Man alive, when you require 2700 words to explain your way out of 900, maybe it’s best to just …. stay down.

Early on, even before Big Government opened, when Big Hollywood was still in its infancy, I was introduced to Conor Friedersdorf through an email he sent to Andrew Breitbart asking him for an editorial job. Without comment, Andrew forwarded Conor’s email and since I was still green, I didn’t really know what to make of someone who felt that he should be installed in a position where he would ensure the political arguments made by our contributors were intellectually sound (that was the crux of his inquiry — really). Did Andrew agree with him? Had he forwarded the email to make some sort of point?

Brei-i-i-i-itbaaaart!!!

But the more of Conor’s inquiry I read, the wider the smile reached across my face. It was obvious the  author was a young, arrogant, self-serious clown who thought he was pretty special but was really only blessed with the necessary lack of self-awareness required to allow him to keep on keeping on without ever noticing that the whole wide world was laughing at him — especially his liberal friends who only kept him around because he was useful. Just as Colonel Klink on “Hogan’s Heroes” was never aware he was being used by Colonel Hogan — that he was a walking joke respected by no one and only flattered when it was necessary to get him to help the other side – so too is Conor Friedersdorf.

If you read the opening paragraphs of Conor’s reactionary and defensive response to us (and Breitbart specifically — who Conor is somewhat obsessed with), this is how he presents his conservative bonifides:

I’ve shown that the DEA callously prevents sick people from getting useful therapy, highlighted work done by the Institute for Justice to advance economic freedom, called out the TSA for its harassment of air travelers, noted that kidney patients are dying needlessly, urged on efforts to rein in excessive public employee pensions in California, called for a repeal of the light-bulb law, highlighted Orwellian threats to privacy, and complained that federal prosecutors misallocate resources.

I’ve profiled Gary Johnson, formulated 11 questions all presidential candidates should be asked to test their civil liberties bonifides, urged the tea party movement to embrace Mitch Daniels, warned against the inexperience of Michele Bachmann, and even curated nearly 100 fantastic pieces of journalism!

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As John Nolte pointed out yesterday, Connor [sic?] Friedersdorf, Atlantic’s resident conservative who spends most of his time trashing conservatives, set out to investigate how audiences are responding to the new Sarah Palin documentary “The Undefeated”. Curiously, he chose to go to a midnight showing in Orange County, CA at the precise moment of the long-anticipated premiere of the final “Harry Potter” film.

I planned on doing the same thing. I planned on going to the movie theatre in Orange, CA (AMC 30 at The Block) and report back to the Big Hollywood readers how Palin was being accepted in the county that Ronald Reagan described as “where good Republicans go to die.” Now Coner [sic?] is a real journalist, as he often reminds us. And I’m just a Breitbart blogger, so what do I know, but it seemed to me that the best time to go check out the audience reaction was during the DAY of the release, not at the midnight showing last night.

The Atlantic’s Conor Frieders-whatever demands girls talk to him at midnight

Connner [sic?], being the brilliant and reliable “capital- J journalist” that he is, reported to the intellectual readers of the Atlantic that he was the only person in the theatre at midnight last night – along with two young girls that he creepily interviewed for his column (hey there, I’m a JOURNALIST, want to tell me your name and what brings you here to this dark theatre after midnight?). He also claims that the manager wouldn’t tell him how many tickets had been sold for the film.

Funny, the manager I spoke with the next day had no problem telling me (more on that later). Maybe the guy Connnor [sic?] talked to was creeped out about the guy who was still lingering in the cinema after 2:00 AM after seeing a movie about Sarah Palin and after scaring two teenagers out of the place. (That’s just conjecture, I have no proof that Coonor’s [sic?] odd inquisition of the teenagers is what led them to leave the movie early, but it’s strange that it didn’t occur to him that a guy sitting all alone in a movie theatre after midnight showing a movie about Sarah Palin might not be the first person two teenage girls from out of town would want to talk to, and maybe THAT’s why they left early and didn’t want to hang out with him).

I can tell you that at 10:45 this morning, the theatre was about 1/3 full and the audience sat riveted. I stood on the side and watched the audience more than I watched the film. They skewed a but older, I’d say 47-ish was the average age. But remember that this was at 10:45 in the morning on a work day. Most good conservatives are working at that time and aren’t able to go catch a flick. Not one of them looked at their watch. Not one left to use the restroom. The only movement was of people turning to their friend or spouse in reaction to the action on the screen.

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The Atlantic Online has a video up today of an unearthed TV episode featuring Ronald Reagan and James Dean acting together, unseen for decades. Edited from “The Dark, Dark Hours” episode of General Electric Theater, which aired live from Hollywood on December 12, 1954:

No one has seen this episode in the decades since; the kinescope has been locked away, until now. My friend Wayne Federman, a writer for NBC’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, unearthed the broadcast, condensing it from its original 23 minutes (without commercials) into the six-minute version you see below. (Federman is planning a retrospective of Reagan’s television career for next year’s Reagan centennial.)

Here, Reagan is a physician, forced to defend his home and family from Dean, a teenage lawbreaker seeking medical treatment for an injured friend… (more…)

In an interview published today, The Atlantic describes Gore Vidal as “a sharp provocateur, as irascible and irreverent as ever.”

I’m assuming that’s some kind of internal Atlantic-code for ”twisted old has-been degenerate desperate for attention“:

ATLANTIC: In September, director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland for leaving the U.S. in 1978 before being sentenced to prison for raping a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson’s house in Hollywood. During the time of the original incident, you were working in the industry, and you and Polanski had a common friend in theater critic and producer Kenneth Tynan. So what’s your take on Polanski, this many years later?

VIDAL: I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s been taken advantage of?

Vidal then goes on to blame Polanski’s legal problems on… (more…)