From ABC’s 20/20 segment on “The Blind Side”:

Deborah Roberts: There are some black people who feel a little uneasy about the notion of the wealthy white family comes in to help the poor black kid…

Michael Oher:  I don’t understand why people would feel that way because as long as somebody’s, uh, somebody’s helping somebody and taking, you know, somebody off the streets,  I don’t care, you know, black or white, that shouldn’t be a problem.

Two powerful and very different movies dealing with the problem of neglected and abused children in America were honored at this year’s Golden Globe Awards.  Precious is a very difficult and painful movie to watch, depicting the utter devastation wrought in the horrible life of Clareece Precious Jones, a fictional but utterly believable character with countless real-life counterparts, while The Blind Side is perhaps the prototypical feel-good movie of the year (and a crowd-pleasing $200-million blockbuster), dealing with the success story of the real-life Michael Oher, who was adopted by a middle class white family and went on to play college football and become an NFL star.  But the two movies starkly show two distinctly different approaches to the problem.

Bluntly stated, Precious presents the liberal solution — let the government do it — and The Blind Side presents the conservative solution — do it yourself.

Precious, an illiterate, pregnant sixteen-year-old girl, trapped in a public school system that passes her along even though she has learned nothing, raped repeatedly by her father resulting in a mongoloid child at age 12 as well as  her current pregnancy, beaten and humiliated her entire life by the sick beast who bore her, is the end product (sadly, one of thousands upon thousands) of one of the greatest liberal crimes of the 20th Century: Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

When the Johnson Administration expanded the AFDC program (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) in the early 1960s to include any household with children in which a male breadwinner was absent (theretofore it had been restricted to widows with children), the devastation it brought to inner-city family life was pervasive and undeniable.  As Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen described it in A Patriot’s History of the United States,  “The war on poverty managed to destroy black marriages and family formation at a faster rate than the most brutal slaveholder had ever dreamed.” (p. 688)

By creating an incentive for poor  women to remain unmarried so that they could receive taxpayer-funded subsidies, and by further increasing the amount of aid for every additional child they birthed, government assistance from 1965 to 1975 nearly doubled the illegitimate birth rate among blacks from 28% to 49%, reaching a staggering 65% in 1989.

By making black men irrelevant to the support of the children they fathered, and attempting to replace their contribution to the family with a welfare check, liberal policies inflicted nearly permanent damage to the very people they sought to help.  These policies have metastasized into a permanent underclass, dependent on subsistence level funding from taxpayer monies, and forever after terrorized by exploitative politicians tightening their grip on power by promising  their payments would decrease or stop altogether if they did not continue to vote for them.

And so we get Precious. Trapped in an apartment with her government-subsidized mother, who allows her boyfriend (Precious’ own biological father) to do unspeakable things to her from infancy onward; lost in a school system that ignores her, and bound by her own ignorance, she escapes the horrors of her life by living in a fantasy world of pop culture dreams that flicker across her television, and she is utterly failed by every government system created to save her.  The government monopoly on public schools fails to educate her; the Social Services Department fails to protect her; the welfare system fails to lift her out of poverty.

But if Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was instead the secretary of Health and Human Services, undoubtedly she would say,  “The system worked.”  It certainly worked for Precious’ mother, who knows exactly how to work the system, as we see whenever she bats her eyes and plays the victim for the social workers who fall for her act and keep the checks coming.

And in fact, in Precious, the system does work in exactly the way it was designed.  The system was created by liberals to make themselves feel good, not to bring any actual benefit or relief to victimized children like Precious.  She and her countless counterparts are doomed by dangerously mistaken liberals who think:

“I will vote to create taxpayer-funded bureaucracies that will fix this problem by taking up a forced collection from all my fellow Americans, and I will never have to get my hands dirty or do something disgusting like open my home to her, or actually do anything to help her myself.  I will let the government take care of her, and since I vote for Democrats who create these bureaucracies, I have helped her, and I am better than those selfish Republicans.”

And if you think that assessment of liberals is too harsh, just remember:  these are the same people that define their goodness by their Prius and their mulchers, and the way they meticulously sort their trash into different colored bins.  When you think you can save the planet just by carrying your reusable bag to Trader Joe’s, there’s really no need to do anything really difficult or icky like becoming a Big Brother or a foster parent or adopting a child.

Which brings us to those awful conservative Christian Republicans  in The Blind Side. Michael Oher, one of thirteen children born to a drug-addicted mother living in public housing, whose life up to that point had probably been somewhat similar to Precious’, is walking down a freezing cold Memphis street in only a T-shirt when Leigh Anne Tuohy drives past him and says to her husband Sean, “Turn the car around.”  His life is changed forever, by an awesome act of love and kindness from a private citizen.

The insane and utterly racist backlash from some quarters against The Blind Side seems to boil down to this: rich white people shouldn’t be adopting poor black kids.  And as usual, this stupidity does not come from the right, but from the  bigoted statists on the left, who want to protect the government mechanisms they have constructed to keep these problems out of their sights.

Left out of The Blind Side, apparently, were the long lines of   black families that the Tuohys elbowed out of the way in order to get their white hands on Michael Oher.  What sort of person could argue that Michael Oher — or Precious, for that matter — would be better off staying in the system if the alternative is to be taken care of by white people?  And what kind of an idiot would think that a family would take on the responsibility of another human being and feed him, clothe him, pay for a tutor to help him learn, all just to get him to play football for their alma mater?

The best way to deal with this hateful nonsense is to dismiss it completely, as Leigh Anne Tuohy demonstrated, in her inimitable style,  on 20/20:

Deborah Roberts: What do you say to people who say they feel a little offended that this white couple took this black kid in and tried to kind of mold him into what they wanted?

Leigh Anne Tuohy: No one has the guts to say that to my face. No one has ever said that to my face and if they did I would tell them don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

At the end of Precious, a bracing dedication comes up on the screen:  For Precious Girls Everywhere.  Perhaps the saddest fact in the comparison between these two films is that this might be one instance where the fictional character is more real than the true-life character.  After all, there is only one Michael Oher, adopted and loved by Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, now the Baltimore Ravens’  left tackle.

But how many Precious girls and boys are still out there, trapped in a system that works only to keep them in it, waiting for a Leigh Anne Tuohy to say, “Turn the car around?”

Ed. Note: This post has been updated to repair a broken link.

I couldn’t help but remember a favorite story that my wife and I tell on each other from time to time. Years ago, we were going through some counseling about our relationship (we’re totally cured now, of course. Just ask my wife). We had two counselors who were partners, one of whom focused on us, but both of whom knew our story.  After a considerable number of sessions had come and gone with no tangible improvement, one day my wife stormed into their office in an obvious fury to see our guy. His colleague, a wonderfully grumpy man, glanced up at her and offhandedly said, “What’s your problem?”

“My husband’s an a**hole.”

He responded flatly, “Maybe you’re the a**hole.”

We’ve laughed about this many times over the years, but it was a strange little turning point for us.  We remember  it often to remind each other always to make sure our side of the street is clean before we start complaining about the other side.

But in Maher’s case, there is just no “maybe” about it.

When I read his column, I realized something about Maher that I also realized about Obama a couple months ago, when he so badly botched the Gates affair in Cambridge: To them, it’s all about race.  Obama admitted that he didn’t know the facts of the case when he decreed that the police acted stupidly, but he knew the only facts that mattered to him.  Gates was black.  The officer was white.  Case closed.  Let’s have a beer.

In his column, Maher is either willfully lying or he is, to use one of his favorite projections, stupid.  He claims that Obama fired Van Jones because Glenn Beck told him to, which would mark the first time in history that Barack Obama ever listened to someone who disagreed with him, and then multiplies the dumbness by claiming that the reason Beck told him to was because he called Republicans “a**holes.”

Everyone from Charles Krauthammer to Beck himself said that Jones’s “Republicans are a**holes” comment didn’t bother them at all, Krauthammer famously stating that he’d called members of his own family that and worse.  Krauthammer even went on to say that Van Jones’s describing himself as an “avowed Communist” didn’t matter, since we’ve had a few Communists in our government before (see Maxine Waters).

No, Bill, it was Van Jones signing on as a “truther” that scuttled him.  You see, in the Obama Administration, you can call the opposition names (Obama does it himself), you can advocate the destruction of free-market capitalism (see previous parenthetical), you can accuse white people of intentionally poisoning minorities who work in their agricultural industries, and you’ll still be a remarkable addition to the team.  But even Obama can’t have a lunatic around who agrees with idiots like Charlie Sheen and Rosie O’Donnell that President George W. Bush, the stupidest man who ever lived in their eyes, somehow pulled off the greatest crime and cover-up in history, by orchestrating the murder of 2,996 Americans and blaming it on Islamic terrorists, all so he could go into Iraq and avenge the attempt on his Daddy’s life made by Saddam Hussein. (Jonah Goldberg has a great takedown of this lunacy here.)

Maher loves to call people stupid as much as he loves to call people racists, as he made clear during his appearance on the Conan O’Brian show, where he said that Obama should just drag health care over the finish line with or without the support of the American people, because they are stupid.  Maher, like most self-righteous liberals,  pines for a nice a**hole dictator who would just ram whatever he wanted down the stupid peoples’ throats (assuming, of course, that said dictator is someone Bill Maher thinks is smart, like, say, Joe Biden).   To a third-grade mentality like Maher, Bush is stupid, Palin is stupid, Reagan was stupid, all the Tea Party protesters are stupid — everyone who doesn’t agree with Bill Maher is stupid.

I know you are, Bill, but what am I?

And in fact, Maher is provably so stupid that he wouldn’t know a truly ignorant, plagiarizing, buffoonish dolt if one bit him in the a** and then got his vote for Vice President. (Hey, wait a minute!)

But the racist label that Maher throws around is the true projection.  To him, Van Jones got fired because he became the “Scary Negro of the week on Fox News,”   and had nothing to do with his radical policies.

But the truth is that conservatives, independents, disaffected Democrats, and unlabelled Americans who disagree with the President do so on the basis of his policies and his philosophy. We look at the people he surrounds himself with and has throughout his life, and we listen to his stated opinions and intentions, and make a judgment based on them. Many of us who are old enough opposed Bill and Hillary Clinton’s health care plan back in 1994 in the same way we oppose it now.   It wasn’t racism then, and it isn’t now.

But the racist Bill Maher looks at Van Jones and Obama and only sees the color of their skin.  His recent disgusting skit based around the Drudge Report abbreviating Negatives to Negs featured racist jokes that we haven’t seen the likes of since Al Jolson sang “Going to Heaven on a Mule“  — or at least since Ted Danson wore blackface to impress Whoopi.

And to complete the projection trifecta, Maher calls others liars, while lying himself.  He says that Obama should stand up for the “70% of Americans who aren’t crazy.”   Where does  that figure come from?  I haven’t seen 70% in any poll about anything.  Maybe Bill just pulled that out of –well, I’m sick of those asterisks — the place on his body that he wants President Obama to become.

You know what, Bill?  Maybe we’re not all stupid lying racists.  Maybe we just disagree.

And the time for asterisks has passed, Bill.

Maybe you’re the asshole.

And then, while I sat there in my comfortable American home watching my big screen television on my recently purchased couch with my coffee in hand, in real time, I saw a second plane hit the other tower.

At that moment, I knew:  This is an attack.  And everything changed for me, utterly and completely.

The war that had been going on without our acknowledgement, a war waged by crazed extremists from countries I had never thought about, came crashing into our homes, killing our citizens, destroying one of our country’s landmarks, and re-orienting, in various ways, all of our lives.

I lost no one close to me on that horrible day.  A close friend who was a paramedic in New York gave me a very harrowing account of her experiences, but she survived.  But I still felt such grief, such a horrible sense of loss, at the fact that thousands of my fellow Americans had lost their lives that day just by going to work.

I remember talking to a Canadian friend who called me out of the blue from Montreal to share his feelings, and to tell me how he felt like an American that day, that his sense of loss and grief was overpowering, and he shared that with me, and offered his love.  Over the next few days, I called my closest friends and my family members, purportedly to talk about the events of 9/11, but actually just to tell them I loved them and cherished them.  And all of us shared a sense of resolve: we must, as a nation, confront these people, and make sure that it never happens again.

But that resolve is simply not shared by our current administration.  We are being governed by a President who will not make a speech about the meaning of 9/11.  Instead he will try to rebrand 9/11 into a National Day of Service which will have nothing to do with the attack on our country.  He might  make a speech about how Americans are lying about his health-care plan, and how Americans are behaving badly in town hall meetings, and implying that Americans are liars and racists if they disagree with him.  But he will not mention the terrorist attack that occurred eight years ago, and he will not vow that it will never happen again.

Let us all remember what we felt on that day, even though our government and our media chooses to forget it.  Our survival as a nation depends on it.

The rosy and heartfelt depictions of “Teddy” this week have seemed to me like intercepted transmissions from an alternate universe, where infidelity, drunkenness, cowardice, and saving your own sorry ass at all costs are virtues. Alec Baldwin even went so far as to assert that Sen. Kennedy might have been as great a legislator as Rep. Barney Frank. While that might seem ridiculous to the people in Massachusetts who keep voting for Barney year after year, I just took it as the usual hyperbole that mourners indulge in while grieving the death of one of their heroes. But a couple of statements by Teddy’s apologists took me aback:

Yet if one weighs the life of a single young woman against the accomplishments of the man President Obama has called the greatest Democratic senator in history, what is one to think?
– Joyce Carol Oates

So it doesn’t automatically make someone (aka, me) a … troll for asking what Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted’s death, and what she’d have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded. Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it. – Melissa Lafsky

Let me get this straight, Joyce: Mary Jo Kopechne’s life was not as important as Sen. Kennedy’s subsequent career? And furthermore, Melissa, correct me if I am misunderstanding you here, but Mary Jo might have felt that her life was worth forfeiting so that Teddy could go on to co-author an education bill, or to destroy the career of Robert Bork, or to protect the rights of women to abort unwanted fetuses?

I seem to remember a certain female reporter remarking, after the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal broke, that she would be willing to perform a “Lewinsky” on Pres. Clinton simply because of his stand on abortion rights.   But I suspect that, even for her, suffocating in a submerged car for four or five hours might just be a Martha’s Vineyard bridge too far.

From what far-flung galaxy does this kind of thinking emanate? How can seemingly sensible, articulate, and intelligent people argue that the death of an individual due to the recklessness, cowardice, and selfishness of another person might be “worth it” because of the politics of the perpetrator? Does the fact that Kennedy supported liberal policies in the years after he fled the scene of an accident and allowed a young woman to die redeem him?

And for someone seriously to posit (obviously without consulting the victim, since her un-televised funeral occurred about 40 years ago) that Mary Jo might have been willing to take one for the team — to give up all the possibilities of her life fully realized, the offices she might have attained, the children she may have had, the lessons she may have taught them, the achievements they might have accomplished, every single unpredictable aspect of her life erased — in order to protect the political career of Ted Kennedy? As if -– let’s be realistic–the Senator who might have replaced Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, after he had been (rightfully) incarcerated and his political career (rightfully) ended, would not have supported the exact same policies? Like the voters of Massachusetts who have effectively bestowed lifetime legislative careers upon Barney and Teddy would suddenly have sent us a Jesse?

But then I realized that this mindset is not from an alternate universe. It is from ours, and we have seen it before. We have seen it in godless countries like the USSR, and Cambodia, and the PRC, and in Nazi Germany. We have have seen it everywhere that individual human lives have been deemed expendable, and that all decisions must be made based on how they affect the State.

If one does not believe in a divine aspect to each human life, then any particular individual’s life is expendable if it serves the “greater good.” Furthermore, if we are not creations of God, then the greater good is determined by whatever political policies one happens to support. In other words, if there is no sacrosanct belief that an individual human life is a gift from a Creator, then any inconvenient life is expendable as long as it serves the current political will.

Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, Castro, Idi Amin, Hussein, Guevara, and all the countless murderous dictators and thugs throughout history who have held onto power by murdering inconvenient people have made the same argument: the murdered were expendable, unimportant, and the greater good was served.

Is there now any wonder why most Americans do not want Statists like the deceased Sen. Edward Kennedy and his apologists and supporters in charge of our most vital commodity, our health care? If an individual human life is evaluated by its worth or cost to the State  rather than by accepting its part in a plan far beyond our earthly understanding, then all of us are negotiable and, ultimately, expendable. And to their credit, it is logically consistent: if we are detrimental or costly to the State, and there is no divine reason to respect us, then we should be killed or mercifully given a cheaper pain pill if it serves the greater good.

But thankfully,  not all of the things we learned about Sen. Edward Kennedy during his three day beatification were so serious. It seems that Teddy himself, magnanimous, glamorous party animal that he was, had a light-hearted side. Good old Teddy reportedly loved him some Chappaquiddick jokes. That crazy rascal was always asking if anybody had heard any new ones! What a great, funny, self-deprecating guy that Lion of the Senate was! Well, I guess he wouldn’t mind if we tell a few now, in remembrance of his endearing ability to laugh at himself.

My personal favorite Ted Kennedy joke is dated, as it pertains to the First Gulf War, in 1991, when America and its allies won the war in a few days, with almost no casualties:

Q:  What’s the difference between Ted Kennedy and the Iraqi army?
A:   Ted Kennedy has actually killed somebody.

What a good one! Boy, I sure hope that good old Teddy Kennedy got a chance to hear that gem before he met his Creator. If he did, I’ll bet he just laughed and laughed.

The drive to the memorial has to be something that one chooses to make.  It is about 90 miles from Pittsburgh, a city that the crashing plane flew directly over that day.  It is not something that you just happen upon, driving down the interstate, on your way to somewhere else.  One must seek it out.  And over 150,000 people a year do so.  I went there today.  I am glad that I did.

When you go there (and hopefully, after you read this post, you WILL go there), over the crest of a hill after a drive through a beautiful rural landscape, you will see, off in the distance, a tiny fenced-in area marked by two flagpoles in the middle of a deserted rolling hillside.  A little parking lot is there beside the tiny temporary structure provided by the National Park Service after it became apparent that Americans would visit this site in droves to pay homage to these heroes.  The site is staffed by local resident volunteers, known as “Ambassadors” on their badges, who felt called to learn the tragic facts of the event and greet those who come to pay their respects.

Within the fence, there are a few large stone plaques, engraved with formal tributes, donated by survivors of the flight 93 heroes.  The tops of these stones are covered with tribute items — coins from police departments, fire departments, veterans groups, etc. – that are heavy enough to weather the steady winds on that hillside.  There are crosses, necklaces, and rosaries draped on them, and poems, letters and paintings on sticks stuck into the ground in front of them.  The sheer volume of them is overpowering, made even more so when you consider that many of them have been removed due to decay and necessity over the years.  (No tribute left is discarded; they are all “cleaned, catalogued and stored.  The Flight 93 National Memorial Collection already numbers over 25,000 objects.”)

There is a double row of forty metal angels on posts in the ground, each inscribed with one of the names of the individuals who died on that day.  A crescent of benches face the angels, and if you sit there, you can see, just above the angels, the American flag planted some 500 yards away to mark the crash site.  Only immediate family members of the deceased are allowed to visit the actual site because it is now “hallowed ground.”  It is the place where, through no choice of their own, the forty people on Flight 93 are buried.

But the dominant structure within the tribute area is a large shelving fence, approximately 32 feet long and 10 feet high with a chain-link backing.  A bulletin board is permanently on the fence where patches can be pinned.  License plates, caps, American flags, laminated poems, signed T-shirts, school class posters signed by students, small stone angels — anything anyone wants to leave as a tribute — adorn it.

But what brought me to uncontrollable tears were the toys attached to the chain links with plastic ties. The stuffed animals.  The action figures.  Children had come there and left their most prized possessions. Batman.  Spider-Man.  A little teddybear.  Darth Vader.  Even a figurine of the WWE’s Heartbreak Kid, Shawn Michaels.  (As a wrestling fan, this moved me beyond all reason.)  The purity of these gifts reminded me of my own children and brought crashing home the reality of all that these forty people had to leave behind that day, knowing that they were going to die and storming the cockpit in order to save as many others as they could from the horrible loss they knew their loved ones were about to face.

For the first half-hour or so that I was there, I was unable to speak.  I wandered from object to object, overcome.  There were only one or two other people there and I eavesdropped on some of what the “Ambassador” volunteer for the day, Clarence, had to say to them.  I signed the guest book, and after seeing the tribute fence, I decided to leave the cap I was wearing, and to write a feeble tribute inside it.  Clarence mistakenly thought I was leaving, and said, “Thanks for coming, sir.”  I tried to say that I was not leaving, but my voice would not break through the lump in my throat, and I sort-of waved vague hand gestures of not leaving which were undoubtedly unintelligible.  Clarence, nonplussed, no doubt having seen this emotion before, came up and patted me on the back and said, “You feel this very deeply, don’t you?”

I could only muster a nod.  He clapped me on the shoulder and moved on.

As I clipped my stupid hat onto the chain-link fence, I kept thinking to myself, as I had ever since I had gotten there, would I have been so brave?  Would I have crumpled in the back of the plane and cried, staying on the phone with whoever I could reach, praying to God to deliver me back to my wife and children?  Would I have begged for my life?  Or would I have fought back?  Would I have attacked the cockpit knowing I was going to die anyway?  What would I have done?

As I stood up from my moment of prayer at the fence, I realized that Ambassador Clarence was talking to a group of about eight that had arrived.  They were sitting on the benches while he gave his talk.  I blearily sat in the back to listen to what he said.

He talked of the facts of the event, how fast the plane was going, how far it had burrowed into the ground when it crashed.  He said that if the plane had been in the air for four more seconds, it would have crashed into the town of Shanksville, where there was a K-12 school in session at that hour.  He told us the first person murdered on the plane was passenger Mark Rothenberg, seated in front of the terrorists in first class, whom they slaughtered simply because he was an Orthodox Jew.  He spoke of how the FBI had become 95 percent sure that the terrorists on Flight 93 had targeted the Capitol building, where there was a joint session of Congress that day.  If these terrorists had been successful, 535 members of congress, their aides and staffers, one entire branch of the three branches of our government, could have perished that day.

He told some individual stories of the passengers and crew: how Flight Attendant Cee Cee Lyles, who had done a fellow attendant a favor and taken her shift that day, had left a message on her home answering machine telling her husband how much she loved him and that she hoped to see his face again with God someday; how Capt. Jason Dahl had changed his shift to fly on Sept. 11th so he could celebrate his fifth wedding anniversary with his wife on Sept. 14th; how Donald and Jean Peterson, the only married couple on the flight, were flying to San Francisco for training to become missionaries.  And he spoke of how Flight 93 had been delayed for 25 minutes, which made it possible for the passengers on-board to know, through their cell phone calls to loved ones, that the attacks on the WTC towers and the Pentagon had already occurred.

And how then, immortally, they decided, probably by a quintessentially American show of hands, to take the actions which came to be encapsulated in the words of passenger Todd Beamer:  “Let’s roll.”

Ambassador Clarence also told us how he had been there one day in early 2008 when a line of eight black SUVs came rolling up the hill and parked in front of the Memorial, and how John and Cindy McCain had gotten out of one of them.  And that John McCain had said to him, “I am not here for politics.  Please don’t think that of me.  I am here because I was in the Capitol building that day, and I owe these men and women my life.  I am here to pay my respects.”  There were no photographs.

And at the end of his talk, Clarence said precisely what I had been saying in my heart ever since I had arrived.  And forgive me for paraphrasing Ambassador Clarence as best I can:

Everyone who comes here always asks the same question: ‘if I had been on that plane, would I have done what the passengers of Flight 93 did?  When confronted with evil men, would I have allowed them to do their will?  Or would I have fought against them, even if I knew that I was going to die?’  Either you stand up against evil, or you lay down in front of it; there really is not a third choice.

What would I have done?  And if my time comes, unexpectedly, as it came for the passengers of Flight 93…

What will I do?

–

Where this…                                          meets this.

Now let me get this straight:  there are a number of protests by free citizens who think the government confiscates too much of their money and spends it unwisely, and the angry rock anarchist Henry Rollins is on the government’s side?  What the hell happened to Rollins?  He was head of the band Black Flag in the 80s, a hell-raising, system-smashing anarchist punk band.  He wrote songs like Family Man, and lyrics like “swimming in the mainstream is such a lame dream,” for crying out loud. But now, in his dotage, he spends his time ridiculing anyone who speaks up against the almighty State, and calling out anyone who refuses to kiss Presidential ass with him now that his guy won.  Then again, maybe he’s just feeling guilty and trying to make up for writing White Minority way back when.

Sadly it’s not just Rollins. John Mellencamp recently incoherently blamed Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics for ruining the music business, proving that he knows nothing about economics or the music business (which might explain why he hasn’t had a hit since he covered a Van Morrison song fifteen years ago).  Oh, wait; unless you count that Chevrolet commercial, where Mellencamp became a tool for an evil American corporation by singing a song pretending that he loves America, a double scoop of hypocrisy with sprinkles and whipped cream that is so rich and multi-layered that it’s hard to stomach all at once.

Bruce Springsteen pushed his 2007 album “Magic” on “60 Minutes” by foolishly reciting a list of President Bush’s “crimes,” including illegal wiretapping and “no habeas corpus“, and yet now that President Obama has continued these very same policies  (making them not only legal, but possibly divine), the Boss’s mouth has been noticeably shut, probably because it’s very hard to speak when your lips are fervently puckered up and moving respectfully toward the nearest powerful Democrat’s ass. 

Jon Bon Jovi, among other distasteful acts of sucking up to various Democrats, went on Larry King in 2006 and called Al Gore “the smartest man I’ve ever met…. We do get together socially and I just sit in awe of him.” 

Good Grief, Jon, what happened to “Livin’ On a Prayer“?  What an anthem of self-reliance that was!  “We’re halfway there, take my hand, we’ll make it I swear?” Now you’re sitting in AWE of some hack politician who won’t even turn off his own lights for Earth Hour?  Mellencamp?  What happened to “I fight authority, authority always wins“?   “Ain’t that America, home of the free”?  And Springsteen?  What happened to “I’ve got this guitar and I’m learning how to make it talk”?  Did a government program teach you to play, Bruce?  “This is a town full of losers/and I’m pulling out of here to win”?  If the government guarantees that there will be no losers, how the hell will anyone ever win?

What happened to the rock and roll I grew up with that was about freedom and individuality, about working for a living, taking pride in your independence, making your own way, not letting anybody tell you what to do, etc. etc.?  Or even about ”YOU GOTTA FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHT TO PARTY,” for God’s sake?  What happened to good old-fashioned rock ‘n roll rebellion?  When did these big rockers, who made it by their talent and their hard work, with no help from the government, all turn into big government-worshipping statists?  

Maybe Rollins and Springsteen and Mellencamp and all the other members of the new breed of hell-raising rock ‘n roll ass-kissers were never the big rebels we thought they were.  Maybe they never believed that stuff they sang about.  Maybe the whole point for them, all along, was just to be popular.  Maybe they were just guys suffering from short-man syndrome who wanted everybody to love them and think they were cool.  And now, since they’ve lost the knack for writing cool songs that people dig, they have found the ultimate easy path to coolness just by being a cool Obama supporter. 

But then again, maybe it’s not even that complicated.  Maybe they’re not that unique, even though they can sing and play the guitar.  Maybe they are just some typical self-righteous liberals, who think to themselves, “I am so great because I voted for that BLACK GUY!  He was BLACK, and I’m so cool and non-racist that I voted for him ANYWAY!  And look at all those RACISTS over there who voted AGAINST the BLACK guy!  I am SO much way cooler than them!”  They call conservatives who have a principled stand against Obama’s policies racist, when in fact it is they for whom it is all about race.

Because there are basically two kinds of Obama voters:

1) True believers who want a powerful, totalitarian state that enforces fairness by confiscating property from one American and giving it to another, and that provides all basic needs for every American so that noone suffers, and…

2) People who don’t really care what Obama does or says, and just like him because they think it makes them cool.

You can at least respect the former as adversaries.  The latter are just trifling thinkers, who don’t care if their President quadruples the spending of the last President, or if he sends more troops into battle.  Because it’s not about policy to them.  It’s about how Obama makes them feel.

So pucker up, all you aging rockers out there.  It’s a new, exciting time in rock history. Gone are the days when the Young Rascals sang “People Got To Be Free” :

All the world over, so easy to see
People everywhere just wanna be free
I can’t understand it, so simple to me
People everywhere just got to be free
If there’s a man who is down and needs a helping hand
All it takes is you to understand and to see him through
Seems to me, we got to solve it individually
And I’ll do unto you what you do to me
There’ll be shoutin’ from the mountains on out to sea
(out to the sea)
No two ways about it, people have to be free
(they got to be free)

Sadly, these Old Rascals, like Springsteen and Mellencamp and the others, are singing a much different tune these days, and it goes something like, “People everywhere, just kiss ass like me!”

Progressive liberal Democrat Alec Baldwin sent many heads spinning all over the blogosphere when he recently said this:

I’m telling you right now,” the actor warned, “if these tax breaks are not reinstated into the budget, film production in this town is going to collapse, and television production is going to collapse, and it’s all going to go to California.

Now the rich absurdity of a statement like that coming out of the mouth of Alec Baldwin has been chronicled many places all over the web (most notably in the Wall St. Journal), and the fascinating “why?” of it all is still being sorted out.  Has he had an economic spiritual awakening?  Has he gone insane?   Or is he simply a narcissistic hypocrite who only wants tax breaks for the industry that pays him exorbitant amounts of money for saying words other people write during the two or three grueling, catered days a week that he actually has to go to work? 

Whatever the answer is, there is one thing in Mr. Baldwin’s otherwise shockingly accurate statement that is utterly wrong.  I can ease his mind totally about one thing: when his beloved 30 Rock flees New York because of the removal of the tax incentives that brought it there, the one place it will not be heading for is California. 

Just as Alec has said will happen in New York, the film business is fleeing California’s punitive taxation for states that are cutting taxes to attract the huge revenues that full-blown film productions generate. As reported in the LA Daily News, the number of production days for feature films shot in California hit a record low of 7,043 in 2008, according to Film L.A., while the Michigan Film Office approved incentives for 73 film productions in 2008, up from three in 2007.  Michigan’s Gov. Granholm has offered cash refunds from the state of Michigan of up to 40%, the highest incentive in the country, for film and TV productions that spend more than $50,000.  If all the films that applied for incentives in Michigan actually get made there, they are expected to generate $436 million in revenues to the state’s struggling economy.

Arec Bardwin: 'Team America'

New Mexico, Louisiana, New York and Georgia have similar tax incentives and all have seen massive increases in film production in their states.  So Alec seems to be on to something here: when you tax a product or business, you actually DISCOURAGE IT FROM OCCURRING!  Incredible!  And when the business doesn’t happen, nobody gets a job!  Amazing!  The business moves to other states where people are employed, paid money, and then taxed, with more revenue accruing to the state coffers!  Breathtaking! 

So with this unforeseen burst of wisdom emanating from one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, what will the state of California do to keep its most unique and profitable industry working within its borders? 

Nothing. 

From Jack Kyser, chief economist at the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.:

The rubric in Sacramento is, “Oh, we can’t do these incentives. It’s just welfare for the big corporations.” But they don’t understand how the industry works.  Why are other states offering these incentives?  It’s because it creates jobs and tax revenues. This is the message they have been trying to get through to the people in Sacramento – “It’s not going to cost you more money. It’s going to bring money to you.”

This is why the State of California cannot and will not ever work as long as one party –one ideology, I should say, since the supposedly “Republican” Governator doesn’t get it either – dominates every branch of state government.  It is an endless and unstoppable cycle:  the State raises taxes because they have a shortfall.  Businesses leave the state to avoid the taxes.  Individuals leave the state because there is no work because the businesses left.  The tax base shrinks. The tax raises do not create the expected revenues because of the flight of individuals and businesses.  Another shortfall is created.  The legislature votes to raise taxes again.  More businesses leave.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

So the big “WHY?” rears its head again.  Why can’t the state legislature of California have the same epiphany that Alec Baldwin has apparently had?  The liberals and progressives that run California seem to understand this when they tax cigarettes to discourage smoking, and tax gasoline to discourage driving.  They are keen on discouraging Big Tobacco, and Big Oil, and Big Pharma.  So why don’t they use the same principle to ENCOURAGE Big Hollywood?  Like Alec Baldwin,  are they stupid (unable to understand it), insane (incapable of grasping reality), or just mendacious (willingly degrading prosperity for the sake of increasing their own power)?

Sad to say, I think it is the latter.  Alec Baldwin, unlike his fellow liberal/progressive comrades in government, needs to get a paycheck from a business enterprise.  Liberal politicians do not.  And the more businesses they run out of their states, the more crises they create, the more misery they spread around, the more they increase and deepen their power base because they make themselves, the almighty State, the source for all sustenance. And the more secure their unlimited term in office becomes.

The bottom line is a bold statement that I have made on numerous occasions among friends, resulting in some scoffs and protestations (and many fist bumps), but absolutely no substantive refutations:

Liberal/Progressive Democrats cannot stand it when anyone makes money (except for them).  It is unfair, they have done it on the backs of the poor, they are benefiting unfairly (except for them).  

And Alec Baldwin has had his moment of clarity because the state of New York might decide not to say “Except for them.”

The only hope that any of us have is that enough people who actually have to work for someone else for a living, like even the great Alec Baldwin, will realize this and vote the liberal/progressive/Democrats out before there are no New Mexicos, Michigans, New Yorks, or Georgias left to flee to in order to do business without punitive tax rates.

The Change Alec Baldwin believed in and voted for is coming, and it is coming for his mailing address.  But it won’t Change to Beverly Hills, Alec.  You won’t be hanging out with your Left Coast buddies.   It will Change to Detroit, New Orleans, Valdosta, or Albuquerque. 

Because California, apparently,  doesn’t want the business back.

This year was different. My friends and I wanted to see two things. I wanted to see Jerry Lewis get his award in the hopes he’d come out with thick glasses, buck teeth, and make a “Why didn’t I win for THE PATSY, you putzes!” speech. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. Instead, they treated Lewis like a Great-Aunt at a wedding nobody knows but is allowed to make a toast anyway.  I guess today’s egomaniacs don’t respect their elder egomaniacs. 

I was ready to turn it off right then, but my friend insisted we see Mickey Rourke’s speech.  I knew this was never going to happen, that the Academy would never vote for a guy who said he was “not one of those who blames Bush for everything,” and that they vote for Sean Penn BECAUSE of his political stances, not in spite of them, as Penn likes to pretend. But since “The Wrestler” is one of my personal all-time favorites (for obvious reasons), and since Mickey Rourke had created the best portrait of a professional wrestler since Henry Winkler in “The One and Only“  — OK,  best portrait of a professional wrestler EVER — I allowed myself to get my hopes up a little and struggle through to the end.  Maybe, just maybe, we wouldn’t have to listen to The Smug Little Prince’s sermon this year.

But as you know, that was not to be.

I don’t want to rehash Penn’s self-aggrandizing testament to his own bravery in being willing to stand in any room in Hollywood and say something that 99.9% of the people in the room agree with, as others have done that much better than I could.  But one thing occurred to me as my eyes rolled heavenward listening to him congratulate himself.

Does anyone at the Oscars ever thank God?

Now as I say, I haven’t watched in years, but I have watched sports and seen countless athletes receive trophies and thank God for their abilities. Kurt Warner recently did so after his team won the NFC Championship.  A lot of people poke fun at these athletes, claiming God has nothing to do with passing ability or a willingness to spend hours in the gym honing a skill, but as a former athlete (to a small degree), I’m sure most professional athletes know hard work doesn’t do it all. They’ve all shared locker rooms with guys who worked just as hard as they did, but didn’t grow to be 6′5″ with quick feet and a great arm. 

I was a great basketball player – for a 6′1″ shooting guard who could barely touch the rim.  I wish God had blessed me with another 8 inches of height and a decent 24″ vertical leap.  But He had other things in mind, and I appreciate the humility of athletes who acknowledge they’ve been blessed.

Members of the military who receive medals frequently thank God.  These men and women who receive little to no recognition in popular culture, who literally risk their lives in anonymity to preserve the freedom to make bad movies and obnoxious acceptance speeches, are the polar opposites of the “beautiful people” in Hollywood. 

I’m an actor who thanks God I’ve been fortunate enough to make a living in this business for twenty years. In my first film where I had a lead role, after looking at the first dailies the director called me and said, “Good news.  You look good on film. A lot of good actors don’t look good on film.  You’re lucky.” I’ve known countless actors over the years who were terrific, maybe even better than me (if such a thing can be imagined), but who never got anywhere.

Why do I have a career and they don’t?

Actors and actresses don’t give themselves the ability to empathize and project their imagination into the lives of others and they don’t make themselves beautiful (at least before they can afford plastic surgery, and even then, it doesn’t always work).  And yet, they thank their agents, writers, directors, dogs (which I understand completely, Mickey), wives, children and on and on — as if they created their own beauty, brains, physical grace and everything else required to be award-winning objects of public adoration. 

But they didn’t create themselves.  None of us did. And maybe by not watching all these years I missed all the Oscar winners who thanked God for the gifts with which they have been blessed. But somehow, I just don’t think that’s how this town works.

Whacked.

I whacked a friend with whom I had worked a number of years ago, and who I enjoyed and respected as an actress.  I said (during a recent email exchange in which she evangelized for my conversion to the Obama religion), that I could not vote for Obama because his background, his associations with Wright and Ayers, and his public pronouncements led me to believe that he adhered to a Marxist philosophy, which was explicitly revealed in his “Spread the wealth around” comments to Joe the Plumber.  As a free-market conservative, I told her, I believe that government-enforced redistribution of wealth is anathema to the American way of life. 

In one of the most baffling non sequiturs I have ever experienced, she immediately accused me of engaging in “hate speech,” and informed me that she could no longer be friends with me. 

Now this same person had, in 2004, the morning after George W. Bush was reelected, loudly proclaimed at our table read that she had hung her head out the window on the way to work while President Bush’s acceptance speech played on her car radio and screamed, “WILL SOMEONE PLEASE ASSASSINATE THIS MAN?”  Through clenched teeth, I noted that many people agreed with her, and most of those people were known, outside of Hollywood, as “terrorists.”  While I found myself unable to speak to her again for a week after her contemptible outburst, I did have to continue working with her for the foreseeable future, and I did find a way to forgive (but not forget), and remain cordial and professional with her. 

But my disagreeing with Obama on philosophical grounds based on his own comments was unforgivable hate speech? 

I whacked her. 

Another friend slowly transformed in front of my eyes during the last election season from a trusted friend, with whom I had had many agreeable discussions over the past eight years about issues like the threat of Islamic terrorism, excessive taxation, and the dangerous Bush Derangement Syndrome afflicting so many of our colleagues, into an unrecognizable Sarah Palin-hating Obamatron, unwilling to listen to any criticism of The One, and parroting mainstream media talking points that only months before we had both ridiculed. 

The first red flag appeared to me when he spoke with contempt about Sarah Palin — which I will admit, I simply cannot bear.  Sarah Palin reminds me of my mother, who came from nothing and earned everything she has.  If you disagree with Palin’s policies or opinions substantively, I can handle that.  But call her stupid, and I see red.  It’s like saying “Yo Momma” to me.  Mrs. Palin is exactly the kind of citizen politician our forefathers envisioned.  She is a decent, normal, beautiful American woman from a small town who worked her way through college without the benefits of wealth, pedigree, or (ahem) Affirmative Action, who then climbed the political ladder, being rewarded by voters for her job performance, and became Governor of her state. 

Sarah Palin has been a mother (of 5), a small business owner, a mayor, a governor, and the point guard on her high school state championship basketball team.  That means she has run a family, a business, a town, a state, and an OFFENSE, for God’s sake.  And she was running with McCain against Obama and Biden, three Senatorial blowhards, each of whom had only ever run one thing: his mouth. 

The last straw was when he sent me one of those chain emails which listed all of Obama’s “accomplishments,” such as they were, and then concluded that the only possible reason anyone could not support Obama was racism.  I told him that since I did not agree with Obama on any issue he could name, and judging by the conversations we’d had over the years that he didn’t either, then if either of us was voting based on race, it had to be him and not me. 

Then after some fruitless back and forth, I realized he was gone.  The friend I had known didn’t really exist anymore.  He was ready to reward the party that had called our President a liar, a loser, and a terrorist, and called our brave soldiers killers, with control of every branch of government because he had succumbed to the Hope and Change cult.  So I put him out of his (and my) misery. 

I took him out behind my address book and whacked him.

Whacking your friends is a dirty business, but sometimes, for their own good and yours, it’s got to be done.  And like Tony Soprano, I have some residual feelings about it that I might need to go talk to Lorraine Bracco about.  But in the end, it’s much like my wife’s philosophy of creating space.  If she has clothes she doesn’t wear, or a piece of furniture she can’t stand anymore, she gets rid of them before she has a replacement.  By getting rid of the old crap you don’t enjoy anymore, she says, you create space in your life for something you do enjoy to appear.  Then when you finally run across something you love, you’ve got room for it. 

This has worked for me like a charm.  I have many new friends now, for the first time in years.  My dear old friends that haven’t lost their minds are still here with me.  And I have room for more. 

I highly recommend it.  Create space in your life.  Don’t be afraid.  If you have friends that don’t fit in your life anymore, face up to it.  Take care of business. 

Whack ‘em.  Tony would.