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.

The 16 Year Cycle of Presidential Politics

I have long held the theory that each new generation of Americans has almost a genetic need to experiment with liberalism/leftism/progressivism/socialism or whatever '–ism' is being attached leftist ideology in this country these days.  Thus, every 16 years or so, as a new generation of American voters comes of age and the people begin to get bored with whatever moderate-to-conservative administration happens to be in power at the time, the country elects a leftist to the presidency, and waits to see what happens.

It generally doesn't take too long for the public to collectively recoil in horror at the terrible mistake it has made, and to then begin the process of correcting things at the polls.  It's very easy to go back in history and observe this apparently unavoidable cycle of American politics.

Let's begin in 1960, when a public tired of 12 years of boring prosperity under Truman and then Eisenhower elected the young liberal John F. Kennedy to the presidency.  Kennedy's liberal social policies and feckless, amateurish conduct of foreign affairs had his public approval rating on a downward trajectory by late 1963, and the country was well on its way to a correcting election the following year.  But then JFK was assassinated, and the public turned to Lyndon Johnson in a sympathy vote.  The Democrats were turned out of office in 1968, but not until Johnson had saddled the country with the massive escalation of the Vietnam conflict, and a set of Great Society programs that are still wreaking damage on the population to this day.

Fast forward 16 years to 1976, and a new generation of voters tired of the Watergate scandal turned to a liberal peanut farmer from Georgia.  The most incompetent presidency in the nation's history followed, resulting in the Reagan landslides of 1980 and 1984.  When George H.W. Bush prevailed over leftwinger Mike Dukakis in 1988, it looked as if the public had learned a lasting lesson from the Carter debacle, and might well avoid another disastrous flirtation with leftism.

But it wasn't to be.  In 1992, the magic 16 years after 1976, a public furious at Bush for breaking his "no new taxes" pledge in a shameful deal with congressional Democrats turned leftwards again, elevating Bill and Hillary Clinton to their co-Presidency.  This time the public caught on far more quickly than it had following the mistakes of 1960 and 1976, recoiling in terror as the Clintons attempted to socialize the healthcare system and implement a massive new BTU carbon tax.  Voters were so appalled by these and many other Clintonian initiatives that they awarded the Republicans with a massive congressional sea change election in 1994, turning both houses of congress over to the GOP for the first time in almost half a century.

Many anticipated that a personal repudiation of the Clintons would follow in the 1996 presidential contest, but Bill Clinton was smart enough to shove Hillary and her hard-core leftism aside, choosing instead to adopt the strategy of "triangulation" suggested to him by pollster and then-White House aide Dick Morris.  Thus, throughout 1995 and 1996, Clinton co-opted Republican positions on everything from military policy to welfare reform, and ended up being re-elected and presiding over a successful presidency for the most part.

All of which brings us forward now to 2008, sixteen years after Clinton's 1992 victory.  Another new generation of voters grew tired of 12 years of moderate-to-conservative policy, and also tired of a war in Iraq that had dragged on for 6 years.  Predictably, another lurch to the left occurred, this time elevating a true leftist radical to the presidency.

This time the public learned even faster than it had following the 1992 mistake, beginning the process of turning the Democrats out of office in November of 2009, as it recoiled in horror at the radical leftist, even fascist, policy pursuits of President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats in congress.  All indicators today point to the likelihood of another sea change election coming this November.  True, there are still more than six months between now and Election Day, but it's hard to see what could happen between now and then that would turn back this growing tide.

Should such a sea change take place this November, the question will then become whether President Obama will choose to moderate his worst impulses as Bill Clinton did following 1994?  At this point, there is no indication whatsoever that this President has a moderating bone in his body.  Bill Clinton was all about Bill Clinton, and was willing to do whatever it took to secure some sort of positive legacy for himself in history.  Leftist ideology was Hillary's deal, not his.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, is all about ideology, and transforming the country as he promised repeatedly to do during his election campaign.  Given that, there appears little chance he will divert himself from the Jimmy Carter-esque path to a one term presidency he currently finds himself treading.  Such a fate could not happen to a more deserving person.

The Saturday Situation

I swear, this presidency just becomes more and more absurd with each passing day.  Wait, did I say "passing"?  That's a football term, right?  How appropo, as they say in all the right cocktail parties in the nation's capital.

The big news this morning is that your President, Barack (the Hussein is silent) Obama, has his Justice Department studying ways to tinker with major college football's means of determining a national champion. That's right:  In the middle of the Great Recession, with a 10% rate of unemployment and a 17% rate of underemployment, with foreign policiy crises popping up all over the world and Islamic terrorists bringing incendiary devices onto our jetliners in their underpants, your President continues to have a laser-like focus on the trivial and the absurd.  This guy is quickly making me long for the days of the Carter Administration.

In Church of Global Warming news, it now turns out that the head of the UN's IPCC knew the information regarding melting Himalayan glaciers contained in his organization's "scholarly" report was false before December's climate summit in Copenhagen, but chose to wait two months before releasing the information.  Golly, a Global Warmist is a liar?  Man, that is shocking.