For close to a half-century now, ever since his first book in 1965, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, the best writer in America has been Tom Wolfe. He told the story of the Hippie Sixties in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) and contrasted it with the Heroes of the Sixties, the original Seven Astronauts, in The Right Stuff (1979).  No one can skewer lefties with a literary rapier better than Wolfe - as he proved in his portrayal of "limousine liberals" (he coined the term) in Radical Chic (1970).  His exposure of the lefty fraud of Modern Art and its nostalgie de la boue (nostalgia for the mud) in The Painted Word (1975), is breathtakingly hilarious. He has written four novels, the first in 1987, The Bonfire of the Vanities, which was made into a movie starring Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Bruce Willis.  The last is brand new, coming out less than a month ago, Back to Blood. The "blood" isn't about gore but ethnicity, specifically the ethnic divisions between Cubans, Whites, Blacks and others in today's Miami.  But it's neither the plot nor the characters that we're focusing on here, but Wolfe's tale of The Micturating Monkey - for it is of enormous relevance to conservatives.  It reveals the strategy by which the Left can be defeated.

I might as well confess this right at the start:  this is the saddest Thanksgiving of my life.  I am still having a very difficult time coping with Nov. 6.  Yes, the number of Moron Uneducated Mooching Taxtaking Americans has increased under Zero enough to get close enough to the margin of fraud, enabling the Dems to steal it via voter suppression and theft.  But what really made it within the margin of fraud is what hurts the most:  That millions of non-Democrats - Republicans, Conservatives, Libertarians - chose to not vote for Romney, thus choosing of their own free will to destroy their country in an act of malicious sado-masochism. My term for them is Platonic Conservatives, Platonic Libertarians.  The basic philosophical battle of Western Civilization has for 23 centuries been between Plato and Aristotle - between Platonists who believe the perfect must be the enemy of the good, and Aristotelians who believe it must not. Romney is a good man, an infinitely better man than Zero - yet the Platonists demanded perfection.  The difference between a Romney Presidency and that of Zero's is not between Heaven and Hell, for neither of them exist here on earth, any more than does Plato's World of Forms.  The difference is an America that would have started digging itself out of a fascist pit, and one that will now dig itself ever more deeply into it.  On Nov. 6, the Platonists chose the latter. Freedom is fragile.  Once freedom is gone -- especially if it is thrown away not taken away -- it is very difficult to get it back.  As the great polymath Jacob Bronowski observes in his masterpiece, The Ascent of Man: "We are being weighed in the balance at this moment. If we give up, the next step will be taken, but not by us. We have not been given any guarantee that Assyria and Egypt and Rome were not given. The ascent of man will go on, but don't assume that it will go on carried by Western civilization as we know it."

When we began the Washington Rendezvous last Friday (11/09), all of us were still shell-shocked.  By the time it ended on Sunday, we were determined to not let the travesty of this absurd election stand.  We first agreed that the stupidest thing to do is form a circular firing squad, like so many pundits and others are doing, pointing the finger of blame at Mitt Romney, the RNC, or other Republican targets. The blame does not lie with Romney, who was the smartest, most decent, and most capable presidential candidate we could possibly have nominated.  The blame lies with the idiots who voted for Zero, the CorruptMedia, and the Dems who rigged the voting machines. I believe it was the latter who stole the election and that Romney was the legitimate winner.  Regardless, the bottom line is that at least half of America did not and does not want this Chicago fascist as its president.  So secondly, we agreed that scores of millions of Americans are mad as hell about this Fascist Fraud in the White House.  The question is: what do we do about it? The answer is we - this means you, Tea Partyers - organize and conduct a Revolution of Disobedience. 

I'm in an airport in Europe waiting to fly back to a country that is no longer mine.  It's 9am here, 3am in the East Coast, and Romney has conceded.  I'll be all day getting back, so I thought I'd put down a few words before boarding time. The science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein once wrote a book entitled Stranger In A Strange Land.  I'm that stranger now, America is that strange land.  A majority of my fellow Americans performed seppuku yesterday, plunging the tonto ceremonial short blade into their country's abdomen and disemboweled it.  America died yesterday, right before our eyes.  Right now I am incapable of understanding or explaining how this could possibly happen. I went to bed last night sure I would be flying off to a joyous celebration at our Rendezvous, where we would plan together the rebirth of American freedom.  I woke up to my horror realizing that I'm headed to a funeral instead. Yet that funeral for our country, as heartbreaking as that is, must not be our funeral.  The most important thing we must do at this moment is commit to survive - for ourselves, our families, for our loved ones.  We are facing a national and historic tragedy of monstrous proportions.  But we must not let it be our personal tragedy. So rather than our Rendezvous in Washington this weekend be, as we hoped, Preparing for the Nobama Future, it will now be Surviving the Obama Future. We have to face the reality of what has happened, and figure out how to personally triumph over it.  This must be our first priority.  Only then can we even begin to figure out how to rescue our country.  It's like the airline flight attendant telling you, in an emergency, to place the oxygen mask over yourself first, and then over your child. It's at a time like this that I most clearly remember sitting on my grandfather's knee as a young boy and him telling me the Wheeler Family Motto.  I suggest that it be the TTP Motto today: There is a solution to every problem The sun will shine after every storm The soul's highest purpose is to be of good cheer. I'm on my way to the Rendezvous - and I hope you will be too.

Looks like no one will be able to recognize Zero's political hit man, David Axelrod, after next week, as he'll be shaving off his mustache.  The Nightmare of Zero will soon be over.  It's time to start thinking about and preparing for the coming Nobama Future. You can start preparing for the Nobama Future right this very moment by reading Joel Wade's Rat Brain.  Joel describes it: "The feeling sense - the sensation in your body of stress and anxiety when you feel the urge to check the polls, or linger too long surfing the web for hopeful news stories; coupled with the anticipation of relief or reward when you find some good news, and a great compulsion to go toward that reward - is your rat brain at work." Is this you?  I confess - it sure is me.  With four days to go until America's fate is decided, my rat brain is in hyper-drive.  Joel's advice on how to handle this comes just in time, and I'm taking it to heart.  I'm ordering my dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to tell my rat brain to shut up - as it understands that Romney is going to win going away. So - the next thing to do in preparing for the Nobama Future is making sure you'll be at the TTP Victory Rendezvous next weekend (Nov. 09-11).  We have added a number of extraordinary speakers (see below). One thing we'll be focusing on at RXIII is the dreaded Transition - the 76 days between Election and Inauguration Days, an enormously long time during which Zero could engage in a gargantuan amount of mischief and revenge.  What damage could he do?

There are 19 days to go.  We must continually keep Yogi Berra's wisdom in mind:  "It's never over until it's over."  Yet the momentum,  the energy, of the campaign is clearly and obviously surging in Romney's direction.  With every day that passes, it becomes massively more difficult for Zero and his minions to reverse it. We all know that if voters choose to elect Zero, it will be a willful act of seppuku, the ritual suicide of America by disembowelment.  There is no chance our country will recover in the foreseeable future.  Anyone who thinks some group of capitalist heroes will emerge out of the pages of Atlas Shrugged to resurrect America from Zero's ashes is indulging in a complete fantasy.  There will be nothing left but ashes. Mitt Romney is as close to a capitalist hero as we're going to get.  He's no John Galt or Hank Rearden.  All he gives us is a chance, and that's all we can reasonably ask of history or reality.  Actually, not one chance, but a large number of chances or opportunities available for us take advantage of.  Let us count the ways, and identify the Losers of the Left.

Beijing.  I've just come back from two weeks in a hermetically sealed land.  No internet, no cell phones, no contact with the outside world.  It is George Orwell's 1984 made real, where its inhabitants truly, deeply, passionately love and worship Big Brother. These people were born on an isolated political island cut off from the world, and have lived all their lives surrounded by a sea of state-worship propaganda.  The State makes every effort to prevent them from learning anything about their country or the world it doesn't want them to. The word that summarizes being here is suffocation.  You are constantly, ubiquitously, unrelentingly suffocated with the deification of the rulers.  The films on television or in the theatres are propaganda productions without exception, with unending smiling, laughing, happy faces, everyone so joyously doing whatever their work is. There is never, ever, the slightest hint of criticism, cynicism, or irony.  All forms of art are suffocatingly saccharine, all the pictures, paintings, songs and singing are beautiful, smiling, and sugary sweet.  This is the Land Without Irony, where Doubt is never permitted. You'd think that this is the world's craziest country.  But after returning from my second venture into it - I was here two years ago as well - I am convinced that it isn't.  I'm now headed for one even crazier - much crazier, in fact.  Where have I been and where am I going?

I'm in a place so bizarre that one of the folks I'm with describes being here as an out-of-body experience.  The internet is not allowed for anyone in the country (save for the ruling elite), and we are not allowed to have cell phones - so we are simply cut off from the rest of the world. Yesterday (9/20), I ran into a British guy who had just arrived.  Any news about the US? I asked.  "This tremendous scandal of Romney's has exploded," he replied.  I sighed.  He explained: "He was caught on a secret video telling a group in Florida that 47% of voters think they are ‘victims' who the government has to take care of, so they will vote for Obama no matter what." I was befuddled.  "Why is that a scandal?  That's the plain truth," I stammered.  He shook his head.  "Your press doesn't think so.  All your papers and television are treating his words as so outrageous that his campaign may be dead, that Obama's reelection is now assured." With that, I realized that my own country is on its way to becoming as crazy as the one I'm in.  Call it an out-of-country experience.  So I wrote this up, put it on a thumb drive, am giving it to a friend who's leaving today and will email it to Miko for posting on TTP.  Hope this works, as I'll be here until the end of the month and you won't hear from me again until then.

[The original version of this ran in 2005] Today, September 11, 2012, we commemorate the eleventh anniversary of a day of Islamic infamy. A day that will remain an indelible moral stain on the Islamic religion, and an acute moral embarrassment to all the world's Moslems. The Atrocity of 9/11 was performed in their name, claimed by its perpetrators to be justified by Allah. Imagine if a group of terrorist Christians committed a hideous atrocity of like magnitude upon a Moslem population in the name of Jesus Christ. The entire world Christian community would experience an explosion of revulsion. There would be no dancing in Christian streets, no attempts to excuse or justify it, nothing but a wholesale rejection of the disgusting claim that Jesus would sanction such an act. Christians all over the world would join the hunt to find the Christian terrorists responsible and do all they could to bring them to justice. The world Moslem community has done no such thing with regard to Al Qaeda. There are individual Moslems who have done so, and there are Moslem groups who pretend to, but there has been nothing remotely close in the Moslem world compared to what it would be in the Christian. Yes, there are plenty of "moderate" Moslems. The questions they need to ask themselves are: Why should I participate in a faith that allows its followers such as Osama Bin Laden to disgrace, insult, and humiliate it? Is this a faith that is an impotent loser, or simply doesn't care about its worshippers? How can Islam today be a faith worthy of worship? It needs to be made clear that as presently constituted, Islam no longer has a future. It is finished as a world force capable of challenging the West. That is why most Moslems dream of ancient Islamic glory centuries ago.