Remember Barack Obama telling his followers to always "bring a gun to a knife fight"? Like good subjects do, his supporters in Texas obeyed. Friday (8/15), Texas Gov. Rick Perry was indicted on two counts of abuse of power.  This ridiculous politically motivated "indictment" of Governor Rick Perry stems from the ugly thug tactics of the "politics of personal destruction" that the left is known for. They draw blood and leave scars on conservatives who threaten their political power, hoping the threat retreats and hoping his or her base of support remains silent in fear of becoming collateral damage. First and foremost, today's liberals have no shame. Case in point: Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg.  Here are the drunk, ugly, and thuggish details.

I was having dinner with Robin Williams' next door neighbor when we both learned of his suicide.  We were on a cruise ship on the Baltic Sea, where I was a lecturer.  We were both shocked at the news, he less than me. "I didn't know him well," he said, "and mostly saw him when he was walking his dog along our street in Tiburon.  He was always friendly and had a nice smile for you.  I must say, though, that over the last couple of weeks, he seemed quite depressed as if a dark heavy cloud was pushing down on him.  As a medical doctor, I was concerned." Most any of us can rattle off their favorite Robin Williams movies.  Mine are Dead Poets Society, Good Will Hunting, Hook, Jumanji, Good Morning, Vietnam - and my favorite of all, Moscow on the Hudson.  Made in 1984, it was wonderfully pro-American and anti-Soviet. He was extraordinarily gifted and talented, beloved and admired by millions, wildly successful, enormously famous, and mega-rich.  Yet at 63 in the prime of his life, he willfully terminated his existence.  Whatever demons he had living in his brain, he let them defeat him.  There should be a sobering lesson in his tragedy for us as Americans.

Barack Obama has a plan.  He wants to use the ceasefire talks in Cairo to strengthen Fatah, aka the "Palestinian Authority."  In remarks Wednesday (8/06), Obama said: "I have no sympathy for Hamas. I have great sympathy for some of the work that has been done in cooperation with Israel and the international community by the Palestinian Authority. And they've shown themselves to be responsible. They have recognized Israel.  They are prepared to move forward to arrive at a two-state solution. I think [PA Chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, aka] Abu Mazen is sincere in his desire for peace." While the administration's new plan sounds nice in theory, it has one basic problem. Hamas and Fatah are partners. Hamas's demands are Fatah's demands. Hamas's goals are Fatah's goals. Giving Fatah control of the borders means giving Hamas control of the borders. Abbas said himself in a speech broadcast on the PA's official station in December 2009 , as he was trying to form the sort of Fatah-Hamas unity government that he established in April, "There is no disagreement between us [Fatah and Hamas]: About belief? None! About policy? None! About resistance? None!" So what is Mr. Obama's Plan of Perfidy trying to accomplish?

"How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?" Adolf Hitler asked his party members in 1920. No one thought it an odd question. Anti-Semitism was at that time widely understood to be part of the broader revolutionary movement against markets, property and capital. The man who coined the term "socialism," the nineteenth-century French revolutionary Pierre Leroux, had told his comrades: "When we speak of the Jews, we mean the Jewish spirit - the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, of speculation; in a word, the banker's spirit." The man who popularized the term "anti-Semitism" had taken a similar line. Wilhelm Marr, a radical nineteenth-century German Leftist, may not have been the first person to use the word, but he certainly - and approvingly - brought it to a wide audience: "Anti-Semitism is a Socialist movement," he pronounced, "only nobler and purer in form than Social Democracy". It's a measure of the modern Left's cultural dominance that simply to recite these quotations is jarring. That we have largely edited such facts from our collective memory says a great deal about the assumptions of modern politics. In the puerile formula that seems to dictate our definitions, Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty so, since anti-Semitism is nasty, it must be of the Right. Such reasoning is not confined to self-righteous seventeen-year-olds; it has, bizarrely, taken over a large chunk of our public discourse.

In eastern Ukraine, Vladimir V. Putin has been playing with fire.  He has mobilized the worst elements to be found in the region. He has taken thugs, thieves, rapists, ex-cons and vandals and turned them into a paramilitary force. He has permitted ad hoc commanders of separatist groups to kill or chase off intellectuals, journalists and other moral authorities in the cities of Donetsk and Lugansk. He has watched as a vodka-soaked rabble army destroys or takes over public buildings, hospitals, schools and municipal offices of the country it is pretending to liberate. He has allowed a veritable gang war to take hold - without caring that he is losing control of the forces that he has unleashed, with rival bands pitted against one another and carving out fiefs amid the growing anarchy. Most troubling of all:

Operation Protective Edge is now two weeks old. Since the ground offensive began last Thursday (7/17) night, we have begun to get a better picture of just how dangerous Hamas has become in the nine years since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip. And what we have learned is that the time has come to take care of this problem. It cannot be allowed to fester or grow anymore. As an example, Hamas tunnels have been found with shafts rigged with bombs located directly under Israeli kindergartens. As a member of the Moslem Brotherhood, Hamas is not a stand-alone terror group. It is part of a much larger web of Islamic jihadist terror groups including al-Qaida and its affiliates as well as the Shi'ite Hezbollah. Like Hamas, all of these threaten several major Sunni Arab states. Due to their recognition of the threat Hamas and its allies pose to the survivability of their regimes, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have taken the unprecedented step of supporting Israel's efforts to defeat Hamas. Israel is making good progress.  But it hasn't completed its missions. It needs several more days of hard fighting.  Recognizing this, Israel's newfound Moslem allies - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE - have not been pushing for a cease-fire. In contrast, the Obama administration is coming to Hamas' rescue by insisting on concluding a cease-fire immediately.

Here's what the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 means: Russia, with Vladimir Putin at the wheel, just drove off the edge of a cliff. The moment Flight 17 exploded was the moment that Putin's foreign policy officially went over the ledge, and with it his dreams of restored Russian greatness. Putin is deflecting blame, of course. He has no choice: he armed, paid, and unleashed a ragtag army of goons in eastern Ukraine, under the command of a Russian intelligence officer who was supposed to provide some adult supervision. Now they've betrayed the Kremlin and screwed up. Putin, a typical and mediocre product of Andropov's KGB, will never again be able to portray himself as a savvy, cool broker in international affairs, nor Russia as just another great power. Now, he's just another Soviet-era thug, a perception that was already growing before the Malaysian airliner plunged out of the sky. No matter how the current crisis ends, Putin's name will forever be tied to this outrage, and his personal bid to create a more respected Russia through violence and intimidation is permanently defunct.

The greatest conspiracy in world history is being carried out by the real-life "Manchurian Candidate": President Barack Hussein Obama. My definition of a "Manchurian Candidate" is a person who hates everything America stands for and whose goal is to win the presidency for the express purpose of destroying the greatest nation, the greatest economic system, and the greatest middle class in world history. That, my friends, describes Obama. I'm not basing it on rumors or innuendo. I'm basing it on the facts. I know liberals hate facts, but bear with me. So here are a few, which I lay out more fully in my new book, The Murder of the Middle Class: For the first time in American history more businesses are closing each day than they are starting. More Americans now receive entitlements than work full-time. There are now 70 percent more Americans collecting entitlement checks than working in the private sector (148 million "takers" vs. 86 million "makers"). The average full-time male employee now earns less (adjusted for inflation) than he did forty years ago. Twenty percent of U.S. families don't have a single member who is employed.

An Open Letter to the President Dear Mr. President: My apologies for missing your commencement address at the University of California at Irvine on June 14, honoring the 50th anniversary of one of our fine academic institutions. Meetings with my constituents just seemed more pressing, and, of course, we can meet back in Washington whenever it's convenient for you. In any case, between fundraisers and enjoying the "Zot! Zot! Zot!" chants of the graduating Anteaters, the questions I have raised about your "green" agenda clearly were on your mind. You evidently determined that ridiculing those, like me, who question your "settled" science would be the best way to make your case. To the laughing grads, you said: "And today's Congress is full of folks who stubbornly and automatically reject the scientific evidence about climate change. They will tell you it is a hoax, or a fad. There was one member of Congress who mentioned a theory involving ‘dinosaur flatulence' - which I won't get into." Mr. President, we both know I have referred to the theory of man-made global warming as a "hoax," and, yes, I once used the phrase "dinosaur flatulence" as lighthearted ridicule at what I considered to be climate alarmism. What I have learned is never to underestimate humorless zealots, especially those cloaked in the pretensions of "science." One of the traits of a fanatic is the willingness to conduct personal attacks, to limit debate, to use questionable facts and to seek government to impose policy on others. Sir, my congressional colleagues and I cannot ignore costs when making decisions. Simply put, no matter how apocalyptic the theory behind it, we cannot make this crony-capitalist concoction of yours into a policy priority.