It is splendid how Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” is not only a double-edged sword but a spear-studded cannonball for world freedom as well.

The Politico-inspired loud-mouthing about Herman Cain’s apparent indiscretion – or perhaps his avuncular bonhomie toward a malevolently ambitious female – the accusations hurled at the presidential candidate have backfired!

It highlights the beauty of freedom of speech.

Yes, we in America also have the freedom to lie and to maliciously exaggerate. However, the court of public opinion in American democracy will decide whether or not accusations are justified or merely the product of greedy but increasingly frightened political ambitions.

Justice Clarence Thomas was the first-such target of left-wing, railroading, character-assassinating, Beltway connivances. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.

(more…)

I am willing to wager my house that not one of my son’s seventh-grade classmates could identify John Locke in a photo. I am then willing to let that wager ride on another gamble that less than one percent of the seventh or eighth-graders in the Los Angeles Unified School District would be able to identify Locke in a photo array of historical figures. Double or nothing that not only would they not know who he is, but they would also have no idea of why he is important. I would then bet my entire stack of chips that a substantially higher number of middle-school students could identify Karl Marx. I anticipate being a very wealthy man.

This venture came to my mind following an end of the year visit to my son’s middle-school.

My wife and I attended a parents’ night at our son’s school. As we entered his English classroom, I noticed that the walls of the classroom were covered with photos of Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, and Vladimir Lenin. The eighth-grade students had been studying George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” On every wall was a hand-made poster featuring a photo of Karl Marx, some biographical information, along with some pithy bit of wisdom attributed to him. As we left the room, I whispered to my son, “Tell your teacher that your father wants to know when she will teach the work of John Locke.” My son responded, “Who is John Locke?” (more…)

Children are uniquely malleable beings, readily convinced of magically colorful tales – Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are the first that come to mind. This innocence is beautiful, but it is a quality that can easily fall victim to radically foreign ideas if taught consistently and pervasively at an early age. One need only look at the birth of fascism or socialism to see a recipe for how radical ideas become ubiquitous among a nation’s youth.

Enter Howard Zinn – an author, professor and American historian – who, with the help of Hollywood and the History Channel, intends to change the way our pre-K through high school children learn American history. His current curriculum suggestions, like introducing three-year-olds to the lynching of African-Americans, or quizzing seven-year-olds on which Presidents owned slaves, should be a red flag to parents.

Zinn has spent a lifetime teaching college students about the evils of capitalism, the promise of Marxism, and his version of American history – a history that has, in his view, been kept from students. His controversial 1980-book The People’s History of the United States paints traditional American history as a façade – one that has grotesquely immortalized flawed leaders and is based on principles that victimize the common man. In 2004, Zinn wrote a companion book entitled Voices Of A People’s History Of The United States, which includes speeches and writings from many of the people featured in The People’s History.

These two books have now become the basis for a new documentary, entitled The People Speak, to be aired December 13th at 8pm on the History Channel. The trailer portrays the documentary as a collage of compelling one-person readings, told through the words of “ordinary” people who have struggled throughout American history against oppression. Produced by Zinn, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, and Chris Moore, the documentary appears to be cloaked, ironically (given Zinn’s admitted socialist agenda), in many of the traditional ideas that were behind our founding. The verdict is still out on the doc, but it is not for the books that inspired the film as well as the educational initiative associated with it. (more…)

To begin with, writing this first editorial for Big Hollywood feels as threatening as the moment I entered California to do my first big film-role in Glory Boy, originally and more comprehensively titled, My Old Man’s Place.

“Do I really want that face I see in the rushes  … the one that looks an awful lot like me … do I want it running around the movie houses of the world?”

By then, of course, it was too late. I’d already signed a contract.

Director Elia Kazan accepts an honorary Oscar (1999)

I’ve already said yes to Andrew Breitbart … and though I’ve been writing editorials on enterstageright.com for more than a few years … this actual return to Hollywood … uh … Big Hollywood, no less … is as disturbing as those memories of My Old Man’s Place.

What does Big Hollywood mean?

Is it a tribute or in-house sarcasm? (more…)

Whenever I hear people outside the administration prattle on about how evil and biased Fox News is, I know I am listening to a flock of parrots who have never even tuned in. As a conservative myself, I have a number of problems with the network. For one thing, I resent Bill O’Reilly’s ridiculing those who merely ask for documentation that their president was born in the United States, and I also wish he’d stop defending Obama against charges that he’s a Socialist or worse. If it walks, swims and quacks like a duck, Bill, it’s a safe bet that you can pop it in the oven and serve it at Christmastime.

I’d also appreciate it if Sean Hannity would wake up to the fact that a lot of us change the channel the second that Bob Beckel shows up on the Great American Panel.

On the other hand, I wish that merely as an experiment a dozen or so liberals could be forced to watch Glenn Beck for an entire week. I would be dying to know how they would react after watching videos of Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Cass Sunstein, Anita Dunn, Andy Stern and John Holdren spouting off when they think nobody outside the room will hear about their plans to transform America.  They would have made Dr. Frankenstein blanch but put a smile on Karl Marx’s ugly mug. (more…)

And for the other bad guys…

Though hailed as one at the time, the Beatles masterpiece Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was not Rock’s first “concept” album.  Per John Lennon:  “It doesn’t go anywhere…  It works, because we said it worked…  Every other song could have been on any other album.”

Flash forward to the latest cacophony from “spoken word” Grammy winner President Obama and his Lefty Health Club Band’s radical “concept” album, A Health Dirge Night; examine a few select tracks; and, recognize the reprised promotional chicanery.

The album opens with the derivative 8-track era chestnut, With A Little Help from the Feds.  Here, President Obama’s Lefty Health Club Band warbles that a radical bill must pass – now! – because our broken health care system is in crisis.  Why?  Because they said so.  Yet, while concerned with rising costs, the vast majority of Americans believe our health care system is good or excellent, and they are satisfied with their current plans.  Why then did Obama’s band try to rush release a radical bill before the public could hear how it impacts their current health care plans? (more…)

In an age when a waiter is a server, an actress is a female actor, and a dubiously-competent socialist cult leader is an American president, it was only a matter of time before the “Global War on Terror” became an “Overseas Contingency Operation” (OCO).  Thus Spoke Zarathustra this week via a memo sent to the Pentagon and select speech writers, officially establishing Team Obama’s redesigned terminology.  The War is over, long live the Operation! This should show the road-side bombers, suicide bombers, bombers-in-burqas, snipers-for-Allah, and other assorted, blood-thirsty, Jihadist savages that the US really means business now.  Victory through euphemism!

The unveiling of OCO capped-off a terror euphemism trifecta for the administration.  Previously, the Justice Department scrapped the ghastly “enemy combatant” to describe war prisoners in favor of the much more uplifting, “detainee.”  Additionally, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano─who may be the only member of the administration more intellectually troubled than Tim Geitner─rebranded terrorism as “man-caused disaster.” (To review:  mail carrier; police officer; business person; but man-caused disaster… maybe the errant sexism has something to do with Ms. Napolitano’s romantic leanings.)   (more…)

When it comes to the wit and wisdom of Karl Marx, it’s likely that his most quoted statement is, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” The perverse irony in that quote is that all of Marx’s pseudo-scientific philosophical and sociological musings are so antithetical to common sense and basic human nature, that in order to believe them one must take a leap of faith far greater than any required for belief in a religious dogma. Certainly, George Orwell had Marx in mind when he famously quipped, “There are some ideas so preposterous that only an intellectual could believe them.”

 Marx wasn’t stupid, though, and surely recognized that in order to get his magical notions widely embraced, people would have to give up their traditional ideas of religiosity, since it is difficult if not impossible to maintain a belief in two, utterly conflicting religious faiths at the same time. Tragically, the true believers who swallowed the toxic claptrap Marx advanced have brought far more misery and brutality into the world than all the fundamentalist religious faiths of history combined. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot (to name a few of the most egregious examples), all held at their sociopolitical core the same pseudo-religious tenets that Marx proposed, and the staggering amount of death and torture those monsters precipitate dwarf, by several orders of magnitude, the suffering resultant from any religious beliefs. ( I know, some who are ignorant of history will object and say that Nazism and Fascism were Right-Wing movements. To them, I suggest they read Jonah Goldberg’s seminal book “Liberal Fascism” to learn the truth. The word Nazi was an acronym stemming from the German name for the National Socialist Party!) (more…)