In the second half of the 2000s liberals did a fine job of blaming Bush for everything that went wrong in the US. His "neo-con" supporters, they asserted, were just as bad.

Now that President Obama and his signature legislation are a twin disaster the same opportunity beckons for conservatives. It's not just Obama, it's the whole liberal project that created this mess. So the road to 2016 involves discrediting Obama, but also the whole liberal ruling class.

A good place to start would be FDR's Four Freedoms, for when the campaign to elect the un-Obama kicks off in 2016 it will be 75 years since Franklin Delano Roosevelt unveiled his Four Freedoms on January 6, 1941. In case you forgot, the freedoms were:

Freedom of Speech

Freedom of Worship

Freedom from Want

Freedom from Fear

Have you ever thought about how the liberals have utterly betrayed the noble sentiments of the Four Freedoms?
Nothing personal here. It's just that all power corrupts, and liberal power corrupts absolutely.

Let us give our liberal friends the benefit of the doubt and stipulate that, then and now, liberals believe what they say they believe in. Even so, for the sake of truth, justice and the American Way, we must look at the liberal record on the Four Freedoms.

The Four Freedoms were famously depicted by Norman Rockwell in the Saturday Evening Post, and the first freedom was a painting of an earnest young white working-class man standing up to speak his mind at a public meeting. Today, the only place you get to hear the voices of white working-class men in America, according to Camille Paglia, is on sports radio. And we've just come through a comical episode where the activist group GLAAD, spear-carrier of the liberal cultural elite, got its head handed to it after a gratuitous lunge at the free-speech right of a conservative Christian.

The point is that liberals today stand foursquare against any speech that hasn't been pre-approved by the liberal censors, and they operate blacklists against people that violate liberal speech codes, according to the principle that you'll never get a job in this tinsel-town again. Liberals have utterly betrayed their belief in Freedom of Speech.

When it comes to Freedom of Worship, depicted by Rockwell as an angelic grandmother piously saying her prayers in church, liberals seem to have misinterpreted religious freedom as Freedom from Worship. Today's liberals are united in a war against God-based religion. Except Islam, of course. Why is it that liberals give Islam a pass?
The sick joke is that while liberals declare that God is dead and religion is bigotry and superstition and worry about the least little religious symbol on government land, everything that liberals do and believe creates an establishment of secular religion -- from forcing little children into government secular schools down to the GLAADs and the HRCs and the PETAs filling in for the Spanish Inquisition.

What about Freedom from Want? Surely liberals have been true to their last on that, shoveling trillions of dollars every year at the poor and the helpless. Unfortunately the Newest Poor Laws of the 1960s War on Poverty have been every bit as useless as the old Poor Law of the late 1500s and the New Poor Law of 1834 in getting the poor out of pauperism. Even liberal economist Robert William Fogel admits: today's problem is not material inequality but a "maldistribution of spiritual resources." But Fogel's solution is that

The nation should develop a program to provide the poor in spirit with spiritual values such as a "sense of purpose," a "vision of opportunity," a "sense of the mainstream of work and life," a "strong family ethic," "a sense of community," ... a "sense of benevolence," "a sense of discipline," ... and "self-esteem."

The trouble is that government can't do that, never could, never would, and liberals can't bring themselves to admit it. Why? Because government only does force; family and work and benevolence is what religion teaches. See liberals and Freedom of Worship above.

Finally, what about Freedom from Fear? Never mind, liberals were hypocrites about that from the very start. Right after FDR spoke grandly in 1941 about a "world-wide reduction of armaments" he spoke of "this foreign peril" and declared that "the immediate need is a swift and driving increase in our armament production." Today the great need is freedom from fear of the IRS, the NSA, and the TSA.

Again, this isn't personal. All power corrupts and fundamental transformation corrupts fundamentally. Even for liberals.

Our job is to remove today's corrupt ruling class from the citadel, and to do that we need to discredit liberal power. Let's get started right now.

Christopher Chantrill (mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com) is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his usgovernmentspending.com and also usgovernmentdebt.us. At americanmanifesto.org he is blogging and writing An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism. Get his Road to the Middle Class.