One can fairly imagine that as the now iconic photograph of the Occupy Wall Street protestor defecating on the side of a police car emerged, it surely created a pretty tense meeting of Barack Obama's political advisers.  You need not be a seasoned politico to know that overtly embracing a movement that is characterized by chants of "long live socialism" and "f*** the USA," syringe wielding maniacs threatening to infect everyone with AIDS, and speakers who call for a bloody, French revolution style Reign of Terror or who proclaim an unalienable right to have sex with animals, might not be the shrewdest move for a president who already suffers from the public perception of incompetence and immaturity.  Yet that's exactly what President Obama did, inexplicably, just a couple weeks ago.

Damage control commenced almost immediately with David Axelrod going on ABC's This Week to clarify that the part of Occupy Wall Street Obama agrees with is not the sexual anarchy and the public defecation, but rather the anti-greed strain espoused by a majority of the street dwellers.  The White House then embarked on another armored bus tour through the key state of North Carolina attempting to portray a culture war between the right's forces of greed and his altruistic brand of liberal redistribution.

This tactical political strategy is fatally flawed, however.  What is greed, after all, if it is not a moral problem?  And what political movement has committed itself over the last half century to a rigorous eradication of morality from the public square?  What political movement has championed the abandonment of Natural Law precedent in our courts?  What political movement has warred against public displays of religious virtue?  What political movement has vehemently protested the public embrace of an absolute, Real Morality by our elected leaders?  What political movement has sought to purge public school classrooms and curriculum of any acknowledgement of a personal accountability to some transcendent, eternal moral authority?  If there is a greed problem on Wall Street, Main Street, or any street, far from complaining about it, the left has no one to blame but itself.  It has been decades-old demands of liberals to abandon our Judeo-Christian morality that has bred and fostered the very self-indulgence they now seek to condemn.

Perhaps if these Wall Street malcontents would have spent a little less time intoxicating themselves on the potent cocktail of Marx and Alinsky and a little more time reading the words of our Founding Fathers, we wouldn't be in this mess.  Founders like John Adams who warned, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by religion and morality.  Avarice (greed), ambition...would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net."  In other words, the recipe for gluttonous corruption is not free markets or capitalism alone...but rather free markets and capitalism unrestrained by moral virtue.  It's why Adams saw it as the government's role to be about "the promotion of that morality and piety without which social happiness cannot exist nor the blessings of a free government be enjoyed." 

But liberals knew better.  The seed of disassociation between faith and the public square that they sowed over a generation ago is now coming into full bloom.  As C.S. Lewis once characterized, they have made men without chests, and yet expect of them honor and virtue.  Moreover, in a perfect depiction of their own moral confusion, notice the suggested remedy to our greed problem that these leftists collectively advance: they rally in the streets demanding that government play the role of Robin Hood - steal from those with wealth and redistribute it to the rest of us.  In other words, they answer greed with greed, practicing the very self-indulgence they protest.

If the Occupy Wall Street folks - or anyone else for that matter - are truly concerned about an increasingly greedy culture, they should recognize it is one of the potential pitfalls of a free society. It's a risk that comes with the ability to succeed and prosper and can only be prevented in one of two ways: either by an oppressive state that will destroy the incentive to excel and thus spread misery (as every socialist regime has done throughout world history), or by embracing and promoting a public virtue based on Judeo-Christian ethics.

Conservatives like me would follow the wisdom of our Founders and choose the latter.  But as the chants of "long live socialism" echo through our streets, it appears certain that the left and their instigator-in-chief will not.

This column was first published at The American Thinker.

The left is beginning to panic, and with good reason.  Despite the misery of Barack Obama's presidential record, those who were his fellow travelers on the road to "fundamentally transforming America" always felt that they held a trump card in their back pocket come November 2012.  And they made no effort to hide their intention to use it. 

Notorious race-baiter Tavis Smiley of PBS bragged to MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell in April of this year that, "this presidential race...[is] going to be the ugliest, the nastiest, the most divisive, and the most racist in the history of this Republic."  Before the Republican presidential field had even been settled, no less a nominee been chosen, liberals like Smiley exhibited no hesitation about asserting that skin color was going to be the dominant issue of the campaign.  Never mind that Barack Obama had captured a larger percentage of white votes than either Al Gore in 2000 or John Kerry in 2004, and that by any fair analysis, his racial diversity helped him in his bid for the presidency far more than it hurt him.  None of that was going to deter liberals in their quest to ensure Obama a second term based on his racial qualification alone.

If Smiley was right - that this election cycle would be the most racist in our history - it should have been clear that was because his fellow liberals were determined to make it such, finding racism in the most bizarre and benign of places.  Take Ed Schultz's recent accusation that Republican opposition to the Occupy Wall Street protesters - a group that by most accounts could be considered lily white - was based on a "problem with race."  Or consider Morgan Freeman and Samuel L. Jackson's mindless smears that those who rationally object to Obama having run up more debt in three years than every president from George Washington to George H.W. Bush combined, were really motivated by a desire to "get the black man out of office."  It's pretty clear to see that liberals had embraced a "no bridge too far, no logic too tortured" policy on crying racism.

But the surging candidacy of charismatic Republican businessman Herman Cain has caused the confident poker face of the left to begin to crack.  As the rags-to-riches personal testimony of this self-made black man resonates in the ears of the inner city poor who for too long have been told that they need handouts from white liberals in order to survive, the once imposing race card is losing its luster for the jokers who clutch it in their increasingly sweaty and shaky hands.

After all, how credible is the charge of white-on-black racism against a movement that is touting a black man as their standard bearer?  For the answer, venture into the dark recesses of cable television to find Al Gore's Current TV network (by the way, how much of a carbon footprint does running a television station leave these days?).  Back in August, Keith Olbermann hosted alleged comedian Janeane Garofalo, one of the few D-listers for whom an invite to come on "Countdown" is actually still alluring.  Asked about Cain's popularity within the Republican Party, Garofalo demonstrated the perilous state of the liberal race canard by brilliantly concluding that, "Herman Cain...is being paid by somebody to be involved and to run for president," in order to deflect charges of racism made against the right.  When prodded, she envisioned Karl Rove sitting behind his Dr. Evil control panel and funding this Cain charade.

There is, of course, only one significant problem with her explanation.  Even if we went on a Garofalo acid trip and assumed Rove was funding Cain's candidacy, what accounts for hoards of racist tea partiers and conservatives supporting him?  Perhaps the Koch brothers are paying all of them too?

Here's the scary reality for the left: the right's opposition to Obama has always been predicated upon his bad policies and not upon his race.  The ascension of Herman Cain proves that to be the case.  Conservatives didn't mind a black president.they just didn't want a socialist one.  Cain still has a long road to travel, to be sure.  But should he win the nomination, the left's best hope for distracting from Obama's failed record as a steward of the country's economy goes by the wayside.

What will remain is a side-by-side comparison of two remarkably different men.  One who preaches the necessity of government dependency versus the other whose life proves the superiority of self-reliance and personal responsibility...one who seeks to fundamentally transform America, the other who fundamentally embodies America.

A Cain nomination means the presidential race becomes about message rather than melanin.  That's a competition the left knows they won't win.

This column was first published at The American Thinker.

It appears that thanks to the Obama administration, our great national nightmare may finally be coming to a close. 

Now, don't be confused.   By national nightmare I am not referring to something as petty as our culture's nearly 40 year old abolition of the unalienable right to life for those deemed inconvenient or unplanned, or something as inconsequential as the breakdown of the family unit and the moral decay that has come as a consequence.  Nor am I talking about the child's play that is the ongoing threat of radical Islam and its war against Western civilization.  And just stop with the silliness about our relentless unemployment crisis and stagnating economy.  I'm talking about the big stuff here.

Word has emerged that President Obama is finally taking steps to protect the melodic golden-winged warbler.  It appears that he was the one that we'd been waiting for after all.

With his finger firmly on the pulse of what is most concerning to Americans, the president has announced that he will soon be extending endangered species status (and the requisite mountain of rules and regulations that accompany the designation) to a list of over 500 plants and animal species.  And besides being great news for the soon-to-be-protected slow-moving Gopher tortoise, this move will undoubtedly benefit a national economy already stunted by oppressive bureaucratic micromanagement.

One can fairly imagine how much easier life is about to get for the people of Hawaii, for instance, when they receive new federal guides on how to identify the 99 new native plants they must avoid trampling or trimming.

And though Americans will be initially alarmed to know that the giant Palouse earthworm of Idaho and Utah Gila monster did not make the cut, the Obama administration is assuring that all rejections are subject to court challenge.  Thank heavens!  It's about time our under-worked court system had something of substance to engage.

In all seriousness, this news should provoke two primary questions in the minds of serious Americans.  First, is there any stronger indictment of our oversized and bloated federal government than the fact that it pays hundreds of individuals to study and evaluate the breeding proficiency of 35 different kinds of snails in Nevada's Great Basin?  In the midst of an epic fiscal crisis in the country, should it really take the commissioning of an unconstitutional Super Committee in Congress to be able to pinpoint areas of the federal budget to eliminate when examples like this abound?

That's not to say that we can balance our books as a country simply by slashing funds for the Fish and Wildlife Service alone.  But it is to say that the only hope for balancing our books comes when we're willing to ask whether it is the proper role of the federal government to even operate a Fish and Wildlife Service in the first place.

Call me a cynic, but I can't imagine George Washington holding cabinet meetings with Alexander Hamilton to discuss the energetic and vital action the national government needed to take in protecting crawfish (82 different kinds in the Southeast alone have been tagged by Team Obama as imperiled).  Yet today we manage to convince ourselves that we are doing a disservice to mankind if we don't have some government agency designing a complex tiered system for evaluating the endangered status of the most obscure creatures in the country.   

But the second question this whole issue engenders is even more fundamental and even more concerning.  What does it say about the ethics of our country when the slimy American eel and the tiny Texas kangaroo rat (both on the new endangered list) receive greater legal protection than full term baby human beings?  What does it say about a president who is willing and eager to mete out harsh fines and penalties for those who callously pollute the habitat of beetles, yet who works diligently to facilitate and abet those who pitilessly invade the sanctuary of the human womb to intentionally kill their fellow man?

What it says is that far from progressing towards a James Cameron-esque environmental utopia like Pandora, we are slouching perilously close to the moral degeneracy of Gomorrah.  And time is running out to reverse course.

This column was first published at The American Thinker.