By Mr. Curmudgeon

As Republicans were heading into the presidential primary season of 2008, the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol advised conservatives to keep their expectations low, which was the standard Republican state of mind pre and post Ronald Reagan:

“Beyond the normal human frailties that affect all of us, including undoubtedly the commentators at this journal, there is one error that is distorting much conservative discussion of the presidential race. It’s -Reagan nostalgia.

“It’s foolish to wait for another Ronald Reagan. But not just because his political gifts are rare. There’s a particular way in which Reagan was exceptional that many of us fail to appreciate: He was the only president of the last century who came to the office as the leader of an ideological movement.”

And small-thinking Republican voters gave small-thinking John McCain the Republican presidential nomination. Painfully aware of the cosmic ideological void in his soul, McCain managed to pull one idea from the still-pulsing reptilian portion of his brain: he turned to Alaska’s Gov. Sarah Palin to breathe life into an otherwise dead campaign. To the extent that McCain elicited any stirring in men’s souls was clearly do to Palin’s conservative message and passion.

Contrary to what the New York Times would have us believe, conservatives don’t take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. The grass-roots Tea Party movement that coalesced during the battle over ObamaCare, came seemingly out of nowhere, taking Obama, conservative talk-radio and the Republican establishment by surprise. Beltway Republicans (and Limbaugh for that matter) were horrified that the Tea Party was equal in its contempt of big-government Republicans as Democrats. One Republican recognized the importance of the Tea Party and gave it support…Sarah Palin.

Speaking at the first Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, last February Palin said, “…I will live, I will die for the people of America. Whatever I can do to help. This movement is the future of politics in America….Put your faith in ideas. I caution against allowing this movement to be defined by one leader or operation. This is about the people.”

The media, of course, dismissed Palin’s significance. A.C. Klienheider at Nashvillepost.com reported on the Palin’s speech with the usual dose of venom mingled with a heavy dollop of wishful thinking. “The Tea Party movement is dead,” wrote Klienheider. “The one I was familiar with anyway…Sarah Palin drove a stake right through its heart live last night on C-Span…She gave a partisan Republican address.” And, as we now know, it was all part of a JournoList smear campaign against Palin that continues to this day.

With Palin closely identified with the Tea Party, the media would portray the movement as phony “Astroturf” created by Macivalian Republican strategists such as…uh….uh…well, you get the picture.

Then came the Republican primaries. Palin’s endorsements began unseating the very Republican incumbents the media cabal said were the driving force behind the Tea Party. Stranger still, only 28 of 178 House Republican incumbents joined the new House Tea Party Caucus, with the Beltway Republican leadership running from the caucus as fast as their little feet could take them. The American people see through the media lies and steadily identify with the Tea Party’s stated goal of rational Constitutional restraints on government that have all but vanished under Obama.

As the taxpayer-supported mouthpiece of big-government, National Public Radio, admitted, “…Palin’s endorsements in Republican primaries – her most significant political initiative since resigning her post in Alaska last year – have been more adventurous and more successful than her critics (and some of her allies) choose to imagine.”

Today, the Economist magazine published a poll that shows Republicans leaning toward a “leader of an ideological movement” than the usual and tired McCain-like Republican retreads: Sara Palin 28%, Mitt Romney 18%, Newt Gingrich 17%, Mitch Daniels 4%, Tim Pawlenty 1%, Mike Pence 1%, Haley Barbour 1%, John Thune 1%, No preference 17%.

The “no preference” 17%, those independents souls, are most likely to move to the Palin column as her political momentum grows in our increasingly Tea Party America.

As Palin’s star rises, another politician’s is dimming. President Obama now enjoys 34% diehard support among the nation’s desperate hope-and-changers. If that isn’t bad enough, a Quinnipiac poll found that a generic Republican candidate would beat Obama 48% to 40% if the election were held today.

This thought experiment may be a little taxing for Beltway Republicans, but I hope the rest of you will bear with me. Imagine that Republican voters nominate a Reaganesque “leader of an ideological movement” to head the Republican ticket in 2012…instead of the usual generic John McCain-like Republican? If your brain synapses are firing on all cylinders, you know the fate that awaits Obama’s hope and change.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

The global furor over Israel’s interdiction of a Turkish ship attempting to run a naval blockade of Hamas’ terrorist rat’s nest — a.k.a., the Gaza Strip — is just one indication of a trend building within the international community to outlaw the war on terror. Another indication is a 29-page report by the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston.

In part, Alston’s report says, “It is an essential requirement of international law that States using targeted killings demonstrate that they are complying with the various rules governing their use in situations of armed conflict. The greatest challenge to this principal today comes from the program operated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency…The international community does not know when and where the CIA is authorized to kill, the criteria for individuals who may be killed, how it ensures killings are legal, and what follow-up there is when civilians are illegally killed.”

Alston saves the best for last, “I’m particularly concerned that the United States seems oblivious to this fact when it asserts an ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe…this strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability is not an entitlement which the United States or other States can have without doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extrajudicial executions.”

The glaring omission in Alston’s report is the reason behind the CIA drone attacks and all the “extrajudicial executions”: Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood, Fata’s al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and a host of other deadly Warner Brother’s cartoon characters, whose “ever-expanding entitlement” to murder the innocent is of little concern to bloodless U.N. bureaucrats and the international community.

The U.S. “license to kill” and its “ever-expanding entitlement” is the 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11. Alston and others in the international community wish for the United States to confer its wartime decisions to U.N. committees for approval. This is understandable in light of President Obama’s speech to the U.N., praising the organization’s founders. “These architects of international cooperation had an idealism that was anything but naïve — it was rooted in the hard-earned lessons of war; rooted in the wisdom that nations could advance their interests by acting together instead of splitting apart.”

Alston’s report was submitted to the United Nation’s Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland. A partial list of the council’s stellar members includes Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Nicaragua and China. These “idealists” would like nothing better than to have a say in whether America and Israel can defend themselves against jihadist evil.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Boy do I love the British press! They cover American politics in a more dispassionate and unbiased way. Who would have thought that the firing of “compassionate conservative” David Frum from the American Enterprise Institute for his piece condemning Republicans unwilling to help President Obama socialize American medicine, ala Britain, would get more ink across the pond than here in the good old U.S.A.

The Times of London’s headline said it all, “Republican elite in disarray after David Frum is sacked by think-tank.” Ah yes, the Republican elite; the reach-across-the-aisle, Democrat-Lite blue bloods that so ravaged the Party of Lincoln. Those elite thinkers, like Karl Rove, who triangulated political strategies that passed such legislative wonders as “No Child Left Behind,” attempted to pass “immigration reform,” and gave America a foretaste of ObamaCare with George W. Bush’s “prescription drug benefit” – all the brainchild of the late Senator from Chappaquiddick, Teddy Kennedy. In short, the geniuses that worked tirelessly to blur any distinction separating Republicans from Democrats. The geniuses that now must convince tea partiers not to add their soiled names to the bums-list for the tossing.

“In Arizona yesterday” reports the Times, “Senator John McCain hit the campaign trail with Sarah Palin, his old running-mate, in an effort to head off a primary challenge from John Hayworth, a talk-show host who considers the Senator too soft on immigration, same-sex marriage and health reform, even though Mr McCain led Republican demands this week for the Bill to be repealed.

“In Florida Charlie Crist, the once-popular Republican Governor, has been attacked relentlessly by Tea Party bloggers since supporting the Obama stimulus package last year. He faces defeat by Marco Rubio, a firebrand of the hard Right, at the midterm elections in November.

“Among potential 2012 Republican presidential contenders Mitt Romney has been forced to condemn the health reforms as an ‘historic usurpation of the legislative process’ even though it is based largely on a Bill he shepherded into state law as Governor of Massachusetts. Mike Huckabee, until recently a favorite of social conservatives, slid back to also-ran status three months ago when a prisoner he released nine years ago went on a shooting spree.”

You won’t see this kind of reporting in the New York Times, or Fox News for that matter. The liberal Times and the Republican-leaning Fox News are still operating as though the political fight between incumbent Republicans and Democrats is an epic death struggle by leftists and conservatives. As the Times of London story accurately states, as things stand in today’s Republican Party, the struggle between many incumbents, Republican and Democrat, is over which party gets to ride the nanny-state pony for a spell.

“No senior Republican has dared to criticize Mrs. Palin for urging her supporters to ‘reload’ and take aim at vulnerable Democrats, whose districts are identified with rifle crosshairs on her website,” reports The Times of London. “This may be because, as Mr. Frum said yesterday, ‘the elite isn’t leading any more; it’s trapped.’”

And the only way for Mr. Frum’s Republican elites to extricate themselves from the Tea Party snare will be to gnaw-off their legs.

The reason the British press gets what American media misses is that no one in this world knows better how potent a tea party movement can be than the subjects of England’s Imperial Crown.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

President Obama is worried about Iran. Not its development of nuclear weapons, but that the Islamic republic’s Revolutionary Guard may overthrow the mullahocracy. In a bizarre take on reality, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in remarks before students in Qatar, “We see that the government of Iran – the Supreme Leader, the president, the parliament – is being supplanted and that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship.” This must be startling news to Iran’s dictator mullahs. After all, the Ayatollah Khomeini established the Revolutionary Guard in 1979, which answers directly to Iran’s top mullahs. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rose to the presidency from relative obscurity due to electoral fraud perpetrated by the Revolutionary Guard – on orders from Iran’s clerics. And Ahmadinejad was once a member of the guard.

Iran once seized our embassy and held our diplomats hostage; it trains and supplies terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah; it smuggles missiles and small arms into the Palestinian Authority to wage a genocidal war against Israel and has actively participated these past eight years in killing Americans fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Shortly after taking office, Obama released a video address directed at Iran’s ruling mullahs, “My Administration is now committed to diplomacy,” the president pleaded. “This process will not be advanced by threats. We seek, instead, engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.”

The president and his Secretary of State fret over an imaginary coup d’état aimed at Iran’s Supreme Leader and his front man Ahmadinejad – the very characters commanding the 125,000-man terrorist army that will soon possess nuclear weapons. A morally, intellectually and financially bankrupt world’s last hope won’t be Obama or Hillary — but tiny Israel.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

At a time when energy costs are starting to rise, President Obama is struggling to see that his Chinese partner, who imports 11 percent of its oil from Iran, is well supplied in the event China joins the West in placing economic sanctions on Persia’s mullahs. Obama is hoping and praying the economic giant will help his bankrupt country prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. The question then arises: If China didn’t prevent its North Korea ally from developing nukes, what makes Obama think they’ll lift a finger to stop Iran? If anything, China reasons for helping Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are less craven and more threatening than the spineless weak sisters of the European Union.

Under pressure from the U.S., Saudi Arabia agreed to make up the loss to China in oil imports resulting from sanctions placed on Iran. Of America’s recent $6.5 billion dollar arms deal with Taiwan – which was arranged during the Bush administration – Obama nixed the sale of F-18 fighter jets and diesel-operated submarines. Obama, I’m sure, was surprised this bow to China didn’t curry much favor with our Asian “partner.”

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Nixon, the U.S. State Department and American industry believed material wealth would convert China from an aggressive totalitarian beast into a docile materialistic giant. It never occurred to them That China was nimble enough to be both. Like the old saying goes, “Fame and riches are fleeting. Stupidity is eternal.”

By Mr. Curmudgeon

“Great ideology creates great times,” said North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. The Tea Partiers at convention in Nashville, Tennessee, would disagree. What Democrats and their coat holders among the Republican Party establishment and the mainstream media fail to recognize is that the Tea Party rejects gangster ideologies in favor of individual freedom. It refuses to sit still while the government uses its muscle to reward its few friends at the expense of its many victims. The Tea Party would restore the Constitutional shackles to government power the way federal prosecutors once restrained mafia kingpin John Gotti. It would bring government of the people in compliance with the law of the land. That is not an ideological expression of as much as it’s an act of self-preservation.

Speaking before the convention, Gov. Sarah Palin said, “The Tea Party movement is not a top down operation. It’s a ground up call to action that is forcing both parties to change the way they are doing business, and that’s beautiful…the soul of this movement is the people; everyday Americans who grow our food and run our small businesses, teach our kids and fight our wars. They’re folks in small towns and cities across this great nation who saw what was happening…and got involved.”

Palin simply and articulately made the economic and political argument against the freedom-killing agenda of Obama’s personality cult. “This week, they unveiled a record-busting, mind-boggling $3.8 trillion dollar federal budget…they keep making us take these steps towards insolvency. Now, what they are doing in proposing these big new programs with giant price tags, they’re sticking our kids with the bill, and that’s immoral, that’s generational theft. We’re stealing the opportunities from our children. And freedom-lovers around this country need to be aware that all of this makes us more beholden to other countries, it makes us less secure, it makes us less free and that should tick us off.”

In the absence of a functioning opposition party to Obama’s personality cult, Palin accurately described what the Tea Party has evolved into, “…When the work of Washington violates our conscience, and when the work and efforts in Washington, D.C. violate our Constitution, then we will stand up and we will be counted, because we are the loyal opposition. And we have a vision for the future of our country, too. And it is a vision anchored in time-tested truths – that the government that governs least, governs best. And that the Constitution provides the best road map towards a more perfect union.”

The Tea Party rejects Obama’s ideologues and their intellectually and morally spent abettors across the aisle who mistakenly think it is the inescapable evolution of the state to grow in power while eclipsing the sovereignty of We the People. Obama would have us believe that Tea Party anger is residual resentment at George W. Bush. The media would have us believe the Tea Party is made up of right-wing Republican crazies. In reality, the Tea Party fits neither description. They reject gangster government and will play big government functionaries against one another until Constitutional order is restored in America. The Tea Party knows what most establishment Republicans forgot long ago, “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.” —Thomas Paine

By Mr. Curmudgeon

There once was a time when politicians were slaves to polls. But public disapproval of the Democrat’s health care plan, financial bailouts and stimulus pork has fallen on political deaf ears. The same, unfortunately, holds true for Republicans.

Gallup reported that conservatism is the leading ideology among Americans. Gallup found that 40% of Americans now define themselves as conservative, 36% moderate and 21% liberal. Most striking is Gallup’s finding that, “Political independents viewing themselves as conservative boosted the overall ranks of conservatives, who now clearly outnumber moderates in Gallup’s annual averages…”

It appears nothing has focused the nation’s mind quite like our near death experience under “hope and change.” In other words, President Obama and his party’s authoritarian initiatives to reinvent us against our will has knocked a good portion of the nation’s fence sitters from their comfortable perch. Rather than fulfilling his softheaded campaign pledge to “bringing us together,” Obama’s presidency provided a more valuable service by forcing Americans to reassess who we are, what we are not and, more importantly, the need to take sides.

Prominent Republicans (such as senators John McCain and Olympia Snowe) still hold to the tired 1950s notion that going along to get along with power hungry Democrats is the best course for the nation and their party. Is it any wonder reach-across-the-aisle McCain suffered such a humiliating defeat last November.

By refusing to take up the gauntlet and vigorously oppose the Democratic Party’s trampling of our liberties, the nation’s growing conservative majority had no choice but to abandon listless Republicans in favor of the more vigorous Tea Party. Sarah Palin wisely distanced herself from her own party by supporting the Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman over a liberal in Republican clothing in upstate New York’s special congressional election. Her party’s leaders, and even some conservative Republicans, condemned her for choosing principle above discredited party loyalty. What the new Gallup poll clearly shows is that Palin recognizes reality even if her party does not.

The comfortable assumption among squishy Republicans has been that conservatives have nowhere else to go. Tea Party support for Doug Hoffman in votes and money proved otherwise. Instead of bulldogging conservative bulls, Republicans should ride the stampede to victory in 2010 and beyond.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

The New York Times, a big fan of Arizona’s Sen. John McCain – until he won the presidential nomination of his party – is working to rehabilitate his image. “Let’s do what the president [Obama] said last October a year ago,” McCain told the Times, “Let’s all sit down together, Republicans and Democrats, with C-Span in the room, and negotiate so that the American people can see what’s going on here.” The New York Times loves nothing better than a prominent Republican eager to rollover for Obama Democrats, providing the thin fig leaf of bipartisanship.

Meanwhile, back in Arizona, McCain’s media-adoring “maverick” status is starting to wear thin. McCain faces a strong primary challenger in the form of former Congressman (and conservative) J.D. Hayworth. “The question that people are asking is this, do we want to send John McCain back to the United States Senate again, or is it time to change to a clear, consistent, common-sense Republican?” asked Hayworth. That same question could be asked of the nation’s Republicans.

After all, how many times does the county have to reject “reach-across-the-aisle” “compassionate conservatives” before the Party of Lincoln rejects squishy bipartisanites in favor of conservative candidates? As Sarah Palin said when she supported third party Conservative Candidate Doug Hoffman in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, her party tends to support the “candidate who more than blurs the lines, and there is no real difference between the Democrat and the Republican…” Sen. McCain is such a Republican.

“I think there’s always going to be some maverick to McCain which makes him unpredictable and hard to pin down,” McCain adviser Mark McKinnon told the Times. ”Which is what makes him so interesting…”

The 2010 mid-term elections will be a referendum on Obama’s agenda. However, the Republican primaries should be a referendum on the disastrous and discredited “interesting mavericks” who governed like Democrats, destroying the Reagan legacy and the Republican congressional majority. It’s time McCain rode off into the sunset.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

The saying goes that a man is distinguished by his enemies. The same holds true for some woman – especially where Gov. Sarah Palin is concerned. House Democrats – tone deaf to the outrage building in the country over health care, multi-trillion dollar deficits, bailouts and wasteful stimulus – have decided to assail Palin for her Washington Post Op-Ed piece attacking the global warming fraud known as “climategate.” “Ex-Governor Palin is at it again,” said Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.). “There is no there,” Rep. Blumenauer said of e-mails proving fraud by climate scientists, “And the ex-governor’s state has [endured] the greatest impact in terms of global warming of any state in the nation…”

Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House climate change panel, grudgingly agreed to hold hearing into the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia – responsible for manipulating climate data. Rep. Markey assures fellow Democrats that the hearings will continue to promote the fiction that the tainted climate data does not undermine the claim that the world is growing hotter due to human activity.

According to a recent Rasmussen poll, the American people are evenly split on the question of global warming, 43% believe global warming is a real danger, while 43% believe it’s a load of eyewash. Eighteen percent of Americans, those easily distracted by shiny objects, have no opinion one way or another.

More Americans are less distracted on the question of America’s direction. Rasmussen reports that a whopping 65% of Americans believe the country’s affairs have been horribly mismanaged under Democratic Party rule. Republicans agree by 92%. Among independents, that number is 80%. The mainstream media refuses the report the obvious – that the aloof Democratic Party aristocracy is heading for electoral disasters in 2010 and 2012.

The Washington Post gives Sarah Palin a soapbox to voice her views believing that, in doing so, the country will reject her analysis and, should she run for president, her. The Post and leading Democrats miscalculate, failing to see the obvious: that their ridicule and distain for Palin is identical to that displayed toward the overwhelming number of Americans in regard to ObamaCare and the president’s crushing federal debt. In doing so, they fail to grasp that they are painting Alaska’s former governor as one of us.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

With the Republican Party bereft of testosterone, it has fallen to Gov. Sarah Palin to say what Republican geldings won’t. In a column published in Tuesday’s Washington Post, Gov. Palin commented on the manipulation of climate data by the malevolent Climate Research Unit (CRU) at England’s University of East Anglia:

“The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue.

“Climate-gate,” as the e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit…have become known, exposes a highly politicized scientific circle — the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the United Nations organization overseeing events in Copenhagen, defended the CRU’s data hoax, which is not surprising. The CRU provided much of the data the IPCC uses to pressure weak-minded world leaders:

“Comments on blogs and in the media about the contents of a large number of private emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom, have questioned both the validity of the key findings of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) and the integrity of its authors. IPCC WGI condemns the illegal act which led to private emails being posted on the Internet and firmly stands by the findings of the AR4 and by the community of researchers worldwide whose professional standards and careful scientific work over many years have provided the basis for these conclusions.”

The AR4 report is a crucial document contending, “warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” and that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th Century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic [We The People] greenhouse gas concentrations.” So, it’s understandable that the IPCC is concerned climate-gate e-mails threaten the legitimacy of the U.N. and Al Gore’s so-called scientific censuses. As Palin states:

“The e-mails reveal that leading climate ‘experts’ deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What’s more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even within the CRU crowd. Some scientists had strong doubts about the accuracy of estimates of temperatures from centuries ago, estimates used to back claims that more recent temperatures are rising at an alarming rate.”

Horrified that a leading organ of the mainstream media would give space to a rare Republican critic of global warming, Tim Lambert of ScienceBlogs.com wrote a response to Palin’s Op-Ed entitled “The Washington Post can’t go out of business fast enough.” Lambert lamented, “…Now they have a piece by climate expert Sarah Palin. The Washington Post simply does not care about the accuracy of the columns it publishes.”

Though unintentional, Lambert raises a profoundly important point. Why would any alert being trust the purveyors’ of incomplete and manipulated data with deciding the fate of billions of human beings simply on the basis of their so-called “expertise?” Would you roll over if handed a computerized bank statement shorting your saving account by several thousand dollars? After all, the bank’s data-entry specialist can certainly claim the title “expert.” Lambert is angry because by publishing Palin’s Op-Ed, the Post opened the door – if only briefly – to the fallibility of the self-professed infallible experts.

Copenhagen’s 11-day summit, therefore, is the byproduct of climate science fiction. Like the humorless intergalactic scold Klaatu in the 1951 sci-fi classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” climatologists assure us that the U.N.’s dictatorial mandates won’t require “giving up any freedom, except the freedom to act irresponsibly. Your ancestors knew this when they made laws to govern themselves and hired policemen to enforce them. We, of the other planets, have long accepted this principle.”

Earthling Sarah Palin isn’t so sure:

“Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference.”

It’s not the bad science that bothers me. It’s that the Copenhagen conference seeks to achieve agreement to erase national sovereignties, giving the U.N. unprecedented power over all human activity on Earth. Like the enforcing robot Gort, the U.N.’s iron bureaucrats believe they are programmed to save us from ourselves, thus saving the planet. This would be laughable if the reality of it weren’t so sci-fi scary.