Before the Republican Party even begins to think about curing what ails it, members have to recognize the fact that the party is Balkanized.

We are never going to win elections if we remain broken up into separate factions, sometimes barely speaking to one another. Bizarre as it seems, each group within this Balkanization of the GOP is united in the belief that Ronald Reagan is its standard bearer.

This, they tell us, is the man they want to follow. Ronald Reagan was not someone who found ways to disagree with you, but spent most of his life trying to find ways to agree with you.

He always sought to find a common ground — to move the party and the country forward. A lot of Republicans quote his statement that we must not let the bad be the enemy of the good. But today’s Republican Party is wedded to allowing the bad to be the enemy of the good.

As a result, we don’t win elections. I may agree with you on taxation, for example. Or I may agree with you on immigration. If I disagree with you on abortion, however, I may just stay home on Election Day, or not vote for you; I might even vote for your opponent.

As a result, we end up electing the candidate who disagrees with us on taxation, a person who disagrees with us on immigration, and also disagrees with us on abortion and everything else. We excuse this exercise in irrationality by claiming we want to make a statement.

It’s the same thing with immigration. I agree with you on abortion, I agree with you on taxation, I agree with you on the war in Iraq, but I disagree with you on immigration. So I’m going to stay home on Election Day and help our opponents — who disagree with us on everything else — win.

That sound you hear in the background is my dad rolling over in his grave.

This is Balkanization at its worst. The Republican Party is broken up into a lot of large pockets nursing our own prejudices and our own grudges, and unwilling to accept the other guy’s opinion if he doesn’t agree with us on every issue 100 percent of the time. So we break up into factions, allowing a single issue to divide us when we agree on everything else.

In your own family, among your spouse and your children, there is never perfect agreement on everything all the time, yet you all get along and present a united front when facing outsiders.

In the Republican Party, however, it seems we find reasons not to get along, and not to present a united front in the face of our opponents. Instead, we need to find reasons to get along and move this party forward regardless of our differences.

That’s what Ronald Reagan did — as Ronald Reagan, citizen; as Ronald Reagan, governor of California; and as Ronald Reagan, president of the United States of America. He had his views on certain issues, but he didn’t take your opposite view and string you up with it and say he’d never support you because he disagreed with you on a single issue.

My dad always looked at the glass as being half full, and never as half empty as so many of us do nowadays. And until we get back to a positive message about moving this country forward, and find a way to unite ourselves, we’ll never be able to unite the nation behind our party.

We are further Balkanized by becoming a party of personalities. We are attaching ourselves to certain individuals, and as a result we have become a party of people and not a party of principles. We are Romney-ites, or Huckabee or Giuliani devotees, or McCain-ites, or supporters of Gov. Sarah Palin — when we need to be just plain Republicans.

In the Balkans, warfare between factions was the status quo. As Republicans, if we continue to Balkanize and fail to unite, then fighting one another will be our party’s status quo.

There are a lot of meetings going on among some Republicans trying to figure out what went wrong on Election Day and how the party needs to respond. None of them involve what the media like to call the base, the folks at the grass roots whose votes, after all, determine the outcome of elections.

The gatherings get a lot of media attention because the media mistakenly believe that the people attending them represent the grass roots of the GOP.

They don’t. What they represent is the coterie who led the party into eight years of ignoring the traditions and principles of the party pursued so avidly by the Reagan administration, with which they have the effrontery to identify themselves.

They represent the big-government, big-spending Republican Party that turned its back on the grass roots, and to listen to many of them what the GOP needs to do is to do more of the same things that put us where we are.

I have news for them. They are not the Republican Party. They remain wedded to the idea that the party is a party of moderation — the party that can’t make up its mind about what is right to do and what is wrong to do. So they try to come down in the middle.

They forget that Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, warned us not to believe there “is some middle ground” between what is right and what is wrong.

The grass roots haven’t forgotten that and the election results prove it. The “values voters” are alive and well, and they spoke loud and clear where values were at stake.

As Brad O’Leary has noted, a majority of Americans still support traditional American values. He cited initiatives to uphold traditional marriage that were on the ballots in two states carried by President-elect Obama, California and Florida.

Says O’Leary: “In both states, voters passed measures to ban gay marriage. In California, where Obama beat McCain 61 percent to 37 percent, ‘values voters’ beat special interest voters 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent on the issue of same-sex marriage.”

In Florida, which he recalls Obama won, the margin of victory for values voters was even more substantial - 62 percent of Floridians voted against gay marriage, while only 38 percent voted in favor.

Most damning for the GOP moderates was Obama’s ability to portray himself as a tax cutter. Obama constantly told the voters that his economic plan would cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, which would equate to 274 million Americans receiving a tax cut.

Yet the big-government, big-spending Republicans whose voice is David Brooks, The New York Times columnist who insists that the GOP must abandon its traditions and values and go merrily down to road to the land of moderation where nothing is really right, and nothing is really wrong.

He neglects to tell his readers that this is the road that leads to lost elections.

The future of the Republican Party is in the hands of the party’s grass roots. In the months to come some of us will be concentrating on organizing the people who are the real base of the party and fighting to restore the party’s values as represented by my father’s administration.

What we stand for is worth fighting for. And it is what will save the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. Let the moderates have their meetings. We’ll be busy taking over the reins and restoring the GOP.

Barack Obama is president-elect of the United States because the Republican Party and John McCain handed him the presidential election on a silver platter.

The Republican Party and the Bush White House walked away from Republican ideals and they walked away from Republican values.

George Bush allowed the Republican Congress to overspend in the first six years of his administration without once using the veto pen, blindsided the conservative Republican members of Congress on many occasions, and walked away from the base of his party on immigration reform and other issues such as Medicare and No Child Left Behind.

He refused to sit down and break bread with the conservative members of his own party on Capitol Hill, yet believed that he could break bread with the liberal Democrats in Washington the way he did with the Democrats in Austin, Texas. And when he discovered it didn’t work in Washington, it failed to stop him from trying and trying and trying over again what was obviously impossible.

Finally, the coup de grace was Dick Cheney’s endorsement of John McCain in the waning days of the campaign, which gave Barack Obama the final nail to put in the coffin of McCain’s campaign, which was striving mightily to distance him from the Bush administration.

Then there was McCain’s campaign itself. It was the worst campaign since Bob Dole’s on the Republican side, and the best campaign since Ronald Reagan’s on the Democrat side.

The McCain campaign was a campaign out of the 20th century, while the Democrats were running a campaign in the 21st century.

We need to understand that this was not a referendum on Reaganomics and Ronald Reagan. This was a referendum on George Bush, and Bush-ism, and Bush’s lack of leadership.

John McCain wouldn’t stand up against the Democrats in Washington D.C. on the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac scandals, against expanding government, a $700 billion bailout, and going against the traditional values of conservative Republicans.

The economic collapse was the Democrats’ fault. Yet John McCain never bothered going after them on that. He let the burglars walk away with the loot because those were his friends, and with George Bush failed to point the finger of blame at the people who caused the financial collapse that has plunged the nation into a certain recession. Bush had the bully pulpit but failed to use it, and the Democrats walked away scot-free.

Shockingly, John McCain failed to use the most potent weapon in his arsenal — the culpability of Barack Obama and his friends in the wholesale looting of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that led to the current debacle. McCain had the goods, but wouldn’t exploit them.

The McCain campaign made inadequate use of Gov. Sarah Palin, who had enormous crowd appeal. A lot of people voted for John McCain because of Sarah Palin. There were bigger a crowds because of Sarah Palin. Yet some of the functionaries in the McCain campaign are trying to point the finger at her for McCain’s defeat.

John McCain lost because of his lack of a clear message. He needed more than the fact that he is a maverick. His answer to the economic crisis was a $300 billion bailout for delinquent mortgagees. He was offering welfarism, while Barack Obama was offering socialism.

People laugh at me when I tell them the difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans take a week longer to embrace communism.

This was not a referendum on Ronald Reagan. As a matter of fact, my dad might well have voted for Barack Obama just based on what he was seeing his party doing.

Finally, I hope that when Barack Obama was making elaborate and extravagant promises about what he was going to do, he was flat-out lying.

I hope Barack Obama will not be what he has promised to be. I hope he doesn’t have a civilian security force. I hope he doesn’t raise my taxes. I hope he doesn’t spread the wealth. I hope he doesn’t raise taxes on corporate America. I hope he looks at nuclear power. I hope he allows us to drill. I hope that there will be no revival of the fairness doctrine.

The other day I went to a Hollywood luncheon crammed with producers, directors, writers and other film industry notables.

One of them, Larry Gelbart of “MASH” fame, spoke telling the group that since capitalism has failed, why don’t we try socialism?

Try socialism? Take a sip of it and see how it tastes? It doesn’t work that way.

There’s an old saying that you can’t be half-socialist any more than you can be half-pregnant; get knocked up with a socialist fetus and you’ll have to deliver a full-born Marxist. There’s nothing inbetween. Try it, you’ll like it, and if you don’t, as the lads in the Gestapo used to tell people, they had ways to make them like it.

Larry Gelbart gorged himself at the capitalist table and came away with untold millions, now safely banked, and continues to collect even more millions from never-ending reruns of the “MASH” sitcom. Having made his bundle from our capitalist free-enterprise system, he seems to be telling us now that the rest of us should get in the socialist bread-line and eat crumbs while he feasts on caviar.

One of the realities of this age is that the great mass of the American people haven’t traveled abroad to see how the rest of the world lives, a lot of it under dreary socialist regimes with stalled economies and no real chance for advancement for the ordinary citizen.

Moreover, our shoddy educational curriculum that has left most younger Americans so deficient in the study of history that vast numbers of them think George Washington was a Civil War general, or a lumberman who chopped down cherry trees. They have no real understanding of the economic system that allowed us to become the wealthiest and most powerful nation since the Roman Empire ruled most of the known world 2000 years ago.

Given that mournful reality, the moment the economic Rolls Royce engine that drove this nation to the top of the hill stalls, instead of installing new spark plugs to get it going again they go looking for an alternative mode of transportation.

In the present case, Obama and the Democrats are directing them to Larry Gelbart’s used-economic system lot where he shows them a jalopy with a fancy paint job on the outside and a one-cylinder motor inside that goes chug-chug.

Listening to the advice of a man who made his name and his money on a show about America’s military at war — yet told the same audience that our armed forces are nothing but “mercenaries” — doesn’t seem the smartest thing to do.

We are now a few days away from an election in which one of the presidential candidates is trying to sell that jalopy on Larry Gelbart’s lot and convince us that it is really a luxury limo that will get hundreds of miles to the gallon and carry us off to the promised land, where the rich will be impoverished and the middle class enriched and everybody will be deliriously happy.

Call Barack Obama’s program socialism, however and he’ll swear on a stack of Qurans it isn’t. He calls it change. He says it’s fairness, not Marxism.

Oh?

How does he explain the proven fact that he has been wallowing in a sty surrounded by fervent socialists and sharing in their swill for most of his life?

According to Fox’s Bill Sammon, his Messiahship recalled that when he attended Occidental College in Los Angeles: “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully,” he wrote in “Dreams From My Father,” his memoir. “The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.”

And that was his milieu for all his years in Chicago.

To anyone familiar with socialism, Obama’s programs fit comfortably within the pages of Karl Marx’s playbook, the root of which is the redistribution of the wealth, the key to the entire Obamian vault. What’s mine is yours, and he’s the middle man.

It’s socialism lite, and it can only evolve into socialism heavy. Remember, you can’t be half-socialist, and Barack Obama knows it.

The media’s almost universal opinion that Sen. Joe Biden simply made just another one of his gaffes — when he warned that the election of the untested Barack Obama would inevitably result in a global crisis where our enemies take measure of the man by confronting him and America with a challenge — was dead wrong.

It was no gaffe; it was a clear warning that Obama will not only be tested, but also that he will not be up to the challenge and will need help in dealing with something he cannot deal with on his own.

I cannot remember a more frightening scenario, especially since it came from Obama’s own running mate and not John McCain or the Republican Party. I have no doubt Biden was sincere in alerting the nation to a very real threat to our national security — the prospect of a totally inexperienced and naive Barack Obama being confronted by an enemy he would rather talk with.

That the nation isn’t alarmed by this prospect, which Biden guaranteed would surely come about, is simply bizarre. Here in a post-9/11 world, when America’s foes have proven they’ll stop at nothing to bring America down to our knees, if the polls are correct voters are on the verge of electing a man to the presidency whose very election will light the spark of an international crisis in a nuclear age.

This is an unprecedented situation, but it’s not the first time the voters have chosen a president who lacked the bona fides required in a leader facing an international threat and a determined enemy.

Unlike Barack Obama, however, John Kennedy had been tested when in harm’s way during WW II, and had shown himself capable of acting with both courage and initiative.

Moreover he had been a first-hand witness at momentous events during his father’s ambassadorship to war-torn Britain and had even written a book, “Why England Slept,” about the crisis England faced because they failed to recognize the threat Hitler posed to their very existence.

Yet even with his experience evident when he won election in 1960, the Soviet Union thought he not only should be tested but was convinced he would fail the test.

As a result America found itself facing a nuclear war with the Soviets after Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev met with JFK, saw what he judged to be his weakness, and confronted America with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It was only after JFK promised to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey and pledged to halt all efforts to remove Fidel Castro from power that Khrushchev agreed to take his missiles out of Cuba.

We cannot afford another such crisis, yet if Joe Biden is correct that’s exactly what will happen if Barack Obama wins the presidency on November 4. He’s guaranteed it.

We can expect that the challenge to Obama to come from Iran which has already observed him promising to sit down with their leaders without preconditions, thus to meet with them as equals.

Iran has already shown how they react to U.S. presidents who show signs of weakness. They saw weakness in Jimmy Carter, and they seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days.

When my father won election in 1980 Iran had no need to test him; they had already taken his measure and he scared the daylights out of them. As a result, minutes after he took the oath of office the Iranians released the hostages.

A soon-to-be nuclear power, Iran is certain to test what they see as a politician with absolutely no experience. And given his demonstrated willingness to greet hostility with mere words eloquently spoken, we an expect Iran to risk a global crisis by facing him with a direct challenge to his leadership, probably by rattling their nuclear sword.

We had better heed Joe Biden’s warning and vote against an untested politician from Chicago’s rowdy and corrupt political machine.

If you believe Newsweek magazine — something that usually requires a serious suspension of disbelief — the Reagan Era is dead. Politico also chimed in, proclaiming the death of the Reagan revolution.

Newsweek doesn’t go on to tell you who killed the Reagan Era, so I will. It was the Republican Party that demolished the shining city on the hill my father built. It was the Republican Party that was 100 percent responsible for the end of the Reagan Revolution.

They forgot who he was; and having forgotten who he was, they stopped following in his footsteps that should have led to smaller, less-intrusive government, and restrained government spending. They are the ones who began to undermine the sturdy foundation my father built.

By the way, the same thing happened to Maggie Thatcher in Britain. Her own party was responsible for undermining all the great advances she made towards dismantling the socialist welfare state that had made England an economic basket-case. It happened because once she was out of power her party weakened.

Maggie was strong and Ronald Reagan was strong, but when they no longer were in power and at their prime, their followers turned into weak-kneed office seekers.

Being weak they were easily led astray and went in other directions, and fell prey to the lure of big government, big spending and big deficit politics.

The end of the Reagan Era was brought to us by the Republican Party, which had thrived under his leadership and is now in danger of becoming a minor player in the nation’s politics and a spectator at the birth of a socialist America doomed to follow the path to ruin of every failed state has embraced the Marxist creed.

Can the Reagan Era be resurrected? It can, but only by the party that was responsible for its death. Republicans killed it and it’s up to Republicans to revive it. And if America is to survive the coming debacle looming ahead under an ultra-left-wing Obama government drenched in the welfare-state philosophies of Karl Marx, only a reborn Republican Party will be capable of bringing America back from the brink of destruction.

Unless John McCain understands what is at stake here, Nov. 5 is going to resemble the smoking rubble of Dresden in the wake of the Allied firebombing of that city. The Republican Party is going to be in shambles.

It’s going to be in shambles because the Republican Party abandoned the trail leading to that shining city on the hill to become itself a quasi-left-wing organization which looks at the Democrats’ welfare programs and says “me too.”

They destroyed the party from within. They are the ones to blame. Not the left-wing media , not left-wing academia, not the Democratic Party but the GOP — the Grand Old Party — no longer grand, just old and scared silly.

Ronald Reagan had the same media that we have today. He had the same left-wing academia that we have today and the same Democratic Party that we have today. But when the media and the Democrats attacked him he found it invigorating, and found strength and fortitude in being under fire, and he fought back like a tiger.

Today, when Republicans are attacked, they tremble and run for cover. And they give in and begin to mumble “me too.”

I’ve heard people say that Ronald Reagan would have supported the bailout. My answer to that is: “Balderdash!” Ronald Reagan would never have supported a bailout, because under his leadership there never would have been a need for a bailout. He never would have allowed the double-dealing and sheer criminality that brought about our current crisis.

In a Ronald Reagan administration the Chris Dodds and Barney Franks — who bled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dry — wouldn’t be running Congressional committees, they’d be fending off Federal prosecutors.

Let’s not have any more talk about the end of the Reagan Era and the Reagan Revolution. It’s time to re-fire the jets and move forward.

Let’s win another one for the Gipper.

To listen to the Obama spin-masters you’d think that the McCain campaign’s questioning of their candidate’s association with unrepentant terrorist bomber Bill Ayers is a smear tactic falsely elevating a casual relationship between the two men into one where they worked together in promoting Ayers’ far-left goals.

Their reaction to the continuing revelations that disprove that claim is one of sheer panic — and they have a good reason to be scared witless that any in-depth probe of what went on between the two comrades will reveal Obama’s true colors — all of them dark red!

If the truth becomes better known — and it will if the Ayers issue is doggedly pursued — it will be clear that Obama was not only deeply immersed the fetid swamp of Chicago’s far-left political scene, but was from the very beginning of his career carefully groomed by the city’s socialist left to follow the path he’s on now in his quest for the presidency of the United States.

Giving credence to the charge that Obama was “groomed by an older generation of radical leftists for insertion into the American political process, trading on good looks, brains, educational pedigree, and the desire of the vast majority of the voting public to right the historical racial wrongs of the [past]” as the American Thinkers’ Thomas Lifson has written:

• Obama belonged to the socialist New Party, described by Lifson as “a radical left organization, established in 1992, to amalgamate far-left groups and push the United States into socialism by forcing the Democratic Party to the left.” A March 22, 1998 article by John Nichols in These Times revealed, “After six years, the party has built what is arguably the most sophisticated left-leaning political operation the country has seen since the decline of the Farmer-Labor, Progressive and Non-Partisan League groupings of the early part of the century.”

• Obama has been allied with ACORN and their Project Vote, the radical leftist group now charged with massive vote fraud aimed at electing Barack Obama president of the United States. Obama has long been directly involved with ACORN. An article by Toni Foulkes of ACORN, “Case Study: Chicago-The Barack Obama Campaign,” which appeared in Social Policy magazine in 2004, Foulkes revealed ACORN noticed Obama when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. Wrote Foulks: “He was a very good organizer. When he returned from law school, we asked him to help us with a lawsuit to challenge the state of Illinois’ refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act … Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar … and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5000 of them). Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office.”

• Obama and Bill Ayers were close associates for years, going back as far as 1995 if not earlier. According to CNN: “A review of board minutes and records by CNN show Obama crossed paths repeatedly with Ayers at board meetings of the Annenberg Challenge Project. The Annenberg Foundation gave the project a $50 million grant to match local private funds to improve schools… Obama was asked to serve as the board chairman in 1995… For seven years, Ayers and Obama — among many others — worked on funding for education projects, including some projects advocated by Ayers … The board, for example, gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bill Ayers’ small schools project… The funding, according to records… CNN reviewed, came directly from the Annenberg foundation which Obama chaired. While working on the Annenberg project, Obama and Ayers also served together on a second charitable foundation, the Woods Fund.”

No wonder the Obama campaign wants the Ayers connection to be off-limits.

I listen to all this talk in the media about the failure of the bailout in the House Monday — what happened? Where did it go wrong? Why didn’t it pass? They’re running around pointing fingers — saying it was the Democrats, it was the Republicans, it was the White House — and nobody has a clue of what really happened and who made it happen.

They should have asked my wife, Colleen. That night she put her finger on it, saying that she -and millions of angry Americans who were dead-set against bailing out the very people who caused this mess — were the ones who killed the measure.

Congress was deluged by a flood of phone calls and e-mails all warning that Americans were violently opposed to the bailout and would exact punishment at the polls next month from members who voted for it. The people spoke loud and clear, and their voices were heard on Capitol Hill.

As Colleen said to me, it just may be that we’re smarter than those people in Washington and Wall Street who think we’re a bunch of ninnies who they can con whenever they feel like it. We get it and we understand it.

They forgot what Abraham Lincoln advised when he said, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time.”

This was one of the times they tried to fool all of us. It didn’t work. Back to the drawing boards.

We looked at it and we saw fear-mongering- attempts to panic us into believing that the banks had no money to lend, and credit was dried up and loans were almost impossible to get — all being peddled from the White House, the Treasury and the Fed, and all the way down to the House and Senate, Wall Street and much of the media.

We knew that was untrue because our daughter, Ashley, had just qualified and easily obtained a mortgage on a $360,000 townhouse from a small local bank. The bank had foreclosed on the house and was stuck with a defaulted mortgage of $560,000. Ashley, who is 25 and a schoolteacher, got the townhouse for $200,000 under what the bank held in bad paper.

Home sales in California in August were up 56 percent over August a year ago. Why? Because now is a good time to get in. There are all kinds of bargains available. Now there are possibilities of making a profit on investments. The market was up Tuesday. Why? Because it was a good time to get in. Maybe America just got it right.

Monday the market went down 6.7 percent, and it was panic time. Back in 1987, when my dad was president, the market dropped 22.6 percent — a 508-point drop in one day — it was the largest single drop in the history of the market.

Did President Reagan panic? Were there calls for bailouts? No. Instead, my dad simply said hold the course — what goes down must in fact go up. He made sure that there was no panic. By remaining calm and steady he kept the nation and the market calm, and what happened? Since 1987, the market has been up as high as almost 12,000 points. Now it’s down to a little over 10,000. In 1987, the market dropped all the way down to about 1786 points. And we didn’t panic.

What’s going on now in Washington is a panic-driven attempt to cope with a temporary problem. We seem to have forgotten the old adage about the foolishness of acting in haste leading to repenting in leisure.

Congress is running around in circles trying to figure out how to handle the hot potato the Bush Administration has handed them with its $700 billion bailout proposal, and how they can load it up with their own list of taxpayer-financed handouts.

If left to their own devices they’ll turn it into a giant cookie jar instead of taking the trouble to enact the measures that will boost the economy when it is in deep trouble.

The bailout is a panic remedy designed to prop up the crumbling mortgage market by buying up mountains of near-worthless paper currently poisoning America’s credit system while ignoring the root causes of the nation’s economic malaise.

No matter how it’s described, it is a socialistic answer to a capitalist problem. It does nothing to foster the system of free enterprise upon which America’s prosperity depends.

Put simply, that system is shackled around the ankles with chains fashioned by a series of Congresses, many of whose members either don’t understand the principles of free enterprise or simply despise it as a mortal enemy of the Marxist dogma many of them embrace with near-religious fervor.

The clear and simple answer to our current economic dilemma is to take those shackles off and allow our free enterprise system to function unimpaired with unnecessary bureaucratic meddling.

Turn America’s economic engine loose and all by itself it will create the kind of prosperity that saw a rustic combination of 13 British colonies transformed into the wealthiest and most powerful nation in world history.

“We did it before,” as the World War II song boasted, “and we can do it again.”

If allowed to, that is.

American businesses and America’s small businessmen and women who make $250,000 a year — the people who create most of the jobs in the marketplace — are groaning under the burden of corporate and personal taxation. At a corporate tax rate of 35 percent we have the second-highest in the world.

There aren’t enough people making $250,000 a year to finance Barack Obama’s extravagant spending plans, let alone the ability to pay for the $700 billion bailout. He has to look elsewhere — in this case the only place he can look — to the middle class.

Like Willie Sutton, who said he robbed banks because that’s where the money is, Obama is going to have go after the middle class because that’s where the real tax money is.

Eliminate capital-gains taxes, cut individual and corporate tax rates to the bone, and watch the economy soar and unemployment shrink.

Don’t allow boneheaded ideas like Barack Obama’s plan to increase taxes at a time of economic crisis become a reality. He tells us that his tax plan would reduce the taxes of 95 percent of the American people, but doesn’t say how he can give a tax break to the 40 percent of them who don’t pay any income taxes at all. Since they can’t get a tax refund for taxes they don’t pay, he wants the people who pay taxes to send them a check.

Obama also wants to throw a monkey wrench into the economy by allowing the Bush tax cuts, which set off an economic boom, to expire. That would be a massive tax increase and it would have a deadly effect on the incomes of the very middle class Obama professes to champion.

Congress should waste no time at all in repealing the ill-conceived Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was allegedly designed to reform American business practices but instead drove scores of American firms abroad to foreign nations.

Let Congress get out of the way and let the American people and American businesses do what they have always done best — put their shoulders to the wheel, their ingenuity to work, and perform economic miracles.

When I was a little boy we used to play a game where we wore a blindfold and tried to put a slip of paper on a drawing of a donkey we couldn’t see. I thought of that as I watched the chattering class, blindfolded and frantically trying to pin the blame for the Wall Street debacle on everything but the real donkey, the Democrats, whose symbol is. guess what?

Right, a donkey, and that’s where the blame lies, on Barack Obama’s Democratic Party.

To find the donkey you need to go back to the Clinton administration, which decided that everybody and his kid brother was entitled to a mortgage even when they didn’t begin to qualify for a home loan.

In saner days, banks designated certain areas as no-loan zones - depressed neighborhoods where lending money to potential home buyers was not just a risky investment, but a certain future foreclosure. Critics of the practice called it “redlining” and President Clinton and his chums on Capitol Hill decided that banks should no longer act like banks and lend money only to home buyers who could afford to handle the monthly payments. Now all bets would be off and people not the least bit creditworthy — and speculators — would be entitled by law to obtain mortgages even when it was obvious they couldn’t afford to handle them.

Enter those now infamous quasi-government banking instruments known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which poured fresh money into the banking system by buying mortgages from banks. Over the long haul they managed to load up their portfolios with billions upon billions of dollars of risky mortgage paper that banks had been forced to offer and then dumped on them.

The scandal of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dwarfs the Enron debacle. In Enron, people went to jail. With the Fannies, some just walked away with millions.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers can be blamed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two big mortgage banks that the Feds recently bailed out with big bucks. As Fox News has pointed out, they used huge lobbying budgets and political contributions to keep regulators off their backs.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the top three U.S. Senators getting big Fannie and Freddie political bucks were Democrats, and No. 2 was Sen. Barack Obama, who as Fox noted had only been in the Senate four years but still managed to grab that No. 2 spot ahead of longtime colleagues John Kerry and Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

According to Fox, Fannie and Freddie were where big-time Washington Democrats went to work and pocketed millions. Franklin Raines, Clinton’s White House Budget Director, ran Fannie and collected $50 million.

Jamie Gorelick, an official in Clinton’s Justice Department — the woman who built the “wall” that prevented the FBI from targeting terrorists before 9/11 — worked for Fannie Mae and took home $26 million. Big-time Democrat Jim Johnson, who headed Obama’s VP search committee, also hauled in millions from running Fannie Mae.

Obama brazenly blames John McCain and the GOP for the current Wall Street mess when it’s clear none of it was due to Republican policies. The truth of the matter is that it was McCain and three GOP colleagues who sought to reform the government’s lending policies three long years ago after the Bush administration had failed two years earlier. On May 25, 2006, McCain spoke on behalf of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, and warned against the debacle we are now facing if it failed to pass.

He told the Senate that a report by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight charged that “Fannie Mae employees deliberately and intentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives.”

McCain warned, “If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.”

McCain predicted the entire collapse we now are suffering through. He stressed the falsification of financial records to benefit executives, including Obama advisers Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson.

Now Obama has the nerve to try to pin the blame on McCain and the GOP when the facts show that the blame must be pinned on the Democratic donkey.