As 2010 comes to an end, a few observations:

1) TIME MAGAZINE proved its irrelevance and reinforced why it is in terminal decline by naming Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of FACEBOOK—featured in THE SOCIAL NETWORK hit movie this past summer—as its 2010 PERSON OF THE YEAR. Are they kidding? In a year of Tea Party political revolution and Wikileaks treachery and heroic Chilean miners, this man is the most important man of 2010?

2) American politics has now disintegrated into near-anarchy. If a Republican Member of Congress even talks about working with President Obama, he/she is demonized. The word “compromise” is banned from our vocabulary—to be replaced by finding “common ground.” How exactly are we going to get anything done like tax cuts and soon–hopefully—spending cuts if we will not work with the (elected) White House? Isn’t politics the art of getting as much of what you can get now and then, in the next election, trying to win more power to do even more?

I hear some talk radio hosts and Sarah Palin and others decrying this tax cut deal. Interesting. These are the same people who were totally in the tank for G.W. Bush and a Republican Congress who were more liberal and fiscally irresponsible than anyone we have seen on the political scene in years! But now they’re fiscal conservatives?

I love almost all conservative talk radio hosts, but they got all flummoxed up with Bush. And because of Bush we have Obama. If Bush had ruled properly, there is no way someone so outside the American political mainstream as Barack Obama would ever have won the White House. But G.W. Bush blew it so badly that the country reacted by going to the other extreme. Thus, we have Obama.

3) No, the tax deal isn’t perfect. But the GOP—not the Tea Party movement—has been fixated on tax cuts over everything and anything else. Wasn’t the lesson of 2010 that we need to cut the National Debt and reduce the size of government? Isn’t our precarious fiscal situation in part responsible for the mess our national economy is in? Yet the GOP pushes these tax cuts over debt reduction—and in that conflict will come the imminent Civil War inside the GOP and the conservative movement.

4) I proudly voted in Congress in 1981 for the Reagan Tax Cuts—with one HUGE reservation: where were some spending cuts? We never had them!!! Yes, we were in a Democratic House, but couldn’t the GOP have tried harder to cut government? So, while the tax cuts did indeed reinvigorate the national economy, the Federal Government exploded in size. And we are today paying for that constant spending–which happened again under G. W. Bush and a GOP Congress: tax cuts, two wars with no one paying for them and then this idiotic Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit–an entitlement put in by Republicans!!!

5) No wonder the Tea Party has come along. And no wonder the Republican Party cannot find its way.

6) The Tea Party movement, not Mark Zuckerberg, should have been the PERSON OF THE YEAR. The Tea Party is the only entity keeping a fiscal eye on the ball in DC.

On Wednesday TIME MAGAZINE will name its Person of the Year. As a friend of mine put it, “that is the only issue of TIME worth reading anymore.”

So, who should be the Person of the Year—and who will be the Person of the Year?

Any objective observer of the entire year would pick the Tea Party as the Person/Thing/Movement of the Year. The Tea Party movement has revolutionized American politics and thus re-focused DC on debt, deficits and the faltering American economy. The Tea Party has begun a revolution inside the Republican Party. And they have only just begun; they will be even more potent in 2012.

However, the TIME MAGAZINE inside-the-Beltway-and Northeast-DC-to-Boston corridor sees Julian Assange and the Wikileaks treasure trove of USG documents as the biggest story of the year. They would probably name him as Person of the Year except he is facing sexual assault charges in Sweden so they will instead make it Wikileaks as the event/revelation of the year. (TIME ran into big trouble years ago when they named Ayatollah Khomeini and lost a substantial part of their subscriber base. So they are probably gun-shy about naming someone who may soon be a criminal.)

Another alternative is the story of the heroic and inspirational Chilean miners. Their story captured the world’s imagination and it ended well. This is the safest choice for TIME’s editors. But it is also bland and soft and corny—and won’t sell as many magazines as a controversial story.

TIME could also do something like the iPad for revolutionizing technology or the New Orleans Saints for resuscitating the morale of the Gulf Region.

Or TIME could do the BP Oil Spill to re-visit the dangers of off-shore drilling.

But in the end the liberal TIME editors will most likely want to do Wikileaks. The TIME editors secretly love Assange and what he has done to the US Government. The American media loves leaks. And this is the biggest leak story—ever!

Assange himself is a tricky person to cover. Is he a hero—or a villain? A rapist or the victim of a government set-up? Will he be indicted by the US Government for the publication of Secret documents? No one is saying. The word is there is no law governing the publication of this material.

Look for Wikileaks to be the Person/Thing/Leak of the Year—on Wednesday.

And, as a result, look for hundreds of other hacksters to try to emulate Assange; they see hacking into government computers as a heroic public service.

Other governments and corporations and intelligence agencies and foreign ministries better be on the lookout as their computers are no longer safe.

The absurd decision to award an un-deserving President Obama the Nobel Prize for Peace made a mockery of a once-prestigious award. We can live with that. And we can tolerate the disappointment of those who actually deserved the award: brave dissidents in Vietnam and China who risk their lives standing up to oppressive dictatorships.

We can not however see an already off-track, floundering and indecisive President Obama emboldened by yet another injection of egomania because of this award.

The key here is how Mr. Obama will now see himself. If he shares the view that this was really an award to Mr. Anti-Bush, then he will keep things in perspective. He will then see that this was given to the successor to Bush—no matter who it was provided he/she was a total break from Bush. A normal person would just chuckle—and admit to himself and those close to him, “It’s nice. But I didn’t do anything to deserve this. I might not even accept it—because I didn’t earn it.”

But—and this is where we have to worry—he takes this prize and adds it to other recent gifts like TIME MAGAZINE’s Man of the Year award and two Pulitzers for the audio versions of his books and falls even more in love with himself then we will all pay for it.

If Obama reads this award as further proof that he is different or better or—his favorite term—transformative as opposed to other leaders then that will reinforce what we have already learned about him: on foreign and defense policy he is blindly naïve (pulling missiles out of Eastern Europe without getting anything in return from Putin), vacillating (his inability to get a plan in place for Afghanistan), and a poor manager (announcing the closing of Gitmo without having a plan in place to replace it with another facility).

After nine months of his Presidency, Obama has not been transformative at all. He has not changed policy on either Iraq or Afghanistan. But he has managed to infuriate the senior ranks of the Pentagon because of his dismissive, casual handling of Afghanistan. He has too many chefs in the kitchen; he has several foreign policy czars plus Biden and Hillary all talking to him. He is on track to emulate another U.S. President who won the Nobel—Jimmy Carter—he of the hostage crisis and a naive weakness that was exploited by America‘s enemies in the Soviet Union, Iran and Cuba.

Meanwhile, behind the din of the Nobel—and last week’s loss of the Chicago Olympics—both houses of Congress are moving toward bringing health care bills to the floor. The ‘public option’ will again be debated. This is going to be a cause of major political trouble for the Democrats.

The continuing deterioration of the jobs situation is the one and only political issue in this country. Despite that Obama continues to push the health care issue—and his ratings correspondingly fall.

There is a growing unease among all Democrats—liberal and moderate—that Obama may not be quite the Great Leader they hoped for. They are whispering that Obama is “all talk and no action.”

This Nobel Prize story threatens to embolden Obama that his way is indeed the divine way and thus the only way.

If that happens, then—ironically—he becomes another version of G.W. Bush all over again.