My newly released book, "The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic," picks up where my previous book "Crimes Against Liberty" left off, chronicling President Obama's record since mid-2010, and it's not pretty.

I firmly believe that Obama is heading this nation toward financial catastrophe, is greatly undermining our national defenses, the Constitution and the rule of law, is severely damaging our energy industry and our energy independence, is dangerously expanding government and smothering the private sector and small and large businesses, and is polarizing this nation in a way that we haven't seen in many decades, along racial, gender and economic lines.

Some conservatives believe that other conservatives, on talk radio and Fox News Channel, are damaging the cause of conservatism by dishonestly overstating their case against President Obama to increase their ratings and profits.

More reasonable Republican politicians, they argue, would like to cooperate with Obama on bipartisan solutions but don't have the power to resist these extremists with the megaphones and so have buckled in lock step to their demands and become the party of "no" and the purveyors of gridlock.

You have to hand it to President Obama and his cabal of re-election strategists; they are masters of illusion. Their newly released Web video and its accompanying campaign slogan, "Forward," are science fiction-level fantastical.

We're all familiar with Obama's penchant for deflecting responsibility and blaming his policy failures on George W. Bush, but after more than three years in office for Obama, it has gone from childish mischief to juvenile delinquency. This is a question for Guinness: Has any other president run for re-election against the record of his retired predecessor?

Mitt Romney's presidential run could turn out to be a test case to resolve the long-running debate inside the Republican Party as to whether the GOP presidential nominee should run as a conservative or more of a centrist.

How often have we heard both Democratic and Republican political "experts" reciting the conventional wisdom that during primary contests, candidates of both parties must play to their respective base voters and then shift toward the center during the general election campaign? Does anyone even challenge this edict?

Though everyone is talking about Democratic strategist and Obama confidant Hilary Rosen's insolent remarks about Ann Romney, I want to discuss them, too, because they reveal her leftist mindset.

Rosen didn't misspeak; she spoke deliberately and with passion. And when given a chance to retract or soften her remarks, she doubled down — at least initially.

In his excellent daily Web news summary, "The Transom," Ben Domenech says that President Obama's speech at the Portland Museum of Art on Saturday "is likely to be Obama's campaign speech from here on out." He's probably correct, so let's take a look, with an eye to whether it's likely to work.

Obama's template is nothing new. He first repeats his claim as to the catastrophic conditions he inherited from President Bush. "It's hard to remember sometimes how perilous things were when I was sworn in."

If you read through the Washington Monthly's list of Obama's top 50 accomplishments, you'll quickly understand why my brother, Rush, properly wanted him to fail.

When Rush said he wanted Obama to fail, everyone knew he was talking about his policies, and for those few who pretended otherwise, he explained it a thousand times: He wanted his policies to fail because his policies are disastrous for America.

A strong move is on to demonize and marginalize social conservatives, a move that originates from the political left but is being aided by some on the right, a move that is based on assumptions that better describe the leftist accusers than they do their targets.

Obama, by rewriting the Bush rules to protect health care providers who objected on moral grounds to abortion, has breached his repeated promise to preserve them and has dealt a significant blow to religious liberties, yet he is painting people of faith as the extremists.

In the intense heat of the present, it is easy to forget even the relatively recent past, but it seems to me that this GOP primary season is more acrimonious than the past few, probably because the stakes are so high.

When I've noted that this is the most important presidential election of our lifetimes, a few excitability-resistant conservative friends have said, "They have been saying that about every election for more than a generation." My response to that is: