Beacon Street Journal

After years of unceremoniously putting his foot in his mouth, this gem could well be the political obituary that appears over his grave come next November. As a loyal liberal foot-soldier, Harry Reid is poised to take one for the Democratic team over his support of the Obama Administration’s wildly unpopular domestic agenda. In the latest polls for his re-election bid in Nevada, he trails his Republican opponents by double digits.

As evidenced by the video clip, Reid’s comment is a product of the chicanery and spin that has emanated from Democratic Party leaders to justify their nearly $1 trillion economic stimulus boondoggle that has not created any jobs, but has swollen an already out-of-control federal deficit. The pathetic attempt to spin the disastrous stimulus policy has caused Democrats to add a new metric to our economic lexicon: “jobs saved or created.” This novel and patently absurd indice, incapable of measurement, has been used to assuage a deficit-weary public from the deleterious ramifications of the Democrats fiscal recklessness.

Harry Reid has been spouting this nonsense since the stimulus passed. It should come as no surprise in this Alice-in-Wonderland world in which he resides that the latest gloomy unemployment figures would be characterized as an unequivocal blessing. Nothing better illustrates how oblivious and utterly disconnected Democratic Party Beltway elites have become from the electorate than the fact that a dismal jobs picture would be cause for celebration.

Obama’s speech yesterday on the urgent necessity of passing his leviathan bill was his thirty-fifth such invocation. Yet, Americans still remain fervently opposed to his health care plan. What does this tell us about the Democrats? The attempt by Democrats over the past year, both substantive and procedurally, to enact a government takeover of our health care delivery system reveals that when it comes to implementing liberals decades-old dream of socialized medicine, the Democrats don’t care one whit about the will of the electorate. Nothing is going to stand in their way. This was the message behind Nancy Pelosi’s imploring her Blue Dog colleagues in the House recently to fall on their swords for the greater good and glory of Obamacare. We’re getting a government run health care delivery system whether we want it or not.

Popular sovereignty is no match for  and has taken a back seat to the fervor and ideological commitment of dedicated hard-left liberals such as Pelosi, Reid and President Obama. This posture helps explain recent commentary by many liberal pundits to the effect that the American people are too stupid to understand the beneficence that Obama is showering upon them with his 2,700 page monstrosity and that once they learn of the bills advantages by further communication from the White House the more they will like it.

In terms of the reconciliation process, forget about the Senate, because the bill’s fate will ultimately be decided in the House. This is because the House must pass the Senate bill, as it stands, word for word without a single change. This creates a dilemma for Nancy Pelosi, as it is not entirely clear how she can persuade Bart Stupak and his other colleagues who are on record as claiming they will vote no due to the unacceptable abortion language in the Senate bill.

Given the unpopularity of the health care bill in their congressional districts, Other Blue Dog Democrats, in the interest of self-preservation, may not be so willing to heed Pelosi’s call for committing what will amount to an act of political hari kare.

The latest bombshell revelation in the global warming hoax, largely ignored by a global-warming-compliant American media, are the startling admissions recently made by one of the leading global warming scientists. During an interview with the BBC, Phil Jones, the scientist at the center of the Climategate email scandal, stated that his raw data which forms the basis for much of the claims of planetary warming are in such a state of disarray that they probably can never be replicated, or more importantly, ever verified.

Jones also admitted that the Medieval warm period may have been similar to temperatures presently observed, which would put the lie to the central thesis of global warming advocates that industrialization is responsible for rising temperatures. Finally, Jones stated that there has been no statistically significant warming in the last fifteen years. Had these startling admissions come from a global warming sceptic, they would have been resolutely denounced as propaganda coming from ignorant deniers and/or defenders of big oil companies. These statements, coming as they do, from one of the most important climate scientists and unwavering proponents of man-made global warming theory should put the final nail in the coffin of the favorite mantra of the global warming alarmists, namely, that the science is settled.

As the leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University demonstrate, the scientific “consensus” concerning global warming consisted solely of a coterie of true believers who manipulated data, omitted data that did not conform to their cherished theory and abjectly conspired to keep sceptics from publishing peer reviewed papers. Yet Jones’ stunning admission is but one of many revelations that are now bringing down the house of cards upon which the global warming theory was based.

The reputation of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the  supposed “gold standard” upon which the certitude of  global warming science has largely been predicated, has been badly tarnished. Its prognostications of melting Himalayan glaciers, African crop devastation, and that 50% of the  Netherlands is under water,  have all recently been proven to be demonstrably false or based on mere hunches, unsubstantiated claims and not peer-reviewed science.

To add insult to injury, the faithful flock of true believers have had to suffer the indignity of taunts and merciless mocking at the hands of deniers in light of the recent record snowfall that has covered much of the nation. While it is true the recent blizzards, in and of themselves, do not prove or disprove planetary warming, we shouldn’t begrudge our global warming sceptics their moment of humor. For a movement that appoints as one of its principal spokesman, a charlatan and serial exaggerator such as Al Gore, sooner or later, is going to be hoisted on its own petard. And, that is exactly what has happened. From Hurricane Katrina, to the presence or absence of snow during winter, global warming hysterics have for years used every incident of abnormal or severe weather as irrefutable proof positive of their warming thesis. As every sentient being realizes, they can’t have it both ways.

What is truly astonishing is that Gore’s unfounded and bombastic assertions and his proselytizing of this dogma garnered him a Nobel prize. So too, it was rather disheartening to hear President Obama, in his state of the union address, ignore  the overwhelming evidence that challenges the fundamental presuppositions of global warming theory. Instead he all too predictably hewed to his left-wing belief system by repeating the tiresome mantra that the science is settled as a basis for his cap and trade legislation. And he expects us believe that he is not an ideologue?

The latest scandals in the global warming drama have had the effect of pulling back the curtain and exposing the Wizard of Oz mentality of the gloabal warming alarmists. It is almost certain that Congress now will never countenance any economy-wrecking regulations promulagted by the EPA to satisfy the fact-free belief-system of the vanishing global warming faithful. The latest harmful disclosures also presage the death of cap and trade as well as the perverse idea that the developed nations must transfer trillions of dollars to poorer countries to combat a problem that is based on mere speculation.

For the inconvenient truth is that the certitude and aura of authority with which the alarmists and their handmaidens in the media have been trumpeting a left-wing political theology masquerading as “science” has been exposed as fraudulent.

In a post Scott Brown world, as they watch the approval ratings of the leader of their party continue to plummet, the Democrat dominoes are starting to fall. The latest to announce his retirement is Indiana Senator Evan Bayh. Bayh who liked to characterized himself as a “moderate” Democrat sealed his fate with his vote to allow Obamacare go forward in the Senate. In light of the overwhelming national opposition to Obamacare, there is no plausible way Bayh could have trumpeted his credentials as a moderate in his bid for re-election.

The electorate is rebelling against the statism of the cadre of  liberals in the Congress who are attempting to foist upon an unwilling public their dreams of a European Socialist regime in this country. Those Congressional Democrats up for re-election can see the handwriting on the wall.  For, the posture of the Obama Administration in light of an angry and disaffected public seems to be to double-down on his wildly unpopular agenda.

Bayh’s announcement comes on the heels of Patrick Kennedy’s decision not to seek re-election in Rhode Island and there is talk of Massachusetts Congressmen William Delahunt talking about throwing in the towel as well. As Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts signifies, there is a national revolt against implementation of the Obama Administration’s hard-left liberalism. Those Democrats in Congress in red states who were along for the ride as his willing accomplices will now pay a price come next November.

Which Democrat will be next to throw in the towel in this inhospitable, throw-the-bums-out, anti-incumbent climate? Perhaps Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas?

The central message of last night’s state of the union address? Regardless of the clarion call sent by voters in Virginia, New Jersey, and now from Massachusetts, Obama is going to double-down on his left wing agenda. In short, Obama is going to fight hard to give an unruly and ungrateful electorate that which they don’t want or need. Those who were anticipating a shift or pivot to the center on the part of President Obama, especially in light of the stinging rebuke most recently delivered by Massachusetts voters, may have been somewhat surprised, but they shouldn’t be.

As evidenced by the unprecedented decline in Obama’s approval ratings, there is serious buyer’s remorse about the land. But, you get what you pay for, and in Obama, all the vacuous rhetoric and mythologizing about him being a post-partisan, transcendent politician notwithstanding, what the voters purchased was an unrepentant liberal. There will be no pivot to the center because at heart, Obama is a left-wing ideologue. The man who hung out with his “spiritual mentor” Jeremiah Wright for twenty years has no interest in governing from the center because he is first and foremost a creature of the far left.

In typical Obama fashion, the speech was laced with personal pronouns some 100 times. For, it’s not about us, it’s all about him. He won’t quit. As our self-anointed savior, he is going to keep on fighting. But for what? The unmistakable answer is: to enact left wing policies the country fervently opposes. This arrogance, born of his innate ideological rigidity, was most pronounced when he declared that he was going full bore for his cap and trade scheme. Never mind that the science behind global warming has been thoroughly repudiated and its fraudulent pretenses exposed. His “facts don’t matter” approach to the global warming scam perfectly encapsulates his governing philosophy: as a liberal elitist, he  knows what’s best for us, and we’re getting cap and trade — the incontrovertible facts that demonstrate that this faith-based doctrine is a monstrous hoax be damned.

Dull, pedantic, predictable, the speech was disjointed, and at times, terribly discordant. How can a man who promised repeatedly during his campaign that he would televise health care deliberations on C-SPAN yet who then becomes a willing participant in all the nefarious, corrupt and secret back-room deals, now utter a word about changing the culture of Washington with a straight face? Remarkably, it’s as if he believes he is somehow immune from the adverse ramifications of his glaring contradictions on this subject painfully exposed via YouTube. Last night, all the by-now familiar themes were on display: the straw men, the invocation of Change, “false choices,” and demonizing the Republicans as partisan.  All the mellifluous and sonorous words however were simply not consonant with the actual facts of the Obama presidency. But we have been down this road so often, that by now, the silver tongue can no longer obscure the reality of the gap between what he says or promises and what he actually does. In short, as most voters have come to realize, our president doesn’t practice what he preaches.

Obama’s agenda and priorities are  perversely inverted: Despite the fact that global warming ranks almost dead last among voters in terms of priorities, despite the fact that that his health care “reform” ranks about eighth, Obama has decided nonetheless to charge forward with his big government agenda.

Obama’s message last night to members of his own party ,who post Scott Brown, can read the handwriting on the wall was don’t head for the hills, stand with me and fight . After last night’s performance, which indicates the Obama Administration is on a political kamikaze mission, I suspect that many more of his fellow Democrats will be abandoning ship.

In the wake of the unequivocal message sent by Massachusetts’ voters last week to President Obama, it has been a source of constant amusement to watch the White House ’s reaction evolve from one of shock and denial, into what now can only be described as delusional. In the aftermath of the stunning Scott Brown victory, Obama assessed the state of voter disenchantment in the Bay State by claiming that the same forces that propelled Scott Brown to victory were responsible for his ascension to the presidency. White House press secretary Robert Gibb’s added to the incredulity with his preposterous assertion, made to Fox News’ Chris Wallace that, “more people voted to express their support for Barack Obama than to oppose him.” When one hears statements such as these, a question arises: Do Democrats have a death wish?

But the comedy of errors continues unabated. In a fit of desperation, a panicked White House has decided that the best way to distract disenchanted voters from the debacle of the health care bill is for Obama to embrace populism by demagoguing Wall Street. In a town hall meeting in Elyria, Ohio last week Obama told the crowd that he would never stop fighting for them and he vowed to continue to battle for his health care reform package.

Despite the fact that most banks have already paid back all the money they were given under TARP with interest, Obama vowed to impose a tax on Wall Street because,…I want to charge Wall Street a modest fee to repay taxpayers in full for saving their skin in a time of need. You can rest assured, we’re going to get that money — your money — back, each and every dime.”

In order to have a fighting chance of credibly converting from a liberal elitist to a Jacksonian Democrat, it is clear that Obama will first need to find some new speechwriters. His repeated mocking of Scott Brown’s pick-up truck during his last minute appearance in Boston to shore-up the beleaguered campaign of Martha Coakley backfired badly and underscores why casting a tone-deaf Obama as a populist is an enterprise that is doomed to failure.

Obama, as an unrepentant liberal, will never be able to don the mask of a populist. For the fundamental conceit of liberalism is the belief of its practitioners in their moral and intellectual superiority. As such, all liberals, including Barack Obama, are elitists. As evidenced by the attempts of  a small coterie of congressional left-wingers to cram down the throats of an unreceptive electorate Obamacare and cap and trade, liberals don’t seek to govern so much as they seek to control and impose their world-view on the country. It is no mystery why during the Democratic primaries, Obama had trouble securing the blue-collar vote. His haughty and condescending comment that these voters opposed him because they cling to their guns and religion simply demonstrates that his deeply held political convictions are alien to most Americans.

Populism is a distinctly American political tradition. Yet Obama has spent the entire first year of his presidency trying to impose on an unreceptive electorate a European style social democratic form of government. The stunning upset victory of Scott Brown in Massachusetts was an unmistakable warning that Americans have had enough of the Democrats’ attempt to foist upon the country  its vision of a left-wing paradise, where inexplicably, terrorists who want to kill us are given the full constitutional protections reserved for American citizens. This may come as a surprise to the man who willingly absorbed the racist, left-wing rants of the odious Jeremiah Wright for twenty years, but Americans don’t want their country converted into a giant province of Amsterdam.

For the new populist, anti-Wall Street Obama, there is also the not insignificant matter of hypocrisy as well as biting the hand that feeds you. For the Democratic Party, by far, has been the principal beneficiary of Wall Street campaign donations. How does Obama expect now to inveigh against the evils of fat cat bankers on Wall Street ,when during the campaign, he was all to eager to accept their cash?

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. After just one year in office, the politician who started his presidency with a national reservoir of good will and so much promise has been felled by  a little known Republican from a state that has been a bastion of liberalism. In a stunning and unprecedented act of political jiu jitsu, Scott Brown achieved a historically significant election victory by deftly using against President Obama the very same themes of Hope and Change that had catapulted him from obscurity to the Oval Office.

Consider the similarities in their respective political ascendancy. During the Democratic presidential primaries, Obama was seen as an impudent upstart, a lightweight who had the audacity to challenge the inevitability of Hillary’s candidacy. He took head-on the formidable Clinton political machine and emerged victorious. Brown faced similar odds in his quest to fill the Senate seat of Ted Kennedy. He squared-off against the entrenched Massachusetts Democratic Party political machine and beat the ‘inevitable” candidate Martha Coakley — the anointed heir to the Kennedy legacy.

Through his insurgent candidacy, Brown rode the crest of what was initially a wave, that quickly became a national tsunami of disenchantment and disillusionment with the hard-left regal asbsolutism with which Congressional Democrats and President Obama have governed over the past year. As the Coakley campaign floundered and Brown started to surge, he became the vehicle of a national protest against the excesses of one-party rule personified in the crafting of a corrupt trillion dollar behemoth health care bill that the electorate fervently opposed. Brown took on the role of the outsider, the everyman against the condescending elitism of Obama and his radical left-wing congressional cohorts.

Brown’s populist victory has inverted the natural political order, both symbolically and substantively. Independent voters in Massachusetts were astute enough to pierce through the empty and vacuous rhetoric of Obama as the post-partisan uniter  and instead saw him and his Congressional allies as corrupt power-brokers having nothing but disdain for democracy and the will of  the people on whose behalf they purportedly serve. With his unequivocal promise to drive a stake through the heart of Obamacare, it was Brown who was viewed across the country by many as the new harbinger of Hope and Change. His victory would be a fulfillment of their wishes to be liberated from the arrogance of their haughty overseers. Brown’s feat is all the more remarkable, all the more accomplished than that achieved by Barack Obama, because Brown accomplished his feat in a fortnight, while Obama had years to cultivate and succor his campaign theme of therapeutic Change.

After the failures of Copenhagen, Virginia and New Jersey, Obama suffered at the hands of Scott Brown the ultimate humiliation — the loss of Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts. The political capital of the president is now exhausted, his credibility in tatters. In terms of helping out on the campaign trail, many Democrats must now realize the obvious: Obama is an albatross, not a savior.

As Lord Acton so famously said: “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The voters of Massachusetts stand poised tomorrow to end the venality, abuse of power and overreaching that goes hand-in-hand when one political party calls all the shots. The corruption on display in connection with both the substantive and procedural aspects of Obamacare has created a stench that is now permeating the land. Massachusetts’ voters have the opportunity to send an unequivocal message, that will be heard from coast to coast, that the electorate has had enough of the assault on our liberties and the callous indifference of our elected representatives and president to the will of the people who fervently oppose a radical alteration of our health care delivery system. The Democratic-controlled Congress nonetheless seems intent on passing this monstrous piece of legislation — the wishes of the electorate be damned.

In many ways, Massachusetts is a perfect microcosm of the current reigning political culture in Washington: arrogant, elitist and wholly unresponsive to those on whose behalf they purportedly govern. Massachusetts’ voters, having been bamboozled by the vacuous rhetoric of empty suit Governor Deval Patrick, the original pied-piper of Hope and Change, can see the national future unfolding through the administration of his political clone, Barack Obama, and by their decision tomorrow, may wish to spare the nation the embarrassment of declining fortunes which the Bay State has experienced at the hands of a political neophyte and his Democratic Party allies in the legislature.

Coakley is a political hack representative of this culture of mediocrity and unscrupulousness so entrenched in the Bay State. She is a product of a political culture that has seen the past three Speakers of the House (all Democrats) forced to resign from office in disgrace after being indicted on corruption charges. Exhibiting a contempt for those who elected them, Democratic politicians in the Commonwealth do what they wish and say what they want with impunity. Coakley’s shameful and shockingly dishonest response to the reporter assault incident is perfectly consistent with this posture.

Even the residents of Massachusetts have had enough. A vote for Republican Scott Brown is a way for the voters of the Commonwealth to poke a stick in the eye of those politicians who are the natural by-products of this nefarious culture.

Seemingly oblivious to the excesses of a hard-left liberalism — of which Obama and Congressional Democrats have come to epitomize — voters in the bluest of blue states are about to awaken from their somnolence and slumber. Come what may Wednesday morning, this much is clear: Massachusetts will have sent an unmistakable warning to Democrats in Congress. If they insist on ignoring it, they do so at their peril.

A new Suffolk University poll in the Massachusetts Senate race has Republican candidate Scott Brown ahead of Democrat Martha Coakley by 4 points. Brown has a staggering 65/30% lead over Coakley with Independent voters.

How panicked are Democrats at these latest results? There are now rumblings that President Obama may make a trip to the Bay State to help shore-up a Coakley campaign that appears to be imploding. In addition, as Byron York reports, the spin on a possible Coakley loss in liberal Massachusetts, a state which Obama carried by 26 points, has begun in earnest:

Intensifying the gloom, the Democrat says, is the fact that the same polls showing Coakley falling behind also show President Obama with a healthy approval rating in the state. “With Obama at 60 percent in Massachusetts, this shouldn’t be happening, but it is,” the Democrat says.

Given those numbers, some Democrats, eager to distance Obama from any electoral failure, are beginning to compare Coakley to Creigh Deeds, the losing Democratic candidate in the Virginia governor’s race last year. Deeds ran such a lackluster campaign, Democrats say, that his defeat could be solely attributed to his own shortcomings, and should not be seen as a referendum on President Obama’s policies or those of the national Democratic party.

The idea that a loss by Coakley — or even a razor-thin victory — will not have national ramifications for the Democratic Party is of course preposterous. Obama himself intimated as much with the web video he produced earlier in the week for the Coakley campaign. Yes, Coakley has run a dreadful campaign. The reason? As the Democrat in the race, she felt she was entitled to the seat. The Democratic Party viewed it not so much as an election to be decided by the voters, but rather as a sort of exercise in political primogeniture with Coakley being anointed as the rightful successor. The Democrats viewed Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat as their personal property as if the election was a mere formality.

It is hard to fathom the enormity of Coakley’s stupidity which has been on abundant display throughout the campaign. The most notable and recent instance being her lame statement that she was not “privy to the facts” of an assault on a reporter while she was captured in an AP photo looking straight at the man as he lay on the ground. More recent gaffes include telling Catholics (about 50% of the Massachusetts electorate) that while they have religious freedom, they probably ought not to work in a hospital’s Emergency Room. Her abysmal record as a District Attorney for Middlesex County has also come under scrutiny.

Coakley, an unrepentant liberal, has let it be known throughout the campagin that she is in lockstep with every single one of the items on the agenda of the Obama Administration that many Independent Massachusetts’ voters fervently oppose. This includes Obamacare and treateing terrorists like criminal defendants.

Massachusetts has been a one-party state and not surprisingly, Democrats have abused their power. The last three Speakers of the Massachusetts House, all Democrats, have been forced to resign in disgrace after being indicted on corruption charges. Voters in this state see the same one-party dynamic at work in Washington and have had enough.  Coakley is representative of a long line of Massachusetts Democratic politicians who think it is their natural right to “trade-up” on the political ladder when a vacancy opens — qualifications be damned.

Coakley, a career hack, hails from this tradition. As confirmed by the findings in the Suffolk University poll, even some registered Democrats are reeling at the prospect of sending this manifestly unqualified dimwit to Washington.

To describe the campaign that Democrat Martha Coakley has conducted as dreadful would be an understatement. The central issue for the Coakley campaign is: has she offered Democratic-leaning voters a compelling reason to vote for her? Cool, aloof and utterly detached from the retail campaigning in which Republican Scott Brown has engaged and excelled, throughout the race for Ted Kennedy’s former Senate seat, Coakley has remained in seclusion, hiding from voters. Meeting with residents of the Commonwealth to seek their vote is an activity that she clearly views is beneath her. Coakley’s campaign strategy has been to expect Massachusetts voters will pull the lever for her come election day solely because she has a “D” after her name.

So I argue in my latest post for True/Slant which you can read here.