Charles Krauthammer, who has been on something of a losing streak of late (he started this “Comeback Kid” nonsense about Obama with a column two weeks ago following the Bush tax rates deal and lately has inveighed against the defunding of Obamacare), appears to be back in the saddle. Today’s Krauthammer column notes what is no secret in Washington, namely that the Obama administration is now abandoning any pretense of democratic government and now plans to rule by administrative fiat.

The American people will smell this soon enough. But with respect to Krauthammer’s chief illustrative example, namely the return of the federal “death panels” wiped out of Obamacare but silently returned under new Medicare rules, it seems the Left is doing its best to cover up the stench until the patient is long dead.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D.,Ore.), author of Section 1233, was delighted. “Mr. Blumenauer’s office celebrated ‘a quiet victory,’ but urged supporters not to crow about it,” reports the New York Times. Deathly quiet. In early November, his office sent an e-mail plea to supporters: “We would ask that you not broadcast this accomplishment out to any of your lists . . . e-mails can too easily be forwarded.” They had been lucky that “thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it. . . . The longer this regulation goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it.”

So much for Democratic transparency — and for their repeated claim that the more people learn what is in the health-care law, the more they will like it. Turns out ignorance is the Democrats’ best hope.

Krauthammer’s entire piece is well worth a read, particularly as he mentions other White House power seizures and weaves them into what is an accurate narrative – namely, that the Obama administration will publicly tout itself as centrist and bipartisan while behind the scenes unleashing regulatory pogroms on the American people such as the nation has never seen.

The only way to effectively fight these assaults on freedom is through the power of the purse and the hearing. The House Republican majority must haul Obama’s regulators in front of cameras one after another, submitting them to humiliating examination and making them into household figures of derision. And after creating political theater out of the administration’s regulatory excesses and petty tyrannies, the GOP leadership must respond to the resulting outcry by de-funding the offending agencies, perhaps block-granting their funding to the states and in so doing sub-contracting those functions to governments closer to the ground the majority of which will now be led by Republicans.

Either way, though, it’s clear both by Obama’s new government-by-fiat gambit and Blumenauer’s whispered glee that today’s Democrats would rather you not know what they’re doing. That’s a not-so-subtle nod on their part to the reality that Americans don’t like lefties.