Thinking seriously about buying into the Hope Diet that’s all the rage among Democrats these days? Planning to send in your check November 4? Can’t wait to begin your new way of life next January 20?

If so, give yourself a chance to avoid disaster by reading a few facts about a scam that so much threatens your life, liberty, and prosperity you’ll want to run from it with a speed that leaves the proverbial bat in the sulfurous dust. 

To motivate yourself to run that fast, you’ve first got to disabuse yourself of the notion that the Diet represents the latest scientific discovery made by the latest star of the political Left. (Remember the phony “scientific socialism” Leftist superstar Karl Marx claimed to discover?)

So, here’s the truth: The Hope Diet Barack Obama concocted in his Chicago political laboratory is based upon science as much as Marx’s “scientific” promise that in his temporary dictatorship of the proletariat, you’d simultaneously own nothing and own everything.

Neither is the Diet new because it has plagued humanity for a very long time. How long? Well, there’s no one who can be sure whether it’s as old as the Free Lunch Diet or even older; but like that big lie, it traces its birth to the time of Adam and Eve’s clan, a profound reality not lost upon Ben Franklin, who took pains to include in Poor Richard’s Almanack the aphorism that warns, “He that lives upon hope will die fasting.”

At this point, you may be thinking, “Old Ben’s not going to scare me. If I find the diet harmful, I’ll give it up long before it takes me out.”

If that’s your reaction, slow down and recall the threat it poses to your life doesn’t mean it has to kill you. Sure, Ben went right for the Big One; but he knew if the Diet doesn’t kill you, it infects you with terrible diseases — leaving you alive, yes, but frighteningly sick and disfigured.

Death, terrible sickness, horrible disfigurement — all that is such bad business many people can’t stand even thinking about it for very long. So, just as Ben spared us the gruesome details that describe a person who dies fasting, the rest of Part One will exhibit the same forbearance as it attempts to convince you of the most important reason for running away from the Diet faster than that famous bat flies out of hell.

That reason, of course, is National Security, whose relationship with the Hope Diet can’t be understood without knowing something about the past.

The truth is that if you go way back in human history, you find that vibrant cultures did a pretty good job of rejecting hope when it came to protecting themselves. In fact, they didn’t just excellently prepare themselves to fight off an invader with real weapons, they fought like hell when he made his move because they knew if they lost, they’d end up dead or doomed to live enslaved in a culture bashed beyond recognition.

Consider, for example, how the Spartan King Leonidas and his small band showed their disdain for hope when they did the astonishing thing they did at Thermopylae. (Yes, Leonidas was right in the middle of things, beginning to end, because in the battles of those days the best leaders could be found fighting on the front lines).

Or recall the genius and resoluteness of the Roman General Scipio with respect to a Carthage so powerful it had successfully invaded much of Italy. He never would have got the chance to figure out how to defeat a great army supported by a battlion of charging elephants if he hadn’t first been courageous and wise enough to reject the orders of the Senate, whose cringe-and-hope buffoons (some things never change) couldn’t understand that if you must get into the thing Sherman would later call hell, you fight like hell to win.

Since the Sixties, however, Liberalism has convinced much of contemporary America to regard the legacy Leonidas and Scipio bequeathed us as pitiable caveman crudity at best, maniac war mongering at worst.

In its place, Liberalism offers the mad nonsense of “anti-war,” a perverse tangle of arrogance and sentimentalism that implores us to raise hope above all else because “everybody’s beautiful,” a dogma of the Liberal Church that demands we reach out and touch the beauty of everybody — including that exhibited by the most unspeakably murderous, psychopathic slime — through perfectly hopeful “dialogue.”

Unfortunately for Liberals and other Democrats but fortunately for the nation, the “anti-war” campaign hs been rejected by the majority of Americans because it speaks not of the supreme importance of the military as the nation’s defender or of the courage, honor, and duty associated with the military life but spits hateful invectives at the institution and the people that Virgil immortalized with the words, “Of arms and the man I sing.”

This fact explains why today’s Democrats have repackaged the moral and intellectual idiocy called “anti-war” as the Hope Diet, peddling the abomination with lofty but empty phrases that Leonidas and Scipio would have contemptuously mocked but which send the Jimmy Carters of the world swooning.

Leaving you now to do your own thinking about the terrors that await those who fail to perceive the actual consequences of national security policies perversely based upon hope, Part One ends with this final piece of take it or leave it advice:

When Democrats ask you to sign up for the Hope Diet (sometimes announced as “Join the Movement/Revolution”), don’t answer until you ponder Ben Franklin’s warning as it applies to the nation’s security — in all its horrible details.

Copyright by A.J. DiCintio