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New Left America

By on May 14, 2013 in News, Politics

Years ago, Hillary Clinton, speaking as the president’s wife, went on NBC’s Today Show and complained of what she called a “vast right-wing conspiracy” without citing evidence. She said there was a conspiracy to discredit her husband over the scandal of his having an affair with an intern. It turned out that there was a conspiracy by the president and White House staff to cover-up his affair.

In the past several days, several newly disclosed facts provide evidence that our government, led by New Left intellectuals and activists such as Mrs. Clinton and chiefly Barack Obama, conspired against Americans’ individual rights and against defense of the United States during an attack on September 11 by Moslems at Benghazi. The scandals are still breaking, and the evidence mounts by the hours, but it’s been known by top government officials that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) targeted specific groups of individuals based on their political views, violating their rights to free speech and association. That these organizations, which include Tea Party groups, Jewish groups supporting Israel and right-wing organizations with the word patriots in the name, were seeking compliance with the tax code is a crucial point. The left’s incessant criticism of the Tea Party is that it is anti-government, an assertion which is on its face not true. But the fact that Tea Party affiliates were targeted by the state while they were attempting to comply with the United States government is essential to understanding why this administration is more anti-government in the fundamental sense than the worst conservatives and libertarians.

New disclosures also show that the U.S. government issued orders to monitor two months of phone records on 20 lines used by 100 reporters and editors for the Associated Press, apparently in order to identify the source of an AP report about the CIA stopping an Islamic terrorist plot to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the U.S., a leak which CIA Director John Brennan, who incidentally has converted to Islam, described as an “unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information.” This is a particularly chilling disclosure. Given what we know about how the U.S. government concealed the truth about the Islamic attack at Benghazi, and concealed the truth about the Islamic attack at Boston, the notion that our Islamic director of intelligence regards a press report as “dangerous” and that our government is spying on the press has ominous implications. In fact, the upshot is clear that our government conceals and lies about Islamic terrorism against America and instead targets the press and those describing themselves as patriots.

The word for that is conspiracy, not scandal. The Obama administration is a vast left-wing conspiracy against the United States and that is an assertion based strictly on what we know.

Movie Review: The Great Gatsby (2013)

By on May 13, 2013 in Movies

MV5BMTkxNTk1ODcxNl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMDI1OTMzOQ@@._V1_SX214_If you’ve ever had a feeling of anticipation prior to attending what you hope and have reason to believe will be a grand and exciting party, where the guest is immersed in celebration of something worth celebrating and eventually reaches an elevated sense of lightness, only to attend and be let down and disappointed, feeling dejected or aghast at the smallness of everything around you, you know what it means to experience The Great Gatsby.

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Jay Gatsby, who throws lavish parties in order to get closer to his true love, Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), who long ago married the cad Tom (Joel Edgerton, the best thing about the movie), who’s cheating on Daisy with Myrtle, who figures prominently into the story’s climax, which occurs with narrative commentary by Nick (Tobey Maguire), who is related to Daisy and in awe of Gatsby. The more Nick learns about Gatsby, and there is presumably much to learn, the more he admires him. The reasons amount to the idea of having and then renouncing wealth for what passes for love. As portrayed here, Gatsby is unsophisticated and unmasculine, with no trace of boyishness or manliness and unconvincing as a man of character, ability and wealth.

The tragedy unfolds in 1922 New York society with no credibility, chemistry or sex appeal. All the close-ups, voiceovers and transitions can’t infuse a sense of mood, place and progression. Performances are flat, dull and painful to watch, especially the one by DiCaprio, whose accent comes, goes and changes. The Great Gatsby, based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald and adapted for movies in the past, starts off with a murky visual, glitters with color in rich period detail and expensive sets, costumes and pictures, and drones on and on like a hip hop recording. Appropos of this grandiose picture show, music is supplied by a bestselling hip hop record maker who made headlines for traveling to a dictatorship powered by slave labor, though the soundtrack eventually settles into jazz age songs. These are the stylings of director Baz Luhrmann.

I suspect that our dumbed down culture has caught up to his trademark style over substance. I don’t mean to pick on Baz Luhrmann, whose Strictly Ballroom is enjoyable and whose Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet (also with Mr. DiCaprio) are not without merit. Hollywood is attracted to similar pictorial stylists, including Joe Wright (Anna Karenina) and Tim Burton (Dark Shadows) when they’re not producing convoluted, pretentious films about nothing, poverty porn or the latest exercise in Tarantino torture porn. The Great Gatsby caters to the perceptual-bound mentality, without regard to a coherent or compelling character or plot, resulting in a complete failure at conveying a theme. Don’t look for concepts played in motion pictures. To rephrase the cliche, a picture like this is worth a thousand vacant stares among a population that obediently lines up for permission to travel on airplanes. Yes, it is that bad, which is why movies about wisecracking comic book heroes, superpowered aliens and dark knights substitute for realistic human tales of grandeur. The Great Gatsby confirms with glitz that glamour is gone and Hollywood’s brain drain goes far beyond Hollywood.

Nothing to Celebrate in Boston

By on April 22, 2013 in Foreign Policy, News, War

tamerlanjihadThere is nothing to celebrate in Boston, despite that city’s spirited efforts at recovery since last week’s deadly jihadist terrorist attack.

What we now know, starting with the fact that the Boston bombings are, as I suspected, motivated by Islamic terrorism, a term which is arguably redundant, is that the government – on every level, local, state and federal – failed in its most fundamental responsibility to protect Boston’s citizens. At every point and in every sense, despite billions of wasted dollars expropriated from Americans to violate individual rights in the name of “homeland security”, such as the fascist TSA, police, intelligence and military did not succeed in doing their jobs. The best among them are impaired or disarmed and the Moslem terrorist attack, which killed three adults and one child, demonstrates that U.S. policy toward national defense is a disaster.

Consider that:

  • At least one bomber, who has been caught (though killed by his comrade before he could be interrogated), was previously identified by the FBI as a potential Islamic terrorist – and he was released and deemed safe for society. This despite a recent, extended trip to a global center for jihadist training and subsequent video postings for Islamic propaganda (pictured here and since removed from Google-owned YouTube).
  • Neither bomber was under surveillance despite clear signs of jihad.
  • Neither bomber was apparently monitored for increased risk of acquiring military weapons such as guns, bombs and grenades all of which they possessed.
  • The Boston Marathon was vulnerable to attack with no warnings, alerts or  lockdowns.
  • All the government programs and agencies which violate individual rights – and all the government agencies that do not violate individual rights – failed to detect, identify and prevent the attack, including the jihadists’ illegal activities, such as bombmaking.
  • Once it was clear that an attack was under way, the government failed to warn the public that Islamic terrorists were at large and, for precious hours, sought to dispel and appease the notion of Islamic terrorism, downplaying the threat of jihadist attack in spite of evidence to the contrary. All subsequent warnings to the public sought to minimize and trivialize any attempt to accurately assess and ascertain the real threat to the public by the terrorists and their collaborators and sponsors.
  • The attack continued unabated as the unidentified jihadists, still named and pictured as common criminals, murdered a college campus policeman execution-style.
  • The attack continued as the Moslem terrorists threatened the residents of metropolitan Boston with more bombs, military weapons and plots for mass murder, as police continued to refuse to assess and communicate the nature of the threat against the city, state and region.
  • One of the attackers was allowed to be killed by his own comrade as police failed to prevent his death before interrogation, crucially foreclosing the ability to interrogate and, if necessary, torture the mass murderer to ascertain the identities and whereabouts of sponsors and collaborators.
  • Another attacker was allowed to escape, despite being surrounded by police, further endangering the city of Boston. He was not successfully pursued and he took refuge on private property, unbeknownst to clueless police and the entire government of the United States. He was discovered by a lone individual only after the government restriction on travel and movement was lifted.
  • The apprehended jihadist was apparently allowed to attempt to kill himself – as he had killed his comrade before he could be interrogated – possibly injuring himself in the throat without being subdued or sedated.
  • Boston and much of New England was under government control for several days, with residents and businesses alike forced by the state into a defenseless state of siege. To my knowledge, it is unprecedented in a major American city that businesses and residents are ordered by the government to remain in hiding without declaration of martial law.

Despite numerous media reports, including CNN’s report that the dead Moslem terrorist is being investigated by the U.S. government for being the recipient of operation plans from an Islamic terrorist group, which CNN reports is linked to the dead jihadist, the government is engaged in a concerted campaign – as it was during the jihadist attack on the U.S. at Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans were assassinated – to divert public attention from the nature of what motivates the attack and minimize, deny or evade any connection to Islamic terrorism.

But even U.S. government broadcasting, National Public Radio, observed a connection, with NPR reporting on the dead jihadist: “Three women who knew [the dead terrorist] have told NPR that they saw changes in the young man around 2008 and 2009, when they say he became a more devout Muslim. As NPR’s Zwerdling reports, the women say [the dead terrorist] sought to control his girlfriend, ordering her to cover herself and convert to Islam.”

Islam is what motivates those who seek to destroy the United States and the West but you’ll never know that from government propaganda and most media reports and, as good a job as police did in catching those who murdered Martin, Lu, Krystle and Sean and maiming and wounding over 250 others, celebrating marginal success or superficial, feel-good unity to the exclusion of facts including the fact of failure to protect by the local, state and federal government is a grave error that denigrates the magnitude of evil in this act of war – whether waged by lone wolves acting on an explicit or implicit command for jihad or a couple of faith-based soldiers in a jihadist terror cell – and, by showing ignorance and projecting weakness, the “celebrating” harms and endangers the community, commonwealth and country. The reason our eyes well up at post-attack sports events pledging unity and patriotism is because we know what happened is wrong, bad and evil, which causes decent people to feel sad and shed tears.

But grief and sadness are not an excuse for evading facts and the motive for the bombing. What happened last Monday was an act of war by Islamic terrorists, lone, in tandem or sponsored. What should have been an overwhelming military offense against states that sponsor terrorism after 9/11 has been pointed inward, against ourselves, forcing us to sacrifice individual liberty for a false sense of security. We must stop celebrating when we are attacked and instead resolve to annihilate the enemy wherever they plan and fester, not breed them by letting suicide bombers shut down the eastern seaboard for days on end.

We have inverted everything meaningful in America. High-fiving “first responders” – instead of scrutinizing front liners and demanding answers and results in the war against the jihad – after an undetected act of premeditated mass murder by our enemies is the opposite of being strong; it is merely another way of accepting our impending doom.

Bombs Bursting in Boston

By on April 16, 2013 in News, War

“The world mourns with Boston,” read the headline for this morning’s edition of the leftist Boston Globe, owned by the leftist New York Times Company, as it appears on Boston.com. It is a perfectly vacant, nondescript condensation of today’s low journalism, distorting the facts and meaning of yesterday’s terrible news.

The headline is not true. In no sense does the world mourn with Boston, which was attacked by twin bombings in a Boston Marathon terrorist strike that targeted runners’ lower body parts with ball bearings-loaded bombs that left multiple victims in need of amputations with many dead and injured. From Asia, where Communist Korea threatens Texas, California and Japan – and, of course, South Korea – with invasion or nuclear attack, to the Middle East’s Iran and the Arab world, where enemies and adversaries threaten to annihilate the United States and celebrate the attack, the world ignores, snorts or welcomes the attack on America at Boston, as it did the attack on America at Benghazi and the 2001 attack on New York and Washington.

Also, the term ‘mourns’ suggests that those mourning have a sense of the loss – in this case, losing three (as of this writing) young lives, including an eight-year-old child named Martin – and reports barely covered the central facts of the attack, such as where the bombs were located (we still don’t know, except that the second bomb went off near an Apple Store) let alone the identities of those lost. The media were focused instead on executing an orchestrated rush to non-judgment, a coordinated attempt to prejudge audiences and prevent them from making logical conclusions that we may have been hit by jihadist barbarians in another attack on civilization. The press was primarily and fundamentally concerned with being defensive of those who tend to initiate force against Americans, such as faith-based barbarians, including devoutly religious Saudi Arabians and Islamic jihadists, not with reporting key facts, such as who bombed us, what happened during the attack, where are the murderers, when are they likely to have struck – circulating sketches of potentially connected persons who may be at large – and why they seek to destroy us.

As the media failed to report the news, the government, which deliberately and wrongly blamed an earlier Islamic terrorist attack on a movie, refused to take the attack seriously, imposing another lockdown rather than matching the act of war or terrorist strike with moral resolve, led by the nihilist Obama who declined to name either terrorism or attack in a bland, callous commentary signifying nothing in particular. Americans again generally accepted the new normal of duty and obedience to total government control with social media pleas for “calm”, “hope” and “prayer” as against outrage. There was hardly any of that as – and I’ll just say it because I think it’s true – the Boston Marathon died never to be experienced in freedom again, not in the age of the TSA and other forms of fascism that people choose to tolerate in order to avoid the necessity of thinking about the reality that we are losing the war to barbarians – foreign and domestic – in conjunction with – and in proportion to – losing life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness.

Yesterday’s news is bleak. Not only because innocent Americans were maimed and murdered and will remain unavenged as their 9/11 comrades do and not merely because the world does not mourn with Boston. It is bleak because Boston, where there once raged a tea party to protest government control, a spirit that no longer lives among most Americans, does not mourn the loss of what makes Boston an especially American city. America’s outlook is dim because, in yesterday’s aftermath, we lost more of the spirit to win at the finish line. We heard and read about thoughts and prayers, we were urged not to think, judge and defend, and we were pummeled with state-sponsored announcements to remain calm, passive and obedient, ever careful not to name those whom we have every reason to believe attacked us again – let alone name those we lost on the day we lost them – and, 12 years after 9/11, we moved closer to the end of America. That is the salient fact of reality. That is what ought to be mourned.

Movie Review: 42

By on April 11, 2013 in Culture, History, Movies, Sports

MV5BMTQwMDU4MDI3MV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMjU1NDgyOQ@@._V1_SX214_Jackie Robinson is the subject of the poorly named 42, an overly sentimental movie about how to change a culture one man at a time that can’t help but be powerful and moving. Unlike other fact-based historical films centering upon an individual, such as Good Night, and Good Luck and Schindler’s List, there is fundamental truth at the core of 42, that one should be judged on his character and rise or fall on his ability, and it helps that the writer and director of the thoughtful, old-fashioned, heartstrings sports movie is the same person. His name is Brian Helgeland (Man on Fire, Robin Hood) and he is white.

That a white artist is so moved to tell this tale of an American baseball player who broke the color barrier, led by a Bible-thumping sports businessman who simply wants to get into heaven (Harrison Ford) and that he tells it with honorable intentions and skill is a sign of how much has changed since the Dodgers first hired a black athlete to play ball. The writing is crisp, for the most part, with some outstanding lines that make you want to cheer and the leisurely plot moves along. The score by Mark Isham is too much and the cliches seem inevitable since we’ve seen this kind of movie many times and some inconsistencies – rows of little pig-tailed girls asking for a baseball player’s autograph in 1947 and Pittsburgh being the butt of jokes – are off the mark but 42 offers an important and uniquely American tale.

That’s why you shouldn’t expect the usual race-baiters (you know who they are) to praise this movie, unless they think they can gain from doing so. With an actor I’ve never heard of named Chadwick Boseman, who’s a dead ringer for the good-looking Jackie Robinson, with Nicole Beharie as his wife, playing talented Robinson as an intelligent, proud athlete who used both his charm and being underestimated to his advantage on and off the baseball diamond, 42 does right by Mr. Robinson. As with Walk the Line, Lincoln and other well-made biographically-themed pictures, (including The Iron Lady, about the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher), we don’t really get to know the subject in the deepest sense. Instead, we get a glimpse of his essential characteristics at particular points in time.

But it is a look at the whole man, from his rejection of a moral obligation to serve others – “we don’t owe the world a thing” – to his insistence on knowing why Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey, who recruited him to play baseball for Brooklyn, did so and what’s in it for him. In one of the best scenes, and contrary to sports and black stereotypes, Jackie Robinson is an equal to his wife during a scene in which he admits that a racist almost got the best of him and it is refreshing to see a hero with fallibility, not feet of clay. As we move from racist Florida and the South, which get off too easy as far as I’m concerned, to Philadelphia and southern Ohio, regions hardly known for racial tolerance, Jackie Robinson faces irrational ideas and actions from teammates, fans and other teams. Some of them change, some do not, and the young black couple from southern California – where the Dodgers play today – adjust to the new normal. Rickey, capably portrayed by Ford playing crusty to the hilt, guides Jackie Robinson and the ball club along the way, dodging Catholics, bureaucrats and others who stand in the way of justice and objectivity about what it means to play – and what it takes to win.

In fact, playing to win and make money is one of the better themes in 42, which unabashedly endorses money as the root of all good; money is neither black nor white, as one character says, it’s green. Though there’s not enough baseball in the sepia-toned film, which features too many characters tagging along, sports scenes and the plot’s pace feel a bit like a day at the ballpark. Time is suspended and winning is everything which, in this case, means winning men’s minds one by one, inning by inning, run by run. Evoking America’s racist past with key symbols, from buses, trains and fields to Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning towering in the background as a team struggles to unite, 42 cashes in its lessons about a great baseball player and honorable man who should be remembered for refusing to sit in the back of the bus – yes, Jackie Robinson did that, too – so he could be his best and play ball just like everyone else.