So a Mormon and a leftist are walking on a street in New York, and they hear screams.  It's Kitty Genovese being stabbed to death, and it becomes a huge preachy New York Times guilt-tripping campaign, because Kitty's neighbors heard her screams and did nothing.  The liberal media smelled a preaching opportunity too good to pass up.  Today Kitty Genovese is still a lib-media symbol for America.

Well, what would Mitt do?  Or Barry?

We don't know, but we know what their lifelong beliefs say they should do.

The left says: The murder of Kitty Genovese is the fault of society.  Create a revolution, put the most "progressive" intellectuals in total control, change society -- how is never explained -- and the crime rate will magically wither away.  Just like Chicago, or the Soviet Union, or China, where murder became a government monopoly.  Or North Korea today. 

It's not a good record.  And yet, the left keeps falling back into the same utopian dream, because dreams beat facts.  Capitalism must be responsible for crime because it's responsible for all the bad things in the world, and none of the good ones.  Everything must be changed, by force if necessary.

That is why the left is against the death penalty even for the worst murderers, who are never held responsible for their actions.  It's all society's fault.  Today Obama is probably still against the death penalty, even while he decides who is going to be assassinated by a Predator drone in Yemen or Pakistan the next day.  It's like playing a shoot-'em-up video game.

Nobody on the left seems bothered by that, because none of them cares about the morality of Obama's actions, like lying, killing, and smearing his country.  These people care only whether it advances their utopian agenda.  Whatever Obama does has to be good.  The end justifies the means.

It is a very primitive way of thinking.  It is also ruthless and arguably sociopathic.  Notice that all the news stories about Predator strikes killing civilian wedding parties have magically disappeared.  Obama's assassinations never kill civilians.  I guess they finally fixed the bugs and that they're now scoring 100 percent with those Predators.    

I've asked leftist friends and acquaintances about the dreadful record of this administration in the Muslim world, in terms of sheer, simple morality, and the answer is always some dumb excuse.  They don't care that the bloody Arab Spring has killed tens of thousands of Arabs and brought the most reactionary, anti-woman, anti-gay, and anti-modern brutes to power everywhere.  They don't care that terrorist nations will soon have nuclear weapons.  They don't care that Obama openly allowed Green Revolution kids in Tehran to be mowed down by police vehicles driven by Basiji thugs -- just so Obama could curry favor with the mullahs, who feel nothing but contempt for Obama today.

The left has a cult mindset, like with Scientology.  Black unemployment is now 14.4 percent, and more than 8% of the population is on disability and not counted in unemployment figures.  The left doesn't care. 

Well, what about Mitt Romney?

What are his beliefs?

I'm no expert on the Latter-Day Saints, but fortunately there was a Book of Mormon in my hotel room recently, with big capital letters under the title: ANOTHER TESTAMENT OF JESUS CHRIST.

Whether you agree with that or not, the meaning is clear enough.  Mormons want the world to know what they believe: that there is one continuous scriptural tradition beginning with Genesis, going on for centuries, preached by Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospels, and culminating in the Book of Mormon.  Muslims believe the same thing, except that their version ends with Mohammed.

Romney has a lifelong investment in that belief, while Obama has 20 years of sitting at the feet of Jeremiah Wright.

What would Mitt Romney do if he heard Kitty Genovese screaming?

We can't know for sure.  We know what his professed faith says.

In the Judeo-Christian scriptures, defending the weak and helpless is a core value, not in just one passage, but in many.  It's not that defending a widow or orphan will bring about Utopia on earth.  It is just the right and moral thing to do.

 Individuals matter as individuals because they have souls.  Paradise is left to God.  Widows and orphans matter in the real world, which is simply filled with moral choices.  Jesus' Parable of the Good Samaritan makes that point, but so do the many versions of the Golden Rule.

The Golden Rule doesn't show up in Marxism, because individuals count for little when all you want is to change the world.  Those 100 million people killed by Marxist regimes in the 20^th century are incidental breakage.  It's too bad, but we've got to forge onward.  Anyway, there are too many people already.  I keep hearing those sociopathic ideas from liberals.  They mean them.

That is also why the left is now allied with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Libya, and with their equivalents in Iran and Turkey.  They don't care about those hundreds of millions of Muslim women living in slavery and fear of death if they walk out of the family jail.  They don't care that Lara Logan was gang-raped near Tahrir Square by the celebrated democracy demonstrators.  They can't see facts, and they can't think from A to B.  Lara Logan is just Kitty Genovese for 2012, and the media turn their eyes away and pass on.

The left will say that ObamaCare shows how much they love the Kitty Genoveses of the world, but of course it shows no such thing, and for a very good reason: O'Care is another centralized power-grab.  There is no evidence that socialized medicine will improve American medical care.  On the contrary.  The reason for O'Care is simply to "tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect," as FDR's political sidekick Harry Hopkins said during the New Deal.

We now have 13,000 pages of new tax laws, and nobody has the slightest idea of how they will work.  You couldn't write a coherent computer program to predict what those 13,000 pages will do.  As for your and my medical care... nobody knows at all.  We've traded in the best medical economy in the world for a pig in a poke.  And don't think the geniuses who designed this horrific mess didn't know it.  They knew, they knew.  They are not as ignorant as they claim to be in public.

The left always falls back on delusions of control -- on par with the Soviet Five Year Plans, which promised food for all but which never worked over seven long decades.  In the USSR, the elites believed their own propaganda, just like in the United States today.  The only people who believe the liberal media are liberal suckers.  They mouth the clichés, but they've never shown that they can think for themselves.  Mouthing the catechism just makes them feel better about themselves.

The evidence is in from a century of ruthless Marxist experiments.  The facts don't support centralized control of complex economic systems.  On the contrary.

Moral behavior in real life is a much better predictor of political character than far-fetched utopian schemes, which just evade the here and now.

Four years ago we elected a U.S. president who does not believe in moral choices; he is a radical utopian, and when he slips into saying what he really believes, he says things like "the private sector is doing fine" -- when the private sector is refusing to invest because Obama has made the world completely unpredictable for the people in that sector.

We are only beginning to see the damage Obama and the Democrats are causing, foreign and domestic.  It is the worst fiasco since the start of the Cold War, because it is another Cold War -- if we're lucky and it doesn't get hot.  The left has imported hundreds of thousands of Pakistani Muslims into Europe, and it is doing it here as well.  Those populations understanding nothing about the political values of the Constitution.  As Michigan Congressman Andre Carson said the other day, they think madrassas ought to be the model.

Obama's openly proclaimed solution for the next four years is to repeat the suicidal policies of the last four.  That will not hurt a single billionaire in America, because they have a hundred different loopholes.  It will hurt you and your children.

In the last election, American voters were suckered bad.  Obama's election was the worst example of America's profound civic failures since the Baby Boomers -- the failure of ordinary voters to educate themselves.  In an electoral system, no matter how flawed, the voters have a say.  In 2008, they flunked the test of common sense.  They fell for the slick talk of a used car salesman because he was black, or half-black, but enough black to make them keel over.

Now they are beginning to see the lemon they bought fall apart. 

How will they vote this time?

Maybe the American voter deserves another four years of Obama, to really drive the lesson home.  People who are mentally stuck sometimes learn from pain and suffering, and there will be plenty of that to come.

The Russians will never elect another Vladimir Lenin because they know where that leads.  Vlady Putin is a new tsar, worshipping with the patriarch of Moscow, expanding Russian power, but not interested in revolutionizing the world.  When Putin and Obama met a couple of weeks ago, there were no smiles for the photo op.  Putin doesn't suffer fools gladly, and he treated Obama with contempt over Syria.  Putin is a thug, but he is a realistic thug.  He saw a chance to get Obama's goat, and seized the moment.  Putin has a record of doing that.

It's not just Russia, but the whole world that's got Obama's number today.  They've called his bluff and smell blood in the water.  If Obama gets re-elected, it will be a rough four years.

Kitty Genovese is a test of moral seriousness.  The political world now understands Obama.  He will never stand for simple, decent behavior.  The Syrian civil war has become a proxy struggle among big-power rivalries in the Middle East, because Obama retreated in the face of Russia opening a naval base in Syria.  The Eastern Med used to be an American lake, with the U.S. Navy keeping the peace.  No longer.  Putin is playing brute force chess, and he'll take his opponent piece by piece.  Iran has sent naval vessels into the Med using the Suez Canal -- which never happened when our ally Mubarak was in charge.  Putin isn't interested in the Middle East itself; he just plays Russian nationalist power games.  Today he decides what happens in the Eastern Med.

Ultimately, character matters.  The left never gets that.  The Kitty test helps clarify our choice in November.