Unless you live in a cave, you’ve likely heard about the administration’s war on salt.  It would be laughable were it not a painful reality, but it has come to this – regulating the condiments Americans can consume.  Ignore the constitutional issues, or even the ‘compelling government interest’ in regulating Americans’ sodium intake; Obama’s war on salt is flat-out racist.  That’s right, I’m pulling the race card.

Think about it – why did he choose salt, the single most popular condiment in the world? Notice, Obama didn’t go after pepper – that mysterious gray-black condiment that is an acquired taste.  Nor did he choose to assail ketchup or mustard – they enhance the diversity of our condiment selection and, therefore, will be receiving subsidies as part of the administration’s Condiment Equalization Program.  He chose salt because salt had it coming – with its purity tests (have you ever seen a grain that wasn’t pristine white?) and its white supremacy.  Salt is on every table in the world, not to mention in most foods and snacks we buy.  It is elitist, arrogant, and incites violence everywhere – using the kind of incendiary and truly frightening rhetoric we saw in San Francisco in the 70s.  Salt causes obesity – a direct assault on joints and muscles; and contributes to serious heart disease.  In short, salt is the single greatest threat to our domestic security – not radical Islamic terrorists.  We must stop the advance of salt before it is too late.

I don’t seriously believe the war on salt is racist, but it seems this is the type of ‘cogent analysis’ that passes for political discourse these days.  Any sign of dissent from the current administration is dubbed racist, dangerous and incendiary.  No matter how many leftists/Marxists we have on record declaring the patriotic value of dissent during the Bush years, any divergent opinion is now seditious and inflammatory.  They keep pushing the lines further to the left, and anything that ignores their ground rules is reflexively racist.  Even pointing out that the simple newsworthiness of incidents of true racism indicates we have come a long way from Jim Crow, as one NRO reader wrote to Jay Nordlinger, is derided as racist.  I am not saying racism is dead – I have met several truly racist people.  Society as a whole, however, is far more tolerant than even just a few years ago.  Apparently the left is not familiar with the boy who cried wolf – when the wolf actually showed up, no one cared.  We’re not there yet, but when normal, patriotic Americans who happen to disagree with one of the most left-of-center administrations in history are reflexively derided as racist, people will soon stop caring.  Using derogatory homo-erotic nicknames for a truly grassroots movement is not going to endear the electorate to the liberal establishment or the mainstream media.  There is a reason Republicans are up 10 points on the generic ballot and Fox News has more viewers that most of the other networks combined.   

Martin Luther King, Jr. (R-GA) spoke of a day when his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  (If you’re not familiar with the speech in toto, I would strongly suggest reading it…and perhaps sending a copy to the POTUS.  Were he alive today, I believe he would be deeply saddened by the divisive politicization of racial differences.  We have now elected an African-American president, African-American legislators, and African-American governors.  African-Americans succeed in business, the law, politics, education and every other facet of society.  Yet, to hear the rhetoric coming from the Democratic Party, we are worse off today than we were in 1860.  Such is the state of our nation, and a sad state it is.  We cannot control their vitriol, we can only control our actions.  Reject racism -true racism, not the imagined racism we hear so much about – and be ever vigilant, for if we operate from the moral high ground, we will never lose.

So apparently GM is recalling 1.3 Million vehicles due to a problem with power steering.  When the vehicles decelerate to a certain speed, power steering stops working.  Given the difficulty to control a car without power steering, I would argue this is on par from a safety perspective with Toyota’s gas pedal/floor mat issue.  I can’t help but notice a stark difference between the Beltway reaction to the two automakers’ travails.  Perhaps it is just the cynic in me, but it seems like there was a concerted effort to play up Toyota’s problems and quickly throw together hearings to investigate.  Democrats in Congress and the White House continued the drumbeat until it reached fever-pitch, ultimately resulting in the CEO of Toyota’s trip to America to testify before Congress.  Where are the calls for all dangerous GM cars to be taken off the road?  Where is Ray LaHood to tell GM drivers their cars are unsafe, stop driving?  Perhaps the government is trying to tear Toyota down to help GM and Chrysler, once-venerable car companies reduced to wards of the state.

I’ll take it one step further – perhaps this is a direct result of Toyota’s dominance during the ill-conceived cash-for-clunkers program.  We, like countless others across the country, used cash-for-clunkers to purchase our Toyota Yaris (thankfully we chose a model that has thus far escaped recall).  It only made sense – why would we buy a GM or Chrysler when the fate of their company is questionable at best?  So long as GM and Chrysler are dependent on the government, there will be no consumer confidence in their endeavors.  Would you want to buy a car from the people that brought you Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs or any of the other horribly mismanaged government programs we’ve suffered?  I certainly wouldn’t.  We have seen how fickle this administration and this Congress are.  Loyalty and vested interest might be there today, but that can quickly evaporate depending on the latest polls or the opinion of the most vocal leftist group.  Not exactly instilling confidence in the product or the brand – especially since everything Obama touches turns to dust (Chicago Olympics, Copenhagen, Creigh Deeds, Jon Corzine, Martha Coakley, health care, etc.).

The problem with GM vehicles covers those manufactured between 2005 and 2010 (uh-oh, I already hear ‘Bush’s fault!’).  Toyota’s recall dated back as far for one model, while most recalled were manufactured between 2008 and 2010. Legislators couldn’t get in front of the cameras fast enough to issue full-throated denunciations of the delays at Toyota in addressing the issue.   One would expect to hear the denunciations of delayed action from the Washington elites regarding the GM matter as well. So far, I have heard nothing.  I know that asking for parity in the treatment of these two issues is asking a lot, but it isn’t unreasonable.  This is why government should not involve itself in the daily affairs of business, and the perfect example of the effect a public option would have on healthcare.  Democrats disingenuously clamor for fake competition to bring costs down (while I welcome their acknowledgement of the efficacy of free market principles, I think they still have a lot to learn about business) by embracing the public option, but they fail to realize you cannot compete with the government.  It is hard to compete on a level playing field with someone who owns the bully pulpit, has the infinite resources of the American taxpayer at their disposal (at least to the point Americans have enough and revolt) and writes the rules of the game.  The disparate handling of these recalls is a perfect illustration of why we must fight the public option with every fiber of our being.

Thirty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court ruled on the ‘landmark’ case of Roe v. Wade, thus effectively granting constitutional protection to infanticide.  Defense of the ruling has become the raison d’être of the left in subsequent years, a banner they wave far too proudly given the 30+ million lives extinguished as a result.  Today, any attempt to curtail the disastrous ruling is seen as an assault on women.  We must protect a woman’s right to choose, they shriek, or else we will force women into unsafe back-alley abortions.  Hyperbole and factual errors aside, this argument is now false on its face. 

Women face the same risks to life and limb in the abortionists’ clinics as they do in the back alley.  One abortionist in Philadelphia (Dr. Kermit Gosnell) allowed an unlicensed and apparently untrained assistant to perform examinations and administer medication.  This assistant had already administered Demerol, Promethazine and Diazepam when the doctor arrived and proceeded to administer yet more medication (and no, it wasn’t the same doctor treating Michael Jackson’s insomnia).  As a result of this malpractice, the woman suffered an arrhythmia after her abortion and subsequently died.  This was not the result of some untrained hack in the alley with a coat hanger, as black market abortions have been so vividly described.  This was a fully licensed, registered doctor practicing within the confines of the law.  Where is the outrage?  Where is the unyielding commitment to women’s health?  I thought the whole movement was dedicated to ensuring women had access to affordable and safe healthcare.  I should, by now, be used to the deafening silence of hypocritical left-wingers when their rhetoric fails to match reality (see the feminist’s rush to defend Sarah Palin).  Where is the coverage that rivals that of the murder of abortionist George Tiller?  Was his life worth more than this young woman’s, simply because he had paid handsomely to ingratiate himself to the Democratic establishment?  This woman died in November 2009, but the story doesn’t end there.  Apparently the doctor had been publicly reprimanded in 1995 for employing an unlicensed assistant and allowing that assistant to see and treat at least one patient on his own.  Had more stringent oversight been employed, or more rigorous penalties applied to this gross negligence, perhaps the young woman from the recent November case might have lived.

Most offensive of all, the Pennsylvania authorities have raided this abortionist’s office several times in the last four days, during which they discovered dozens of frozen fetuses, some dating as far back as thirty years.  How can a doctor be allowed to horde carcasses of aborted fetuses for thirty years, during which time he was investigated by state licensing authorities?  How can the state be so oblivious to what is going on in this abortionist’s clinic – to the point of allowing a sociopath to horde his victims’ carcasses for thirty years?  The state was negligent to the point of complicity in this particular case, having allowed this doctor to practice his particular ‘medicine’ unrestrained.  Unfortunately this lack of oversight cost a woman her life.  Who knows how many more there are whose lives could have been saved had the government taken a more active regulatory role in the industry of death they helped sanction over thirty years ago.  I normally bristle at the mere concept of government regulation or intrusion, but this industry has been given carte blanche to circumvent the laws of society and moral decency for far too long.  Their lobby in Washington may be powerful but, as we have seen with the Tea Party movement and the growing sense of grassroots discontent, nothing can withstand the power of an informed, active, engaged and morally enraged electorate. 

Abortion on demand is not a right; it is merely a sacrosanct privelege of a population that is unable to accept personal accountability.  Our society treats abortion as merely another form of birth control – nevermind the unintended consequences of playing God.  The abortion ‘rights’ movement has a history of less than ethical conduct to acheive this end.  Margaret Sanger, the mother of the abortion ‘rights’ movement, believed that abortion could be used to limit procreation among the mentally disabled and immigrant groups (especially among Africans) and, therefore, help rid society of less desirable elements.  Why is it that leftists are so committed to Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest, yet seem to neglect the whole concept of natural selection?  The culmination of her life’s work – Planned Parenthood – has made it their mission to circumvent the will of parents and eschew their religious beliefs when it comes to their children’s sexuality.  They constantly lobby to allow minors to abort their children without notifying the parents, and encourage promiscuity among teens.  PP adamantly opposes abstinence education, despite the proven efficacy of such programs. They do everything in their power to prey on the vulnerable during moments of profound confusion and weakness to encourage abortion, yet they don’t bother with the psychological impacts of abortion.  It is telling that some of the most vociferous opponents of abortion are those who have had one of their own.

Much in the tradition of Ms. Sanger, Dr. Gosnell apparently has no concept of the value and worth of human life, no moral compass, and no sense of ethical conduct.  The fact that his practice was allowed to continue, uninterrupted and undeterred, to the point that it cost a woman her life and those dozens of infants their dignity, is a sad commentary on our society today.  This should be a wake up call to all those who support the sanctity and dignity of life that those who are ideologically opposed to our cause will stop at nothing to achieve their ends.  They are going so far as to open abortion ‘supercenters,’ lest one woman be made to wait more than fifteen minutes to end the life of her unborn child.  The abortion industry has grown beyond control, and has done a tremendous job of entrenching itself in society.  How much abortionist money has flowed into Washington?  More importantly, how much more can we tolerate?