Update # II: ‘Redacted’: De Palma Tells The Truth

Film, Hollywood, Media

“There’s one pesky problem with all the indignant huffing and puffing” over the film “Redacted”; it’s “based on a true story. It’s a docudrama. Moral grandstanding notwithstanding, our mighty mediacrats have failed to mention that minor detail.”

“De Palma has, at least, bothered to commemorate the vanquished young victim at the center of ‘Redacted.’ To Rupert Murdoch’s protégés in Mainstream Media, Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi is redundant, a castaway. The same broadcasters who won’t quit braying when an American youngster is harmed pan De Palma for widening his lens to include an Iraqi girl’s ghastly demise at the hands of American soldiers…”

The complete column is “Redacted: De Palma Tells The Truth,” now on WorldNetDaily.com.

Update #I: I’m pro-truth, not anti-troops. For those who can’t Google–or rely on Michelle Malkin to verify facts for them–this case is well-documented. The culprits are sitting in jail, one for 90 years. The idea that individuals should shut up to serve what the mediacrats and their masters in Washington declare to be best for the fictitious collective is … fascistic.

Update #II: Americans don’t want to see a miserable film about a war most don’t support and aren’t able to bring to an end, thanks in no part to the lapdogs that lap up the propaganda perpetrated by what I’ve dubbed the Media-Military-Congressional-Industrial-Complex.
Said offenders have surmised Americans won’t see the film because they want the army to continue mucking about in Iraq. Who’s to say Americans are not simply avoiding a miserable film, about a miserable reality they can do nothing about? Wake up lapdogs! The likes of Ann Coulter are getting rich off the war; you ordinary suckers are paying for it—some with their lives, and all with a devalued dollar and depreciated assets.

As for those who would like to decide what narrative will power a De Palma film: Why can’t De Palma tell any sorry story he likes? Why must he do what these collectivists think he should do? Since when must a director be directed in the choice of his subject matter? So much for our dwindling freedoms. Live and let live.

Asking “what is De Palma’s motive or justification” for producing his film is like asking me why I inveigh against injustices as I see them. I’m a political and cultural commentator. If you want to read non-controversial nonsense, then read Cosmopolitan. Similarly, filmmakers are like novelists; the one writes about things he thinks are important and have touched him; the other depicts them on celluloid. (Personally, I like films like “Dressed to Kill”—thrillers. As I say in the column, Hollywood no longer entertains me.) This reminds me of the foul attacks I got when, starting in 2002, I protested the unjust, illegal, unconstitutional Iraq war. It’s no different.

On Idiot Ideologues Who Pan Paul

Elections 2008, Ilana Mercer, Individual Rights, Liberty, Private Property

A word about the tinny ideologues who pan Paul because he isn’t perfect: They hate freedom, plain and simple. They don’t know what it is to live without it. They are mollycoddled milksops. Here’s why:

I don’t agree with Paul about everything—I voiced my reservations about his understanding of Islam and the Muslim world in “Some Advice for Ron Paul.”

Without going into it, I don’t much care for his position on abortion. However, unlike Paul’s detractors, I happen to know what living without freedom is like. Paul is as close to The Good Life we could hope to come. Only idiots encased in an armor of worthless ideology—worthless because it exists in the arid arena of their minds, not on earth—would turn their noses up at the prospect of Paul.

Let me share with you a little something: I left South Africa with the proceeds from the sale of my apartment stashed in the soles of my shoes. Had I been apprehended smuggling my property out of that country, I’d have gone to jail with my husband. We both stood taller on that trip. As I am in the habit of sending funds to family, I’ve seen firsthand the same creeping oppression sneak-up on Americans. We’ve already seen the South-African model of detention-without-trial slowly become part of the American legal landscape.

I love life and liberty. Almost more than anything I want to keep what is mine—not to pay the mafia shakedown fee levied on my home (property tax), which means I can never really own my abode, and that ownership is merely nominal. When such prospects loom, I seize them. Being an individualist who loves life and liberty means seizing the day; it means that when one encounters a man whose understanding of freedom and individual rights approximates—if not parallels—your own, you seize the moment.

This is not to say one ought to become a mindless “Paulbearer.” Some have; I have not. (More criticism of Paul’s position on immigration is in “Ron Paul’s Electability.”) Nor does it mean that one turns into an asinine detractor, while deluding oneself that rejecting imperfection is tantamount to a show of principle. What the love of liberty means is seizing the best opportunity at a revolution one has. Those who stand on the sidelines are pussies, and worse, slaves to abstractions.

Update: Barely a Blog friend Steven Browne has continued the thread here. Lest I be identified with the treason faction of the liberty movement—the rank pinkos who promote open borders to the detriment of liberty and property in the US—let me add that Dr. Paul is not sufficiently restrictionist on immigration. As I’ve written, “When government orchestrates an unfettered movement of people into an interventionist state, in which the rights to property, free association, and self defense are already heavily circumscribed by the state—it is guilty of unadulterated social engineering, central planning, and worse.” Aiding and abetting this is philosophical treason.
Our Immigration Archive, in which I’ve demolished most of the feeble arguments advanced by those who are laissez faire on immigration. Admittedly, if one is an anarchist, a meaningless position, then the open-borders stance is the only principled one. But since I’m not a kook (anarchist), but belong to the respectable classical liberal tradition, my position is perfectly congruent philosophically.

Paul was wrong to imply, reductively, that Islamic terrorism in general and September 11 in particular are the sole consequences of American foreign policy. Libertarians cannot persist in such unidirectional formulations. As I’ve said previously, our adventurous foreign policy is a necessary precondition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one, given that Muslims today are at the center of practically every conflict across the world. The received leftist wisdom that the Arabs were (and remain) hapless and helpless victims of the West is false and patronizing. As scholars such as Efraim and Inari Karsh have shown, “Middle Eastern history is essentially the culmination of long-standing indigenous trends, passions and patterns of behavior rather than an externally imposed dictate.”

Ultimately, a rational suspicion of power, upon which libertarians pride themselves, must be predicated on distrusting all power, not only American power.

Updated: The Accursed CNN/YouTube Debates: What to Expect

Elections 2008, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Republicans

You surely recall the kind of questions asked by the liberal media’s brain trust, Anderson Vanderbilt Cooper, during the last Democratic debate. Refresh your memory with “Jackass Cooper & The 1-Trick Donkeys.”

Darling Anderson is an intellectual pigmy. Affirmative appointments—the dumbing down and feminization of the media—has meant that we are not only subjected, day-in-and-day-out, to soft news stories about pets and pestilence (flu, food poisoning, childcare, the nation’s ballooning bigotry and weight); but also that competent, critical, hard-nosed, older reporters (Jack Cafferty, for example) are stashed behind the scenes.

You can detect the difference when one of the androgynous front-people is replaced for a session—things look up somewhat when poor Miles O’Brien, for example, is allowed occasionally into the studio to interview a challenging subject. Suddenly real questions are asked, then, rather than, “How hopeful are you, Mr. ambassador, about the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations?” To be sealed with a, “Thanks for your insights.” I’m sure O’Brien’s a pinko, but he has a brain, unlike girls such as Don Lemon, Cooper, and Kyra Phillips.

In any event, with the YouTube questions for the St. Petersburg, Florida debate to be selected by the CNN “V” Brigade (“V” is not for victory), rest assured that the Republican candidates will be honing their Democratic bona fides. I predict whiny demands such as, “What are you going to do about making taxpayers pay for my health care?” Or, “When will you join Gore in admitting there’s a global-warming crisis?” Economic nonsense about energy independence and renewability will also abound.

Update: The debate was excellent. Cooper did a 180 degree about-face from the previous YouTube debate he hosted, and I described in “Jackass Cooper & The 1-Trick Donkeys.” Compared to the cretins Cooper picked to pose questions to the Democrats, the questions selected this time were conservative and clever. The demographic was different, sure, but so were Cooper and his cohorts at CNN. Perhaps they got the message that quirky would not cut it. Hey, perhaps he read “Jackass Cooper & The 1-Trick Donkeys

Update # II (Nov. 29): Further impressions about the debates: Dr. Paul, of course, was given the least amount of time. Also, I wish he had remembered to count the IRS among the departments he’d abolish, before the phony saccharine Huckabee muscled in.
Huckabee’s Fair-Tax scheme will not see the demise of the IRS—it may change its name, but not its function. The Fair Tax—a contradiction in terms—will not necessarily see a reduction in taxation. Bruce Bartlett has demolished that myth in “Fair Tax, Flawed Tax.” If anything, and as I wrote in the “Flat Tax Limits State Theft”:
“In a free enterprise system, people do not pay for goods and services in proportion to their income (or else Bill Gates would be paying a million dollars or so for a loaf of bread). Rather, they all pay the same amount. The fairest method of taxation then would be a poll or head tax, where we are all taxed equally. That the poor would not afford much would limit government spending like nothing else.”
Choke those chickens! Huckabee is such a spender; out of one side of his mouth he disavows the national; out of the other, he vows to fund the space program, which can be done best privately.
On a more intuitive level: There were two honest-to-goodness, plainspoken non-politicos on stage last night: Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo. Very shortly after George Bush was elected, I told you he was not a good man. I was vindicated. You can trust me to make sound character judgments. You’re used to the analytical me; today you got gut instinct. (In rational individuals there is no bifurcation.)
Next: Did you notice how sour and superior John McCain behaved? It was as though he came down from the heavens to grace the rest with his presence. Give me a break! It goes without saying that he was one of two pinko candidates who eschewed carrying a gun. The other was gunless, gun regulator, Benito Giuliani. BOOOOO! Mitt Romney supports farm subsidies, which hurt third-world farmers immensely. Doing away with those would be infinitely more productive than sending more money down the African foreign aid rathole.

‘The False Conservative’

Christian Right, Conservatism, Elections 2008

You read it all before here, in “Huck’s for Huck – Paul’s for America.” Now Bob Novak reinforces, in “The False Conservative,” what we’ve already documented about Mike Huckabee the statist:
Who would respond to criticism from the Club for Growth by calling the conservative, free-market campaign organization the “Club for Greed”? That sounds like Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards, all Democrats preaching the class struggle. In fact, the rejoinder comes from Mike Huckabee, who has broken out of the pack of second-tier Republican presidential candidates to become a serious contender — definitely in Iowa and perhaps nationally.

Huckabee is campaigning as a conservative, but serious Republicans know that he is a high-tax, protectionist advocate of big government and a strong hand in the Oval Office directing the lives of Americans. Until now, they did not bother to expose the former governor of Arkansas as a false conservative because he seemed an underfunded, unknown nuisance candidate. Now that he has pulled even with Mitt Romney for the Iowa caucuses and might make more progress, the beleaguered Republican Party has a frightening problem.

The rise of evangelical Christians as the force that blasted the GOP out of minority status during the past generation always contained an inherent danger: What if these new Republican acolytes supported not merely a conventional conservative but one of their own? That has happened with Huckabee, a former Baptist minister educated at Ouachita Baptist University and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The danger is a serious contender for the nomination who passes the litmus test of social conservatives on abortion, gay marriage and gun control but is far removed from the conservative-libertarian model of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

There is no doubt about Huckabee’s record during a decade in Little Rock. He was regarded by fellow Republican governors as a compulsive tax-and-spender. He increased the Arkansas tax burden 47 percent, boosting the levies on gasoline and cigarettes. When he lost 100 pounds and decided to press his new lifestyle on the American people, he was hardly being a Goldwater-Reagan libertarian….

Read the rest here.