Returning once again to the land beneath the Big Hollywood sign for a most important poll question. “The Stoning of Soraya M.” has received powerful rave reviews across the political spectrum. The buzz is hot. From the leftie pundits at HuffPo (who only seem to be discovering the true human rights horrorshow nature of that regime now, most curious) to the Righties at Big Hollywood and elsewhere, SORAYA M. is a must-see movie that will linger with you long after you’ve left the theater.

Strangely enough, Amnesty lnternational’s Elise Auerbach doesn’t like it. Because stonings in Iran are so rare, don’t you know. No suspension of disbelief for Ms. Elsie. I’m sorry, what’s her job again? Oh yeah, Iran Specialist for Amnesty International. Go figure. Personally, I happen to think one stoning is one too many. And it wasn’t the only one, not by a country mile! But that’s just me. I’m not an Iran specialist for AI. Like, say, Ms. Auerbach. Nice work if you can get it, huh, Ms. Elsie?

By the way, did the acronym AI in the context of Ms. Elsie’s employer and thumbs-down review of Soraya M. remind anyone else of Artificial Intelligence? But I digress. To be sure, there are a number of disturbing productions from Thugocracy Studios that have lingered with me for a very long time now. A young woman’s brutal and heart-wrenching Islamic clothing violation arrest I posted last May, which has generated 6000 hits since. The gay executions. The 140 children on Death Row.

The mass hangings. The stonings and executions of a lot more women and young girls than just Soraya M. Here’s a thugocracy twofer, sisters Zoreh and Azar Kabiri, each charged with adultery, already hit with 99 lashes and now awaiting the rock-throwers. Do their husbands want new wives too, like Soraya’s? Who needs a messy divorce when a good clean stoning works just as well? Nice law if you can get it, if you’re a philandering, misogynist God-fearing Islamist, and the fascist women-hating judges give your word as a man twice that of a woman’s in court.

If you want the full bloody extremist Third Reich tour of Iran, here it is. Here’s the regime’s gay-friendly extermination program. Boys In The Band it ain’t. Point being, will SORAYA M. make the AMPAS nominee list next January, even in its now-extended format of ten candidates for Best Picture? Or, will the Academy bury it as a dirty reminder of their collective shame this past March?

First, let us admit that no politics takes place during The Academy’s selection process. FISH HOOK! You people are just too easy. As for me, I’m torn. See, the Academy, particularly the Nine Stooges of Team Oscar, bravely commanded by Academy Prez and Stooge-In-Chief Sid Ganis, may find it embarrassing to rave about a powerful film on a brutal stoning in Iran after producing TEA WITH AHMADINEJAD and praising the regime’s boffo womens rights record, as thugocracy stooge Annette Bening did. Very unfavorable contrast with Soraya M.

Then again, by rallying to the Forces of Good and whitewashing that abysmal affair in now-chaotic Iran, as they’ve already attempted to with their lame website promo The Road To Isfahan (seen the real Road To Isfahan lately? It ain’t no Bob and Bing movie, that’s for goddamn sure!), they can once again proudly don the mantle of human rights champs, the one they so misplaced for their last tea and finger cookies soiree to the gay-slaughtering and women-stoning Islamist butchers of Iran.

So whattaya think, people? Does “The Stoning of Soraya M.” get showered with Oscar praise, and perhaps even Oscar gold, as Academy absolution of their egregious PR sins in Tehran? Or, do the King-Of-Hearts on Wilshire Boulevard put SORAYA M. in the closet, with all the 4000-plus exterminated Iranian gays? You know, the ones they so forgot about to play the roles of Hollywood Diplomats at the Ahmie and Khamie Punking Extravaganza? Or is it just too powerful a film for even the Academy to sweep under the rug as an Inconvenient Truth?

Cast your vote in the Comments section. Assorted woolgathering on the subject will also be welcome. I leave it to you fine folks at Big Hollywood to ward off the trolls. I’ll be too busy working on my Oscar-quality script honoring and paying homage to no less than Oscar himself.

That is not a punchline, either. Truth is stranger than fiction. Started it last year, when I still adored the Academy and all its members beyond measure. So shall it end, in the spirit of that love. I don’t let politics poison my scripts. I guess I now know why they call it La La Land. You really do have to exist in a state of unreality to get anything worthwhile done. Speaking of states of unreality, feel free to cast your own vote here with the Asylum of Motion Picture Airheads and Stooges.

Lastly, the WaPo, and others of the Leftie LibDem persuasion like President Obama, say any help to the people of Iran, or even siding with them, is a bad move. That smells like moral cowardice to me. Such naive and wishy-washy idealists have stood idly by from King George to Adolf Hitler. I personally believe in calling freedom-crushing, blood-drinking, power-grabbing dictators for what they are. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, Let Iran Be Iran.

Siding with the Iranian people, who are unimaginably oppressed and trying to shake off their Gestapo-like shackles can’t be bad. Besides, should they win this war on ruthless clerical fascism, which has nothing to do with Allah, whose side do you want them remembering YOU being on?

Playing nice never works with the Hitlers of this world. The regime is already blaming us for interfering anyway. Always have. Makes it easy to label people like students and dissenters as Imperialist and Zionist traitors and execute them. Ever read 1984? May as well commit the crime. And it’s not like they’ve been holding Death to America rallies for thirty years to show their affection.

Let’s show some of that love back. I would also add to that love of a free Iran any requests by a future Iranian People’s Resistance, if the bloodshed of innocents mounts to sickening proportions (which it most likely will), to include smuggling arms to them from Afghanistan and Iraq. Let the regime deal with the kind of Islamic-driven insurgency they’ve been fueling in both countries, not to mention Gaza and Lebanon. Sorry, people. I’m siding with the victims here in full measure, not the perpetrators.

I always side with the Resistance against Hitler. I also believe Congress, The White House and the State Department should be made aware of that sentiment as well. Oh, and if you do contact the White House, please have them correct the President in addressing Khamenei. It’s Supreme ASSWIPE. Do we support Hope and Change in Iran? Or do we play nice, so Ahmie can slaughter all the rounded-up protesters with bloodthirsty impunity, then tell us to fuck off as he finishes his shady basement nuclear project, as he’s always done to the UN, the IAEA and every other nation on earth?

As for me, I say DEATH TO THE DICTATOR! FREE IRAN! Good Night and Good Luck, especially to the poor innocent Iranians suffering unimaginably at the hands of Ahmie and Khamie’s Islamist Gestapo goons even as we speak. It’s the Basiji, Hamas and Hezbollah goons that deserve to die. I’ll gladly help with that any way I can. So should we all. Anything less would be uncivilized. Let’s be the Iranian people’s Right Guard, and help eliminate the foul stench of fascism once and for all.

It’s really stinking up the joint, isn’t it? Lastly, I’d like you all to send a shout-out to the stunningly beautiful and incredibly humorous (she thinks I’m funny) Hannah Irani, aka LuvManatee, at her YouTube and Twitter pages. She is an Iranian-American medical student in LA who is spending a lot of her time live-blogging Iran. Tell her a joke to cheer her up, let her know you’re with her and the Iranian people all the way, and ask her how you can help.

I must say, during these tumultuous times, I have truly found out just how incredibly gorgeous Iranian women are. Persian Princesses all. Women that beautiful have to be saved. Just think of the bennies. A lot of hot bennies for you gays, too

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: Here are some protesters in Iran torching the gas lines to a basiji building and blowing it up. It’s at 0:05 on the far right of the screen. Five Islamist Gestapo basiji goons dead, many injured.  It’s the feel-good movie of the summer. Just listen to those cheers! Somebody give that cameraman an Oscar, LOL! You know, I generally don’t like bloodshed. But only if it’s the wrong blood being spilled. Other than that, the Iranian Resistance has carte blanche.

FREE IRAN! DEATH TO THE DICTATOR! Worth a second shout-out, yes? See you at the Oscars!

From that point on, I was addicted. I couldn’t get enough of Peter Maas, Robin Moore, Woodward and Bernstein, Nick Pileggi, Ovid Demaris, James Bamford, James Michener, Cornelius Ryan, anything from the Ballantine Espionage/Intelligence Library, and too many others to list here.

I only recently read Michener’s The Bridge at Andau, an account of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising based on hundreds of eyewitness accounts, written in novelized form to protect identities at the time. It takes you right into the chaotic and revolutionary Bupapest of the day as though you were there.

Mr. Michener, who was living in Austria at the time, went to the nearby Hungarian border to conduct interviews among the hundreds of thousands fleeing the brutal Soviet backlash, which claimed the lives of 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops. The Bridge at Andau is a must-read that clearly illustrates the contrast and conflict between an oppressive Communist regime and its freedom-seeking people.

Many of the above authors’ works were serialized in the press, and stand as testaments to pure investigative journalism that always followed hot on the trail, no matter where that trail led. Stalwarts such as Ernie Pyle and Edward R. Murrow risked life and limb to give Americans the real skinny on World War II, be it reporting from rooftops during the London Blitz, or from the beaches of the Pacific.

If you wanted to go all the way, you might even call Albert Speer’s Inside The Third Reich, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize-winning Gulag Archipelago masterpieces of eyewitness investigative journalism, though they are far more than that. These profound words from Mr. Solzhenitsyn, from his address to Harvard’s graduating Class of 1978, really jump out at me:

Harvard’s motto is “Veritas.” Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit.

Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.

Those words could not sum up more my attitude to and perceptions of today’s Fourth Estate in America, and even the entire democratic Western press. It is like I married young and totally in love, only to watch as the years passed as my betrothed became bitter, polarized, angry and even a mortal enemy. I still remember the reasons I fell in love, but am now filing for divorce out of my own bitterness and remorse at how far a once-great love has descended into madness.

And it has been a long downward slide. I certainly know how John Nash’s wife felt now.

Pyle’s and Murrow’s war reporting was intelligent, gritty, unfiltered and unadulterated with propaganda. Unlike, say, Geraldo Rivera giving away our troops’ positions to the Iraqi army. Or TNR knowingly fabricating Nazi-like tales of American soldiers in the Iraq War.

Or anything on the Iraq War from Pinchy’s New York Times. This Times article is eerily reminiscent of DHS’ implication of veterans as prone to violence, though the numbers in fact prove the homicide rate is far lower for returning veterans than the general population. And they always throw in alcoholism on vet stories. It’s like there’s a left wing playbook somewhere. Hmm. Curious.

Even worse, I had to kick all their asses to start reporting on Roxana Saberi when everyone, and I mean everyone, the White House, State, Congress, the press, EVERYONE, pulled a major disappearing act on Roxana in early March. It’s like they were all trying to sweep the Obama bad press on Roxana under the rug.

By the way, my best piece on that subject is approaching 4000 hits. You tell ME who’s doing the reporting as a public service here! In fact, the only subject the MSM is even more silent on is Iran’s egregious human rights abuses. Bunch of hopeless dupes is what they are on Iran, just like Team Oscar and Sean Penn. I ask you. What good are they?

In short, ‘excellence in journalism’ today is less reflective of Murrow and Pyle than Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass and Frederick Foer. And why? Because like Fox Mulder in the X Files, all their editors Wanted To Believe, because those frauds and plagiarists wrote all the News To Print That Fits. When editors like the NYT’s Howell Raines get stories that line up neatly with their own left-wing tinfoil worldviews, who needs editorial oversight? Doesn’t exactly give me a tingle up my leg.

One could go back as far as the Vietnam War and the Big Three’s incessant campaign to ensure America’s loss in that war, turning even major battlefield victories into ignoble defeats. The Big Three are still at it even today, only now turning their cameras into swords to hack their fellow citizens, who peacefully protest against government policies with which the Big Three’s PRAVDA-like bureaucracies happen to vehemently agree. By the way, pravda in Russian means truth.

I don’t believe it necessary to rehash every propaganda lie spewing forth from today’s ‘Main Stream Media’. We are awash in them. Perhaps the seminal moment in American media today, in which the Fourth Estate shed all vestiges of objectivity and aligned itself ideologically to the Democratic Party lock, stock and barrel, occurred in 1998. Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff was denied the scoop of a lifetime, because Newsweek’s propaganda chiefs buried his expose on President Clinton’s sordid affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Even today, Newsweek is still burying Isikoff’s scoops, as they did with this piece outlining senior Obama advisor David Axelrod’s extensive lobbyist connections, even as candidate Obama vowed that “lobbyists won’t work in my White House!” They also had no issue with David Axelrod, still an Obama kingpin, suggesting Tea Party protests could ‘mutate into something that’s unhealthy’ and are ‘peaceful so far,’ implying an underlying proclivity toward violence that has no basis in fact.

Even worse, Mr. Axelrod’s own left wing extremist viewpoint is now official government policy based on equating all conservatives, and even veterans returning from war, with Timothy McVeigh, much in the same manner Lefties condemn furiously when all Muslims are equated with Osama bin Laden. It is in fact blatant propaganda aimed at alienating and intimidating the minority party of dissent. Nothing less. And our so-called Mainstream Media is right there with him one hundred percent.

But what else would you expect from a de facto fourth branch of government? Or ‘news giants’ that even hold meetings to pressure their networks to lay off the President? Or fails to condemn Janeane Garofalo’s slandering of Tea Partiers as ‘racist teabagging rednecks’ based on journalistic standards? How sick and twisted a policy is THAT?

The really sad part is, that ideological rigidity is only the publicly visible tip of a very large iceberg into which MSM Titanic is sailing with reckless abandon. Actually, perhaps the Bismarck is a better analogy. That terror of the seas was once all powerful as well. It, too, was also sunk by its own crews on captain’s orders. And I couldn’t be happier to see all the MSM lifeboats being hoisted today, just as the Allies took a great deal of pleasure in watching the Bismarck fanatics take a dunk.

Since I was very young, I have been both fan and student of the methods and processes of intelligence gathering, propaganda, psy-ops and counter-intelligence, i.e. the Spy Game. Blame Ian Fleming. Even scored a 3.8 on the very tough officer-level Fundamentals of Naval Intelligence course, which the Navy graciously allowed me to take as an enlisted man.

I also spent a few years of my naval service during the Cold War listening to Radio Moscow, which often interrupted VOA broadcasts through jamming, which the USSR spent more money on at the time than we did on the entire VOA program. Even caught Radio Moscow’s coverage, if it can be called such, of the KAL 007 passenger airliner shootdown in 1983, which consisted of jamming VOA broadcasts for three days straight with silence, then spewing a series of heated accusations that KAL 007 was actually on a spy mission. They even pointed to the KAL flight number, 007, as proof.

The main point of my listing all my bona fides here is that I know propaganda when I see it. And boy, do I see it today. Too much of it! I believe today’s MSM would not look so much at that Soviet ‘reporting’, or even Orwell’s ‘1984′, less as examples of the worst form of propaganda and more as instruction guides. And they have learned well from their Soviet-era progenitors. Too well.

In fact, I really can’t tell which is the bigger lie from the infamous Olbermann-Garofalo hatefest: Garofalo’s rant that Tea Partiers are all ‘racist teabagging rednecks’, or Olbermann’s opening claim that Garofalo is ‘an actor and an activist’. Where is the evidence for any of those claims?

The big difference here, of course, it that Radio Moscow and PRAVDA were organs and extensions of the Soviet-era government masquerading itself as a free press. Actually, I take that back. No difference. But that is what happens when our so-called Fourth Estate abrogates its duty as an impartial, objective and investigative free press and becomes a fourth branch of government, slandering opposition candidates, even turning on its own citizens with unbridled contempt and sinister intent, in order to demonize huge swaths of the American electorate for political purposes.

We even have names now for these types of political manipulations by the press, so common are they. RatherGate, a blatant and clumsy attempt to influence an American presidential election with fake documents. Fauxtography, primarily used by the worldwide press to demonize Israel during their war with Hezbollah in 2006. When the press starts piling up colloquialisms for their blatantly fraudulent attempts to manipulate the news, you know we’re in trouble.

And now the four branches of government, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, seek total and absolute media dominance with the Fairness Doctrine. Which of course, only would mean less Fairness and more Doctrine, and could even regulate web content. Just like Iran and China do.

What else can you call it but a Goebbels-like left wing power grab, when Rush and conservative talk radio is specifically targeted, yet NPR and Far Left TV news ‘reporting’ is considered so honest and grand it doesn’t require any intervention? Don’t answer, it’s a rhetorical question.

But all is not lost. It was the ‘pajamas media’ that ran Howell Raines out the Times’ door on a rail. Otherwise, he and Blair would probably still be there. And even though Newsweek buried the Isikoff scoop on Lewinsky, Matt Drudge picked up on it and set the bar for online journalism.

I remember reading somewhere, I believe either in Matt Drudge’s Drudge Manifesto or Ann Coulter’s High Crimes and Misdemeanors, that White House operatives were refreshing the Drudge Report screen 3500 times an hour during the Lewinsky scandal. If our press functioned today as it should, the White House would have full-time crews doing the same for dozens of media outlets. Not really necessary when those same media outlets ARE your full-time crews.

Yet Americans are not as stupid as those in the MSM, America’s left-wing extremist Reichministry, would have you believe. In fact, it is the MSM’s own stupidity and unabashed bias which is now leading these media behemoths straight into the tarpits of history, not unlike those in La Brea which devoured the mammoths of old. And like those towering monstrosities, today’s versions stagger likewise into those tarpits, totally oblivious and self-blinded to the dangers their own clumsy and misdirected footsteps bring.

The Dead Tree Press is in fact today’s Petrified Forest. Though many claim the explosion in online journalism and fall in ad revenues is to blame, even the New York Times’ online version is as biased and partisan as the fishwrap edition, which explains their demise. Yet the New York Post and Daily News have actually seen increases in circulation, and USA Today is holding relatively steady.

The same is true for television. Though FOX News is roundly condemned as right wing by those who proselytize a left wing agenda, FOX is at least willing to brook opposing opinions. The puerile jolly teabag frat house jokesters of the MSM brook none. And that is why FOX is blowing them all out of the water. Who wants to watch a ‘news’ program when you already know what their ‘news’ is going to be, or whose ‘reporters’ insult the very viewers they seek to attract?

Predictably, members of Congress, spearheaded by Senator John Kerry, are even now looking at ways to bail out left wing propaganda organs like the Boston Globe, aka the New York Times Jr, and which may close its doors soon if a contract with union workers falls through. Celebs like Alec Baldwin are pleading to save the New York Times, which may bring added weight in Congress to that facetious argument.

Yet in reality, the only real political difference between a privately or publicly financed Globe or Times would be their source of income. In fact, government paychecks to the press would actually be more honestly reflective of their current ‘journalism’ status.

I say let them die. Pull the plug, even. They are dying for a reason. Put them, and all of us, out of our misery. And I’ll be damned if my tax dollars go to Pinchy so he can remain President Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s PRAVDA on my dime! On that note, here’s Congress. Let your representatives know how you feel about the government subsidizing their own private Reichministries with our tax dollars. And let then hear it on the Unfairness Doctrine, too.

I hope someday we see a real press that not only doesn’t serve as a fourth branch of government, but engages in the same old-school investigative journalism that should keep our government officials sitting on pins and needles. THAT is the function of a truly free, objective and impartial press, regardless of the ideological positions of the government in power.

Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath on that one. But I am withholding my dollars and viewership on the most egregious offenders. And I hope you do, too. Let the free market decide these modern-day dodo birds’ fates, and not our government and tax dollars. All bad things should come to an end.

Good Night and Good Luck.

AFTERWORD: One very pleasant surprise in modern-day reporting, and I never thought the day would come I would say this, is today’s Huffington Post. Granted, many of their pundits are as brain-dead as KOS, but their Iran coverage is phenomenal, perhaps the best out there. As a bonus, even many of their naively idealistic pundits are starting to realize Iran isn’t the Garden of Paradise Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, AMPAS and Sean Penn would have us believe.

And I seriously doubt in HuffPo’s early days that you would have seen Op-eds like this one by Daniel Sinker: “When The Left Went Teabagging: As You Chuckle At The Right’s Newfound Activism, Don’t Forget That The Left Sucked Balls For Years.” Some are even criticizing President Obama!

Hope Springs Eternal.