Morgan Freeman wants the President to be as “pissed off” as he is.

That’s an interesting comment coming from one of America’s best actors.

Morgan is a craftsman’s craftsman. I believe he represents the best of classic American acting since Henry Fonda. With similar aesthetics and discipline, both he and Henry Fonda have shown young American actors how to do “more with less” but do it with sharpshooting accuracy.

 I can honestly say that I’ve never seen him give a bad performance. Either on stage or in film.

I, along with the hundreds of others less disciplined, certainly wish we could say that for ourselves.

Morgan seems to be congenitally incapable of substandard work. Plus he carries what Fonda carried and what the great English director, Sir Tyrone Guthrie said was the rarest gift among actors: “nobility”.

Morgan and I once discussed, briefly I must add, getting “pissed off”. It was in relation to why Morgan hasn’t performed Othello in a big venue. He generally indicated that the rage within Othello was out of his reach.

Hmmm …

Now, I know he doesn’t want Barack Obama to be tearing the Presidential seal to tatters as Laurence Olivier might be prone to, but Morgan does want the President “pissed off”.

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“The incubation period of the opera (Nixon In China) was rife with serious second-thoughts, by no less than Adams (the composer) himself, who initially resisted the proposal made by Peter Sellars (the director), a progressively radical director whose idea the composer found too risky.” – An excerpt from “Opera Review: John Adams’ ‘Nixon in China’” by Sam Juliano.

Hmmm … the course of Marxist genius never runs smoothly.

If you don’t believe me, read the life of Bertolt Brecht.

However, Peter Sellars’ Marxism, as Wikipedia prefers to translate it, is to be a “progressively radical” artist of some sort.

With President Obama in the White House, it can now be known as “radically Progressive”: the Progressive Clinton as versus the radically Progressive Obama.

Radicalism, a la Van Jones, even as seen through the eyes of the Huffington Post, is the inevitability of the “Progressive” New World Order, whether you like it or not.

There is, however, one impressively dialectical twist in this drama: women such as Alice Goodman, the librettist.

Her Marxist heresy, because of the ministerial collar, is what is sometimes referred to by the KGB  hardliners as the Western Sentimentality of “useful idiots” and the decadent schmaltz seems to have escaped even the intriguingly odd but hawk-eyed Peter Sellars.

Reverend Goodman is still a “Progressive” of the Progressively Baptist Bill Clinton sort. She is actually an ordained Anglican priest; and is now a chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge.

The initial Wizard of Nixon In China happened to be the director, Peter Sellars.

The real Wizard, however, is Alice Goodman.

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A common refrain used by progressives against conservatives is a deconstructionist war against the concept that there even is such a thing as the Left: “There’s so much diversity and disagreement in ‘the Left’ that you can’t just call it ‘the Left.’”

This is just a defense mechanism the leftist employs to avoid having to actually examine their movement. Cult members need to have criticism of their cult obscured. It’s the equivalent of “The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club…”

There’s a grain of truth here, though. All leftists share core ideas – particularly hatred of conservatives and an infinite faith in big government – but there is a range of thought, not unlike denominations within religions. There are variations in doctrine and tactics between Marxists, Alinskyites, Mother Jones populist progressives, Nation socialists, Daily Kos Democrats, Counterpunch communists, and Dissent social democrats. Grouping them all together under the label “the Left” is no more inaccurate than describing Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, and Lutherans as Christian.

Today, thanks to the extraordinary journalism and research of Ben Shapiro for his must-read book Primetime Propaganda, the focus is on one “church” in particular: the Hollywood Left. (more…)

This is our sixth month of Obama Nation strips. Huzzah!

Before we begin…

Perhaps it’s genetic and, because I’m Irish-American, I’m sounding like Joseph McCarthy when he railed against Communism with his Un-American Activities Committee. Plus, with a name like Moriarty, given that’s the “handle” for the major villain in the World of Sherlock Holmes, I’m doubly cursed.

My sometimes awkward efforts to trace the growth of communism in the American performing arts does not have the substantive weight of an historical scholar, but it does have my over-forty years of personal experience behind it.

In an almost childlike way but with plenty of time to ponder my past in film and theater, I offer up a truth that, for me, has only been glimpsed in depth by Glenn Beck. (more…)

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NewsBusters:

Cameron claims “Great wealth makes me uncomfortable,” and he has a track record of producing “quasi-Marxist epic[s],” as Newsweek described Titanic. Cameron himself said that Titanic was “holding just short of Marxist dogma.”

Critic James Kendrick pointed out Titanic, Aliens and The Abyss as three Cameron films that include Marxist overtones.

Certainly Avatar can be added to that list. Along with the global warming message—Popular Science calls it “every militant global warming supporter’s dream come true”—it has also been described as “blatant anti-military” and “anti-American.” (more…)

The whole “Robin Hood theory” argument has been used by radical leftists (most commonly referred to as “college professors”) for decades across our great country. “Steal from the rich and give to the poor” is the rhetoric they’ll always undoubtedly regurgitate. There’s only one problem… It’s wrong. Dead wrong.
Every time I hear some dumb college know-it-all or stupid self-righteous celebrity use the story of Robin Hood as an argument for socialism, I want to punch them right in their perfectly zoom-whitened teeth. The truth, is that Robin Hood was the quintessential ANTI-Government revolutionary. He’d have more in common with our Founding Fathers or Ronald Reagan than the likes of Stalin, Marx, or Sean Penn.

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: (more…)

Sunday night, the History Channel airs The People Speak, a star-studded presentation of Howard Zinn’s Voices of A People’s History of the United States.  Accompanying this series is the Zinn Education Project, a curriculum meant to expose children from pre-school through high school to American history through the philosophical lens of Zinn.

The plan has many critics, and rightly so.  For one thing, as Zinn openly admits, his is an activist history meant not only to inform the student, but to inspire them to take up his cause.   This puts the teaching of Zinn in public schools on precarious legal grounds at best.  Others draw attention to Zinn’s radical views themselves.  Zinn says of America, with her representative government and guaranteed freedoms, that,  “The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history,” parceling out just enough wealth and comfort to its citizens to keep them from revolting.  But to truly understand Zinn, and why his work has no place in public education, all a person needs to know is this –  Howard Zinn is not an historian at all; Howard Zinn is a religious zealot. (more…)

Last Friday, America was introduced to documentary filmmaker Phelim McAleer when he asked an inconvenient question of former vice-president and multi-millionaire climate-change spokesperson Al Gore.  The terse exchange has become a hit on YouTube, and has afforded Phelim several appearances this week on cable news shows.  In it, Phelim asks Mr. Gore to weigh in on a British judge’s ruling that nine facts cited in the vice-president’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth”, were in fact not true.  After struggling to remember the exact details of the case (it was so long ago…), Mr. Gore and Mr. McAleer wrangle briefly over whether or not polar bears are actually endangered.  Mr. Gore remarks that if they are not, “the polar bears didn’t get the message.”  Cute.

Of course, this answer is really at the very heart of the current debate over global climate change (formerly global warming, formerly global cooling), because whatever the polar bears might think about their own species’ global population, it is obviously far more than most every human environmentalists seem to care about theirs.

“Their is an anti-human element to many environmentalists.”  That was what Phelim told me the day I first met him and his lovely wife Ann McElhinney early last year.  The two had just spoken, quite passionately I might add (everything the two of them do is quite passionate), at a private gathering of conservatives in Sherman Oaks, California.  (more…)

Moviefone:

Crude posters of Lenin and Trotsky adorn the threadbare walls of an office in a desolate part of town, and a group of outcast revolutionaries hatch a scheme to overthrow the ruling powers and bring equality and a classless society to mankind. The beginning of an Eisenstein film? Bunuel? Renoir?

Try ‘Astro Boy,’ the upcoming animated film featuring the voices of Nicolas Cage and Kristen Bell about a boy robot (Freddie Highmore) that leaves his scientist father after finding out he isn’t human. Ostensibly a film for children — with a fringe following of fanboys, thanks to its comic book series — the movie features very adult ideas of ownership and class structure that will most likely be future fodder for college philosophy classes around the country. (more…)

Cap and Trade, the biggest tax increase in American History, sailed through Congress without anybody even bothering to read it. What will prove to be perhaps the biggest historical change to the American way of life seemed nothing more than a Congressional mouse click, the Terms of Service Agreement on a new software installation. What is it about Democrats that they have such trust in other Democrats?

There was no debate, no discussion; in fact the bill wasn’t even finished when they started voting on it. Yet they all knew they would like everything in the bill, and rushed the vote. I’m somewhat envious of the common goal they all seem to share, but I’m also suspicious of why nobody bothered to read it. Granted it was fifteen hundred pages, Fourth of July recess, and the deposit on the Martha’s Vineyard cottage wasn’t refundable.

I think there is also something else at work here: Democrats tend to have more faith in the system than they have in the individual. When President Reagan tried to close the Department of Education, he was considered to be against education. It’s not just spin, Democrats really think that way. They feel it’s important to keep the Department of Education, because without it, there will be no education. Without the Department of Health, we would all be sick; without the Department of Commerce, the economy would fold. Ditto for the FDA, the FCC, FAA, and the rest of the alphabet soup. (more…)

Well, they are finally starting to use it.  I think you might remember I was the first.  I bravely spoke it to the Hollywood Congress of Republicans (October, 2008), who put it on the Internet; and then I spoke it on O’Reilly and Hannity.  My husband scolded me.  He said no one would take me seriously if I was such an alarmist.  I got hate mail.  I lost friends.  I probably lost jobs.  I didn’t want to be mean.  It really isn’t mean.  It’s probably a compliment to the President since he likes to quote his Marxist professors, and by his own words and actions is trying his very best to “change” our country from Capitalist to Communist.  I kept repeating, “but Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, so what’s the difference between Marxist and Communist?”  No one had an answer.

I think it has something to do with the McCarthy era, when everyone was using the “C” word, and pointing fingers at everyone and getting everyone in trouble.  But it’s different now.  Anything goes, and we’re all “tolerant” and “inclusive”, right?  I think we can use the word if it fits the situation.  Words are just letters and sounds we use to communicate our ideas.  Of course, words are powerful and should be used politely and accurately, so I assumed an attitude of kindness, and did my homework.  (more…)

Four hundred years ago, Miguel Cervantes described an archetypal delirious fruitcake who wanted to change the world by turning the clock back to the idealized Utopian times that never really existed. Imagine what Cervantes would write today about the futility of his satirical effort, if he were to learn that four centuries later, a whole movement would arise that emulated his loony character and elected one of their kind as the leader of the free world.

Some conservative commentators are demonstratively wishing President Obama well. My heart admires their good intentions, but as I watched Obama’s inauguration on TV, my mind couldn’t help but ponder the possible consequences thereof. As someone coming from another country (ex-USSR) I don’t participate in racial debates nor do I want to. Being post-racial is fine by me. So let’s accept Obama’s post-racial premise, leave the issue of melanin content aside, and judge the man solely by the content of his agenda. And the more I look at Obama’s agenda the more I realize that wishing him well is like wishing luck to Don Quixote in wrecking the windmill that feeds me and my family. (more…)