This would seem a disaster custom made for Hollywood liberal involvement. Look at the elements: A Big Ugly Corporation, the environment, animals suffering, and a chance to jump up and down and say we were right about off-shore drilling.

However speaking out on this disaster would perhaps mean taking a position where one might have to criticize the President. I have also noticed that most of Hollywood’s liberal elite’s never seem to take a position in opposition to the current administration. For example, how much outrage have we heard about Guantanamo lately? Answer: none. How many anti-war demonstrations have we seen since President Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan? Answer: very few. Now that I’m thinking about it, how much media coverage do we see about far left true believers like Cindy Sheehan who are still protesting since the new administration took over? Answer: darn little.

Since drawing attention to the situation in the Gulf of Mexico would also draw attention to the lack of leadership by the President, Hollywood has been laying low. However, I believe there’s another reason: Hollywood hates the South!

Why, would liberal Hollywood types hate the South?  Because they are indulging in an out of date stereotype about the people who choose to live there. You see, Hollywood liberals get most of their information about life from the movies they make. They think of the South as the South from 1956. In their world anyone who is white, conservative and from the South is obviously a Bible-thumping, uneducated, red neck, racist with a white robe and hood stashed away somewhere nearby. When it comes to politics Southern States are deep red except for New Orleans, an area worthy of their charity. Think I’m wrong? Look at the imbalance between Hollywood’s help to The Big Easy and the rest of the area affected by Katrina.

In the Hollywood stereotype, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi are the center of the GOP stronghold called “the solid South” and that area deserves whatever karmic destruction is sent their way.  Maybe when the oil starts hitting Florida in mass quantities they will begin to show up to clean some pelicans. Then again, that is the state that cheated Al Gore out of the White House.

 Hey, speaking of Vice President Green Jeans, where has he been through all this. Isn’t he the Nobel Prize winning expert on the environment?

Obviously, it was on the radio and I wasn’t in prison.  I’m also not a radicalized Muslim terrorist.  But it was not a hoax! I repeat: NOT A HOAX.

We kept telling management, the insurance companies, and the local Chicago cops we weren’t really going to do it until we did.  Otherwise, they weren’t gonna let us do it!  We got a U.S. Marine that told us he had studied how to do it and he volunteered to waterboard me in return for a mention of his charity.

I was on a decline and I was waterboarded.  Was I in chains?  No.  Does that make it less real?  I am failing to get the point attempted by my detractors.  We never claimed it was an exact recreation.

The CIA technique is exactly what we did:

1.    Keep the chest elevated above the head and neck to keep the lungs “above the waterline.”

2.    Incline the head, both to keep the throat open and to present the nostrils for easier filling.

3.    Force the mouth open so that water can be poured into both the nose and mouth.

Sorry, I thought for years it wasn’t torture and now I do.  The video is there for all to see.

The left has taken my message and distorted it as well.  Would I waterboard to save my daughters (or any American children)? Yes!

The three terrorists that were waterboarded at Guantanamo were done so by military professionals.  And it was done to save lives with America’s best interests at heart.  Mine was a silly radio time filler in comparison.  It’s apples & hand grenades!

It would be insane to equate what I did with anything that happens in prison.  I am simply a free man in a radio studio that always tries to get inside the big issues.  This is an ugly issue with no easy answers.  But I now see it’s easier for some to dismiss me than to do any real soul searching on this very heady issue.

Since my last review, we saw: A stand up comedy routine that was apparently gleaned from the mistaken assumption, that jokes about President Bush were standard Correspondent’s Dinner protocol. President Obama also announced his plan to save the auto companies by forcing them to raise their prices thirteen-hundred dollars (proving He has less business sense than the cartoon Wal-Mart slasher). He appeared on stage with a handful of people beholden to bailout money in a photo-op that looked very much like a hostage situation. Photographed on stage with Governors’ Granholm and Schwarzenegger, you had to guess which leader actually had a US birth certificate. He also broke his promises to end military tribunals, release the interrogation photos and suspend don’t ask don’t tell. He proved that He had as much problem speaking “Mexican,” as he has with “Austrian,” and promised to drastically slash the overdrawn budget by a whopping 1/2 of 1 %.

(BTW: Blogger Jim Blazik has been compiling a list of Presidential gaffes since He took office, and you can really get a sense of how much the Late Night Comedians are ignoring just by the amount of time this page takes to load.)

Something strange happened this week. Neither Letterman nor Ferguson made any reference to anything really political. Ferguson did a couple fluff jokes about making Presidential candidates sing rather than debate and that Larry Craig never hit on him. He also intimated that the show was filmed a week ago, to air last night, so perhaps Worldwide Pants gives everyone the week before Memorial Day off and neither host wanted to do any material, that might date the show. Strangely, Kimmel avoided political material as well. Jimmy Fallon did only one mildly political line about Obama and Cheney giving competing political speeches: “It’s kind of like American Idol, except one of them got voted off months ago.”

There seems to be some sense throughout the talk shows that hosts are perceived as partisan hacks. Not only did many of the shows avoid political topics, Bill Maher had TWO Republicans on a panel for the first time in my memory (Amy Holmes and Richard Brookhiser). The audience seemed quite off balance, since two well-spoken conservatives are awfully hard to shout down. Left-wing weekly writer Dan Savage was able to get a few clap lines in by calling Bush and Cheney war criminals from time to time, but it almost seemed forced and pathetic.

There were two twofers Wednesday night: Stephen Colbert, was a guest on Letterman and Bill Maher was on Leno. Colbert avoided any political jokes on Letterman filling his time with lighthearted chat about an upcoming USO tour and growing up the youngest of 11 children.

The other two-fer was Jay Leno (whose reign in the Tonight Show chair is rapidly coming to a close – Last Show, May 29th) who hosted Bill Maher. Bill seemed perplexed. He implied that his audience on HBO is a monster he can no longer control: ”Every week I get booed. I get booed by my own audience, constantly. Because, you know, I don’t know if they really follow politics that closely. What they know is Obama good, Bush bad…Obama is not some infallible Chocolate Jesus. That’s Kanye West you’re thinking of.” (He also referred to the President as The Chocolate Jesus on his Friday show, a reference that I would like to see a Republican attempt to get away with).

The Most Interesting Interview of the evening was on David Letterman. GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz, came on the air to rebut some of the false accusations made about GM three weeks ago when Tesla inventor Elon Musk was on the show. Lutz stated that despite contrary opinion, GM’s electric car program was suspended because it was a technological and financial failure. He also said that GMs problems have nothing to do with their inability to make economical cars because:

“The way you create shareholder value is to produce vehicles that people want; and at two bucks a gallon, you couldn’t give small cars away in the United States; and this fiction… where the American public wanted small highly fuel efficient vehicles, that happened for four months during 2008 when gas was over four dollars a gallon… this idea of the government mandating strict fuel economy standards, at the same time that we have the world’s cheapest gasoline is like combating national obesity by forcing clothing manufacturers to make only small sizes.”

Jon Stewart handily took the Lamest Attempt at an Obama Joke with the only other real Obama line of this review, claiming that Obama is the only President that can turn a speech about fuel economy into the Gettysburg Address: “Mileage? Save it for when the Chinese invade!”

“Saturday Night Live” wrapped up their season Saturday by bringing in some of the more popular cast members from the days when it was funny. Will Ferrell and Darrell Hammond reprised their Bush and Cheney shtick, taking this week’s Oldest Presidential Joke Award.

Amy Poehler dropped by to do another “Weekend Update” with Seth Meyers,and reprised their “Oh Really” segment. What sparked their outrage last Saturday? The fact that Arizona State University refused to give His Presidency an honorary degree because they feel he hasn’t achieved enough.

Writers looking Over Shoulders Award  went to Both SNL and Bill Maher for highlighting this presidential snub, both complaining that ASU is one of the biggest party schools in America (Maher: “This is the school strippers are referring to when they claim they are working their way through college.” ). Both shows laughed off the claim that he hasn‘t achieved enough by pointing out that Obama is the first black president.

Wow, that’s an achievement? Being president certainly is, since only 43 Americans have ever held the title, but being black is simply an accident of birth not an achievement. Unless of course, you are the administrator of an affirmative action program.

The only other mention SNL made of Obama the entire night was during the “Jeopardy” sketch (which was actually quite funny) One of the categories was “Current Black Presidents.” (That was the entire joke, the category was never even selected).

Most Overused Person as a Punchline was a tie between Nancy Pelosi (Collbert, Maher Leno) and Michael Vick, who found his way into 3 different talk shows. Leno said he has to stay 100 yards away from Snoop Dog; Fallon claimed that he hated jail, being locked in a cage where everyone is fighting; Letterman said while he’s under house arrest, he’s going to have to STAY…STAY.

Carrie Prejean gets an honorable mention as she was used for a punchline several times on Bill Maher’s show alone. (She’s becoming Maher’s new Bush.) She was also brought up on SNL: “Who would have thought Donald Trump would side with a hot lady who likes to take her top off?”

The Angriest White Man Award  goes to Bill Maher for the second week in a row for a couple of mean ignorant lines. In his New Rules segment: “Joe the Plumber and Carrie Prejean must have a one night stand in order to produce the ultimate Right Wing icon, a born-again, anti-gay, war-mongering blue-collar beauty queen. Oh, they’ve already got one? (picture of Sarah Palin).” He also called Miss Prejean “retarded” (and suggested that she might be Sarah Palin’s daughter because of that.) He also called President Bush retarded on Jay Leno, and was bleeped out.

The Grand Prize goes to Jay Leno, who started off his set by hitting three lines clear out of the park: “‘I watched the season finale of “24″ with Nancy Pelosi. You know? She couldn’t remember the first 23 hours …didn’t remember any of the torture …NONE of it! — Hey, President Obama has found a way to quickly close Guantanamo Bay. He’s going to turn it into a Pontiac dealership. — Oh, and a Vice President Joe Biden is on a trip to Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosovo. The White House is calling it ‘Operation Keep Biden Away From the Microphone.’ I think he goes to Antarctica next.”

What a strange day it is when Jay Leno is most political comic on Late Night.

Even the Mighty KOS can’t hold them at bay.

You won’t find any of that disaffection in the Vein Stream Media, of course. Just as you’ll find none over people eating tree bark in Kim Jong-Il’s PR machine, and for the same Dear Leader reasons. But the press can cheerlead President Obama all it wants. It is the political base that matters, the grassroots networks upon which all fundraising, canvassing and voting is dependent.

And unless I’m completely mistaken, the President’s grassroots political base is, and will be, experiencing a number of earth-shaking political tremors in the days, months and years to come. Pick an issue, any issue. Gitmo? Having trouble there. Military tribunals for detainees? Ran against them, supporting them now. You know. Kinder, gentler violations of international law.

The release of torture photos? Sure! Umm, wait a second. Habeas Corpus for Bagram detainees? Habeas this. Skyrocketing domestic NSA intercepts, beyond even the limits set by Congress? Who, us? How about the prosecution of Bush-era war criminals? That might be kinda dicey, since many now consider the President a war criminal for the same reasons as Bush.

How about gay rights? Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which candidate Obama ran against? Don’t ask Daneil Choi! Support for gay marriage and same-sex rights issues? Still in the closet, with Daniel Choi. What did gays expect? Why do gays consider Obama a gay rights hero, when his policies on gay marriage and DADT are no different from President Bush’s or Clinton’s? When has Obama ever given his unqualified support to gay issues? Prop 8? Don’t think so.

Obama could overturn DADT tomorrow with an executive order. Why doesn’t he? He promised to.

Tax hikes? How about Whoopi Mania? I’m sure more than a few Democrats attended the Tea Parties as well. They don’t all have trust funds or big Hollywood salaries, you know. But Whoopi Goldberg does, and even she’s hollering to the skies about it.

So those are the details, and it’s only going to get worse. But that’s what happens when idealism runs into reality. What if President Obama can’t close Gitmo by next January? What happens when military tribunals are cranked up again for Gitmo detainees? Or if the President uses executive privilege to prevent the release of torture photos? Do the jumpsuited protesters start chaining themselves to the White House fence again? Will Obama become the new American Hitler?

Will gays start protesting as President Obama totally ignores the issues that concern them most, as he has to date? Will the President even move to act on stopping the Holocaust of gays in Iraq, yet another issue that is beginning to inflame American gays, considering it is happening on our dime and watch? If we broke Iraq and it is ours to fix, as Gen. Colin Powell stated, what of this major breakage, which Newsweek called “Don’t Ask, Do Kill”?

Can’t blame all this stuff on Bush now. He’s watching Ranger games in Texas. And waiting to be called up for those long-awaited war crimes trials, though I wouldn’t recommend that the former President give up his season tickets just yet.

I. for one, am certainly not disappointed. In fact, I’m elated! But I’m not a liberal Democrat, either.

Let me state for the record that I firmly believe America should not torture. But I’m at ease about that, because America does not torture. Do we use harsh interrogation techniques?  Of course we do, and why not? This is war – why should we treat captive enemy combatants to a rejuvenating stay at the Four Seasons? Some of these maniacs plotted the devastation of 9/11, all cheered it, and if given the chance, all would gleefully saw your head off and then post a video of it on the Internet as inspiration for others of their fanatical ilk. Many of them might have information that could prevent further mayhem here and abroad – information they’re not going to volunteer simply because we’re congenial hosts.

But liberals presumably would prefer that we sit down with the captives (after bowing to them, of course), and engage in mutually respectful “dialogue”  – the left’s favorite and only way of confronting evil – which will yield no life-saving information, but which will enable them to air their grievances. After we promise to make things right, we can let them return to the battlefield and take up arms against us again. This makes for a pathetic, brainless wartime strategy, but hey, national self-preservation and victory against violent jihad are far less important to liberals than providing our guests with civil rights that the Islamists themselves want to deprive us of.

Many liberals and conservatives say we should handle enemy combatants (I keep forgetting we’re not allowed to call them that anymore) with kid gloves because to do otherwise incites the enemy to take punitive measures against their prisoners of ours. This is perhaps the lamest argument against harsh interrogation. First of all, the Islamists need absolutely no incentive from us to mutilate and murder infidels, Jews, and Muslims who don’t fall in line. Second, they do not operate according to such rules of fair play, so we are not rewarded for our good will. Third, jihadist captives are trained to lie anyway about the brutality of their “mistreatment” at our hands, so what we do is irrelevant. And those who insist that America is obligated to hold herself to a higher standard than our enemy are willfully ignoring the fact that we already hold ourselves to the highest possible standard – and unlike our enemy, we punish any interrogators and guards who cross the line. 

The problem is that the left thinks everything crosses the line, that causing enemy combatants any degree of discomfort constitutes sadism. Because the left in America has commandeered the topic of torture, such basic interrogation techniques as sleep deprivation and waterboarding have been held up as reprehensible and horrific examples of it. Is waterboarding extraordinarily uncomfortable, even panic-inducing? You bet your ass it is, and that’s the point. Is it torture? Not surprisingly, former community organizer Barack Obama has announced that it is, and as with all his opinions about confronting radical Islam, he is wrong.

Do you want to know what torture really is? Have you ever seen a beheading video, or footage of a stoning? Because that’s torture, and nothing America does is even remotely in the same category. Below are four marginally more palatable examples that you won’t hear about in the current liberal-driven debate because they were committed by jihadists, and liberals and their media collaborators don’t want to cloud the whole torture issue by allowing the ghastly facts about our enemy to be introduced. I tried to refrain from explicit detail:

1) The drug-stoked jihadists who devastated Mumbai last Thanksgiving weekend and left nearly 200 infidels dead in their wake took time out from their rampage to sexually torture a rabbi and his pregnant wife (who, as it was later revealed, were their primary targets) before executing them. The doctors who examined the corpses were so horrified they didn’t want to discuss it.

2) This week the leader of a jihadist gang went on trial in Paris. The gang had kidnapped a Parisian Jew in 2006 and tortured him over a period of 24 days – 24 days – during which over 80% of his body was “butchered,” according to police. He was dumped near a train station, bound and unable to speak, and died on the way to the hospital. The gang leader proudly shouted “Allahu Akhbar!” in the courtroom and taunted the victim’s family.

3) In June of that same year, two young American Privates, Thomas Tucker and Kristian Menchaca, were captured and tortured to death by Iraqi insurgents. Their bodies were later dumped and booby-trapped (because of course it’s not enough for the Islamist cowards to butcher helpless captives – they also have to wire the corpses with explosives to cause even more mayhem). The mainstream media reported only that the two had been killed in a “barbaric” way; I won’t even begin to relate here the truth of how horrifically they were mutilated, but if you want a gut-wrenching appreciation not only for what torture really means, but also for the depths of our enemy’s sadism, you can read the details here. 

 4) A former torturer for the Taliban describes here how inventive he used to be in terms of enforcing the most fundamentalist strain of Islam on the planet. His methods against insufficiently pious Muslims included crucifixion and rubbing salt in the wounds of victims who were so badly beaten and bloodied that it was impossible to tell whether they were wearing clothes.

(If these contemporary examples aren’t enough to convince blustery, high-minded liberals that true torture is unimaginably worse than our own interrogation techniques, then they could enlighten themselves with such eye-opening historical examples as: Armando Valladares’ memoir of 22 years in Castro’s prisons, Against All Hope; Haing Ngor’s Survival in the Killing Fields of Cambodia under the monstrous Khmer Rouge; and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s epic of Communist brutality, The Gulag Archipelago.)

None of the victims in the above list was suspected of war crimes and “harshly interrogated” for information that might prevent another 9/11; on the contrary, all were targeted, cruelly brutalized, and killed by evil men for no other reason than that they were Jews or Americans or supposed “apostates.”

Let’s get real. As much as it pleases the New York Times and leftists here to brand America as “Torture Nation,” we must recognize that there is a vast gulf between the ways we and the enemy treat prisoners. It is the Islamists who torture, not us. Roughing up suspects who have been trained to resist our medically-supervised interrogation techniques, and who are among the most hateful bastards on the planet, in order to extract information that may prevent more terrorist horrors, is not the same as torture. Anyone who says that we’re the bad guys, brutalizing helpless innocents who just happened to be caught in the net of Bush’s chimerical war on terror, is completely divorced from reality.

Speaking of divorced from reality, the Obama administration is determined to pretend that we’re not at war with radical Islam; it recklessly intends to release Guantanamo suspects on our own soil; it is suicidally exposing America’s intelligence secrets to the world; and it is vindictively seeking to retroactively punish the previous administration for its anti-terrorism efforts. The enemy, meanwhile, is laughing at all our moral and legalistic hand-wringing, and at our paralyzing internecine debate about interrogation. They consider it contemptible weakness – which indeed it is. It’s no wonder that insanely apocalyptic Iranian President Ahmadinejad recently declared to America, “We say to you that you yourselves know that you are today in a position of weakness. Your hands are empty, and you can no longer promote your affairs from a position of strength.”

For once, Ahmadinejad is right. Instead of bending over backwards to treat these scourges of civilization better than we treat our own prison population, we need to grow a pair and start presenting an uncompromising and unapologetic strength. The first step is to seize back control of the discussion about torture in this country from those who have no grasp of the reality of torture, who blindly serve the propaganda purposes of our enemy, and who froth at the mouth all day long about the satanic Bush cabal but never have a critical word to say about real evil. It’s time America shows the world that we recognize we already have the moral high ground, that we derive strength and national unity from that certainty, and that from now on the spotlight on torture will be trained on those who are truly guilty of it.

… Anywhoozer, I’m thinking later how crazy it was that they even got Hogan’s Heroes on the air, but at least the fascists were the bad guys and the Americans were the good guys. CUT TO: Any given night this week, no less than three contemporary movies are running on cable where the fascists are the good guys and the Americans are the bad guys… wow, talk about crazy.

And everyone over 35 remembers that, amazingly, the farcical sitcom Hogan’s Heroes grew out of the Hollywood-made drama; “Stalag 17,” where – get this – the fascists were the bad guys and the Americans were the good guys! Hey Sandy, looks like all you gotta do is make the Gitmo terrorists the good guys and the Americans the bad guys, and its green-lightville, baby!

But it’s all moot because our new president signed an executive order to shut down Guantanamo Bay Prison requiring it be closed within a year. And I say; “More power to ‘ya, President Obama – close down Gitmo!” Now I know what you’re thinking: “But Rodney Lee, if you close down Gitmo, where do you put the prisoners?” Answer: American prisons… “But Rodney, then they’ll get the same rights under the Constitution that regular American prisoners get.”

This is true.

But for you folks who don’t want Gitmo closed and the “detainees” relocated to American prisons to get fair trials and rights and lawyers and book deals and remote interviews on Oprah; I ask you: What good are rights under the Constitution when you, yourself are under a 270-pound Samoan cellmate named; “Chester”?… Say what? Chester lost a friend in the 9-11 attacks? Ouch, mommy!

And good luck chatting with your ACLU lawyer with a mouthful of shower soap and a shiv in your ear. Oh, and about that speedy trial? Hope it’s speedier than ten minutes because that’s about how long these guys are going to last in an American prison. “But Rodney, they’ll segregate them from the other prisoners – they’ll be protected.” … Oh yeah, a lot of good that did Jeffrey Dahmer, who was “protected” in prison – yet was beaten to death with a meat tenderizer (kind of ironic, eh?).

But I digress… Back to Guantanamo – I hear you get to read the Koran, eat three squares and what – pray five times a day? I got bad news for the idiots who think the enemy are being treated poorly at Gitmo: Put these guys in Rikers Island and the only thing they’ll be praying for is to be back in Cuba. Give these fanatics a choice between San Quentin and Abu Ghraib and they’ll form a naked pyramid faster than you can say; “Thank-you Slave-mistress Lynndie, may I have another?”

Put them in American prisons, my friends, and as Ross Perot used to say; “Problem solved.”