Very Inconvenient Truths
The Democrats are warning us what they just might do if President Trump, with the help of Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney, of all people, actually succeeds in replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Amy Coney Barratt.
The Democrats are warning us what they just might do if President Trump, with the help of Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney, of all people, actually succeeds in replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Amy Coney Barratt.
Among their threats is the addition of more justices (“packing the Court”) once they’re back in the catbird seat and granting statehood to both Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., which would mean four additional seats in the Senate and a few more in the House.
The problem is that those aren’t, strictly speaking, threats so much as they’re items on their wish list, no matter what the President does or doesn’t do.
The fact is, if the Left had as much power as it wished it had, it would do away with the Bill of Rights. They have already, thanks to the lockdown, done away with the freedom of religion by shutting down churches and synagogues and, in concert with their allies in the Silicon Valley, they have denied freedom of speech to millions of Americans by knocking them off their platforms at Facebook, Google and Twitter. They have even knocked off the President of the United States and suffered no consequences, and will suffer none so long as Congress, bought and paid for by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, continues to shield them from lawsuits.
The latest example of the war on religion took place recently in Idaho, which is already showing the influence of all those over-caffeinated Washingtonians fleeing the insanity of Seattle and importing some of their own insanity along with their bags of over-priced coffee.
It seems that a group of Christians had gathered outside their church to sing hymns when the cops showed up, arrested them, cuffed them and drove them off to the local hoosegow.
The upside is that at least there are some police departments that still believe in arresting lawbreakers, at least so long as the offenders aren’t burning, looting and assaulting the cops, and even if the only conceivable crime being committed is singing offkey in the first degree.
Sean Davis, the co-founder of The Federalist, is just the second person I’ve heard of who has dared question the integrity of the 35,000 rank and file FBI agents. He recently pointed out to Tucker Carlson that not one of them ever blew the whistle on the illegal activities of their Deep State superiors, including James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok.
That other person, by the way, was yours truly and I beat Mr. Davis by over three years.
The worst news of all is that apparently nothing has changed under William Barr, Christopher Wray or John (“The Invisible Man”) Durham.
When Amy Coney Barratt was being vetted for a federal judgeship in 2017, Sen. Dianne Feinstein employed a left-wing dog whistle when she said: “The [Catholic] dogma lives loudly in you.”
Although it sounds as if the senator is advising emergency surgery because, as everyone knows, a noisy dogma anywhere near someone’s bladder can have dire consequences, she was actually signaling her fellow Leftists that then-Professor Barratt opposed abortion.
It will be interesting to hear on what grounds Joe Biden opposes her confirmation since he, too, in spite of his wholehearted support of the abortion mill that calls itself Planned Parenthood, is rumored to be a Catholic.
There is no question that millions of young Americans fantasize being movie stars and rock idols. But celebrities also have their own fantasies. Robert Vaughn was such a fan of President John Kennedy that he had his home office re-done to look exactly like the Oval Office.
That way, even though he was only the man from U.N.C.L.E., he could pretend to be the man from Hyannisport.
Warren Beatty kept threatening to run for governor of California, possibly as a stepping stone to the presidency. God knows he couldn’t have been any worse than Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom or, for that matter, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Besides, he was certainly more photogenic and could read his lines better than any of them.
Bill Cosby kept telling us that once his sitcom series went off the air, his plan was to become a school teacher. As things worked out, it’s probably a good thing that the man who went from being “America’s Favorite Dad” to being “America’s Least Favorite Rapist” never got anywhere near a classroom. At least, his victims were all adult actresses, who almost knew what they were getting into, and not a bunch of eighth and ninth graders.
After the President said he was going ahead and carrying out his constitutional responsibility to nominate a justice to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, he must have almost keeled over when he heard Chuck Schumer announce from the floor of the Senate “You are not a dictator.”
That contradicted everything that Sen. Schumer and his congressional colleagues have been saying for the past four years. What’s next? Is Schumer going to break the news that Trump isn’t really Satan or even a Nazi?
If Trump doesn’t receive more than the usual five percent of the black vote, it certainly won’t be for lack of trying. First, he made federal funding of black colleges a permanent obligation of the American taxpayer. And now he has promised, if re-elected, to devote half a billion dollars to advancing black economic interests.
I understand the political motivation, but as an American, I’d prefer it if he spoke about helping poor people in general since there are plenty of whites and Hispanics who are struggling to make ends meet.
Why, in what is supposed to be a colorblind society, is it that our tax dollars must always be earmarked for blacks?
Although I never planned it that way, during the course of my life, I have known a great many famous people. What makes it so surprising is that I was extremely shy when I was young. So the idea of interviewing people I had grown up admiring or even working with them wasn’t even a pipe dream. If anything, it would have been a nightmare. But as someone once said, life is what happens while you’re making other plans.
I didn’t always care for the notables with whom I crossed paths. Occasionally, I did. Where I got particularly lucky is that some of my friends lived a very long time. Norman Lloyd will be 106 on November 8th, Orson Bean would still be around at 92 if he hadn’t been hit by a car last February and Billy Wilder made it to 95.
What was astonishing about all three of them is that they retained their wits up to the end, although thanks to the C-19 shutdown, I haven’t been able to visit with Norman for about seven months. But he was as sharp as ever at his last birthday party.
I confess that of all the “names” I have ever known, the only one I ever remained in awe of was Wilder. Even though he called me Burt and I called him Billy, I always felt I should call the man who either wrote or wrote, directed and produced “Ninotchka,” “The Major & the Minor,” “Lost Weekend,” “Double Indemnity,” “A Foreign Affair,” “Sunset Blvd.,” “Stalag 17,” “Sabrina,” “Love in the Afternoon,” “Witness for the Prosecution,” “The Apartment” and “Some Like it Hot,” Mr. Wilder.
Once, when we were going out for lunch, I prepared two trivia questions for him based on his own career. I had a hunch he would have a tough time getting all the answers and I was right.
The first question was how many of his movies were turned into Broadway musicals. The second was to name all the movie directors he had directed in his own movies.
If the movie buffs among you want to try to guess, stop reading now and get out your pen and paper.
The musicals were “Silk Stockings” (based on “Ninotchka”), “Sunset Blvd.” “Sugar” (based on “Some Like it Hot”) and “Promises, Promises” (based on “The Apartment”). In a strange reversal, his biggest financial success was “Irma la Douce” (which had been a Broadway musical, but which he turned into a romantic comedy without the songs). Billy forgot about “Ninotchka,” probably because he had only co-written the script and not directed or produced it.
When it came to directors, I knew there was no way he was going to think of the actors who directed only one or two movies and decided it was not for them.
The actual directors were Mitchell Leisen (“Hold Back the Dawn”), Otto Preminger (“Stalag 17”), C.B. DeMille, Buster Keaton and Erich von Stroheim (“Sunset Blvd.”).
The Wilder actors who dipped their toes into directing movies included Ray Milland, Jack Lemmon and Charles Laughton. If there were others, I, too, failed the quiz.
To his credit, Mr. Wilder took defeat well. He even seemed to take delight in being reminded of his past glories and well he should have.
After all, in Hollywood, some pisher fresh out of film school who directs a low budget movie that makes some money is regarded as a genius. Someone like Orson Welles who spent 40 years making movies and only made one good one is an immortal.
What’s more, in the land of the left-wing lemmings, these days every last member of the Directors Guild feels entitled to dismiss half the potential audience for his movies as racists, dupes and right-wing fascists.
Mr. Wilder, on the other hand, never held the public in contempt; only the studio bosses.
