So I headed on down to Shock City Studios in Saint Louis, owned by Chris Loesch, with nothing more than a concept. The idea; what if the founding fathers rose from the dead only to see how badly we’ve screwed things up? What you now see is the fruit of hard working professionals as well as the inability to pay our rap-video sirens in anything more than sandwiches.

Note: No women were actually objectified during the making of this video. Not while they were looking.

I’ve been looking around for answers, but all I hear is noise. Everyone is pointing fingers at the Left or the Right, blaming Hollywood or Capitol Hill. Time is flying by too quickly for petty arguments. My children’s future won’t wait. I’ve got to do something now.

Here’s my hunch: Could it be that we have simply forgotten what made us such a great nation in the first place? So many people are waiting around for our leaders to come up with a grand plan to save our nation. But is that really how America got started? What if things actually work the other way around? What if real change doesn’t start at the top but at the bottom? What if the best place to begin transforming our country is not the Oval Office but the dinner table?

For the past year and a half, I’ve been making a film called “Monumental,” and I am thrilled to announce that it’s coming to theaters on March 27. We are creating a live, one-night national event in 500 theaters where audiences can experience a monumental moment together. Then we will release the film in theaters in select cities, while providing helpful new resources to families, churches, and schools who want to go further with what they’ve experienced in the film. 

In the film I retrace the footsteps of our Founders from England to America in the hope of discovering our true “national treasure.” I wanted to listen to them, to learn from them. Our forefathers knew we were a forgetful people, that someday we would lose our way as a nation. So they left us “maps” that would guide us back to the source of America’s success. What I discovered is amazing! This is one of the most important journeys of my life. America is worth fighting for, and so are our families. We can still be a “city upon a hill,” but we need to work together. With God’s help, we can turn this thing around. It’s been said, “Footprints in history are not made sitting down,” and I couldn’t agree more. I hope that our children will mark this moment as the turning point when we stood up, came together, and reclaimed the true national treasure of America.

Bill Maher is that monkey.

See, Bill Maher’s a smart guy. None of us can deny that. A nuisance at worst, a more than worthy adversary at best, Bill Maher is the kind of intellectual whose worst enemy is his own pride. Smart people generally don’t make intellectual miscalculations; they make careless errors.  Sometimes, a mistruth is so often repeated in society that even smart folk like Maher accept it as fact. A good example would be Bill Maher’s constant claim that the Bible encourages slavery and the founding fathers were anti-Christian.

Firstly, Bill would be right to say that the founding fathers were anti-religion.  One could say the same thing about most pastors heading churches throughout the United States today. A disdain for man-made religion does not equal a hate for personal faith in God. 

As a matter of fact, oftentimes as one grows in their relationship with God, they find themselves saddened by the state of the modern church. People like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin (the same people whom Maher loves to quote) would be perfect, powdered-wig crystallizations of religion-hating, God-fearing Christians. A simple glance through the founding documents or personal journals of the founding fathers confirms it.

As for the Bible being a rampantly pro-slavery piece of literature… false.  It’s true that there are passages in the Bible dealing with slavery, which when read in modern America without the proper context, seem cringeworthy at best. Nowhere in the bible, however, is there an open-ended encouragement of the practice and in multiple places, being what we would consider slavery today is thoroughly condemned.

See, we have to understand that the slavery referred to in the Bible is most often not slavery as we know it today. In both Old and specifically New Testament times, people would go into slavery themselves if they were unable to pay their debts, or unable to pay their own cost of living (which would then be covered by their master). They would have more in common with a lower class worker or a college student still mooching off of their parents than the race-based slavery we’ve known in the Western world.

A prime example of where one does see race-based slavery in the Bible, is when a little group of people were enslaved by the Egyptians solely because they were Hebrew (Exodus 13:14). Anyone know what happened next?

Anyone? Anyone?

…God was pretty ticked. Angry enough to bring the freaking plagues. [Note: They were kind of a big deal.]

The Bible also does address the act of “man stealing,” (exactly the kind of thing that Africans did to their own people) and had this to say about it: “Anyone who kidnaps another and either sells him or still has him when he is caught must be put to death” (Exodus 21:16).

God then went on to put such folks in the same category as murderers and rapists. I guess you could say he had a thing about that.

In the end, don’t blame Bill Maher.  He’s just accepting common mistruths because he doesn’t know any better… and nobody will tell him. Maybe he needs an uneducated, God-loving, gun toting, tea-partying, redneck in his Hollywood entourage.  You know… just to keep him in the know.

The activist left, which denigrated the previous president in a merciless fashion, took the reins of power with reckless abandon and shoved its brand of poisonous hope and change down the throats of the American people. So we the people, the reawakening silent majority, responded in the form of a grassroots movement that is turning into a juggernaut set to roll past November 2nd and become something transcendent and long-lasting. Our Founding Fathers would be proud that we have rediscovered the spirit and the essence of their ideas.

While the Tea Party has not been specifically partisan–many Republican carcasses lie in its rubble–this conservative and constitutional checks and balances has created a rejuvenated GOP, chastened and wiser.

This weekend I have the honor of sharing the stage with one of the Tea Party’s and Republican Party’s fearless leaders, Sarah Palin. Since her arrival on the national stage, the Democratic Party has recognized her potential as a political powerhouse and has worked in tandem with its partners in crime, the mainstream media, to wage an unprecedented personal campaign against her and her family. The Tea Party can relate.

But the power of Alinsky and the politics of personal destruction vis a vis the Democrat Media Complex has reverse effects when the object of the hate bravely stands up to the bullies and thugs. The Tea Party and Sarah Palin have given America a great lesson in standing up to the bullies who have co-opted the Democratic Party and the American media.

As we head into the home stretch, Sarah Palin will be in California to draw attention to a state in economic shambles. After a generation of nanny-state and Ponzi scheme policies, Californians and Americans want a radical change. This is the Republican Party’s chance to win back one of the bluest states, and what better way to usher in that change than with a dynamic female leader like Sarah Palin cheering on fellow free market, limited government feminist success stories Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina.

Michael Steele, “American Heart” singer/songwriter Jon David, other California GOP candidates and I will join Palin on stage to cheer on a new era of hope and change in the pursuit of helping California avert economic disaster.

I invite all of our readers to come down to have a rollicking and patriotic time. I’ll be hanging out to meet and greet one and all well after the bunting has been taken down.

Palin FACT SHEET – CA 9.29.10-1 –

It would not be the last time the founders appealed to the Almighty God.

James Madison acknowledged God’s favor in our founding in Federalist 37 referring to “a finger of that almighty hand, which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution.”  I dare say that men like Madison and Cushing would not recognize the America of today, filled with politicians afraid to confess their faith or educators fearful of offending the sensibilities of their students with any mention of God.

Math teacher Brad Johnson of Westview High School of the Poway School District in San Diego, California, is a case in point.

In 2007, Westview Principal Dawn Kastner ordered Johnson to remove banners hanging in his classroom because they contained the words “God” and “Creator.”  According to media reports the banners, which had hung in his classroom for 25 years, measured approximately 7 feet long by 2 feet wide and carried the phrases: “In God We Trust,” “One Nation Under God,” “God Bless America,” “God Shed His Grace on Thee” and “All Men Are Created Equal, They are Endowed by Their Creator.”

Kastner objected to the banners, claiming that they promoted a Judeo-Christian viewpoint and might make some students feel uncomfortable. The school district agreed.  Oddly enough neither Kastner nor school district officials were concerned with posters hanging in other classrooms containing Buddhist, Islamic, and Tibetan prayers or those containing anti-religious messages that might make Christians uncomfortable.  What remains unclear is why those that preach diversity and tolerance seem incapable of practicing those same virtues when it comes to Christians and the role of Christian faith in our American history.

Kastner and Poway district officials might argue that they are simply enforcing the Constitution’s wall of separation between church and state.  The U.S. Constitution, of course, recognizes no such wall.  There are roughly 4,500 words in the original unamended document and not one of them was written to imply that God – specifically the God of Abraham – should be hidden from school children.

The Bible – Old and New Testament – was the most common piece of household literature of the time; it was the primary textbook from which children and adults learned reading, writing, and morality.  The first American dictionary contains biblical references on just about every page.

Moreover, the founders believed religion and religious teaching to be essential to the maintenance of a free society.  The great patriot Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania wrote, “All its [Christian revelation] doctrines and precepts are calculated to promote the happiness of society, and the safety and well being of civil government.”  Therefore, reasoned Rush, “the only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion.  Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.”  In short the founders recognized not only the nexus between virtue and happiness, but also virtue and liberty.

We should not be surprised when those that endeavor to erase God from our history also seek to shackle us to the administrative state.  Man will “either be governed by a power from within or controlled by a power from without.”

In his farewell address, George Washington said, “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.  Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

The founders would find the mushy multi-cultural political correctness of the 21^st century to be outrageous.

The first round of the legal battle was won by Johnson.  U.S. District Court Judge Roger T. Benitez delivered a scathing rebuke to the Poway School District, correctly reasoning that “recognizing that God places prominently in our nation’s history does not create an Establishment Clause violation requiring curettage and disinfectant for Johnson’s public high school classroom walls. It is a matter of historical fact that our institutions and government actors have in past and present times given place to a supreme God.”

Not content to leave well-enough alone, the Poway School District has appealed the decision, which will be heard by the liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  Heaven help us!

But before I get into the stomach-churning details of the Hollywood Left’s shattered moral compass vis-a-vis directors Polanski and Panahi and other Iranian film artists, I would like to take a moment to honor more of the true heroes who have spoken out loudly on Mr. Panahi’s behalf and signed petitions for his release. The National Society of Film Critics. The Boston, L. A. and  Toronto Film Critics Associations. Arin Paul of the New York Times. Filmmaker Ken Loach. Rutger Wolfson, director of the Rotterdam Film Festival. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle. Human Rights Watch. French Minister of Culture Frederic Mitterand. Iranhumanrights.org. The list really is long.

Of course, noticeably absent from those petitioning and publicly calling for the release of Mr. Panahi from his unjust tomb-like captivity in Tehran are all of the prominent Hollywood A-List petitioners for Polanski. So Mr. Polanski’s arrest for child rape is worthy of international pressure and outrage, but famed director Jafar Panahi being tossed into a crypt in Tehran on “unspecified charges” is not? Welcome to Lefty Hollywood. And it only gets worse. The most tragic case of Jafar Panahi is yet one more sorry, perplexing and infuriating chapter in leftist Hollywood’s incredible blind side to any human rights violations in Iran, never mind only those perpetrated against Iranian filmmakers today.

Gay rights zero Sean Penn’s PR jaunt for the Mad Mullahs in Tehran in 2005, praising the Islamists even as then president-elect Mahmoud “No Gays in Iran” Ahmadinejad was jacking up the regime’s barbaric anti-gay pogrom. The sordid and embarrassing Team Oscar trip to Iran in March 2009, in which actress Annette Bening praised the regime’s women’s rights record even as Roxana Saberi rotted in Evin prison across town, and as Iranian-American filmmaker Esha Momeni awaited an Islamist kangaroo court for the crime of filming a women’s rights documentary. She awaits trial still.

The Academy’s posting of the self-aggrandizing Road to Isfahan promo last summer, with no mention that many of the Iranian filmmakers featured in it had been blacklisted by the regime. In essence, the Academy profited from their McCarthyite misery. AMPAS knew, in the same way that you now know. I told them. The Academy’s emailed response? They don’t get into politics, don’t you know. Same with the AMPAS Iran film seminar in L.A. last October. Two blacklisted Iranian film artists, including renowned actress Fatemeh Motamed-Aria, were barred from leaving Iran to attend.

The show went on, the blacklisted whitewashed from the Academy’s program in Orwellian fashion. Also noticeably absent from Hollywood’s list of cause celebres’ is renowned Iranian director and President of the Asian Film Academy Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who now serves as official spokesman for Mir Hussein Mousavi and the Greens outside Iran. Who in Hollywood has invited Mr. Makhmalbaf to speak on the plight of the Greens and Iranian film artists? None I can find. How can you explain any of this to where it makes any sense at all? Why not any peep out of Hollywood on Iran at all?

Theo Van Gogh

Is it the Islamist Fear Factor? Are they just too enamored of blood-drenched dictators like Chavez, Castro and Ahmadinejad that they can’t find it within themselves to say a bad word about them? Or is it just plain endemic Hollywood racism? Polanski is white, after all. Panahi and most Iranians are not. I’d like to believe that, but I don’t really. I just believe leftist Hollywood is so morally corrupt that child rape and cop killing are morally defensible, yet dissent in a fascist dictatorship is not. Perhaps if Mr. Panahi had drugged and raped a tween, he would be getting the rabid and unqualified support of the lefty Hollywood establishment today. How I only wish to God that were a sick joke.

For those of you who do still have some shred of morality and human decency left in your souls (unlike some people), here are two petitions for the release of entombed director Jafar Panahi. One is at Facebook, the other at Petitions Online. Thank you, on behalf of Mr. Panahi and his family. And thanks to the many worldwide voices who have NOT remained silent in the face of this abomination of justice for a cutting-edge director, whose only crime is being cutting-edge in a fascist dictatorship where such innovation is rewarded with the death of a thousand cuts. I can think of many lefty Hollywood film types more deserving of that fate than the brave Jafar Panahi.

Here’s an idea. Why don’t we petition the Iranian government and work out a trade? They send us Jafar Panahi and all their blacklisted film artists, and we send them all the signatories to Roman Polanski’s petition. Let’s Make a Deal! And no, I’m not joking. I would make that trade in a heartbeat. I am at my wit’s end with Lefty Hollywood, people. For over a year now I have been pressing the case of Iranian film artists, and they were all just as dead silent on the subject then as they are toward Jafar Panahi and other persecuted filmmakers in Iran today, some of whom they once called friend.

I have even tried to shame them into action. But how do you shame the shameless? How do you explain morality to moral reprobates who equivocate the drugging and anal rape of a child? Who believe critics of dictator Hugo Chavez should be thrown in jail? Who believe that we were as racist and terrorist as the genocidal Imperial Japanese in the Pacific War? Who believe America is evil and everything it stands for sucks, even as they lead lives of freedom and luxury not possible anywhere else on earth? What happened to the Hollywood heroes of old who made fun of fascist dictators, often at risk to their own lives, instead of jaunting off to run PR campaigns for them?

Maybe it’s time for a new and revolutionary tack, people. Maybe it’s time to found a new Hollywood built on the principles of the old. The Hollywood in which the brave Victor Laszlo was a hero, not the murderous Che Guevara. In which America’s greatness and heroism was praised, not vilified. In which the American people were enlightened with great film stories that made them proud to be Americans, not browbeat with leftist anti-American propaganda. There is a great hunger in America for that brand of storytelling in film. A market of hundreds of millions just waiting to be tapped.

A huge undertaking, no doubt. But nowhere near the task faced by our Founding Fathers, and look at the miracles that ragtag band of rebels wrought. We Americans can do anything we put our minds to. But that is a piece for another time. For now, forget those useless leftist Hollywood idiots. We can deal with them later. Right now, Jafar Panahi and his family need each of us to speak out on his behalf. His life is hanging in the balance. Please sign the petitions at Facebook and Petitions Online linked above. As I have said in Part One, concerted voices raised in outrage have saved lives in Iran before, and can do so again. To save one life is to save the world entire. That is all that matters now. Hollywood lefties can go fuck themselves. History and their silence will damn them for all time.

—–

How could I not post this? The Tea Party convention’s about to get underway and the video is a perfect smash-up: 1776 meets 1983 — which just happen to be my two favorite years.

Enjoy!

From the website:

Those of us at Soomo who are over 35 don’t know much about Timbaland, but we couldn’t help but get interested in our colleague Tim Alden Grant’s video project when we heard it featured the Framers in an 80’s Hair Band moment. Check this out. Share it with friends and your classes. And let us know what you think!

See the one point that liberals miss when they read the story of Robin Hood was that the man never stole from “the rich.” Leftists like to vilify the wealthy, but the tale of Robin Hood vilifies a corrupt government. Robin Hood was stealing from an oppressive monarchy/administration and giving the wealth back to its rightful owners. He was essentially re-distributing wealth by removing it from the initial re-distributors. Confused? Let’s break down the story of Robin Hood for a second:

• Members of the monarchy are born into positions of power without having been elected.
• Peasants are born into a life of poverty; all of their acquisitions are taken from them by aforementioned monarchy.
• Robin Hood sees the injustice in hard-workers living in squalor while corrupt government officials “be livin’ likes pimps” (this is a quote from the original text, of course).
• Robin Hood says “enough” and takes on the government.
• Government loses control in an elaborate sword-fight (Errol Flynn wears tights).
• The people take back what they’d rightfully earned in the first place.

Hmmm… I’m still not seeing this as any sort of socialist crusade. Where in the story does Mr. Hood steal from small business owners or entrepreneurs? If there’s a sub-plot where Robin Hood professes the necessity of “equal outcomes,” I haven’t read it. Perhaps it’s my mere fourth-grade reading equivalency getting the best of me, but nowhere in the book do I see the Prince of Thieves even SUGGEST any sort of higher or additional taxes.

So again, I’d have to ask: Why do liberals so often use Robin Hood as a Marxist parable? Have they not read the story, or have they only watched the Disney version?

Come to think of it, I thought it was weird when Sean Penn started quoting “Robin Hood the Fox.”

History serving “a social aim,” rather than chronicling the past in a detached manner, is what readers get in A People’s History of the United States. With any luck, “The People Speak,” the History Channel documentary based on the book that premieres this Sunday, will be, like so many Hollywood productions, unfaithful to the original. Given A People’s History of the United States’ infidelity to facts, this might be the only chance viewers have of seeing anything resembling an accurate retelling of history.

Through Zinn’s looking-glass, Maoist China, site of history’s bloodiest state-sponsored killings, transforms into “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.” The authoritarian Nicaraguan Sandinistas were “welcomed” by their own people, while the opposition Contras, who backed the candidate that triumphed when free elections were finally held, were a “terrorist group” that “seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua.” Admitting some human rights abuses, Zinn writes that Castro’s Cuba “had no bloody record of suppression.”

Readers of A People’s History of the United States learn very little about history. They learn quite a bit about Howard Zinn. In fact, the book is perhaps best thought of as a massive Rorschach Test, with the author’s familiar reaction to every major event in American history proving that his is a captive mind long closed by ideology.

If you’ve read Karl Marx, there’s no reason to read Howard Zinn. In fact, reading the most important line of The Communist Manifesto makes a study of A People’s History of the United States a colossal waste of time. The single-bullet theory of history offered by Marx–“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle”–is relied upon by Zinn to explain all of American history. Economics determines everything. Why study history when theory has all the answers?

Thumb through A People’s History of the United States and one finds greed motivating every major event. According to Zinn, the separation from Great Britain, the Civil War, and both world wars—to name but a few examples—all stem from base motives involving rich men seeking to get richer at the expense of other men.

Zinn’s projection of Marxist theory upon historical reality begins with Columbus. According to Zinn, those following the seafaring Italian to the New World did so for one reason: profit. “Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property,” maintains the octogenarian scribe.

A materialist interpretation continues with the Founding. “Around 1776,” A People’s History informs, “certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from the favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.”

Zinn sarcastically adds, “When we look at the American Revolution this way, it was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers deserve the awed tribute they have received over the centuries. They created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.” Rather than the spark that lit the fire of freedom and self-government throughout much of the world, he portrays the American Founding as a diabolically creative way to ensure oppression. If the Founders wanted a society they could direct, why didn’t they put forth a dictatorship or a monarchy resembling most other governments at the time? Why go through the trouble of devising a constitution guaranteeing rights, political participation, jury trials, and checks on power? Zinn doesn’t explain, contending that these freedoms and rights are merely a facade designed to prevent class revolution.

Zinn paints antebellum America as a uniquely cruel slaveholding society subjugating man for profit. Curiously, the war that ultimately results in slavery’s demise is portrayed as a conflict of oppression too. Zinn writes, “it is money and profit, not the movement against slavery, that was uppermost in the priorities of the men who ran the country.” Rather than welcoming emancipation, as one might expect, Zinn casts a cynical eye towards it. “Class consciousness was overwhelmed during the Civil War,” the author laments, placing a decidedly negative spin on the central event in American history. America is in a lose/lose situation. The same thing, according to Zinn, caused both slavery and emancipation: greed. Whether the U.S. tolerates or eradicates slavery, its nefarious motives remain the same. Zinn’s jaundiced eye fails to see the real issues surrounding the Civil War. Instead, he envisions the chief significance of the grisly conflict as how it allegedly served as a distraction from the impending socialist revolution.

By the time the reader reaches World War I, Zinn begins to sound like a broken record. “American capitalism needed international rivalry—and periodic war—to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor,” the Boston University emeritus professor of history writes of the Great War, “supplanting the genuine community of interest among the poor that showed itself in sporadic movements.” Yet another diversion to delay the revolution!

“A People’s War?” is Zinn’s chapter on the war in which he served his country. Zinn suggests that America, not Japan, was to blame for Pearl Harbor by provoking the Empire of the Sun. The fight against fascism was all an illusion. While Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan may have been America’s enemies, Uncle Sam’s real goal was empire. Regarding America’s neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, Zinn asks:  “[W]as it the logical policy of a government whose main interest was not stopping Fascism but advancing the imperial interests of the United States? For those interests, in the thirties, an anti-Soviet policy seemed best. Later, when Japan and Germany threatened U.S. world interests, a pro-Soviet, anti-Nazi policy became preferable.” Reality is inverted. It’s not the Soviet Union that went from being anti-Nazi to pro-Nazi to anti-Nazi. Zinn projects the Soviet Union’s schizophrenic policies upon the United States. While Zinn awkwardly excuses the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he all but proclaims a Hitler-Roosevelt Pact.

The reader learns that the Second World War was really about—surprise!—money. “Quietly, behind the headlines in battles and bombings,” Zinn writes, “American diplomats and businessmen worked hard to make sure that when the war ended, American economic power would be second to none in the world. United States business would penetrate areas that up to this time had been dominated by England. The Open Door Policy of equal access would be extended from Asia to Europe, meaning that the United States intended to push England aside and move in.” Yet, this didn’t happen. The English Empire expired, but no American Empire took its place. Despite defeating Japan and helping to vanquish Germany, America rebuilt these countries. They are now America’s chief economic rivals, not its colonies.

The profit motive certainly is central to numerous major events in American history. The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Fort in 1848, for example, undeniably stands as the primary reason—alongside the favorable outcome of the Mexican War—for the subsequent population explosion in California. The Gold Rush is one of several historical occurrences that conform to Zinn’s overall thesis. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. For every major figure or event whose catalyst was economic interests, scores were sparked by some unrelated concern.

To question Zinn’s method of analyses is not to say that economics does not influence events. It is to say that one-size-fits-all explanations of history are bound to be wrong more than they are right. History is too complicated to find a perfect fit within any theory. For the true believer, this inconvenience can be overcome. When fact and theory clash, ideologues choose theory. To the true believer, ideology is truth. Time and again, A People’s History of the United States opts to mold the facts to fit theory, leaving the reader to wonder what “people” he is referring to in the book’s title. Dishonest people? Left-wing people? Delusional people?

“Unemployment grew in the Reagan years,” Zinn claims. Statistics show otherwise. Reagan inherited an unemployment rate of 7.5 percent. By his last month in office, the rate had declined to 5.4 percent. Had the Reagan presidency ended in 1982 when unemployment rates exceeded 10 percent, Zinn would have a point. But for the remainder of Reagan’s presidency, unemployment declined precipitously. While Zinn teaches history and not mathematics, one needn’t be a math whiz to figure out that 5.4 percent is less than 7.5 percent. Despite unleashing an economy that created nearly 20 million new jobs during his tenure, Reagan continues to be smeared by historians—and it’s not hard to figure out why. Reagan’s free market polices were anathema to Marxists like Zinn. Upset at the pleasant way things turned out—Reagan’s policies unleashed an economy that continuously grew from late 1982 until mid 1990—historians prefer to rewrite history.

These are but a few of Zinn’s errors, which curiously seem to always bolster the left-of-center position. No error goes against the grain of the author’s general thesis. Every author makes mistakes. Zinn, it seems, would make less of them if he used his mind rather than his ideology to do his thinking.

By now one might be thinking: On what evidence does Zinn base his varied proclamations? One can only guess. Despite its scholarly pretensions, the book contains not a single source citation. While a student in Professor Zinn’s classes at Boston University or Spelman College might have received an “F” for turning in a paper without documentation, Zinn’s footnote-free book is standard reading in scores of college courses.

More striking than Zinn’s inaccuracies—intentional and otherwise—is what he leaves out.

Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Reagan’s “tear down the wall” speech at the Brandenburg Gate all fail to merit a mention. Nowhere do we learn that Americans were first in flight, first to fly solo across the Atlantic, and first to walk on the moon. Alexander Graham Bell, Jonas Salk, and the Wright Brothers are entirely absent. Instead, the reader is treated to the exploits of Speckled Snake, Joan Baez, and the Berrigan brothers. While Zinn highlights immigrants that went into professions such as ditch-digging and prostitution, he excludes success stories like Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, and Louis B. Mayer. Valley Forge rates a single fleeting reference, while D-Day’s Normandy invasion, Gettysburg, and other important military battles are left out. In their place, we get several pages on the My Lai massacre and colorful descriptions of U.S. bombs falling on hotels, air-raid shelters, and markets during 1991’s Gulf War.

How do readers learn about U.S. history with all these omissions? They don’t.

Daniel J. Flynn is the author of A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008) and Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas (Crown Forum, 2004), from which this essay is adapted. Copyright © 2004 by Daniel J. Flynn.

1)  People jumping from burning buildings.
2)  Congress standing outside, humbly bowing their heads, and praying.
This was a shocking sight.
3)  The pews of my church completely full of people…and for several months after.

It’s human nature to remember God when we’re in big trouble.  Even agnostics offered up a prayer that day.  We needed super human help from a higher power to defeat the Enemy Without.

God answered our prayers, and along with the excellent leadership of Bush, Cheney, our fantastic military, and superb FBI and CIA, we have been safe for eight years.  Thank you. 

Now we need that Divine help to defeat the Enemy Within.

Strangely, our present White House and Capitol seem to be crawling with sneaky subversives who are intent on destroying capitalism, freedom and the American Way as we know it. They have lots of different labels and labels that keep changing.  They are like a cancer that slowly eats it’s way across the healthy host until it is fat enough to kill it.

When I was 12 years old,  I was warned of Communism and required to read “1984″ by George Orwell.  I hated the dark, sinister story of a free country that turned bad.  I wanted to think about The Carpenters, and Bread, and how to get my hair to look like Farrah Fawcett.  My high school was Christian, so we were aware of spiritual warfare, invisible enemies.  We were taught that the 2nd Amendment, the right to “bear arms” would prevent a military takeover. Instead, they said, the Communists would try to destroy us “from within” by encouraging sin in our youth.  Promiscuous Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n Roll, and a disrespect for authority would render our citizens helpless and weak. (Rap and it’s profanity hadn’t been invented yet.)  This subtle, invisible, inward takeover was more powerful.  Apathy, lack of education, lack of a family unit…lack of God.

II Chronicles 7:14 says, “If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”  We had to memorize that Bible verse and I still know it by heart today.  I graduated in 1976, the Bicentennial of our country, so we were wearing red, white, and blue bell bottoms when we recited that verse at graduation.

Now, every day, minute by minute, I have been watching the prophetic fiction of “1984″ become reality.  My voice is irritating, but I’ve been squawking like a rooster, to my fellow Americans, “Wake Up!  Wake Up!”  I think it’s starting to work.

There is a painting of our first Congress humbly praying to God.

When I see Obama brag ”I have a gift,”  “I just wanna spread the wealth,” or ”The police acted stupidly” or  lie “My health plan will not add one dime to the deficit.  It will not fund abortions or insure illegals.”  When I see Pelosi sneer ”un-American, Astro-turf,” or ex-Czar Van Jones say, “Republicans are A–holes,” I replace those images with the image of our leaders humbly praying to God for help.  This is my dream.

Then, I roll out of bed, humbly get on my knees and pray.  “Help!”