July 4th is Freedom’s Birthday. My suggestion is, amidst the fireworks and barbeques and flag-waving fun - all of which is great - that you take the time to feel good about America.

Put aside your worries and concerns, your frustrations and fears about what’s wrong with America. For one day, forget the negative - put it all in a zip-lock bag, hide it in the back of the freezer, and pretend it doesn’t exist.

One reason is that for all your worries about America’s culture and morality - you and all your fellow conservatives can feel good about your country. Liberals can’t. One of the defining characteristics of leftie-liberals is an inability to feel truly proud of their country - proud to the bone.

You cannot be a liberal without feeling apologetic and embarrassed over being an American. You cannot be a conservative without lacking any such embarrassment or compulsion to apologize at all.

Being an American is simply the coolest thing in the world. Wherever I have traveled in the world - it’s over 180 countries now - whenever someone asks me, “Where are you from?”, it’s always such a thrill to answer, “America - I’m an American.”

I’m an American. Say it to yourself. Doesn’t it feel fantastic? It’s a feeling liberals can never have.

It is startlingly instructive to see Bill Clinton seize the public limelight again immediately after the funeral rites for Ronald Reagan, to juxtapose the dignity of those rites with the deception of Clinton’s book, the national outpouring of grief and admiration for Ronald Reagan with the adolescent infatuation for Slick Willie.

Bill Clinton’s intelligence and abilities exceeded Ronald Reagan’s - but they don’t count. It was their choices that made the difference between Clinton’s sleaze and Reagan’s nobility.

This month, June 2004, the American people have been pulled between two poles: the positive of Ronald Reagan’s appeal to the best within them, and the negative of Bill Clinton’s appeal to irresponsibility and depravity. I am confident the pull of Ronald Reagan will be the stronger.

One reason is that it’s too blindingly obvious that Bill Clinton’s book should have been entitled My Lie.

Last April, famed theoretical physicist Haim Harari, Chairman of the Davidson Institute of Science Education and former president (1988-2001) of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, gave a speech entitled “View from the Eye of the Storm.” It is a fascinating discursion by a brilliant mind on the conflict between Western Civilization and Islam.

Dr. Harari singled out Iran as "the number one danger to the world today." Yes, Iran is waging war upon the United States, is the primary sponsor of terrorism in Iraq, and will soon be capable of indulging in nuclear blackmail and terror. Yet it is not Iran that is the world’s primary danger. It is Colin Powell’s State Department which is waging war against George W. Bush and is doing everything it can to keep Iran’s Islamofascist regime in power.

In the Monday, June 14, 2004 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan wrote a despicable hit piece on her fellow speechwriters in the Reagan White House. It was entitled “The Ben Elliott Story,” supposedly a tribute to the White House Chief Speechwriter told in the context of seeing him at President Reagan’s National Cathedral funeral service - yet it ended up being a nauseating attack on her former colleagues.

The people she attacked are my friends, and it so happened that I attended President Reagan’s service with them. That she took this sacred occasion to vindictively smear them is beyond and beneath contempt. I was compelled to write the following letter to The Wall Street Journal:

To: Ned Crabb, Letters Editor, Wall St. Journal
It is a sad and bizarre spectacle to see Peggy Noonan immolate her reputation in a gratuitous spasm of spite. As someone who worked closely with the Reagan White House speechwriters for five years - 1983-1988 - I know the source of the resentment. She was never part of the team.

Back in early February, I told you that Ariel Sharon’s purpose in building a Security Fence walling off the “West Bank” was to precipitate a civil war among Palestinian terrorist groups (The Coming Palestinian Civil War, TTP Weekly Report, February 6, 2004). Four months later, we can see Sharon’s strategy is clearly working.

In those intervening months, terrorist attacks are way down while the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) has relentlessly hunted terrorists down and either killed or stymied them. Hamas has been decapitated. Arafat, sick and dying, finds his grip on power slipping away. Even senior members of the Palestinian Authority run by Arafat are admitting that it would disintegrate except that it pays salaries to 140,000 workers - which are now in serious arrears.

The February essay predicted a dark period of murderous chaos with Palestinian militants killing each other off in a warfare of competing mafias. Thus there are now news reports that militants in the West Bank and Gaza have “created a lawless society in which citizens complain more about the armed gangs than about Israeli soldiers.” Yet there are indications that this could be short-lived.