NBC Sports:

Though ESPN’s decision to yank Hank Williams, Jr. from the opening theme music to Monday Night Football initially seemed to be a one-week suspension, it’s a little more permanent than that.

OK, it’s a lot more permanent than that.

ESPN has parted ways with Williams. The network announced the decision on Thursday, via John Ourand of SportsBusiness Journal.

“We have decided to part ways with Hank Williams, Jr.,” ESPN said in a statement. “We appreciate his contributions over the past years. The success of Monday Night Football has always been about the games and that will continue.”‬‬

Hank, of course, sees it differently. He claims that he has pulled his song from the show. Says Hank on his website: “After reading hundreds of e-mails, I have made MY decision.

Full piece here.

He was promptly sacked from last night’s broadcast of Monday Night Football:

Hank Williams, Jr., the voice famous for asking millions of football fans whether they’re ready for some football, has been pulled from tonight’s broadcast of “Monday Night Football” over a comment he made on Fox News this morning.

Williams, who sings the lead-in song to the game each week, criticized the president for his golf summit with House Speaker John Boehner this summer.

“It would be like Hitler playing golf with (Israeli leader) Benjamin Netanyahu,” Williams told “Fox & Friends.”

USA Today, among others, picked up the quote, speculating on whether the comparison would get Williams booted from the broadcast .

This afternoon, ESPN released a statement to the affirmative:

“While Hank Williams, Jr. is not an ESPN employee, we recognize that he is closely linked to our company through the open to Monday Night Football. We are extremely disappointed with his comments, and as a result we have decided to pull the open from tonight’s telecast.”

ESPN was fine when its Las Vegas radio affiliate joked about, and seemingly advocated for, the rape of Sarah Palin just a few weeks ago.

From my perspective, Williams didn’t call Obama “Hitler.” He made an exaggerated comparison to the political conflict between Obama and Boehner. (Perhaps a more appropriate analogy would have been Reagan and Gorbachev.) It seems that progressives are doing more to call Obama “Hitler” with their accusations than Williams implied with his remark. Of course, only Williams himself can clarify that. Regardless, ESPN yanked him from the broadcast. By the way, what’s with progressives’ new sensitivity over comparing a president to Hitler?

Williams’s job would likely be safe had he done what Mike Tyson did on an ESPN radio affiliate and joked about Palin rape.

Related:

ESPN’s Double Standard

Here at the BIGS, we all picked squares to back up our prediction of who would be the first member of the MSM to compare the upcoming Sarah Palin documentary”The Undefeated” to Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous pro-Nazi propaganda film. “Triumph of the Will.”

Looking oh-so sincere and innocent in black and white…

Personally, my gut told me this person would have to be uncommonly angry and cruel; someone willing to stoop to a level of partisan inhumanity where few fear to tread, someone so despicably desperate to destroy another they would use a political figure’s own children as weapons of attack.

Well, according to my Google Alert… Ladies and gents, Mr. Andrew Sullivan:

“If someone gives it a chance and watches it, watches the film, I think they will be surprised at the caricature that’s been drawn and the contrast to reality. I just think every aspect of it is so powerful, you cannot walk away from this film looking at Sarah Palin the same way. You just can’t,” – Meg Stapleton, on the upcoming propaganda movie, “Triumph Of The Will” “The Undefeated.”

The strike-through is Mr. Sullivan’s and a cool nine bucks and an expired Denny’s coupon (thanks for nothing, Dan Riehl) is all mine.

But once a global warming alarmist, he’s now a skeptic.

He now believes that “The debate about global warming…is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings.”

And he blames it all on greed, vanity and careerism.

Because, he says, “the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome.”

So rather than admit exaggeration, the alarmists chose the path to hysteria.

This reveals a truth I’ve tried to explain to my global warming pals. That the only experts you can trust are the ones who keep their traps shut.

As a health journalist – I learned that the good doctors were the quiet ones. And those guys always viewed the blabbermouths as opportunists who sacrificed science in favor of ego and influence.

And this is why two decent people can read the same article, and reach two different conclusions.

For a person unfamiliar with the professional and personal motives behind the science, you will buy into the dire predictions.

But for a health hack like me, I knew you could extrapolate any possibility into a craze or a panic, for personal gain. I saw it a thousand times with vitamins, fitness gadgets and health scares. Man-made global warming was no different.

The good news: eventually hysteria dies down. the question is, how much damage does it leave behind.

Did overwrought concern obliterate legitimate worry?

My suggestion: restart the debate, and find out.

And if you disagree with me, then you sir are worse than Hitler.

Tonight:

Andrea Tantaros!

Mike Tobin! (first time!)

and comedian Ryan Reiss!

I’m beginning to think our President likes the damn place.

Either that, or he realizes it’s necessary- especially when a fair portion of the men released end up back at war with us.

And the rest are just fat.

True, these jerks eat well at Gitmo. Along with 21 TV stations and great medical care – they live better than me.

And, right on the water.

My apartment window looks over a fat man urinating.

Almost, the same thing.

Now I used to think Obama saw these suspects as criminals. Which meant they get all the rights that go with it.

But maybe now he sees them as enemy combatants on a strange new battlefield – where the victims can be found in Manhattan, London and Ft. Hood. I dunno.

So with Gitmo open, and our Prez okay with indefinite detention and military tribunals, you’d think someone might say, “I was wrong.”

I can.

I can say that I never expected Obama to refute Erik Holder. I never expected him to reject his dangerously earnest naiveté about the world, or the disapproving opinion regarding America’s role fighting evil.

I never expected them to see it my way.

So I can say, I was wrong.

But now, they should do the same. After all, they trashed so many people for the very policies they practice now. Remember all that crap Bush got by people like Obama?

Someone deserves a hand-written note.

So it would be kinda cool to see someone say, “Hey, they were right. We were wrong. Holder’s a dope. Let’s move on.”

I’d be okay with that.

Also, I’d like some flowers.

And a dune buggy.

Made of chocolate.

And if you disagree with me, you sir are worse than Hitler.

Fish’s main point is that in the new True Grit, purposely there is no relationship between physical heroism and virtue. To the professor physical heroism is displayed by almost everyone in the new film, “‘good’ and ‘bad,’ and the universe seems at best indifferent, if not hostile.” He sees young Mattie Ross as far more heroic for her acceptance of the world as random and brutal, Jeff Bridges Cogburn’s heroism is merely an after thought. The professor didn’t in the least misunderstand my desire to instead see the kind of heroics John Wayne displayed in the original film when he takes on the outlaw gang single-handedly with his “Fill your hands, you son-of-a-bitch!” charge to glory.

Justifiable violent responses to real life threats are often not random. America has always had common men heroes and well trained professionals who can reach down deep into themselves and find the kind of inner courage needed to risk life and limb to save the life of another or stand up to the evil and power hungry. The elitist left who for the time being control most of the public debate on popular culture would have us believe that all is relative. Despite the current “no tolerance” foolishness in American schools, sometimes you have to hit back, and hard, or else the bully will take far more then just your lunch. You’re own personal dignity is indeed something worth fighting for.

A lying scumbag like Michael Moore might ridiculously offer up that al Qaeda terrorists are as brave or braver then our own and is awarded and feted for his cowardly idiocy. Physical bravery in the service of recognizable evil, whether it be Hitler’s SS or the Taliban and al Qaeda, irrevocably negates that supposed bravery, one that is also further negated by extremist brainwashing. Flying jets into civilian occupied buildings, suicide bombings – especially those directed at civilians and throwing acid into the faces of Muslim school girls isn’t brave, it is every bit as evil and perverted as Hitler’s death camps and Saddam’s torture chambers.

Professor Fish points out that in the new True Grit, there is no score card for the after life, “…in which damnation and/or salvation are distributed, as far as we can see, randomly and even capriciously.” Really…? God may be forgiving, but Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, Manson, and others most certainly have a special place in hell that is personally reserved for them.

Which leads me back to John Wayne: Why do the liberal elitists and academics deny a healthy society’s need for the kind of physical courage John Wayne best represents in our popular culture?  Most heroes in today’s films wear tights and sport some sort of super-human power in fantasy fare with no relation to the real world. Yet, just last year Wayne still ranked third in the annual Harris poll of most popular American movie stars, where he has been in the top ten every year since the poll’s creation in 1994.

John Wayne films like Stagecoach, They Were Expendable, The Sands of Iwo Jima, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man through Rio Bravo, The Shootist and yes, True Grit showed true to life heroics that represented America in a particular time and place. The men Wayne played weren’t super human, but possessed hard earned skills and a well defined moral compass. As Wayne’s character in his last film The Shootist tells a teenage Ronnie Howard, “I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted and I won’t be laid a hand on. I do not do these things to others and demand the same of them.” Sounds like a damn good way to conduct yourself to me.

Far better then the elitist left, Middle America recognizes the values that Wayne’s celluloid bravery represents. The seriously wounded and bitter Vietnam Marine Corps vet Ron Kovik damned John Wayne’s Sergeant Stryker in Born on the Fourth of July. Yet, far more seriously wounded American heroes from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, some suffering the loss of multiple limbs or first degree burns over ninety percent of their bodies, often react first with concern for their fellow soldiers and then a stoic “I guess I just had a bad day at the office.” Where do such amazing Americans come from today? Most often, though not exclusively, they come from traditional backgrounds and the South and rural West where John Wayne’s films are still shown to appreciative children and grand children.

Two years ago I was standing behind the chutes at a college rodeo in Cody, Wyoming with one of the rodeo committee members when we overheard two young bull riders talking about John Wayne’s excellent 1972 film The Cowboys, which had just played again on cable. It’s a film that in no small part is famous for Wayne actually being killed on screen, after beating the hell out of a murderous rustler leader while defending his very young trail hands.

“Two bad they had to kill the Duke off like that,” the one nineteen-year-old rodeo hand offered up. To which his fellow bull rider replied, “Maybe, but you know he did the right thing. He reminded me of my dad and grandpa, that’s how they would handle that kind of deal.” You won’t hear that kind of sentiment in Brentwood or on the upper West Side, but behind the bucking chutes at a rodeo in Wyoming waiting to get down on a 1500-pound bull, it’s about as normal as a really great slice of apple pie at the local diner.

Recently in the Los Angeles Times, Kim Darby, who played Mattie in the original film, told a wonderful story about a major star photo shoot on the Paramount lot soon after the filming True Grit ended.  The shoot included, Clint Eastwood, Barbara Streisand, and John Wayne. “I was sitting on the curb a ways away watching,” she said.  “The Duke stepped out of the picture and he said, ‘Hey, kid.’ He put out his arms and lifted me up and brought me over and put me in the center of the picture. How wonderful is that?” Wayne was the biggest movie star in the world at the time and Darby was still yet unknown. While Wayne was the ultimate representation of courage on movie screens, off screen he was also the most generous and giving of super stars, as well.

A nation and culture that denies physical courage in their own legends, fiction, and popular culture also denies the same bravery in real life, very much to its own peril, if not its own destruction. Go rent one of Wayne’s really good films, maybe even the original True Grit, and show it to your kids. His virtues on and off the screen need to be kept alive.

—–

Hitler promised health care, said that Germany’s business infrastructure needed a total government reform, and promised that all of the Germans would have jobs. Also, Hitler may have been elected by less than 40% of the people in Germany, but he was elected by 98.8% in Austria. After becoming Chancellor of Austria he took over the health care system, the car company (Austria had one major car manufacturing company at the time), and the business infrastructure.

Hitler did not sell fear and anger, he sold fundamental change of the nation’s infrastructure. He sold the hope of everyone having a job and that everyone had a right to be given medical treatment at the government’s provision.

That is definitely not what the Tea Party is selling. The Tea Party is selling a return to the constitutional principles that our country was founded upon. It is selling less government intrusion into our lives and that people can make better decisions for themselves than the government can. In other words, the Tea Party is selling the exact opposite of what Hitler promoted.

In the final homestretch to the elections, though, facts are dispensable to the left. It’s important in these last few days before the elections to smear the Tea Party as much possible because it’s all the institutional left has. The left has lost the intellectual debate of big government to the American people this election cycle, that is apparent by the choice of candidates on the right and the campaign ads coming from the left. Bad history or bad facts don’t matter to the left right now because they are in serious danger of losing their overwhelming power.

It’s not surprising to see people like Robert Reiner and Bill Maher promote bad history with the malicious intent to paint the Tea Party as the next Hitler. It is sad, though, because several people will actually believe their blatant revision of some very important history.

In a recent blog post upbraiding Glenn Beck for his reckless invocations of Nazism and Communism, Roger Ebert, the boring movie critic turned heavy-breathing political blogger, laments the “increasing tendency of the extreme right to automatically describe its opponents in negative buzz words.” Couldn’t agree more, Roger. But wait! Here he is, offering a warm encomium to American Taliban and Moulitsas, who “alerts us to a clear and present danger in America: radical zealots who disregard our Constitution and our freedoms and who disguise themselves as patriots.”

In Ebert’s post on Beck, he rightly bemoans the lazy use of Nazi references, “This whole argument is described by a term widely familiar on the internet (sic), the (sic) reductio ad Hitlerum. It is also known, Wikipedia explains, as playing the Nazi card.” But that’s only when the other side calls people fascists; when Ebert does it, it’s with a certain measure of precision and élan. So in a more recent post, Ebert writes that, in her silly effusions on the so-called Ground Zero mosque, Sarah Palin “employs the methodology of the Big Lie, defined in Mein Kampf as an untruth so colossal that ‘no one would believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.’” No need to explain the implication.

Read the full piece here.

The Past

Let’s deal with Ebert’s off-topic attack on Palin first. For a piece that is supposed to be about the Ground Zero Mosque (and by the way, he never once calls it the Ground Zero Mosque, even though the Imam planning the thing has called it that) Palin’s appearance at point six on his list makes no sense. Not only that, but Ebert goes off on a tangent of a tangent by discussing Palin’s interaction with Dr. Laura and her “N” word controversy. What do Palin and Dr. Laura have to do with the mosque?

Even more absurdly, Ebert’s first few points are filled with his ruminations on the First Amendment. Then he attacks Palin for employing her own freedom of speech? It’s a whiplash-inducing tangent, for sure.

Plus, in essence, he calls Palin a liar by assuming that some right-wing “anonymous genius” is writing all her Tweets and Facebook posts. Ebert has to reach into the dim corners of his conspiracy-laden mind for that one because there is no hint anywhere in the rest of the world that Palin isn’t writing her own stuff. It’s just Ebert’s hatred of Palin informing his belief that she’s too stupid to put two words together.

Worse, he seems to be saying that it was Sarah Palin who invented the name “Ground Zero Mosque.” This is an untruth. Then he compares Palin to Hitler by saying she’s using tactics from Mein Kampf.

His off-topic Palin tangent aside, let’s start with Ebert’s first point. He says America is the one “missing” an opportunity with the Ground Zero Mosque. We should bend over backwards for Imam Rauf so we can “showcase” our “Constitutional freedoms,” Ebert insists. We should allow the mosque because it is these Muslim’s right to build it at Ground Zero.

Never mind, Roger, that Imam Rauf is deeply involved in a project to push Sharia laws on the U.S. and if successful his law would eliminate everyone but him from having freedom of religion in America. I guess Roger thinks it is Rauf’s right to take away all our rights.

The Future

Ebert does have a good point on the mistake of planning a mosque near Ground Zero, though. But once again he mars what could be a good point with left-wing talking points.

The choice of location shows flawed judgment on the part of its imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf. He undoubtedly knows that now, and I expect his project to be relocated. The imam would be prudent to chose another location, because the far right wing has seized on the issue as an occasion for fanning hatred against Muslims.

First of all, this Sharia-pushing Imam has made no such admissions. What we have here is Ebert giving him the benefit of the doubt, a benefit he does not extend to 70% of  Americans. In his first point, Ebert scolds Americans for not being sensitive to the Muslims needs for their mosque project. But in this third point, does he scold Muslims for not being sensitive to Americans who might be angered that a mosque is being built within striking distance of a place where Muslims killed three thousand people? Nope, Ebert instead scolds right-wing Americans for making this mosque a political issue. But…

…the Muslims are innocent as a lamb as far as Ebert is concerned. Quite despite the fact that the very name of the project, Cordoba House, implicitly invokes an historical Muslim victory over westerners in 8th century Spain when Muslims invaded and took over that country.

Ebert blames Americans, as he always does, even when other Muslims are saying that this GZ Mosque is a bad idea.

Point four is a real gymnast’s twist. Ebert thinks that a “buried motive” for attacking the Ground Zero Mosque is that evil Americans think Obama is a Muslim. Never mind the fact that America had been outraged by the GZ Mosque for at least a week before Obama even opened his mouth — and inserted his foot — about the matter.

Point five is right on. He says that like being pregnant, you can’t be only “a little free.” As it happens, point seven has no point at all.  All he does is ramble about how much he hates Fox News.

In point eight Ebert simply makes things up. “A meme is infecting our society that Muslims are terrorists and hate America; they are the enemy.” Really? Who is saying that all Muslims are terrorists who hate America? There is a difference to feeling that almost all terrorists today are Muslim — which is a true statement — and all Muslims are terrorists. No one thinks “all Muslims are terrorists.” But, what do we have here really? What we have is Roger Ebert promulgating the very meme he pretends to decry. It is called the strawman argument. Set up a false premise and then bat it down with righteous indignation.

He wraps up with point ten, a rant claiming Americans are too stupid to know what is really being planned for the Ground Zero Mosque. Ebert puts on the shine to the project claiming that it’s really just a “community center” and that it will have a “retail mall,” as if the fact that shopping might be involved erases the Sharia-pushing ideas behind the thing. He also paradoxically says that the mosque is “not intended for Ground Zero” but at the same time says, “This mall will be deep enough to connect with subway lines — deep enough, that is, to theoretically be embedded in the ashes of some of the 9/11 victims.” If it isn’t “intended for Ground Zero,” then how can it become “embedded in the ashes of some Ground Zero victims”?

Clearly if the thing will somehow become intermingled with remains of 9/11 victims then it IS intended for Ground Zero!

In the end what we have here is Roger Ebert putting on his hate for his fellow Americans, excusing those that would stand against her, and rolling out one left-wing trope after another.

“In any case, it was never intended to kill the Jews.  This was a development which came when the war was at its peak–which cannot be justified and God help us, it made many enemies for us after the war.  The result?  Hardly anyone nowadays thinks of the positive accomplishments brought to Germany and Europe by Hitler.” –Anonymous Munich citizen, 1974 

“I would say that if we were not all guilty of crimes, then we were at least accomplices.” –Ostheer Soldier Roland Kiemig, 1991 

“We cannot and should not be allowed to win this war.” –Oberstleutnant Helmuth Groscurth in  letter to wife after execution of 90 orphaned Jewish children, 1941   

CHAPTER 1 

In the pre-dawn darkness I struggle out of bed with a groan.  When you’ve lived eighty-two years as I have, you learn not to get up too swiftly since one misplaced step could mean a shattered hip.

Once steady on my feet, however, I move with the purpose of a man who’s held command in the past.  I pause at the doorway to my bedroom and glance back through shadows at the sheets that lie in tussled balls.  The bed is empty.  Marina’s been gone for one month yet I still expect to see her form there.  She should be lying on her side, the mound of her hips gently rising and falling with her breathing as if bobbing in a current.

In my robe and slippers, I feel my way down the stairway to the second floor.  As delicate as I try to be, one of the steps creaks under me.  I pause and grit my teeth as if a grimace will somehow muffle the sound.  Dora, my fifty-year-old daughter and only child, stirs in the guest bedroom.  She’s temporarily abandoned her family in Dover to stay with me since her mother was buried. She knows I’m lonely.

She calls to me: “Papa?  Are you okay?” 

“Fine, daughter,” I assure her from the bottom of the stairwell. “Go back to sleep.”

“I’m already up.  If you wait a moment I’ll come down and brew you some tea.”   Although Dora’s mother and I grew up in Germany, and thus never lost the tell-tale “zis” and “zat”, Dora’s a product of London and as such developed a curious continental brogue that can’t be placed with any one country.

“That would be kind,” I say. “If it’s no bother.”

“Of course it’s no bother,” she calls from her closet.  I hear her fumbling through a rack of clothes, scraping the hangers over the metal pole, searching for her robe.

In the shadows I creep away from the banister to a pair of French doors.  A surly November wind howls outside my walls and whips through the streets of Westminster.  This flat leaks like an old vessel and drafts push through the hall.

I nudge open the doors and shuffle into the conservatory, gently closing them behind me.  Two leather couches sandwich a mahogany table which in turn pins a Persian rug to the oak floorboards.  Bookshelves line the far wall.  On the other wall hang photographs from my life.  Frozen snippets from my past. Sometimes I have to turn away from them before the memories build…and when I do I come to face a richly stained grand piano that waits for me in the recess of my bay window.  The Steinway’s been my constant companion this past month.

I see from my window that it promises to be a crisp, clear autumn day.  And as I take in the first hint of pink ribbon peeking over the eastern London sky, I sit down to play.  Closing my eyes, I strain to hear in my mind the Beethoven sonata before my fingertips touch ivory.  Then I lay them gently on the keys preparing to step into the musical world that has sustained me throughout my life.  And I whisper to myself, as I have done every morning for the past sixty years, these words:

“I am not a murderer.”

[Ed. Note: "Hummel's Cross: is available for purchase at Amazon.com.]