Unlike Barack Obama, I have been an unwavering public supporter of gay marriage since first writing on the subject on my blog almost ten years ago. I remain so today. It is a clear human rights issue to me.

That said, I think same-sex marriage is being shamelessly exploited by the president whose constant vacillations on the topic are the stuff of farce — first supporting it, then not, then “evolving” a policy, then being absolutely against it (only a year ago, according to a spokesperson) and finally, May 9, 2012, claiming to have sufficiently “evolved” to be for it.

Liar.

Barack Obama has been for same-sex marriage (to the extent he is for anything other than himself) since he declared himself a supporter back in the nineties in Chicago. He just changed his mind publicly for electoral expediency. Now he is changing his mind back for the same reason, but it’s amped up. He wants to put Mitt Romney – who polls are showing to be a formidable presidential opponent – on the spot on an issue the governor would rather not talk about (and probably shouldn’t).

Obama and his people are seeking to change the subject of this election from the dreadful financial condition of our country to same-sex marriage or anything else that sticks.

Don’t fall for the bait.

In Romney’s words: “It’s the economy — and we’re not stupid.” (We better not be!)

Keeping the focus, however, won’t be easy. You can bet the media will be beating the drum constantly on this one, gay marriage being a far more emotionally potent issue than the trivial nonsense they’ve been flogging of late, dogs on car roofs, etc.

Moreover, our gay friends and relations are going to be angry about being asked to have their rights put on the back burner again. It may be of little use to remind them that they too are suffering from the unending economic meltdown whose greatest indicator is the similarly unending decline in the Labor Particiption Rate. More and more people of all sexual orientations have simply given up on finding a job.  Even the high 8.1% unemployment rate is a fake. The real numbers are staggering.

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At PJ Media we preach to the choir quite a bit.

It’s not our fault for the most part. It’s the way of the world these days. The Left talks to the Left and the Right talks to the Right.

Sure we have some internal differences (gay marriage is one area), but PJM writers and readers largely agree on the big issues of the economy (stop spending), size of government (less is more), and, mostly anyway, on foreign policy (be strong).

The vast majority of people reading this article will vote for Romney, some grumpily, some not.

In sum, we’re preaching to the choir, albeit a somewhat fractious one.

So we’re not changing anyone’s mind — or hardly anyone. At best we’re giving people arguments and nuggets of information with which to regale their liberal friends at the water cooler, ammunition for a possible conversion or two. We’re also deepening our readers’ understanding of the issues and, we hope, entertaining them a bit.

Nothing wrong with any of that but, alas, it doesn’t move the meter much. And in this election year — universally acknowledged the most important since the invention of the secret ballot or maybe since drawing straws — we’d like to do better than that.

The question is how. Should we engage liberals in respectful discussion? Back in the early days of Pajamas Media, we attempted to do just that. It didn’t last long. Neither side “worked or played well with others,” as it used to say on our grammar school report cards, though I like to think it was the libs that were the more dysfunctional.

What you see now in mainstream media is a form of faux opposition installed for appearance’s sake or, even more, entertainment value (like Bob Beckel on Fox or, let’s be honest, David Brooks in the New York Times).

We don’t have any faux opposition on PJM, not that we want that. What we really want is a way to get our message out to the other side so that they actually read and consider it.

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Socialism is a rich man’s game.

Oh, sure, random overheated (sometimes impoverished) Occupiers agitate for their version of economic equality, possibly gumming up the works at the Lincoln Tunnel, but the real financial justice action comes from the wealthy – or so it would seem.

And I’m not just talking about Hollywood, where George Clooney is full steam ahead on a putative record-breaking ten million dollar fundraiser for Barack Obama, or the laughably meretricious theatrics of the “Buffett Tax” that no one would pay anyway, but across the nation.

According to a book about to be released, The Rise of the President’s Permanent Campaign by Brendan J. Doherty, Obama has held more fundraisers than all presidents since Nixon combined.

What does this have to do with socialism?  A lot, really, because what Obama promises – especially in his second term — is a socialism of permanent elites, a kind of new, very American, version of the old Soviet-style nomenklatura. And those who are in it will get to stay in it (via government support) as social mobility, aka the American Dream, diminishes or disappears.

This was what socialism ultimately was all about, indeed is all about, the preservation of nomenklaturas, whether of Hollywood, the media, union, and bureaucratic leadership or what remains of selected industry. Keep hoi polloi out.

All those fundraisers and bundlers, from Clooney to the considerably more anonymous, know this on one level or another. It’s certainly not subtle and those too clueless to understand were reminded by the recent quasi-blacklisting of potential Romney supporters. A warning shot was fired. No elite status for them.

Being part of this new nomenklatura is particularly crucial in hard times and even more so in hard times that look to be long-lasting and possibly permanent.

Seemingly disastrous undertakings, like the overweening government support of the feckless solar company Solyndra, therefore can actually have what would appear to be a reverse effect, reassuring elites that they will be protected, even cosseted, in their most irrational enterprises. Just stay on the team and all will be well.

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We try not to be sore losers at PJ Media.

So after our first ever attempt at a Pulitzer Prize for Christian Adams & Hans von Spakovsky’s series “Every Single One” – revealing how every single Obama Justice Department appointee has been a liberal — lost this April, you won’t hear a peep out of us.   We will not complain even though a 2007 Pulitzer was awarded to a similar series that detailed how 57 percent of Bush’s Justice Department appointments went to conservatives. (Okay, that’s maybe a peep.)

We know the biases of the Pulitzer Prize and did not expect to win.

No, at PJ Media we don’t get mad or complain… we get even.

Starting this year, PJ Media, in conjunction with our good friends at The New Criterion, will be awarding the first annual Walter Duranty Prize for Journalistic Mendacity.

Walter Duranty – it will be recalled — was the New York Times’ Moscow correspondent in the 1920s and 1930s who whitewashed Joseph Stalin’s forced mass starvation of the Ukrainians (the Holodomor) and many other aspects of Soviet oppression.

Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his efforts.

Despite numerous attempts by Ukrainian organizations and others, the prize has never been revoked. Duranty’s photograph remains in its honored place on the New York Times’ wall along with the newspaper’s other Pulitzer winners.

The Duranty Award

The first annual Duranty Prize will be given for what our readers consider the most egregious example of dishonest reporting for the fiscal year 2011-2012 (July 1, 2011 – June 30, 2012).

We will be officially accepting nominations from PJM and TNC readers starting May 1, 2012, at Duranty@pjmedia.com (but if you want to go ahead now, no one’s going to stop you – the email address is functioning).

A Duranty Prize Committee of seven journalists and writers will then sift the nominations and decide the winner (or winners) to be announced at a ceremony in New York in the Fall.

Committee members are: Peter Collier, Roger Kimball, Cliff May, Ron Radosh, Glenn Reynolds, Claudia Rosett, and Roger L. Simon.

The intention of this award is to highlight the continuing extreme bias and misreporting of our media.  Nominations are welcome in text and video forms, in print or on the web.  The committee would appreciate an Internet link with your nomination.

Since this is a new prize the committee also solicits your suggestions on how we should carry on our work and any other suggestions regarding the Walter Duranty Prize in the comments section.  You are free to put your nominations in the comments section as well, but in order for them to count, please remember to send them to Duranty@pjmedia.com.

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Richard A. Grenell – a PJ Tatler and PJTV contributor and general all-around friend of PJ Media – has been named “national security and foreign policy spokesman” for presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

Writes Philip Rucker of the Washington Post’s Election 2012 Blog:

Grenell brings foreign policy chops and more than a decade of political experience to the aggressive but relatively young Romney staff. His is one in a series of hires as the presumptive Republican nominee rapidly expands his small staff as it moves into the general election against President Obama.

During all eight years of President George W. Bush’s tenure, Grenell served as the administration’s director of communications and public diplomacy at the United Nations. He advised four U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations: John D. Negroponte, John C. Danforth, John R. Bolton and Zalmay Khalilzad.

From what I know of Richard, he is particularly close to John Bolton, which augurs well for those of us who would like to see Bolton return to the UN or assume an even higher foreign policy role in a possible Romney administration. With all the ongoing treachery of Iran, Syria, the putative “Arab Spring,” Hamas, Hezbollah, North Korea, etc., etc., Bolton’s more needed now than ever — and the Grenell appointment points the way.

Richard also has considerable background as a spokesperson for Republican politicians (George Pataki, San Diego Mayor Susan Golding, etc.).

But there’s one thing about Grenell not mentioned in the politically correct WaPo – he’s openly gay.

What, you say – who cares? And you are correct.

But I am putting that essentially irrelevant fact out here on PJM as a safeguard of sorts against attacks that are likely to come. Some — a tiny number, really — on the most extreme end of the socially conservative right might object to an open homosexual in such a key position on Romney’s foreign policy team. But almost all would likely ignore this, respecting Grenell’s bona fides and — let’s be honest — his solid hawkish leanings.

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I was amused to read Maureen Dowd’s recent column titled “State of Cool” in the New York Times, calling Hillary Clinton “cool,” because I was about to write just the opposite — not just about Hillary, but about her (and my) whole generation of liberal-progressive-whatevers. They are anything but cool. They are the New Squares.

But allow Dowd to state her cool case:

Hillary Clinton cemented her newly cool image and set off fresh chatter about her future when she met at the State Department with two young men who created a popular Internet meme showing photos of the secretary of state on a military plane, wearing big sunglasses, checking her BlackBerry and looking as if she’s ready to ice somebody.

The pictures, as Raymond Chandler would say, make Hillary look “as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”

The meme, which exploded on Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter, was dreamed up last Wednesday by Hillary fans Adam Smith and Stacy Lambe, communications specialists here in Washington, at the gay sports bar Nellie’s.

Wow. An old person trying to emulate the hipster young. Dowd goes on to detail various snarky tweets attributed to “Hillary” (Romney should start drinking, etc.). How cool.

Well, actually not. It’s pathetic. How could a generation that has not changed its worldview one jot since 1968 be considered cool? That’s 44 years dancing to the same DJ with no alteration of rhythm or style or even a change of venue. Since the sixties, it’s been one long variation on The Twist — and Chubby Checker did it so much better in the first place.

So what follows is not going to endear me to this group.

It is my personal observation — having been there and done that in more ways than one — that the ones making the loudest noises now were some of the biggest losers then. This is true not just because Clinton looked rather, excuse the term and the sexism, dowdy as a Yale Law student, but for the deeper reason that what we have around us now are the cowardly also-rans of the sixties and seventies.

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Passover 2012, which starts at sunset Friday, will not be a particularly auspicious one for the Jewish people.

Despite being superficially strong in many ways, Israel — the sole Jewish state — and Jews in general face more determined opposition than they have at any time since World War II.  From terrorists in the South of France to professors at Boston’s Northeastern University, anti-Semitism is rife. Meanwhile, Iran, which repeatedly calls for the extermination of Israel, draws ever closer to nuclear weapons capability. And the once vaunted “Arab Spring” has turned into the darkest of winters with Egypt morphing into its own Sunni version of a Khomeinist Islamist autocracy with women in veils, Christians attacked, homosexuals jailed, and the peace treaty forged at Camp David fragile as a potato chip.

But have no fear. Our president “has Israel’s back.” Or so he says.

Others, of course, feel differently. Mindful of his odd behavior beginning when he was a candidate and promised to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem but took it back the next day, to his disrespect (both public and private) for Israel’s prime minister, preferring, as he does, Turkey’s quasi-Islamist leader, to the curious fact that one of the few countries in the Middle East and Europe that this peripatetic president has yet to visit is our ally Israel, one could easily be skeptical of Obama’s sympathy for the Jewish state.

At this moment, he and his minions seem to be doing their level best to rein in Israel vis-à-vis Iran, making sure Netanyahu & Co. dare not act for their own self-preservation without the approval of their powerful U.S. ally, an approval that is unlikely to be forthcoming – the most recent example being the leak of a possible Israeli military alliance with Azerbaijan.

So it’s hard not to see Obama as, to be polite, ambivalent toward the Jewish state; to be impolite, one could call his attitude passive-aggressive, with all the semi-conscious hostile intent that diagnosis implies.

And, to continue in that vein, plenty of clinical evidence exists, several old friendships, that would lead one to think Obama might be, again consciously or unconsciously, deeply antagonistic to Israel, because these old friends had attitudes toward Zionism as adverse as the appalling Holocaust–denying professoriate at Northeastern.

Which leads me to the Los Angeles Times and the Khalidi tapes.

I wrote in April 2010:

Rashid Khalidi — a Palestinian-American historian known for his strong pro-Palestinian opinions — is currently the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia and director of that university’s Middle East Institute. After Khalidi received this Columbia appointment in 2003, a farewell dinner party was held in his honor in Chicago. A videotape was made of that party where many good things were said about the Palestinian cause and many bad things about Israel. Then Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama was in attendance, as were, some say, William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

That tape was given at some point by an unknown person to Peter Wallsten of the Los Angeles Times. Wallsten then reported on some of its contents in a brief LAT article of April 10, 2008 titled “Allies of Palestinians see a friend in Obama.”

Perhaps because it was so attenuated, that article engendered a cry for the release of the full tape. What really happened at the party? What was said? How did Obama react? People wanted to know more details of the Middle East views of the presidential candidate. But the LAT was effectively mum and sequestered the tape in its safe.

In response to a charge of suppression of information by the McCain campaign, the paper’s editor Russ Stanton said:

“The Los Angeles Times did not publish the videotape because it was provided to us by a confidential source who did so on the condition that we not release it. The Times keeps its promises to sources.”

Was this an oral promise made by the paper or by the reporter? Or was there a written agreement, as would be more proper and normal in such circumstances? The Times has not told us, nor have they produced a written agreement of any sort, even without the source’s name. We don’t know either whether a transcription is proscribed.

They have told us almost nothing. We have to take this all on faith, just as we do this risible comment by the paper’s “readers’ representative”Jamie Gold, quoted in the same article with Stanton:

“More than six months ago the Los Angeles Times published a detailed account of the events shown on the videotape. The Times is not suppressing anything. Just the opposite — the L.A. Times brought the matter to light.”

Detailed? Brought the matter to light? I am tempted to use the tired Internet acronym ROFLOL. But let’s examine Wellsten’s original article instead. It begins:

It was a celebration of Palestinian culture — a night of music, dancing and a dash of politics. Local Arab Americans were bidding farewell to Rashid Khalidi, an internationally known scholar, critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights, who was leaving town for a job in New York.

A special tribute came from Khalidi’s friend and frequent dinner companion, the young state Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking to the crowd, Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi’s wife, Mona, and conversations that had challenged his thinking.

His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation — a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,” but around “this entire world.”

And? Well, that’s about it. Wellsten doesn’t tell us much more from the videotape or the party other than:

a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, “then you will never see a day of peace.”

One speaker likened “Zionist settlers on the West Bank” to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been “blinded by ideology.”

That’s it. No word of the details of how Obama reacted or what he really said, other than the short quote above.

Interestingly, that sole Obama remark, as reported by Wallsten, contains an ellipsis in the middle. After the then-state senator says the Khalidis had given him “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases” comes a strategically placed dot-dot-dot. We don’t know what those blind spots and biases were and what he might have thought of them. Or how he might have changed. That, in Wallsten’s or some Times editors’ judgment, was best left on the tape.

So what are we to think? We have an administration that not only ascribes most of the Middle East blame to Israel, but also has banned “Islamism” and all related words, even “Islam” and “jihad,” from our national security documents. They’re completely gone. Indeed, even the Fort Hood massacre, so clearly inspired by Islamic extremism, has now been shifted into the comfortable category of the lone, angry killer.

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When Barack Obama asserted – in advance of a jury trial or grand jury investigation, let alone a completed police investigation – that he identified with young Trayvon Martin, the black teenager shot and killed in Florida, it was an extraordinarily reactionary moment with possible ramifications of interference with the justice system.

But it was not surprising.

Since obtaining the presidency, Barack Obama has led a Democratic Party that would be better called The Society for the Preservation of Racism.

The reason is evident. Increasingly, racism – and more generally the division of our country into racial and ethnic interest groups — is all the Democrats have. The rest of liberal/leftist ideology is disintegrating all around them, as fragile and illusory as the welfare state itself.

Without racism – or more exactly the putative existence of racism – the Democratic Party would be an association of overpaid trade union executives, unemployed Occupy movement sympathizers and trial lawyers. In other words – mighty small.

So no wonder Barack Obama rushes to judgment in a case for which none of us know the true details, a case, moreover, in which those details are so obscure and debatable that they may be ultimately unknowable, our opinions mere projections of our prejudices and beliefs.

Did the six-foot-two Martin sufficiently injure or threaten to injure George Zimmerman to justify a mortal response? Frankly, I don’t know and suspect I never will know to any degree of certainty. I also will probably never know to what degree race had to do with it, if anything.

Nevertheless – tragic as it is and was for Trayvon Martin, his family and friends – the teenager’s death is an ultimately marginal event in a gigantic country, a one in 311 million shot, the furthest thing imaginable from an epidemic of any sort.

When this death was first publicized last week, Leon de Winter made this clear when he published statistics in PJ Media indicating the numbers of white on black and black on white murders are minuscule in the USA. In the years 1974 -2004 “86% of white murders had white offenders, and 94% of black murders had black offenders.”

By 2009, according to Department of Justice statistics, the number of white murder victims had declined to 3518 of whom 454 were killed by blacks (for whatever reason – who knows if they were racist?). Black victims were at 2867 of whom 209 were killed by whites (again for whatever reason). By way of comparison, traffic deaths for the same year were 33,963. Obviously, you have much better chance of being killed by a Porsche than by a racist.

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Vladimir Lenin on 1970 Communist Romanian postage stamp.

What follows is not my writing. It is an interview conducted by my daughter Madeleine Simon with Ion Mihai Pacepa for Madeleine’s eighth grade Global Studies Class at her Los Angeles school. Her class assignment was to do a report on a particular foreign country and to interview someone from the country. Madeleine’s choice was Romania.

Normally, such an eighth grade assignment would not merit publication at PJ Media or anywhere other than, perhaps, the school paper. But the man Madeleine interviewed, through my help and others, is no ordinary Romanian. He is Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking intelligence official ever to defect from the former Eastern bloc (also the author of many books, including the best-selling Red Horizons, and a contributor to PJ Media). Mr Pacepa defected from the Ceauşescu regime by walking into the American Embassy in Bonn, Germany, in July 1978.

As the reality of communism and what it was like begins to diminish from the public memory, I think you will understand why we have chosen to publish this remarkable interview here.

INTERVIEW WITH ION MIHAI PACEPA:

1. What effect does the prominent Gypsy population have on Romania as a country?

In my other life, in Romania, one of my best friends was Ion Voicu, a prominent violinist (a pupil of David Oistrakh), and at first I had no idea that he was a Gypsy. Even if I had known, I wouldn’t have cared. I had many thousands of people working for me, and all I cared about was what they could do. One day, however, I suspected that Voicu was a Gypsy. It happened in the mid 1960s, when I attended a superb rendition of Paganini’s “First Violin Concerto.” Voicu was recalled to the stage nine times, and the audience was still clapping frenetically when a dusky-skinned old lady wearing a flowery dress and hat jumped up from her seat in the front row and screamed with all her lungs: “Quiet! Quiet! Don’t scare him!” After pausing for a moment, she burst into tears: “He’s my only son.”

Voicu returned to the stage, closed his eyes when his bow touched the string, as he usually did, and kept them closed until the last note. To a faultless technique he added a warmth that engulfed my body — and the whole concert hall with it. When Voicu played the last note of “La Campanella,” the audience exploded again. Nobody remembered the dusky-skinned old lady. Soon after that, Voicu became director of the Romanian Philharmonic, and he transformed it into a major European orchestra. During those years, I never heard anyone even suggesting that Voicu might be a Gypsy. He was just the Grand Maestro. That remained the case, until Voicu’s best friend — that was me — broke with Communist Romania and began exposing its crimes. From one day to the next, the Romanian government suddenly remembered that Voicu was a Gypsy, and it began wielding that weapon of the emotions called racism, which had so successfully been used by Nazism and Communism. The Gypsy Voicu was replaced as director of the Romanian Philharmonic, and he disappeared into anonymity. After Communism collapsed in Romania, one of Voicu’s sons, Mădălin (also a musician), became a member of the Romanian Parliament and dedicated his life to defending Romania’s Gypsy community.

Romania always had a Gypsy minority, just as it had Jewish, German and Hungarian minorities, but no one cared. The Gypsies were all Romanians, just as American Jews and American Germans are all Americans. Things suddenly changed in 1939, when the Nazis took over Romania. Hundreds of thousands of Jews and Gypsies were sent to concentration camps, where most perished. After the Communists replaced the Nazis at the country’s helm, they began expelling the Jews, the Germans and the Gypsies — or even selling some of them for hard currency. (I suggest you glance through The Ransom of the Jews, written by a good friend of mine, Radu Ioanid, a director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum; I helped him document that book, and I wrote its Postface.)

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Psychotherapists often talk about the difference between “wanting to be right” and “getting what we want.” Many of us, myself included, often prefer to be right — or what we believe to be right — even if it interferes with our larger goals.

This is the kind of behavior that destroys marriages. It can also have a detrimental impact on politics and the world at large.

At this moment, we can observe it in some people’s reactions to Mitt Romney. They are sure they are right that something is wrong with Romney and everything he says … or doesn’t… or supposedly doesn’t… is construed as evidence of this.

This happens in the most obvious instances, as in the case of Obamacare, which Romney has asserted more times than Carter’s has Little Liver Pills that he immediately, on election, will work to repeal; yet many just refuse to believe him – or don’t want to believe him or, in some weird cases, refuse even to hear what he is saying. (Yes, it’s possible he’s lying, but he made this promise so often he would have to be almost pathological to renege on it. This is far from the case of Bush 41 saying, “Read my lips — no new taxes.” It’s as if Bush said it ten thousand times.)

Other more sophisticated examples abound. Over at The Corner, my friend Michael Walsh writes:

Instead, from the front-runner we get patriotic bromides and half-exculpatory statements about the president, such as, “he’s in over his head.” But the fact is, Barack Obama is not in over his head. As Andy and some idiot have pointed out recently, he’s doing exactly what he intends to do — fundamental transformation (be sure to watch the clip at the link) of the United States of America — exactly at the politically permissible speed.

Well, yes, but in fact no evidence exists that Romney doesn’t understand exactly what Obama stands for or is doing, just as well as the writer or anybody else. Moreover, I would agree with the former Massachusetts governor that the president is “in over his head.” You can be both a neo-Alinskyite with a dog-eared copy of the Port Huron Statement under your pillow and be “in over your head.” Those things are in no way mutually exclusive and Obama has demonstrated a fair degree of incompetence mixed with an ideology honed, to whatever degree, by the likes of Bill Ayers and Rashid Khalidi.

So why pick on Romney over this? In truth, we are in the era of Romney Derangement Syndrome. It has gone so far that in the PJ Media comments today, someone wrote there was no hope for the country because Obama and Romney were both Marxists.

Really? The co-founder of Bain Capital is a Marxist? Well, I suppose if Bain were wildly unsuccessful you could hypothesize some kind of Cloward-Piven covert sabotage of our economic system was being attempted. But it wasn’t — and isn’t.

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