'Ridicule is man's most potent weapon' ~ By Joseph Farah

By Joseph Farah Posted: August 10, 2009 1:00 am Eastern © 2009 "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." Who said that? One of Barack Obama's political mentors – Saul Alinsky. Do you think he embraced those words? Do you think his acolytes do? I see evidence of it every day – particularly with regard to those calling on Obama to do the only decent, moral, legal and American thing to do about his mysterious, elusive birth certificate. I don't have a frail ego. I have been criticized viciously before, and I survived. I have been attacked by presidents before – in ways that actually hurt my finances, my reputation and distracted me from my mission as a journalist. It was hardly the end of the world for me. But for other journalists, or pseudo-journalists, or "media personalities," they fear such attacks. They have reached such lofty positions of great wealth and prestige, they can't bear the risks those attacks involve. And that's why ridicule is such a potent weapon – especially against one's political enemies and especially when those attacks are coordinated and directed by powerful people. That's what you have witnessed over the last several weeks as anyone who "steps out of line" on the issue of Barack Obama's constitutional eligibility gets caricatured and derided as a buffoon or worse – a racist. It was Saul Alinsky's fifth rule of power tactics. He wrote the book, "Rules for Radicals," and it is a playbook for the Obama administration, the Democratic Congress and their operatives, of which there are many, in the "state-run media," as Rush Limbaugh so accurately dubbed it. If you can't articulate a coherent response to people calling for the release of something as innocuous as a presidential birth certificate, kill the messenger. Proclaim him or her a fool, a conspiracy theorist, a tinfoil-hat-wearing lunatic. [READ COMPLETE COLUMN]