By Mr. Curmudgeon

Last March, Associate Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito asked President Obama’s Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart a simple question, “Could the government ban political books that contained express advocacy if an incorporated entity was involved?” “Yes,” said Stewart. Alito’s fellow justices blinked hard, leaned forward and asked a few follow up questions. Chief Justice John Roberts asked, “If [a book] has one name, one use of a candidate’s name, it could be covered?” Stewart replied, “That’s correct.” In last week’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court struck down the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, known popularly as McCain Feingold. Media darling and self-described “maverick” John McCain was handed his head for joining Democrats in banning free speech – all in the name of bipartisanship, of course.

But old habits die hard for McCain. Just as it appeared ObamaCare’s death panels were dealt a fatal blow, Sen. McCain is reaching out, yet again, in the spirit of bipartisanship to resuscitate them. “We’d be willing to sit down and start over from the beginning with genuine negotiations,” McCain said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” referring to Obama’s plan to seize the health and wellbeing of every American. “There are things we can agree on.”

Meanwhile, over on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “The president made a decision to go hard left. That’s why he doesn’t have many of my members. If he chooses to govern in the middle, I think he’ll have much broader cooperation from Republicans.” I’ll say one thing for Republicans; no one is better at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Republican bipartisanism will be the death of us yet.

Thank God the Tea Party is working hard to overthrow squishy Republicans in the upcoming primaries. The current Republican leadership may disagree with their Democratic colleagues that the Constitution is a suicide pact, but they seem more than willing to meet them halfway by putting the founding document on a resuscitator. The high court’s McCain-Feingold ruling couldn’t have come at a better time. The upcoming Tea Party political ads will no doubt send a chill up what passes for a spine in McCain and his “reach across the aisle” Republicrats.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Back in 1999, the Brooklyn Museum of Art sponsored the exhibit “Sensation.” And it certainly lived up to its billing. New York Times art critic Robert Smith observed, “…English painter Chris Ofili, famous at the moment for attaching spheres of shellacked and decorated elephant dung to his canvases…affirms his seriousness and talent as an artist and reflects an expanding vision.” His dung covered “painting” was titled “The Holy Virgin Mary.” In the exhibit’s audio commentary, rock singer David Bowie intoned, “On a damp day its rich, earthy sent wafts elusively around Mr. Ofili’s works.” It is important to remember that the comments referring to the overpowering stench of Ofili’s masterworks are meant as a compliment.

Reviewing a 2009 exhibition of 40 works by American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell, Times critic Benjamin Genocchio wrote, “No doubt some viewers find this innocent, even charming. But the more I looked at the works in this show, the more I began to get a sense of something off and possibly even sinister in the Rockwell universe. The artist always seems to be selling something, be it optimism during a time of hardship, patriotism in wartime, or any number of products for which he created seductive illustrations for magazine advertisements.” Fellow Times critic John Canaday simply described Rockwell as “the Rembrandt of Punkin’ Crick.” Rockwell’s first mistake, apparently, was his use of oils and not elephant dung. His second was refusing to use his art, suicide bomber-like, to blow up Judeo/Christian moral order to replace it with…well, nihilists have not quite figured that out yet.

I write this having just returned from “American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell” showing at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The forty-two original works encompass a career that stretched form 1916 to the 1970s.

Whether his paintings depict children at play or a young veteran returning home to the happy faces and open arms of his family and friends, Rockwell rendered an idealized picture of what America was at its innocent best. Rockwell used the mass market provided by print publications to portray family life, fair play and common decency – quiet sentiments he thought Americans should aspire to. For his modern critics, Rockwell’s crime is that with paint on canvas he managed to render, simply and powerfully, a moral universe. That Times critics believe optimism and patriotism are mere commercial commodities says more about their limited nihilistic materialism, where everything is for sale (just ask Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid). The truths revealed in Rockwell’s paintings are not tangible comities that stack neatly in rows on a supermarket shelf. They are part of the invisible universe the nihilist says does not exist – yet tirelessly works to overturn. Love, honor, faith are the invisible and powerful forces that move men and women to transcend mere materialism. Images of an American soldier facing death for love of country, the grandmother and child at a diner saying grace or a pair of teenagers experiencing the first pangs of love while sharing milkshake cannot be erased by all the dung-covered parodies of art the nihilist can summon. This drives the crazed nihilist crazy. Rockwell, therefore, is the ultimate artistic provocateur. For bizarre nihilists, Rockwell’s art arouses the very reaction dung-smeared religious icons provoke among the normal and well adjusted.

Of the turbulent early part of the 20th Century, Rockwell recalled, “The 20s ended in an era of extravagance…There was a big crash, but then the country picked itself up again, and we had some great years. Those were the days when America believed in itself. I was happy and proud to be painting it.”

By Mr. Crumudgeon

2010 is turning out to be a bad year for Nobel Prize winners. First, Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted their claim that Himalayan glaciers will disappear in thirty years is a laughable exaggeration. Then Massachusetts voters put a Republican in Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, threatening the legislative health care centerpiece of our Nobel Peace Prize winning “hope and change,” community organizing president. Now, Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is beside himself with grief. Of ObamaCare Krugman laments, “…some Democrats want to just give up on the whole thing.”

In Krugman beats the totalitarian heart that exists in all utopians. “…politics is supposed to be about achieving something more than your own re-election. America desperately needs health care reform; it would be a betrayal of trust if Democrats fold simply because they hope (wrongly) that this would slightly reduce their losses in the midterm elections.” Scott Brown’s election to the United State Senate occurred because Democrats in Congress betrayed the public trust by trying to pass totalitarian health care legislation that ran counter to the public will. Krugman, however, is worried more about Democrats betraying the tyrannical idea that government is most noble when subverting the consent of the governed.

Krugman makes an interesting observation that abandoning ObamaCare “wouldn’t protect Democrats from charges that they voted for ‘socialist’ health care – remember, both houses of Congress have already passed reform.” It is only right that Republican Chairman Michael Steele send Krugman a dozen roses, a box of candy and thank you card for providing a powerful quote for Republican political ads in 2010. “And remember folks,” the ads should say in conclusion, “Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize winner.”

By Mr. Curmudgeon

One year ago today, a newly inaugurated President Obama’s fist Oval Office ceremony was the signing of an executive order mandating the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The effeminate Euro Intelegencia hailed it as a triumph – that is until Obama asked them to take some of the poor misunderstood waifs off his hands. One year later, Gitmo is still in operation. Hard reality, it turns out, is not subject to softheaded presidential executive orders.

Janet “the system worked” Napolitano told reporters during her European visit, “We have known for some time now that it [the deadline to close Gitmo] was not going to be met because assembling the information about detainees and moving them out of Guantanamo is very difficult and we have to do it in the right way.”

Like Obama’s health care and other issues, closing Guantanamo is unpopular with the American people. According to the Gallup organization, nearly three-quarters of Americans want Washington to keep Guantanamo open for business. They are also partial to jihadists facing former Vice President Dick Cheney’s watery question and answer sessions. Then another reality threatens to delay the president’s Gitmo closing – Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass). According to the Washington Post, “Republican Scott Brown’s startling Senate win in Massachusetts, propelled in part by his opposition to Obama’s terror-fighting approach, has weakened Obama’s legislative hand just as Congress is demanding answers about security. And although health care reform is the matter most immediately affected by Obama’s sudden loss of the minimum 60 votes he needs in the Senate on big legislation, his entire agenda will be reshaped in some way by the political fallout.”

The “fallout” is already taking effect. Sen. Dian Feinstein (D-Ca), of the Senate Intelligence Committee, immerged from a closed-door session investigating the Justice Department’s decision to treat the Christmas Day underpants-bomber as a criminal suspect and not an enemy combatant. “This man is not going to be set free, one way or another,” said Feinstein of failed bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmatallab. Feinstein, who authored legislation to close Guantanamo shortly after Obama became president, is now starting to distance herself from her president and her recent past. “Feinstein said she was not suggesting the administration move Abdulmutallab to military detention,” reported the Post, “only that it could do so.” It may be a short matter of time before frightened Democrats stop suggesting and start demanding. Fox News reported that White House advisors are debating whether to reverse the administration’s decision to try high-level Al Qaeda combatants as common criminals in New York City. Gitmo may have some life in her yet.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

No member of President Obama’s national security team was fired over “systemic failures” that nearly resulted in an Al Qaeda terrorist binging down an airliner last Christmas Day, but the nation got the next best thing – Errol Southers withdrew his name to be Obama’s director of the National Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Saying his Senate confirmation was “obstructed by political ideology,” Southers “…decided, after deep reflection and in consultation with my family and friends to respectfully withdraw.” Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) Gave Southers a fine send off. “The Senate could have had an open and transparent debate this week to approve Mr. Southers,” said DeMint, “but apparently, answering simple, direct questions about security and integrity were too much for this nominee.”

The Washington Post acknowledged the obvious. “Southers’s withdrawal comes on an already bad day for the White House, as it attempts to salvage health-care reform efforts following Tuesday’s Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate race. The Obama administration has also struggled in recent months to earn Senate confirmation for several top nominees.”

With the arrival in Washington of one freshman Republican Senator from Massachusetts, Obama and his Democrats act as though they have already lost their majority in Congress and are ready to call the Beacon’s moving truck to the White House. Gee, what do they know that they aren’t telling us?

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Wake-up calls are going off all over the world; the election of Scott Brown as the 41st no-vote on ObamaCare, trillions of dollars in stimulus producing no demonstrable results and now global warming. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced that its prediction Himalayan glaciers were destined to melt into one big puddle by 2035 was, well, all wet. “In drafting the paragraph in question the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly,” read a statement released by the UN panel. The paragraph in question was contained in a 2007 report that won the errant members of the IPCC the Noble Peace Prize.

As the Times of London reported, “Monitoring Himalayan glaciers is extremely difficult because most of them lie in some of the most inhospitable terrain in the word at an altitude of more than 5,000 metres (16,000ft). Most studies until now have therefore been based necessarily on a mixture of outdated and incomplete data, satellite imagery, photography, and anecdotal evidence.”

If UN climatologists are in need of “anecdotal evidence” global warming is a load of hooey, they need do no more than step away from their climate modeling computers and walk outside.

Christopher Booker at the London Daily Telegraph observes, “Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed…all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flat lining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.”

When in the 1920s British mountaineer John Mallory was asked, “why do you want to climb Mr. Everest?” he replied, “Because it’s there.” Mallory didn’t have to prove the existence of the world’s highest peak, the evidence of its existence was clear for anyone to see. That is clearly not the case for the hysterical claims made by global warming buffoons.

Mr. Curmudgeon

Former White Hose communications director Anita Dunn, for whom Mao Tse Tung is a favorite philosopher, has advice for her old boss, “What the president needs to do is go explain to the people exactly why what has been done is going to get us on a better path for the future,” Dunn told the Washington Post. “What the president is doing now to create jobs, to build a better economic future – that is something that contrasts very well with the Republicans’ refusal to do anything.” Tell that to Scott Brown. He got elected on the strength of his promise to say no to ObamaCare. As the fictional detective Nero Wolf says, “It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust to inertia. It is the greatest force in the world.”

Today, the Labor Department reported that Chairman Obama’s stimulus “great leap forward” is nothing more than a pratfall, “…initial claims for unemployment insurance rose by 36,000 to a seasonally adjusted 482,000…” reports the Associated Press, “but the so-called continuing claims do not include millions of people who have used up the regular 26 weeks of benefits customarily provided by states and are now receiving extended benefits for up to 73 additional weeks, paid for by the federal government. More than 5.9 million are receiving extended benefits in the week ending Jan. 2, the latest data available, an increase of more than 600,000 from the previous week.”

It’s difficult to see how Dunn or any other White House flack is going to sell this as a positive. If anything, jobless figures prove the damaging effect Obama’s stimulus is having on the engine of real job creation – the private sector. Misdirecting trillions of dollars away from the real economy has even awakened the sleepy and hopelessly utopian people of Massachusetts.

President Obama hoped to use health care and his stimulus as major props to showcase in his upcoming State of the Union address. With Obama’s agenda sinking like the Titanic, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters the president has only one bright bit of news to report to a joint session of Congress – Republican Scott Brown’s election to Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat. “He will undoubtedly address the results and what they mean in the State of the Union,” said Gibbs.

Democratic Party pollster Celinda Lake, who helped craft Martha Coakley’s doomed campaign strategy, leaned nothing – like most Democrats – from last Tuesday’s stunning defeat. “We should pass it,” Lake said of the president’s unpopular health care bill, “and then we have to go sell it.” Every used car salesmen knows that you first hit the rubes with a sincere-sounding sales pitch before selling them a lemon.

Like Mao, the assumption on the part of many utopians is that government is a “great leap forward” perpetual-motion machine. It requires lots of oil (taxpayer dollars) to maintain peak inefficiency. Under Chairman Obama, that machine has never been larger or better oiled. Until the Massachusetts vote, it never occurred to Obama or his fellow Democrats that they might get caught in the gears.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Democrats are scared and scratching their heads in reaction to Tuesday’s rout of Democrat Martha Coakely at the hands of Massachusetts’ Sons and Daughters of Liberty. On one hand, they say Coakely ran an inept political campaign against the Republican underdog Scott Brown. On the other hand, they say public outrage that continues to build against ObamaCare resulted from the inability of its Democratic proponents to articulate its benefits and successfully counter “misinformation” by its opponents. They are wrong on both counts.

Thomas Jefferson explained ObamaCare and Martha Coakely’s rejection by a majority of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts over two centuries ago:

“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Ah, “A decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Jefferson and his colonial brothers felt compelled by decent respect to pen an eloquent indictment of the king’s offenses in the Declaration of Independence. King George felt no such obligation. Trampling upon the rights of his loyal subjects was a sign of his royal contempt for the opinions of those he governed. Every good faith petition made by colonial representatives to the King was rejected out of hand. His North American subjects were, after all, rough frontiersmen not of noble birth. When they rebelled, King George was determined to “keep the rebels harassed, anxious, and poor, until the day when, by a natural and inevitable process, discontent and disappointment were converted into penitence and remorse.”

Like King George, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and President Obama have no respect for the opinions of those they perceive as subjects. Like King George, their governance is designed to keep us “harassed, anxious and poor.” Like King George, they too believe America’s “discontent and disappointment” will dissolve into “penitence and remorse.” The closed-door meetings, the multi-billion dollar bribes, the out-of-hand dismissals of public disapproval of the health care bill, all led to their stunning defeat in Massachusetts.

They looked at the political map and assumed a solid blue state would suffer continued abuses as loyal members of the king’s personality cult. By viewing reality through the distorted prism of politics, Pelosi, Reid and Obama forgot they were dealing with human beings. As of this writing, King Obama and his Privy Council continue planning strategies to circumvent the people’s will. They do not hear opinions they cannot respect, even when doing so condemns their party and its agenda to defeat.

Like the single-minded and rebellious Lucifer in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Obama and his minions yell at Massachusetts and the nation, “To the last, I grapple with thee; from Hell’s heart, I stab at thee; for hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.”

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Paul Waldman at The American Prospect magazine doesn’t like the direction in which the country is heading – away from the Czarist imperatives of Obama’s “post partisan” rule. In a piece entitled “Why Massachusetts doesn’t matter,” Waldman outlines a legislative path for Democrats to get around the will of the people. Of ObamaCare, Waldman demands Democrats “get the bill done before Brown is sworn in…Though reports about what is in this version are sketchy, it looks to be a considerable improvement on the Senate bill. They have to get a score from the Congressional Budget Office, which takes a few days. Then depending on how the bill is offered in the Senate, a vote could come within a few days after that. In other words, no matter what happens in Massachusetts, if Democrats decide to move things through quickly, we could get a vote on health care within 10 days…” Waldman’s enthusiasm for a kamikaze assault on American public opinion is understandable – he is, after all, a progressive.

The American Prospect’s editors say their publication’s “founding purpose was to demonstrate that progressive ideas could animate a majority politics; to restore to intellectual and political respectability the case for social investment; to energize civic democracy and give voice to the disenfranchised…” It never occurs to them that the “disenfranchised” just happen to be a majority of Americans and a greater part of the voters of Massachusetts, both of whom reject Obama’s health care, bailout and stimulus “social investment.” Waldman’s answer to the animated “majority politics” played out in Massachusetts is to ram ObamaCare down the voter’s throats before Scott Brown arrives in Washington. You see, Brown is a danger because his threatened no-vote on ObamaCare will “give voice to the disenfranchised.” If Waldman and the Democrat’s anti-democratic views sound eerily fascistic, that’s because they are.

In Jonah Goldberg’s book “American Fascism,” he writes:

“…a coalition of intellectuals going by various labels – progressive, communist, socialist, and so forth – believed the era of liberal democracy was drawing to a close. It was time for man to lay aside the anachronisms of natural law, traditional religion, constitutional liberty, capitalism, and the like and rise to the responsibility of remaking the world in his own image. God was long dead, and it was long overdue for men to take His place. Mussolini, a lifelong socialist intellectual, was a warrior in this crusade, and his Fascism – a doctrine he created from the same intellectual material Lenin and Trotsky had built their movements with – was a grand leap into the era of ‘experimentation’ that would sweep aside old dogmas and usher in a new age.”

In his 1932 book “What is Fascism,” Benito Mussolini wrote, “The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone…” Paul Waldman, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and President Obama took an old “progressive” project and gave it a new name. You have no need of “harmful freedom” when you have the “deciding power” of “hope and change.”

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Participants in the Boston Tea Party of 1773 made plenty of noise throwing chests filled with tea over the ship’s rails. The two big splashes heard Tuesday night, however, were the sounds of today’s Tea Party protesters throwing Obama’s “change” and Ted Kennedy’s health care legacy into the frigid waters of Boston Harbor. Both watery events were minor in themselves but monumental in their implications.

In response to the first Boston Tea Party, the British Parliament passed the Coercive Acts, which closed Boston Harbor until restitution was made for the liquidated tea, disallowed democratic town meetings, sanctioned the quartering of soldiers in private homes and provided immunity to British officials from criminal prosecution in Massachusetts. The punitive measures were meant to drive a wedge between Massachusetts and her sister colonies, hoping fear of royal retribution would prevent the colonies from uniting in resistance to the Crown. Instead, nine months later, delegates from the 13 American colonies convened in Philadelphia for the first meeting of the Continental Congress.

King Obama is far more ambitious than King George III. Obama’s totalitarian health care plan proved more coercive than the British Parliament’s Coercive Acts. At his insistence, and by decree of his heavily bribed Democratically-controlled Parliament, a free people were ordered – under pain of financial penalty – to surrender their fragile mortality into the cold hands of Obama’s death panels. Americans, however, were uncomfortable with the idea of selling themselves into slavery as a down payment toward building Obama’s Kingdom of Hope and Change. With no organized opposition to the King (loyal or otherwise), it fell to the Tea Party to fight for a cause that was once the exclusive domain of the Party of Lincoln – emancipation.

The mainstream media will portray Brown’s victory as an anomaly and dismiss the Tea Party as a “fringe” element that will pass in time. They forget it was 116 men that comprised the original Tea Party protest. They dressed as Mohawk Indians and dumped tea into the sea in protest of a king’s overreaching rule. They were the very definition of the word “fringe.” Their small act of toppling tea into a harbor eventually toppled a king’s power over a people determined to have independence.

And the Tea Party “fringe” is on the move nationally. A Rasmussen poll reported that the nation was rooting for Scott Brown 49% to Coakely’s 34%. That means Martha Coakely is but the first, and certainly not the last, of King Obama’s ministers to find themselves treading water in a very cold harbor.