There, I’ve said It: Tom Cruise is selling himself short by jokingly comparing his action-hero movie stunts to being “deployed overseas in Afghanistan.” The moron media is hyperventilating over Cruise’s alleged sacrilegious comment.
I’ve been meaning to come to the defense of the iconoclastic, embattled actor yet again.
Fact: Tom Cruise has created real value for all those hundreds of millions of film fans who’ve consumed his products over the decades. He makes movies people enjoy and want to see. He’s an industry unto himself.
Cruise makes peace, not war. He generates wealth; he doesn’t consume the wealth of taxpayers. He creates a product, rather than wreck property not his.
Enough aid.
American masses and media can’t stand a non-conformist. The actor’s heroic stand against the “psychiatric peanut gallery” drew vitriol, but failed to dampen America’s enthusiasm for Cruise’s product.
Cruise, you should know, is a principled devotee of the late (great) anti-psychiatry thinker, Thomas S. Szasz.
Fox News is energetically marketing the neoconservative warmonger, Chucky Krauthammer. A generally “fair and balanced” newsman, Fox News’ Bret Baier turned positively obsequious in his Krauthammer coverage, making a song-and-dance of disclosing their close friendship. It’s all so incestuous, isn’t it?
When it comes to spying on Americans, Charles Krauthammer sees Obama’s NSA, 4th Amendment infractions as a vindication of Bush’s. The columnist has invited Democrats now excusing Obama to pardon Bush and … party on.
“After badmouthing tea-party Republicans for attempting to leverage a partial government shut-down and debt-ceiling deadline to dilute ObamaCare, Krauthammer quickly scolded ‘the media” for its biased coverage of the quixotic showdown. Pot. Kettle. Krauthammer.”
Like all “neocon artists”—they were once radical leftists and are still hardcore Jacobins—on the invasion of Iraq, Krauthammer dished outdollops of ahistoric, unintuitive, and reckless verbiage. Neocons had dismissed and maligned the Old Right (that’s us) and rubbished generals and government officials who warned against that war: Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, Secretary of the Army Thomas White, former general and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft; former Centcom Commander Norman Schwarzkopf; former NATO Commander Wesley Clark; former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, and Marine Corps Commandant James Jones: all were cool to the war. Retired General Anthony Zinni, distinguished warrior, diplomat and card-carrying Republican, warned Congress against the “wrong war at the wrong time.” The neocons dismissed them all as “yesterday’s men.”
From anti-discrimination legislative attacks on private property and First Amendment rights to the promotion of “large-scale Third World immigration” that displaces “Western core populations by groups that are culturally different and, in some cases, openly antagonistic”—the neocons are in philosophical tandem with The Left.
… these “illiterate leftists posturing as conservatives,” as Paul Gottfried has dubbed them, have been partial to—even complicit in—the historical elevation of Martin Luther King Jr. above the Founding Fathers. Neocons are always eager to conflate the messages of the two solitudes, even though the founders’ liberty is related to King’s egalitarianism as neoconservatism is related to traditional Republicanism—never the twain shall meet.
About the “sage of Fox News,” Jack Kerwick has reminded me of Krauthammer’s admission, as late as the eve of the 2008 election, that neither he nor George Will could figure out who Obama was: a centrist or a leftist. This, ventures Kerwick, speaks volumes. How anyone could’ve doubted that O was anything but a radical leftist, especially after the Jeremiah Wright thing blew up, is unfathomable. Jack thinks “Krauthammer and co. have zero business doing what they’re doing if they are that blind. And, of course, they got the country into Iraq.”
As to Chucky’s prose. He writes decently enough, but I am never curious enough to complete a column of his. It’s as unexciting as he is.
Chucky Krauthammer is a failed “expert,” for whom public goodwill runs eternal. “So why are insightful commentators whose observations have predictive power generally barred from the national discourse, while neoconservative false prophets are called back for encores?” This last question was posed and answered in “PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES!”:
The answer will not please admirers of the late James Burnham, who blame scheming elites for any popularly accepted project they dislike, be it unwarranted wars or welfare. Contrary to Burnham, elites, media included, can rule only if they represent ideologies that are widely embraced, as the invasion of Iraq was. Today’s news is not what it used to be because a dumbed-down population, well represented in newsrooms, cannot distinguish evidence from assertion and fact from feel-good fiction. News is now nothing but a slick, demand-driven product designed to please – not inform – the populace.
Watch this ceremony at the Dover Air Force Base. Soldiers receive the coffined body of a slain comrade on its arrival in Dover. They handle it with exquisite care, hands clad in white gloves. What a stark, pathos-filled, sad ceremony, every move so tender and respectful.
The real scandal is not the death-benefit short-term lapse, but that American men and women are still dying (and killing) in these dumps for no good reason. What a wanton waste of promise-filled young lives.
A webcam ought to be installed permanently at Dover—a debt clock of sorts—to remind Americans of this G-d-awful grief and waste.
The punditocracy is shouting almost in unison that Russia and Syria have pulled one over us. The US, they say, has been weakened because someone halted the momentum of the American war juggernaut.
You see, the pundits and the pols cannot perceive of greatness outside the state because they are part of the state apparatus; and depend on it for status and income.
Individual Americas who have nothing to gain and only losses to sustain from a war are somehow mistakenly identifying with the state and its emissaries—politicians and pundits—who have everything to gain from the great theatre that is war. “In Syria (and all else), it’s ‘Us’ against ‘Them.'”
Think about it. Who benefits when America goes to war? Not you. Not ordinary Americans. Those who benefit “function within the nimbus of great power” in D.C. and around it—the media-military-congressional-industrial complex.
What happens to the bluster of Bill O’Reilly, his sidekick Dennis the Menace or Charles Krauthammer if the US is no longer dictating the terms of war (lots of it) and peace (too little of it) in the world? Their immense egos suffer. Maybe even their incomes, eventually. But not you, the ordinary American. Krauthammer, ridiculously, equates the failure to go to war against Syria with “Russia supplanting America as regional hegemon.”
But the proof is in the Putin, who stopped a war. Why is stopping a war tantamount to supplanting US power?
“This allows Moscow to supply proxies such as Syria and Iran with weapons while positioning itself as the defender of international law and peace.”
UPDATE II (9/15): Yet another Republican pundit (albeit one of the few talented ones) who depends on The Party for status and income. Here Ann Coulter praises Republican wars.
