Columnist.
Those who attack the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin -- as too conservative, too vitriolic or simply unhinged -- have that right, even if, as is so often the case, they rely on others rather than listen to the shows themselves. That's what liberals do. There are pretenders to the throne of conservative talk radio who claim to be so much less "poisonous" and stupid than Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, et al. -- and travel the same character-assassination route. Congressman Mike Rogers told The New York Times he's retiring in January to join Cumulus Radio for a national show, because "I think there is room for a more productive, you-might-actually-learn-something kind of talk radio in the marketplace." Rogers, call your office.
In August of 2011, the former child actor Corey Feldman made a stunning assertion to ABC News: "I can tell you that the No. 1 problem in Hollywood was and is and always will be pedophilia. That's the biggest problem for children in this industry ... It's the big secret." The rest of the media said nothing. Almost three years later, it's happening again. The Los Angeles Times reported on April 18 that "X-Men" director Bryan Singer "has been accused in a federal lawsuit of drugging and sexually assaulting an aspiring teenage actor in the 1990s." Michael Egan III claims that he was forced into a "sordid sex ring" in the entertainment industry in which underage boys were supplied alcohol and drugs. Egan alleges that the assaults took place at wild parties in California and Hawaii when he was 17.
In March 2006, CBS News announced that President George W. Bush had stumbled into a "record low" approval rating of 34 percent. All the other networks jumped on the poll. CNN was reporting the number every hour on the hour. The survey confirmed their suspicions. The wheels on the Bush presidency had come off. Last week, ABC and the Washington Post found President Barack Obama is "facing the worst poll numbers of his presidency," with an approval rating of 41 percent, and 52 percent disapproving. It's another administration on political life support. ABC offered its own survey a mere 18 seconds of attention from "Good Morning America" on April 29, and nothing on its own news that night. The others said nothing.
Buyer beware those promising a "Catholic education." Saint Mary's Institute is the Catholic grade school in my wife's New York hometown, Amsterdam. It is affiliated with Saint Mary's Catholic Church, whose pastor Rev. John Medwid pens the opening to the Saint Mary's Institute annual newsletter. "In September at the opening Mass I officially announced that this was going to be the Year of Our Lady at SMI," the letter began. How nice. Except that's not what he wrote. There was someone else he had in mind to honor besides the Virgin Mary.
The times they are a-changing in ways even Bob Dylan didn't foresee. I have an early childhood memory riding my bike and coming across a discarded booklet on proper social etiquette. It had the perfunctory rules. *Gentlemen always open doors for ladies. Stand when a lady comes in the room.* And so on. But the one I remember vividly is this: *A lady always extends her hand first in greeting.* Why? Fifty years ago I could understand the concept, but even then, I thought it was a bit much. Today that rule's been abandoned. Who decides these things anyway? Miss Manners (Judith Martin) entered the arena in 1978 and instantly became America's politeness pundit, writing thousands of columns printed in more than 200 newspapers ever since. She's arguably the nation's most influential arbiter of social etiquette.
The accountants in Hollywood don't have to believe in heaven to notice the box office numbers on recent movies with religious themes. "Heaven Is for Real" opened in the days before Easter and grossed more than $22 million, coming in second for the weekend, just $3 million behind the latest "Captain America" blockbuster (in its third week). The movie's per-screen average -- $8,895 -- was far above the rest of the top five. "Heaven Is for Real," like many movies, is based on a best-selling book. It's a real-life story about 4-year-old Colton Burpo and his visions of heaven after an emergency surgery in 2003. Within three weeks of its November 2010 release, the book debuted at No. 3 on the New York Times best-seller list. Eventually, it made its way to No. 1.
Chelsea Clinton announced she's going to be a mother this year. That should elicit the same reaction reserved for the daughter of any former president: a polite "how nice." But this is a Clinton. Everything with the Clintons gets filtered through politics. It is fitting (and equally crass) that this news is met with this reaction: "Hillary (Clinton) in 2016. Does it help or hurt?" Indeed, that is precisely how pro-Hillary pundits reacted, leaping to profess this will succeed in adding warmth and humanity to Hillary's image in the years to come. But put the celebration on hold. This was surely the same concept the Democratic pundits had in Little Rock, Ark., when Chelsea was born in 1980, and the warm image never really stuck.
For its second season, the creators of the FX series "The Americans" have chosen a new source for insight into the Cold War during the Reagan years -- one Lt. Col. Oliver North. It's a dramatic reversal from the first season, and it has infuriated some hard leftists. The show began with the shocking promise from creator Joel Weisberg that the series' heroes would be KGB agents: "We're making them the sympathetic characters. I'd go so far as to say they're the heroes." It quickly became apparent that these characters could be unsentimental killers of innocent Americans, so perhaps that triggered a change of heart. What's resulted in the second season has been a more conventional dramatist's take: The KGB agents are morally conflicted, and so is the FBI agent who lives across the street. The reaction from the hard left is equally conventional. After shocking conservatives before the first season began, Weisberg's decision to hire North to consult on the second season has thrown these liberals for a loop.
For a moment, imagine yourself back in 2006, at the height of liberal aggression about the "imperial hubris" of George W. Bush in the war on terror. The left's contempt for this man was rampant. Liberals savaged him for turning the world against this country. Keith Olbermann announced "the beginning of the end of America." Now imagine, in that milieu, if during the Bush administration, we'd witnessed a mass shooting by an Islamist at Fort Hood. Or a terrorist bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Or a deadly terrorist attack on a consulate in Libya. Would liberals have granted Bush a pass for any of these? Or would he and his policies have been blamed?
It's graduation time. Many college students are preparing for their commencement ceremonies. On some campuses, some students are playing a game of what we might call "Dump the Speaker." Conservative speakers chosen to deliver commencement addresses are being howled off campus by leftist student organizations and faculty as well. It's either a left-wing speaker -- or none. Rutgers University recently faced this by inviting Condoleezza Rice and refused to budge. But Brandeis University has just knuckled under to student and faculty protests over its announced speaker, author Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She was disinvited. You'd think a human rights advocate would be cheered by these liberals. You'd think they'd positively swoon at a human rights advocate for *women*! But, no. She is a conservative.
On April 1, Washington Mayor Vincent Gray was denied a second term, defeated in the primary by upstart city councilwoman Muriel Bowser. The beginning of the end came on March 10, when U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen struck a plea bargain with a wealthy businessman who confessed he'd spent $668,000 on an illegal "shadow campaign" to fund get-out-the-vote efforts that helped Gray win the mayoral office in 2010. So the corrupt mayor of America's most important city is thrown out. A political scandal? The same networks that were utterly breathless over the local story of Gov. Chris Christie's aides slowing traffic on a bridge into New York City didn't breathe a word about corruption in the nation's capital. Unlike Christie, the mayor is a Democrat.
Top Barack Obama aide Valerie Jarrett recently granted an interview to a celebrity gossip website called POPSUGAR and revealed why she had come to Hollywood. "I'm meeting with writers of various TV shows and movies to try to get it into the scripts." The "it" is Obamacare. Conservatives are no match for liberals in this arena. The White House people know the immense cultural power the left has in popular culture. Liberals rightly credit TV and movies and pop songs for America's growing support for gay "marriage." So why not use that power for Obamacare? Jarrett told the POPSUGAR crew that they've used all kinds of famous people to push Obamacare: "We're talking to celebrities. We're talking to athletes, because obviously they get injured a lot and many of them are the same age as the market we're going after. And what (athletes) can say is, 'Look, you never know when life is going to throw you a curve ball. You're walking down the street, you're a little clumsy, you trip, you fall -- where do you end up? Emergency room. A couple grand just to walk in the door ... Who can afford that?'"
Our English-speaking media were very clear after the 2012 election that the Republican Party was demographically doomed, since all the voters "of color" were shifting toward President Barack Obama and the Democrats. They echoed the mantra of GOP moderates, stating the only way to political viability was through "comprehensive immigration reform." What these analysts did not do was explore the messaging Hispanic voters are getting from Spanish-language media. Has the conservative message been rejected by Spanish-language voters -- or is something being kept from them? We've seen a disturbing set of reports on how hand in glove these Spanish networks seem to be with both Obama and Hillary Clinton -- not just in news reporting, but in creating "empowerment initiatives" that provide positive images of these Democratic leaders.
Politico reported something interesting before President Barack Obama met with Pope Francis: "The visit is a rare chance for Obama to associate himself with a world leader whose cool factor far outweighs his own." It's rare for pundits to admit that someone else might top their revered Barack in the coolness category. They're equating coolness and popularity, and the pope certainly polls much better than the president, which is no surprise these days. Liberals have developed a collective man crush on Pope Francis, even though he hasn't budged an inch on the church's teachings. The Catholic Church is just as "homophobic" as ever in its defense of marriage and just as "intolerant" as ever in its defense of human life.
Obamacare is a fiasco. Why don't the media acknowledge that? And it's fair to ask: Why don't they ridicule it? After all, in the Bush years, the press reran President George W. Bush in front of the "Mission Accomplished" banner time and again, did they not? Perhaps Joe Biden at the signing ceremony saying into an open mic that this was a "big (blanking) deal" would suffice. How do we know Obamacare is failing? Ironically, because those very same "reporters" are doing the opposite of the Bush years. They're burying the story. They aren't in denial. They know the truth. They're just choosing to ignore it. They are pretending there are no broken promises about keeping your insurance plan, or keeping your doctor, or lowering your premium by $2,500 a year. They are pretending, like Ellen DeGeneres told the president, that "everyone" in America loves Obamacare.
"The Laramie Project" is an agitprop play compiled from real-life interviews that indicted the entire state of Wyoming as homophobic and therefore responsible for the murder of Matthew Shepard. One character announced it was just like "the Germans who looked the other way are guilty of the deaths of the Jews, the gypsies and the homosexuals." The play packs a political punch, and the left has seen to it that it has been widely performed at colleges and even high schools across America for years. But last year, the accepted narrative began to unravel. Author Stephen Jimenez produced years of research that argued Shepard's killers Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were not heterosexual monsters after all. "A manager of a gay bar in Denver recalls seeing photos of McKinney and Henderson in the papers and recognizing them as patrons of his bar. He recounts his shock at realizing 'these guys who killed that kid came from inside our own community.'" It was a gay-on-gay murder. That would make the political message -- the very essence of the play -- fraudulent.
The other day, this story hit the New Media. It's one the Old Media will simply never report. Two sisters, 16 and 21, and members of Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust, were holding a pro-life sign while demonstrating at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A choppy cell phone video caught the scene: Students hurl obscenities at the young girls while a large, imposing woman, with two accomplices in tow, march off with the sign, having ripped it from one girl's hands. The girls follow the thugs to the elevator, and as the video continues recording, the intimidating woman sneers at the girls, taunts them and dares them to try retrieving the stolen sign while her accomplices laugh.
Liberals view the term "compassionate conservatism" as an oxymoron. How could it not be so? they ask. After all, conservatives are greedy, and conservatism feeds that greed at the expense of the poor. It is preposterous for liberals to believe this because if it were true, conservatism would be not just wrong; it would be evil. Some liberals want to demonize as reckless the traditional entrepreneurial spirit of America. Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation, will have none of it and is taking that notion head-on into the media with his new book "Falling in Love With America Again." DeMint is championing the "little platoons" that meet human needs at the neighborhood level and judging their effectiveness against that of big government redistributing our wealth through an enormous, inefficient bureaucracy.
After months of pressing the CBS News brass to get out of her contract, reporter Sharyl Attkisson was finally granted her request. While that is good for her, it ought to underline how CBS has abandoned hard-hitting reporting in the Obama era. Politico's Attkisson headline was "The right loses its hero at CBS," and liberal blogs tried to guess how long it would take for her to sign up with Fox News Channel. That might happen. Roger Ailes loves scooping up talent from other networks. That's meant as an insult, of course. Only those dreadful right-wing propagandists challenge Team Obama.
If a teenager were zipping around Amazon.com looking for "a reliable guide to the turbulent physical and social transitions of adolescence," would that child want to first consult a 76-year-old grandmother who's had three unsuccessful marriages? This is a question that must never be asked if the unexpected author of the sex-and-relationships guide is Jane Fonda, an icon to liberals everywhere. Even Michelle Obama recently oozed to People magazine that Fonda was her role model for what she wants to be in her 70s, "a beautiful, engaged, politically savvy, sharp woman."
