Geert Wilders – the sometimes-libertarian Dutch politician currently on trial for “hate speech” in his country – has become a kind of Rorschach test for right-of-center American pundits. He has recently been under attack by Glenn Beck, who seems to have called him a fascist, and by Charles Krauthammer, who, while more judicious, claims Wilders does not understand, or misconstrues, the difference between Islam and Islamism (and is therefore not worthy of our support).

Beck’s criticism of Wilders is pretty dismissible since the populist TV commentator does not appear particularly versed in European affairs. Indeed, in the video linked at his name, Beck erroneously identifies French politician Dominique de Villepin as “far right” and then mispronounces his name – in fingers down a blackboard fashion – as if he had confused the Chirac protégé with the truly fascist Jean Marie le Pen. Maybe he had. Only his producers, who have served him poorly here, know for sure. And maybe even they don’t, which is the problem. (Beck should also have another look at Jonah Goldberg’s book and at Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom before he makes such simplistic conclusions about fascism, the left and the right across the pond.)

I could go on about how the American Right ought to become sophisticated about international affairs (not that the American Left is!), but I will pass on to Charles Krauthammer, a man many of us – myself included – regard as the sine qua non of conservative columnists. He too seeks to distance himself from Wilders:

What he says is extreme, radical, and wrong. He basically is arguing that Islam is the same as Islamism. Islamism is an ideology of a small minority which holds that the essence of Islam is jihad, conquest, forcing people into accepting a certain very narrow interpretation [of Islam].

The untruth of that is obvious. If you look at the United States, the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the U.S. are not Islamists. So, it’s simply incorrect. Now, in Europe, there is probably a slightly larger minority but, nonetheless, the overwhelming majority are not.

Paul Mirengoff of Powerline responds:

The words “radical” and “extreme” connote the relationship between Wilders’ view and mainstream thinking (in this they differ from the word “fascist,” which connotes a specific ideology). In the politically correct West of today, I believe it is fair to characterize Wilders as radical and extreme.

But is Wilders wrong? Krauthammer says he is because the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the U.S. and Europe are not Islamists. Wilders does not deny this. As he said last week in London:

The majority of Muslims are law-abiding citizens and want to live a peaceful life as you and I do. I know that. That is why I always make a clear distinction between the people, the Muslims, and the ideology, between Islam and Muslims. There are many moderate Muslims, but there is no such thing as a moderate Islam.

Wilders is making a theological point here — his contention is that Islam, as set forth in the teachings of the Koran, “commands Muslims to exercise jihad. . .to establish shariah law [and]. . .to impose Islam on the entire world.” I’m no scholar of Islam, but I believe Wilders is correct. To show otherwise, one would have to explain away portions of the Koran. It is not enough just to call Wilders’ interpretation of that book “narrow.”

If you agree with Mirengoff – and I do -, it is important to support Wilders in his trial, if only as a supporter of fundamental free speech. The ACLU – if it existed in any honest fashion – would be behind the Dutchman in a heartbeat. Such support would seem to be obvious and an easy choice for a man like Krauthammer. So why his unease with Wilders?

As promised earlier, Lionel and I review this year’s Oscar ceremony and the victories of “The Hurt Locker” and “The Blind Side” with a “Special Guest” who may or may not reappear. At the end, we reveal our Best Picture of the year. I don’t know about Lionel, but it was an easy choice for me. It may surprise you – or not. Anyway, here’s “Hollywood Makes a Right Turn at the Oscars.”

The 2010 Academy Awards may not have marked the end of “liberal Hollywood” as we know it, but they certainly put a solid dent in it. With the pro-military “The Hurt Locker” winning over the enviro-pabulum of “Avatar” and Sandra Bullock garnering the Best Actress Oscar for a Christian movie, the times are a-changin’ at least somewhat, maybe even a lot.

But one thing is now certain. It is time for conservative, center-right and libertarian filmmakers to stop feeling sorry for themselves and go out and just do it. Their “victocrat” days are over. No more excuses. “The Hurt Locker” and “The Blind Side” have proven that it can be done. Get out of the closet, guys and gals. If you want to make a film with themes you believe in, quit whining about Industry prejudice and start writing that script and trying to get it made. That’s not an easy thing, no matter what your politics.

Right siders can take inspiration too from Sunday’s Oscar ceremonies themselves. They weren’t defamed for a moment. Missing in action was the usual libo-babble, no extended hymns to the cause du jour or ritual Bush-bashing. And Barack Obama wasn’t even mentioned. Not once. But the troops were – several times by Kathryn Bigelow.

And, yes, we can all take pleasure in her being the first woman to win Best Director, again no matter which side of the political spectrum we come from. She did a Helluva job.

And, oh yes, I thought Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin did a reasonable job of hosting too – a lot better than the likes of Letterman, etc. They kept things moving along (except for the unbelievably tedious “salute to horror” and the traditionally soporific dance numbers). And didn’t you like the look on Sean Penn’s face when Bullock won for “The Blind Side”?

More here on Poliwood with Lionel Chetwynd and me: Hollywood Makes a Right Turn at the Oscars.

The New York Times has an informative and depressing piece this morning: U.S. Enriches Companies Defying Its Policy on Iran. Not that it matters. Last week we learned that Russia and China just about torpedoed any serious sanctioning of Iran anyway. Meanwhile, France’s Sarkozy – the most militant of world leaders regarding Iran – is in electoral trouble. No wonder crazy A-jad continues with his wild bellicose statements: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday called the September 11 attacks on the United States a “big fabrication” that was used to justify the U.S. war on terrorism, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Glad it was official. But what do we do? In his column the other day, David Ignatius provided a cynical, but alas accurate, quote from retired US diplomat Douglas Paal: “Sanctions always accomplish their principal objective, which is to make those who impose them feel good.” Okay, then?What next? Nobody wants war and nobody wants a nuclear Iran. Maybe the Administration should start priming the space program again. We’re outta here.

When I first moved into my house in the Hollywood Hills (1989), the Academy Awards were far away at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion or the Shrine Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. No longer. As the world knows (or the world that cares anyway – more of that in a moment), in 2002 the Oscar ceremony moved to the Kodak Theater in that post-modern nightmare known as the Hollywood & Highland mall — home to myriad mediocre restaurants, retro Heavy Metal t-shirt shops and the odd Versace store. It’s not more than a half mile from my house as the stoned crow flies.

And there went the neighborhood.

This means that every year at this time, major arteries are shut off (making the already mind-bending traffic even more hellacious), the area becomes riddled with satellite trucks and temporary grandstands, and the usually quiet hills are filled with Oscar parties. Replete with bad, loud and often off-key rock and roll, echoing through the canyons — Bono doesn’t play for these things — these parties are anything but glamorous. Often an expensive-looking home is rented out to whoever (porn producers, racketeers, real estate developers) for a day or two of non-stop festivities, resulting in narrow winding streets littered with beer bottles, pizza boxes and, no surprise, condom wrappers. (Note that many of these homes these days are normally empty, luxurious remodels that never sold in the dead housing market, despite plummeting prices.)

At one point it seemed I gave up my neighborhood in support of something America cared about. Anecdotal information suggests this is not so anymore. As I write this, a snap CNN poll (yes, it’s Internet) registers that 62% will be following the Academy Awards “not at all” and 30% “somewhat” with only 8% at “very.” Actually I was surprised the “very” was that much. In the Tea Party era it would seem Hollywood and America were at a period of maximum estrangement.

Still, human beings that we are, we desire, maybe even need, entertainment. It’s worth remembering that some of Hollywood’s finest hours were during the Depression. (Of course, that was under an entirely different system than we have today.) So that pair of Oscar rejects — Lionel Chetwynd and I (we were both once nominees, but not winners) — will be covering Oscar night for an Academy Awards postmortem Poliwood, which should be up late Monday on PJTV. We’ll be reviewing the evening, including the novelty of having two hosts — Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin — and the even greater novelty of having ten best picture nominees.

On the face of it, I oppose the latter. It’s kind of like movie business “grade inflation.” And like most “grade inflation,” it waters down the results. But as Sly Stone once put it, “Everybody is a Star.” So why not?

And, of course, we’ll be watching for the amusing, infuriating or eye-rolling (your choice) use of the platform by Oscar winners or presenters to espouse the pseudo-liberal cause du jour. Be grateful for one thing: this year, at least, Al Gore is not nominated.

ADDENDUM: Lionel and I will be viewing the event, just as you are (if you are), from in front of our television sets. As Academy members, we are entitled to seats, but at a few hundred a pop, doubled for a significant other. And those seats would be in the distant balcony, since we are not nominees or related to one. QED: we’ll watch from home.

Call it the “Gunfight at the Not-OK Corral” but things don’t look so happy down at Camp Washington Post these days. That antediluvian dean of political reporters David S. Broder is taking pot shots at his “friend” (when someone calls you “friend,” watch out) WaPo young (well, young-ish) buck Dana Milbank for articles Milbank wrote. Broder also hits Jason Horowitz – evidently not a friend – even harder for a “purported news story” by Horowitz in the paper.

These stories – purported or otherwise – concerned Rahm Emanuel and whether the President’s key adviser was long for his job, currently an expanding brouhaha in the media. To be clear, I have no view on this subject – whether Emanuel is or was good, bad or indifferent – since I am far from the “leakers’ circuit” providing the necessary information or disinformation to form an opinion; nor do I much care, since the entire Obama Administration, as far as I’m concerned, could drop off the planet at this point. But it is all fun to watch, in a gallow’s humor sort of way.

The ironic subtext of all this is that all three WaPo writers were so deep in the tank for Obama during the election they could see China – or Saudi Arabia, as the case may be. But that, of course, was in another country and the dead wench in this instance is an administration approaching rigor mortis. And withal, fingers must be pointed and blame assessed both within the administration and the Washington Post. This blame game within the Post, however, will be more of a dumb show with only egos at stake. Inside the Administration, I predict, it will be more serious blood sport. When things go this bad for so long, people got fired, nasty memoirs written, and so forth. Whether Emanuel or Geithner or someone else will be the first to go, who can tell? But once one goes, many may. And then everything may start to unravel. Get out your popcorn – but don’t eat too much of it. You may not have sufficient health care to deal with the attendant stomach disorders.

It’s only an hour or so after learning that Nancy Pelosi finally defenestrated Charlie Rangel (D-NY) from his position at the helm of the House Ways and Means Committee and I am already missing Charlie – and it’s not just because Charlie and I had such a good time together in Copenhagen.

Pelosi is replacing him with Pete Stark. Yes, you heard me correctly. The Pete Stark. Rep. Fortney “Pete” Stark of California Pete Stark:

Other controversies include singling out “Jew colleagues” for blame for the Persian Gulf War and referring to Congressman Stephen Solarz of New York (who co-sponsored the Gulf War Authorization Act) as “Field Marshal Solarz in the pro-Israel forces.” in 1991.[16] In 1995, during a private meeting with Congresswoman Nancy Johnson of Connecticut, he called Johnson a “whore for the insurance industry” and suggested that her knowledge of health care came solely from “pillow talk” with her husband, a physician. His press secretary, Caleb Marshall, defended him in saying, “He didn’t call her a ‘whore,’ he called her a ‘whore of the insurance industry.’”[16] In 1999, he said to former California State Welfare Director Eloise Anderson, herself a former welfare mother, that she would “kill children if she had her way” for her advocacy of welfare reform.[7] In a 2001 Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health hearing on abstinence promotion, he referred to Congressman J. C. Watts of Oklahoma, an African American, as “the current Republican Conference Chairman, whose children were all born out of wedlock.”[16] In 2003, when Stark was told to “shut up” by Congressman Scott McInnis of Colorado during a Ways and Means Committee meeting due to Stark’s belittling of the chairman, Bill Thomas of California, he replied, “You think you are big enough to make me, you little wimp? Come on. Come over here and make me, I dare you. You little fruitcake.”[16]

(that’s only a taste – there’s plenty more at the Wikipedia link)

Do these Democrats have a death wish? Have they gone completely bonkers? Or did Nancy Pelosi’s plastic surgeon misfire and accidentally inject the Botox into her brain? Whatever the case, this an extraordinary gift to the Republican Party. It’s unclear at this point whether they will use it well, but it still constitutes an amazing opportunity. On the other hand, it is a huge insult to the American people. To appoint a man of Stark’s character – a complete and utter nut job- as the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee at a moment of national economic near-catastophe is about as cynical act as I have ever seen a modern American politician perform. Since it’s Oscar season, I think we can channel Sally Field and safely say this of Pelosi: “She hates us, she really hates us!”

UPDATE: Easy come, easy go or Sic Transit Stark. From Politico:

Rep. Sander Levin will take over as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee after Rep. Pete Stark, who held the gavel for a day, stepped aside.

The dominoes fell after Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) resigned the chairmanship of the powerful tax-writing panel Wednesday as Republicans and many Democrats were moving to oust him following an ethics committee ruling that found he violated House gift rules.

Levin, who had been chairman of the Trade Subcommittee, will helm the panel through the end of this Congress — barring the unlikely return of Rangel.

Officially, Stark stepped aside to keep the gavel of the panel’s Health Subcommittee. But lawmakers and aides said Stark faced a rebellion within the committee and the caucus over his sometimes bizarre behavior and penchant for making offensive comments.

Did the comments on this blog have something to do with this? We like to think so.

Well, it now seems that not one but two two-term governors will be running for unprecedented third terms in our two most populous states. What are the odds of that? And what are the odds that your-not-so-humble-servant knows both of them? As it happens, one hundred percent. I never expected to be that well connected (at least in this life) and I’m still trying to figure out how to exploit this, although my encounters with Jerry Brown are now over twenty years old and deep into the land of lost synapses. I met Rick Perry quite a bit more recently, not more than a couple of months ago, when I had the pleasure of going pistol shootin’ with the Texas governor in his hometown of Austin. (The video at the link is fun, if you haven’t seen it. And congrats to Gov. Perry — a PJTV fan — on your primary victory today.)

Of course, Perry is going to be running for a consecutive third term, while Brown has been off doing other things like being Mayor of Oakland and California Attorney General and, intermittently, wannabe zen roshi, etc. Further, Perry looks to be a shoo-in because Texas is in great shape compared to most of the nation now, while Brown is going to have a fight on his hands because California is, in a word, a mess. Some people even say it’s worse than Greece. And we don’t even have the Acropolis. We have to make do with Arianna Huffington’s mansion.

So would I support these guys? Well, I’m easy. You shake my hand, tell a few jokes, slap me on the back and you’ve usually got my vote. In fact, I thought Rick Perry was just a great fellow and if I lived in Texas, I’d certainly support him.

Jerry Brown is another matter. Much as I like Jerry — he’s an original mind and an amusing guy — he’s absolutely the wrong person for the job under the current catastrophic conditions in my home state. Reason: for all his famed Governor Moonbeam exoticism, when push comes to the proverbial shove, Jerry is very much a conventional liberal politician and very much his father’s son. But the days for that kind of approach to solving California’s financial problems are as long gone as the Buffalo Springfield from the Sunset Strip. Or should I say Linda Ronstadt?

Brown is using the failure of “political amateur” Arnold Schwarzenegger as California governor to try to convince voters to stay away from another “political amateur,” former Ebay CEO Meg Whitman. But right now California needs someone who can wield a red pencil with absolute determination — not allowing it out of his or her hand until half the lines in the budget were scratched out — or we really might turn into Greece. If I were a betting man — and sometimes I am — I’d bet California voters will be handing that pencil to Whitman in November.

Are values, family or otherwise, something we look for in the movies? They used to be – a loooong time ago. But that was before (at least) 1972 when Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris made hip sexuality King of the Cinema. Now I don’t have anything against sex in the movies – or outside of them, for that matter – but it is worth noting the winds may be heading the other way now, away from the ultra-edginess of Last Tango and toward the traditional morality of The Blind Side, the true story of a white Christian housewife who saves a lost child of the ghetto. Surprisingly… well, maybe not so surprisingly… the heart-warming Sandra Bullock film is the audience favorite going into Sunday night’s Oscars. According to Rasmussen, 25% of adults who are going to be watching on Sunday will be pulling for The Blind Side, as opposed to the vaunted Avatar, a film Lionel Chetywynd and I didn’t like very much, which is garnering only 17%.

Does this mean the return of the family movie? This is a strange conundrum. For the executive class family-oriented movies have never really gone away, because it is well known that at the box office the grosses for G and PG-rated fare usually outstrip the racier stuff. But don’t look for artsier Hollywood types to suddenly embrace remakes of Little Women. Normally you don’t win Oscars for that. You win them for Last Tango in Paris, better yet The Last Emperor, a Bertolucci film I hugely admire.

Whatever may happen in the best picture and director categories, look for Sandra Bullock to win the best actress on Sunday night (uh-oh… a prediction… bring out the crow) and look for more of The Blind Side approach to filmmaking in the near future. Call it Tea Party filmmaking. It’s the coming thing. Lionel and I will be doing a post-Oscar special for next Monday (Will Leonardo diCaprio say that Chile happened because of climate change?), but meanwhile check out the latest POLIWOOD: “The Blind Side vs. Last Tango in Park: Values in the Movies.”

Press bla-bla continues on the putative assassination of Hamas thug Mahmoud al-Mahbouh by the Mossad in Dubai last January. I don’t have much more to say on the subject, but couldn’t resist the title above. In fact, it may be more accurate than I intended because what the emirate seems to be embarked upon is a publicity campaign and, hey, their hotels aren’t as busy as they used to be (whose are? well, maybe Washington’s).

The latest jab from Dubai authorities seems to be an attempt to keep dual citizenship Israelis out of their country. (Normal Israelis weren’t welcome in the first place.) From the CSM: Dubai’s decision Monday to ban Israeli dual citizens in response to the assassination here last month of a senior Hamas figure is one part security, many parts politics. Gag me with a spoon, as Moon Unit Zappa would say.

But further down the piece we learn that even emirates don’t like being accused of racial profiling: “In announcing the sanction against Israeli citizens traveling to Dubai on second passports, Tamim raised hackles about racial stereotyping when he said that security personnel would be trained to identify Israelis by their accents and their faces.” But not to worry. High tech Dubai knows how to handle this: “Rather than relying on appearances and accents to identify Israeli citizens, says Dr. Karasik, Dubai authorities will likely improve their system for checking passports, including using biometric data.

Police can also identify dual nationals after they enter the country by tracking where they congregate and where their businesses have tended to be located, he adds.”

I didn’t know there were any delis in Dubai. (The Vegas analogy only goes so far.) Meanwhile, the Dubai police are calling for reinforcements in the form of the Federal Bureau of Investigation no less: Dubai police have called on the FBI to probe links between the suspects in the assassination of a Hamas commander and their U.S.-issued payment cards, the National reported on Tuesday, citing a source at the federal intelligence agency.

Hmmm…. interesting. Why this grandstanding? I’m not sure this is particularly good publicity for Dubai, though it is good publicity (sort of) for the police chief, etc. Nevertheless, the longer this story stays in the news the longer the biggest of all lingering questions stays there: What the Hell was Dubai doing being the transit for Hamas weapons for all these years that it would necessitate this Mossad action? It’s unlikely the Israelis want to send six, sixty or six hundred (whatever the number proves to be) agents into their country. Well, the answer is a four-letter word and it begins with I….