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The Continuing Crisis

February was Winter Olympics month. It concluded with Canada winning the most gold medals while the United States accounted for the largest overall medal haul with 37. Curiously, America's Nobel laureate, President Barack Obama, was awarded no medal at all. Not even in the giant slalom, despite the fact that no one this year has gone downhill faster. According to the Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll, on February 22 Our President rated a negative 19, equaling his lowest rating since coming into office. Fully 41 percent of those polled strongly disfavor the president. Only 22 percent strongly favor him, and many of them would not reveal their names.

Nonetheless, Mr. Obama proceeded with his "health care summit," bringing together congressional leaders from both parties to discuss his health care monstrosity, which is opposed by the electorate 52 percent to 44 percent, with 42 percent strongly opposed and only 22 percent strongly in favor, though, again, many of them refused to give their names, and some seemed to have completely forgotten their names -- even their dates of birth. The summit itself was stupendously tedious until Congresswoman Louise Slaughter (D-NY) piped up to asseverate that one of her uninsured constituents was so bereft of health funds that she had to use the false teeth of her deceased sister, Matilda, or perhaps Hermione, or maybe the deceased was so poor she could not even afford a first name. At any rate the plight of the Hon. Slaughter's penurious constituent could have been worse. Her sister might still be alive, and then the two would have to share the false teeth, even in public restaurants.

By month's end it became apparent that the Angry Left has not been appeased by the election of the Prophet Obama or even by his attempt to recast American health care along the lines of the Cuban model, where everyone is healthy and has marvelous dental care...or else! During a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, Dr. Amy Bishop, a 44-year-old professor of neurobiology described by a member of her family as being a "far-left extremist who was ‘obsessed' with President Obama to the point of being off-putting," pulled a gun out at a faculty meeting and shot six colleagues, three of them to death. "She was an oddball -- not very sociable," reported a co-worker, Miss Sylvia Fluckiger (pronounced fluck-a-ger and occasionally used as a verb), to the Boston Herald. Yet how would that distinguish her from other members of the professoriate? Later in the month, Mr. Andrew Joseph Stack III flew his Piper Cub into the Austin, Texas, offices of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), killing himself and an IRS employee, after posting anti-IRS profanations on a website. The posting gave hope to liberal media that Mr. Stack was a Tea Partier, but it also included howls against the Catholic Church, organized religion, "the rich," and even George W. Bush.

So Mr. Stack was another member of the Angry Left and probably a global warmist not unlike the Hon. Osama bin Laden, who himself released a tape denouncing the industrialized West for global warming. À la former vice president al-Gore, Mr. bin Laden calls for "drastic solutions" to climate change, "not solutions that partially reduce the effect of climate change." Doubtless this new convert to Mr. Gore's religion will be voting Democratic in the years ahead. Mr. bin Laden did suffer a setback early in February when he tried to palm off one of his daughters to an as yet unnamed Arab diplomat. Appearing at an Islamic sharia court in the United Arab Emirates, the diplomat successfully claimed that he had been tricked into marrying a burqa-clad woman and only discovered that she was cross-eyed and mustachioed after she removed her veil. Better luck next time, Osama!

Finally, as we go to press, it is reported that another member of the Angry Left has attempted violence. He is Mr. John Patrick Bedell, 36, who after pulling a gun on Pentagon guards was shot dead. Mr. Bedell was a pot-smoking intellectualoid who left word on the Internet that after the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy a "coup regime" governed Washington "up to the present day" and was complicit in 9/11 -- a judgment apparently shared by Mr. Van Jones, the former Obama environmental czar who signed a petition to this effect. Recalling Mr. Bedell, a high school classmate told the Washington Post, "I remember him being a sweet-natured, funny peacenik." Nevertheless, in its analysis of Bedell's assault the Post, a few paragraphs later, writes of "Bedell's rampage as a distorted manifestation of the anti-Washington view that has driven the rise of right-wing militias." Then the Post gibbers on about "militias and hate groups" that "are interlinked to a much greater degree by the Web and mainstream radio and TV talk shows that echo many of the same viewpoints." So, if Mr. Rush Limbaugh is spotted in the environs of the Pentagon, duck.

Waterboarding came several steps closer to being accepted as an Olympic event when Mr. John Yoo and Mr. Jay Bybee, the former Justice Department lawyers who justified the sport in their report to the Bush administration on the legality of enhanced interrogation, were cleared of professional misconduct. Acceptance of the sport by the International Olympic Committee is seen as brightening the otherwise bleak prospects of Islamic terrorists in quest of an Olympic medal, a goal that has eluded them despite at least one attack on the Olympic village (1972) and several foiled plans to murder and torture Olympic participants and possibly even spectators. At the present time the world's leading waterboarders are all Islamic terrorists, and the world record holder, Mr. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), whose world record of two minutes and 30 seconds surpassed the former record by a full two minutes, would almost certainly walk away with an Olympic gold medal, if he could actually walk away. For now Mr. Mohammed is imprisoned in posh facilities at Guantanamo Bay, but his temporary release by the Obama administration for an international waterboarding event is not implausible as long as he promised not to hurt anybody.

Washington nominated its first ambassador to Syria in five years. The unfortunate candidate is Mr. Robert S. Ford, a career diplomat, fluent in Arabic, so he will fully understand when he is told he is to put up his hands or unlock the embassy liquor cabinet. MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show may be getting competition from the Latvian illusionist Mr. Gennady Palychevsky. Mr. Palychevsky's 64 hours and 32 minutes spent completely alone in a six-foot-square cube of ice was filmed from beginning to end this month on location in Moscow, and now comes news that a TV documentary of the exciting event is scheduled to be broadcast later this year. Miss Maddow has released no comment, but her show only lasts for one hour a night, and it is often interrupted with advertisements, usually for pharmaceutical products for the elderly.

All in all February was a lively month for American politics, beginning with the pulchritudinous Mrs. Sarah Palin's eloquent appearance at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tennessee. There she bid fair for inclusion in the next edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations with a zinger at Our President: "How's that hopey, changey stuff working for ya?" However, it was not all bad news for the liberals, who early in the month saw yet another promising reform movement bolstering the liberal base. It is the anti-circumcision movement, and in Boston, Massachusetts, Miss Georganne Chapin, executive director of the anti-circumcision movement's vanguard group, Intact America, is lining up progressive legislators to outlaw the abomination. She calls it "male mutilation," and who doubts she will be a prominent speaker at the next Democratic National Convention, along with the head of the anti-fur movement. That movement went wild with excitement upon hearing late in the month that Costa Ricans have elected as their president Señora Laura Chinchilla.