool while his opponents are angry hayseeds who need all ten fingers in order to count. In stooping to talk with them, we’re told, Obama wastes precious political time.

But perhaps a better explanation is that (a) we just disagree with a man who is a point man for the Abortion Establishment; and (b) the reason Obama did what he did often had nothing to do with time spent talking sloooowly to his supposed intellectual inferiors and everything to do with his own lack of executive skills and the fact that his proposed course of action (see ObamaCare) was staggering in scope and audacity, and flawed from stem to stern

I ask you to take time to read this simply because we will hear this refrain over and over again, especially now that pro-abortion Democrats no longer command both Houses of Congress. But repetition doesn’t make it true.

Obama is not “pragmatic,” but an ideologue of the first order. One tenet of his real philosophy is that there is nothing—nothing—the abortion industry wants that he won’t promote, even as he tells us (yet again) he is striving to reach “common ground.”

Some people will fall for this—again. We never did-- nor will we ever.

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