Trickle Up Poverty (35 page)
Looming over all, though, is the ongoing threat posed by the teachers unions, and especially the National Education Association, which have done more to permanently diminish the achievement of American students than any other forces we could have imagined. They’ve perpetuated a Marxist agenda since the days of John Dewey, the so-called “father of progressive education,” in the early part of the last century, and they’ve consistently championed policies that lead, not to educational excellence, but to the consolidation of power in their hands.
Through the centralization of education and the watering down of educational standards in order to turn those who are culturally and educationally disadvantaged into members of the permanently disadvantaged underclass in our country, they’ve managed to pervert one of the most sacred institutions in our country.
Hollywood, Liberal Talk Shows, and the Ministry of Propaganda
Mentioning free market capitalism in front of a leftist Democrat is analogous to holding up a cross in front of a vampire. Neither Democrats nor vampires can stand anything resembling truth, and so they shrink away from symbols that remind them of just how devoid of truth and meaning their lives and their politics are. But beyond that, nowhere does the free market render its judgment more harshly on Democrats than in the area of communications and artistic production, specifically broadcast journalism and movies. When you give an audience a choice of whether or not to subject themselves to the anti-American, anti-freedom, anti-religious messages contained in so many leftist news-talk shows and films, Americans vote with their wallets.
The votes are an almost universal collective “nay.”
Like the slow dying of left-leaning newspapers across the country, the film industry is discovering that movies which perpetuate the radical left’s anti-American agenda are box office poison. In the past decade, dozens of anti-American films hit the big screen across America, and they’ve generally all sunk like stones. In the Valley of Elah an anti-war film starring committed lefties Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon, is what the Old York Times calls a film whose “message is that the war in Iraq has damaged this country in ways we have only begun to grasp.”33
Make no mistake: That’s commie-speak for “a film that shows the United States military at its murderous and imperialist worst.” The film’s producers have apparently not yet “begun to grasp” the fact that Americans found the 2007 film itself to be unwatchable, as the movie’s worldwide box office receipts of a mere $29.5 million attest.34
Other America-as-imperialist-pariah movies haven’t even fared that well. Despite boasting such Marxist mega-stars as Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise, the anti-American bomb Lions for Lambs—which drearily summons up a fairly typical leftist assessment of the War in Iraq, college professor Redford is “fighting the good fight” against the war-mongering Bush administration; “opportunistic,” “true-believing,” “conniving” Republican politician Cruise is “compromised”—couldn’t claw its way out of the box office basement. The film grossed only $15 million worldwide,35 hardly enough to pay for the on-location catering during the filming of the movie.
The only Ministry of Propaganda—sanctioned film that scored at the box office was James Cameron’s Avatar, and the reason for its success had a great deal more to do with the movie’s special effects than with its message. Cameron is the director of the mega-hit Titanic and the mother of ugly rhetoric, including his desire to “shoot … those boneheads” who deny man-created global warming.
In fact, interviews with Cameron make it clear that the director’s intent in making Avatar, in addition to trashing America, was to deliver a stinging rebuke to global warming “deniers,” the people who, unlike Cameron, actually possess the intelligence and the savvy to see through the fraudulent “science” underlying Cameron’s cause of choice. Reviewer John Nolte offers the following assessment: It’s “‘Avatar’ as ‘Death Wish 5’ for leftists. A simplistic, revisionist revenge fantasy … if you freakin’ hate the bad guys (America).”36
But if the leftist message is bombing at the box office, it’s finding even less success with its forays into broadcast media. One of the prime examples of that is the left’s flagship radio talk show, Air America, or, more accurately, Hot Air Radio, although to imply that the emptiness of its content is the equivalent to playing Air Guitar is actually an insult to Air Guitar players everywhere. The perpetrators of this broadcasting embarrassment, once they’d exhausted the A-list of lefty guests—Michael Moore, Al Gore, Al Sharpton, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn, Barbra Streisand, and a few dozen other celebrity airheads—had to answer the question, “Where do we go from here?”
The left couldn’t produce anything remotely resembling the intellectual firepower conservatives bring to serious political issues. And even if a large cadre of analysts who could shed light on key political issues from a Marxist perspective were available, the hosts of Air Radio shows simply didn’t have the intelligence or the integrity to delve deeply and dispassionately into the issues.
While supporters of and investors in Air Radio pushed ad nauseam the idea that there is a huge public hungry for talk radio that caters to their liberal sensibilities—in much the same way they pushed the idea that Americans were eager to see their healthcare legislation pass—America wasn’t buying it. A small group of disaffected leftists does not a market make, especially when the marketers and the front people they enlist to represent them can do little more than whine about how unfair it is that conservative ideas and policies are getting so much run.
No matter how trendy and viable liberal talk radio might have seemed, no matter how urgently its “message” was pushed, in the final analysis, air was not enough. The network met its end on January 21, 2010, a victim of its own embarrassingly bad programming and the unsustainability of a message that mercilessly denigrated about 90 percent of the American people.
Left-leaning cable television news-talk network MSNBC would have met the same fate as Air Radio long ago if it weren’t for the fact that it can fall back on the bankroll of its parent network, original TV broadcast behemoth, NBC. Its partner in news broadcast crime, CNN, which was founded in 1980 by one of the original liberal idiots, Ted Turner but has since been taken over by Time Warner, survives despite ratings that reflect the emptiness of its content.
Among the reasons the ratings are so dismal are CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. In Blitzer’s case, the problem is credibility. The CNN news anchor made the mistake of appearing as a contestant on Celebrity Jeopardy. He confirmed what everyone who has ever watched one of his broadcasts knows: that he’s way out of his depth. Blitzer’s painfully embarrassing performance—he ended up thousands of dollars in the hole as the result of being unable to answer questions such as one about where Jesus Christ was born—drew derision even from those on the left.
Long before the Jeopardy fiasco, though, Slate.com’s Jack Shafer observed that “Blitzer draws on such a limited vocabulary that I predict that when he dies and the coroner cores his skull, the world will learn that he possesses a brain the size of a walnut.”37 Keith Olbermann’s brain is not likely to prove much bigger. The angry misogynistic host of MSNBC’s nightly show “Countdown” has alienated even the most hardened leftists with his ugly rants. By the end of 2009, his show was attracting less than 20 percent as many viewers as those who were watching his competition, and even his colleagues at the lowest-rated cable news network were wondering why management was keeping him on.38
One of the important things we need to take away from the fact that television news networks still survive despite ratings so dismal they would have driven unsubsidized businesses out of existence long ago is that, with liberals, what audiences think and what markets select is meaningless. The only thing important to the left is to blast its message out to the public, even if the public is, in increasing numbers, getting wise to the lies that lurk at the foundation of the message.
The left’s answer to the fact that it can’t compete in the marketplace is the same for broadcasting as it has been for banks, health care, and the auto industry: Try to nationalize the radio and television industries. The method they’ve chosen to do that is to revive the Fairness Doctrine, and although it appears to be legislatively dead in its current iteration, it lives on in the hearts and minds of free-market-hating liberals everywhere. The original Fairness Doctrine, passed in 1949, demanded that airtime must be devoted equally to both “sides” of any political issue.
In 1987, the Federal Communications Commission repealed the Fairness Doctrine on the grounds that it violated the free speech rights of broadcasters and that as a result there was less broadcast time devoted to important issues. Despite the obvious constitutional challenges a law that reintroduces the Fairness Doctrine would inevitably face, the Obama administration insists, unsuccessfully so far, on trying to bring it back through the legislative process.39
Among the obvious problems for the left in trying to reinstitute the fairness doctrine is that only one TV news network even comes close to presenting more than one side of any political issue today, and that’s Fox News. CNN and MSNBC are radically skewed toward favoring coverage of issues only through a liberal lens and through hosting liberal guests. This is not to mention that most MSNBC broadcasts can be characterized as scurrilous and invective-intensive at best. The law’s target is conservative talk radio, its intent to silence conservative talk show hosts.
Ignoring the fact that in all the media outlets they run the left shows no signs of allowing opposing viewpoints to be heard, they continue to promote this egregious affront to true fairness, which involves allowing the people who access such services to make their own choices. Where that happens, the will of the people is clear, and Marxists are routed.
Even more serious, though, “fairness” legislation, which would be the communications equivalent of Outcome-Based Education, would put the United States on track to become what Canada has become where free speech is concerned. If you thought American college campuses were bastions of leftist hate speech and repression of any speech not in compliance with the rules of the Marxist thought police, perhaps you haven’t tried to speak out in Canada.
Our neighbor to the north is one of the most repressive countries outside of the Arab world when it comes to allowing its citizens (and its visitors, for that matter) to express themselves. One conservative American writer was publicly warned before she visited the country that things she might say could be construed as “hate speech” under Canadian law and that she could well face prosecution in Ottawa, where she was scheduled to appear. She needn’t have worried about being arrested for what she said, though. Several hundred people who opposed her appearance showed up brandishing rocks and sticks, and the Canadian authorities caved in and canceled the speaker’s appearance, fearing for her “safety.”
The questions surrounding the incident focused on whether the Canadian police, who should have dispersed the mob, were actually acting in sympathy with the political left, who favor being able to shut down such performances if they disagree with the opinions likely to be expressed.40
Bring Back HUAC
In addition to being pervasive in American movies, media, and classrooms, anti-Americanism has found champions throughout the Obama administration. We have elected as president a man who conspicuously bows to Islamic leaders and apologizes to Muslims for America’s bad behavior. Our Commander in Chief seeks out photo ops with the likes of communist dictator Hugo Chávez while weakening our ties with our strongest and most important allies. He’s alienated England and Israel by insulting their leaders and siding with a world hostile to Israel’s presence in the Middle East through his insistence on preconditions that would help cripple Israel’s economy as part of a deal to promote even more fruitless Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
Much has been made of the communists and communist sympathizers in the Obama administration, and of the power given to the appropriately named “czars” the president has appointed without Congressional vetting or, apparently, without any vetting whatsoever in so many cases, to oversee everything from energy policy to executive pay. The administration’s approach smacks of the same totalitarianism that Thomas Friedman seems to favor so strongly when he talks about how much better China’s one-party system is than our own. Friedman is getting his wish. The United States is moving rapidly toward a one-party dictatorship in which decisions about every aspect of our lives are made centrally, in much the same way they have been in communist regimes during the last century.
Obama’s left-hand man, Attorney General Eric Holder, a true coward if there ever was one, insulted a majority of Americans by calling them cowards for not engaging in a public debate on race, this in the only country in the history of this planet’s civilizations ever to have granted full citizenship rights to a racial-ethnic group that had formerly been enslaved. Perhaps our Attorney General is unaware of the debate that raged in the mid 20th century when we created legislation that guaranteed those rights. Perhaps he’s unaware of the brave people, both black and white, who stood up for human rights as our country made itself over into something more honorable, something more humane than it had been.
Holder’s ignorance, or disavowal, of American history extends well beyond his inability to acknowledge the true transformation that has taken place over the last fifty years. It now encompasses—in contravention of both reason and morality—his promoting giving terrorists the same rights to protection under the law as those afforded American citizens; in keeping with his willful dismissal of all things just, he’s expressed his support for prosecuting the officials in the Bush administration who lawfully did their duty in actually trying to protect America from the same terrorists Holder now openly advocates for.