Here's a fitting tribute to the first bad boy of American cinema, Rhett Butler, appearing in American Spectator:

Conceited and coolly cynical, he has "the most terrible reputation," so breathtakingly scandalous that he isn't received by "any decent family in Charleston." Yet 70 years since his silver screen debut, Rhett Butler's roguish charms are still irresistible.

Rhett will once again swagger into ladies' hearts tonight as the Turner Classic Movies cable channel broadcasts the Civil War epic Gone With the Wind on the anniversary of its 1939 Atlanta premiere at Loew's Grand Theater.

If you've never experienced this thrilling epic and its bigger-than-life characters, or never understood why GWTW was so enthusiastically embraced by so many, North and South, you're in for a surprising eye-opener only Robert Stacy McCain could offer.

But wait! There's more! In discussing the broader meaning of GWTW, McCain lobs this potent little logic grenade at whites he dismisses as "self-righteous hypocrites" who parade their anti-racism:

In recent years I've noticed that those who most relentlessly charge others with racism are white people who, by pointing the accusing finger, seek to make a public display of their own colorblind virtue:

Not only am I not a racist, but I am such an enlightened and courageous crusader against racism as to be able to detect the hidden hate of my fellow whites and to expose and fearlessly denounce it. Admire me!

I do believe the politically correct convoy has taken a direct hit.

Washington Post

... we'd be in trouble.

Yes, but the threat isn't from right-wing, homeschooling, gun-owning Christians and Ron Paul voters -- it's from Muslims! Who would've ever guessed? The Southern Poverty Law Center sure didn't. But then, the SPLC is a fundraising and thought monitoring outfit. Here's what REAL terror experts say:

"There's definitely a rise in jihad recruits and volunteers in the United States, whether they're concerning plots here in the U.S. or whether they involve material support to terror plots overseas," says counterterrorism analyst Steve Emerson, author of "American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us."

Danny Coulson, former deputy assistant director of the FBI, agrees.

"I ran the entire terrorism program for the FBI for a period of time, and just from what you see in the newspaper there have been more American Islamic extremists terrorists arrested than years in the past," Coulson told FoxNews.com.

A major concern, Coulson says, is that the majority of the suspects in the 2009 cases have no direct links to major terror organizations.

"They're just homegrown terrorists who sympathize with the same Islamic extremist philosophy, and although they're not connected by order or by organization, they're connected by philosophy and religion," he said.

"Invite the World/Invade the World" would make an apt epitaph on the DC Empire's tombstone.

From Pajamas Media:

South Africa is plagued with astonishing levels of crime and poverty, its peoples segregated and suspicious of one another. But the new Clint Eastwood-directed movie Invictus says that’s all okay, because the country’s rugby team won a few games in 1995.

Not to mention that the film deifies a bloody terrorist.

This threat to our security is 100 times greater than the alleged threats of Afghans resisting foreign occupiers:

For eight straight months foreclosure filings have hit 300,000 or more yet banks on Wall Street are gearing up for record yearend bonuses for a job well done. The average American is seeing the culmination of 40 years of systematic leeching by the corporatocracy that culminated in the largest transfer of wealth in modern history. A bloodless coup that cemented the true nature of our current economic system.

Once the American Middle Class goes, so does republican government.

Former congressman Virgil Goode issues a challenge to the president:

When Barack Obama completely ignored the problem of uncontrolled immigration during his Jobs Summit, my former colleague Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) issued the following statement that was signed by 21 conservative Republican congressmen:

“With a 10 percent unemployment rate, now is the time for the Obama administration to stand up for citizens and legal immigrant workers. Now is the time for the President to enforce immigration laws. When the jobs stolen by illegal immigrants are recovered for citizens and legal workers, American workers will benefit. President Obama could create eight million jobs for citizens and legal workers simply by enforcing immigration laws.”

I applaud Rep. Smith for standing up against illegal immigration, but we need to go a step further to protect displaced American workers. The first priority of our government needs to be the interests of American citizens -- both native born and naturalized -- not “legal immigrant workers.” And the 25 million American citizens out of work are not only pushed out by illegal aliens, but also by certain legal immigrants.

Even if we completely stopped illegal immigration tomorrow, the government still issues 75,000 permanent work visas and approximately 50,000 temporary work visas every month. These 125,000 jobs should go to Americans first.

Of course, Obama won't do any such thing. DC's purpose is NOT to protect American jobs, but to provide cheap, exploitable labor to Big Business.

Virgil Goode is one of the few elected officials who've dared confront the Treason Lobby, including their volunteer thugs. Our earlier post on an attempt to ban him from addressing students at the University of North Carolina is worth revisiting, if only to remind yourself of what the charge of "racism" really boils down to.

Glenn Greenwald correctly observes that Obama is more dangerous to liberty and peace than Bush. However, he's stumped by Obama's appeal to both liberals and Neocons:

How could liberals and conservatives -- who have long claimed to possess such vehemently divergent and irreconcilable worldviews on foreign policy -- both simultaneously adore the same comprehensive expression of foreign policy? ...

Obama puts a pretty, intellectual, liberal face on some ugly and decidedly illiberal polices. Just as George Bush's Christian-based moralizing let conservatives feel good about America regardless of what it does, Obama's complex and elegiac rhetoric lets many liberals do the same. ... When you combine the two rhetorical approaches, what you get is what you saw yesterday: a bipartisan embrace of the same policies and ideologies among people with supposedly irreconcilable views of the world....

Still, the question remains: why did so many Bush-loving neocons and progressives alike react the same way to Obama's comprehensive foreign policy speech yesterday? What could explain that?

This "strange consensus" only appears strange to those who cling to the notion that Americans have two parties with distinct platforms to choose from. We don't: we have two wings of a single ruling party. What both advocate is globalism, the destruction and reconstruction of historic societies into one secular global culture.

Just as there's only one ruling party in the American Empire, there's also only one ruling ideology, and that is the ideology of permanent revolution at home and abroad. Wherever DC projects its power, it does so in the name of promoting human rights. When Obama invoked the name of Martin Luther King in his Oslo speech, he annointed the death drones and cluster bombs and everything else the Pentagon unleashes on a fallen world as tools for its redemption.

Both Neocons and liberals aim to destroy tradition and replace it with their own values and blueprints. Leftists call it “revolution,” Neocons call it “creative destruction.” The goal of each is the same. Both want to reconstruct society according to abstract, universal principles of their own making. Both believe in government interventionism as a weapon to advance their agenda. They only fuss about the target. Neocons see backward Muslim nations as the more urgent threat, while liberals focus on the American Heartland.

Both Neocons and progressives agree on the necessity of a powerful central government to achieve their mission. Woodrow Wilson explicitly called for an activist, globalist government. At his dedication of a monument to fallen Confederates at Arlington National Cemetery in 1913, he said, "Let us first see that we are a united and irresistible nation, and then let us put all that force at the service of humanity." That "irresistable nation" has swollen into a sprawling, busy bureaucracy. Obama, like Clinton and Bush before him, has expanded the Federal government's power at home through citizen surveillance, warrantless searches, and the power to detain suspects indefinitely. They all know that intervention abroad depends on government's ability to intervene at home.

Of course, the idea of an activist government is antithetical to America's traditional beliefs. The Founding Fathers rebelled against the Crown to preserve their traditional rights as British citizens, not as egalitarian citizens of the world. More important, they did not presume to impose their notions of liberty on others. Instead, they fought for their right to live by their own ideas of political and social order, and to be left alone. They even spelled out in the Declaration of Independence that all peoples possess the same right to be left to pursue their own values. The Founders appreciated that the specific political rights of peoples can only be determined by the people themselves, not by a supposedly benevolent global empire that somehow knows what's best for all.

The ruling elite's mission of transforming the US into a universalist empire is the other side of the imperialist coin. The "Bush-loving neocons and progressives" explicitly reject the Founding Fathers' vision of a peaceful, traditional, decentralized republic. America has mutated into a rootless, deracinated regime with no guiding principles except the expansion of its power. Obama's internationalist crusade will destroy our traditional rights at home, and spread chaos and suffering around the world.

The horrendous, all-consuming threat of Saddam Hussein justified lies, says Tony Blair:

Reporting from London - Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he would have found a justification for invading Iraq even without the now-discredited evidence that Saddam Hussein was trying to produce weapons of mass destruction.

"I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean, obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat," Blair told the BBC in an interview to be broadcast this morning.

It was a startling admission from the onetime British leader, who was President Bush's staunchest ally in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Speaking to broadcaster Fern Britton, Blair insisted that ousting Hussein had improved the situation in Iraq by laying the foundation for a more democratic country.

Iraqis would thank Mr. Blair, but most were busy dodging suicide bombers and bribing officials to obtain US passports.

127 killed, 400 wounded in Baghdad bomb attacks

Bombing at Iraq police recruitment center kills one, injuring 20

Car bomb kills 2 in western Iraq

Return? Shoot, we've been right here, smacking the faces of puffed-up pretend patriots and ringing the alarm at ever-expanding government power.

So it's gratifying that the Neocons have been exposed as the authoritarians they really are -- and more important, genuine conservatives are coming back home:

The notion of defending one’s country is something patriots of all political stripes can subscribe to. But that every military action our government commits to should automatically be considered righteous and unassailable is a bizarre position for conservatives, given their natural distrust of government in every other sphere. The Wilsonian idea of “making the world safe for democracy” has never been the language of hard-headed conservative realists, but maniacal ideologues, and yet the liberal dispensation and celebration of such utopian rhetoric by the last Republican president, his party and most self-described conservatives, left the Right a confused mess.

That’s what makes sane conservatives like Congressman John J. Duncan, Jr. of Tennessee so refreshing. Says Duncan: “There is nothing conservative about the war in Afghanistan. The Center for Defense Information said a few months ago that we had spent over $400 billion on the war and war-related costs there. Now, the Pentagon says it will cost about $1 billion for each 1,000 additional troops we send to Afghanistan… Fiscal conservatives should be the ones most horrified by all this spending. Conservatives who oppose big government and huge deficit spending at home should not support it in foreign countries just because it is being done by our biggest bureaucracy, the Defense Department.”

Let's all resolve that we won't be fooled again. Of course, the first step is to scrutinize any politician who preaches support for the Neocon Wars. The last thing we need is another W clone.

Winston Churchill would've ridiculed Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech as an oxymoron wrapped in a contradiction inside a negation. But the mind-splitting hypocrisy of this line in that speech has been overlooked:

"Although a legitimate government was elected by the Afghan people, it has been hampered by corruption..." Barack Obama, preaching to the fallen in Oslo.

Here are a few random stories, still fresh on the Internet, that give Obama's moralizing a little perspective:

Ex-Rep. Jefferson Sentenced to 13 Years for Bribery

Pennsylvania official admits to bribery

Contractor gets 9 years in Army bribery case

Two District of Columbia employees charged with corruption