By Mr. Curmudgeon

California, long considered a political laboratory for the rest of the country, is witnessing its state Republican Party attempt to find its lost soul. Like most states that trend heavily Democratic, Republicans in the Golden State traditionally employ a knee-jerk strategy to win votes from members of the opposition party – pose as Democrats. Take Arnold Schwarzenegger…please. But we now find ourselves in an economic depression (though the media and politicians refer to it as a recession), and voters, even perpetually comatose Californians, find themselves questioning the bipartisan spending and taxing ways of their elected officials. A case in point is California’s three-term U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer. A January Rasmussen poll found Tea Party-supported conservative Republican Charles S. DeVore trailing close behind Boxer 47% to 42%. And the California senate race may prove pivotal in the Republican plan to take control of the U.S. Senate.

“It is hard to see how Republicans can win control of the Senate without toppling Mrs. Boxer,” reports the New York Times. “Democrats control the chamber 59 to 41; Republicans need 10 seats to take control, since in an evenly divided Senate, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. would cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the Democrats.” There can be no better reason for unseating Boxer than preventing the bumbling Biden from having such power. Californians, the near-term survival of the nation is in your hands.

In a state whose mightiest politician-buying public employee union represents prison guards, it’s time Californians stage a political prison riot. You have nothing to lose but your chains.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

The Texas Republican primary for governor is a shadow of things to come. Incumbent Republican Gov. Rick Perry defeated Bush-supported, McCain-like, compassionate conservative Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in a four-way primary race. “The message is pretty clear,” said Perry in his victory speech. “Conservatism has never been stronger than it is today. And we’re taking our country back — one vote at a time, one election at a time! It is clear that the Obama administration and its allies has Texas in its crosshairs,” Perry told the crowd of supporters. Their response? “Bring it on!”

Meanwhile, in Arizona, McCain-like McCain is pulling out all the stops to insure he does not suffer the same fate as McCain-like Hutchison. According to POLITICO.com, “McCain is racking up endorsements despite the considerable animus toward him that exists in some GOP quarters. One reason is that his two presidential campaigns have enabled him to dole out favors and collect chits, and his campaign recognizes that now is the time to cash in on his wealth of high-level contacts.”

McCain’s un-McCain-like challenger, J.D. Hayworth, responded by saying, “There is a clear fault line that McCain’s endorsements suggest: the Washington establishment vs. the conservatives of Arizona and across the country. And in this election year, I’ll take our people-based endorsements of Tea Party patriots, gun owners and illegal-immigration fighters over the 24-year incumbent’s.”

It’s clear McCain is frightened. Instead of building bridges with disgruntled Tea Partiers, he halls in the usual McCain-like establishment empty suits (Mitt Romney) to save his political bacon. Chuck Coughlin, a Republican consultant, told POLITICO, “He’s running scared, and it’s stupid.” But as McCain-like Forest Gump would say, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

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

Back in 2007, during the bad old days of the Bush administration, many around the world – including the left here at home – worried after reading press reports that warned of an impending Bush attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups,” wrote Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker magazine. “The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.”

As if by magic, members of America’s crack intelligence community leaked portions of a National Intelligence Estimate, parts of which were later declassified. “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program,” said the report. Democrats in Congress used the report to rein in any attempt by Bush to needlessly confront Iran on its nonexistent nuclear program. ABC News described the NIE report as creating an “embarrassing situation for the United States as it pushes for a third United Nations resolution against Iran for its nuclear activities.”

The insightful neocon Norman Podhoretz made an interesting point during the controversy regarding the CIA leak. “…I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations.”

Today, the New York Times reports, “The United Nation’s nuclear inspectors declared for the first time on Thursday that extensive information they have collected raised concerns about ‘past or current undisclosed activities’ by Iran’s military to develop a nuclear weapon. The unusually strongly worded conclusion seems certain to accelerate Iran’s confrontation with much of the rest of the world.” However, the Times offered a glimmer of hope to Obama’s supporters on the radical fringe, assuring them that “several of President Obama’s top national security advisers have questioned it.”

The Times continued, “Perhaps the most startling revelation in the report is that for the first time Iran told inspectors it was preparing to make its uranium into a metallic form — a step that can be explained by some civilian applications, but is widely viewed as necessary for making the core of an atom bomb.”

If our CIA wasn’t so secretive (that is, when it isn’t leaking misinformation to the New York Times) it would offer a one-word statement in response to the U.N. report, “Oops.”

Back in the 1980s, President Reagan was roundly criticized for running a secret intelligence network from the White House basement. The effort, you may recall, was to overthrow the socialist Sandinista dictatorship in Nicaragua. Reagan understood what Republican administrations that followed him never figured out: that the CIA is a worthless intelligence gathering body with a leftist and subversive contingent working to undermine American efforts against dangerous external enemies.

Nearly a decade has passed since 9/11, and the paper-shuffling hacks at the CIA still can’t get it right. That intelligence failure cost 3,000 Americans their lives. Will it take the destruction of an entire U.S. city before we wake up to the dangerous inadequacies of the CIA?

We can only hope that when President Obama leaves office in 2012, the Palin administration will do away with the CIA and the Tea Party Congress will charter a new intelligence agency – with Dick Cheney as its director. Hey, if Massachusetts can elect a Republican to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, anything is possible.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

If it walks, talks and attempts to act a like a Tea Party, is it? No, it’s the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Conservative Republican leaders gathered in Washington one day prior to the conference’s opening to sign the Mount Vernon Statement; a list of conservative principles they hope will endear the Republican Party to suspicious Tea Partiers. Better late than never.

As the New York Times put it, “This gathering of establishment leaders of conservatism — some of them the remaining elder statesmen of the Reagan era — is occurring against a backdrop of splintering conservative and Republican bases, with right-leaning activists like those in the Tea Party movement tugging against moderates over adherence to core party values and vying for candidates representing the ‘real deal.’” The problem for Republican conservatives has always been their adherence to what party loyalists refer to as the “eleventh commandment,” thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican. It was this self-imposed decree that kept many conservatives mum while accommodationists like Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, George Bush the elder and younger and John McCain worked with Democrats, undermining conservative principles and the party’s credibility.

Conceived after Barry Goldwater’s defeat to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, California Republican Chairman Gaylord Parkinson devised the eleventh commandment to end the intra-party bickering seen when liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller provided ammunition for Democrats by labeling Goldwater an “extremist.” However, the new code never did apply to liberal or moderate Republicans. In 1979, George H. Bush referred to Ronald Reagan’s plan allowing Americans to keep more of what they earned as “voodoo economics.” The phrase became a mantra for the left throughout Reagan’s eight years in office.

In New York’s 23rd Congressional District special election last November, conservative heavyweight Newt Gingrich threw his support behind liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava. “Our best chance to put responsible and principled leaders in Washington starts here,” said Gingrich. He justified his support by describing the contest as “the first election of the new Republican Revolution.” Disgusted conservative Tea Partiers threw their support to Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, who lost by a narrow 3,000 votes.

Thankfully, what separates the Tea Party from CPAC Republicans is their loyalty to principle and not party. For them “thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican” has been replaced by “thou shalt defend Constitutional limits on government and not carry water for Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.”

Conservative Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) warned fellow Republicans who refuse to sign CPAC’s vague Mount Vernon Statement “…are part of the problem and should be replaced.” The Tea Party has already launched a process to unseat Republicans for failing to live up to a previous document designed to “…secure the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…” But, better late than never.

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

Sixty years of Camelot is ending – not with a bang but a whimper. Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), son of the late Edward Kennedy, announced his retirement from politics. “…My life has taken a new direction,” Kennedy said in a video to his dwindling supporters, “and I will not be a candidate for re-election this year.” Recollecting past glories, Kennedy thanked his constituents for looking past his family’s deep pathological character flaws, “When I made missteps or suffered setbacks,” Kennedy said, referring to his DUI conviction and addiction to drugs and alcohol, “you responded not with contempt but with compassion.” Looking at recent polls, however, Kennedy is lucid enough to know that the voter compassion once felt for him and many of his fellow Democrats has morphed into a bubbling caldron of contempt.

In a speech endorsing then candidate Obama for president, Sen. Ted Kennedy said, “I came to the Senate to get things done. We’ve been able to achieve a number of important achievements, and I want to continue that. My interest is in getting things done, and I think he [Obama] has the ability to bring people together.” The late “Lion of the Senate” was correct. Just a year after taking the oath of office, Barack Husain Obama has united a formidable army of Americans against his and Kennedy’s destructive agenda to “get things done.” That agenda has plunged the nation, Chappaquiddick- like, off the road of fiscal sanity and into the murky depths of red ink. The Tea Party rescued Massachusetts by installing Scott Brown in Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. With their help, they may rescue the rest of the country from the submerged vehicle in which Obama and the Kennedy clan have abandoned us.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Oh where, oh where can my squishy little Republicans be? That seems to be the question President Obama is asking. “We can’t afford grandstanding at the expense of actually getting something done,” the president told reporters. He, of course, was grousing about the Republican Party’s sudden aversion to support his toxic agenda. Obama’s plea sounds perfectly reasonable if you believe the purpose of government is to become an all-consuming Godzilla monster turning its burning hot breath on trillions of dollars while trampling on our freedoms. Otherwise, you have no choice but to use every tool at your disposal to bring the colossal beast down. Even the New York Times’ favorite bipartisan, Sen. John McCain, is disappointing his ivory tower media pals.

McCain faces a stiff challenge from conservative – and Tea Party supporter – J. D. Hayworth. And, as much as it kills him to do so, McCain must move to the right of Obama. “Mr. McCain now finds himself jammed, moving starkly — and often awkwardly — to the right, apparently in an effort to gain favor among the same voters whom Mr. Hayworth, a consistent voice for the far right, could pull toward him like taffy come summer,” said the Times.

Obama’s criticism of the Supreme Court in his State of the Union address for striking down the Arizonan’s draconian campaign law, which trampled on the First Amendment protection of free speech, can’t be a help to McCain. Preserving the Constitutional protections of the citizen against the encroachments of a power-hungry state is a red meat issue for Tea Partiers throughout the land. If the doddering McCain wins against his conservative Republican challenger, he has Gov. Sarah Palin to thank – again. It was Palin who gave the lethargic “maverick” what little chance he had last election, and she recently endorsed the embattled incumbent in his quest to win a fifth term in the U.S. Senate.

“…A vote for a Republican, no matter what you think of him as a person,” warns New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, is a vote for paralysis.” From your lips to God’s ears, Paul. The current “paralysis” is not so much a byproduct of principled opposition by Republicans as it is the throbbing heart terror generated at the thought of electoral retribution looming for politicians of both parties who cross the Tea Party. According to Krugman, Republicans “inveigh against the deficit — and last month their senators voted in lockstep against any increase in the federal debt limit, a move that would have precipitated another government shutdown if Democrats hadn’t had 60 votes.” The obvious goal, then, is to strip Obama’s personality cult of its dangerous 60 votes.

For months, the media and Democratic strategists (is there a difference?) believed the Tea Party would initiate a bloody civil war within the Part of Lincoln. Instead, it scared timid bipartisan Republicans, if only for this election cycle, into the waiting arms of conservative principles – even maverick John McCain.

“This party that we call the Tea Party,” said Palin before its Nashville convention, “this movement, as I say, is the future of politics in America.” J. D. Hayworth hopes the meteoric Tea Part will force McCain to realize that the Jurassic age of bipartisanship is coming to a fiery end. “We all admire and respect John for his service,” said Hayworth. “But he’s been there too long, and it’s time to welcome him back home.” That’s good advice for McCain and the many Republican mavericks that, until the Tea Party arrived, were more than eager to help Obama with “getting something done.”

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

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.