We’ve gone from Dirty Harry to Jason Bourne (or whatever his name ended up being; the camera was too shaky for me to ever tell what was going on). We’ve gone from Humphrey Bogart to George Clooney.  We’ve gone from John Wayne fighting Indians to Na’vi fighting Americans.

But, don’t fret. For there is an answer to our problems, fellow film buffs. I know you’re six feet from that ledge, but let me give you hope…they are called books. They are these contraptions with bindings and pages with words on the inside. Together this all creates a story one hundred times more fulfilling than today’s dim-witted liberal flavor-of-the-month films.

Hollywood has always been a liberal town. They give us anti-Iraq war movie after anti-Iraq war movie despite the fact that they all flop at the box office. But what of the literary world?  They must surely share Hollywood’s contempt for conservatives and enriching stories, right? Wrong. The publishing world seems to get it, for the most part. They like to publish what sells and what seems to sell today are right-leaning stories.

Stephen Hunter, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, Tom Clancy, Frank Miller, James Ellroy, and Andrew Klavan. These are just a handful of names of today’s top fiction writers. All of them have something in common: they have, admittedly, right leaning politics and philosophies. This does not mean that their books are some kind of weird right-wing propaganda. What it means is that their stories usually make the bad guys who the bad guys really are and their heroes don’t shy away from masculinity or righteous indignation. These writers also have something else in common: they are all New York Times bestselling authors. Try out Stephen Hunter’s new novel Soft Target. It’s a hundred times better and more visually striking than any new action film to hit theaters in the last year. Or try Andrew Klavan’s last adult thriller, The Identity Man. It’s more thought-provoking and more well thought out than any half-baked political thriller cooked up by George Clooney. These writers lead the fiction front in literature today. They put out bestsellers that frequently win acclaim from critics.

As for non fiction…now we are really getting to the heart of the beast. Look at the New York Times bestseller list for non-fiction and you are bound to see a plethora of conservative thought. While Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham are regularly blasted in the mainstream media, they regularly put out bestsellers. Others do too. In fact, most non-fiction political books that hit shelves are written by conservatives. Why this phenomenon and why now? Is it that conservatives have been turned away by Hollywood so they have retreated to the inner workings of books? Or is it because right-leaning artists and right-leaning thinkers need more than a 90-minute film to bring across a message and/or story?

Perhaps films are more representative of a liberal approach to storytelling, while writing is a more conservative approach. Films are a collected effort. They takes hundreds, if not, thousands of people to create, and usually have a vision that is compromised by too many cooks in the kitchen. Books, on the other hand, are a celebration of individualism. It takes one person to sit and put his vision down. Maybe this is the explanation, but maybe not.

But whatever it may be, this much is true: if you hit up your local bookstore or head over to Amazon, you’ll find a world of old school storytelling and right-leaning stories. John Wayne and his films ain’t dead, they just grew up. They exist in an entirely new world: the world of books.

Check out footage from the latest Tea Party rally and you’ll see people holding signs referencing classics like 1984 by George Orwell and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Check out footage of the latest Occupy Wall Street rally and you’ll see people wearing “V for Vendetta” masks. That says it all.

Weinstein was there to support some of his recent films, including the Oscar-bait biopic “My Week with Marilyn,” but the Fox News host opened with a salvo of political questions.

The longtime Democratic supporter took the bait, first waving away concern about President Barack Obama’s falling poll numbers – “they go up and down,” he says in a calm, dismissive tone – and then saying the president will breeze to re-election.

Then, the Obama worship really began in earnest.

Bill O’Reilly: What is it about Pres Obama that appeals to you?

Harvey Weinstein: He’s a man of great intellect and a man of great moral character. He’s a knowledgeable man. Anybody who models a cabinet as Lincoln did has gotta be a smart guy.

Host and guest then discussed whether it’s wise to have the rich pay even more of their money to the government. Weinstein agreed they should but couldn’t offer any specifics on the matter.

Finally, Weinstein played the Left’s most valuable card, what Homer Simpson would call, “It was like that when I got here!”

“President Obama didn’t start this [struggling economy]. He inherited this. He didn’t cause the crisis … at the end of the day, he didn’t cause  it. He did not cause it.”

Much more here.

So we have three Pew studies that superficially rank Fox viewers low on the well-informed list, but in several of the surveys, Fox isn’t the lowest, and other general-interest media outlets — such as network news shows, network morning shows and even the other cable news networks — often score similarly low. Meanwhile, particular Fox shows — such as The O’Reilly Factor and Sean Hannity’s show — actually score consistently well, occasionally even outpacing Stewart’s own audience.

Meanwhile, the other set of knowledge surveys, from worldpublicopinion.org, offer mixed support for Stewart. The 2003 survey strikes us as pretty solid, but the 2010 survey has been critiqued for its methodology.

The way Stewart phrased the comment, it’s not enough to show a sliver of evidence that Fox News’ audience is ill-informed. The evidence needs to support the view that the data shows they are “consistently” misinformed — a term he used not once but three times. It’s simply not true that “every poll” shows that result. So we rate his claim False.

Stewart’s response…

In short: “Yes, I lied, but look at how much Fox lies!”

The response is significant in two ways; first, Stewart’s subtly shifting the goalposts to cover the black eye this has given him. Minus a shred of context (such as “Who said these things on which program?” or “what are the criteria by which Politifact deems this a lie?” or “how frequently is Fox caught in a false statement that it doesn’t correct compared to other news networks?”), Stewart has quietly changed the conversation. Since he wasn’t in his element (constant brown-nosing) on Sunday, he slipped up and made a claim that could be refuted by statistics, so last night, given time to plan and after much ego massaging by his staff, Stewart could make safe, anecdotal charges against FNC as if they prove the same point as the lie he spat at Chris Wallace.

Second, his deflection reinforces the impressions we got from his recent incident with Steven Crowder:

1. Stewart is a coward. For those who aren’t aware of what I’m referring to, one of Stewart’s producers emailed Steven Crowder’s manager and literally said “we never book conservative pundits.” When Crowder made the message public, Stewart freaked out, and his producer intimidated Crowder’s manager until he severed ties with our fellow blogger for fear of being blacklisted. This wasn’t a move to save face; there was no more information to suppress; this was pure bullying. Crowder embarrassed Stewart, so Stewart tried to destroy an up-and-coming comic’s career.

To clarify his producer’s email remarks, he has conservative *pundits* on the show– suit-and-tie WASPs, dry political types who he knows will be on defense the whole time. He gets to own the debate by being the sole possessor of the Comedy card. If he dared to have a conservative comedian like Greg Gutfeld or Crowder, he might have someone who pushes back against him and beats him at his own game. He can’t let conservatives be funny in front of his audience; why, they might start believing crazy things, like conservatives can be funny! We see it in his recent interviews and debates with Bill O’Reilly; in an environment that Stewart can’t control, the Fox host gets to break this unspoken rule, taking witty, deadpan jabs at Stewart, himself, and the television culture in which they operate, much to the visible discontent of the Most Trusted Man in America. And that brings us right to our next point:

2. Stewart is incredibly thin-skinned. Any time someone goes on offense against him, Jon gets beyond indignant. We see it most clearly on his Sunday appearance; he’s practically snarling at Chris Wallace. Why? Because Wallace doesn’t treat him as the wizened statesman/hip cat persona the rest of the MSM has built up for him; Wallace treats him like this guy. Instead of going, “Oh, garsh, I guess my entire existence really is based around an organization designed solely for malevolent propaganda, and you’ve convinced me to do some soul-searching!”, Wallace challenges him to admit Fox is no worse than outlets like the New York Times. With the grace and poise of a college freshman, Stewart barks back his “consistently… every poll” nonsense. Because Wallace doesn’t automatically acknowledge him as the smartest guy in the room, he commits an unforced error, revealing that his hatred of Fox is an a priori prejudice, not an evidenced conclusion. And now he’s doing his best to tap dance around it with a number of anecdotes drawn from a multi-year period– a number we could match from a week’s worth of content from any other cable news network.

3. Stewart’s downfall will be his insistence that he’s not on the playing field. If we take just a smattering of the issues Stewart has covered in the past couple years– reasons for the Iraq war, waterboarding, 9/11 first responders, Stewart has gone full-on editorializing pundit multiple times, shoehorning the occasional sardonic joke into angry rants and gotcha-grasping interviews that would make Charlie Gibson vomit. Even progressive pundits see through it; he’s the only one with blinders big enough to deny the obvious. In an interview as fascinating as it is uncomfortable, Rachel Maddow spends 50 minutes trying to get him to admit that his schtick, on which she has shamelessly modeled her own schtick, is actually comparable to her schtick. Yet, by leveraging her undying admiration, Stewart pushes Maddow away again and again, going so far as to say outright, “we have no responsibility.”

He’s desperately trying to hold together the fantasy that his work exists in a vacuum devoid of any cultural significance– that whatever happens on his show stays on his show since he’s only on the sidelines– but the fantasy is falling apart faster than ever in the wake of this Fox interview; If he keeps it up much longer, he’s going to become the joke, like David Letterman has become to us (if you’re a Stewart fan, just switch out Letterman with Leno so you can understand that). And based on his response to the Politifact article about his Fox claim, we may look back at this whole affair as the moment that Jon Stewart officially jumped the shark.

Cross-posted at the Landmark Report.

—–

Mendenhall recently lost his endorsement from Champion Sports over a few infamous, perhaps impulsive tweets.  Common wrote a damn love song about convicted cop-killer and domestic terrorist Assata Shakur, went to visit her in Cuba, and named his daughter after her.  I have attached that song at the end of this post, because I want everyone to see exactly what we’re talking about here.  If you name your daughter after a convicted cop-killer, domestic terrorist and violent, militant Black Nationalist, then the song you wrote worshipping said cop-killer was not simply adopting an artistic voice.  If your defense is going to be that you believe she’s really completely innocent, you better have some damn good reasons for believing so if you expect anyone to let it slide. 

Common’s taking sides with Assata Shakur doesn’t have anything to do with his expert legal opinion.  He’s taking sides with Assata Shakur because he apparently worships everything for which she stood – Black Panthers, Black Liberation Army (BLA), ethnic sectarianism, and the great socialist revolution.  He didn’t write a song arguing that even though Assata Shakur joined a reprehensible, racist and violent terrorist organization like the BLA and did a number of awful things with them, in this particular incident there were anomalies in the application of due process.  He wrote a song worshiping her values and her life’s mission. 

By all means read up on the BLA.  During the 1970’s they carried out a string of violent acts, bombings, robberies, murders, and jail breaks.  They even worked alongside with the Weather Underground.  How exactly does Common believe that Assata was fighting “so we could be free?”  Common’s entire song is rewriting the repugnant history of a cold blooded murderer and substituting a fabricated narrative wherein the police and the American government are a bunch of vicious, racist goons simply out to get black people. 

Jon Stewart can’t figure out why that’s incredibly offensive, especially to police?

Common also somehow believes, celebrates and sings about the “innocence” and greatness of another convicted cop-killer, Mumia Abu-Jamal.  Coincidentally he was also a Black Nationalist and Black Panther.  That’s a pretty unmistakable pattern.  Add to that Common’s personal, not artistic, opposition to interracial marriage, which somehow went unmentioned on The Factor.  If this guy were either a white guy or a conservative and promoted this kind of ethnic sectarianism, this guy would be so unthinkably toxic, and rightfully so, that no honorable President would ever think of validating his artwork, and he would never be allowed anywhere near Sesame Street.  Yet these are the kinds of messages promoted by our President, the great racial healer?

We have all sat through hysterical warnings time and time again about how “dangerous,” “radical,” and “anti-government” all of those wannabe Timothy McVeigh tea-partiers really are, in spite of absolutely all evidence to the contrary.  The President’s and his allies’ direct ties and open advocacy of actual anti-government radicals and domestic terrorism or terrorists (see Bill Ayers, see Jeremiah Wright’s support of Qaddafi) are all supposed to be ignored.  Somehow conservatives are the ones with double standards? 

Like many others, I’m disappointed in Fox News’ handling of the Common controversy.  It’s not that they’re on the wrong side of it; they just keep whiffing badly in their presentation and argument.  Understandably, assessing pop-culture is not really Sean Hannity’s forté, and Jon Stewart is going to have a built-in advantage on that turf going up against Bill O’Reilly, but O’Reilly should have wiped the floor with Stewart last night, but he played nice and let him off the hook (or if you’re Mediaite straight news guy Colby Hall, O’Reilly producers cut to commercial as a “standing eight count” to duck the merciless beating from Jon Stewart.  The “editorial” tag must still have a glitch over there).  It’s not that O’Reilly lost the debate by any means – he didn’t.  It’s that he left so much on the table and let Stewart get away with so much. 

Common is not only a miserable influence on children, but the promotion of his art by the White House (not to mention the President’s former church) is just another reminder that this administration’s approach to race has nothing to do with interracial unity.  It is much more about ethnic solidarity and division for the advancement of a radical political agenda.

A Song For Assata”
(feat. Cee-Lo)

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/common/asongforassata.html

[Common]
In the Spirit of God.
In the Spirit of the Ancestors.
In the Spirit of the Black Panthers.
In the Spirit of Assata Shakur.
We make this movement towards freedom
for all those who have been oppressed, and all those in the struggle.
Yeah. yo, check it-

There were lights and sirens, gunshots firin
Cover your eyes as I describe a scene so violent
Seemed like a bad dream, she laid in a blood puddle
Blood bubbled in her chest, cold air brushed against open flesh
No room to rest, pain consumed each breath
Shot twice wit her hands up
Police questioned but shot before she answered
One Panther lost his life, the other ran for his
Scandalous the police were as they kicked and beat her
Comprehension she was beyond, tryna hold on
to life. She thought she’d live with no arm
that’s what it felt like, got to the hospital, eyes held tight
They moved her room to room-she could tell by the light
Handcuffed tight to the bed, through her skin it bit
Put guns to her head, every word she got hit
“Who shot the trooper?” they asked her
Put mace in her eyes, threatened to blast her
Her mind raced till things got still
Opened her eyes, realized she’s next to her best friend who got killed
She got chills, they told her: that’s where she would be next
Hurt mixed wit anger-survival was a reflex
They lied and denied visits from her lawyer
But she was buildin as they tried to destroy her
If it wasn’t for this german nurse they woulda served her worse
I read this sister’s story, knew that it deserved a verse
I wonder what would happen if that woulda been me?
All this shit so we could be free, so dig it, y’all.

[Cee-lo vocals]
I’m thinkin’ of Assata, yes.
Listen to my Love, Assata, yes.
Your Power and Pride is beautiful.
May God bless your Soul.

[Common]
It seemed like the middle of the night when the law awakened her
Walkie-talkies cracklin, I see ‘em when they takin her
Though she kinda knew,
What made the ride peaceful was the trees and the sky was blue
Arrived to Middlesex Prison about six inna morning
Uneasy as they pushed her to the second floor in
a cell, one cot, no window, facing hell.
Put in the basement of a prison wit all males
And the smell of misery, seatless toilets and centipedes
She’d exercise, (paint?,) and begin to read
Two years inna hole. Her soul grew weak
Away from people so long she forgot how to speak
She discovered frredom is a unspoken sound
And a wall is a wall and can be broken down
Found peace in the Panthers she went on trial with
One of the brothers she had a child with
The foulness they would feed her, hopin she’s lose her seed
Held tight, knowing the fight would live through this seed
In need of a doctor, from her stomach she’s bleed
Out of this situation a girl was conceived
Separated from her, left to mother the Revolution
And lactated to attack hate
Cause federal and state was built for a Black fate
Her emptiness was filled with beatings and court dates
They fabricated cases, hoping one would stick
And said she robbed places that didn’t exist
In the midst of threats on her life and being caged with Aryan whites
Through dark halls of hate she carried the light
I wonder what would happen if that woulda been me?
All of this shit so we could be free.
Yeah, I often wonder what would happen if that woulda been me?
All of this shit so we could be free, so dig it, people-

[Cee-Lo]
I’m thinkin’ of Assata, yeah.
Listen to my Love, Assata, yeah.
Your Power and Pride, so Beautiful…
May God bless your Soul.
Oooh.

[Common]
Yo
From North Carolina her grandmother would bring
news that she had had a dream
Her dreams always meant what they needed them to mean
What made them real was the action in between
She dreamt that Assata was free in they old house in Queens
The fact that they always came true was the thing
Assata had been convicted of a murder she couldna done
Medical evidence shown she couldna shot the gun
It’s time for her to see the sun from the other side
Time for her daughter to be by her mother’s side
Time for this Beautiful Woman to become soft again
Time for her to breathe, and not be told how or when
She untangled the chains and escaped the pain
How she broke out of prison I could never explain
And even to this day they try to get to her
but she’s free with political asylum in Cuba.

[Cee-Lo vocals]
I’m thinkin’ of Assata, yeah.
Listen to my Love, Assata, yeah.
We’re molded from the same mud, Assata.
We share the same Blood, Assata, yeah.
Your Power and Pride, so Beautiful…
May God bless your Soul.
Your Power and Pride, so Beautiful…
May God bless your Soul.
Oooh.

[Assata]
Freedom! You askin me about freedom. Askin me about freedom?
I’ll be honest with you. I know a whole more about what freedom isn’t
than about what it is, cause I’ve never been free.
I can only share my vision with you of the future, about what freedom is.
Uhh, the way I see it, freedom is– is the right to grow, is the right to
blossom.
Freedom is -is the right to be yourself, to be who you are,
to be who you wanna be, to do what you wanna do. [fade out]

Ken Larrey is working up a piece of analysis now, but I wanted to post the video and throw this question out there…

The First Lady invited rapper Common to the White House, a man openly opposed to interracial relationships. Common didn’t state his opposition to interracial relationships while assuming the role of a particular character in a song, he said so in a 2005 interview.

Why didn’t that come up last night?

Thank you, Bill O’Reilly:

—–

Some, like O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, did bring up Common’s open opposition to interracial relationships and his craven support of two convicted cop killers. In other words, on top of the lyrics, there was also a discussion at FNC (and elsewhere) about the full context of this extremely divisive and sometimes repulsive “artist” the White House saw fit to stamp with their approval. But Comedy Central’s “New Murrow” only wanted to discuss Common within a safe-for-Obama context (the lyrics) and in the above video, Bill O’Reilly calls Stewart out for this act of “comedic” intellectual dishonesty.

Naturally, in their journ-o-listic quest to put the story to bed before the full truth gets out, the MSM grabbed hold of Stewart’s dishonest attack on Fox News, labeled it “epic,” pronounced it “ownage” (want to see how corrupt journ-o-lism works? Click this and this), and positioned it as the last word. But this story — and some of this is our fault for making lyrics an issue — still hasn’t been properly told. O’Reilly understands this and to his great credit has no intention of allowing Stewart, the MSM and the White House to wriggle off this hook so easily.

Moreover, Jon Stewart makes a big deal out of being a friend to first responders, and has, to his credit, frequently put his money where his mouth is in this regard. But slain police officers are also “first responders” and thus far (unless I missed it) Stewart has refused to address the justifiable outrage some police organizations have expressed towards a White House invitation extended to a man who vocally defends those who have, uhm, murdered “first responders.”

The other area Stewart and the MSM refuse to go near is that 2005 interview in which Common openly expressed his opposition to interracial relationships. No “artistic license” cover there, folks. If Stewart takes O’Reilly up on his offer to debate the matter further, I would love to hear The New Murrow’s defense of a White House inviting a man opposed to interrelationships over for an audience with the president. Maybe instead of a clown nose, Stewart has a time machine that can take him back to 1902.

Bottom line: good on Bill O’Reilly for finding the perfect way to keep this story alive and giving it another opportunity to be told properly. Hitting back at Jon Stewart with a debate challenge was the perfect choice. If the corrupt media and the White House want to live by the “Daily Show” narrative-sword, they can also die by it.

—–

Tonight:

Mike Baker

Opie and Anthony’s Anthony Cumia

Patti Ann Brown!