Welcome to yet another thrilling edition of the only newspaper column in America that hasn't lied about serving in Vietnam, Hobnobbing With Dave!

Item:  So this is why libertarians never win elections…

Well, Sarah Palin can celebrate now:  the leftwing news media has discovered a new boogeyman to hound, and his name is Rand Paul, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky.  Though nominally a Republican, Mr. Paul is in fact a libertarian, as is his father, Texas Congressman Ron Paul.  While libertarian views tend to be technically correct about what the Constitution actually says, those GOP voters in Kentucky who nominated Mr. Paul for this senate seat are about to find out exactly why it is that the Libertarian Party seldom fields candidates who can actually win elections.

Libertarianism is all about telling people what the government cannot do for them.  Like it or not, the truth about America is that most voters want to know what the government can do for them, and base their voting decisions accordingly.  In a poll released just after last Tuesday's primary vote, Mr. Paul led his Democrat opponent by more than 20%.  You can bet that the leftist news media will make sure that gap closes quickly – helped along by the foot-in-mouth disease that Mr. Paul inherited from his father – and that what ought to be an easy Republican win in November will instead become a nail-biter at best, and possibly even a Democrat win.

Item:  Blumenthal is the left's latest gold medalist.

So a Democrat politician is revealed to be a bald-faced liar, and liberals rally around him in support.  What else is new?  From Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to Al Gore to John Kerry to Barack Obama, American liberals have made it obvious for a long, long time that bald-faced liars have real political potential as far as they're concerned.

The latest winner of the liberal gold medal for creative prevarication is Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who has now been starkly revealed to have repeatedly lied throughout his political career about having served in Vietnam.  Were he a Republican, Mr. Blumenthal would not only be removed as the Party's nominee for higher office, he would be hounded from the AG's job by the leftwing news media.

But because he's a Democrat, the reaction from the news media has been a round of perfunctory reporting on the matter that will soon die away, and a statement from the Obama Administration that its support for Blumenthal has not changed.  Knowing this would be the case, Blumenthal last week responded to the revelation of his serial lying with a statement that he would not allow his record to be attacked.

His "record" is that of a bald-faced liar, which makes him the perfect liberal candidate for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut.

Item:  The Great Climate Fraud Morphs into the Great Species Fraud.

If you thought that the death of Global Warming as a viable driver of government policy means you can relax a little bit, think again.  As is always the case with the world socialist movement – the driver behind Al Gore's Great Climate Fraud - the death of one political fraud only gives birth to the next.  As of Friday, May 21, we know what that next fraud will be.

On Friday, the United Nations leaked excerpts from its soon-to-be-published fake study on endangered species, and in the process made it obvious that this will be the next great cause of world socialism.  For those who closely followed the political drivers of the Great Climate Fraud, it will come as no surprise that this Great Species Fraud will advocate that the UN report will advocate:

• "...a whole sale revolution in the way humans do business, consume, and think about their lives." And
• "…massive changes to the way the global economy is run."

In other words, like the Great Climate Fraud, the Great Species Fraud will be little more than a concerted attack on the free market industrial economies of Western Europe, and more importantly, the United States of America.  The devolution of market-based economies to the socialist model – with ever-increasing influence of the UN and other world government organizations – has been the singular focus of socialists around the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.

The collapse of the Great Climate Fraud changes nothing in that regard, and the frightening fact of the matter is that this kind of thinking completely dominates the Democrat Party at the national level, and pervades the senior leadership of the Obama Administration.

So while we should all celebrate the death of fake climate "science" as a driver of government policy, we mustn't kid ourselves that the world socialist movement has died along with it.   These people are like zombies – they just keep coming back from the grave to try to strangle us.

Lindsey Graham, Pitiful RINO

Pity poor Lindsey Graham.  Ok, well, don't pity him – rather, snicker at him for his stupidity in becoming the latest Republican senator to get caught up the crossfire of Democrat mid-term electoral calculations.

Mr. Graham, of course, is the Senator from South Carolina who styles himself as the second coming of the now former "maverick", Arizona Senator John McCain.  (McCain, we recently discovered, is now an ex-Maverick, having recently disavowed having ever been anything but a loyal conservative Republican in the face of a strong GOP primary challenge from former congressman J.D. Hayworth.) 

Senator Graham has spent the last six months engaged in a negotiation with Democrat Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and "independent" (but really Democrat) Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut on "climate", i.e., cap and trade legislation.  Keeping with the hubris of their massive egos, these three senators have proceeded on the belief that they, and only they, can devise the ideal solution to the non-existent "problem" of man-caused global warming, with Sen. Graham taking on McCain's former role as the poster child for Republican-in-name-only (RINO) stupidity.

The Kerry/Graham/Lieberman bill – we'll call it KGL for short – was set for a grand unveiling this past Monday, but a funny thing happened on the way to Lindsey's coronation:  Democrat election year politics intervened.  On Saturday, poor Lindsey issued a plaintive message announcing he was pulling out of his negotiations on the KGL bill – meaning, one supposes, that we will have to henceforth refer to it as simply the KL bill – due to the fact that the White House has now convinced Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to take up immigration reform rather than "climate" legislation next on the senate's agenda.  Graham's note went on to express his disappointment that the Democrats have chosen to yet again delay dealing with such a critical issue, after they had promised him that KGL would be next on this year's agenda.

Oh me, oh my, what is a poor RINO to do?

The only surprising thing about this shift in Democrat strategy is that it comes as a surprise to anyone, much less Sen. RINO.  The Democrat agenda is never about dealing with issues that are somehow important to the American people.  If it was, healthcare would have been far down the list of priorities, and "climate" wouldn't even be on the list.  After all, large majorities of the public adamantly opposed the healthcare atrocity, and that majority has continued to grow since the bill's passage, and "climate" legislation consistently places dead last in polls that ask respondents to the issues that are most important to them.  In most polls, it wouldn't even register as an issue at all unless the questioner specifically asks about it.

Immigration, on the other hand, does register in the collective public mind, and so, as the Democrat leadership in Washington looked at this year's remaining congressional schedule, and realized they were quickly running out of days on which issues could be brought to the well of the Senate for consideration, they had a choice to make.  Not surprisingly, they made the choice that they perceive will give them the greatest political advantage in November.  Despite Sen. RINO's complaints, it was an entirely rational choice.

For the Democrats, "climate" legislation is about one thing and one thing only:  placating the radical leftist "environmental" groups who contribute tens of millions of dollars to Democrat campaigns.  But while the radical greens control gobs of money, they don't control a lot of votes at the end of the day, and they can just as easily be placated through the regulatory processes at EPA and the Department of the Interior as they can through legislation.  So, although they give great lip service to it, for the Democrats, "climate" legislation is really a secondary priority, especially in an election year.

Immigration reform, on the other hand, is where the votes are.  One of the great looming problems the Democrats face in this year's elections is a great deficit in what pollsters call "voter enthusiasm".  The 

Democrat voter base always tends to experience lower turnout in mid-term congressional election years, and that is only exacerbated in years, like this year, when the Democrat voter base – made up largely of ethnic minorities – is less motivated to vote than the GOP voter base.

So, facing this election-year reality, the Democrat leadership in the White House and congress made the very cynical and simple calculation:  What better way to stir up the voter base than with a big fight over immigration reform?  It doesn't matter to the Democrats if they win or lose, it makes no difference whether a bill is ultimately signed into law or not – the fight is what matters in an election year.

So, the Arizona immigration bill that was passed late last week gave the President and Sen. Reid their opening, and they jumped through it, with Sen. RINO becoming the big loser in the whole process.

Gosh, don't you feel terrible for poor Lindsey?