It has now been revealed that the Boston Marathon bombers were two Muslims from southern Russia near Chechnya: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a firefight with Massachusetts police early this morning, and his brother Dzhokhar, who as of this writing is still at large.

As more and more material comes to light about the pair, their motivations become clear. On a Russian-language social media page, Dzhokhar features a drawing of a bomb under the heading “send a gift,” and just above links to sites about Islam. Tamerlan’s YouTube page features two videos by Sheikh Feiz Mohammed. According to a report published in The Australian in January 2007, in a video that came to the attention of authorities at the time, Mohammed “urges Muslims to kill the enemies of Islam and praises martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad.”

Tamerlan also says, “I’m very religious.” He notes that he does not drink alcohol because Allah forbids it: “God said no alcohol,” and that his Italian girlfriend has converted to Islam. Even his name indicates the world from which he comes: Tamerlan Tsarnaev is apparently named for the Muslim warrior Tamerlane. Andrew Bostom wrote in 2005 that “Osama bin Laden was far from the first jihadist to kill infidels as an expression of religious piety….Osama lacks both Tamerlane’s sophisticated (for his time) military forces and his brilliance as a strategist. But both are or were pious Muslims who paid homage to religious leaders, and both had the goal of making jihad a global force.”

Combine all that with the fact that the bombs were similar to IED’s that jihadis use in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a jihad car bomb in Times Square jihad car bomber, used a similar bomb, and that instructions for making such a bomb have been published in al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, and the motivations of the Tsarnaev brothers are abundantly clear. It is increasingly likely also that they were tied in somehow to the international jihad network, as is indicated by how they fought off Boston police early on Friday with military-grade explosives – where did they get those And where did they get the military training that they reportedly have, and displayed in several ways during the fight Friday morning

Yet despite all this, the mainstream media continues to obfuscate the truth. NBC doesn’t see fit to mention any of the brothers’ connections to Islam in their profile of them. CNN warns that “it should not be assumed that either brother was radicalized because of their Chechen origins.” And this, of course, follows days of speculation about how the bombings appeared to be the work of “right-wing extremists,” “Tea Partiers,” and the like. According to Victor Medina in the Examiner, “Esquire Magazine’s Charles P. Pierce attempted to link the bombings to right wing extremists similar to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. In another, CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen speculated that the type of bomb device could link it to right wing extremist groups.” Salon hoped that the bomber would turn out to be a “white American.”

Will Pierce, Bergen, and all the others who offered similar analyses apologize now They almost certainly will not – and even worse, they will not be held accountable. No matter how often mainstream analysts are wrong, they never get questioned or jettisoned.

But in one sense, they were right: the bombers were indeed white, if not American. That demonstrates once and for all the vacuity of the mainstream media and Islamic supremacist claim that opposing jihad and Islamic supremacism is “racism.” Islam is not a race, and the massacre of innocent civilians is not a race. Opposing jihad is not racism, but the defense of freedom. The Tsarnaev brothers have confirmed that. However, nothing is more certain than that next week, Islamic supremacist and Leftist spokesmen will be featured on NBC and CNN decrying “racism” and an imagined “backlash” against innocent Muslims, which is always a feature of mainstream media coverage after a jihad attack, even though the “backlash” itself never actually materializes.

And there will be no accountability for that nonsense, either. Nowadays, it’s much more of a path to success to be politically correct than to be correct.

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In what has become a depressingly familiar EU template, yet another “eleventh hour” deal was reached between the European Central Bank (ECB) the European Commission (EC) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — known as the “troika” — and Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades to avoid national bankruptcy. “It’s been yet another hard day’s night,” European Union Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn told reporters in Brussels, where the deal was put together. “There were no optimal solutions available, only hard choices.”

Hard choices indeed. In return for a $13 billion ($10 billion Euro) bailout, the tiny Mediterranean nation has agreed to wind down Laiki Bank, Cyprus’s second largest, wiping out thousands of jobs in the process. Depositors holding more than $130,000 will take potentially huge losses, the percentage of which has yet to be determined. But because the bank is expected to yield approximately $5.4 billion to satisfy the latest agreement, it is estimated that those losses will be as much as 40 percent, more than four times the 9.9 percent that was part of the deal rejected by the Cypriot parliament in a unanimous 36-0 vote last week.

No parliamentary vote will be required this time around. In the previous deal, the bailout money confiscated from bank accounts was going to be raised by imposing a nationwide tax on bank accounts that were both insured and uninsured. Imposing a tax required a vote by the Cypriot parliament. Because this new grab only targets uninsured accounts at Laiki Bank and the Bank of Cyprus, nine laws passed last Friday by parliament allowing bank “restructures” to go forward means no further vote is required.

Depositors with less than $130,000 in holdings will remain ”fully guaranteed.” In a deal reminiscent of the TARP bailout, Laiki Bank will be immediately dissolved into a “bad bank” containing uninsured deposits and toxic assets, while the remaining insured deposits with be transferred to the “good” Bank of Cyprus, the nation’s largest lending institution.

EU-philes and other assorted leftists offered their typical rationale for this latest effort. The New York Times framed the deal as one that would “prune the size of Cyprus’s oversize banking sector, bloated by billions of dollars from Russia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union.” IMF leader Christine Lagarde called it a ”a comprehensive and credible plan” to restore faith in the nation’s banking system. French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici deemed the deal necessary because Cyprus is “a casino economy that was on the brink of bankruptcy.” Cypriot Finance Minister Michalis Sarris claimed that “we really have avoided a disastrous exit from the eurozone.” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Shaeuble contended the agreement was “capable of stabilizing the situation in Cyprus.”

The realists were far less sanguine. ”This decision is painful for the Cypriot people. This decision was a defeat of solidarity, of social cohesion, which are fundamental freedoms, fundamental principles of the European Union,” Parliament President Yiannakis Omirou told AP. ”So as soon as possible we have to prepare our economy to go out from the mechanism and the troika,” he added. Nicholas Papadopolous, chairman of the Cypriot parliament’s finance committee, was far more direct. ”We are heading for a deep recession, high unemployment. [The troika] wanted to send a message that the Cypriot economy ought to be destroyed, and they’ve succeeded in a large part-they’ve destroyed our banking sector,” he told the BBC. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev spelled out the meaning of the deal in no uncertain terms. ”The stealing of what has already been stolen continues,” he said.

Perhaps the most amazing-and utterly naive-aspect of this deal is the idea that what has happened in Cyprus will stay in Cyprus. UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage called on British expats in Spain to pull their money out of Spanish banks, contending the EU leaders had “crossed a line” in Cyprus. “There is going to be a big flight of money and that flight of money won’t just be from Cyprus, it will be from the other eurozone countries, too,” he warned. “There are 750,000 British people who own properties, or who live, many of them in retirement, down in Spain. Now that we see the EU are prepared to resort to anything to keep alive their failing euro project, our advice to expats living down in the Mediterranean must be, ‘Get your money out of there while you’ve still got a chance.’”

Christopher Pissarides, a Nobel prize-winning economist advising President Nicos Anastasiades, contended that the troika is treating Cyprus “far worse” than other EU basket cases that needed bailouts, and predicts that ”the way we deal with this situation has implications for the rest of Europe.” “We have a German finance minister who comes and tells us Cypriots that ‘We don’t like your economic model, bankrupt your banks and you can sort it out on the way’…The difference with Cyprus is that it is small. Is Luxembourg going to be next in line Is Malta going to be next in line Small members of the Eurozone beware,” he cautioned.

In the same Friday session during which bank restructuring laws were passed, the Cypriot parliament also imposed capital controls to prevent a likely stampede of money out of the country. Yet the EC, claiming they were acting on behalf of “Cypriot authorities” said that such controls, which violate EU laws regarding the free flow of capital, can only be imposed for a short time. ”This is a restriction on movement that may only last a few days,” said Michel Barnier, the Commissioner responsible for the EU’s single market.

Cypriot banks are supposed to open today, after imposing cash withdrawal limits at bank machines over last weekend when Cypriots began withdrawing their money in droves. At first, they could withdraw 400 Euros, then 260, and then only 100 Euros, after the central bank in Cyprus stepped into prevent a run. Cash was king over the weekend as well, as several retailers refused to take credit cards or checks. “It’s been cash-only here for three days,” said Ali Wissom, a restaurant manager in Nicosia. “The banks have closed, we don’t really know if they will reopen, and all of our suppliers are demanding cash-even the beer company.”

It will undoubtedly get worse. Russians, who maintain accounts totaling $31 billion of the total $88 billion held in Cypriot banks, will surely find other places to put their money, after having been caught flat-footed by this deal. Dozens of them descended on the country last week to vent their anger at Cypriot officials. Fedor Mikhin, who owns an international shipping business, illuminated the implications. “The locals should understand: as soon as the money leaves, the people who go to restaurants, buy cars and buy property leave too,” he said. “The Cypriots’ means of living will disappear. They are saying we laundered all the money, but they lived on that money for ten years and forgot about it,” he added.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso insists the future is less certain.”I am confident that the program will work, but let’s be honest. At this moment, we cannot say exactly what the impact is going to be,” he told reporters. ”It will depend on the level of implementation and the commitment of Cyprus itself.”

The “impact” may be more than monetary. A public poll conducted by Cyprus’s Sigma television reveals that more than 66 percent of those surveyed would be willing to drop the euro and move closer to Russia. Much of the island’s anger has been directed towards the EU in general, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in particular, whose nation Cypriots consider the chief architect behind the deal. “There is a clear danger of this area becoming a platform for confrontation between East and West,” said Harry Tzimitras, director of a research center in Nicosia.

It already has, and the more than 50,000 Russian-speaking people who have come to Cyprus from the former Soviet Union deeply resent the underlying rationale behind this confiscation of funds. “We are not criminals, arms dealers or bootleggers,” said Sergey Ivanov, a Russian who runs a wine business. “There is a generation of Russian businessmen like me who have lost faith in the Russian government, in Russian banks and in Russian laws. That is why we are in Cyprus.” A Nicosia-based lawyer was equally contemptuous. “I don’t understand why it is money laundering when it’s in Cyprus, when in London it’s a perfectly respectable company.”

There is no question that Cyprus has benefited greatly from its 30-year reputation as a tax haven. Foreign companies pay a flat tax rate of just 10 percent, making it extremely attractive to operate there. That reality may explain what this deal is really all about: to send a message that the socialist beast devouring Europe will brook no challenges to its high-tax, supra-nationalist authority despite the reality that it was the supra-nationlists and their lust for a “new world order” under the EU that set the entire “poor southern Europe versus rich northern Europe” dynamic in motion. It is a dynamic that has a financially secure Germany berating its spendthrift southern neighbors for being fiscally irresponsible, even as its heavily export-dependent economy requires such nations to buy German goods.

Ever since the European fiscal crisis began, the bureaucrats in Brussels have successfully convinced the majority of people living in places like Greece, Spain and Italy that national bankruptcy and a return to a national currency would be far more catastrophic than the ongoing austerity measures currently being imposed.

Yet one has to wonder how long that argument will continue to resonate. In Greece, for example, the unemployment rate reached a record-setting 27 percent in November. Almost unbelievably, that rate soars to 61.7 percent for those in the 15-24 age group. They are in their sixth straight year of a “recession,” that is really an outright depression, and their economy shrank another 6.45 percent in 2012. Furthermore, 35 percent of the entire population will be officially living in poverty by the end of 2013, an increase of five percent in just two years, all with no end in sight.

Can national bankruptcy and a return to the drachma, which would then be devalued to attract foreign investment, be any worse

Coming to that conclusion is precisely what the Brussels bureaucrats and the international finance establishment are desperately trying to suppress. Yet in their unrelenting arrogance, they have overplayed their hand. The ultimate fundamental that encourages people to put their money in financial institutions is trust. That trust has now been obliterated. “We now have a new type of rule and everyone within the euro zone has to sit down and see what that implies for their own finances,” warned Christopher Pissarides.

David Folkerts-Landau, chief economist of Deutsche Bank, was far more honest. “If a single country leaves the euro zone, it sets a precedent,” he said last week. “No one will ever again believe that a country will not leave the euro zone.” Whether it stays or goes, Cyprus is facing a nightmarish scenario. What the people of that nation have to figure out is which scenario puts them in a better position for the future.

Cypriots might take their cue from Iceland President Olafur Ragnar Grimson. When that nation faced a banking crisis in 2008, they took a capitalist approach to the problem: they let the banks go under. Five years later, the economy is growing at a three percent clip, and their unemployment rate, which rose to 8.6 percent in January 2011, was down to 5.5 percent in January 2013. At the World Economic Forum in Davos that same month, Grimson posed a fundamental question. ”Why do we consider banks to be like holy churches” he wondered. Perhaps Cypriots-along with a lot of other people-might ask themselves the same question.

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A month before the election that would make Obama the first Democratic Socialists of America member in the White House, another prominent DSA’er wrote a cheerful article about the 160th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the daughter of a Gillette executive, had gone mainstream by writing about poverty in America, but her politics never strayed far from her own roots in a more prosaic Marxism. It wasn’t poverty that Ehrenreich objected to. It was capitalism.

After September 11, Ehrenreich complained that applying the word “evil” to Islamic terrorists made her “nervous.” “The real challenge,” she said, “is to look at terrible acts and try to work our way towards an understanding of how a human being might undertake them.”

But there is one country that the morally ambiguous Barbara Ehrenreich has no difficulty branding as “evil” or refusing to understand. On the list of endorsers for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel, Barbara Ehrenreich’s name appears next to that of her son, Ben.

As the son of John and Barbara Ehrenreich, leftist politics of the worst kind were in Ben Ehrenreich’s DNA, and both mother and son found their calling as pseudo-journalists who exploited other people’s suffering while managing to make the story all about them.

Ben was graced with the typical directionless biography that qualified him to do little except express self-righteous anger on a semi-professional basis. He studied religion at Brown and wrote for alternative newspapers. He packed a backpack and went to dangerous parts of the world and wrote self-centered diatribes about the military-industrial complex.

In Haiti, Ben Ehrenreich declared that Obama’s post-earthquake relief effort was “savage and bestial in its lack of concern for human life.” His Post-Katrina article began by suggesting that New Orleans had been deliberately flooded. In Arizona, he compared policing the Mexican border to the war in Vietnam. One can only imagine what the copy would have read like if he had ever made it to Disneyland.

If Ben’s mother had learned to deliberately tamp down her invective in order to be taken seriously, her son went in the other direction, amping up the volume to hysterical levels until every place he set foot in was the worst place on earth.

After plumbing the depth of such atrocities as the relief effort in Haiti, Arizona border patrols and the plot to flood New Orleans, Ben Ehrenreich eventually found his Disneyland in Israel.

If there was any place where Ben Ehrenreich could fully unleash his histrionic borrowed socio-realist prose filled with dusty landscapes full of hardworking brown peasants threatened by the murderous forces of white capitalist imperialism, it was in the Jewish State. And unlike Haiti or New Orleans, no one would even notice he was writing complete barking lunacy.

Barbara Ehrenreich had found her niche by pretending to care about working people. Her son found his niche by learning to hate Jews. While there’s only so much gain in accusing America of genocide in New Orleans or Haiti; there is a bottomless market for accusations of genocide against Israel.

In a Harper’s article, the same place that helped his mother rocket to fame with her “Nickel and Dimed” stunt, Ben Ehrenreich informed readers that the Jews stole the water from the Muslims. In medieval times, Jews were accused of poisoning the wells. Now they were being accused of emptying them. By the time the screed concluded, the water-stealing Jews stood accused of starting the Six Day War for water and of hydrological ethnic cleansing.

But Ben Ehrenreich couldn’t be satisfied with chanting “No Blood for Water.” In an LA Times op-ed he declared that Zionism was the only reason that Jews and Arabs couldn’t get along, introduced a reference to Israel as “the Hitlerian concept” and informed readers that his Marxist grandparents (on his father’s side) saw Zionism as a distraction from class warfare.

“It has been all but impossible to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite,” Ben Ehrenreich complained in the same whiny tone of every bigot outraged at the unfairness of the social disapproval for bigotry. And then he went on to denounce Israel as worse than South Africa, equate Hamas with Israel and to propose the destruction of Israel as the only solution to terrorism.

Having done all that, the man who exposed the plot to flood New Orleans with water and the Jewish conspiracy to steal all the water, was stuck on the horns of a dilemma. Once you’ve called for the destruction of Israel, where do you go next The answer is Disneyland. For professional provocateurs like Ehrenreich, whose M.O. is to always escalate the violent rhetoric, Disneyland is spelled “Intifada.”

“If There Is a Third Intifada, We Want to be the Ones Who Started It,” Ehrenreich’s New York Times Magazine cover story headline screams. The “we” was meant to refer to the rogue’s gallery of anti-Israel portraits decorating the cover, but of course it really referred to Ben Ehrenreich who had finally found his Disneyland in a village filled with terrorists. The sort of men who were willing to do what he could only write about.

Ehrenreich’s prose lavishes a great deal of love on the ground, the hills and a swing set. But in his prose, murdered Jews are stripped of all context and identity. They are objects, vague and formless. When a Jew is murdered, he is described only as a “settler” without gender or name.

A cousin of the man whom Ben Ehrenreich’s article is designed to glorify participates in the murder of children in a family restaurant and Ehrenreich dryly describes the atrocity in the passive voice. “Fifteen people were killed, eight of them minors.” One of those passively murdered minors was Hemda, a 2-year-old girl. But that 2-year-old girl is very minor to Ben Ehrenreich.

The fictional novelist-slash-fictional journalist who strives so hard to bring color and life to an argument over a spring has no color or life to spare for entire families wiped out by having nails and bolts from a bomb driven through their bodies while eating lunch. They are non-persons. Water thieves who start all the wars and distract from all the Marxist class struggles.

Like so many of the protest tourists trooping through West Bank towns in $150 keffiyehs hoping to throw some stones over the weekend, sniff some tear gas and then brag about it to everyone back home in Berkeley or Olympia; Ben Ehrenreich is bored.

Wars are his Disneyland. Like his mother, he lives by exploiting misery, feeding off other people’s suffering and passing off the results as political outrage. The New York Times insists on calling Ben Ehrenreich a freelance journalist, but he’s just another privileged political activist looking for a fight. Israel happens to be the place where he can find it.

Ben Ehrenreich searched for his Disneyland in Afghanistan, Mexico, Haiti, Los Angeles and New Orleans. But those places are dangerous and the only real danger in Israel comes from the terrorists whose side he is on.

Like so many privileged children of privileged parents, Ben Ehrenreich is still looking for somewhere to play Peter Pan in a keffiyeh and for someone else to start a war that he won’t get hurt in. If there is to be a Third Intifada, he wants to be the one who started it and wrote about it. And then in the footnotes he will mention, in the passive voice, that some settler minors were killed in the fighting.

If Ehrenreich’s Third Intifada has begun, its first victim may have been Adele Biton, a 3-year-old girl, critically injured after a rock throwing attack.

Just another minor little body. Another victim of the war a bored leftist is so eager to start.

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Τhere are two ways that liberal historians usually look at Stalin. The most leftward of these is to see Stalin as a victim of German and American imperialism who struggled to maintain the peace in the face of aggressive expansionistic efforts by Nazi Germany and the United States.

Such a revisionist history would seem to have been thoroughly discredited in this day and age, despite its persistence in the early days of the Cold War, but it continues resurfacing, most recently in an Oliver Stone documentary series.

But for the most part, Khrushchev’s disavowal of Stalin completed a process that began once the Soviet dictator cut a deal with Hitler, triggering a growing Destalinization cascade on the left. Stalinists still persisted in the West, but their influence on the authoring of history steadily diminished. Instead they embraced a different version of history that would salvage the ideological integrity of the left.

In this more conventional version of history, Stalin was not truly a Communist, but a non-ideological dictator who had seized control of the Soviet ship of state and transformed a promisingly progressive revolution into a backward feudal tyranny.

This version of history had been developed by the Trotskyites and a number of disaffected groups on the left and with the Cold War; it became the conventional version of history. After the fall of the USSR, it was embraced by nationalists looking to resurrect Stalin as a monarch, rather than a party man.

Stalin indeed appeared to have jettisoned bits of the old international Communist agenda and zeroed in on domestic purges. The constant civil bloodshed convinced many of his potential enemies that Stalin’s USSR was mainly a threat to its own people. They viewed Stalin as a domestic tyrant, rather than an international Red Emperor.

But as Robert Gellately argues in Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War, accepting the view of Stalin as a pragmatic tyrant may have been the worst mistake that they ever made.

Gellately takes on both versions of Stalin, contending that the Soviet tyrant was not the victim of warmongering, but the author of the Cold War who had deliberately sought a global conflict for the sake of Communist ideology and Communist power.

The linkage between these two elements is vitally important. By reducing Stalin and his Soviet Union to mere tyrant and tyranny, revisionist liberal historians could successfully argue that they just wanted to be left alone. And if Stalin had been no more than a tyrant and the USSR no more than a pedestal for his cult of personality, that reading of history might have some plausibility.

Only by rediscovering Stalin as an ideological tyrant and the USSR as a Red Empire, as Gellately does, is that revisionist reading of the Cold War rendered null and void.

As early as 1920, Stalin was already envisioning a Red Empire, in Gellately’s words, that would encompass Russia and much of Eastern Europe. Stalin’s actions in both World War II and the Cold War were aimed at realizing that Red Empire.

Gellately takes note of Stalin’s self-definition as a “professional revolutionary and party organizer” and connects it to his international ambitions. The Stalin who emerges in Stalin’s Curse does not represent a break with the leftist history of the revolution, but a continuation of it. While liberal history insists on viewing Stalinism as a break from Leninism, Gellately makes a convincing case for the reign of Stalin as a natural extension of the reign of Lenin.

Most compellingly, Stalin’s Curse argues for recognizing Stalin’s strategic acumen in outwitting FDR and Churchill, as he had been unable to outwit Hitler, using the familiar narrative of Russian victimhood in a war that he had clumsily stumbled into to demand territorial concessions all the way up to Germany.  And yet Stalin’s achievements largely came from the willingness of his Western allies to lose sight of what he was and what he represented.

In one telling moment, that has a dreadful modern resonance, FDR, while staying in the bugged Soviet mission, is warned by Churchill that Stalin was preparing “a Communist replacement for the Polish government.”

The Soviet agent overhearing the conversation listens to FDR accuse Churchill of preparing an anti-Communist government and recalls “thinking how strange it was” for the president to “put Churchill and Stalin on the same plane” and to think of himself as “the arbiter between them.”

That moment is not the only one in Stalin’s Curse that bears such historical echoes. The National Front coalitions that the Soviet Union used to take over Eastern Europe bear a strong similarity to the Islamist coalitions used to take over the Arab Spring. And the willingness of the West to believe the comforting lies that they were told remind us that our disastrous foreign policy did not emerge yesterday.

While Stalin casually disposed of hundreds of thousands of lives, he took few major strategic risks, relying on attrition to do his work for him. As a canny negotiator, Stalin used every peace offer as an opening bid to expand his control replicating his battlefield strategy at the negotiating table

When FDR and Churchill thought that they were shaping a final settlement for Europe, they were actually engaging in an endless bargaining session that would only be settled with the Red Army.

History concerns itself with dry facts, but has less to say about human minds, and so it is difficult to know whether FDR and Churchill were fooled or whether they chose to be fooled. When FDR and Churchill praised Stalin’s integrity and sincerity, had they been deceived by the world’s greatest actor or did they allow themselves to be deceived so that the terrible compromises they made seemed more palatable

This question, like so many of the others in Stalin’s Curse, remains applicable today. While Stalin is dead, there are many lesser Stalins like Morsi, small vicious men with an unlimited capacity for bloodshed and an even more unlimited ability to fool Western leaders into believing in their sincerity and goodness.

The negotiations that allowed Stalin to gobble up so many countries have been repeated again and again. And every time that diplomats call for a diplomatic solution in North Korea and Iran, we find ourselves back sitting across the table from Uncle Joe.

And that may be Stalin’s true curse.

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The Untold History of the United States, by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, weighs in at 750 pages, an elephantine encyclopedia of neo-communist demonology. None of it is “untold” and on every page one hears the sound of a barrel being scraped. David Horowitz rightly called it “unbelievable crap,” but some readers might profit from an examination of the places where the book most needs stool softener and a polygraph test.

This must be the only book endorsed by Bill Maher, Daniel Ellsberg, and Mikhail Gorbachev, which makes sense. The only hero is former vice president Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate for president of the United States in 1948. He’s portrayed here as a kind of American Gorbachev, the only hope to save the United States which, by setting off atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “once again, proved itself unready to provide the kind of leadership a desperate world cried out for.”

The authors tout Wallace’s “Century of the Common Man,” but fail to note that, as one observer put it, Wallace’s Communist backers confused the Common Man with the Comintern. That organization does not appear in the book, which contains material about the USSR, Stalin, Communism and such.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact does appear but consider the treatment of the 1939 alliance that started World War II. It was an “unsavory deal,” Stalin struck with Hitler because he feared a “German-Polish alliance” to attack the USSR. It was actually to divide up Europe and crush the democracies, but that’s how Stalin and his echo-chamber spun it.

True to form, Untold History lists only two atrocities for Stalin, the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest and “having the Red Army stop on the banks of the Vistula while the Germans put down the Warsaw uprising.” Nothing about the genocide noted in the Black Book of Communism and, more recently, Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. The authors even include a photo of Russians mourning Stalin, who at the time of his death in 1953 was about to unleash terror on Soviet Jews, then slandered as “rootless cosmopolitans.”

As Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton noted in The Rosenberg File, American Communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were responsible for giving nuclear weapons to the worst mass murder in history. Here they are only “accused atomic spies.” Stone and Kuznick tout “the legendary Communist-backed Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” but ignore the real story of this Stalinist militia as outlined in Cecil Eby’s Comrades and Commissars.

Stone and Kuznick are not eager to explain what American Stalinists were up to during the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Readers will not learn that they worked in concert with pro-Nazi organizations against the allies, particularly Britain. They picketed the White House and called FDR a “warmonger,” a charge the authors apply to virtually all U.S. Presidents, particularly Reagan, whose chapter is subtitled “Death Squads for Democracy.” No moral equivalence here. In Untold History, the USSR is the peaceful regime.

After World War II the USSR “had no blueprint for postwar Sovietization of Eastern Europe and hoped to maintain friendly and collaborative relations with its wartime allies.” Further, the Soviets “had gone out of their way to guarantee West Berliners’ access to food and coal from the eastern zone or from direct Soviet provisions.” So the heroic Berlin airlift touted in American schools was all for nothing.

The USSR oppressed half or Europe for nearly half a century, smashed reform in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and later invaded Afghanistan. Yet CIA director William Casey’s picture of a “hostile, expansionist USSR” was “an image that didn’t accord with the facts.” And in the1983 the Soviets “mistakenly took a Korean Air Lines passenger jet for a spy plane.”

Thus, the Soviets make “mistakes” and are evaluated by their alleged aspiration for a better world. The United States, on the other hand, commits crimes and is evaluated on the authors’ vision of its record. The USA emerges here as an evil empire eager to spread tyranny and crush the poor by any means necessary. But consider the untold backstory here.

Hollywood leftists, Richard Grenier once observed, charge that America and capitalism are evil – except for their three-picture deal, except for their bank account, except for their Bel-Air mansion, except for their BMW and Mercedes-Benz. So despite JFK, Wall Street, and The Untold History of the United States, Oliver Stone does after all believe in American exceptionalism.

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In 1960, Nixon beat Kennedy in California following up on Eisenhower’s decisive wins over Adlai Stevenson. Nixon won California again in 1968, beating out Humphrey, and then McGovern in 1972. Ford held on to California in 1976, Reagan won it decisively in two elections and Bush held on to it against Dukakis.

All that ended in 1992. No Republican has won California since.

With the largest number of electoral votes in the country, California played a decisive role in Republican presidential victories.  Texas, with the second largest number of electoral votes, a state which leaned Democrat around the same time that California learned Republican, has become the ace in the hole. And if the Democrats can turn Texas blue, then it may be a long time until we see a Republican in the White House.

Jimmy Carter was the last Democrat to win Texas and he was the Democrat who lost Texas. But today’s Democrats are hoping that Hillary Clinton can win Texas back.

On paper Texas does not seem very shaky. Mitt Romney, a Massachusetts moderate, pulled in better numbers than McCain and nearly matched George W. Bush’s numbers in 2000. Romney performed even better than Ronald Reagan did when he first took Texas in 1980. That alone is a sign of how red Texas has gotten in the last thirty years.

So why worry? Demographics are one reason. Texas is approaching the same demographic tipping point as California. Even with Republican 4/10 Latino vote scores, the Texas future is inevitably tilting in a Democratic direction even without the proposed illegal alien amnesty. The demographic tipping point won’t arrive in 2016, but the voter registration and community organizing tipping point might.

Battleground Texas is the new Democratic strategy for doing to the Lone Star State what General Santa Anna tried to do in his time. Their strategy depends on heavy doses of voter registration and community organizing. The two are largely interconnected in urban areas where the Democratic Party’s political machine links together social services, community groups and bloc votes.

In 2012, that machine took a great leap forward by merging community organizer tactics with dot com data mining operations and corporate email lists for a technocratic community organizing machine. With both sides crediting voter turnout and smart data for the win, the Democratic Party is feeling bold enough to head on into Texas.

Battleground Texas may be bravado, a feint to put the Republican Party on the defensive and get it to commit valuable resources to fighting for its formerly safe territories, but it may also be the real deal as a Democratic Party convinced that it can name its own price and do anything with a bunch of emails and a lot of PACs sets the stage for the next Alamo.

Jeremy Bird, Obama’s national campaign field director, who scored big with voter registration in western swing states like Colorado and Nevada, is hoping to help Battleground Texas do the same thing. But Battleground Texas’s actual executive director is Jenn Brown, an Obama campaign veteran, without much local experience, and while its digital director, Christina Gomez, does have that experience, its digital footprint is underwhelming, from its sloppy website to its chummy insider Twitter accounts.

Battleground Texas is mainly talking about itself and its plans for making Texas blue. That may feed the dreams of its New York and California donors, but there’s little there to appeal to non-partisan Texans. Battleground Texas has the usual spin about racial underrepresentation and voting rights indicating that its only real strategy is the race card. And while the race card has yet to wear out, expecting it to tilt Texas over in time for 2016 may be unrealistic.

While Bird promises that he can turn Texas into another Virginia, Texas is a very different place than Virginia. Battleground Texas smacks of an elitist national attempt to bypass the Texas Democratic Party with a lot of college students and not a whole lot of knowledge of the battleground territory. Unlike the old Obama organization which did its dirty work without constantly boasting about it, Battleground Texas has a borrowed ten-gallon hat full of bravado and not a whole lot of cattle, people or anything else to show for it.

Is Battleground Texas overreaching with its plans to spend tens of millions of dollars for a long shot plan to shift Texas? Tellingly Bird is counting on California and New York donors to buy into his plan to turn Texas blue. Texas doesn’t have a shortage of rich Democrats willing to plow money into the party. One of them is financing the Giffords gun control PAC. And yet Bird seems to think that not enough Texas donors will be willing to help Battleground Texas cover its grandiose budget. And that may be because even Texas liberals know that a grand project for the state this decade will be wasted money and effort.

Romney won Texas by 1.2 million votes. Those are formidable numbers and countering them will take big budgets and armies of volunteers that will have to go well outside their Austin comfort zones. Obama picked up Austin’s Travis County, Dallas County, Houston’s Harris County and El Paso County. Voter registration could no doubt find new voters there or duplicate voters, as the Dem machine has a way of doing, but it’s not as if the machine hasn’t already done a pretty thorough job of finding Dem voters in Houston, Austin and Dallas.

While the Democratic Party may be betting that forcing the GOP to fight for Texas will divert their resources, an extensive Democratic engagement with Texas may divert theirs even more. Battleground Texas offers a big dream to lure bicoastal billionaires into splurging money that Democrats could use to win actual battleground states.

A Democratic struggle for Texas backed by big money and bigger ambitions may be another case of fighting a land war in Asia or more aptly, the Blitzkrieg into Russia, with some initially deceptive successes leading to wasted resources and national defeat.

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Defeats are never easy to take and yet every defeat is a necessary learning experience. Reading the memoirs of the greatest athletes and generals, you discover that they learned more from their defeats than from their victories because their victories only taught them their strengths while their defeats forced them to confront their weaknesses.

The Republican defeat in 2012 was a difficult blow, especially coming after the victories of 2010, and its lessons are still being argued and absorbed. Different schools of thought have emerged and different conclusions are being drawn from what took place several months ago. These necessary debates confront us with our weaknesses and prepare us to claim the victories to come.

Last month, Bruce Thornton wrote an article for Front Page Magazine containing his diagnosis of the defeat. That article, “It’s Not the Message, It’s Not the Messenger, It’s the Voter,” argued that the conservative message had been properly polished and had reached its intended audience, but that the average voter was not receptive to that message because he was unwilling to give up the comforts of the social safety net and the welfare state.

“Only the stupid or willfully inattentive haven’t heard that we face a financial abyss waiting at the end of our entitlement road, that entitlements need to be reformed, that we have an exploding debt and deficit crisis, that a ‘tax the rich’ policy only produces chump-change for solving that problem, that Obama’s economic policies have bloated the federal government at the expense of jobs and growth, and that Obama himself is the most left-wing, duplicitous, partisan, and incompetent president in modern history,” Thornton wrote.

In a Front Page follow-up article to that, “Messengers, Messages, and Voters, Part 2,” Thornton expanded his theme using historical references to Ancient Greece and the Founding Fathers to depict the universal franchise as an aberration that would always lead people to place their own private good above that of the national good.

“So unless one believes that human nature has evolved beyond passion and self-interest so that today a critical mass of voters will consider principle and the good of the whole even at the cost of their own interests,” Thornton wrote, “we still face the same problem that troubled earlier critics of democracy.”

In response to that first piece, David Horowitz took a different position. In his article, “It’s the Message and Yes the Messengers – NOT the Voters,” he argued that there was indeed a messaging problem at the heart of the defeat. He linked this problem to a continuing underestimation of the left and their tactics, as well as a lack of sufficient aggressiveness on the part of conservative campaigners.

Horowitz contrasts the Democratic Party’s willingness to play the heroes protecting minority groups from the ravages of the Republican Party with the lack of moral outrage and offensive momentum from the Republican Party in pushing back against these dishonest slanders.

“Republicans didn’t lay a finger on Obama and the Democrats for their wars against women, minorities and the middle class. They hardly mentioned the suffering of these groups under Obama’s policies,” he wrote.

This theme is further elaborated on in his new pamphlet in an article that appeared on powerlineblog.com called “Go For the Heart: How Republicans Can Win.” There he writes, “The only way to confront the emotional campaign that Democrats wage in every election is through an equally emotional campaign that puts the aggressors on the defensive; that attacks them in the same moral language, identifying them as the bad guys.”

Horowitz argues that the primary organ is not the head, but the heart, and that rational arguments go nowhere unless they connect to emotional narratives. While the reasoning person may be expected to rationally process and accept a message of small government, low taxes and personal freedom, this message will not connect unless it goes for the heart, rather than the head.

Americans are not a nation of takers, Horowitz says, they are coping with uncertain and difficult times without a clear sense of direction. They have been misled by the left’s false narratives and the ineptness of the right in challenging those narratives.

“When Democrats tell their underdog story it is not an abstraction but a powerful, polarizing, emotionally charged attack on their Republican adversaries. In the Democratic narrative, Republicans are cast as oppressors,” Horowitz warns. “How can you win a war when the other side is using bazookas and your side is using fly swatters?”

Both Horowitz and Thornton agree that the people are not perfect or ideal, but Horowitz argues that this requires a change of tactics. Rather than dismissing the possibility of winning the argument, the Republican Party must instead learn how to make the arguments that bypass the head and go for the heart.

While Thornton focuses on the head as the primary aspect of man, a reasoning creature who thinks and only then acts, and whose actions spring from rational or rationalized motives, Horowitz argues that man should be viewed as less rational and more emotional, as a heart rather than a head. Man thinks less and feels more. It is these feelings that drive him and move him, activating his moral senses and his sense of self-interest.

“The weapons of political campaigns are hope and fear,” Horowitz writes. “Obama won the presidency in 2008 on a campaign of hope; he won re-election in 2012 on a campaign of fear.”

2012 was not an election of thinkers or takers, in Horowitz’s view, but an election that was won on the ability of the left to manipulate emotions, to banish hope and inspire fear. And his advice to conservatives who want to win is to focus less on the rational argument and more on the emotional argument. To tell the story, rather than display the pie chart. To worry less about the head and more about the heart.

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Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is visiting Egypt this week, becoming the first Iranian head of state to visit Egypt since Tehran broke off diplomatic relations with Cairo in 1980.  Ahmadinejad is in Cairo for a summit meeting of the inter-governmental Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), but he hopes his meetings with Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi will help the Iranian regime to forge a strategic alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood-led government in Egypt.

Ahmadinejad’s journey to Cairo follows the icebreaker of Morsi’s visit last August to Tehran during the meeting of the Iranian-led Nonaligned Movement and a visit last month to Cairo by Iran’s foreign minister.

Although Ahmadinejad was confronted by an angry mob and almost hit in the head with a shoe while leaving the historic Al-Azhar mosque and university with Morsi, Ahmadinejad was unbowed.  Recall that he did not care what his own people thought of his fraudulent re-election as they gathered in the streets of Tehran. Thus, unruly protesters in Cairo meant absolutely nothing to him.  What mattered to Ahmadinejad was that the Egyptian government rolled out the red carpet in a welcoming ceremony at the Cairo airport and appeared receptive to strengthened ties.

“Egypt is a very important country in the region and the Islamic Republic of Iran believes it is one of the heavyweights in the Middle East,” Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, told Iran’s state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) earlier this week. “We are ready to further strengthen ties.”

The head of Egypt’s interest section in Iran, Khaled Amareh, said Egypt-Iran relations date back to as early as 500 BC.  “The establishment of bilateral ties between Egypt and Iran is greatly important for the region, and we hope to see ever increasing ties between the two nations,” he said last month during an interview with IRNA.

Although Iran is a Shiite-majority country and Egypt is a Sunni-majority country, the Iranian leaders are willing to put aside the historical theological conflicts between Shiites and Sunnis and focus on areas of common interest. Ahmadinejad explained the overarching bond among Muslims this way in an interview with Egypt’s state-run Al-Ahram daily, responding to reports of some differences of opinion between him and Egypt’s leading cleric:

For example, 40 people are sitting in a bus and they differ among themselves, but they are all heading to the same destination and to the same goal. What is common among us is bigger than our differences.

As an example of their common goals, the Muslim Brotherhood’s innate hostility towards Israel dovetails nicely with the Iranian regime’s hatred of the Jewish state. At the OIC summit in Cairo, Ahmadinejad warned, “The Iranian people are ready to march on Israel to destroy it if it launches an attack adventure against Iran.”

Faced with the prospect of losing influence in Syria, as its ally President Bashar al-Assad desperately tries to hang on to power, and feeling encircled by hostile governments in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Gulf states, the Iranian regime is looking for a new dance partner. It appears willing to give Egypt a pass on supporting the opposition forces battling to bring Assad down, most likely because Egypt is presently too weak and inwardly focused to be of any real concern to the rebel cause.  On the other hand, it is in Iran’s interest to buttress Egypt’s attempts to re-assert its own influence in the region to counter-balance that of Iran’s main Middle East rivals in the Gulf region.

Iran also sees an opportunity to wean Egypt away from economic and military dependency on the United States. Exploiting Egypt’s debt squeeze and its plunging currency reserves, Ahmadinejad said that his government was ready to provide a “big credit line” to help revive Egypt’s battered economy.

“We can provide a big credit line to our Egyptian brothers,” the soon departing Iranian president told Al-Ahram. “If the two peoples cooperate and join forces, they can become an important element.”

The initial reaction from Egyptian leaders was caution, as they do not want to jeopardize the economic lifeline extended by the United States and the International Monetary Fund by being seen as overly intertwined with Iran’s financial system. Moreover, Egypt has to walk a tightrope in its relationship with the United States if it wants to receive billions of dollars in financial aid and advanced weapons such as F-16s to build up its military.  On the other hand, Morsi sees some leverage in hedging his bets and keeping the U.S. on edge as to just how far Egypt is willing to go in pursuing deeper ties with Iran.

Ahmadinejad’s offer of a credit line to Egypt may be a difficult promise to keep in light of Iran’s own economic distress under the weight of the sanctions imposed on the regime. However, reading between the lines, the Iranian government may have in mind the shipment of oil, weaponry and other goodies to Egypt in exchange for some old-fashioned bartering.

What can Egypt offer?  It can start with providing Iran with unfettered access to the Suez Canal.  The Egyptian government already started to open the canal to Iranian warships last year.

Second, while Egypt may not formally break diplomatic relations with Israel and withdraw from the Camp David peace treaty in the foreseeable future, it can revert to a cold peace and allow Iranian arms to transit the Sinai on the way to Hamas in Gaza.

Third, while the U.S. State Department does not presently consider Egypt to be a major hub for money laundering, the State Department said in its 2012 Money Laundering Report that “Egypt has a large informal cash economy, and many financial transactions are undocumented or do not enter the banking system.”

The State Department report went on to say that Egypt’s government “has been hesitant to utilize its money laundering statutes to their full legal extent.”  Egypt’s informal economy and lack of careful documentation of many financial transactions provides Iran with a potential vehicle to evade sanctions through networks of front groups, in order to move funds into and out of Egypt and access the international banking system through indirect channels.

Fourth, as long as Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood-dominated regime remains in power, its rapprochement with Iran provides Iran with more legitimacy in the region and lessens Iran’s diplomatic isolation.

If the Obama administration is not careful, it risks being played in the emerging Middle East chess board as alliances shift rapidly as an unintended consequence of the Arab Spring.

John Kerry has indicated that he plans to visit Egypt and Israel in his first trip as the new Secretary of State.  He would do well to convey a firm message to Mohammed Morsi that he ultimately has to choose between aligning himself with a rogue terrorist-sponsoring regime with unacceptable nuclear arms ambitions whose own economy is in shambles, or the countries, led by the United States, that can help Egypt move beyond its current travails. Morsi has to be made to understand that he will pay a heavy price if he tries to play both ends against the middle.

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In this election the Republican Party ran two wholly inoffensive blue state Republicans on a platform of jobs at a time when the economy was everyone’s chief concern and the incumbent had absolutely failed to fix the economy. And they lost.

The Monday – or Wednesday – morning quarterbacks will have a fine time debating what Mitt Romney should have done differently. The red Republicans will say that he should have been more aggressive and should have hit Obama on Benghazi. The blue Republicans will blame a lack of outreach to Latinos. Some will blame Sandy, others will blame Christie and many will point to voter fraud. And they will all have a point, but the makings of this defeat did not happen in the last two weeks; they happened in the last two years.

Mitt Romney won the primaries because he was electable. But, as it turned out, he really wasn’t electable after all. Not when the chief criteria of electability is having no opinion, no point of view and no reason to run for office except to win. Not when the chief criteria of being a Republican presidential nominee is being able to convince people that you’re hardly a Republican at all.

Romney was a star political athlete who had an excellent training regimen and coaching staff. But to win elections, you have to change people’s minds. It’s not enough to try hard or to fight hard; you have to fight for something besides the chance to round the bases. You have to wake people up to a cause.

The Republican comeback did not begin with innocuous candidates; it began with angry protesters in costumes and Gadsden flags marching outside ObamaCare town halls. The 2010 midterm election triumphs were not the work of a timorous establishment, but of a vigorous grassroots opposition. And once the Tea Party movement started the fire, the Republican establishment acted like the Tea Party had sabotaged their comeback and cut the ties with their own grassroots movement. Separated, the Republican grassroots and the Republican Party both withered on the vine.

The stunning 2010 midterm election victories happened because a conservative opposition loudly and vociferously convinced a majority of Americans that ObamaCare would be harmful to them. And then that fantastic engine of change was packed away and replaced with political consultants who were all focused on seizing the center and offending as few people as possible. But you don’t win political battles by being inoffensive. And you don’t win elections by avoiding conflict.

Is it any wonder that the 2012 election played out the way it did?

The Democrats in the Bush years were about as unlikable a party as could ever be conceived of. They were hostile, hateful and obstructionist. They spewed conspiracy theories at the drop of a hat and behaved in a way that would have convinced any reasonable person not to entrust them with a lawnmower, let alone political power. And not only were they rewarded for that by winning Congress, but they also went on to win the White House.

Why? Because dissatisfied people gravitate to an opposition. They don’t gravitate to a loyal opposition. They aren’t inspired by mild-mannered rhetoric, but by those who appear to channel their anger.

When the Republican Party sold out the Tea Party, it sold out its soul, and the only driving energy that it had. And there was nothing to replace it with. The Republican Party stopped being the opposition and became a position that it was willing to reposition to get closer to the center. Mitt Romney embodied that willingness to say anything to win and it is exactly that willingness to say anything to win that the public distrusts.

The elevation of Mitt Romney was the triumph of inoffensiveness. Romney ran an aggressive campaign, but it was a mechanical exercise, a smooth assault by trained professionals paid to spin talking points in dangerous directions. But, what if the voters really wanted a certain amount of offensiveness?

What if they wanted someone who mirrored their anger at being out of work, at having to look at stacks of unpaid bills and at not knowing where their next paycheck was coming from? What if they wanted someone whose anger and distrust of the government echoed their own?

Romney very successfully made the case that he would be a more credible steward of the economy. It was enough to turn out a sizable portion of the electorate, but not enough of it. He tried to be Reagan confronting Carter, but what was remarkable about Reagan, is that he had moments of anger and passion; electric flashes of feeling that stirred his audience and made them believe that he understood their frustrations. That was the source of Reagan’s moral authority and it was entirely lacking in Romney. And without that anger, there is no compelling reason to vote for an opposition party.

The establishment had its chance with Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor was everything that they could possibly want. Moderate, bipartisan and fairly liberal. With his business background, he could make a perfect case for being able to turn the economy around. They had their perfect candidate and their perfect storm and they blew it.

The Republican Party is not going to win elections by being inoffensive. It is not going to win elections by going so far to the center that it no longer stands for anything. It is not going to win elections by throwing away all the reasons that people might have to vote for it. It is not going to win elections by constantly trying to accommodate what it thinks independent voters want, instead of cultivating and growing its base, and using them as the nucleus for an opposition that will change the minds of those independent voters.

The Republican Party has tried playing Mr. Nice Guy. It may be time to get back to being an opposition movement. And the way to do that is by relearning the lessons of the Tea Party movement. The Democratic Party began winning when it embraced the left, instead of running away from it. If the Republican Party wants to win, then it has to embrace the right and learn to get angry again.

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“I’m a son of Detroit,” Mitt Romney confessed during Monday’s presidential debate. “I was born in Detroit. My dad was head of a car company. I like American cars. And I would do nothing to hurt the U.S. auto industry.” But like so many Detroiters, Mitt Romney left before the capital of the U.S. auto industry could hurt him. Detroit is scary.

Detroit has just been named the most dangerous city in America. This is the fourth consecutive year that Forbes has bestowed the dishonor upon the Motor City. A few years back, the Bay Area Center for Voting Research named Detroit the most liberal city in America. If you believe the two listings are mere coincidence, I have a domed stadium in Pontiac to sell you.

Detroit proves that liberalism is hazardous to your health.

America’s most dangerous city hasn’t been governed by a Republican for a half century. Yet, on November 6, the city’s residents will again take out their anger on a Republican-this time one of the city’s sons-at the polls. The worse the performance of Detroit’s hard-left officeholders paradoxically means the greater the punishment for the party that opposes them. When the largest employer in a city is the city itself, urging the cut backs necessary to attract employers is seen as an attack on employment.

Detroit’s violent crime rate, more than five times the national average, is shocking only when glimpsed outside the context of the city’s other depressing social trends. The illegitimacy rate is 85 percent.  Two thirds of the city’s children live in poverty. Less than a third of ninth graders graduate from high school within four years. Just 53 percent of the adults are functionally literate. The people are as bleak as the decrepit concrete landscape.

So is the government. The city has closed half of its schools during the past decade, hasn’t fixed the 40 percent of its street lights that remain broken, and has decided to divert a huge chunk of its 911 calls to a telephonic queue. “It’s giving criminals the wrong idea,” Tony Wright, a retired Detroit homicide detective featured on A&E’s The First 48, explained. “If you want to do something, do it in Detroit. The police won’t show up.”

Like Mitt Romney, most people born in Detroit no longer live in Detroit. In 1950, 1.85 million people lived there. Detroit, which lost 200,000 people during the last decade, now hosts about 710,000. Motown Records has rebuffed Michigan for Manhattan. Eminem has extracted himself from 8 Mile and moved to Rochester Hills. Even the Motor City Madman isn’t crazy enough to live in Detroit.

It’s not that there aren’t inducements to moving there. The median home on the market sells for $86,000-$13,000 less than the city with the second lowest housing prices. Buyers looking for a fixer-upper can find listings for gutted 3-bedroom homes for as low as $500. But when your neighbors are a pack of feral cats, a crack dealer, and a jungle of weedy overgrowth, even $500 is too expensive.

No group surveys the American city that most closely resembles 1980s Beirut or postwar Dresden. If one did, Detroit would be its place. Detroit is number one in chlamydia. But its baseball team is in the World Series. So it’s a wash, right?

Sixty years ago, Detroit was the wealthiest city in the United States. Today, it is by far America’s poorest big city. There is a cautionary tale here for the U.S.: things fall apart-fast. America may not go from riches to rags. But the mighty do fall. Because America is the most powerful nation today doesn’t necessarily follow that it will be the most powerful nation tomorrow. In Detroit, corruption, lavish government sinecures, muddleheaded social policies, horrible schools, greedy unions, overbearing taxes, gutter morality, and too many eggs in one industrial basket combined to make the first the worst. To the extent that America follows the policies embraced by Detroit, America will not, as Mitt Romney worried in Monday night’s debate, follow the road to Greece but instead will follow the one that leads back to Mitt Romney’s birthplace.

It is strangely fitting that the presidential candidates fixated on Detroit during a foreign policy debate. Policies have certainly made Detroit very foreign to anyone familiar with “the Paris of the Midwest.” The city that gave the world Henry Ford and Berry Gordy now gives us the likes of jailed mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and disgraced police chief Ralph Godbee, Jr. “Governor,” President Obama remarked Monday night, “the people in Detroit don’t forget.” If this is true, memory may be a more painful blow than the crime, illegitimacy, and poverty they currently experience. Not long ago, Detroit was one of the  most thriving cities on Earth. The Paris of the Midwest has become the Basketcase of the Midwest.

Let Detroit go bankrupt? It already has. The $16 trillion question for the presidential candidates is whether they will let America go Detroit.

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