By Mr. Curmudgeon

Move over Helen Thomas. CNN announced that the services of senior editor of Middle Eastern affairs, Octavia Nasr, were no longer required at the Cable News Network. Nasr released a Twitter message admitting she was “sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah…One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.” Like Thomas and many among the mainstream media, Nasr had a thing for dysfunctional killers. Many on the right mistake the affection media-type’s feel for the world’s deadly losers as a sign of their political leanings. In doing so, I think the right misses the mark.

Psychologists at the University of New Mexico describe men like Fadlallah as having “dark triad traits,” which include “callousness, impulsive behavior, extroversion, narcissism and various other anti-social traits for which ‘bad boys’ are known.” Like Helen Thomas, Octavia Nasr gets weak in the knees thinking about the brooding anti-social misfits of the Middle East.

How, you ask, can anyone be enamored of dead-enders whose only thought is of the next kill? What else explains the vampire “Twilight Saga” phenomenon? Schoolgirls force their pimple-faced boyfriends to sit through a tedious love story between a damned, blood-sucking creature of the night and his confused mortal girlfriend.

Slate.com’s Dana Stevens described the teenage vampire saga as, “essentially uncritical celebrations of that overwrought, obsessive passion that is the hallmark of immaturity — passion that wholly subordinates all sense of one’s own identity and elevates the beloved to…the sole good; passion that leaps as readily to suicidal impulses and fantasies as to longing for union.”

In other words, the tendency to apologize for the likes of Joseph Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and, apparently, the blood-sucking Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah – is an expression of the left’s over-eager adolescent female attraction to bad boys.

Octavia Nasr admitted that her fawning words for Hezbollah’s Fadlallah were due to his “contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman’s rights.”

Why, it’s enough to make the left’s girlish heart go pitter patter.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

The reviews are in and the Obama media is not happy with the divine one’s performance in his first Oval Office address concerning the BP oil leak. “Does it really matter if you lose the pundits anymore?” asks the New York Times. One would think so, considering President Obama is a creature of media mythmaking. After all, Obama’s radical leftist leanings were mostly swept under the rug or downplayed as unimportant during the 2008 presidential campaign. The fact that Obama’s short Senate career was launched in the home of 60s radical and domestic terrorist Bill Ayers did not get much attention until Hillary Clinton’s campaign leaked it to the media.

Even MSNBC’s resident loon, Keith Olbermann, was dumbstruck by Obama’s speech. “I don’t think he aimed low. I don’t think he aimed at all. It’s startling.” Olbermann’s fast-talking network compatriot Chris Mathews was more direct. “It was a great speech if you were on another planet for the last 57 days…I don’t sense executive command.” It wasn’t all that long ago that Mathews chimed, “I felt this thrill going up my leg,” on hearing an Obama campaign speech.

It’s bad enough when a politician believes his good press, it’s quite another when the media does as well. That’s apparently ending now. Sensing an impending Democratic electoral pounding this November, the media is already lashing out at the community organizer whose election they worked tirelessly for and heralded as the second coming.

From Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush, presidents have used the potent visual symbol of the Oval Office as a backdrop during addresses to the nation – many concerning the issue of war. Obama used it in a desperate attempt to shore up his plummeting approval ratings. In doing so, Obama showed himself to be a small and petty man.

After such presidential addresses, opinion polls show a positive bump in a president’s approval ratings. That was not the case for Obama. The reason, according to the New York Times is the “mistrust of the news media: it is at an all-time high. Many Americans are more likely to assume that anyone they read or see on television has a political bias.” Gee, you think?

Here is the big lesson to be learned from the Obama phenomenon: Always – and I mean always – distrust politicians lionized by the mainstream media. But if you must use the media to help you form an opinion, go with those who were out front about who and what Obama was before it was cool to trash “The One.” Most of these voices were on the right. You know, the guys who were labeled crazy right-wing extremists, alarmists, and haters.

In other words, go with those too independent to go all gooey over a politician’s child-like pronouncements — the manly guys who would never say in public, let alone on national television, that they feel a thrill going up their leg.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

That Obama’s anti-business message isn’t getting much traction with the American people is disturbing some in the media. “…The only potent grass-roots movement to emerge from this moment of dissatisfaction with America’s economic elite exists not in support of the president or his party, but far to the right instead, in the form of the so-called Tea Party rebellions that are injecting new energy into the Republican cause,” says the New York Times. It never dawns on them that Obama and his party’s so-called populism is as phony as a three-dollar bill.

Lately, the media has focused on the fat cats at Goldman Sachs. During the ObamaCare debate, Goldman advised investors to buy shares of UnitedHealth Group and Cigna because its analysts believed (correctly) that insurance rates would rise sharply as competition dropped. They also created bundled mortgage-backed security investments designed to fail – so they could make a bundle shorting them. Goldman’s fat cats, who Obama now condemns, contributed $994,795 to get him elected. Besides, how is it that Obama earned the populist title? His net worth is estimated at $11 million.

“Most Democrats, after all, persist in embracing populism as it existed in the early part of the last century,” says the Times, “…In this worldview, the oppressed are the poor, and the oppressors are the corporate interests who exploit them.”

Then the Times has a rare Eureka moment. “It’s not incidental that the old manufacturing unions, like the autoworkers and steelworkers, have been eclipsed in membership and political influence by those that represent large numbers of government workers.”

The reason the Tea Party is considered so dangerous by mainstream media and status quo Washington is that they are redefining populism to mean the little guy (that’s us, the unemployed and over-taxed) against the fat cats…and that’s not BP or Goldman Sachs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average government employee earns a $67,691 annual salary, with an additional $40,785 in health, pension and added benefits. Washington’s public sector fat cats cost taxpayers $224 billion a year (and these figures are for 2008, before Obama expanded fat-cat Washington to never before seen levels).

Democratic political strategist Stanley Greenberg believes the Democrat’s populist message will push voters away from “the Tea Party and the extremism of the Republican Party…” Someone forgot to tell the voters of Nevada. Home schooling, Tea Party Republican Sharron Angle leads Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry (hiss, hiss) Reid 50 to 39 percent.

Obama, like his pal Bill Ayers, is still living in the radical 60s. Some people never grow up. And there is nothing like an economic depression to make the “workingman” nostalgic for the carefree days being exploited by evil capitalists thriving in a robust and growing economy.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

By now, you’ve no doubt seen the video of Congressman Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.) confronting two students on a Washington, D.C., street. In the video, Etheridge grabs one of the young men by the wrist and violently jostles him about, demanding he identify himself. And what was it exactly that sent Etheridge on a downward spiral into madness and violence? The young student asked the 13-year Congressional veteran, “…Do you fully support the Obama agenda?”

Being associated with the leader of the Democratic Party was more than Etheridge’s fragile psyche could stand. As so many Democrats can testify, their close association with Obama is something of a poison pill – just ask Martha Coakley of Massachusetts or Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter.

Etheridge faces stiff competition this November. Republican Renee Ellmers, a former nurse and vehement Tea Partier, decided to run against Etheridge because, “…Last summer she and her husband attended a Town Hall meeting to hear Congressman Bob Etheridge speak on behalf of President Obama’s health care plan,” reads Ellmer’s bio on her campaign website, “Later, as a volunteer, she became an outspoken critic of government-run health care. She is now a candidate for Congress – opposing Congressman Etheridge – in North Carolina’s 2nd District.”

“So who are the students?” asks the Washington Post’s David Weigel, who writes the “Right Now” column, which monitors the conservative movement in the same way Jane Goodall once studied chimps. “The National Republican Congressional Committee tells me they didn’t send them…But without any name or organizational support, just by riling up a member of Congress, the students have created the first conservative meme of the week. They seem to have learned from organizations such as ThinkProgress that any video of a member acting strangely, no matter how grainy, is grist for the Web.” Weigel misses the point.

In a New York Times Op-Ed, former President Bill Clinton warned of those who hold to the “belief that the greatest threat to American freedom is our government, and that public servants do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them…Civic virtue can include harsh criticism, protest, even civil disobedience. But not violence or its advocacy.” Unless, of course, you’re a Democratic Congressman drenched, like an oil-spill pelican, in the muck of Obama’s hope and change.

While MSNBC broadcasts specials on the sadistic threat posed by the Tea Party, the opening broadside of violent political unrest in America is from one of Bill Clinton’s Democratic “public servants” while making his way to the House chamber to “protect our freedoms.”

The desperate left knows its days are numbered. A great awakening is occurring in America thanks to the Tea Party. Congressman Bob Etheridge knows this better than anyone at the Washington Post or MSNBC.

The young student asked a good question of Etheridge. It’s a question that should be asked of every Democrat standing for office in 2010. At every town hall meeting and campaign stump speech, Democratic candidates should be confronted with the question, “Do you fully support the Obama agenda?” When you do, make sure you are standing out of arm’s reach. You could be putting yourself at great risk.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Last January the New York Times moderate “conservative” columnist David Brooks offered his observations on the Tea Party, “In the near term, the tea party tendency will dominate the Republican Party. It could be the ruin of the party, pulling it in an angry direction that suburban voters will not tolerate.”

Recent events have him in a tailspin:

“First, Senator Robert Bennett, a Republican from Utah, loses his seat in part because he co-sponsored the bipartisan (cue harp music) Wyden-Bennett bill. Then, Senator Arlen Specter, the Republican-turned-Democrat from Pennsylvania, the quintessential inside dealmaker loses to Representative Joe Sestak. Next, Senator Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat from Arkansas, gets dragged into a run-off with a candidate from MoveOn.org for being too moderate. And, in the most important event of the month, Rand Paul beats the G.O.P. establishment candidate in Kentucky by arguing that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell hasn’t done enough to oppose President Obama and somebody has to go up there who will be confrontational.

“The message to all incumbents and challengers is: No more playing around! It’s time to get polarized!”

As Brooks is a moderate in the mold of John McCain, it’s understandable how this might jar his delicate ivory tower sensibilities. But here on the ground floor, the polarization he speaks of is just the cure for what ails us.

The fact is that both Ronald Reagan and Barrack Obama rode into the White House on a wave of discontent flowing from the nation’s great, gooey center. And swaying that center is no easy feat. They have to be hit over the head with something hard and heavy before they sit up and take notice.

It took nanny-state Democrats, from FDR to Jimmy Carter, a span of over forty years to drive unemployment up to 7%, inflation to 13.5% and interest rates to 21%.

The nation’s vast inland sea of centerness jettisoned conventional wisdom and elected Ronald Reagan, the nation’s first real conservative president.

After Reagan left the national scene, nanny-state Democrats, aided by reach-across-the-aisle Republicans, undid Reagan’s repairs, driving the nation’s economy back into the tank. This time the center turned to Barrack Obama, the nation’s first real socialist president.

To say the center is somewhat fickle, if not outright insane, is an understatement.

Enter the Tea Party

Obama’s excessive spending, excessive deficits and dictatorial ObamaCare, provided the sledgehammer of awareness needed to awaken the center to the dangers of socialism. And the economic and social unrest in Greece proved a nifty glimpse into America’s bleak future.

What frightens establishment Democrats and Republicans is that the Tea Party, to use a well-worn phrase, is raising awareness. This time, it has nothing to do with high fat intake, endangered whales or the plight of the Dalai Lama. Throughout the past year, the Tea Party have made Americans keenly aware of the threat unrestrained government poses to our freedom and the very survival of American civilization.

The Tea Party, as David Brooks observes, is helping to polarize the nation. That vast polarization threatens to undo the tidy consensus between the two major parties that has existed since the age of FDR.

The lunatic left sees this as a rightward shift, as do frightened Republican moderates. They are wrong.

The Tea Party is simply reacquainting the great center of the nation with its Constitution and that document’s restraining safeguards on government power. And most of all, with our Founder’s creed that America is unfriendly soil for kings.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Last year, a study by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found, “No major news outlet – broadcast or cable, print or online – stood out as particularly credible. There was no indication that Americans altered their fundamental judgment that the news media are politically biased, that stories are often inaccurate…”

With newspaper readership declining and ad revenues plunging, many left-of-center mainstream media outlets are less than eager to antagonize their few subscribing friends and family members.

La-la-land liberals were stunned when the Los Angeles Times refused to endorse incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer for re-election, saying, “…we find that we’re no fans of incumbent Barbara Boxer. She displays less intellectual firepower or leadership than she could.” They went on to praise her Democratic primary opponent Robert “Mickey” Kause for questioning Boxers “lockstep liberalism on labor, immigration and other matters,” but said, “…we can’t endorse him” either.

The Times was kinder to Republican Tom Campbell’s conservative primary opponents, though just as unsupportive, finding Tea Party-supported Chuck DeVore “interesting, even impressive, but in the service of doctrinaire conservative stances that we could not support.”

It appears the Tea Party is scaring more than incumbent politicians. The Times added conservative columnist (and National Review editor-at-large) Jonah Goldberg to its roster of commentary contributors. This might be an act of desperation in light of the Times’ parent Tribune Company filling Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

“Republicans, by contrast, are substantially more likely to give the highest credibility rating to Fox (34%) than are Democrats (19%),” Pew found. “Even with these low scores, Fox’s ratings among Democrats are much higher than Republican ratings for The New York Times (10% give it a four).” More bad news for the mainstream media. No wonder the Tea Party is getting so much traction…everyone is putting down their morning newspaper and turning to Fox.

 

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By Mr. Curmudgeon

Mirroring the paranoia expressed by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano shortly after President Obama’s inauguration, former President Bill Clinton defined what Democrats believe is behind today’s domestic terrorist, “…The belief that the greatest threat to American freedom is our government, and that public servants do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them,” said Clinton in a New York Times Op-Ed.

Nothing better expresses the imperial mindset stretching from King George III to Nancy Pelosi than the idea that government and its paper-shuffling thralls are above criticism or organized political opposition. By Clinton’s definition, Thomas Jefferson was the granddaddy of today’s domestic terrorist. “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold,” said Jefferson, “is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” The Tea Party movement won’t be silenced or allow government bureaucrats or Obama’s Czarist government to define, let alone defend, our freedoms.

A free people, by definition, are the stewards of their own freedom, and the electoral process allows a free people to restrain the over-reaching ambitions of representative government. That is why the Tea Party is viewed as a threat by status quo politicians. The Tea Party has done an end-run around the two-party, big-government system. The Tea Party threatens to change the political complexion of the Republican Party in the primaries, turning it into a party of limited government. This would overturn the decades-long big-government consensus between leading Democrats and John McCain Democrat-Lite Republicans.

“Civic virtue can include harsh criticism, protest, even civil disobedience. But not violence or its advocacy,” said Clinton. “That is the bright line that protects our freedom. It has held for a long time, since President George Washington called out 13,000 troops in response to the Whiskey Rebellion.”

Now that’s a not so veiled threat. It is clear that the Democrat’s political strategy leading to November is to link peaceful Tea Party protesters with violent militias and white supremacy groups. This is a main theme with columnists at the New York Times and Fox News’ token liberal contributor Bob Beckel.

Clinton may have terminated all the men, women and children at the Branch Dividian compound at Waco, Texas, with extreme prejudice, but the Tea Party is too big and influential a target to fit in the rifle sites of the FBI’s Hostage Negotiating Team.

If Democrats continue to equate the Tea Party with domestic terrorists throughout the campaigns leading to November’s midterms, Democrats will lose by numbers larger than their political strategists can imagine. Can Democrats really be this stupid? The answer, in the words of Obama’s cult followers, seems to be, “Yes we can!”

By Mr. Curmudgeon

New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman fears for President Obama. He sees his presidency, after only one short year, transforming into that of a lame duck. “…Instead of making nation-building in America his overarching narrative and then fitting health care, energy, educational reform, infrastructure, competitiveness and deficit reduction under that rubric, the president has pursued each separately. This made each initiative appear to be just some stand-alone liberal obsession to pay off a Democratic constituency…” Whether bundled together under the rubric of “nation-building” or released drop by painful drop – like Chinese water torture – Obama’s initiatives are nothing more than obsessive payoffs to Democratic constituencies. Administration payoffs to ACORN and other fringe groups in the early days of the Obama presidency cemented that perception.

With such perceptions center in the minds of a majority of Americans, Democrats have stalled in passing the centerpiece of the president’s domestic policy, ObamaCare, until after a televised summit later this week with Republican lawmakers. The president and the media need their help. “…The Republican Party has never been more irresponsible,” laments Friedman. “Having helped run the deficit to new heights during the recent Bush years, the G.O.P. is now unwilling to take any responsibility for dealing with it if it involves raising taxes.” As big a spender as compassionate conservative George W. Bush was, his budget deficit before leaving office totaled $410 billion dollars. Obama’s 2009 deficit totaled $1.8 trillion dollars. Obama took the “new heights” of Bush’s deficit to higher orbital heights.

Scared straight by Tea Party fury, Republicans have been strangely unanimous in their refusal to walk the plank for their friends across the legislative aisle. Even Maine’s Olympia Snow doesn’t seem to be making her usual visits to the White House for dinner with Obama. And when was the last time you saw John McCain rush before the cameras to announce his willingness to help the president “get things done for the country?” Democrats are not used to this. If Democrats are going to drive the country over a fiscal cliff, Republicans – at least for now – aren’t willing to take their turn at the wheel.

Friedman fears the old Obama magic has warn so thin with Americans, his honeyed words can no longer move them down the road to self destruction. “I am under no illusion that this alone would solve all his problems…If Obama fails, we all fail.”

This nation has a history of failed presidencies. And in spite of them, the nation goes on. The worlds of Friedman and the rest of the Obama media may end when voters force Obama from the White House in 2012. Then Friedman and all the others will hate us for taking the country back and making it a stunning success, proving we didn’t need Obama after all. For that, they will never forgive us.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

What to do about the Tea Party? That seems to be the question asked by Republicans and Democrats alike. New York Times columnist Frank Rich is exasperated by how the populist Tea Party is helping to brighten the political fortunes of previously flat-lined Republicans in advance of the 2010 midterm elections. “This G.O.P. populism is all bunk, of course,” complains Rich, “Republicans in office now, as well as Palin during her furtive public service in Alaska, have feasted on federal pork, catered to special interests, and pursued policies indifferent to recession-battered Americans. And yet they’re getting away with their populist masquerade — not just with a considerable swath of voters but even with certain elements in the “liberal media.” Rich, of course, is right in condemning big-government accommodationist Republicans, but he fails to acknowledge the Tea Party’s rehabilitative powers.

Florida Gov. Charlie Christ, considered a shoe-in to win his party’s U.S. Senate slot, trails his Tea Party-supported nemesis Marco Rubio by 12 points. Former Republican-turned-Obama-Democrat, Arlen Specter, trails his likely Tea Party-endorsed challenger Pat Toomey by 9 points. Weak Republicans, scared straight by muscular Tea Partiers, are positioned to hammer unrepentant big spending, liberty-stomping Democrats next November. “…The [Republican] party is exploiting the Tea Party movement to rebrand itself as un-Washington…” says Rich. Sorry Frank, it’s the other way around. And Republicans had better get a clue.

For now, Tea Partiers are attempting to see if Republicans can change their Democrat-Lite ways and become an opposition party to Obama’s Czarist personality cult. Only by dedicating themselves to reversing every plank of Obama’s “hope and change” will they ever have a hope of becoming the majority party in Washington. This may be the last chance Republicans have to prevent what can be their party’s death knell – the formation of a potent conservative third party. A Rasmussen poll finds that 35% of Americans reject our dysfunctional two-party system in favor of a new political party. Comically, 81% of politicians polled reject the need for a new party. This means nearly 20% of them are waking up to reality.

One pol that seems to get it is Republican Party Chairman Michael Steel. He’s scheduling meetings with various Tea Party organizers to form a coalition leading up to the November election. However, the Tea Party is a little dubious in associating itself too directly with the GOP. According to POLITICO.com, “Some have welcomed the attention, forging tentative alliances or at least opening channels of communication, usually to intense criticism from fellow tea partiers. But most have either proudly spurned Republican advances or approached their suitors apprehensively, keenly aware that while Republican resources and infrastructure could both boost the Tea Party movement to a new level of effectiveness, the GOP’s tainted brand could also jeopardize the independence that is part of their populist appeal.” If Republicans thinks they can co-opt them, they’re whistling past the graveyard.

The assumption of the mainstream media, and the politicians that slavish follow their editorial advice, is that the Tea Party is leaderless. Lost on the New York Times and John McCain Republicans is that the Constitution and the drive to preserve and defend it is what leads the Tea Party forward.

The mechanism preventing the United States from degenerating into a dictatorship, wrote Hamilton, Madison and Jay in the Federalist Papers, is that “the citizens understand their rights and are disposed to defend them. The natural strength of the people in a large community, in proportion to the artificial strength of the government, is greater than in a small, and of course more competent to a struggle with the attempts of the government to establish a tyranny.”

The founders seem to have directed some of their more stinging insights for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “If I be asked, what is to restrain the House of Representatives from making legal discrimination in favor of themselves and a particular class of the society? I answer: the genius of the whole system; the nature of just constitutional laws; and above all, the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America – a spirit which nourishes freedom and in return is nourished by it.”

The Tea Party may still drive the Party of Lincoln to remember the words of Lincoln. Looking back to the founding of the nation, Lincoln said:

“As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor; –let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children’s liberty. Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap –let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; –let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs; –let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”

If the media and their legislative thralls don’t get what the Tea Party is about, it’s because they don’t speak the language of 1776.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Al Gore once denounced all who disagreed with the “scientific consensus” that the globe is warming and it’s all our fault. Then hackers (not all are bad) broke into the computers at England’s University of East Anglia and discovered e-mail correspondence between the world’s climatologists  suggesting Gore’s cherished consensus was manufactured. Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who published a paper in the British medical journal Lancet, claimed a link existed between the MMR vaccine (for mumps, rubella and measles) and autism. The number of vaccinations plummeted in the United Kingdom and the U.S. and occurrences of the dreaded childhood diseases rose. News reports later revealed that Wakefield was paid nearly one million dollars for his fraudulent study by lawyers wanting to sue vaccine manufacturers. Currently, 18 European countries have governing bodies to investigate science fraud. In the U.S., the National Science Foundation and other government bodies have subpoena powers. According to Science Daily, “offenders can be required to take a course in scientific ethics or, in the most serious cases, banned from receiving any federal research funding for up to five years.” That’s a slap on the wrist considering the enormous sway so-called experts have over our lives – cap-and-trade and the Copenhagen climate change treaty.

All one has to do to see the insidious effect experts have on our way of life is to watch C-SPAN. Nine times out of ten, there is some bloodless technocrat peering over his readers and telling eager lawmakers how best to manage our lives. And there is a pre-existing relationship between these so-called experts and Congress; much of their research is funded by the very government that uses their findings as an justification to increase imperial federal power. In other words, the educated class of experts feeds the government’s appetite for power. This is why the left condemns the anti big-government Tea Party movement as anti-intellectual.

“The educated class believes in global warming,” wrote New York Times columnist David Brooks. “The educated class supports abortion rights…The educated class supports gun control…The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high…The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should ‘go our own way’ has risen sharply.” Brooks then adds, “In the near term, the tea party tendency will dominate the Republican Party. It could be the ruin of the party, pulling it in an angry direction…” Brooks, a Republican establishmentarian, misses the point completely.

Today’s Tea Party is as horrified at being ruled by an educated class of “experts” as the original Tea Party was at being ruled by a deluded English king who believed he governed by  “divine right.” The outrage over “climategate” and ObamaCare represents a revolution against the rulers by the ruled, not the uneducated against the “educated class.” Free men and women bow to no one. Obama, Pelosi and Reid have a hard time dealing with this revolutionary idea.