It’s in Hollywood.

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All great civilizations are brought down from within, brought down by the corrosive influences of pampered and bored elites foisting their suicidal death wish on fundamentally sound and morally healthy populations. We see many of those signs today.

Above is a brief Case and Plan video, which is now (in the immortal words of Rod Serling) submitted for your approval. Things are dire, but they are not hopeless, and Jeremy Boreing, and I, and many others feel this might be one small foothold in the counterattack. We’d love to hear your comments, and if you’d like you can look around, for free, over at declarationentertainment.com.

So many of us in the business know people who have been overseas to help entertain the troops, and the luckiest among us have actually had the experience ourselves. I’m proud to have moved from Category A to category B this last week, when I was able to spend five days down at Guantanamo Bay.

There’s a lot to talk about. But the thing that struck me hardest was the fact that even though I expected to be blown away by our men and women in uniform, I really had no idea of just how far my high expectations would be exceeded. The competence and discipline I took for granted going in. It was the soldier’s generosity that kept knocking me on my butt.

So here are the remarks I was privileged to have been able to give. I hope that it in some small way captures not just what I feel, but what all we civilians feel, and not just about the men and women stationed at Guantanamo Bay, but rather about every single one of them: past, present and future.

Congress has an approval rating of 21%. And when I heard that Harry Reid is actually discussing plans to sneak single-payer, National Health Care legislation not only past the will of the people, but sneak it past the lower house of Congress by attaching it as a rider to a completely unrelated bill… 

…Well, that is an act of such unremitting and bastardly sinfulness that it simply has to be addressed. 

Click Image to Play

I take a look at the four Senators and twenty-something Representatives currently under ethics investigations of one kind or another, and present to you, the American people, my Modest Proposal to get government back in the hands of the governed. 

I’ll save the details for the video, but suffice it to say that the Whittle Plan, at $935,000,000 is not exactly cheap, but it is definitely a bargain at .0003 of the Federal Budget for 2008. 

I don’t want to spoil the delicious details, but here’s the elevator pitch: 

We already pay farmers not to farm. Why can’t we pay legislators not to legislate?  

It’s bold and it’s foolproof. Congressional greed and mendacity have been allowed for. 

I dare say it is an idea whose time has come.

Thomas Sowell

I mention this because not too long ago I started reading A CONFLICT OF VISIONS by Thomas Sowell, and as I did, I started to get the sense that Sowell may have developed a Grand Unified Theory of politics, because he went (as usual) right to the core of the issue: beyond Republican / Democrat, beyond Conservative / Liberal… all the way down to the brass tacks of why people believe what they believe. — VIDEO BELOW THE FOLD… 

Sowell argues that when it comes to the culture wars, each of us will be drawn to a specific trench not because of policies or parties but rather because of the vision we may hold of human beings and how they are constructed. He names these the Constrained and Unconstrained visions of humanity; Mankind either as constrained by his biology to moral weakness and self-interest, or, on the other hand, a creature unconstrained by his biology and therefore perfectible. 

The kind of society you would construct for each model of the human heart is vastly different; opposite, even. And so I decided to test his theory against history and look for examples. The results are here:

Thomas Sowell is uplifting. He is also terribly depressing, at least to me. Because only when I read a mind like Thomas Sowell’s do I fully realize just what a second-rate thinker I really am.  Still, he gives us something to aim at… no matter how far from the mark we may fall.

The anniversary in the mainstream media will be muted, as always – and we’ll come back to that. And even though three thousand people died that day, I want to concentrate on two – not to exclude the others, but simply to show you that they were not some abstract number but individual lives. 

Kevin Cosgrove

One of the people who died that day, eight years ago, was a businessman working in the World Trade Center. His name was Kevin Cosgrove. Kevin Cosgrove stands out from the other three thousand because he was on the phone to 9/11 when the tower he was in collapsed around him. (Fast forward to about 4:00 if you are pressed for time) And I’m warning you, this is not for the faint hearted. 

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The most telling and poignant thing I felt when I hear the sound of a man, as the floors of his office fell away around him, is simply that this voice – recorded on tape – was only one of thousands of identical screams of terror that went unrecorded in the floors above and below, and in the other tower. I try to imagine what that must have been like, and how repugnant to their memory the entire idea of 9/11 “trutherism” is.   

There’s somebody else I would like to remember today. In the years since that beautiful clear morning, many people have tried to identify the people who leapt to their deaths to escape the flames. The most famous of these doomed people has been called “The Falling Man.”  

A newspaper article, followed by an exceptional documentary called The Falling Man, attempted to identify him and many of the others who took control of their final moments and plunged to their deaths that day. 

Jonathan Briley

The Falling Man was named Jonathan Briley, and I’d like to remember him today as well. To get the essence of who Jonathan was and the consequences of the decision he made, watch from about 3:15 to from about 3:15 to about 5:15 in this clip from the truly remarkable doc, The Falling Man… 

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The media won’t show these images. They say they don’t want to rile up the population. I say we should be riled up. There was talk that the current administration plans to “re-brand” 9/11 into a National Day of Service in order to chill out this nation of children they are trying to create. But I’m not going to calm down and “get over all the anger” of 9/11. I promised myself that morning that I would never forget what I saw that day, and I never will. 

Just a few days ago, British Intelligence interrupted a plan that was days away from fruition, and convicted these three Muslim terrorists on charges of attempting to blow up seven airliners in mid-Atlantic. I said Muslim Terrorists because that’s what they are. Throughout the past eight years they have been foiled time and time again by British and American intelligence agencies – the same nameless heroes the Obama administration now wants to prosecute.  I’m sure that will end well. 

We’re not allowed to be enraged, you see? 

Actually, you know what? That’s not true. We are allowed to be enraged, but only about certain things. You can’t be outraged when America is in the right, but you can be outraged when she is in the wrong: about Abu Graib, for example.  Likewise, you are encouraged by the media to be outraged at corporate transgressors like AIG, but outrage at the politicians who caused this mess is given a “dangerously un-American howling mob rabid pack of animals” dismissal. 

It’s a RAGE RATCHET, and it goes one way only: to the left. Well, I refuse to be controlled by these sons of bitches. If what happened to Kevin Cosgrove and Jonathan Briley doesn’t fill you with outrage and anger, not only are you not my moral superior… but your inability to see right and wrong is an indication of deep-seated, delusional psychosis.   

Never forget what happened that day.

Bill Maher, never one to miss an opportunity to express his contempt for anything not Bill Maher, wrote: “Yes, our so-called President wrote that people in other countries might like their countries better… I was so shocked I nearly dropped the Bible I was using to help me masturbate into my gun.”  

[click image to play video]

People like Maher use this kind of snark to cover the fact that either they have serious issues in comprehension, or, more likely, that they do not care for the lay of the intellectual battlefield and so want to move it to another, slimier, filthier one. 

The question to the President was not whether or not he believed in American Patriotism – that is, the love of one’s country. Of course other people love their countries. But the idea of American Exceptionalism is a specific political construct, much like British Colonialism. I suppose I should have cut both of them more slack, unfamiliar as both hearts are with the feel of patriotism and faced with the clear evidence of lack of intellectual exceptionalism on both their parts. 

Anyway, this has to be responded to: and never were there bigger fish in a smaller barrel. Many of the elements I used to make the case for American Exceptionalism I first used here at Big Hollywood in a piece called The Workshops of Identity. I opened those arguments up considerably, and the great thing about video [click image above to play] is the ability to include a lot of statistics and graphic elements to hammer home the point. (The list of American inventive genius in particular is a great deal of fun.) 

At 15 minutes it’s a little long for the web – I know, you are shocked… Shocked! – but that’s how much data is in there. And you really can’t end a piece like this without pining for the days when a common citizen didn’t have to explain the idea of American Exceptionalism to the President of the United States, but rather the other way around.  Hearing those words from a President who loved his country as much – if not more – than the rest of us certainly highlights just how far we have fallen and how much work remains for all of us to do.

Here’s a better question: If Kenneth Gladney — a black American who was beaten when he went to protest ObamaCare — had been there instead to support President Obama and had been beaten up and called a nigger by Anti-Obama town hall protesters… [click image below to play video]

…Well, does anyone doubt he would have been as famous as Rodney King? Why is Kenneth Gladney ignored? And why did a black patriot who showed up in opposition to ObamaCare with an AR-15 have his face and hands edited out of the video that MSNBC used to create the belief that wild white mobs, enraged at the very idea of a black man in the White House, were waiting outside to lynch the “President of Color?” 

The example of these two black patriots flies dead in the face of The Narrative. Well, what is “the Narrative?” 

Andrew Breitbart has been championing this idea for years – he covers it in Hollywood, Interrupted and every time I see that soldier of ours he’s out there again fearlessly hammering home the double standard the Left has used, time and again, to control the language and the official cultural storyline that he and I refer to as The Narrative. 

All I have done is look into the historical roots of Political Correctness, and tried to tie the work of The Frankfurt School into the present-day landscape. 

This is something you should know about. It really is important. 

And if you come out of this as shocked as I was when I first got a glimpse of The Institute for Social Research, then you really should follow up with this remarkable look at the history of the Frankfurt School and their effect on American life today: 

THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS 

Knowledge and information is our friend, not theirs! Ammo up!

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…Well, you put all of those forces in harness and you, sir, will attain 53% of the vote!

Just think about that for a second. Think about how many things have to go perfectly for Liberals to eke out a bare majority.

This leads me to think that their entire edifice doesn’t need a whole lot of demolition to swing the tide. One or two planks ought to do nicely and then the rest of it will collapse under its own weight. 

One of those planks is marketing and packaging. The Obama example is a case of horrible content beautifully packaged. Conservatism, on the other hand, is a beautiful message horribly packaged, and if we ever hope to win again we’d better get in this game and right quick.

If you can spare eight minutes, you might this look into how the Democrats use the power of marketing and especially iconography to great effect.

BIG HOLLYWOOD is read by Conservatives who know how to do this. So much is made of high-level celebrities coming out in favor of the Conservative message, and God knows that helps. But I think it is much more important for those of you who can write, direct, design and edit to get in this game.

The events of the last few years have shown me that if the Democrats ran unopposed, they would lose. The ultimate question will be whether or not the GOP leadership needs another two years of pain, or four, or eight, to fully get what the Dems have understood for a generation: packaging counts.

I hope it wakes you up. More than that, I hope it motivates you to bring your skills to the table and join the Resistance.

(Viva El Britbarto!)

Now I haven’t opened an issue of Newsweek in years, although I have to admit that Evan Thomas is a valuable – actually, essential – addition to society. He forgets to speak his true mind only among his friends, you see, and that gives us a little insight into what these media elites actually believe. He recently said that Barack Obama looked to him like a god, a man above petty things like “America.” 

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It was Evan Thomas who in 2004 admitted that liberal media bias was good for fifteen points at the polls. (That was for John Kerry. If you take away Obama’s 15 points of bias – I suspect is was much more — he would have won Vermont and the District of Columbia and that’s all he would have won – but I digress.) 

Anyway, the Newsweek cover showed the outline of the Enterprise – without the nacelle caps. Whoever made the model for the cover forgot to put them on. It was obvious to me from across the room, but then, that’s the kind of accuracy I have come to expect from Newsweek. And I digress yet again. 

Inside was a “Star Trek” / Obama administration comparison chart, written by Maureen Dowd. Obama was Spock. Rush Limbaugh was a Klingon commander. Rahm Immanuel – RAHM IMMANUEL! – was Captain Kirk. The Un-American. Bastards. 

This got me angry enough to do some poking around. All around the web, we are seeing comparisons of Barack Obama to Mr. Spock. Maureen Dowd, who is without question the dimmest bulb in the burned-out chandelier of the once-glorious New York Times, wrote a piece in the Times comparing Spock to Obama and ended the piece with the line, “Kirk out.” 

When I regained consciousness I was in the ambulance. 

So here is the result. It examines the terrible danger of putting intellectuals in charge. Not that I think Barack Obama is an intellectual. He, like Larry Fine, simply looks like one standing next to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Joe Biden. But I granted the premise and tried to show why intellectuals are so dangerous and so spectacularly and consistently wrong when they try their hand at politics. 

Not my deepest work ever, but it was a blast to make. Two desires in life hold monumental power over me: 

1) to wear a custom-fitted gold velour jersey.

2) to work with my friend Maurice LaMarche. He was the voice of The Brain in Pinky and the Brain, plays Morbo, Calculon and Kip on Futurama, and who is the go-to guy for William Shatner impressions. As a matter of fact, he can teach you – yes, YOU! – to Talk Like William Shatner by going here.  

So without further ado, here’s “The Dowd Conundrum.” I hope you like watching it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Click pic for video.