As it stretched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, the estimates of its size ran to half a million. This was twice the size of the crowd that heard Martin Luther King Jr. 47 years ago and matched the antiwar demonstrations of 1969.

Wisely, Beck dropped partisanship to convert his gathering into a God, country and Constitution rally, with speakers honoring the courage and sacrifice of America’s military.

Like the controversy over the mosque, the Post editorial reveals the two Americas we have become, uncomprehending of and hostile to each other, even as we drift apart.

To the Post, opposition boils down to three arguments, all of them “objectionable.”

The first is a wrong-headed belief “that the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center and killed almost 3,000 people there in 2001 really did represent Islam.”

Workers their own governments thought expendable, Congress decided were so essential, it borrowed another 26 thousand million dollars from China to keep them on state and local payrolls.

No one believes that Iran is anything but a nation that is one small step away from becoming a complete religious dictatorship, but the country has a small economy, a tiny defense budget, and, as far as the world’s intelligence services can determine, neither nuclear weapons nor a program to develop them.

Labeling the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a new Hitler and describing the regime as “Islamofascist” is convenient but hardly conveys the reality of the complex political interaction taking place inside today’s Iran.

Here is the mayor explaining how the heroes of 9/11 died so that mosques might be built anywhere in New York City.

“On Sept. 11th, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive.

So, that is it. Biden is saying the 100,000 U.S. troops in theater or on the way is our limit. If Kabul and the Afghan army fail with this investment of American forces, they will be permitted to fail. All the chips we are going to commit are now on the table.

And a series of critical deadlines is approaching.

By the end of August, all U.S. combat troops are to be out of Iraq. Only 50,000 “training troops” are to remain, but all U.S. forces are scheduled to be withdrawn by the end of 2011.

Webb argues that while the nation still owes a debt to some African Americans because of the slavery and, later, Jim Crow segregation, not enough attention has been paid, especially by the federal government, to the lack of opportunities for many disadvantaged white Americans, especially in the South.

An excerpt:
Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs.

Though two-thirds of the U.S. population then, they had dropped to one-fourth of the student body. Comes now a more scientific study from Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford to confirm that a deep bias against the white conservative and Christian young of America is pervasive at America's elite colleges and Ivy League schools.

New Mexico's Gov. Bill Richardson, himself Hispanic, gave the game away. At the Boston governor's conference, he assured colleagues, nervous over the administration attacks on Arizona's immigration law, that "Obama is popular with Hispanic voters, and this is going to be a popular move with them nationally."

Eric Holder fended off criticism of his Justice Department suit against Arizona that alleges the state usurped federal responsibility by saying he has not ruled out a second suit for "racial profiling."

Something we Americans often forget is that our country is widely admired for the civilian dominance in our governing DNA. Indeed, every student at West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy is marinated in this belief system. Anybody who works on Afghanistan policy can understand why McChrystal's team was frustrated.

Each years, China passes a new milestone. Last year, China surpassed Germany as the greatest exporting nation. This year, China surpasses Japan as the world’s second-largest economy.

For a decade, China has been running history’s largest trade surpluses with the United States and has amassed a hoard of $2.3 trillion in foreign currency. She now holds the mortgage on America.

How has China vaulted to the forefront in manufacturing, trade and technology?

Export-driven economic nationalism

But the narrative is coming now not just from critics of the war but stalwart defenders.

John McCain says the war effort could be headed for “crisis” and holds President Obama responsible for announcing a timetable for withdrawal starting next summer.

And how optimistic can Americans be when, last month, in the ninth year of our longest war, the U.S. field commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, said the Taliban have fought us to a draw.

Colorado’s Andrew Romanoff has now confirmed that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina trolled three federal jobs in front of him, if he would desist and not run against incumbent Sen. Michael Bennet. And Romanoff has produced an e-mail where Messina presents the three-job menu, one of which might be his, if he passed up the Senate run.

Washington was heroic in keeping the young republic out of the wars that erupted in Europe after the French Revolution, as were his successors John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Jackson, arguably America’s greatest soldier — who won the Battle of New Orleans, which preserved the Union, and virtually annexed Florida — resisted until his final days in office recognizing the Republic of Texas, liberated by his great friend and subaltern Sam Houston. Jackson wanted no war with Mexico.

At the 1952 Republican National Convention, California’s favorite son, Gov. Earl Warren, released his delegation reportedly in return for Ike’s promise that he would give Warren the first open seat on the Supreme Court.

In September 1953, Chief Justice Fred Vinson dropped dead of a heart attack. As they say, the rest is history. In 1824, Andrew Jackson won a plurality of both the popular and electoral votes, but not a majority. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams came in second; Speaker of the House Henry Clay fourth.

And so we come to the battle over history books in the schools of Texas. Liberals are enraged that a Republican-dominated Board of Education is rewriting the texts. But is the rewrite being done to falsify history, or to undo a liberal bias embedded for decades?

If Barack Obama is sincere in his policy of “no nukes in Iran — no war with Iran,” he will halt this rude dismissal of the offer Tehran just made to ship half its stockpile of uranium to Turkey.

Consider what President Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah himself have just committed to do.

Iran will deliver 1,200 kilograms, well over a ton, of its 2-ton stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Turkey. In return, Iran will receive, in a year, 120 kilograms of fuel rods for its U.S.-built reactor that produces medical isotopes for treating cancer patients.

Protected by the United States through a half-century of Cold War, Europe cut back on defense and ratcheted up spending for La Dolce Vita. All of Europe adopted universal health care. All voted in a shorter workweek, a higher minimum wage, greater job security, earlier retirements and munificent pensions.

Since Gov. Jan Brewer signed that law a week ago, Arizona has been subjected to savage attack as the modern embodiment of Jim Crow, apartheid and Nazism. Few have risen in her defense.

In San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., moves were afoot to boycott Arizona and cancel conventions to break the state, as it was broken when Arizona declined to set aside a holiday for Martin Luther King.

Allowing Greece into the euro-zone was essentially a political decision with re-assurances to critics that in an era of growing pan-European solidarity it was no more than the right thing to do. Greeks, we were told, would assume the responsibility that came with belonging to the euro-zone.

From us. From consumers at Wal-Mart. That $20 billion is 1 percent of the $2 trillion in trade surpluses Beijing has run up with the United States over two decades.

Beijing is using its trillions of dollars in reserves, piled up from exports to America, to cut deals to lock up strategic resources for the coming struggle with the United States for hegemony in Asia and the world.

From Russian reports, the Polish pilot waved off four commands from air traffic control to divert to Moscow or Minsk. The airfield at Smolensk was fogged in. There is speculation that Kaczynski, fiercely nationalistic and distrustful of Russians, may have defiantly ordered his pilot to land, rather than delay the 70th anniversary of Katyn.

To American Catholics, the story of pedophile priests engaged in criminal abuse of children, of pervert priests seducing boys, is unfortunately all too familiar. That some bishops covered up for pedophiles and seducers and enabled corrupt clergy to continue to prey on boys was equally disgraceful.

But to American Catholics, this is an old story. The priests have been defrocked, some sent to prison, like John Geoghan, who was strangled in his cell. Bishops have been removed. “Zero tolerance” has been policy for a decade.

The Center for Immigration Studies reports that, since 1980, some 25.2 million immigrants have entered legally and been granted permanent status with “green cards” to work and become citizens.

“Immigration, Political Realignment and the Demise of Republican Political Prospects” is the title of the CIS report, which understates the crisis. Bottom line: The more immigrants in an electoral district, the more grim the GOP prospects.

Consider a few of the largest counties in the nation.

There swiftly followed the collapse of Yugoslavia. Yet, if one knew nothing of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires or the First and Second Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, one would likely have been surprised by the sudden emergence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo on the map of Europe.

Globalists all, they rejected any federal measure to protect America’s industrial base, economic independence or the wages of U.S. workers.
Together they rammed through NAFTA, brought America under the World Trade Organization, abolished tariffs and granted Chinese-made goods unrestricted access to the immense U.S. market.

With publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, the hunt was on for the “missing link.” Fame and fortune aiwated the scientist who found the link proving Darwin right: that man evolved from a monkey. In 1912, success! In a gravel pit near Piltdown in East Sussex, there was found the cranium of a man with the jaw of an ape.

“Darwin Theory Proved True,” ran the banner headline.
Evolution skeptics were pilloried, and three English scientists were knighted for validating Piltdown Man.

The Empire's birth can be traced to World War II, when America put 16 million men in uniform and sent millions across the seas to crush Nazi Germany and Japan. After V-E and V-J Day, the boys came home. But with the Stalinization of half of Europe, the fall of China, and war in Korea came NATO and alliances with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan and Australia that lasted through the Cold War.

Quoted in The New York Times’ lead story, “Party Gridlock Feeds New Fear of a Debt Crisis,” Hoagland nailed it. 

America faces a crisis of democracy. At its heart is a fiscal crisis. After the 2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion, we are running a 2010 deficit of $1.6 trillion. Trillion-dollar deficits are projected through the Obama years, be they four or eight.