Imagine catching a lethal, fast-growing yet operable cancer in a child before it’s spread. The doctors assure a high survival rate, assuming traditional protocols.  Meanwhile, a third opinion proposes no treatment believing the child can co-exist normally with cancer.

Entrusted with the awesome responsibility of ensuring the child’s healthy future, how long would you Think Again before opting to remove the cancerous “Sword of Damocles” – and fear – hanging over precious life?

Alas, too often leaders charged with safeguarding life have sacrificed it on the altar of “normalization,” preferring inaction to threat-mitigating albeit difficult operations.

Regretful that Western powers didn’t avert World War II by restraining Hitler, Winston Churchill lamented “There never was in all history a war easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe.” Craving Hitler’s partnership in a stable Europe, and trusting he’d abide by international treaties, European powers negotiated the Munich Agreement without Czech participation, permitting Germany to annex Czechoslovakia’s “Sudetenland.”

Today, a confrontation-wary world faces another genocidal, fanatical, and global threat – radical Islam and its various savage and infidel-hating manifestations. Like the Nazis who pursued a “master race” through ethnic cleansing, Islamic radicals seek a sharia-compliant “master faith” – though disagreeing on the master -- to crush other faiths, including Islamic ones.

Increasingly brazen, headline-grabbing terrorist organizations include ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko-Haram, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Yemen’s Houthi’s. ISIS’ propagandistic snuff videos of executions by beheading, live burial and burning attract recruits willing to commit atrocities, even in Western capitals.

If ISIS is radical Islam’s “JV” team, as President Obama called them, Iran is its Olympic team. Long recognized by the U.S. government as the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, Iran is the planet’s “most dangerous regime,” the title of Ted Koppel’s documentary about the anti-Western theocracy. Required by Allah to wage global jihad until their Messiah’s return, apocalyptic mullahs uphold their constitution’s commitment to “a universal holy government and the downfall of all others.”

Since its 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran has sought Middle East dominance. As American leadership and involvement receded, to our allies’ dismay, Iran’s influence and terrorist activities -- financing, weapon provisioning, intelligence, safe harbor and logistical support -- expanded.

As enemies of freedom, peace, human rights, and international law, militants target the beating hearts of these bedrock values – America (Great Satan) and our most reliable ally Israel (Little Satan). Though denying the Holocaust, Islamic militants and their Iranian overlord want to trigger a second one by obliterating Israel, as Hamas’ charter promises.

“If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide,” Hezbollah’s leader boasted. As French Jews stream into Israel following the anti-Semitic attack at a Paris kosher butcher, it simplifies the fulfillment of their “Judenrein” ambitions, especially with Israel’s neighbors – Syria, Lebanon and Iraq -- now firmly within Iran’s grip.

Fearing nuclear-backed Islamic extremism and proliferation, successive US presidents and Congresses have affirmed America’s peace-through-strength strategy, insisting “all options are on the table” to derail Iran’s nuclear ambitions -- even Obama. “I don’t have a policy of containment,” he declared in a 2012 speech, promising “to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” with military force if necessary.

Unfortunately, if you like Obama’s election-year pledges, you can’t keep them. In November 2013, just as ratcheted-up sanctions were forcing Iran to choose between economic collapse and dismantling its nuclear program, the administration announced its pivot to Iran engagement. In return for “freezing” it’s nuclear program, Iran could become “a very successful regional power,” the President said.

Amid echoes of Churchill’s laments, America’s premier nuclear arms negotiator, Henry Kissinger, testified before the Senate about the agreement administration officials want to sign, potentially by March 24^th. Having negotiated without the involvement of fretful Mid-east allies, the administration aims to skirt Senate ratification, extraordinary given the far-reaching international security implications.

According to Kissinger, what “began as an international effort… to deny Iran the capability to develop a military nuclear option” has morphed into a “bilateral negotiation over the scope of that capability.” The impact ”will be to transform the negotiations from preventing proliferation to managing it,” he said, predicting, “We will live in a proliferated world in which everybody – even if that agreement is maintained – will be very close to the trigger point.”

The truth is we can’t coexist with a metastasizing cancer like a nuclearized Iranian terrorist state. That’s why in 2010 the Senate voted 99-0 – against Obama’s wishes -- for intensified sanctions, since relaxed, and why there’s overwhelming bi-partisan support to restore their negotiation-strengthening effect. Entrusted with safeguarding civilization’s future, shouldn’t our leaders act while the cancer is operable?

Think Again – To avert the tragic fate of the Jordanian fighter pilot, we mustn’t let the Iranians cage us, leaving us vulnerable to their nuclearized Sword of Damocles.

Aired-out uproariously on Saturday Night Live, “Deflate-gate” has been a national fixation since word broke that the New England Patriots used under-inflated footballs in their Super bowl birth-clinching victory over Indianapolis. The alleged cheating controversy has even pumped up the lovability of the oft-despised Seattle Seahawks.

However, Think Again if you believe Deflate-gate is merely hot air. Though overblown, Americans’ disquiet reflects our fairness instinct and commitment to equality of opportunity – the ideal that all competitors in the race of life, no matter their status, can succeed on a level playing field.

Sensing a slanted NFL field, Seahawk Richard Sherman questioned the close relationship between NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and Patriot owner Robert Kraft, calling it a “conflict of interest.”

Sherman’s unease resonates in an America increasingly distrustful of society’s umpires. President Obama spoke to this anxiety in last week’s State of the Union address. “This country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules,” he declared, labeling this “middle-class economics.”

Yet the story of our five-year-old recovery is how poorly working Americans have fared. With workforce participation at forty-year lows, “America’s wealth gap between middle-income and upper-income families is the widest on record,” Pew Research recently reported. From 2010 to 2013, household incomes fell for all except the most affluent 10 percent, a 2014 Federal Reserve survey revealed, with the bottom 40 percent suffering disproportionately.

So while Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Washington boom, the rest of America suffers crisis levels of job insecurity, economic immobility and government dependency, with a record 50 million living in poverty.

That’s because our economy’s playing field is askew, warped by a cronyist system -- long in the making -- that is neither “middle-class economics” nor Thomas Jefferson’s ideal: “a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.”

Free to pursue their individual life objectives, American entrepreneurs -- and immigrants fleeing societies where one’s start pre-determined one’s end -- transformed an agrarian backwater into human history’s greatest economic wonder. Between 1800 and 2007, economic well-being (real GDP per-capita) increased 32-fold in America compared to 14-times in Great Britain and 5-times in India. 

It’s not a miracle; it’s the free market where rivals meet in open competition, generating a continuous stream of innovation, choice and value. In return for pleasing customers and being good corporate citizens, entrepreneurs earn profits.

As government has grown, so have its anti-competitive powers, corrupting the free market with corporate cronyism -- the incestuous relationship between Big Government and Big Business that rewards political connections over competitive excellence.

Our tax code is a cronyist masterpiece, allowing well-connected individuals and big companies like GE to lobby for, win and exploit tax breaks, rendering their tax bills negligible and affording lawmakers unending contributions.

Equally distortive are corporate welfare programs sold as economic saviors -- the 2009 stimulus, cash-for-clunkers, farm bill, bailouts, Export-Import Bank loan guarantees and Dodd-Frank “Wall Street reform.” Each benefits well-connected private companies, forcing Americans who “work hard and play by the rules” to subsidize elites who don’t.

Then there’s cronyism’s granddaddy, Obamacare, “the product of an orgy of lobbying and backroom deals,” according to Steven Brill, whose new book “America’s Bitter Pill” details how the $3-trillion-a-year health industry’s largest stakeholders – drug and medical device companies, hospitals, insurers – profited, at taxpayers’ expense.

When profits accrue to those with the most to invest in politics -- and the most to lose in the free market -- wealth and opportunity shift from ordinary people to the government and its friends. That’s why Americans struggling to maintain living standards must contend with ever-increasing prices in government-controlled sectors -- housing, health, and education.

Most worrisome, the small business sector, which generates two-thirds of new jobs, is languishing. Unable to grow in a market that protects large corporations from competition, and disproportionately burdened by an explosion of regulatory red tape, small business deaths now exceed business births for the first time in the Brookings Institution’s thirty-plus-year history of data collection.

So who are the greedy Gordon Gekko’s? Those who prudently risk hard-earned money to continuously deliver life-enhancing benefits – iPhones, 3-D printers, medicines, refrigerators – or cronies who relegate competitors, consumers, employees, and investors to the sidelines of a rigged game?

To protect our freedom and broadly share prosperity, shouldn’t we disperse power away from economic leeches, returning it to economic producers whose raison d'être is the fulfillment of needs and desires?

Think Again – It’s human nature to want competitive advantages -- whether tax breaks or deflated footballs.  That’s why a free society needs referees with only enough power to assure fair competition, not so much that they become self-interested players in the game.

So a priest, an imam and a rabbi walk into a bar. The bartender says, “What’s this?  A joke?”

Yes, and it’s funny, so accustomed are we to religious humor and wit that pokes fun at humanity and the powerful who govern it. 

Though humor is in the eye of the beholder, its historic purpose is to induce us to Think Again. Truth-telling with laughter pushes conformist societies’ boundaries, whether by medieval court jesters; cartoonists; humorists like Mark Twain; Charlie Chaplin impersonating Hitler “The Great Dictator;” comedy troupes like Monty Python; or sitcoms like Archie Bunker.

Today, enlightened Westerners living in human history’s freest society know that free speech doesn’t end where offense begins (except on college campuses, alas), no matter how insensitive or provocative. Even lowbrow, cringe-inducing satire is stomached, like “The Interview,” Sony’s controversial North Korea spoof. It’s a trivial price to pay for liberty’s luxuries. 

What’s blasphemous to some is social commentary to others, like South Park creators’ Tony-award winning lampoon “The Book of Mormon,” or religious icon-desecrating art like Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” (a crucifix submerged in urine) or Chris Ofili’s elephant dung-smeared “Holy Virgin Mary.” 

Though justifiably offended, Mormons and Christians turned their collective cheeks, recognizing that while each is free to practice a chosen faith, others are free to critique it.  Freedom to mock is the flip side of religious liberty.  

So indispensable to a healthy, innovative and prosperous society are free expression and individual rights, America’s founders implanted these bedrock principles in our cultural DNA and the Constitution’s First Amendment, making it government’s duty to protect freedom of speech, press and religion.

Only a few centuries old, these human rights-assuring ideals have produced civil societies where differences are settled in the marketplace of ideas -- not by thought police -- rendering obsolete 17^th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ depiction of man’s life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” 

Yet it’s back to Hobbes’ world we go if the ever-growing radical Islam movement achieves its aim -- more important than taking innocent life is taking our way of life, as they’ve demonstrated since 9/11.

In a constant state-of-war with non-believers, militants invoke Islamic law to justify waves of barbarity against those, including Muslim majorities, who don’t submit to their fanatical creed. Even in the West, disaffected and unassimilated Muslims living in Balkanized “no-go zones” -- often where sharia law supersedes domestic laws -- are lured, radicalized and trained to terrorize. 

We’ve witnessed the Islamic State’s mass beheadings, including journalists and aid workers; the Pakistani Taliban’s shooting of 132 school children; and Boko Haram’s raping, forced conversion and enslavement of Nigerian girls. 

Crescendo-ing last week, the Paris massacres -- 12 at Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine famous for publishing Muhammad cartoons, and four Jewish hostages at a kosher market – by “Allahu Akbar”-hollering jihadists overshadowed al-Qaeda’s other attack in Yemen, killing 37, and Boko Haram’s deadliest massacre yet of Nigerian women, children and elderly. 

Writing in USA Today, British-born Muslim cleric Anjem Choudaryin defended the repressive sharia creed being practiced worldwide, arguing “Islam doesn’t mean peace,” but “submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression.” Choudaryin’s threat is clear: forfeit your liberty or face “the potential consequences of insulting the Messenger Muhammad.”

Eager to reclaim Islam from radicals like Choudaryin who’ve made “the entire Islamic world…a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction,” Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi recently addressed Muslim clerics and scholars, imploring them to “revolutionize our religion.”

Concerned “the Islamic nation is being torn apart and destroyed,” Al-Sisi argued “texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world.” Underscoring tolerance in the Arab world’s most populous Muslim nation, he became Egypt’s first president to attend a Coptic-Christian mass.

Similarly courageous, Rotterdam’s Muslim mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb championed assimilation as a means to sustain the civil societies to which “well-meaning Muslim” immigrants like him are drawn.  “If you can’t stomach freedom [or] humorists who created a newspaper,” he proclaimed, “pack your bags and leave!”

Aboutaleb’s unapologetic defense of freedom reveals the truth about radical Islam – without any rational political objectives, it can’t prevail in a post-Hobbesian world that protects liberty and individual rights. 

Free expression – not self-censorship or accommodation – is not only morally superior, it’s the water that will extinguish the Wicked Witches of Islam, enabling the Muslim world to embrace the freedom and modernity its innocents and we Westerners crave. It will also safeguard our free society, generating more of the cultural riches we cherish – books, films, plays, art exhibitions and satirical cartoons.

Think Again – imagine a priest, an imam and a rabbi attending an irreverent Broadway show together… and it’s not a joke!

In an ironic twist, the long-awaited sequel to the cult-classic “Dumb and Dumber” opened as Americans discovered that in the eyes of our Political Class, we’re like the film’s low-IQ duo – “stupid voters.”

Caught dropping truth bombs in a series of videos, MIT professor and Obamacare co-architect Jonathan Gruber describes how policymakers hid the Affordable Care Act’s true nature. “Call it the stupidity of the American voter,” Gruber chortled, since “that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

But who’s the dunce considering Gruber is now persona non grata in capitals where he’s earned millions of taxpayer dollars for his wizardry?

Prior to Obamacare’s enactment, Americans overwhelmingly approved their health insurance plans -- 86 percent, according to Time Magazine’s July 2009 poll. Fearing their health system-upending plan wouldn’t survive public scrutiny, Gruberites launched an operation to obfuscate and deceive.

Without a vote to spare, there wasn’t time to Think Again about Obamacare’s numerous taxes, employment disincentives and cross-subsidies from healthy to sick (including those with unhealthy behaviors) and young to old.

"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what's in it," Nancy Pelosi insisted, demonstrating how raw political ambition trumped the consent of the governed in passing modern history’s most consequential law.

In our era of secretly negotiated lawmaking, “comprehensive” legislation (Obamacare, Dodd-Frank’s “Wall Street reform” and the Senate’s Immigration bill) means complex enough to hide the special interest-laden truth.

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber explained, which is why the 2,409-page “bill was written in a tortured way” to game the arcane Congressional Budget Office’s system for measuring legislation impacts. “If CBO scored the [insurance] mandate as taxes, the bill dies,” Gruber admitted.

Armed with CBO’s contorted conclusions, politicians and their media minions wielded them like weapons, including at the Supreme Court, which upheld Obamacare’s constitutionality by deeming the mandate a tax.

To achieve other politically treacherous measures, like limiting tax deductions on employer-provided health benefits, Gruberites designed the “Cadillac Tax” on expensive plans. “Mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people,” was possible, Gruber contends, because “the American people are too stupid to understand the difference.”

In revealing Obamacare’s deceptions, “Grubergate” upsets Thomas Jefferson’s self-government truism -- “whenever the people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government.” By conspiring to misinform and manipulate, Gruberites have engendered distrust of the institutions they’re empowered to run.

More interested in advancing partisan agendas than assuring government’s legitimacy and durability, Gruberites endanger the constitutional stability that’s enabled America to become the freest and most productive society on earth, deviating from history’s norm – tyranny, instability and stifled human potential.

Unfortunately, by circumventing the debate and consensus on which pluralistic democracies depend, Gruberites prove Jefferson’s observation that “even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

As America’s constitutional framers understood, process matters to orderly self-government. To constrain Gruberites, the founders designed a liberty-preserving system founded on popular consent, limited government, and equality under the law. To check abuse, they separated political powers among co-equal branches, pitting “ambition against ambition.”

That’s why President Nixon was wrong to tell interviewer David Frost, “When the President does it, that means it isn’t illegal.” Similarly, President Obama is wrong to claim authority for sweeping legal changes – like amnesty-by-fiat for 5 million illegals -- if Congress doesn’t pass laws he likes.  Presidents are entitled to discretion in executing, not vacating, the law.

According to Jonathan Turley, constitutional scholar and Obama policy-supporter, the President’s unprecedented separation-of-powers violations render him “the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid -- the concentration of power in any single branch.”  If Presidents can enact consequential changes in defiance of Congress, the law and public will, what can’t they do?

Unilaterally legalizing millions of low-wage workers – a magnet for millions more -- to compete with America’s economically distressed working class mirrors the imperial and unfair rule we overthrew in 1776. Absent rapid job growth, it’s also a recipe for poverty and dependency, straining the society to which immigrants are drawn.  Americans aren’t stupid or heartless to insist on the right to control whom we admit and in what numbers, no matter what Gruberites say.

Saturday Night Live mocked Obama’s King George-like views and his “go big or go home” immigration overhaul in its Schoolhouse Rock parody: “How a Bill Becomes Law.”  First it passes Congress; then the President signs it. Even lame-duck Presidents must operate within constitutional bounds, using the bully pulpit and the legislative process -- not imperial edicts -- to advance policy goals.

Think Again – Ambitious Gruberites are an enduring threat to government of, by and for the people. Wouldn’t it be dumb not to deploy all available checks and balances to curtail them?

“The people have spoken…. and they must be punished,” former New York City mayor Ed Koch famously vented in defeat.

In sweeping away waves of Democrats in Tuesday’s midterm election – even in blue states like Maryland, Illinois and Massachusetts – a punished and disrespected American people have vented, silencing the politicians whose agenda and tactics they soundly rejected.

In this collective Think Again election, Harry Reid was demoted for allowing hyper-partisanship to trump the constitutional integrity of the Senate, known as the “world’s most deliberative body” -- except under Reid’s leadership.

Though Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu’s fate awaits a December run-off, she typified the political class’ disdain for constituents, attributing electoral woes to their sexism and racism. “The South hasn’t always been the friendliest place for African Americans,” she told NBC correspondent Chuck Todd during her campaign’s frantic homestretch, nor “a good place for women to present ourselves.”

But with the American Dream slipping beyond reach for ordinary citizens, and amid unease over America’s increasingly weak standing in the world, how is dissing one’s constituents a winning message?

Apparently, that’s shrewd politics, even in a state that thrice elected Landrieu and just re-elected its Indian governor, according to the New Republic’s Brian Beutler who applauded “Landrieu’s candor [because it] came in the service of her political interest.”

Herein lies America’s gravest problem, one that Tuesday’s midterm tsunami should help mitigate: Rather than do the right thing even when no one is looking – the definition of integrity – today’s self-serving leaders routinely do the wrong yet politically advantageous thing, even when everybody’s looking.

Whether in the Rose Garden, TV interviews, before Congress, or on the campaign trail, political elites have promised the unattainable, spun the news cycle with false narratives, stonewalled investigations, and smeared adversaries. Absent honest disagreement and accountability, the “truth” becomes any story that sticks, allowing them to coast on benevolent intentions, above their policies’ wreckage.

Labeling successive controversies “phony scandals” -- Obamacare chaos, dying veterans, murdered U.S. diplomats in Benghazi, IRS harassment, NSA snooping, Syria’s red-line erasure – they’ve managed to stay atop the responsibility-evading tight rope.  Despite overwhelming foreign and domestic concerns, most campaigns refused to discuss Americans real preoccupations, paying dearly.

For too long politicians have played the identity politics trump card to win political advantage at the expense of the public good. Actively fomenting social unrest, they’ve cynically divided Americans into warring camps while short-circuiting the deliberation and debate on which national consensus in a pluralistic democracy depends.

Doubling down on the War on Women shtick, campaigns courted female voters like the Neanderthals they claimed their opponents to be. Consider the menacing Colorado ad about condom shortages because “Cory Gardner banned birth control,” or the contention that  “A vote for Tom Cotton is a vote against Arkansas women.” Ironically, even Joni Ernst – now Iowa’s first female senator and a combat veteran -- was accused of waging a war on women.

Of Republicans, Congressman Charlie Rangel declared, they “believe that slavery isn’t over and that they won the Civil War!” Actually, Republicans – the Party of Lincoln -- did win the Civil War and passed the 13^th, 14^th and 15th Amendments abolishing slavery and granting voting and due process rights to former slaves, though Democrats work hard to convince otherwise.

Reporting on these race-baiting efforts, the New York Times noted “how overtly they play on fears of intimidation and repression... -- invoking Trayvon Martin’s death, the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., and Jim Crow-era segregation -- to jolt African-Americas into voting.”

The Times was surprised that “the effort is being led by national Democrats and their state party organizations.” In North Carolina, Harry Reid’s “super PAC” ran a radio ad linking senate candidate Thom Tillis to the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin in Florida, garnering four Pinocchios from the Washington Post. Additionally, incendiary leaflets distributed at black churches featured “a grainy image of a lynching,” foreshadowing a reversion to a pre-civil rights era if Sen. Kay Hagan lost.

To counter the cynical race baiting, Louisiana state senator Elbert Guillory and his Free At Last PAC ran ads across the south noting that while senators Landrieu, Hagan and Mark Pryor promised to be champions of the black community, the white-black gap grew in virtually every socio-economic category -- fatherless homes, high school dropouts, incomes, poverty, incarceration, and joblessness.

Ultimately, Guillory’s message – not Landrieu’s -- resonated. Even deeply red South Carolina re-elected a female Indian governor and a black US senator proving that southern voters judge on character and competence, not skin color or gender.  Making America’s promise accessible to every demographic requires honest leaders who hew to their constituents’ concerns, not their own.

Think Again – in Koch’s ironic wisecrack was the insight that American voters punish failing leaders, not vice versa. May this be the lesson our new crop of leaders draw from their victory.

It’s been an October of surprises. As U.S. health officials’ mistake-riddled handling of the deadly Ebola virus topped newscasts, the Denver Post editorial board captured headlines for its denunciation of Sen. Mark Udall’s campaign tactics, helping subdue the fevered politics that’s plagued us.

Insisting Udall -- dubbed “Mark Uterus” -- Think Again about his fixation on gynecological issues while “a great deal is at stake,” the Post’s endorsement of challenger Cory Gardner injected truth serum into a poisonously dishonest election season.

Noting Udall’s lack of leadership in Washington and his “obnoxious one-issue campaign” in Colorado, the Post contends “Udall is trying to frighten voters rather than inspire them with a hopeful vision.” As if inoculating himself from scrutiny, the Post notes Udall has spent a “shocking amount of energy and money…to convince voters that Gardner seeks to outlaw birth control despite the congressman's call for over-the-counter sales of contraceptives.”

The Post’s rebuke may not be a cure-all for mindless and dispiriting “War on Women” sloganeering, but it’s healthy if it incentivizes politicians like Udall to address constituents’ real preoccupations and priorities. 

In addition to war with the Islamic State and Ebola, Americans face serious economic mobility concerns described last week by Federal Reserve Chairwomen Janet Yellen as significant “gains for those at the very top and stagnant living standards for the majority.”

Unfortunately neither striking an independent pose nor debating and shaping such great issues are allowed in Harry Reid’s Senate, contrary to the two-century history of the world’s most deliberative body.

With the Senate now less open and more partisan, unanimous Democrat votes set an all time high for either chamber, according to a recent study by Congressional Quarterly, with the average Senate Democrat voting the party line 94 percent of the time in 2013.

To maintain this governing conformity, Reid has denied votes on over 350 House-passed measures, many with large bi-partisan majorities, and used parliamentary trickeries to pass controversial measures on narrow party-line votes. Last December he activated the “nuclear option” eliminating the Senate’s two-century-old filibuster tradition (the 60-vote threshold requiring consultation with the minority) on most presidential nominees.

Smash-mouth politics has served the governing elites -- many of whom, like Reid, have parlayed influence into family fortunes -- but not Americans who feel ill served by the institutions they oversee.

Not surprisingly, two-thirds of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, a recent WSJ/NBC poll reveals. Furthermore, the two most respected federal agencies in a 2013 Pew poll – the Veterans Administration and Center for Disease Control -- are reeling from reports of veterans consigned to death by waiting list and Ebola-infected nurses. Considering presidential security lapses, even the Secret Service is suspect.

The merry-go-round of evasion and unaccountability is well known. First never-ending investigations are launched promising to hold people accountable. Then governing elites blame budget hawks -- even amid increasing budgets -- not misplaced priorities and misspent taxpayer money. Finally, to protect the governing agenda, appointed mouthpieces run interference, rambling incoherently at oversight hearings to run out the clock.

More worrisome than the cavernous competence gap is the politicization of every bureaucracy, even institutions charged with equal enforcement of laws, like the Justice Department and IRS.

Aided and abetted by elected officials who defend the indefensible, the Administration diverts our attention with false assurances: you can keep your health insurance and your doctors; there’s not a smidgeon of corruption at the IRS; al Qaeda is on the run; the border is secure; and a US Ebola outbreak is extremely unlikely.

Unsettled by Ebola’s transmissibility and skeptical the government can track and contain the lethal virus, Americans want travel restrictions from affected African countries. Yet President Obama resists, claiming a ban could lead to more Ebola cases.

Willing to defy public opinion before an election, imagine what controversial policies Obama will pursue afterward. An Iranian nuclear deal that sidesteps Congress and legalization of illegal immigrants are reported, though political allies like Udall studiously avoid these issues.

In a television interview this week, Udall admitted to being “brain-dead,” which isn’t surprising given how dumbed down and non-deliberative the Senate has become. Had Udall and Reid succeeded last month in passing their constitutional amendment to refashion the First Amendment (under the guise of campaign-finance reform), there’d be even less need for politicians to defend themselves in the marketplace of ideas.

Calling the senators’ amendatory efforts “exceedingly dangerous to the democratic processes,” the American Civil Liberties Union warned the amendment “would lead directly to government censorship of political speech… fundamentally break the Constitution and endanger civil rights and civil liberties for generations” -- a contagion our society couldn’t endure.

Think Again – with sunlight being the best disinfectant, Coloradans could have a senator who’ll represent our interests in Washington, not a servant of Washington’s agenda back home.

God knows Joan Rivers had much to atone for every Yom Kippur, considering her trenchant wit, off-color jokes, and celebrity takedowns—though sidesplitting.

Never deferential to fame and status, Rivers claimed, “I succeeded by saying what everyone else is thinking.” Hence, Liz Taylor was “so fat, she puts mayonnaise on aspirin” and “hamburgers on hotdogs,” and HBO-star Lena Dunham’s ever-present breasts “look like Michael J. Fox drew them and Stevie Wonder filled them in.”

Alas, the trailblazing performer can’t Think Again and repent this year. Known for resilience and career rebirths springing from fearlessness, a legendary work ethic and her “this-too-shall-pass” philosophy, Rivers has now passed. Yet in continuously reversing nosedives, Rivers’ life story – struggle, growth and renewal—is High Holiday sermon-worthy.

Rivers didn’t go to the woods like Henry David Thoreau to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,” preferring her palatial apartment. But like Thoreau, she did “learn what [life] had to teach” and didn’t “practice resignation,” discovering when she came to die that she’d truly lived.  “I’m so, so lucky,” she proclaimed in her last interview. “I’m relevant. I’m funny. And I look OK.”

We lament Rivers’ premature exit from life’s stage. After all, refusing to be “Joan of AARP,” she’d just commanded a comedy stage before undergoing vocal chord surgery to repair her act’s instrument, causing the only setback her determination couldn’t overcome.

Rivers realized her death wish, dying peacefully in her sleep like Grandpa—not screaming like the others in his car—as she joked. At 81-years-old, the tireless comedian who claimed her body was falling so fast her gynecologist wore a hard hat, predicted nobody would say “how young!” upon her passing. “They’re going to say,” ‘She had A GREAT RIDE!’”

Indeed, a roller coaster ride with dramatic downturns, breathtaking heights, and a trajectory that careened past indignities and disappointments toward accomplishment and fulfillment.

“Comedy only comes from a place of tragedy or anger or being hurt,” Rivers believed, rendering her woes comedic fodder—husband Edgar Rosenberg’s suicide, daughter Melissa’s estrangement, discrimination, career failures, mentor Johnny Carson’s rejection, indebtedness, suicidal thoughts, and cosmetic-surgery scorn.

Nothing was off-limits and self-ridicule was her specialty. After Edgar’s suicide, she joked that his will requested daily visits. “So I had him cremated and scattered his ashes in Neiman Marcus. I never missed a day.” Making herself the punch line – “I’ve had more reconstruction than Baghdad” – she would’ve cracked cardiac arrest jokes, if alive.

More than wit and courage, Rivers had wisdom and self-awareness. She knew her life’s spark was inducing laughter, and in a novelty-manic era, she refashioned herself to sustain freshness and relevance. At the epicenter of popular culture—stand-up comedy, late-night then daytime television, hawking jewelry on QVC, critiquing red-carpet fashion—her comedic commentary cheered the world.

“To everything there is a season,” the Byrds sang (and the Bible posits) -- a time to get, lose, love, hate, laugh, cry, be born, die – because life is a journey, not a destination. Rivers journeyed “through any door that opened,” she boasted, confident “something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.”

Though my treasured friend recently succumbed to cancer, I know as a survivor that amid darkness and despair, there is light and hope, inspiring a more vigorous return to life. Long winters render summer more glorious because profound joy derives from knowing nothing lasts forever. That we’re never done experiencing, learning and growing – more from disappointments than successes—is a call-to-action.

In answering life’s calls, and making the most of herself – albeit with considerable plastic coating—Rivers wore her soul brightly, finally relinquishing it better and more burnished.  Joan cried a river after each setback, but then she built a showboat to float to happier times, cracking us up en route. Her life was a blessing for blessing us with her wit, and wisdom.

Still standing til the end—though with some osteoporosis, she quipped—Rivers embodied this ancient Talmudic advice:

“Get the most from each hour, each day and each age of your life. Then you can look forward with confidence and back without regret. Be yourself, but be your best self. Dare to be different, to follow your own star.

Enjoy what is beautiful. Believe that those you love, love you. Forget what you’ve done for your friends, and remember what they’ve done for you.

Disregard what the world owes you; concentrate on what you owe the world. When faced with a decision, make it as wisely as possible, then forget it. The moment of absolute certainty never arrives.

Blessed is the generation in which the old listen to the young; double-blessed is the generation in which the young listen to the old.”

Think Again—May every soul searcher’s life follow this path.

Asked by a convert to distill the Torah’s essence, Rabbi Hillel -- Judaism’s great sage -- taught, “What is hateful unto you, do not do unto your neighbor.” 

Like the Golden Rule that roots most ethical traditions, Hillel’s first-century precept aimed at inspiring a better society, one that brought order, dignity and peace to an otherwise cruel and warring world.

That too much of the world still inhabits a darker moral universe – refusing to Think Again about its preference for violence, hate and death -- is perhaps humanity’s greatest challenge.  

As Nazi refugee Albert Einstein understood, defending our collective values is the humane response. “The world is a dangerous place to live in,” he said, “not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”

Today, the world’s spotlight is on Israel, which is trying to do something about the evil emanating from the Gaza strip, the territory controlled by Hamas, a murderous terrorist organization.

As the only democracy in a swamp of Middle East extremism -- and the world’s only Jewish state -- Israel confronts a Nazi-like neighbor whose slogan is “we love death more than Jews love life,” and who pumps hate into its society’s bloodstream. Besides killing Jews, Hamas aims to bait Israel into self-defense actions it abhors, causing Palestinian deaths that elicit international scorn.

Hamas’ charter foretold this story. Calling for the destruction of Israel and Jews everywhere, it declares, “leaving the circle of conflict with Israel is a major act of treason.” After years of terror attacks killing nearly 1,300 innocent Israelis, witness Hamas’ relentless rocket assaults and tunnel invasions.

Imagine the devastation that could have resulted from Hamas’ massive plot – planned for the Jewish New Year and foiled last week -- to inject terrorists into Israel via its newly discovered tunnel network.

Despite the existential threats, Israel tried to facilitate Gazan peace and prosperity. Having assumed control over Gaza in 1967 -- after defeating the Arab armies that launched the 6-Day War -- Israel withdrew in 2005 to enable Palestinian self-determination. To bolster Gaza’s economy, Israel expanded border crossings and gave the Palestinians 3,000 fruit and flower greenhouses. Even amid rocket fire, Israel transfers 100,000 tons of humanitarian goods monthly.

Alas, though the world’s largest per-capita recipient of foreign aid, Gaza didn’t become Canada-on-the-Mediterranean. After destroying the greenhouses and violently overthrowing the Palestinian Authority government, Hamas diverted resources and exploited ceasefires to build a vast military infrastructure -- amid civilians and even UN facilities – from which to terrorize Israelis.

Hamas knows its most lethal weapon is retaliation-caused devastation, which is why its “dead baby strategy” works. But critics accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza are not only libelous, they ignore Hamas’ disproportionate immorality reflected in its eagerness to kill its own citizens, never mind authentic genocides, like Syria and Darfur’s.

Consider these moral inequities: Israel uses missile defenses to protect civilians while Hamas uses civilians to protect missiles; war is Israel’s last resort though Hamas’ first; and Israel undertakes unprecedented efforts to forewarn innocents in attack zones, while Hamas urges (often compels) innocents to become propaganda-aiding victims.

Not surprisingly, many Gazans “have a dream, to work or live in Israel,” reported Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh.  

Israel also has a dream -- sustainable peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians – and a lament that former Prime Minister Golda Meir best articulated. “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children,” she said, “ but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill theirs.”

Responding to terrorism as America has since 9/11, though with greater self-restraint, Israel aims to degrade Hamas’ threat by destroying rockets and collapsing tunnels – demilitarization goals shared by Israel’s neighbors Egypt, Jordan and Fatah, the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank administrator.

Israel couldn’t agree to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s ceasefire proposal because it adopted Hamas’ demands while ignoring Israel’s, awarding legitimacy, concessions and rearmament opportunities to a group designated a terror organization by Kerry’s State Department.

Reflecting Israelis’ frustration, Ari Shavit, columnist for Israel’s left-wing Haaretz wrote, “The Obama administration proved once again that it is the best friend of its enemies, and the biggest enemy of its friends.”

Hillel’s other famous lesson -- “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?” – is instructive.  Alone and isolated, Israel’s fate is in its own hands, yet as goes Israel, so goes our civilized world.

To preserve our values and send an unequivocal message to terrorists everywhere, we must stand by our ally Israel as it finally, reluctantly confronts this evil.

Think Again -- If Israel laid down its arms, it would cease to exist; and if Hamas demilitarized, there would be peace in Gaza.

“Too often…we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought,” President Kennedy famously asserted before Yale’s class of 1962.

Denouncing political debates that “bear little or no relation to the actual problems the United States faces,” Kennedy urged policymakers to Think Again before engaging in “false dialogues” that “distract our attention and divide our efforts.” 

“The very future of freedom depends,” he believed, “upon the sensible and clearheaded management of the domestic affairs of the United States” and a “vigorous economy” -- quaint concerns 52-years hence.

Because today’s political discourse is so dishonest and domestic affairs so muddled, we’re living in an era of manufactured social strife. Creating policy impasses, politicians pick unnecessary fights over our constitutional system’s commitment to individual liberty and the rule of law, transforming dissenters into black-hearted villains with sinister agendas.

Faux-hysteria and fear mongering – especially in an election year -- are potent tools for squeezing money and outrage from voting blocs whose “rights,” they’re told, are under assault. 

Witness the feverish backlash to the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision. The ruling grants the company a religious exemption from the Health & Human Services regulation -- imposed during the 2012 election year without congressional input -- forcing employers to provide 20 types of contraception, including four abortion-inducing methods.

Facing crippling IRS-enforced penalties, the company’s devoutly Christian owners refused to provide the four abortifacients -- all cheap and ubiquitous -- though their gold-plated health plan covers the other 16 contraceptives cost-free.

Now closely held for-profit companies like Hobby Lobby (where five or fewer shareholders own at least half the corporation) needn’t defy their owners’ religious conscious, shocking national leaders including Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton. Based only on their reactions, Americans could fairly assume the court had banned contraception and imposed an employer-led theocracy.

Forgetting an all-male majority decided Roe v. Wade, Pelosi opinioned, “We should be afraid of this Court, that five guys should start determining what contraceptions are legal or not” – rated “false” by Politifact.

Clinton suggested that in denying women “access to contraception,” the decision makes the U.S. akin to extremist and theocratic nations where women are “deprived of their rights….” and “control over their bodies.”

In fact, because the government has alternative ways to assure cost-free contraception, the court crafted a narrow holding that respects religious liberty without interfering with employees’ rights. Women enjoy the same access to contraception they’ve always had, and all forms are legal. 

Speaking to his MSNBC choir, constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe explained the case hinged on the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Co-sponsored by Pelosi, passed nearly unanimously and signed by President Clinton, the law says, “corporations, along with people and… unions, should be able to argue that something needlessly burdens their religion,” clarified Tribe, concluding, “That’s not [a] radical decision.” 

Tribe won’t be quoted this election year. Absent an improving American standard of living, politicians need the faux “war on women” narrative to woo female voters, as they do the Latino vote-winning claim that proponents of immigration law enforcement are racist xenophobes.

Like the Hobby Lobby case, the escalating humanitarian crisis on the southern border was avoidable if the government merely followed the law. After all, what distinguishes America is our healthy respect for the law. Instead, pro-amnesty appeals and the Obama Administration’s de facto “open border” policies created powerful magnets for migrating multitudes.  

Though the administration insists the border is secure and unlawful crossers will be deported, the migratory surge proves otherwise. So does a leaked Border Patrol memo saying only 3 percent of detainees are repatriated. The illegals and their countrymen know from experience that indefinite U.S. residency is virtually guaranteed, incentivizing them to make the life-endangering trek.

The influx of under-age migration, up 5-fold since 2012, began shortly after Obama’s election-year order effectively legalizing 550,000 alien youths. They’re coming predominately from countries not contiguous to the U.S. because of a 2008 anti-trafficking law granting repatriation leniency to non-Mexicans, which must be corrected.

If our leaders were as clear-headed as Kennedy, they’d realize that a national consensus on immigration won’t happen without crisis-ending steps including: building fences in insecure border sectors, like California’s; eliminating deportation leniency; conditioning foreign aid on exodus-ending measures; and enforcing U.S. immigration laws.

Since none of these fixes are in Obama’s $3.7 billion funding request to provide migrants housing, food, transportation and lawyers, the explosive issue remains.

Sadly, the wave of humanity stretching across America is stressing services -- from trash collection to education to healthcare -- imposing ever-growing economic and social costs that weaken the society to which huddled masses are drawn.

Think Again – Kennedy was right. We need more leaders mindful of the national interest who are willing to “separate false problems from real ones.”

Imagine a 4^th of July tradition like Hollywood’s where each year the Oscars pay homage to fallen stars.  Liberty-loving Americans would fete public servants who’ve honored Thomas Jefferson’s rule to “leave no authority existing not responsible to the people.”

Might celebrating trustworthy stewards inspire Americans to Think Again about our founders’ insights, ingraining a culture that prizes democratic accountability and lawful government, the one that transformed our risky political experiment into history’s freest and most prosperous society?

We’d be celebrating two recently passed stalwarts who put country and constitutional order before party: Senator Howard Baker, the Senate Watergate Committee’s ranking Republican who famously asked “what did the President know and when did he know it,” and Johnnie Walters, President Nixon’s IRS commissioner, who refused to target his “enemies list.”

Like our Founders, Baker and Walters understood that where equality under the law goes, so goes freedom. Therefore, the greatest threat to civil society and human potential is a powerful, deceitful and unaccountable government where the few rule the many.

That’s why the Founders designed a liberty-preserving system that fragmented and checked government power among equal, competing branches, conferring ultimate authority upon the people -- not our representatives.

Respectful of Jefferson’s rule, unlike many in today’s “Ruling Elite,” it’s doubtful Baker or Walters would stomach the IRS targeting Americans for their political beliefs, or the evaporation of email evidence critical to congress’ investigation -- called “a conspiracy theory” by the White House. 

Journalistic sleuths Woodward and Bernstein know that government accountability derives from an active media and an informed citizenry.  In comparing the IRS and Benghazi scandals to Watergate, they criticized the media for abandoning its constitutionally protected watchdog role, appearing instead to protect the government from Americans.

Public servants may arrive eager to drain Washington’s cesspool, but after harnessing governmental power and dispensing money and favors, they discover it’s a hot tub made inviting by politicians, bureaucrats, public-sector unions, lobbyists, donors, and the media.

Our greatest challenge -- and the biggest threat to the world’s oldest (and shortest) constitution -- isn’t a left versus right tug-of-war, but a struggle to wrest power away from those who collude at the citizens’ expense.  

Incentivized to invest in influence instead of innovation, Big Business (currently enjoying record profits) can buy access to trillions in spending, tax and regulatory favors. The result is a heavily indebted citizenry and a stagnant economy warped by cronyism, as evidenced by the 2.9 percent plunge in first-quarter U.S. GDP -- the worst non-recession contraction in over 40 years.

Not surprisingly, the small business sector that accounts for two-thirds of net new job creation is suffering as “business deaths now exceed business births for the first time in the thirty-plus-year history of our data,” according to a new Brookings Institution report on declining business dynamism.

While Wall Street and Washington boom, the rest of America suffers crisis levels of income stagnation, underemployment, economic immobility and government dependency, with a record 50 million living in poverty.

Yet as the American Dream slips beyond reach for ordinary citizens, those who oppose the Ruling Elite are labeled extremists, proving George Orwell’s adage that “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

Consider last month’s Mississippi Senate run-off that spoilsman Thad Cochran narrowly won, thanks to crony donations and promises to keep the gravy train running, unlike his “extremist” opponent.

But who are the extremists? Those who advocate free markets, equality under the law, fiscal responsibility, constitutional adherence, in God we trust, and peace through strength – the campaign platform of David Brat, Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s vanquisher – or the Ruling Elite who subvert these guiding principles?

Though distressed Americans clamor for law, order and security on our southern border, slack immigration-law enforcement has accelerated unlawful migration. Exacerbating the lawlessness are lawmakers like Nancy Pelosi who called the deluge of illegal immigrants an “opportunity.”

Unfortunately, the opportunity is at the expense of working Americans, considering all employment growth since 2000 went to immigrants (legal and illegal), the Center for Immigration Studies reported.

Meanwhile, with Congress requiring border security prior to any amnesty, President Obama intends to act alone, as he did in 2012 when he indefinitely suspended deportations of 550,000 alien youths, granting them work permits. 

Commenting on Obama’s intentions following his twelfth unanimous Supreme Court rebuke for federal power over-reach, constitutional law professor and Obama-voter Jonathan Turley explained, the President “can’t say the solution to gridlock is you simply have to resolve it on my terms.”

Having overthrown King George’s unfair and arbitrary rule, our Founders established an America of, by, and for the people – not Ruling Elites -- stipulating that presidents “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Think Again – wouldn’t a shared allegiance to our constitutional order be the best way to realize a more perfect union, for “ourselves and our posterity?”