Taking adulation of Barack Obama on a looney left trip through idolization of Mikhail Gorbachev (Obamagasm + Gorbasm = Obamagorbabasm?), far-left Boston Globe columnist James Carroll dreamed that Obama will fulfill Gorbachev's 1988 pledge to achieve “the demilitarization of international relations” and change the world “from an economy of armament to an economy of disarmament.” In his Monday column, “Gorbachev's model for Obama,” Carroll, who fully credited Gorbachev with the fall of the Berlin Wall and dismantling of the Soviet Union, trumpeted Obama's opportunity: “By the grace of God, it is not too late to match the greatness with which Gorbachev acted 20 years ago, an overdue acceptance of his historic invitation.”

Fretting about America's “refusal to dismantle its Cold War military economy,” Carroll yearned for “yes we can” responses: “Is it too much to expect Barack Obama to change history? Make peace? Transform an economic system? Rescue the Earth? Build a political program around the truth? Restore a great nation's decency?” Justifying his faith in Obama, Carroll recalled: “On the cusp of this decisive year, it will do Americans well to recall that just such a transformation took place once before, even if we declined to respond with transformation of our own.”

(Just below Carroll's column, in the newspaper owned by the New York Times, readers were treated to an op-ed piece that carried a Tripoli dateline and the byline of “the leader of the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya” -- yes, that would be Muammar Gaddafi -- titled “Provoking Russia” and which began: “Once again, the West's policy toward Russia and its addiction to interfering in the affairs of other countries is having dangerous effects on the rest of the world.”)

This morning's column by James Carroll, the Boston Globe's resident gushy liberal, is so predictable you wonder whether it might have been produced by a liberal-column-generator software program. You know the kind: insert issue, names of political players, a few factoids, and let the program spit out the boilerplate of a standard leftist diatribe.

I mean, as soon as you knew that Carroll was writing a column about Ahmadinejad's visit to the U.S., could there be any doubt as to where he'd come down on the controversy surrounding the Iranian president's desire to visit Ground Zero? And Carroll doesn't disappoint. Naturally, this was just one big Kumbaya moment squandered:

I don't know James Carroll, but if I were a friend or family member I might truly be concerned. His Boston Globe column of this morning, American Disconnection, is a disjointed lament about the state of the world and his feeling of disconnectedness, invoking the anomie of his youth. What makes it interesting for present purposes is the way in which Carroll, the prototypical MSM liberal, looks at the world, sees a litany of wrongs, and naturally concludes . . . It's All America's Fault.

Carroll seeks to reassure us, and no doubt himself, that "my adult connections are strong, and ever more interesting . . . My friendships are intact. Boredom is a word of absolutely no relevance in my life, nor has youthful moodiness left a stamp on me." He even claims that "I was part of a large, happy family." This from someone whose alienation from his Air Force general father was so intense he famously wrote a book about it: An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us.

Carroll recites his bona fides of psychic health as a prelude to admitting:

What do you call a guy who leaves the priesthood, rejects fundamental doctrine of the Catholic Church, and propagates egregious falsehoods about Catholics? If you're the Los Angeles Times, you call him a "Devout Catholic" - in your headline. Un·be·liev·a·ble.

The subject in a fawning article in the Times is James Carroll. A new documentary film is based on his 2001 book, Constantine's Sword, an awful work that advances the premise that anti-Semitism is central to Catholicism and Christianity.