…one being about a country and its leader, specifically the leader, upon whom so many of our misguided, stupid, lefty toilet cake Hollywood buffoons fawn with the leg trembling worship of the garden variety MSM “reporter” drooling on the feet of an Obama.

I have a few personal reasons I won’t get into just now for despising that G-d forsaken country, one that would allow a Hugo Chavez and his commie goons to come to power to begin with, but what goes on there is a pure insult to all of humanity.

Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, rebuffed by voters in his previous attempt to become president for life, has now taken a giant step closer to his goal. A reported 54.4 percent of voters approved a referendum on Feb. 15 that would permit Chavez to run for re-election indefinitely. It was the sort of “election” we remember from the communist days — or see today in Zimbabwe. According to the Economist: “Public buildings and vehicles were plastered with pro-Chavez propaganda. State television and radio channels turned over almost their entire resources to promoting the campaign. And even the Caracas metro obliged passengers to listen to campaign jingles.” In 2007, opposition to Chavez’s power grab was led by students. But this time, Chavez ordered that demonstrations against the referendum were to be broken up “with a good dose of gas.”

Now, a triumphant Chavez declares, the way is clear to lead Venezuela to “21st century socialism.” We know what Chavez means by this. He has been implementing his socialism, which is barely distinguishable from Castro’s, since 1999. Freedom of the press is a memory in Venezuela. Newspapers and electronic media that opposed Chavez have been harassed. The 2004 “Law on the Social Responsibility of Radio and Television” requires all outlets to carry Chavez’s speeches in full, contains penalties for a variety of offenses and insults, and permits licenses to be revoked for a second offense. Globovision, a private 24-hour cable news channel, was recently accused of insulting Chavez. Pro-Chavez legislators have urged the attorney general to investigate. Meanwhile, thugs linked to the government lobbed tear gas canisters into the newsroom. RCTV, the second largest television channel in the country, was closed down altogether in 2007.

Read Mona Charen’s entire column here.

Another item is the latest column by Ann Coulter, of whom I can never get enough.

Six months after America’s all-time greatest president left office in 1989, historians ranked him as only a middling president. (I would rank George Washington as America’s greatest president, but he only had to defeat what was then the world’s greatest military power with a ragtag group of irregulars and some squirrel guns, whereas Ronald Reagan had to defeat liberals.)

At the time, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. dismissed Reagan as “a nice, old uncle, who comes in and all the kids are glad to see him. He sits around telling stories, and they’re all fond of him, but they don’t take him too seriously” — and then Schlesinger fell asleep in his soup.

Even liberal historian Richard Reeves blanched at Reagan’s low ranking in 1989, saying, “I was no fan of Reagan, but I think I know a leader when I see one.”

Reagan changed the country, Reeves said, and some would say “he changed the world, making communism irrelevant and the globe safe for the new imperialism of free-market capitalism.” In Reeves’ most inspiring line, he says Reagan “was a man of conservative principle and he damned near destroyed American liberalism.”

Truncating a bit…

Soon after he took office, President Reagan famously hung a portrait of President Calvin Coolidge in the Cabinet Room — another (Republican) president considered a failure by historians.

Coolidge cut taxes, didn’t get the country in any wars, cut the national debt almost in half, and presided over a calm, scandal-free administration, a period of peace, 17.5 percent growth in the gross national product, low inflation (.4 percent) and low unemployment (3.6 percent).

Unlike some recent presidents with Islamic middle names, he didn’t run around comparing himself to Lincoln constantly.

I know I promised not to throw any rocks at the “recent president with the Islamic middle name”, but — wait, it’s not me who’s throwing the rocks, it’s… it’s… one of my favorite author/ columnists.

Anyway, the entire piece is a good read, so it would behoove any and all to take the time to read it.

And finally, I know this issue has been receiving its share of flogging in recent weeks and months (and years, though one would think, by the way the linked article puts it, that it has only been of concern for the last couple of weeks). Howsomever…it’s actually been an issue ever since liberal talk radio began to realize that no one wanted to hear their blathering, commie malarkey while Americans had and have their ears glued to conservative talk radio. According to the rules of a free market, the liberal dudes and dudettes had to be dropped because no sponsor wants to waste money running ads during a program that no one is listening to.

An Obama senior adviser has indicated that the administration is mulling whether the controversial Fairness Doctrine will get a new lease on life, according to a report in Broadcasting and Cable.

The now defunct Fairness Doctrine, if revived, could be used by a liberal administration to silence Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other radio talk show hosts, as well as much of the new alternative media. The doctrine required broadcasters to report both sides of controversial issues. The Federal Communications Commission dropped it in 1987.

And now…

“Senator Obama does not support reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters,” press secretary Michael Ortiz said in an e-mail to Broadcasting and Cable at that time.

“He considers this debate to be a distraction from the conversation we should be having about opening up the airwaves and modern communications to as many diverse viewpoints as possible,” Ortiz said.

Hmmmm, opening up the airwaves and modern communications to as many diverse viewpoints as possible sounds to me like a somewhat left-handed method of saying one doesn’t support the fairness doctrine but supports the fairness doctrine just the same. It would certainly be a pleasant change if these people would just come out and speak their minds, but heaven knows, telling the American people the truth about their actual intentions might receive a largely negative response.

Yeah, better to mince a few words than just say what you mean, you “progressives”, you…

Of course, Bubba weighs in:

Last week on a radio show, former President Bill Clinton announced that in his opinion something needed to be done to balance broadcasting.

How about broadcasting some patriotic programming, instead of left wing garbage put forth for the sole purpose of tearing our great nation down?

“Well, you either ought to have the fairness doctrine or you ought to have more balance on the other side,” Clinton said, “because essentially there has always been a lot of big money to support the right wing talk shows.”

Big money tends to support winners, Mr. Bill, at least smart big money does. This ain’t Utopia. In the competitive game of the free market, the losers have to work a little harder to run with the winners, and do so without a Mom & Dad government interfering on their behalf.

If you want the kind of government you left wing folks are trying to force on us, I suggest you abandon your plans and, instead, move here, where you’ll get exactly what you’re asking for, because the rest of us just won’t be having any of what you’re peddling.

To the rest of you, have a wonderful day, breathing the freedom laced air of America.

…and I will give our new president a chance, unlike the treatment by those folks to the left of things who came right out of the starting gate throwing rocks and various and sundry innuendo at the Bush Presidency before he even had the chance to be sworn in.

However, there are a few small bones I believe need picking, such as, of course, the debate, or lack thereof, surrounding the so-called “Stimulus Bill”.

Mr. Obama made great hay on the subject of promulgating a bi-partisan government, and was even caught on video, smiling a positive sort of smile, saying that he is determined to get the Republicans to work as a team with the Democrats.

That’s very nice, Mr. President, but unless I am being obtuse in my observations, the reality, as things are working out, is that in your lexicon “working together” means everybody towing the liberal line rather than the Democrat majority accepting and incorporating the input of the Republicans in the decision making process.

Even Pelosi’s ‘we won, so we rule’ attitude goes against the grain of your promises to maintain a bipartisan government.

Now, the “Stimulus Bill” itself is crammed with billions of dollars’ worth of partisan agendas that have little or nothing to do with stimulating the economy, not least of which is the billions earmarked for ACORN or the what? Half billion or so destined to combat STDs? As a commentator on FOX news this morning put it, there are some wonderful ideas packed into the “Stimulus Bill”, but quite a few of these don’t belong on the price tag of a bill whose goal is to revitalize our economy.

In the liberal tradition of a bi-partisan Congress, all Republican input is being completely ignored, shut out, etc, etc…

…so much so that the new president can’t seem to hang on to certain cabinet nominees who are endowed with consciences.

Well, how about a little spot-on input, then, from Ann Coulter?

It’s bad enough when illiterate jurors issue damages awards in the billions of dollars because they don’t grasp the difference between a million and a billion. Now it turns out the Democrats don’t know the difference between a million and a trillion.

Why not make the “stimulus bill” a kazillion dollars?

All Americans who work for a living, or who plan to work for a living sometime in the next century, are about to be stuck with a trillion-dollar bill to fund yet more oppressive government bureaucracies. Or as I call it, a trillion dollars and change.

I wasn’t what you would call overly thrilled at the new president’s appointment of Hillary Clinton as SecState, but he seems to have softened the blow on one hand…

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is finding that her job description is dissolving under her feet, leaving her with only a vestige of the power she must have thought she acquired when she signed on to be President Obama’s chief Cabinet officer.

Since her designation:

Vice President Joe Biden has moved vigorously to stake out foreign policy as his turf. His visit to Afghanistan, right before the inauguration, could not but send a signal to Clinton that he would conduct foreign policy in the new administration, leaving her in a backup role.

Richard Holbrooke, the former Balkan negotiator and U.N. ambassador, has been named special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He insisted on direct access to the president, a privilege he was denied during much of the Clinton years.

Former Sen. George Mitchell, D-Maine, negotiator of the Irish Peace Accords, was appointed to be the administration’s point man on Arab-Israeli negotiations.

Samantha Powers, Obama’s former campaign aide, who once called Hillary Clinton a “monster,” has been appointed to the National Security Council as director of “multilateral affairs.”

Gen. James L. Jones, Obama’s new national security adviser, has announced an expansion of the membership and role of the security council. He pledges to eliminate “back channels” to the president and wants to grow the council’s role to accommodate the “dramatically different” challenges of the current world situation.

Susan Rice, Obama’s new United Nations ambassador, insisted upon and got Cabinet rank for her portfolio, and she presumably also will have the same kind of access to Obama that she had as his chief foreign policy adviser during the campaign.

{to me, this sounds suspiciously like “Hillary, you’re butt’s finally out of the Senate and you’ve got yourself a bigger job title, now go sit in the corner and shut up” — heh, heh}

…but continues “business as usual” in the game of patty cakes with our avowed enemies.

{Need to scroll down a bit to get to the quote below}

Question: Thank you, Mr. President. I’d like to shift gears to foreign policy. What is your strategy for engaging Iran? And when will you start to implement it? Will your timetable be affected at all by the Iranian elections? And are you getting any indications that Iran is interested in a dialogue with the United States?

Obama: I said during the campaign that Iran is a country that has extraordinary people, extraordinary history and traditions, but that its actions over many years now have been unhelpful when it comes to promoting peace and prosperity both in the region and around the world, that their attacks — or their — their financing of terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas, the bellicose language that they’ve used towards Israel, their development of a nuclear weapon or their pursuit of a nuclear weapon, that all those things create the possibility of destabilizing the region and are not only contrary to our interests, but I think are contrary to the interests of international peace.

What I’ve also said is that we should take an approach with Iran that employs all of the resources at the United States’ disposal, and that includes diplomacy.

And so my national security team is currently reviewing our existing Iran policy, looking at areas where we can have constructive dialogue, where we can directly engage with them.

And my expectation is, in the coming months, we will be looking for openings that can be created where we can start sitting across the table, face-to-face diplomatic overtures, that will allow us to move our policy in a new direction.

There’s been a lot of mistrust built up over the years, so it’s not going to happen overnight. And it’s important that, even as we engage in this direct diplomacy, we are very clear about certain deep concerns that we have as a country, that Iran understands that we find the funding of terrorist organizations unacceptable, that we’re clear about the fact that a nuclear Iran could set off a nuclear arms race in the region that would be profoundly destabilizing.

So there are going to be a set of objectives that we have in these conversations, but I think that there’s the possibility at least of a relationship of mutual respect and progress.

Anyone who’s read this blog in the past knows what I think of Ahmadmanjihad’s respect for America, or of even the remotest possibility that we can sit down with him and his ilk and hold a mutually honest discussion leading to any kind of mutually honored agreements.

Notice how the Iranians waited until Obama was in the White House before they tested their new missile. You know, the one they claimed is meant to launch communications satellites but (ahem!) also confirms their capability of delivering a warhead not only into Israel, but southern Europe, as well.

On another note, I was watching an interview with John McCain on Fox, and he made a valid point regarding the conduct of the Democrats, now that they have a Democrat president to go with their majorities in the House and Senate.

He said that what the Democrats are doing now, as far as wielding their power, is not much different than what the Republicans did during the Bush Administration. He added that the GOP paid dearly for it in November, 2006. Now we can only hope that the Democrats pay the same price in 2010, as a response from voters on the price the taxpayer has to pay as a result of the “Stimulus Bill”, and that, G-d willing, we get a sweep of all three branches two years after that.