Please read his latest musings and then take The John Fugelsgang poll!

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There’s a terrific debate going on in this earlier post defending Democratic Congressman Cohen’s right to call us Republicans Nazis without a bunch of media Speech Policers publicly shaming him into shutting up. It’s fine to criticize his hypocrisy and argue that he’s wrong on the facts, but to criticize his speech… That’s something else entirely.

So while that debate’s rocking and rolling, let’s move part of the discussion back onto the grounds of hypocrisy. While we’re being told the use of the word “crosshairs” is wrong, the term “job-killing” is verboten, and Nazi references unacceptable, we’re currently left wondering if an exception we’re unaware of has been granted to Stephen Colbert.

Unless we missed it, there was no media criticism or Jon Stewart humiliation-logues after Mr. Colbert launched this profane, insulting and objectively non-New Tonish attack on Governor Sarah Palin:

• coded talking points mixed in with words picked up at random from a Thesaurus.
• self-promoting ignoramus
• encouraging insurrectionists
• pathetically unstatesmanlike
• shut up for just ten fucking minutes
• media troll

From what we can see, both Jon Stewart and the Media Elites gave Colbert a pass on this one. We understand there were other “crosshairs” dragons to slay, but that is some pretty ugly and mean-spirited rhetoric spewing from Mr. Colbert — at least from our point of view. Before we call all the New Toners out on their hypocrisy, though, let’s take a poll and see what you think…

His “this” refers to the couple’s new song “Fidelity.” The song and title, they’re proud to announce, bubbled into the puppy-lovers’ consciousness during a recent pilgrimage to Stalinist Cuba, where the cheeky free-spirits and human-rights champions “saw pictures of Fidel Castro everywhere!”

Imagine that!

“I found my perfect lover, but he’s only half my age, “sings Hynde about JP Jones in another recent recording.  (Weren’t Liz Taylor and even Madonna less exhibitionist in these matters?)

At any rate, dutiful  to a maxim  more predictable than the sun setting in the west after rising in the east, champion of  Cuban Stalinism (and segregation) Chrissie Hynde was a  noisy  opponent of South African segregation. You’ll find the identical “inconsistencies” from Charles Rangel to Maxine Waters, from Danny Glover to Jack Nicholson, from Sidney Pollack to Steven Spielberg, from Francis Ford Coppola to Norman Jewison and from Ry Cooder to Bonnie Raitt.

And speaking of Bonnie Raitt, she’s not quite up to Chrissie Hynde’s exacting standards in naming improbable offspring after Stalinist (and segregationist) Fidel Castro. But the anti-apartheid and peace activist Raitt did compose a song in honor of the mass-murderer, segregationist and war-monger who came within a hair of nuking her nation.  “Say hello to my little friends!” Fidel Castro prepared to yell right before the mushroom clouds from those “Missiles of October” in October of 1962.

But don’t take it from me. Take it from his famous sidekick, “If the nuclear missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S., including New York City,” boasted the t-shirt icon of peaceniks and flower children in November 1962. “The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” Che Guevara thought he was speaking “off-the-record” to Sam Russell of Britain’s Daily Worker at the time. I note that Benicio Del Toro and Stephen Soderbergh left out this surefire dramatic quote from their recent drama on Che. 

Bonnie Raitt titled her paen to the dictator who craved to incinerate her, her family and her countrymen, “Cuba is Way Too Cool!” and performed it in Fidel’s very fiefdom in March 1999 during a star-studded musical extravaganza titled “Music Bridges over Troubled Waters.”

With Woody Harrelson gyrating drunkenly beside her, the rapidly oxidizing chanteuse, she of the big red hair and the famous gray roots (even then), rasped out her ditty at Havana’s Karl Marx Theater. A beaming, waving Jimmy Buffett came on after Bonnie. Joane Osborne, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, former Police-men Andy Summers and Stuart Copeland all made the groovy scene and took the stage in turn, delighted to croon, strum and strut as guests of a regime that jailed Cuban “roqueros” en-masse. 

These Cuban “roqueros’ ” crime?  Why growing long hair, wearing blue jeans and listening to “yankee-imperialist rock music.” The testimony of one such Castroite-victim might be considered particularly noteworthy:  “In Cuba freedom is nonexistent,” the rock guitarist told Mexico’s Proceso magazine. “The regime demands submission. It persecutes all hippies, homosexuals, poets and free thinkers. It employs total repression against them.”

This “roquero” divulged the truth only because he’d managed to escape the nation-prison Bonnie Raitt, Chrissie Hynde, Jimmy Buffet, Andy Summers, etc. all herald. That escapees name is Canek Sanchez Guevara– Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s very grandson! The regime co-founded by his grandfather jailed and tortured Canek for the crime of trying to play Rock music!

A crowd of 5,000 Cubans huddled before Bonnie, Jimmy and friends that day in March ‘99, swaying and clapping. Most were Cuban Communist Party members and their families. Let’s step back and contemplate the scene: here are these troubadours for human rights. Here’s the same smarmy gang who boycotted South Africa (“I Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City!” thunders Bonnie Raitt herself alongside Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Darryl Hall and scores of similar political imbeciles on the 1985 recording titled, “Artists United Against Apartheid.”)

But she’ll GLADLY play in Havana’s Karl Marx Theater and bask in the applause of an audience pledging proud fealty to the most murderous ideology in human history. Indeed she’ll happily compose a song in their honor–and all on the house!

Here’s Bonnie, Carole, Jimmy and other shrill foes of capital punishment happily crooning love songs to card-carrying members (literally!) of an ideology who’s minions shot, starved, strangled, drowned, hacked and worked to death 100 million human beings in the 20th century. According to researcher Dr. Armando Lago, many in Bonnie and Jimmy’s very audience had a hand in almost 100,000 of these murders. Here are these do-gooders playing (free-of-charge) because of an invitation from Stalinists!

These musical hipsters composed gushy odes to coolness and happiness of a nation with the highest (youth) emigration, incarceration and suicide rates on the face of the globe.

When Cuba’s suicide rate reached 24 per thousand in 1986–making it double Latin America’s average, making it triple Cuba’s pre-Castro rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal in the world, and making death by suicide the primary cause of death for Cubans aged 15-48–at that point the Cuban government ceased publishing the statistics on the self-slaughter. The figures became state secrets. The implications horrified even the Castroites.

In Fidel Castro’s fiefdom Jimmy Buffet and Bonnie Raitt proudly authored paeans to the coolness and happiness of a place that also criminalized Beatles’ and Rolling Stones’ records, and where long hair, blue jeans, and/or effeminate behavior got tens of thousands of youths yanked off the streets by secret police and herded into prison camps at Soviet bayonet-point.

“Way Too Cool!” indeed, Ms Raitt.

UPDATE: Note the environment Cameron’s in when he’s lashed out at conservative “Avatar” critics:

• According to the Hollywood Reporter Cameron called Beck a f–king a–hole “surrounded by journalists inside a West Hollywood hillside mansion.”
• Last month Cameron took on his right-wing critics in a Hollywood Cafe while being interviewed by an L.A. Times reporter.
• In January the Malibu Mansion Dweller gave us hell from the Arclight Theatre at a screening for Hollywood Insiders.

Interesting. And with that I end the update.

Uh, oh, James Cameron’s angry and you know how James gets when he’s angry… Stupid:

“Glenn Beck is a f—ing a–hole,” he said, according to The Associated Press. “I’ve met him. He called me the Antichrist, and not about ‘Avatar.’ He hadn’t even seen ‘Avatar’ yet. I don’t know if he has seen it.” …

“I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads,” Cameron said. “Anybody that is a global-warming denier at this point in time has got their head so deeply up their a–, I’m not sure they could hear me.”

Cameron said conservative criticism of the environmental message of “Avatar” aren’t necessarily attacks. “They’re just people ranting away, lost in their little bubbles of reality, steeped in their own hatred, their own fear and hatred,” he said. “That’s where it all comes from. Let’s just call it out. Let’s have a public discussion. That’s what movies are supposed to do, you know. You can have a mindless entertainment film that doesn’t affect anybody. I wasn’t interested in that.”

My first question for Mr. Global Warming would be to ask why a mansion-dweller so concerned with the welfare of the planet would initially release ”Avatar” on DVD and Blu-ray with no extras whatsoever.

Here’s what a cynical charlatan James Cameron is. The first “Avatar” DVD release occurs on Earth Day to take full advantage of all his Stupakky fans who want to feel good about themselves without actually doing anything to further their cause. But it’s a barebones release. This way Cameron can make a whole lot more money in the future releasing the same film again and again in Special Editions, Deluxe Editions, Platinum Editions and so on.

Does this sound like someone who gives a hi-ho hearty damn about Mother Earth? No, this sounds like just another greedy capitalist wringing every possible nickel from his wares by finessing the market in a way that promotes as much consuming as possible of a product that, by the way, comes in a thick plastic case that must have a landfill half-life of a couple thousand years.

For the record, I have a tremendous amount of affection for greedy capitalists who wring every dime out of their product.

It’s lying hypocrites who slander the military I can’t abide.

James Cameron doesn’t believe the planet’s in trouble. If he did, he would live and behave differently. And if he does, his behavior is a form of genocide. He’s intentionally conducting his life and business in a  way that will kill us all. (Who’s the f–king a–hole now?)

If Beck calls Cameron’s bluff (pretty please, Glenn), I’d bet all kinds of money Cameron locks himself in his air conditioned mansion and refuses to come out.