“The decision to end the show now, or ever, is a painful one, as it risks putting asunder hundreds of close friendships that have developed over the last eight years,” said executive producers David Shore, Katie Jacobs and Hugh Laurie, “but also because the show itself has been a source of great pride to everyone involved.

The producers have always imagined House as an enigmatic creature;  he should never be the last one to leave the party.  How much better to disappear before the music stops, while there is still some promise and mystique in the air.”

Now’s as good a time as any for a post-mortem on one of the quirkiest, most interesting character shows of the last decade. “House’s” focus on a thoroughly unlikeable character was risky, and it paid off; the creators’ decision to make him a thoroughgoing atheist constantly at conflict with others subtly made the case for the bankruptcy of his ideology.  Or, at the very least, it offered philosophical contrast.

Most famously, “House” featured a very pro-life episode in 2007, “Fetal Position,” in which an unborn child reached out of the womb and touched House’s hand, mirroring the famous photograph. That was mirrored by a pro-choice episode that same season that made the case for abortion for a religious rape victim. That was House’s style.

When I interviewed Shore for my latest book, Primetime Propaganda, here’s what he told me about the abortion episodes: “As you can imagine, we’re in Hollywood, we’ve got our share of rabid left wing Democrats here. And … our writing staff has the makeup you’d basically expect of a Hollywood writing staff, and I remember when we were doing ‘Fetal Position,’ there is that image of that little finger of the fetus clasping Dr. House’s hand. And it was a powerful image. And we recognized at the time that’s going to go up on billboards and websites for pro-life organizations. But it was true, and it was accurate, and it was real. And the last thing I want to do is, I happen to be pro-choice, but the last thing I want to do is to give false information or convince people of my argument. I think that’s just not the way to approach things. It’s a difficult choice, and it is a difficult issue.  And I think treating it as anything different than that is dishonest and ultimately counterproductive.”

Shore’s honesty on politics meant that he admitted there was bias against conservatives in Hollywood. As he told me, “there is an assumption in this town that everybody is on the left side of the spectrum, and that the few people on the right, I think people look at them somewhat aghast, and I’m sure it doesn’t help them.” Those are the words of a truth teller. And in its own way, when it wasn’t burdened down with the typical hallmarks of leftist Hollywood (hot bisexuals, open marriages, and the like), “House” was a uniquely truth-telling show.

And they aren’t.  They’re commercials targeted to the younger demographic.  And as the Super Bowl itself shows, the younger demographic isn’t where the cash is.  The advertising agencies had better wake up and smell the coffee: older, more conservative audiences are the ones that should be targeted now.

The networks and the NFL get it: we’re getting old as a country.  Seven of the last eight Super Bowl halftime shows have featured Boomer and Gen X icons: Paul McCartney (2005), the Rolling Stones (2006), Prince (2007), Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (2008), Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (2009), The Who (2010), and Madonna (2012)?  Perhaps the under-40 crowd remembers Madonna, but if they do, it’s in a very vague half-sleep state.

And yet America’s commercial advertisers seem to think that the most valuable audience is the 18-49 crowd.  For years, American advertising has been run on the notion that young audiences are more valuable than older audiences; that if you grab a youngster’s brand loyalty early, you’ll grab ‘em for life; and that older audiences are set in their ways.  That’s how so much liberal television has been sneaked past advertising honchos – young people tend to be liberal, and so the honchos figure that liberal television will appeal to the most lucrative demographic.  Even if more older people watch than younger people, the advertisers figure, they need to greenlight young-skewing programs to hit the target demo.

But the Super Bowl gives the lie to that.  The viewership was enormous, of course – over 111 million people watched the game – but the interesting part of the ratings breakdown is the age breakdown.  Among adults 18-49, the Super Bowl scored an incredible 40.5 rating; each ratings point is worth approximately 1.159 million viewers.  That means that somewhere around 47 million people aged 18-49 watched the game.  Where did the other 64 million people come from?  The older crowd and the younger crowd.  It’s fair to assume that the vast majority of that rating came from the older crowd (Nielsen age breakdowns are either pre-programmed into television devices, or manually input).  In other words, at least as many people 50+ watched the game as people 18-49.  Hence the entertainment choices at halftime.

Now, that doesn’t automatically mean that older audiences are worth targeting, of course.  But the Nielsens themselves say they are – a joint study by CBS (which nobody under the age of 50 has ever watched) and the Nielsens shows that, in the words of CBS Chief Research Officer David Poltrack, “There is no link, none, between the age of the specified demographic delivery of the campaign and the sales generated by that campaign.”  That’s why there was a seeming gap between the content of the commercials, which skewed younger, and the content of the halftime show, which skewed older: the networks understand that to get viewers, they need to aim older.

If the advertisers ever catch on, television may have to skew more conservative, too.

Perhaps that was the real purpose of Obama’s routine appearances on late night television as president of the United States, an unprecedented breach of traditional decorum: he wanted to make it routine for all candidates to appear on the shows run by his allies.  By appearing himself, Obama essentially dared anyone who opposes him to take the seat opposite the Jon Stewarts and Jimmy Fallons of the world – and, as they have to, Republicans have taken the bait.  That’s why we’ve seen Rick Perry reading a top ten list on Letterman about his debate foibles.  That’s why Bachmann was on Fallon.  That’s why McCain deigned to appear with Stewart, even knowing what was coming.

Dennis Miller​ was both brave and correct when he bashed Jay Leno​ for kissing Obama’s royal arse last week.  He actually recommended that Leno hire Obama after Obama loses his re-election effort: “I could see you guys doing comedy bits on here where you come out as Carnut the Magnificent and you have the turban on and the mechanic overalls and he reads ‘You are correct, sir!’ off a teleprompter.”

More likely, Obama will end up hiring all of these comedians as his court jesters sometime in the near future.  Their ratings are dropping, and their biases are now obvious.  And we already know the relationships are good: the Comedy Central writers are Obama’s brain trust of hilarity, writing jokes for his speeches and giving him tips on how to win over an audience.

What happened to Rep. Bachmann is nothing new.  It’s just the most obvious crack in the solid wall of propaganda put out by the late night left that it bashes both sides equally.  The “Lyin’ Ass Bitch” slam was planned in advance – Questlove tweeted shortly before she appeared, “aight late night walkon song devotees: you love it when we snark: this next one takes the cake. ask around cause i aint tweeting title.”

Read full article at Front Page Magazine.

So, because you all enjoyed that list so much, and because I apparently have a death wish, it’s time for another: The Top 10 Most Overrated Actors/Actresses of All Time.

Unlike last time, I will claim that these are objective facts, not subjective opinions, so that all my critics may have full liberty to attack me (To those same critics who claimed last time that I phrased my opinions in an “objective” manner, this is called being facetious. That means I’m kidding. Also, seriously? That was your criticism?).

Here are my criteria: are they considered great actors/actresses? If not, they can’t make the list (sorry, Rob Schneider). Are they actually great actors? If so, they can’t make the list (sorry, Laurence Olivier). Only those who are considered great actors but are not, in fact, great actors can make this list. Even then, I’m not claiming that these are bad actors unless I explicitly say that I am.

So, here we go. In the words of Han Solo, I’ve got a bad feeling about this …

10. George Clooney: Not a great actor. Not a good actor. Not really an actor. If you’ve ever seen a movie with Clooney where you didn’t say to yourself, “Hey, I’m watching George Clooney” every thirty seconds or so, you haven’t seen a George Clooney movie. You’re mixing him up with Kate Winslet. He’s a D actor. Dull in “Michael Clayton.” Dreary in “Up In The Air.” Dreadful in “Syriana.” Dismal in “Batman and Robin.” He’s not a low-rent Cary Grant. He’s an affordable-housing Robert Wagner.

9. Dustin Hoffman: He turned in some tremendous performances in his early days (most notably “Papillon,” “Kramer vs. Kramer,” and “Tootsie”), then became a caricature of himself. He has not done anything worthwhile since “Tootsie,” in fact. Even in his better performances, he is a bit too mannered for my taste, perhaps an effect of his method acting. Laurence Olivier thought the same thing. When they were working on “Marathon Man” together, Hoffman showed up on set after having not slept for several days in order to get “in character.” Olivier took one look at him and said, “Dear boy, it’s called acting.”

8. Spencer Tracy: He’s immensely likable on screen, but he’s not a great actor by any stretch of the imagination. Light comedy is his forte (watch the original “Father of the Bride” or “Adam’s Rib”), but he’s too stolid in heavy drama like “Bad Day at Black Rock.” He’s always Spencer Tracy, no matter what he’s in. That’s more a characteristic of older actors who were movie stars rather than actors (see John Wayne, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, etc.), but those actors are rarely listed among the best of all time. Tracy routinely is.

7. Katharine Hepburn: Overwrought, overhyped, and overblown. Hepburn is the same in virtually all of her films, save “The Rainmaker,” “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” and “On Golden Pond.” She tends to chew the scenery, and she never inhabits a part; she insists that the part inhabits her. Her films with Tracy are just as formulaic as Hope and Crosby (and no one ever called Hope and Crosby great actors). Many critics loved her because she wasn’t afraid to lose her femininity at the door, but that made her a hard actress to love onscreen.

6. Gregory Peck: Atticus Finch is supposed to have a Southern accent. Joseph Mengele is supposed to have a German accent. And characters are supposed to be different from each other. Philip Green in “Gentleman’s Agreement” is not supposed to be the same character as Joe Bradley in “Roman Holiday” or Captain Ahab in “Moby Dick.” Peck could not play pathos, could not play vulnerability, and could not play real anger. Like Tracy, the best word to describe him would be stolid.

5. Leonardo DiCaprio: He shows flashes of brilliance, then subsumes them in gigantic waves of mannerisms. When he burst onto the scene with “Titanic,” I thought he was going to be one of the great ones – for someone that age to turn in a performance that good in a movie that bad is worth noting. But watch him in “Gangs of New York,” and you find yourself laughing out loud at the notion that this whiny nobody is supposed to be the tough guy. Watch him in “The Man in the Iron Mask,” and he can’t even decide whether to pronounce Athos as “Aaathos” or “Aye-thos.” Watch him in “The Departed” – well, don’t bother to watch him in “The Departed.” Somebody has been whispering in his ear that great acting is about being showy. It isn’t. It’s about being subtle. We can only hope he heeds that warning before he ends up like Dustin Hoffman.

4. Bill Murray: Great in comedy (see “Tootsie” and “Groundhog Day”), laughably awful in everything else. He turned in what may be the single worst performance in the history of film in the remake of “The Razor’s Edge.” It is a wonder that the director of that film did not somehow mix up Murray and a block of wood during the shoot. It is unthinkable that he was nominated for an Academy Award for the most boring movie of all time, “Lost In Translation;” sitting around mumbling does not make for great acting. Here’s the thing about emotion on film; we should actually see it. I understand the idea of allowing things to simmer beneath the surface. But that doesn’t mean your performance style should invariably mirror a Tiki mask.

3. Tom Hanks: Bill Murray with a touch more emotion, Robin Williams with a touch less. Light comedy is fine (“Big”), everything else borders on the maudlin. “Castaway” is unintentionally hilarious (rent it and do bits on it), he’s a hole in the screen in “Saving Private Ryan,” and his performance in “Forrest Gump” is one-note. He’s not a bad actor, but he’s certainly not a great one. He is a great producer, though – for “Band of Brothers” alone, he should be enshrined among the best.

2. Meryl Streep: Undoubtedly I will be hung by my toenails for this pick. She is a marvel technically, but she’s always cold. I can’t think of a single film in which she has reached me emotionally. I always get the feeling while watching her movies that I’m watching a documentary about acting for a master class; I never get the feeling that her characters are real. On this one, I agree with Katharine Hepburn, who couldn’t stand Streep’s acting: “Click, click, click,” she once said, talking about the gears you can see turning inside Streep’s head.

1. Jack Nicholson: He sucks in everything. It’s that simple. Anyone who considers him a great actor ought to get his/her head examined. I understand that he’s a hero to the ‘60s generation because he did drugs and got murdered for psychedelic “freedom” in “Easy Rider.” That doesn’t excuse him for cursing film with his presence for the next forty years. He has no versatility whatsoever. He is always a cynical/menacing fellow with “reserves of depth” (unless he has no “reserves of depth”). He is the worst case of miscasting in movie history in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (McMurphy is supposed to be a huge red-headed Irishman, not a 5’10” counterculture weasel), a glaring problem in a film that is otherwise impeccably cast (Brad Dourif as Billy is one of the great overlooked performances in the annals of film). Nicholson over Peter Fonda in “1997″ is a cosmic injustice. He is boring, predictable, and what’s more, he’s pretentious and annoying. 12 Oscar nominations for this hack testifies to the idiocy of the Baby Boomer generation that made him famous.

That, of course, was their right, although they didn’t use similar discretion when some of their local radio hosts allowed Mike Tyson to fantasize about Sarah Palin being raped.

Where’s the reaction to Susan Sarandon calling the pope a Nazi? Perhaps you didn’t hear about that one, because she’s a Hollywood celebrity rather than a conservative country singer – and because Hollywood celebrities are usually granted full leeway to say idiotic things. In fact, Benedict served in the Hitler Youth unwillingly and was never a Nazi Party member. He deserted before the end of World War II and turned himself over to the Americans.

Now, I disagree with the Pope on a wide variety of issues: he received anti-Semitic priest Rev. Tadeusz Rydzyk in 2007, he made a rather rotten speech at Auschwitz in May 2006, he was slow to respond to a British-born bishop who denied the Holocaust, and his perspective on the Middle East conflict is problematic.

Nonetheless, he has stood tall against terror on many occasions, and he has criticized in strong terms both moral relativism and radical Islam.

So what prompted the Nazi reference by Sarandon?

Nothing. She just made it, as though it were perfectly obvious to everyone that the Pope is worthy of total disdain. This from a woman whose idea of fun is being on the receiving end of projectile vomit.

Will the media decry her in the same way it did Hank Williams Jr.? Of course not. The good news is that the public probably will. As we’ve detailed over and over on Big Hollywood, Americans aren’t fond of stars who take advantage of our goodwill to be outrageously liberal. Sarandon will surely feel the brunt of these comments at her next box office appearance.

There’s a familiar adage that recognizing you have a problem is the first step toward recovery. And Hollywood certainly has a problem with discrimination against conservatives. 

As I detailed in my new book, “Primetime Propaganda,” Hollywood insiders routinely discriminate against conservatives, believing them to be untalented hacks and political barbarians undeserving of a paycheck. 

I spoke with top executives, writers, and producers in the industry who agreed that discrimination is common – and some even celebrated it.

But many in Hollywood continued to deny this truth. Marta Kauffman of “Friends” fame – whom I interviewed, and who told me that her writers room was made up of liberals – dismissed such criticisms were “silly.” 

Patrick Goldstein of The Los Angeles Times said that such accusations were largely unsubstantiated, despite the tape I released.

Now, however, the worm is turning. Last week, for the first time, Hollywood openly acknowledged that it has a discrimination problem against conservatives. 

Read the full piece here.

So where are all those liberals who opposed McCarthyism now, when the evidence of such discrimination is out in the open?  Where are they, condemning those like Vin Di Bona (America’s Funniest Home Videos), who celebrates discrimination, or Nicholas Meyer (Star Trek II, IV, and VI), who hopes discrimination takes place?  Where are they, following up on comments by David Shore (House) that conservatives have it rough in Hollywood, or responding to Leonard Goldberg’s (Blue Bloods, Charlie’s Angels) accusations of anti-conservative blacklisting in the industry?

Nowhere to be found.

And where is the Dean of First Amendment rights in Hollywood?

Missing.

I’ve put in two calls to Norman Lear (All in the Family), perhaps the most-respected show creator in Hollywood history.  Neither has been returned.  The Hollywood Reporter has called him.  No response.  This despite the fact that an organization he co-founded – the Caucus for Producers, Writers and Directors, is being torn apart as a result of the comments made by Di Bona, and despite the fact that the same Caucus now refuses to pass an anti-discrimination resolution.

Where is this champion of First Amendment freedoms?  This is the same Norman Lear who railed against the Family Viewing Hour back in the 1980s, filing a lawsuit to prevent its implementation on First Amendment grounds.  This is the same Norman Lear who founded People for the American Way in order to preserve his liberal interpretation of the First Amendment.  This is the same Norman Lear who spent $8.1 million to buy an original copy of the Declaration of Independence so that he could tour the country and give Americans a first-hand look at their “birth certificate” firsthand.

Norman Lear says he “love[s] being associated with the First Amendment.”  He explained at the Ford Hall Forum that “Literature, the vehicle of ideas, must be unrestricted by the political, religious, or moral dictates of the controlling group of the day.  There can be no freedom of expression in the full sense, Mill said, unless all facets of life can be portrayed, no matter how repulsive the disclosures may be to some people.  ‘Those who desire to suppress an opinion deny its truth,’ Mill continued, ‘but they are not infallible.’”

Lear constantly focuses on the “Moral Majority mind-set,” which he says stifles freedom of speech. But today, it is the Hollywood left that violates freedom of speech.  Lear once stated, “if we agree that the American experiment is based on the conviction that a healthy society is best maintained not by an attempt to impose uniformity, but through a free and open interchange of differing opinions, then the dogma of the Religious New Right violates the spirit of the First Amendment – and the spirit of liberty.”

It is not the Religious New Right, as Lear terms them, but the Hollywood left that attempts to impose uniformity, violating the spirit of the First Amendment in the process.  Norman Lear must lead the charge against discrimination in Hollywood. If he does not, he is worse than a hypocrite – he is a partisan hack who uses the First Amendment as a club when it suits him and a discardable shibboleth when it does not.  Lear would then be emblematic of the entire Hollywood establishment, which whines about blacklisting when it targets communists but practices it regularly with regard to political conservatives.

It’s time for Norman Lear to stand up and be counted, to speak truth to power.  If he leads, the Hollywood left will follow.  That would be a true act of heroism.

I began receiving emails from underground conservatives in Hollywood thanking me for revealing what everyone in town knows but few could confirm: that liberal Hollywood kills careers of those with whom it disagrees. I even got a few calls from liberals congratulating me on my attempts to open up the industry to different political viewpoints.

But traditional Hollywood remained silent. They were unruffled by the revelation that many in their industry hire and fire out of ideological bigotry. They didn’t even see it as controversial.

Then Lionel Chetwynd stepped up.

For those who don’t know Lionel, a multiple Emmy-award nominee for his television writing and the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.” Lionel is also a member of an elite honor society called the Caucus for Producers, Writers and Directors. The Caucus was co-created by television icon Norman Lear in 1977 in order to promote “creative freedom” and “quality and diversity of all television.”

Unfortunately, Di Bona is a high-ranking member of the Caucus. Disgusted by Di Bona’s admissions, Lionel quit the Caucus. He was soon joined by mega-producer Norman Powell. “I knew most of my fellow members looked upon [conservative] political positions … as distasteful,” Chetwynd wrote in his resignation letter. “What I know understand is the disgust was not for their views, but for their very person. Such people, Mr. Shapiro’s sources make clear, must be silenced, and it is therefore proper to make them suffer discrimination.”

The fallout was immediate and intense. The New York Times covered it. So did The Hollywood Reporter and Variety.

But was Hollywood upset? Of course not.

Read full piece here.

The media has jumped all over the story.  Or rather, they’ve jumped all over the wrong story.  When in doubt, attack the messenger. 

Rather than focusing on the tape we started to release yesterday through Big Hollywood, Townhall, HotAir, and other websites, the left has focused almost exclusively on a one-and-a-half page section of “Primetime Propaganda”: the Sesame Street section.  They’re claiming that I call Big Bird a pinko (nope), that I say that Sesame Street is a socialist haven (wrong) and that I am deeply upset by Sesame Street’s use of liberal pop culture icons like Katy Perry and Neil Patrick Harris (not so much). 

They should probably just read the book.  In the book, I do detail Sesame Street’s historic liberal tilt – the former VP of Children’s Television Workshop, Mike Dann, told me that the show was “underwritten and created primarily for black children, Spanish-speaking children.  It was not made for the sophisticated or the middle class … there’s no written material in a black household.  But there is television.”  This sounds like typical soft bigotry of low expectations material.  

In the 1980s, Sesame Street staffers talked about using the show to preach to kids about divorce; after September 11, the show creators decided to tackle peaceful conflict resolution (an odd topic, implying as it does either that we should peacefully resolve our problems with those who want to fly planes into buildings, or that our children need training in not beating up those of different cultures).  

Sesame Street’s liberalism is soft and overarching, not intrusive and annoying. The Sesame Street website lectures Americans about their deep, dark cultural biases ordering parents to examine “your own cultural assumptions and biases” as a “good place to begin your anti-bias work.”  The website also tells parents to “try to use gender-neutral language … [use] words such as firefighter, flight attendant, garbage collector, and humankind to replace the use of ‘man’ as a generic noun or ending.”  The goal, of course, is to parrot the feminist line about language’s inherent sexism.  The website also encourages parents to find toys and books with characters “that break stereotypes about men and women, for example, dolls for boys and building toys and puzzles for girls.”  Larry Summers has amply debunked such nonsense – it’s leftist utopian thinking at its finest, fostered with your tax dollars. 

Nobody in the media has bothered to examine the actual evidence with regard to Sesame Street.  But that’s no surprise – they’d rather shoot the messenger than listen to the tape. 

Sadly for them, this is only the beginning.  We’ll see how long they can ignore the real story.

Only one problem: last week she proved that not only was she a raging blacklister, she proved that she was an ignoramus.

—–

It all went down on last Thursday night’s show.  Maddow decided to “debunk” Mike Huckabee’s “Learn Our History” program, a rethinking of the American journey from the conservative point of view.  Specifically, Maddow had a problem with Huckabee’s “new and improved past, a revised American history carefully constructed to make you feel more comfortable than you might otherwise feel about our national history.”  She then picked out one specific example – the left’s favorite example: “You may remember the House Un-American Activities Committee.  Part of that was Senator Joe McCarthy red-baiting the living heck out of the entertainment industry … In 1947, Ronald Reagan testified before that committee as a friendly witness, as the president of the Screen Actors Guild.  And in 2011, Mike Huckabee reimagines all of this as six words in his animated hagiography of Ronald Reagan for kids: … ‘He worked against Communism in Hollywood.’”  She then proceeded to attempt to blacklist the company that did the animation for the Learn Our History series, explaining, “If you know who brought this amazing animated sauce to life, please get in touch with us.  We would like to know.”

Whoa there, missy.  Let’s start from the beginning here: in ripping Huckabee, Maddow ignores the fact that Huckabee’s history is actually right, and hers is dramatically wrong.  First off, Senator Joe McCarthy had nothing to do with HUAC – a fact she should have realized since he was a Senator while HUAC was a House committee (in doing so, by the way, she missed out on nailing Richard Nixon, a fact that will surely have her bitching out her producers).

Second, and more importantly, Reagan did fight communism in Hollywood.  Despite the left’s constant insistence that communism was never a threat to Hollywood, every single piece of contemporary evidence demonstrates the contrary.  Reagan had belonged to probably two communist front organizations in Hollywood, the Hollywood Independent Committee of Arts, Sciences and Professions, and the American Veterans’ Committee.  As soon as he found out what they were, he quit.  As SAG President, Reagan had to carry a gun on him because his life was threatened by communists in the industry.  Communists in Hollywood attempted to shut down the industry on October 5, 1945, when they initiated the “Battle of Hollywood,” a strike called by the Conference of Studio Unions, headed by communist Herb Sorrell.  Big Peace’s own Peter Schweizer, in his beautiful biography, Reagan’s War, quotes the People’s Daily World, a Communist newspaper of the time: “Hollywood is often called the land of Make-Believe, but there is nothing make-believe about the Battle of Hollywood being waged today …. The prize will be complete control of the greatest medium of communication in history.”  The war wasn’t make-believe – communists threw firebombs and rocks at anyone attempting to enter the Warner Bros. lot.  Kirk Douglas said, “Thousands of people fought in the middle of the street with knives, clubs, battery cables, brass knuckles and chains.”  Reagan, who opposed the communist strike, refused to sneak onto the lot – instead, he rode a bus, sitting tall (against the advice of the studio’s security chief).

Furthermore, Reagan was no blind McCarthy advocate.  He condemned McCarthy, stating that he “used a shotgun when a rifle was needed, injuring the innocent along with the guilty.”  In those HUAC hearings, he refused to name names, and according to biographer Dinesh D’Souza, “testified in 1947 that he opposed government legislation from Washington that would make membership in communist groups or the espousal of communist views illegal.”  The proof is in the pudding – at the urging of famed director Mervyn LeRoy, Reagan worked to get an unknown actress named Nancy Davis off the blacklist (she had been mistakenly placed on it).  She later became Nancy Reagan.

The reason that those like Maddow can’t stand Reagan’s SAG presidency is because it gives the lie to the liberal notion that conservatives hate culture.  Maddow wants to depict all Republicans as evil (even though Reagan was a Democrat at the time), even as she attempts the same McCarthy tactics with regard to Huckabee’s animator as McCarthy did with regard to communists.  The only difference is that McCarthy actually had reason to try blacklisting communists – there were communists in Hollywood.  Maddow has no reason to target these animators.  It’s just another example of how the left tries to run anybody out of the entertainment business who disagrees with their fallacious take on history – even as they openly screw up history themselves.