By Mr. Curmudgeon

Dim bulb Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is concerned about domestic violence. “I met with some people while I was home dealing with domestic abuse. It has gotten out of hand. Why? Men don’t have jobs…Men, when they’re out of work, tend to become abusive.” Reid made these claims to justify the $15 billion dollar Senate “jobs bill.” Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi included domestic violence as a “pre-existing condition” covered under ObamaCare. “You’ve survived domestic violence, and now you are discriminated [against] in the insurance market because you have a pre-existing medical condition. Well, that will all be gone,” said Pelosi.

Reid’s comments seem like a not so veiled threat. With Nevadans unlikely to return Reid to the United States Senate, Reid will join the unemployed later this year, increasing his tendency “to become abusive.” Reid seems to be saying, “reelect me or I’ll go Neanderthal.”

By Mr. Curmudgeon

The History Channel is in hot water over a docudrama whose script will not be finished until sometime next year. “The Kennedys” is an eight-party miniseries chronicling events in the lives of America’s most prominent political dynasty. The controversy surrounding the miniseries is not over what might be in the film as much as who is behind its making – Fox television network’s “24” creator Joel Surnow. It’s feared the conservative Surnow will further tarnish the Kennedy image by portraying the Massachusetts clan in ways not in keeping with what for liberals is a Bauer-esk heroism.

The New York Times reports that documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald is upset that any member of the Fox entertainment family should attempt to tell the story of New England’s holy family. He describes the yet-to-be-made miniseries as a “political character assassination,” and criticizes the portrayal of salacious events in the lives of the Kennedy men as “sexist titillation and pandering.” John and Ted’s sexual adventures may be titillating, but as the name of the channel airing the miniseries suggests, they are history.

Greenwald, therefore, is undertaking preemptive damage control, something the Kennedy’s could have used in life, by posting a 13-minute Internet video plea for viewers to sign a petition telling the History Channel “I refuse to watch right-wing character assassination masquerading as ‘history.’” This could be the filmmaker’s attempt to rise above what the New York Times once describes as his “commercially respectable B-list” movie reputation. What’s so odd about Greenwald’s rescue attempt is that so much of what he fears about the film has been the subject of so many supermarket bestsellers. Even stranger, Theodore Sorensen, a trusted adviser and speechwriter for President Kennedy, is joining in on this fool’s errand.

“I was amazed to find, reading those pages,” says Sorensen in the video, “that every single conversation with the president in the Oval Office or elsewhere, in which I, according to the script, participated, never happened.”

In 1955, JFK’s book “Profiles in Courage” won the coveted Pulitzer Prize. The book chronicles the story of eight U.S. Senators who defied public opinion to do what, in their view, was just. It is well known that Sorenson, not Kennedy, wrote the celebrated book. Sorensen’s complaint seems to be that the job of putting words in JFK’s mouth was filled over fifty year ago. And he has – err, JFK has – the Pulitzer to prove it.

Greenwald’s video divides each short interview with a text message. One such note informs the viewer to, “Tell the History Channel this belongs in the National Inquirer.” Greenwald does not help his cause by bringing up the sensationalist Inquirer. It was the Inquirer, after all, that broke the stories of the Gary Hart and Donna Rice affair, Rev. Jesse Jackson’s illegitimate child and John Edward’s adultery and its resulting love child. Who knows what they would uncover by revisiting Camelot. The History Channel will go a lot easier on the Kennedys than a supermarket tabloid that includes at least one extraterrestrial story in every issue.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Dr. Amy Bishop is a bright scientist and inventor who believed her application for tenure (job security) at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she taught for eight years, was a done deal. Unfortunately, Bishop’s application was denied because, according to a fellow faculty member, she was “not able to deal with reality” and was “not as good [a teacher] as she thought she was.” In response, Bishop allegedly fired a weapon at her deniers, killing three fellow faculty members and wounding three others. To say Bishop has a strong sense of entitlement is an understatement. But then again, Bishop has a degree from Harvard.

According to the Huntsville Times, Dick Reeves, a business associate of Bishop, said, “She was one of those very opinionated, bright people.” Jody Smith, a student that took a class taught by Bishop, described the professor as “fairly vocal” in her criticism of the University’s administration and believed UAH wasn’t “doing things she wanted for the students, offering the classes they deserved.” And who are we to disagree? After all, Bishop has a degree from Harvard.

Bertrand Russell, who interviewed Russia’s Vladimir Lenin in 1920, said, “If I had met [Lenin] without knowing who he was I should not have guessed that he was a great man but should have thought him an opinionated professor.” Lenin may have murdered millions in cold-blood, but he graduated with honors from the University of St. Petersburg.

“I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University,” William F. Buckley once said. I’m sure Dr. Amy Bishop would disagree. And she has a degree from Harvard.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

A new movement is about to sweep the globe, and Greece – the cradle of democracy – seems to be leading the way. The debt-ridden Hellenic Republic is no longer able to sustain the socialist government’s behemoth budget deficit, and is unable to refinance the country’s upcoming $28 billion dollar payments to nervous investors come this April and May. The threat of default precipitated a fall in world markets as anxious investors eye the growing debt accumulation of nations around the world. Having exhausted other avenues to deal with its debt, ugly reality forced Greece to do what for many spendthrift governments is a last resort – they’re instituting austerity measures. But Greek civil servants are furious at the government’s attempts cut back the public sector. This is understandable in light of the fact that one out of three Greeks works for the state.

Klafthmonos Square, in the capitol city Athens, provided the venue for one angry bureaucrat who screamed through his bullhorn, “We won’t pay for their crisis! Not one euro to be sacrificed to the bankers!” In other words, he was more than willing to take money from bankers; he’s just not willing to pay it back. He exemplifies the child-like view of nanny state paper-pushers who believe governments are exempt from the treacherous crosscurrents of reality.

President Clinton once told a joint session of Congress “the era of big government is over.” Of course, he only said so after the Democratic Party lost control of both houses of Congress due to Hillary’s attempt to nationalize health care. The greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression is insuring that the age of big government is indeed over.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

There was a lot of hysteria leading up to last Sunday’s Super Bowl contest between the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints. And it had nothing to do with football. Horrified that the Christian organization Focus on the Family paid $3 million dollars to air a commercial promoting its website and pro-family message, angry feminists at the National Organization for Women were outraged, which, for its members, is a perpetual state of mind. “Make no mistake about this ad,” read the warning on NOW’s website leading up to Sunday’s game, “it’s offensive to women. Yes, it features Heisman trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother, who had been advised to have an abortion after a serious illness. Standing alone, it sends the message that all women who give birth are heroes; it sends a message that abortion is always a mistake; and it is insulting to the one in three women in this country who have abortions.”

Terry O’Neill, president of NOW, expressed her personal perpetual outrage at CBS for airing Tebow’s sweet and playful expression of love and gratitude for his mother, “I am blown away at the celebration of the violence against women in it. That’s what comes across to me even more strongly than the anti-abortion message. I myself am a survivor of domestic violence, and I don’t find it charming. I think CBS should be ashamed of itself.”

An organization that promotes the mass killing of millions upon millions of the unborn is horrified by a vaudeville sight gag. There is no better illustration of the upside down world of the left - where the trivial is magnified and monstrous horrors are trivialized. And there’s no better definition of evil. Thank you NOW.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

“With God’s help,” said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “[Iranian] scientists will be sent into space and will observe the universe from there.” He described the suborbital flight of the Kavoshgar-3 – that contained a capsule holding one rat, two turtles and several worms – as an “unparallel” technological achievement. It’s clear Ahmadinejad needs to read more than the Koran. All the critters mentioned above (with the exception of Ahmadinejad) were sent into space over forty years ago.

With America scheduled to halt all manned space flight missions when the Space Shuttle fleet is retired this spring, the field of space exploration is left wide open. President Obama doesn’t believe America needs to maintain a presence in the high frontier of outer space when stimulus tax dollars are so desperately needed elsewhere – like ACORN or CounterPULSE, a gay-lesbian organization producing weekly events called “Perverts Put Out.”

In the late 1950s, the Brookings Institution produced a study that resulted in NASA’s founding. A portion of that report touched on the sociological implications that might result from humans coming in contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life:

“Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behavior.”

Little did we know that “hope and change” would do to America what scientists once feared from E.T. On the other hand, can you imagine the damaging effect a face-to-face meeting between Ahmadinejad and advanced beings from Alpha Centauri might have? They’d annihilate life on Earth – with the exception of rats, turtles and worms.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

What do you do if once you are elected to power you want to stay there? With the mood in the country turning decidedly against the current crop of utopians in Washington, billionaire leftist loon George Soros had a solution: control those who certify elections. A Soros sponsored group with the Orwellian name The Democracy Alliance has been throwing support and money at Sorosians running for the office of Secretary of State for several years.

Back in 2006, under the headline “Top vote counter becomes prize job,” USA Today reported that, “…the new San Francisco-based Secretary of State (SOS) Project [is] focused on swing states, where close races pose ‘the greatest likelihood of abuse and the greatest consequences,’ SOS strategist James Rucker says. His project aims to raise several hundred thousand dollars from liberals online for candidates…”

Today, 18 states have Sorosians insuring the “integrity” of the voting and counting process. In fact, comedian Al Franken (now in the U.S. Senate) owes his election to Minnesota’s Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a Democrat supported by SOS. As the Wall Street Journal reported at the time of the Minnesota recount, “Under Minnesota law, election officials are required to make a duplicate ballot if the original is damaged during Election Night counting. Officials are supposed to mark these as ‘duplicate’ and segregate the original ballots. But it appears some officials may have failed to mark ballots as duplicates, which are now being counted in addition to the originals.” It took several months, but Al Franken’s 215-vote loss to Republican incumbent Norm Coleman tuned into a 312-vote victory for Franken. 100 of these votes came from the Democratic Party stronghold of Iron Range, Minnesota. One precinct ballot machine in question “carried a date of Nov. 2, two days before the election,” the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported.

Speaking to Soros and fellow billionaires working hard for us “the little guy,” the Secretary of State Project website states, “With your support, we have made a major difference. We can be sure that the Republicans and the opponents of honest elections will try triply hard to regain lost seats and capture seats held by reformers.” In other words, George Soros will use his considerable money and power to insure his “reformers” are not subject to the vagaries of the electoral process. He won’t have We the People getting in his way. The Tea Party and her allies would be wise to focus attention on upcoming Secretary of State races least the batty Soros becomes Americas next King George - with a Napoleonic Complex.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

In his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress and the American people, President Obama told all who would listen that he and the yawning Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid see eye to eye on one important issue. To that end, the president redefined redistributive payoffs to targeted constituents as “tax cut.”

“…We cut taxes for first-time homebuyers. We cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children. We cut taxes for 8 million Americans paying for college.
I thought I’d get some applause on that one.

“…Two hundred thousand work in construction and clean energy, 300,000 are teachers and other education workers. Tens of thousands are cops, firefighters, correctional officers, first responders. And we’re on track to add another one-and-a-half-million jobs to this total by the end of the year.

“The plan that has made all of this possible, from the tax cuts to the jobs, is the Recovery Act. That’s right — the Recovery Act, also known as the stimulus bill.”

It was a longer version of his answer to Joe The Plumber, who asked then candidate Obama if he would raise taxes. “I think when you spread the wealth around,” said Obama, “it’s good for everybody.” In other words, the president and Harry Reid are on the same page when it comes to buying power with your dollars.

WILSON v. OBAMA

The last time President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress, the month was September and the issue was health care. “There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants,” said the president. “This, too, is false – the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” In response to the president’s false claim, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) yelled, “you lie!”

In last night’s State of the Union speech, the president scolded the U.S Supreme Court for striking down provisions in the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law. Obama said, “…last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.” In truth, what the Supreme Court did was uphold the supremacy of a two-hundred-year-plus First Amendment guarantee of free speech. Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito, in his front row seat, shook his head at the president’s mischaracterization and mouthed the words, “not true.”

Rep. Wilson made the charge, and the people of Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts recently rendered their electoral verdicts on the president’s veracity. In the court of public opinion, in the matter of Joe Wilson v. Barack Obama, Justice Alito has affirmed that President Obama is indeed a liar.

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. 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.”