This is as pithy a summary as any I’ve seen about the antisemitism permeating Occupy Wall Street, and binding together the Left, the Islamists, and the White Supremacists:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(If the video isn’t showing up, watch here.)

By the way, why is no one commenting on the fact that the so-called 99% are not a monolithic block, but range from the 1% crazy guy eating food out of a garbage can, all the way up to the 98% gal who was raised in poverty, but worked her way up to splendid financial independence?

This whole 99% versus 1% thing is insanely stupid.  The American reality is that we don’t live in the Middle Ages, we don’t live in a totalitarian dictatorship such as North Korea or Cuba, we don’t live in pre-Revolutionary France, or in any other time or place where the vast majority of citizens are or were a monolithic block of nasty, brutish and short lives, rules over by a few vastly wealthy despots.

Yes, there are some vastly wealthy people in America, although the ones such as Bill Gates and Larry Ellison are singularly disinterested in political power, instead just wanting toys (Ellison) or to save the lives of Third World children (Gates).  Mostly, America represents a rare economic continuum.  There is no 99%.  Instead, in America, we have the 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%, 5% . . . 50%, 51%, 52%, 53% . . . 87%, 88%, 89%, with the vast majority living in the middle of the percentage bell curve, a bell curve that has nothing to do with either Wall Street wealth or Zuccotti homelessness or even spoiled brat student loans.

Hat tip:  Ed Driscoll

Two stories at the British Guardian caught my eye.  The first is the Guardian’s announcement that its readers think Private Bradley Manning deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.   You’re not imagining things.  Britain’s Left — at least that portion that answers unscientific online newspaper polls — thinks that the man who stole thousands of classified U.S. government documents and gave them to a man hostile to America, who in turn published them, leading to lots of boredom and, unfortunately, many deaths, is deserving of a “peace” prize.  The only thing that makes this logical is that you and I understand that “peace prize” is a misnomer.  What it really should be called is the “Nobel Hate America, Individual Freedom, and Capitalism Prize.”  Called by its true name, Manning is a perfect recipient.

The other story is one that’s both unbelievably tragic and that highlights the Left’s moral blindness.  The story is about a terrible famine affecting North Korea.  Here’s the Guardian’s take on the famine:

Footage of malnourished North Korean orphans and official warnings over failed harvests have given a rare glimpse at the scale of devastating food shortages in the country following a harsh winter and widespread flooding.

[snip]

North Korea has struggled with its food supply since the crippling famine of the 90s, and its biggest donors – South Korea and the US – have yet to decide whether to resume aid suspended in 2008, while rising global commodity prices have exacerbated its problems.

[snip]

The Reuters AlertNet humanitarian news service, which shot the new video, was allowed to make a tightly controlled trip to South Hwanghae, a farming province in the country’s arable heartland. The team reported signs of severe malnutrition in children and medical staff said they lacked the drugs they needed.

“The natural disasters of last year and this year have forced the people to live on potatoes and corn. Because people aren’t taking in proper nutrition, the number of in-patients has increased. While in May the number of inpatients was about 200, we have had around 350 inpatients each month from July to September,” said Jang Kum-son, a doctor.

Kim Chol-jun, paediatrician at a school for orphans, said heavy rainfall and flooding had also contaminated water supplies, leading to digestive diseases.

The governing People’s Committee said a bitter winter destroyed 65% of South Hwanghae’s barley, wheat and potato crops, and that rains, flooding and typhoons had destroyed 80% of the maize harvest. Officials added that they expected less than half the usual rice crop this month.

What’s missing from this story, with its focus on rainfall and flooding (some of which I assume affected neighboring South Korea) is that North Korea has had a perpetual famine problem.  This is not a weather related famine problem, although you wouldn’t guess it from the Guardian’s coverage.  Instead, it’s the same famine problem that affected the Ukraine in the 1930s and China during the Great Leap Forward:  It’s called a Communist-caused famine, and it occurs when a tyrannical centralized government destroys markets, designates food and farmland for favored citizens, diverts most of its resources to the military that props it up, and generally uses its citizens as servants of and tools for a small cadre of privileged people.

Did you notice, too, that the South Koreans are feeding their starving neighbors?  On the one hand, I totally understand it.  They don’t want hordes of hungry, nuclearized North Koreans swarming over the border.  On the other hand, it’s a shame that they’re propping up a dictatorship that’s systematically starving its own citizens.  I’m not exaggerating with the systematic starvation comment.  When I quoted from the Guardian, I left out a paragraph that provides the Guardian’s single nod to the fact that nature isn’t the only one at fault as North Korea’s children die:

Some suspect that Pyongyang may be hoarding crops to ensure there is plenty of food next year. The North has pledged that 2012 – the centenary of founder Kim Il-sung’s birth – will be the year it becomes a major power.

One of the hallmarks of a modern totalitarian government is stagecraft.  Leni Riefenstahl made a whole movie dedicated to glorifying a totalitarian government’s meticulously staged extravaganza.  As a child in the 1960s and 1970s, I vividly remember footage of marches in the Soviet Union, with soldiers in perfect goosestep order.  China and North Korea are also much given to elaborate shows and parades, none of which originate with the people, and all of which are aimed at demonstrating the people’s alleged love for their leaders (and for the latter’s policies).

Would you be surprised to learn that Obama’s White House is carefully inching in that direction?  Obama is not doing anything as blatant as mass rallies or inhumanly perfect parades, of course.  In a way, he’s doing something much worse, which is co-opting a fundamentally American democratic institution and, without letting people see, turning it into a carefully staged political show.

The latest example of this propaganda impulse is the President’s “townhall” regarding healthcare.  Americans think of a townhall as a free exchange between a political leader and “ordinary” people.  We’ve learned over the last few years that audience members are more likely than not to be friendly to the candidate or president than not, but we believe that the questions are freely asked and unknown to the politician.  Obama’s changing this game and, worse, hiding that fact from the public.  His upcoming townhall, during which he plans to “sell” his government-controlled health care plan he will take only pre-scripted questions.  This is entirely new and it’s bad — so bad that even Helen Thomas, the liberal doyenne of the White House press corps and the one who never met a Republican she liked, is up in arms.

Obama’s reluctance to expose himself to unscripted moments isn’t surprising, of course.  It was when he went off script that he revealed his belief that the federal government’s purpose is to redistribute wealth.  And even when he’s not redefining the American dream to bring it closer in line with the Soviet dream, his teleprompter-free moments reveal him to be a man of few words, most of which are “uh.”

Thanks to an outraged press corp and the blogosphere, Americans are now learning about the perversion of the traditional townhall concept.  The new administration’s control over content, however, is even worse than staging completely fake question-and-answer sessions with “ordinary” members of the public.  In a move that more closely aligns it with North Korea than with North America, the Obama administration is forcing people to listen to his message, whether they want to or not.  This is the antithesis of the marketplace of ideas.

I have it on very good authority (an employee at US embassy in a major NATO country) that this year, in order to celebrate America’s (not Obama’s, but America’s) Independence day, all embassies have been ordered to install a big screen TV in a prominent location in order to play an endlessly looped Hillary Clinton speech for the duration of the festivities.

My employee contact notes that, at his particular embassy, people are appalled by this requirement.  They see it as “tacky.”  I see it as profoundly un-American.  Indeed, I can think of only two precedents for this kind of thing.  One is found in George Orwell’s 1984. In that book, as you may recall, all party members have in their living quarters TVs that may never go off and that sprout endless party propaganda (not to mention have cameras that watch everyone perpetually).

And lest any readers think to themselves “well, 1984 is just fiction,” think of North Korea’s struggles to ensure that its citizens hear only government-approved propaganda:

Until the mid-1990s, it didn’t make sense to broadcast to North Korea. Authorities since the 1960s had dealt with the “foreign broadcast problem”, which created so much trouble for other communist regimes, by outlawing all radios with free tuning. Radios sold in North Korea had fixed tuning and thus could receive only three or four official channels.

If North Korean citizens purchased a radio in one of the country’s hard-currency shops, which accepted foreign cash and had a wider variety of items, or when overseas, it had to be submitted to police where technicians would “fix” (disable) it, making sure its owners could only listen to ideologically wholesome programs about the deeds of their Dear Leader – Kim Jong-il.

This ban was enforced with remarkable efficiency. It was largely entrusted to the heads of the “people’s groups” or inminban, to which all North Koreans belong. Typically, such group consists of 30 to 50 families living in the same block, and is headed by an official. These low-level officials were required to regularly check all radios in their neighborhoods, making sure that they could not be used to listen to foreign or, more likely, South Korean broadcasts.

The punishment could be harsh. One official said in the 1980s she discovered that a family in the neighborhood under her supervision had a radio that could tune into foreign broadcasts. She duly reported her discovery, and the family was immediately exiled to the countryside.

Ironically, even as that situation has improved slightly in North Korea, Obama’s working on putting it into effect in North America.

I recognize, of course, that an endless loop of Hillary blathering away in the background is not the same as the total content control in either Orwell’s fictional Oceania or Kim Jong Il’s horribly real North Korea.  Nevertheless, the impulse is always the same:  force people to listen to a government message without the opportunity either to avoid the message or to hear alternatives.

Obama’s impulses are totalitarian in nature.  In a fight, although he affects an Olympian detachment, laboring always to position himself in the middle, the straw men he places on either side of himself ensure that his Solomonic cogitations always bring him down on the side of the antidemocratic group, be that Hamas, Chavez, Saudi Arabia, Ahmadinejad, or the American people’s right to tune out from government controlled propaganda.  And on the home front, true to these totalitarian impulses, Obama and his team will constantly search for ways to make his the only voice the American people can hear.

Clearly, predator nations smell blood in the water — and that blood is Obama’s manifest inability to cope with predator nations.  At least, that’s how I read this, from BNO News at 9:30 ish p.m. PST:

N. Korea says it is no longer bound to the armistice which ended the war and says the peninsula will soon be returned to the state of war.

Not quite 3 a.m. in the White House, but close enough, right?  The only thing I know with pretty perfect certainty right now is that BHO has absolutely no idea what to do.  Let’s hope (a) his advisers have some plans and (b) he picks a good plan from the options presented to him.

UPDATE:  Lorie Byrd reminds us that, while there’s every reason for us to continue to hope that Obama is unable to carry out his domestic agenda, we should all be at his back right now, praying for a good outcome.

UPDATE II:  This news story started running over the wire at about 9:00 pm PST last night (and I picked it up about a half hour later).   Shortly before 10:00, I told Mr. Bookworm that North Korea had announced that it was no longer bound by the armistice but was, instead, at war (which I think accurate represents the wire information).  Mr. Bookworm was flabbergasted and instantly turned on the news:  which didn’t mention this story at all.  Every single local station was obsessed with the gay marriage story and nothing short of Amageddon was going to dislodge it!  Mr. Bookworm concluded I was hallucinating, although I suspect today’s Drudge headlines might change his point of view.

As it is, someone who has a very good read on these situations thinks it’s still sabre rattling — and will continue to be so until China has a good read on Obama and, if Obama fails to impress China, moves in on Taiwan.

Again, let us join with Lorie Byrd in hoping that Obama passes this test.

I few hours ago, I read the Twitters on “peculiar earthquakes” in the Korean Peninsula.  Now I know why they were peculiar:  the North Koreans are testing nukes.  Oh, joy.  I hope the White House’s “grave[] concern” translates into intelligent action.

Didn’t Biden say Obama would be tested within months of taking office?

The State Department says that North Korea has launched a rocket, following through on its promise of a launch despite international criticism.

State Department spokesman Fred Lash confirmed the launch, saying it occurred at 10:30 p.m. EDT Saturday.

“We look on this as a provocative act,” said Lash.

North Korea had informed international authorities that it planned to launch a rocket sometime between Saturday and Wednesday in order to put a satellite into orbit.

But the U.S., South Korea, Japan and others suspect it is a cover for testing a long-range missile for the North, which has nuclear weapons. Leaders from those countries had warned Pyongyang not to proceed with the planned rocket launch.

They fear such a test could be a first step toward putting a nuclear warhead on a missile capable of reaching Alaska and beyond.

Let’s hope he passes this test.

Given Obama’s manifest belief that the US (the country he leads) needs to be taken down a few pegs, I suspect that his idea of passing the test is going to be different from our idea of passing the test.

Abe Greenwald looks at the vast differences between the values of America’s enemies and semi-enemies (such as Iran, North Korea, and Russia), as well as Obama’s naive and dangerous inability to understand that the leaders and fanatics in those nations are not like us.