My old Communist girlfriend was an exotically beautiful actress whose parents had emigrated from Russia and settled in New York City. Nola went to Party meetings and kept up with the correct way to think and behave by reading The Daily Worker. This was back in the fifties. In those days, the bulldog edition of the next morning’s Times, Tribune, News, Mirror and even the Worker would appear at the news stand on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty Second Street shortly before midnight. Actors, anxious to read tomorrows review of the latest Broadway play would be waiting there, along with entertainers curious to see if they’d made it into Walter Winchell in the Mirror or Ed Sullivan in the News.

Beautiful Nola was anxious to read the review of the new Off-Broadway show she’d just opened in. The Times and Trib would be covering it but Nola wanted to see what The Daily Worker had to say. Her face fell when she read it. The play was a socially relevant drama, of course, about the struggles of the Negro. She had chosen a dazzling white suit for her wardrobe. The critic said that this was unconscious racism on her part. She had, in fact, picked the suit because it made her boobs look good.  (more…)

As Gloucester in Henry VI beguiled like the mournful crocodile, so the political praises and tears for the late Democratic Senator from Taxachusets mouthed by his enemies have diminished and signaled the time for candor. Teddy Kennedy was a cheat, a proven liar, a shameless demagogue and a probable murderer. Those character traits were well known. But did you know he was a security risk dropped from the US Army intelligence school and a genuine traitor who offered Cold War US nuclear arms negotiation secrets to the Soviet Union if it would help the Democrats beat Ronald Reagan and further his own presidential ambitions?

That’s why my blood went to full boil a couple of days before he died when I glanced at the TV in a rural Bates motel — been staying in a lot of those lately — and saw Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz laud the youngest Camelotian as the greatest Senator and humanitarian of all time from the deck of Geraldo Rivera’s berthed yacht in Martha’s Vineyard. Dershowitz went on to tell the FOX mustachioed-one how he had rushed to Teddy’s aid with expert legal skills “in his hour of need” after Kennedy had left his date, Mary Jo Kopechne, to die in a Chappaquiddick Island tidal pond during the summer of 1969. Dershowitz’ considerable skills aside, the fact that full media attention was diverted from Kennedy by the coming Moon landing and walk to take place two days later probably helped the Kennedy fixers regroup and save his political hide. (more…)

Return with me now to the days of yore, when frothing left wing loonies exhibited some semblance of knowledge and didn’t just spew bizarro diatribes, as exhibited in the recent Garofolo rant. I hearken back to an era of bi-polarity (no, not the mood swing/disorder, lithium kind) but to the 1980’s, when the Good Guys (USA and western society) and the Black Hats (the Soviet Empire and their captured lackey governments) squared off to contest ways of life and global spheres of influence. 

It was a simpler time. Our external enemies were easily identifiable: they were blatant in railing against capitalism, freedom of speech, belief in God, individual accountability, and love of country, while pleading, teary eyed, for pro-government wet-nurse-ism (Soviet-style socialism). Their domestically deranged fellow travelers, the unhinged adversaries of the Founder’s Constitutional principles, were relegated (correctly) by voters to minority political power status, and were as effective as a brace of quacking ducks.  (more…)