Where to begin?

Obama and the Democrats are out of the gate with disturbing words and actions. So is Steele and the Republicans.

And NRO’s Andrew McCarthy has a blistering account of it all.

The GOP wants you to know: It is terribly “disappointed.”

That is the message of the first salvos fired by — or dribbled out of — the Republican National Committee under the leadership of its new chairman, Michael Steele. Over the weekend, the RNC issued press releases in response to the passage of the Democrats’ appalling “stimulus” package and the Obama administration’s machinations over the 2010 census. It shouldn’t have bothered. The releases are self-inflicted wounds that read like self-parody.

This is a bracing, bi-partisan thrashing.

Conservatives already wondering whether the GOP has a clue are now left to wonder whether the party even has a dictionary. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition, defines disappoint as “to fail to meet the expectation of.” Can anyone seriously be disappointed by the Democrats’ plan for radically remaking the American economy?

President Obama, once the candidate of an openly socialist party, has made a career of calling for fiscal and social upheaval, hiding behind such euphemisms as “redistributive change,” “economic justice,” and “spread[ing] the wealth around.” He criticized the Warren Court for not being radical enough — which is like saying Nadya Suleman wasn’t pregnant enough — because it failed to embrace a constitutional theory that would have imposed confiscatory tax policies to underwrite a new New Deal. He is, in short, the most left-wing politician ever elected to the presidency.

With the stimulus, Obama’s leftism, and that of his Democratic colleagues, is on ugly display. We are witnessing the most intrusive extension of central governmental control over the lives of Americans in our nation’s history.

The government-dominated healthcare system, the undoing of welfare reform…

This leaves the RNC . . . “disappointed.” You have to wonder what it would take to get Republicans “miffed.”

And then there’s the Census plan the White House grabbed from Commerce. McCarthy makes an explicit remark I haven’t heard anyone else point out. Yes, the Census grab is political manuevering. But…

…only professional politicians think it’s effective to accuse the professional politicians on the other side of making politics “about politics.” There is a tiny handful of people, most of whom work either in Washington or the mainstream media, who give a hoot about that. Of the remaining 300 million or so Americans, those who care about public policy want to know how it will affect their lives. And the Obama census will affect them dramatically — not because of who does the counting but because of how the counting is done. 

Here’s where McCarthy gets to the heart of the matter, the story behind the story.

The president, a former community organizer, is steeped in Saul Alinsky’s principles of radical revolution — he has studied them, taught them, and written about them. As Alinsky himself wrote, his “rules for radicals” are essentially about one thing: “How to organize for power: how to get it and to use it.” They instruct radicals how, through misleading language and stealthy infiltration of the institutions, to seize power. Anyone who has read Alinsky could have predicted that the census would be among Obama’s top priorities. It is abstruse and bureaucratic, but it apportions political clout. It is tailor-made for an activist bent on shifting power from red states to blue.

To do that, Obama needs to cook the books. That is what the GOP should be paying attention to.

Heads up here…

How far can Democrats push that envelope and count (or double count, or invent) new Democratic constituents? How many non-citizens or imaginary Americans will they include in their tabulations? We don’t know. But you can bet the Obama administration plans to do for “actual Enumeration” exactly what it is doing to “stimulus,” and for the same reason: to cement a permanent majority to sustain leftist policies…

But Republicans did not seize the opportunity. Steele and the RNC missed their chance to highlight the real problem: voodoo statistics.

Whichever guy is your guy, whichever party you subscribe to, these charges are pretty accurate. The Alinsky stuff is true. The Census plans are real and he’s right about the reluctance of just about everyone to publicly ask the hard and sharp questions.

Some 58 million Americans voted against Obama in the last election — more than had ever voted for any winning presidential candidate in U.S. history until George W. Bush’s election in 2004. If you penetrate the fog of Obamedia infatuation and discount voters’ natural tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to a new president, Obama’s popular position is far from commanding. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned and plenty of Americans who would be receptive to a cogent explanation of those concerns.

This is one. Watch for more.