In parliamentary systems, when a nation like Britain was faced with a deadly threat, competing parties tended to form unity governments – because "the prospect of hanging in the morning concentrates the mind wonderfully."  In deadly crises, American politics also swings toward unity.  In the face of the Hitler/Tojo war, Republicans reluctantly joined FDR and Truman in a united front.  Republicans and Democrats also cooperated, at least in public, in the face of the Soviet threat.

But with the Vietnam War, our political center broke apart, when the left drove repeated wedges into the American consensus, setting blacks against whites, women against men, gays against families, urbanites against Christianity, everybody against the rich, and so on.

That is how the left-Islamist axis has been able to elect an ideological radical like Obama, driving their united phalanx to split the American body politic.  Deliberate splitting is what we've seen over and over again in the Obama years.

The coming election is therefore much more crucial than any prior election in our lives.

Politically conscious Americans might be well advised to consider voting for a genuine unity ticket.  These are not ordinary times.  We all sense the earth moving under our feet, and constitutional government, which has served Americans so well for 240 years, is now in indisputable danger.

If the Trump and Cruz campaigns understand the threat to national survival, they can act by running as a joint ticket.  The U.S. Constitution does not govern the play of "political factions," as the Founders called them.  Right now, Trump and Cruz are wasting time and energy attacking each other.

A Trump-Cruz administration could appoint a genuine unity cabinet, including the strongest patriotic candidates – Dr. Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Rudy Giuliani, and even Jeb Bush.  That may sound like a formula for chaos, but those are exactly the kinds of people who managed to come together in previous times of national peril — the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the world wars, and the Cold War.

The GOP candidates represent a great deal of talent and some very strong egos.  But a person like Jeb Bush, for example, might accept a cabinet appointment if the national security is at stake.

Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures.

Trump and Cruz are imaginative enough to work out a unity government against Hillary and her pet choice, including the controlled media.  Right now, Trump would not win a national majority, but add Ted Cruz as V.P. candidate, Ben Carson as the promised head of Health and Human Services, Rudy Giuliani as attorney general, Carly Fiorina as head of Treasury, Jeb Bush at Department of Education, and some patriotic Democrats, like Joe Lieberman and Senator Mark Warner, to help clean out the pigsty in D.C.

This election is like the Lincoln-Douglas election just before the Civil War.  These are not a normal times.

If the voters do not come down hard on the Islamo-left in this election, Hillary and the Democrats will keep pushing Obama's slither toward anti-American and anti-Western policies.

Just look at the Muslim Brotherhood characters the Democrats invited to Obama's SOTU address.

Obama keeps doing in-your-face provocations to American patriots, like wearing that shahada ring in public and openly using jihadist jargon. "The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam," he said in 2012 at the U.N.

That's jihad lingo for "surrender or die, sucker!"

It's code language, and every single Muslim in the world gets it.  It is also a clear promise to destroy the First Amendment to punish any critic of Islam.  Don't ever think those words are empty rhetoric.

Symbolic betrayal is one of Obama's first weapons.  Our enemies understand the writing on that shahada "wedding ring" — which Obama wore long before his actual wedding.  Whether Obama is a believer or not is irrelevant.  There's no question that he makes deliberate use of jihadist war signals, over and over again.  Those signals bring him money from oil powers abroad, as well as promises of future support if he makes a run for U.N. secretary general.  Obama is a Leninist, and when he talks about "change," he means a bloody revolution.

Obama will not change one little bit when he leaves office.  His kind of personality never does.

Or why did you think Michelle made a quick trip to Qatar just a few months ago?  To celebrate women's lib on the Arabian peninsula, as the media told us?  Not bloody likely.  Qatar is the biggest money backer for ISIS.  Everybody in international politics knows it, and so do the Obamas.

Since we are all learning Muslim symbols, we'd better use that knowledge to read the signs.  They are not hard to spot; it's only the media that are frantically trying to cover them up.

Our Big Media are now wholly owned by only half a dozen transnationals, where characters like Walid Bin Talal can simply buy big shares to control the public discourse.  Buying media holding companies comes down to massive legal bribery, in the full light of day.  Mexican super-billionaire Carlos Slim now owns a chunk of The New York Times, which means that he owns millions of brain-locked liberals.  It's never been clear whether Slim has links to the Mexican mafia, but it's hard to believe that a Mexican billionaire could even survive without Sinaloa protection.

Imagine Bin Talal, Carlos Slim, and George Soros playing poker in that famous smoke-filled room, and you can see our national destiny long before it hits the headlines.  Add in President Hillary, mullah sympathizer Valerie Jarrett, and attack dog Sidney Blumenthal, and you don't even need a YouTube video of Huma typing out the top-secret emails in Hillary's office.  At some point, all that becomes obvious.

As Andrew McCarthy wrote recently, Hillary's SecState emails reflect the highest level of espionage and exposure of our national security.  Just because the left is filled with useful idiots, that does not mean that the rest of us have to go along.

We can see the Hillary-Huma cabal in the clear light of day, and anybody with the guts to say it out loud has a clear obligation to say so.  Obama is trying to shut up his fired generals, like Gen. David Petraeus, but patriots know about taking personal risks for national survival.

Plenty of American soldiers and marines made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq, because they believed in serving the nation.  Their officers swore an oath to the Constitution, not to Obama or the corrupt Democrats.  And yes, high officers do play politics in D.C., but not to the point of betraying national security.

Admiral James "Ace" Lyons (USN, ret.) is the most prominent general officer to speak out openly in public so far, but 200 field grade officers have signed an open letter of protest against Obama's Iranian surrender.

As military people, they know perfectly well who will suffer and die when Iran obtains nuclear weapons: it's our own military, along with our allies.  And if our military are defeated, it will be the civilian homeland.

Military officers are not supposed to reveal their strategic thinking in public, but at some point the simple act of telling the truth becomes the sine qua non for national security.  As for Obama's generals, they might consider the consequences to their careers if a real patriot wins this election.

Obama's support for our deadly enemies is not just verbal. He gave Iran a clear path to nuclear weapons and repeatedly exposed the civilized world to jihadist threats — in Libya, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all very vulnerable nations. In the near future we may see Saudi Arabia break apart, when the OPEC price cartel crumbles, as is visibly happening even now.  A Saudi coup would inevitably trigger an Iranian blitzkrieg to conquer the Arabian peninsula.  Starting with Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranians have tried to overthrow the Saudis, to gain control over the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

An Iranian war of conquest might trigger a major war with the 80% of Muslims who are Sunnis, not Shi'ites, including Pakistan, Egypt, and Jordan.  Under harsh external pressure, Egypt could also go the way of Islamofascism.  Syria is already shattered.  Just a little stronger nudge and those countries could fall into Islamofascist totalitarianism, like Iran — which used to be our close and reliable ally.

We are clearly facing the threat of a new global war; the signs are all over the Muslim world, with more than a billion people.  Since 9/11, numerous terrorist assaults have been launched against the United States and our allies.  Millions of Muslims are infiltrating Western countries, which are now acting in collusion with the threat, using blackmail, bribery, and vote-buying.  The Western response has been one signal of surrender after another.

We are therefore already in the early stages of a major jihadist war, and as soon as the self-proclaimed enemy can unite and get WMD, the conflict will blow into the open.  They have been threatening mass destruction against the infidel for decades, and during the Obama years we act like a woefully weak horse.

Not long ago, the news leaked out of a secret Swiss surrender to Arab terrorists way back in 1973.  The Swiss are not the only ones; the EU Ruling Class is so secretive that it could have signed any number of surrenders to Iran, Hamas, Hezb'allah, and the Muslim Brothers.  Obama has probably done the same thing, since he doesn't believe in constitutional treaties.

Democrats like Hillary are frantically signaling their own Islamofascist sympathies — because that's the biggest source of (illegal) foreign money for the Hillary campaign.

Suicidal actions like Angela Merkel's open door to jihadists in Germany show the same left-Islamist alliance at work. Those two million (expected) jihadist "immigrant" rapefugees were allowed to come in to strengthen a European Fifth Column, under the direct control of Wahhabi priests, who negotiate with the left and the European Union, greased by oil dollars.  European leaders are known to have taken massive bribes before, including former Chancellor Kohl, French presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, Dominic de Villepin, and high-level Eurocrats.

The U.N. and the EU are part of the same corrupt international network, as we can see in the global warming fraud.  National bureaucracies in Western Europe now form a seamless web of NGOs, the Eurocracy, the U.N., and their completely controlled media.

During the Cold War, when America led the Western alliance, we provided a rallying point for Europeans who did not want to live under the Soviet knout.  More than once Stalin's USSR came close to taking over Greece, Italy, and France, but each time, Europeans chose democratic capitalism — for one thing, they could see which system provided general prosperity.  But the American CIA was also involved in shaping European and Middle East opinion during the Cold War.

According to Admiral James Lyons, our most authoritative open source on Islamo-leftist infiltration, all that started to fall apart as far back as the 1960s.  By the 1970s, the Arab oil embargo showed the political class that they could not survive being whipsawed by fast oil price manipulations just before elections.  Jimmy Carter was the first U.S. president to empower reactionary Islamists in Iran, a near impregnable nation of 70 million people that has now been given a clear path to nuclear weapons.

Obama has done his utmost to bring the radical Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt and now in Jordan.  That is not a sane policy for Western leaders, because it greatly amplifies the enemy threat to us and our (former) allies.

As a result, the Saudis, Egypt, and Israel see Russia's virtual invasion of Syria as a possible stabilizing factor.  Putin does not want to destroy world stability, which would threaten Russia with missiles and nukes; he would much rather be paid off.  Other countries can do deals with Putin, who desperately needs cash for development.

But Obama is an ideological fanatic, and under him the United States has acted to destabilize the Middle East, time and time again.

When supposedly rational leaders promote national suicide, as Angela Merkel and the EU are doing, we have gone beyond normal politics.  Something else is going on.

Extraordinary threats require extraordinary solutions.

We are again facing Abe Lincoln's choice in the Gettysburg Address:

That … this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.