I wasn’t going to write about Oliver Stone’s recent Mel Gibson (“Yes, I can be an anti-Semite too!”) imitation, even though I — once upon a time in a universe far far away — knew Oliver pretty well. Frankly, I was too disgusted and didn’t want to add my tiny bit to the filmmaker’s pathological, never-ending search for publicity — or is it notoriety? And when it comes to exonerating Hitler, I prefer Mel Brooks.
But Oliver has now apologized, sort of, and the brouhaha seems to be dying down — at least until his Showtime series informing us brainwashed unwashed of what Stone considers the real secret truth of America, or should I say Amerikkka, makes it to the air (if it does).
I can’t wait. It’s sort of like history as told by Captain Queeg. (Okay, I take it back. I don’t think I will watch — especially if it interferes with more important programming like the Real Housewives of New Jersey.)
But speaking of “real,” the real story here is and was Showtime, not Stone, whose multiple derangement syndromes are well-known, and not just from my book. Just why would this company, a CBS subsidiary, be so desperate as to want to finance the filmmaker’s puerile paranoid fantasies?
Well, the bottom line is the bottom line, but imagine the company’s consternation when they realized they had something akin to a Holocaust denier on their hands. Being “Edgy” has always been considered good business in Hollywood, but this was One Edge Too Far. I would bet my house, most of it anyway, that Stone heard from the folks at Showtime (either directly or, more likely, via his agent) post haste after his Protocols of Zionish statements about Jews controlling the world appeared in the London Times, hitting the global Internet almost immediately; hence the speedy retraction.
Will this be the last we see of Oliver the way it may be for Gibson? No such luck, I’m afraid. Like a pretentious, pseudo-leftist Energizer Bunny, he will just keep on coming. An ego that size cannot be denied. It can latch on to anything. Last year Scientology, this year Hugo Chavez. Who knows what or who will be next?
Attention Bruce Springsteen and other similar Tribunes of the People – the people (small “p”) are irritated with you. According to Rasmussen, 70% of them think the cost of tickets is too high. (Whatever happened to the other 30%?)
This is not such a big deal for me, since most of my concert going went out with The Who and I’d rather listen to my favorite music, from Tammy Wynette to Pavarotti, in the car. It’s interesting to see, as an aside, how your taste in music morphs over the years. I used to adore Coltrane, but now will only listen on certain occasions. Jerry Lee Lewis, however, remains high on my hit list. Late at night, driving, I turn to the classics. Beethoven’s 7th gets a lot of plays. It’s all rather mysterious.
But back to the high cost of concerts. We live in a time when most of us don’t want to spend money. I know I don’t. It’s a form of low-grade depression cum lack of optimism. The future does not look promising – better hunker down. As we know, our leaders aren’t particularly inspiring a change of attitude. They don’t seem to know how to do it. And in some ways they don’t want to do it, preferring a drone-like society with everyone dependent on them. But they don’t even make good dictators. They don’t appear to be enjoying the process.
What is the way out of this? No one can be sure, but it may come from the states. Earlier in my life, I wasn’t such an advocate of states’ rights. Why they even had Jim Crow laws in some Southern states. How backwards was that! But things have changed. Local action may be our best hope.
I have noticed of late that the moment someone starts talking about race, whether in person or, even more so, on television, my mind wanders and I start to feel very sleepy. It’s almost hypnotic, as if someone had just slipped a triple dose of those time-release Ambien capsules into a cup of Sleepy Time tea and poured it down my unsuspecting throat. Soon my eyes are beginning to close… No more race…. No more race…. You are very sleepy…
And then my eyes are shut.
If I hear one more reference to Shirley Sherrod’s video, I think I will turn into Rip Van Winkle. Wake me up when it’s over. Even if it takes twenty years.
Am I the only one who is feeling this way? I don’t think so. In fact I rather suspect I am in a majority. If there’s one thing most of us don’t want to hear about now, whatever color we are, it’s race.
Eric Holder had it all wrong (as he does about a fair number of things these days) when he said we don’t have the courage to talk about race. It’s the reverse. We don’t have the courage to NOT talk about it.
Like monks at a Zen monastery told by their abbot to STFU until further notice, we need nothing more than a solid dose of enforced silence about race. The minute we mention the “R” word we should be clapped on the back by the abott’s hardwood stick and made to sit endless hours in the lotus position — without a cushion.
There is another way to look at it: Years ago I heard about a treatment used by French psychiatrists to circumvent decades of painstaking and overpriced psychoanalysis. They would put highly troubled neurotics in the hospital and, instead of giving them the “talking cure” or some other treatment, they would just make them go to sleep for two weeks. (I’m not sure that was the precise length, but you get the idea.) When they awoke they would be all better (or close).
That’s the way I feel about race.
I know this sounds a tad sarcastic but actually I think it’s true. The best way to deal with America’s race problem at this precise moment in history is to shut up about it. Everybody. Including me.
One thing hasn’t changed since my lefty days pre-9/11. I still admire the immortal words of Groucho Marx: “I’d never join a club that would have me as a member!”
And I never felt them so acutely as when reading Jonathan Strong’s excerpts in the Daily Caller this morning, regarding the Journolist crew’s reaction to the Jeremiah Wright affair. These quotes from a private list of soi-disant liberal journalists read like outtakes from some notebook stolen from a proto-Trotskyite home for the aged — and not one of them is faintly clever. What a bunch of fuddy-duddys. Yes, I know Strong was being selective for his own purposes, but still … these guys are writers? Hunter Thompson not. For that matter, Roger Kimball not.
But forget the paucity of imagination and style, what about the group think? These are the independent minds that seek to mold our culture and political lives? Nowhere to be found is an original thought – unless you count accusing Karl Rove of racism as a brainstorm.
Well, we have had the generation gap and tons of other gaps. Now Journolist reveals we have an “elitism gap.” Gone are the days of the Algonquin Round Table to be replaced by a cabal of humdrum mediocrities on a listservr plotting how to justify the racist ravings of a reactionary theocrat.
Nowhere in evidence, at least in Strong’s article, is the single question any rational mind would ask re: Obama-Wright at the height of a political campaign. Just why did Barack Obama remain in the pew of this reverend for twenty years? But enough of rationality. Journolist clearly isn’t about truth. It’s about winning. What it gives us, inadvertently or not, is the profession of journalism unmasked. And what we see is, alas, what we already knew. And it ain’t pretty.
Journalism, no matter what the J-schools say, is not cardiology. It’s not even plumbing. It’s just another biased human activity practiced by those who can get — and keep — the job. The Daily Caller has performed a service in publishing the dull maunderings of the Journolist crowd. It takes them all down yet another peg. How many are left to go?
Of course, this doesn’t apply just to self-described liberals or leftists. Simply because their ideology is in desperate retreat doesn’t make them unique in this regard. No matter what our views, we are all merely citizens of a virtual Grub Street. Almost anyone can do what we do. In his jaunty cynicism, James Boswell had more to say about the life of a journalist than all the professors at Columbia added up and squared. The “elite” members of Journolist, who take themselves sooo seriously, would be well advised to read — our reread — his London Journal.
I have nothing personal — I don’t know the man and wish him well — against the Washington Post’s ombudsman Andrew Alexander, when I say he shouldn’t have his job. I don’t think the Post — or any newspaper or news website, for that matter — should have an ombudsman.
Ombudsmen perform a dubious task, prolonging the pretense that such media outlets are unbiased. They are not, they cannot be and, in the final analysis, they shouldn’t be. They are written by humans, a uniformly biased group, whether they admit it to themselves or not, for whom objectivity is almost impossible. Live with it.
What the ombudsmen does is essentially a form of co-optation, defusing the wrath of readers so the media outlet can go back to business as usual — or something very close to it — pretending that it will now be objective. Bosh!
Alexander’s own post about the WaPo’s lack of coverage of the New Black Panther case is a perfect illustration. The ombudsman struggles to be critical of the Post, but not too critical. (They are his employer after all … sort of like CBS setting up its own investigation of Rathergate. Remember that?)
Meanwhile, the Post’s own defense of its behavior in Alexander’s piece is laughable: National Editor Kevin Merida, who termed the controversy “significant,” said he wished The Post had written about it sooner. The delay was a result of limited staffing and a heavy volume of other news on the Justice Department beat, he said.
Huh? What news could be more “significant” than that the US Department of Justice is biased — or should I say just plain racially prejudiced — in its treatment of voting rights? Equal voting rights for all was one of the original bases of the civil rights movement in the sixties. I remember well — I was there, in South Carolina, registering voters. Any subversion of this now, from whatever perspective, is execrable and big news indeed.
Like spurned lovers eager to get back on the American people before the public votes them out of office, the U. S. Congress has enacted financial regulatory legislation that – remarkably like their healthcare legislation before it – exists only in broadest outlines for manipulation by generations of unregulated bureaucrats to come.
The far-reaching new banking and consumer protection bill awaiting President Barack Obama’s signature now shifts from the politicians to the technocrats.
The legislation gives regulators latitude and time to come up with new rules, requires scores of studies and, in some instances, depends on international agreements falling into place.
For Wall Street, the next phase represents continuing uncertainty. It also offers banks and other financial institutions yet another opportunity to influence and shape the rules that govern their businesses.
In hailing the bill’s passage in the Senate on Thursday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner acknowledged that implementing the new law will take time.
“But we are determined to move as quickly as we can to provide clarity and certainty,” he said.
Oh, really? It sounds more like a cruel joke on all of us.
Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, criticized the bill as not “real reform,” saying it doesn’t address the problems of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose questionable lending helped start a collapse in the housing market.
Speaking on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” he also complained the bill creates a massive bureaucracy but doesn’t create jobs.
A letter from Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) to Glenn Fine — inspector general of the U. S. Department of Justice — asking the IG to launch an investigation into the dismissal of U.S. v. New Black Panther Party — has been made available exclusively to Pajamas Media before its formal release by the congressman.
Wolf is the ranking member of the Commerce-Justice-Science Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee — the committee that controls appropriations for the Department of Justice. Though a Republican, Wolf is known as a moderate and a firm supporter of the Voting Rights Act.
This is the latest of several letters on the Panther case sent by Wolf to the inspector general and to Attorney General Eric Holder. They have been almost completely ignored. He has written this most recent letter in the aftermath of testimony by former Department of Justice attorney J. Christian Adams before the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights.
July 14, 2010
Mr. Glenn Fine
Inspector General U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington DC 20530
Dear Mr. Fine:
In light of the recent testimony of Mr. J. Christian Adams before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR), I urge you again to investigate the dismissal of U.S. v. New Black Panther Party. Over the last year, I have asked you on multiple occasions to investigate this matter to no avail. Considering the mounting evidence of improper activities in the department’s Civil Rights Division (CRD), I urge you again to immediately initiate an investigation into this matter.
I was disappointed in your previous responses to my letters. The primary responsibility of the inspector general is to ensure “integrity, economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in Department of Justice operations,” according to your office’s statute. The new information provided by Mr. Adams to the commission last week clearly underscores the need for an investigation into whether the department’s “integrity, economy, efficiency, and effectiveness” have been compromised. I recall that you, rightly, had no qualms about investigating allegations of impropriety during the previous administration and I would hope that same ethic would remain during this administration.
There is something rotten happening at the department. Your continued refusal to investigate has been — and remains — inexcusable. As inspector general, you have a legal and moral obligation to go wherever truth takes you. Although it is understandable that you would be hesitant to upset the department’s senior political leadership, some of whom could be directly tied to the dismissal of this case, you nonetheless have a responsibility to investigate the mounting allegations of political impropriety.
As you are aware from our previous correspondence, which I have enclosed for your review, this case was inexplicably dismissed last year — over the ardent objections of the career attorneys overseeing the case as well as the division’s own appeal office. Despite repeated requests for information by members of Congress, the press, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the department continues to stonewall efforts to obtain all information regarding the case’s abrupt dismissal. Recent events and information has compounded this troubling situation.
Mr. Adams was a career attorney with CRD before resigning last month in response to the department’s illegitimate instruction that he not comply with a USCCR subpoena. I am deeply concerned that the department, which is statutorily obliged to execute USCCR subpoenas, is in fact obstructing individuals from complying in this matter. I believe that this obstruction — aside from the many troubling actions surrounding the dismissal of the case — merit an investigation into the department’s enforcement of the commission’s statutory authority.
Additionally, I am concerned about revelations from Mr. Adams’ testimony that Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes, a political appointee, reportedly forbid CRD attorneys from bringing forward additional voting intimidation cases in which the defendant was a national minority. I believe that this allegation merits immediate investigation. There is no excuse for the selective application of federal law based on the whims of political appointees.
You should also be aware that I have asked the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) to review your failure to investigate this matter. It is my understanding that the CIGIE’s Integrity Committee will be discussing your actions at its July meeting.
I urge you again to investigate the myriad of troubling issues surrounding the dismissal of this case. With the commission obstructed from fully conducting its investigation, the inspector general must be willing to ensure the integrity of the department. I appeal to you to fulfill the duties of your office.
Sincerely,
Frank R. Wolf Member of Congress
P.S. The American people are counting on you to ensure the integrity of the department. With the commission impeded from conducting its investigation and the Congress unwilling to act, you alone have the authority to be an independent watchdog for the American people. Please don’t let us down.
Obama seems to be failing more completely than any president in my lifetime. Everywhere you turn he is floundering, overreaching, or outright flunking. His only success — health care legislation — was achieved over the will of the people, rarely a good idea. He is manufacturing conservatives and libertarians at an unprecedented clip. The only mystery left for the coming November election is how bad a donnybrook this will be for the Democrats.
Why has this happened?
There are several obvious answers. Obama, too inexperienced for his office, never expected to accede to it so quickly in the first place. The public (correctly) has no stomach for multiculturalist foreign policy. Liberal economics has reached the end of its Ponzi scheme road and we’re in a recession/depression with no end in sight. And, of course, there is that little eco-catastrophe in the Gulf
But there is another reason, perhaps more important than all of them. Obama has been unable to use the Bully Pulpit. No one pays attention to him. The vaunted Demosthenes of the campaign trail disappeared literally upon inauguration. He hasn’t been able to convince anyone of anything. He only succeeds when he acts purely as a bully, muscling through legislation.
Some say this is because he wasn’t such a great orator in the first place. He just read decently off a teleprompter and with the prompter gone the emperor has not clothes.
But I think it is something more complex and deeper. There have been plenty of presidents with limited abilities off the cuff. I think it is because Obama was elected on a lie, a big one that was enabled by the mainstream media, and that by the time he was in office he had spent his credit. Belief was gone. Everyone knew he was a liar, including many liberals, even if they wouldn’t admit it to themselves and even if they had colluded with him in the lie.
I am speaking, alas again, of the Reverend Wright affair. I thought it was serious at the time. In retrospect, I think it was disastrous, probably fatal.
Barack Obama told us on several occasions then that he had not been aware of Wright’s extreme black nationalist views during the candidate’s twenty years in the reverend’s church. That made no sense, since Obama had dedicated his book to Wright, had his children baptized by him, etc. Also, Wright’s separatist brand of black liberation theology was no doubt quite familiar to Obama. It had been to many of us for decades.
I am not the first to observe that it’s impossible to take a vacation in these wired times. And maybe I really don’t want to, running around my beloved Bainbridge Island with an iPad tucked under my arm, checking in every five minutes via a surprisingly good ATT connection, at least hereabouts, when I could be off doing something constructive, like paddle boating.
What’s happening with Bibi and Obama, LeBron and D-Wade, Christian Adams and Pajamas Media? Speaking of the latter, my vacation got interrupted Thursday morning – or I interrupted it, whichever way you want to view it – by the discovery that my good friends at Media Matters were accusing me of racism or “race-baiting” or something.
Well, not me personally, but Pajamas Media, the company of which I am CEO, and other “conservative” media outlets, so I guess that makes me an enabler of racism, if not fully a racist myself, or a racist once removed, like a cousin. Or, more precisely, in their words, a “race-baiter” once removed.
Given my past in the civil rights movement, even a couple of years ago, this would have set my teeth on edge, but this time I just laughed. What clowns. Don’t they have something better to do – or has Christian Adams gotten so deeply under their skins that they have to reach for the R-word? Can’t they be a little more imaginative? Never mind that the man has prosecuted dozens of civil rights cases in favor of African-Americans, Adams must be a racist (excuse me, a “race-baiter”) for drawing the line at (New) Black Panthers brandishing batons at polling booths. And I’m in there with him for publishing him. Me bad.
So it goes in these times of bear-baiting or race-baiting or something.
But wait a minute. Maybe they’re right. Maybe I am a racist. I was really ticked off when I heard LeBron signed with Miami and would be teaming with D-Wade and Bosh against Kobe and Pau. That’s three black guys against a black guy and a white guy. See what I mean? Not fair.
Well, maybe you don’t. I don’t either. It all seems silly to me. But ask Media Matters. They’ll explain it
“A Very Merry Unbirthday.” We all remember the lyrics from Alice in Wonderland: “A very merry unbirthday/To me/To who?/To me/ Oh, you.” Etcetera. They were written by Robert B. Sherman of the Sherman Brothers who wrote so many of the great Disney hits, including that most super positive of all super uppers, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
But one thing that it isn’t very “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” this Fourth of July is our country. It’s her birthday — but not a happy one. Maybe we should, in Robert B. Sherman’s other words, call it an “unbirthday.”
But whatever we call our situation, the causes of our malaise are all too apparent — a depressed economy, out-of-control government spending with the largest deficits since World War II, an intractable ecological disaster with no plan how to end it, a continuing global war against an enemy we dare not even name, a mad theocracy on the verge of nuclear weapons, and so on.
Worst of all, however, may be the growing cancer inside our own house. Difficult as our problems may be, they can be resolved democratically in a society under the rule of law. But we have reason to believe that these days, that most basic of all our legal principles, that keystone of our system, one which was fought for by generations of Americans, equality before the law, is under attack at the center of our government.
That is why the most important story that Pajamas Media has covered since its inception in 2005 may be the emergence of whistleblower J. Christian Adams from the Department of Justice. Adams was an attorney in the voting rights division who resigned when the Department forbid him to testify on the New Black Panther case before the US Commission on Civil Rights. The Department had dismissed that case before sentencing, even though they had won it. According to Adams, the DOJ has a dreadful record when pursuing examples of black on white racism. Only racism towards people of color is countenanced.
As CEO of Pajamas Media, I am proud to have published Adams and will continue to do so. I am also a former sixties civil rights worker and what we were fighting for at the time was true racial equality, not an unbalanced system in which aggrieved interest groups, whatever their historical justification, can threaten and bully people of other races. I can’t say what Dr. King would think today (unlike others, I am not psychic) but I would like to think he would oppose racism from all quarters and toward all races. In fact, I am almost certain he would.
I also know Adams’s story is important because it has been met by stone cold silence from the mainstream media. And not just from the usual suspects – the triumvirate of reified liberalism, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post — but even from the Wall Street Journal. The supposedly center-right WSJ has thus far ignored the story of the Justice Department attorney. Shame on the Journal and kudos to Fox News’ Megyn Kelly for having the courage to bring this forth.
Well, on Tuesday, Adams — no longer a government employee — will finally get to testify in front of the commission. And I have it on good authority that he will name names — the names of those in authority who let the Panthers off free after the case had been won: Loretta King and Steve Rosenbaum. I have no idea if he will officially name their boss the attorney general, but as the old saying goes, “The fish rots from the top down.” Indeed, I am told that Holder was “aware of the outlines of the case.”
